PREACH!

What if I don't want to compromise with fascists?

You know I kind of question that. I think democracy is more about rich people controlling the mechanisms through which everyone votes in order to sort of fool the masses into believing that whatever the oligarchs decide they want, is what they must've wanted, while simultaneously also being a good way for the rich to kind of gauge public interests through a periodic census and more easily manipulate them.

No, but I kid. Mostly. I think, democracy, more, in it's pure forms, is less maybe about compromise, and more about a kind of assumption that the majority of people are reasonable, and can be reasoned with, which I think is kind of a foundational assumption you need to make if you want any non-authoritarian form of society. Which isn't to really say that democracy can't be authoritarian, or employ authoritarian methods, because it can.

Most people don't believe we should get rid of all guns, or that we should be able to freely own machine guns, or even lots of regular guns. A functioning democracy would end up having some level of background checks, and mental health checks, and general procedures that you would have to go through (probably involving hands-on training classes and certifications), in order to own a gun. If you poll people, with a good poll, rather than a stupid binary dynamic single choice poll, you'll find that's what most people want. From what I've seen, the same is true for abortion, and I haven't seen the public sentiment on drugs, but I'd imagine most people probably would like most hard drugs to remain more illegal, or harder to access, than most "soft drugs". You can find this across most different things you'd poll people on. Healthcare, other forms of public infrastructure, including civic infrastructure, military funding, space research, every aspect of government.

This isn't to necessarily say that most people are moderates, but I think a very underrated aspect of democracy is the fact that people can choose not to vote if they feel like they're not informed enough on a concept, which will naturally select, if done correctly, for people who are more knowledgeable on a subject. Even the general public is capable of giving you a somewhat nuanced answer on many different political topics, that kind of breaks through two-party dynamics, and might even break through what are thought to be general consistent ideological positions.

None of this is to say that democracy isn't also about some level of compromise, but I think it's also up to the reasonable participants of a democracy to decide their level of compromise, what they're willing to accept and what they're not okay with. I think, you know, if your democracy was more on the side of my initial, joking answer, than on the side of all of what I've laid out, it would be kind of a shame were the whole system NOT sabotaged and taken down. In my view, at least. And, you know, providing something worse didn't sprout up in it's place.

Western democracy originated in ancient Greece. This political system granted democratic citizenship to free men, while excluding slaves, foreigners and women from political participation. In virtually all democratic governments throughout ancient and modern history, this was what democracy meant. An elite class of free men made all the decisions for everyone. Before Athens adopted democracy, aristocrats ruled society, so "rule by the people", or the idea of a government controlled (in theory) by all its (free) male citizens instead of a few wealthy families seemed like a good deal. But really it was just a new iteration of Aristocracy rule rather than the revolution it's painted as. The rich still rule society by feeding voters carefully constructed propaganda and keeping everyone poor, overworked and desperate to be granted basic needs by the state.

In democracies today, only legal citizens of a country are granted democracy. In a lot of countries, people who have been convicted of a "crime" are denied the right to vote, regardless of how long ago they served their sentence. In the US, this is used to deny voting rights to minority groups, who make up a large proportion of the prison population.

In some societies only a small minority group are allowed to participate in the democracy. In Apartheid South Africa, the minority group (European settlers) granted themselves democracy and excluded the native majority, using democracy to deprive the native population of the rights granted to European settlers. Anarchy, of course, is an absence of government; of rulers. Democracy aims for the individual to be governed, ruled, controlled by others.

Our rulers use democracy to separate us into in-groups and out-groups, pitting the majority group against the minority groups and giving everyone a false sense of control. We're made to believe we have a say in how our lives are run because we get to participate in glorious democracy. Of course, all of us outside the ruling class continue to be exploited, living in perpetual servitude, and the only people who really benefit from democracy are the ruling class who use it to keep us alienated and distracted so we don't rise up and kill them all for the debilitating misery they create.

Democracy grants authority to favored groups to oppress minority groups. Democracy ignores the autonomy of the individual in favor of the collective will of the dominant group. Democracy exists to enable rulers to uphold brutal power hierarchies. It's really the full embodiment of authority; used to maintain the tyrannical capitalist-statist status quo all over the world today.