When you voted for your representatives.

Our representatives never voted on lockdowns. It's all done by executive decree.

You didn't vote for your executive branch?

Which governors ran on imposing lockdowns?

I don't recall any governor who ran on a platform of, "here are all the possible scenarios that could impact anyone in my state and how I would approach them."

You vote for a governor because you believe they will make a decision you generally agree with when presented with facts. Your vote says that for the next little while you think this person would represent your interests, no matter what happens. Some governors have mild terms, others have catastrophes they have to navigate.

No governor lists all the powers granted by previous legislatures as things they are running on. If you don't like them having such powers, elect people to remove such powers.

That you don't like it does not mean the majority of civil society doesn't like it, and the price you pay to have civil society is having laws not every single person likes at all times. But the mechanism is there to pursue change.

If the voters had known that their governor would exercise virtually unlimited powers based on what amounts to a little known emergency powers dictatorship clause - would they have voted for him? If not, do these governors really have the consent of the governed to do these things willy nilly of the legislature's blessing?

List the state where you think governors used powers not granted to them by the legislature.

If you, as a citizen, are unaware of public laws passed by your legislature, then you cannot blame the governor for using them during an emergency. It's your fault for not knowing the law, which in probably every case, has been public knowledge for decades.

I know in the states near me, MI, IN, OH, all the states have various powers granted to the governors, and I have known about them and the powers granted for two of the states for over a decade.

When you get surprised by things you didn't know but could have easily known beforehand, don't get so upset that someone is tricking you. They are not.

>If you, as a citizen, are unaware of public laws passed by your legislature, then you cannot blame the governor for using them during an emergency. It's your fault for not knowing the law, which in probably every case, has been public knowledge for decades.

The publicity of a law among tens of thousands of other laws is irrelevant. Government authority comes from the consent of the governed. Citizens do not give consent to something just because its on the books. People have jobs and real things to get done in their lives. They cannot and should not be expected to waste their time crawling through hundreds of thousands of pages of legislation, let alone have the legal background to interpret all of it. Imagine how much of an asshole you sound like right now: "Oh, your family business went bankrupt because of lockdowns? You have no right to complain, you should have studied § 46.2-872. Didn't know about it? Too bad!"

Public polling and widespread non-compliance suggests that governors lack the lockdown orders lack the consent of the governed.

>List the state where you think governors used powers not granted to them by the legislature.

Do you vote? Because that's your answer.

No politician ran a campaign on enforcing lockdowns. Nothing was put on the ballot, no votes were held. Where is the consent of the governed to all you who worship democracy?

Direct democracy doesn't really exist so not sure what you are complaining about.

What we have now is neither direct democracy nor representative democracy. Nobody voted for this.

What we have is literally representative democracy. Did we not just have elections last November?

Who voted for or against the lockdowns? If something this important was never held to a vote either directly or via representative, its not democratic.

I don't understand why this exact pattern of argument happens so much in online debate, but I really despise it.

Acrobatic_Road makes a reasonable point that they don't feel they were given the proper means to express their policy preferences, and reasonably calls it 'undemocratic'.

After all the reason we want democracy in the first place is so that ordinary citizens can influence the policy.

Chillwaves reasonably points out that America is a representative democracy and so you vote for candidates whom you trust to vote in accordance to your policy preferences.

That's two great points! We should be able to have an interesting discussion right? For example we could discuss ways in which the US system of representative democracy is failing Acrobatic_Road. We could also discuss why we might like it despite its failings.

But for some reason, online debate seemingly always end up in an inane discussion debating definitions with one side claiming X is not truly Y while the other side claims X lives up to standard definition of Y.

Nobody is any smarter. We entirely failed to learn anything from each others perspective.

We can be better than this :(

You seem confused as to the purpose of democracy. It is not to capture the wisdom of the crowd. The crowd is intensely stupid (as a vote on lockdown would certainly reveal). It is an agreement that power will change hands peacefully.

You're just wrong about this. A democracy is the rule by the people. That's why the Declaration of Independence says rulers derive their just powers from the governed. Democracies aren't particularly good at ensuring a peaceful transition of power as history shows (just look at the Roman Republic). "Peaceful transition of power" is a phrase that's not even relevant to other forms of government where one administration rules indefinitely.

>The crowd is intensely stupid (as a vote on lockdown would certainly reveal)

Oh, thanks for admitting that lockdowns are undemocratic.