To answer this question you first have to define what democracy is.

A decent definition is probably something like, a system of government in which policy is decided by having a public debate in which anyone can participate and then, after everyone has had a chance to say their piece, policy is chosen through voting.

From this you immediately run into potential problems. For example, suppose the majority is quite fond of the current leadership and wants to put them in power forever and stop holding elections. Is that democratic? It's the policy people are voting for. And yet, it would be the end of democracy, so the answer has to be no.

From this we discern that in order to have a democracy, there have to be certain things the government is never allowed to do, even if they're what the majority wants. You can't cancel elections, censor the opposition, throw people in jail without due process, etc. These types of things are inherently undemocratic, regardless of what the majority wants, because if the government does them you no longer have a democracy.

It should go without saying that the government can never do these things to "save democracy" because they are the very things that destroy it.

See the Italian constitutional court as an example

They emphasize (in good faith I might add) that certain actions, such as censoring the opposition, canceling elections, or jailing people without due process, are inherently undemocratic and would destroy democracy if allowed, regardless of the intentions behind them. The argument is that democracy must adhere to its own rules and principles, even in the face of threats, because violating those principles in the name of protecting democracy ultimately leads to its destruction.

You can’t “protect Democracy” by violating its core tenants.

I feel like your arguments are more whataboutism than substantive.

It might lose but it will have to put up a fight, legal or physical.

Let's suppose you're right. We have a "democracy" that holds elections and whichever candidate gets the most votes wins, but there is no freedom of speech. Whoever is in office controls all the media, all private communications are monitored and lèse-majesté is a crime. Everything is a crime, in fact, and the law relies entirely on selective enforcement. By election day, opposition candidates with any chance of winning are always blood relatives of the incumbent. Deranged candidates with no chance of winning are ignored but independent candidates who start to gain any support are immediately executed for treason. Every year there is an election in which the people can choose between the incumbent, the incumbent's favored offspring (if any) and a selection of paste-eating loons who think Hitler is still alive, campaign on raising energy costs to help Hitler accelerate human extinction and never get any votes.

That isn't a democracy, it's the fig leaf dictatorships wear when they want to lie about being a democracy.

I agree such a government is not acting democratically. However, it's better than the alternative. Don't we do democracy because it's usually good, and not for its own sake? Then if doing something nondemocratic is even better than doing something democratic, we should do the former.

The first thing every dictator and tyrannical government does is stop or subvert the elections. There's still elections in Russia and China and North Korea.

The candidate people voted for would enter office, but elected officials should not have the power to do the things Hitler did.

> The Nazi party is banned in Germany. Is that good or bad?

It's basically meaningless. If you ban the "Nazi party" and then someone comes and says they're a member of the Social Nationalists party which is totally different even though it shares a lot of the same policies, now you have to decide which policies are banned. And we're back to politicians are never allowed to censor their opponents etc.

Those tends to be based on variants of democracy being "institutions that enable a peaceful transfer of power". This usually includes the so called democratic freedoms, overseeing journalists, and a non-politicized judicial system.

Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty. Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You don't offer an established definition, but you do list some things the government must not do, e.g. overseeing journalists, politicizing the judicial system. Those things could easily fall within GP's definition.

You can pretty clearly have a democracy without a peaceful transfer of power. Suppose the state of California had entered open revolt after the 2016 election and the rebellion had to be put down by the military. You could hardly have called that a peaceful transfer of power even if the end result was that people voted and the winner took office. And the reverse can also be true; some aging dictator undemocratically chooses a successor who comes into power without bloodshed.

Also, it is not the role of governments to oversee journalists, it is the role of journalists to oversee governments.

> Every practicing democracy however includes some exceptions for law and intelligence services, as that is required to uphold the system in times of uprisings and uncertainty.

These things are not inherent requirements, they are the implements of tyranny. Notice that the US constitution doesn't have these exceptions written into it, they were read into it by authoritarians and cowards in times of weakness.

The day you find out if you have principles or just empty words is the day when following them is hard.

> Advocating genocide or revolting against the democratic institutions is not considered within the bounds of democracy anywhere.

You can advocate whatever you want, you're just never allowed to actually do it.

Think about it. A system of checks and balances that can stop them from doing it even after they're already in power is the only thing that matters. If you have that, they can say whatever they want. If you don't have that, censorship doesn't help, because they can gain power under false pretenses (politicians lie) and your system isn't configured to stop them once they do. Indeed, a censorship apparatus would even make it worse, because now they're the ones deciding what gets censored.

Censorship is always the tool of the villain because lies and bad ideas can be openly refuted but the only solution to a ban on the truth is to defeat the ban.

You want democracy to be prevented from acting out on its passions by a balance of powers.

IN the brazil case, the state powers, and the brazilian voters are not preventing 1 judge from acting out his passion "to protect democracy". Ergo, this is the problem. The mob is granting him this power, when in fact it should be voters, via congress or even the office of the president which brings this loose cannon of a judge back within the powers given by the constitution of brazil.

In this case, brazil is behaving like a raw democracy. It is true majority rule. Laws apply as the majority sees fit.

Hope you don't end in the minority.

You can rest your case if you'd like but it's a loser.

Democracies got rid of those things that still exist today in undemocratic societies.

The mob rule here is Bolsonaro’s, and in no functioning democracy are multiple Powers (legislative, governmental and judicial) collected into 1 hand.

If a judge goes out of control it’s another judge’s task to regain it, or an independent Judicial court.

However, whether the judiciary in Brazil is actually overstepping or properly fulfilling its role is a matter of interpretation and context.

The broader and very much core question is whether the actions taken by the judiciary, such as censoring social media or jailing individuals without trial, are justified under the circumstances or if they themselves undermine democratic principles. This is the same basic issue I made my other comment about in your series of replies.

This is a nuanced issue that can be debated from different perspectives and much more of a subjective question, and it’s important to separate the issues.

I would say it should not do that essentially ever? If so, what kinds of undemocractic behavior would be allowed and what isn't? You probably have a certain kind of behavior in mind that you want to allow when you pose this question. If so, why not legislate that behavior using the democratic process?

It seems to me that the argument that protecting democracy by undemocratic means is okay, is essentially the same argument that a benevolent dictator is superior to democracy. Both arguments give special power to a certain group or individual that others do not have, which can be used to go outside the system if things don't work out. First order this argument is plausible. But second order effects (there is no such thing as categorically benevolent, and characters change, especially when in power) will always ruin it.

Democracy is messy. And when the world changes, there are challenges that democracy has to overcome. We're in the middle of a few of those changes right now. But the mess in by design. I believe that if we give up on a very high democratic standard things will turn out for the worse. My one addition here would be that in my view democracy is necessary but not suffient to get to a prosperous society. It needs to go hand in hand with a common value system where there's fellowship between citizens and genuine respect for individual right and the law. If not, there's a risk that the majority will only cater to itself.

In a democracy, policy has the ability to arrest perpetrators by force if they break the law. The key thing is that the law the perpetrators are breaking was approved democratically, and that there is due process by an independent judiciary. Democracy does not mean that there never is any violence.

Thus it takes longer to slide into an undemocratic state, and checks and bounds are slower to change than a simple election. In essence, laws passed in such democracies becomes the will of the people over decades, not one election.

If a democracy has a will to move towards undemocratic rule, and it takes decades to get there, then really the people have failed themselves.

After the general election the amendment has to be voted on by both houses of Parliament again and win by a super-majority. Thus it is technically possible to disband Parliament and return all power back to the King within a year without the courts having any power to stop it.

So in case Parliament suddenly decides we should go back to an absolute monarchy, then we're only one general election away from completely dismantling democracy.

Just to be clear, this is in no way intended as an endorsement of rioting.

Many protests may turn into riots, that does not suddenly mean that the people involved in the violence are no longer expressing an opinion.

Riots are characteristically very much a messy case, because not everyone joins a protest with the same intentions. Some will join a protest intending a purely peaceful display of dissent, while others seek violent confrontation.

On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence. Sometimes there are even saboteurs within the protest that try and lure out violent incidents in an attempt to get the protest to be declared a riot.

Finding the right balance between allowing demonstrations and keeping the peace and order is one of the most challenging aspects of democracy.

The people intending a purely peaceful display of dissent don't smash or set fire to anything, even if the people standing next to them do. Now, the court may have some trouble here with evidence because you then have to distinguish these people from one another, but that has become much less of a problem in modern days when everybody has a cellphone camera and police can be issued bodycams.

Either way this is a question of fact rather than a question of law.

> On top of that repressive regimes will routinely declare otherwise peaceful protests a riot at the first sign of violence.

Declaring something a riot shouldn't mean anything. If a specific person is breaking windows and looting they're breaking the law. If they're just standing there holding signs they're not.

It shouldn't be too much to ask to have the cops arrest the criminals and not the bystanders.

Have you ever met a cop before? The only disincentive to arresting more people is a bit of paperwork, and the whole court system is stacked against the arrested unless they can afford non-court-appointed lawyers to pave their way. Guilt-by-association doesn't magically disappear from the psyche when handing someone power and a gun, rather it gets easier to apply indiscriminately because it's very hard for people to oppose the one with authority over their freedom and state-sanctioned license to be violent.

This is indeed a problem in which the police are, essentially, breaking the law. The question is, how do we fix it?

The intuitive answer would be to impose penalties on cops who arrest people without cause. Which sounds great, until you consider the incentive it gives them to commit perjury and falsify evidence in order to avoid the penalty. So what else you got?

One possibility is to have better cops. Right now we need a lot of cops who are willing to get into shootouts with gangs and wrestle amped up meth cooks to the ground, which attracts a certain type of person to the profession, and not really the ones we might want. If we were to end the War on Drugs and thereby put all the drug dealers out of business because they can't compete with Walmart's pharmacy, the people you attract to a profession that is no longer so steeped in violence might be of a different kind.

Here's just one example out of literally countless examples of police brutality directed towards individual peaceful protestors: https://www.thecity.nyc/2022/08/29/nypd-cop-pepper-spray-blm...

Ironically (but unsurprisingly), this example of wanton and indiscriminate police brutality was the police response to protests against wanton and indiscriminate police brutality.

Actually probably not. Judging from them holding their hands up, their protest are probably motivated by the "hands up, don't shoot" hoax, based on a false claim that Michael Brown had his hands up when he was shot by the policeman. In reality, Michael Brown was not a victim of the indiscriminate police brutality, but rather repeatedly attacked a police officer and tried to relieve him of his weapon (no doubt out of mere peaceful curiosity). The whole "hands up" narrative has been invented later and distributed by the media, and had no basis in fact. One may notice here that while police brutality is indeed an existing and reprehensible thing, a lot of cases of "indiscriminate police brutality" touted by the press, after proper examination, turn out not to be so.

A protester, by staying in a protest that turns into a riot, may also turn into a rioter.

Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

Only if that individual protestor personally commits acts of violence. Obviously they are not a rioter simply by being near other rioters. That's an illegal concept known as collective guilt or collective punishment.

> Usually, a protester would understand that there's law breaking and leave the scene. Staying put, he'd become a rioter.

That would mean the government can outlaw protests by simply committing a single act of violence during one (or falsely claiming there was violence), declaring it a riot, and calling all the protestors, rioters. Obviously illegal.

> If you are standing around watching a friend engage in a streetfight, and someone ends up dead, now you are at a murder scene, and if you stick around doing nothing, don't be surprised if you are arrested as a suspect

Few would be surprised by police doing illegal things. That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

In the same vein, if you record police brutality in the United States, don't be surprised if you are threatened or targeted by police. If you insult a police officer to their face in the United States, don't be surprised if you get assaulted, arrested, or shot and killed. Does that make such police behavior legal or righteous?

That could happen, but in pretty much all known riots that is not what happened. Instead, massive groups of determined violent people have committed many acts of violence, arson, destruction and assault, leading to millions upon millions of dollars of damages and hurting a lot of people. Of course, each rioter would claim there were just present there and its some other people who did that, but it is almost universally a blatant lie. People come to this kind of events with certain intentions, and these intentions are not "mostly peaceful" - they are politically motivated violence. Their claims are just lies aimed at avoiding responsibility. It may be successful in strictly legal sense - that's why terrorist organizations like antifa insist on wearing similar clothing and masking up - to make attributing the violence to a specific person harder - but let's not be fooled by it. All people in that group have the common violent aims, regardless of whether it's possible to legally prove which part of violence were committed by which particular person.

> That doesn't mean the illegal things are legal.

That doesn't only apply to the police. It also applies to the rioters. If you are a participant of the event aimed at political violence as part of the group that explicitly declares political violence as its tactics, then don't whine about "collective guilt".

Suffice it to say, if there are eyewitnesses or video evidence of a given individual committing an act of violence, then they might have. If there are not, then they are assumed to have not done so, and are not rioters, as I said above.

This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

This goes even in instances where law enforcement initiated violence against someone and claimed there was a riot, which is a common occurrence.

> All people in that group have the common violent aim

Another spurious claim. No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

> don't whine about "collective guilt

Please be respectful on this forum. Pointing out that the concept of "collective guilt" is illegal, fullstop, is not "whining". Not liking what someone says here is not an excuse for attacking them.

That's bullshit. You are trying to purposely confuse the rules of criminal court (which are necessarily very strict about standards of proof) and common sense understanding of events. If a group of people clad in black with baseball bats, improvised shields and other implements sets buildings and cars on fire, attacks people and breaks windows, it is obvious they are violent rioters, even if when they remove their masks, I can't point to a video evidence of a specific individual breaking a specific window. One of them broke it, and even if I don't know which one exactly, I know they all participated in a riot and thus are violent rioters. Yes, their tactics makes it harder to prosecute them for their violence - that's why they are using it, they are not stupid - but that doesn't change the facts about their violence as readily observed.

> This goes even if someone such as yourself claims that everyone came there with violent intentions (a blatant lie).

There's enough easily discoverable social networking resources that advertise, coordinate and support various "direct actions" and other violent activities. They do not hide their intents, their purposes and their methods. While they prefer to operate in shadows - and violently attack journalists who try to report on them - they are not exactly a secret to anyone who is willing to look. You claiming it is a "blatant lie" just emphasizes how far you are willing to go to not look at what lies in plain sight.

> No matter how much you make it, it doesn't make it true, and it doesn't make the illegal claims of "collective guilt" true or moral.

You behave like just saying words "collective guilt" somehow makes any claim you attach to it correct. This is bullshit. First of all, "collective guilt" is very much legal - there's RICO statute which is pretty much embodiment of this concept, and there are multiple laws which criminalize affiliation or even cooperation with a terrorist organization, even if the person does not commit any terrorist acts by themselves. You could argue it is immoral, for whatever warped definition of moral you use, but certainly claiming it is illegal is just ignorant. Of course, legally speaking, a person can be convicted for participating in a criminal enterprise.

But, of course, the case I am discussing is even simpler. While one can argue that somebody who is merely driving a terrorist around may or may not be guilty in the acts of terror, the rioters I am discussing voluntarily come to the pre-announced place where violent acts are about to happen, voluntarily dress in the same way as those who perform those violent acts, voluntarily stay around while these acts are happening, voluntarily act in concert and cooperation with those who perform the violence, and do it repeatedly, for many instances. Claiming that they are random innocent bystanders does not pass the sniff test.

> Please be respectful on this forum.

I am not sure how you decided that you are the person who defines what "this forum" is and what is allowed here, but I don't think you earned this right by anything. Especially when boldly proclaiming complete hogwash at the same time. Even if what you said were true, you still wouldn't earn the condescending tone you adopt, but certainly it sounds even less earned when what you proclaim is easily seen to be completely false.

Why does this matter?

> The question that needs to be answer is how far democracy is willing to go outside of democratic bounds to preserve itself.

Democracy is not an being. When you act democratically, that's democracy. When you act undemocratically, that's against democracy. Acting democratically is when the justification for your rule comes from the desires of the people ruled. When you believe it's fine to silence (or officially harass, imprison or kill) people whose desires don't conform with yours, you are actively working against democracy.

The biggest scam of the centrist blob is convincing some (comfortable, middle-class) people that they're insiders who own democracy, so all of their anti-democratic behavior becomes democratic by definition.

For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is able to expand its powers, but it can always be overridden by the legislative branch by design. The executive branch doesn’t even have to follow the Supreme Court’s rulings. And the legislative and executive can be replaced by citizens.

By design, the US Constitution basically has an infinite loop of checks and balances - there is always another institution that can override one institution without breaking any rules.

That said, the buck does stop, but it stops at the people. The problem is that people do need to be well-informed and vigilant to for the this scheme to work out, but to be honest, that is not a problem specifically with democracy — it’s just a general societal problem.

There have been recent Supreme Court rulings that many would say are disagreeable, but we’re not doing anything about it because a lot of citizens either support it or just don’t care. But if citizens did, we could easily undo those decisions using the rules set out by the Constitution. So the problem really lies more with the people than the system.

Now I’m not familiar with the Brazilian political system — who checks the Supreme Court there? I just know the US Constitution had a LOT of people working on it and they covered a lot of bases.

A lot of this is more fragile than you want it to be though.

For example, the US Constitution was set out to have a weak federal government and have the state governments handle all the things that didn't specifically need to be federal, and one of the biggest checks and balances for this was that federal legislation had to pass the Senate and federal Senators were elected by the state legislatures. The Senate was the states' representation in the federal government, that's what it was for. Then the 17th amendment took it away, which was immediately followed by a persistent massive expansion of federal power, because the thing that was meant to act as a check on it got deleted.

Sometimes the checks and balances need more checks and balances.

In theory, the Senate can check the Supreme Court by impeaching the judges, the problem is that the Supreme Court checks all the senators and congressmen, by being the only one who can prosecute them.

9 out of 11 Supreme Court judges were indicated by the Labor Party (Lula and Dilma) in the last 20 years, some closely related to Lula. They can do anything they want, without worrying about elections. The president of Brazil doesn't matter anymore, at least for the next couple of presidential elections.

* if a senator commits a crime it can rest assured that the process will moth in a drawer until prescription as long as the senator doesn't go against the supreme court or its ministers personal interests.

* the supreme court (STF) also controls the electoral tribunal (TSE).

That is wildly outside democratic norms IMO. Not just the arrest of individual employers, but the threat of which coming directly from a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

Leaving aside all inaccuracies that are unavoidable in political situations: Philosophy spent quite some time thinking about this: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dirty-hands/

... Uhuh.

These are supreme court judges who openly and publicly showboat about being the ones personally responsible for defeating Bolsonaro. They literally said things like "mission given, mission accomplished" after the election was over. I saw news where one of them said he was proud to be partidarian. They've also said that Lula being elected was due to decisions of the supreme court.

And you would have us believe they did not favor Lula in any way whatsoever.