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Peter Gerdes's avatar

Isn't a simpler answer that we want to signal our own virtue and the more we endorse high standards the more it suggests we have high standards for ourselves. Much like the way saying you voted to keep drugs illegal suggests you aren't the kind of person who does drugs?

I mean if we ask someone how a company should behave, when a country should go to war or a judge should behave we also set overly high bars. Yet in those cases there is no acceptance/rejection asymmetry since those are all just about public discourse.

I do feel you are onto something about the desire to have an excuse to critisize being greater than the desire to approve but I'm not sure that's about personal acceptance. Maybe it's about the fact that it's easier to be friends against something than friends for something so we form coalitions via criticism more than approval?

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John of Orange's avatar

The reason for the weird overloading of "democracy" is mostly just that you lose too many people by more accurately talking about liberalism, or liberal democracy. Otherwise what you quoted doesn't seem like a bad definition at all.

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