The best thing about democracy, bar none, is the uncontestable unambiguous legitimacy that it gives to the people who take power according to its rules. This is pretty much the conventional wisdom as far as I can tell.
It is really not that hard to design uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy that have nothing to do with winning elections.
“To be emperor, you have to have successfully matriculated from the nation’s accredited emperor school.”
(Yeah, yeah, something something “will of the people,” I am not impressed and at this juncture I don’t think anyone else is either.)
>It is really not that hard to design uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy that have nothing to do with winning elections.
Let me revise that claim: “It was really not that hard to design an uncontestable unambiguous source of legitimacy that had nothing to do with winning elections.”
Past tense. And that’s true.
But what’s not true is that it is still easy. The thing about uncontestable unambiguous sources of legitimacy is that they stop being uncontestable and unambiguous as soon as there are two of them. And you’re right back to endless civil war and arguments between factions each of whom has their preferred “uncontestable” “unambiguous” source of legitimacy.
Witness as an example: Thailand. One faction trusts the results of elections as an uncontestable unambiguous source of legitimacy: the rural poor. The other faction trusts, hard to name it, popular revolution? Which is practically equivalent to “election by people in population centers which ends with by massive supermajority”. And both sides are willing to use violence to defend their source of legitimacy, because they are Morally Right and are Just Defenders Of The Uncontestable Unambiguous Source Of Legitimacy.
So, yeah, that was probably true in the past, but unless you’re starting from scratch with a founding population that doesn’t believe that elections can convey legitimacy or have any other mechanism they feel tightly attached to, it’s not true in the present or future.
Elections are losing their legitimacy pretty fast, which is one of the core problems here.
Maybe that just means we’re fucked forever, but I maintain hope that new memes can spread where old memes once flourished.