Thanks for your reply!
you’re assuming an abstract notion of ‘democraticness’ that infuses everything the government does
Isn’t this what commitment to democracy entails if you think that democratic governance is procedurally valuable? If a decision derives from a democratic body, then that decision at least prima facie deserves respect as a democratic decision.
whereas the critics don’t care whether it’s a democratic government that’s making a bad decision―it’s still a bad decision that leaves individuals with outsized power.
If this was their criticism, they wouldn’t bring up democracy, since it’s irrelevant. This is a substantive criticism: our democracy has done the wrong thing here. This is not the same thing as being anti-democratic, which is what they seem to be arguing.
I think there is a steelman of this argument which is something like:
A decision made by a democratic body is prima facie democratic, but can be undemocratic if it has certain characteristics like undermining democracy in the long-run or abusing “market failures” in the democratic system itself.
But the problem is I don’t think “making someone more powerful” is necessarily a procedurally objectionable outcome—I don’t think it necessarily undermines democracy. It seems perfectly reasonable to me for a democracy to decide that it will allow billionaires to make a lot of money if they give it away. What the critics have failed to do, in my estimation, is argue that this is not the type of decision that democracies can ratify. In the absence of such a showing, it seems reasonable to me to conclude that a well-known and easily stoppable pattern of mega-philanthropy has been democratically acquiesced to.
Yes, it might be. Feel free to sync offline if you want to investigate this.