democracy as a terminal value
telling people that they only get to win elections if they vote for things they don’t actually want is isomorphic to telling them they don’t get to vote. The point of voting is securing one’s preferences. If voting can’t do that, voting is pointless.
I do not believe anyone involved in this discussion at any level considers democracy itself as a terminal value. If a durable 75% majority of Americans supported reinstating slavery of a specific ethnic/racial group, it would be madness to expect the other 25% to simply accept this outcome because them’s the rules, so whaddya gonna do? If you convince people that they do not have a reasonable hope of achieving their preferences through the political system, they will work to achieve those preferences through other systems.
- /u/FCfromSSC