If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people.
So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public sentiment was), then the politicians did the right thing: They obeyed the will of the people.
Which also means that in this case, the people of Ireland f'd up and need to take responsibility for that, rather than blame the politicians who simply implemented their will.
We can't have it both ways. We can't demand a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and also let ourselves off the hook whenever our collective decisions suck.
Maybe we, the people, suck at governing in a crisis.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
What you are describing is leaning towards "direct democracy", which nobody tries to implement, vs "representative democracy" which is what we all experience. In the latter it absolutely is a feature that representatives will go against the preference of the majority at least some of the time.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people.
Not necessarily. I think some people have said that democracy is designed to imitate revolutions without actually being violent: that if much of the populace is armed and not that many people have enough gear and training to make them enormously more effective than a random person with a gun, then "one person, one vote; majority wins" approximately reflects what would happen if there was a violent revolution, so people don't have much to gain by adding violence. If that's true, then appeasing the mob by letting them more or less get their policies implemented may be best even if those policies are not the best—because the alternative is risking a bloody revolution followed by the mob implementing their policies anyway.
The US government is based on the idea that "citizens" (note: lots of problems with the way they defined them at the time) elect people who make decisions on their behalf. It was designed to have more and less democratic institutions so that there would be block on the popular will.
They believed that the purpose of democracy was to be able to remove the people who ruled you, to ultimately prevent autocracy. They didn't believe every decision should be a plebiscite.
> If we believe in democracy, we necessarily must believe that the crowd - the mob, if you're feeling less generous - is better at making decisions than any small group of people
Well, no.
If we believe in democracy, we believe that government must ultimately serve and be accountable to the people.
It's possible along with that to also believe that it is a bad idea for the crowd to have day-to-day responsibility for the detailed decisions of government (if nothing else because of the dynamics of extra-large groups a d the communications problems involved), which might motivate us to prefer that democracy be representative rather than direct, with a relatively small group, that it is accountable to the crowd, making decisions.
One way I look at democracy is that it’s the will of the majority + the rights of the minority.
It gets a little.. speculative.. once that minority in this case is “(future) victims of covid”. Not sure how to fully and clearly articulate the principle behind why we should give up a little impatience now, in a somewhat unpopular way, and how that is compatible with democracy, but I believe it is.
This is why democracies are usually republics versus direct vote democracies -- the will of the majority will always throw the minority under the bus. This is why you have laws, checks and balances against mob rule.
Which means believing that it's better to implement a terrible but popular decision than to override the will of the people.
So in this case, IF the majority supported lifting restrictions (and I'm not Irish so I have no idea what the public sentiment was), then the politicians did the right thing: They obeyed the will of the people.
Which also means that in this case, the people of Ireland f'd up and need to take responsibility for that, rather than blame the politicians who simply implemented their will.
We can't have it both ways. We can't demand a government of the people, by the people, for the people, and also let ourselves off the hook whenever our collective decisions suck.
Maybe we, the people, suck at governing in a crisis.