Whether the referendum was a good idea in the first place is another question entirely. I think that it was not. Plebiscitary democracy, in which a government puts questions to the population in the expectation of getting the answer it wants, is dangerous. The modern European tradition is to hold a plebiscite and then take no notice of the result if it is “wrong.” This, of course, is the worst of both worlds, but it is what the demonstrating “defenders” of democracy want.
If they had objected beforehand to the whole procedure of the referendum, for example—to the absurdity of deciding so complex a question on the basis of a single vote decided by 50 percent of the votes plus one—those who now decry what Johnson has done might have had a point, but they did not. They expected to win the referendum and only turned against it because of the unexpected result.
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Whether the referendum was a good idea in the first place is another question entirely. I think that it was not. Plebiscitary democracy, in which a government puts questions to the population in the expectation of getting the answer it wants, is dangerous. The modern European tradition is to hold a plebiscite and then take no notice of the result if it is “wrong.” This, of course, is the worst of both worlds, but it is what the demonstrating “defenders” of democracy want.
>
If they had objected beforehand to the whole procedure of the referendum, for example—to the absurdity of deciding so complex a question on the basis of a single vote decided by 50 percent of the votes plus one—those who now decry what Johnson has done might have had a point, but they did not. They expected to win the referendum and only turned against it because of the unexpected result.
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