Direct Democracy in Switzerland

Not sure how it works in Switzerland, though a quick look at Wikipedia suggests plebiscites can be involved. National plebiscites don't really exist in the US.

A woman with kids can choose whether to stay at home or work (full or part time at their discretion) and plenty of women choose to be stay at home mums.

No such choice is given to most fathers.

The kind of everybody is equal mentality that must underlie such a statement boggles my mind. It's an attitude that is shockingly disconnected from the real world. We may as well be talking about Santa Claus.

That's one hypothesis but there are many things it can't explain. We could compare African countries that were colonized to African countries that were not colonized. The hypothesis predicts a big difference but is there?

We could compare non-African countries that were colonized to African countries that were colonized. Hypothesis predicts a small difference, is there?

Democracy by itself is not necessarily a stable institution. In the absence of a strong social commitment to rule of law and an effective and disciplined state, it doesn't work. The path that some societies took to get to this state did involve education, and in particular literacy, to a fair degree.

Africa is a mess due to western imperialism but failed democracy is a different topic than that: because most societies started off in some kind of mess, either in disarray, or in a state of tyranny. We don't have any examples of states going directly from tribal societies to functioning democracies with rule of law in one, peaceable step. Looking only at the west, it took centuries of violent conflict.

However (ignoring the ad hominem), I don't agree with your second point that a more education citizen will not necessarily make better decisions than less educated ones. Obviously everyone will make decisions that benefit themselves, but only with Education can someone understand the ramifications of their decisions in a broader context. Many political situations have little-to-no effect on an individual in the short-term, so making a decision (since it's not based on personal gain) must be based on something else. I would argue that something would be an individual's understanding of the impact on society in general - an understanding that a "good education" is supposed to cultivate.

The EU bureaucracy's near-fanatical, unbending approach to what it wants doesn't make anything different "inconsistent", "a dream", "unrealistic" or "not reality". That's the sort of attitude that is inflaming serious anti-EU tensions across all of Europe and will eventually cause either the EU to crush European democracy itself, or the EU to collapse chaotically.

Indeed, the "watering down" you mention was a violation of the Swiss constitution and has led to quite serious political tensions, including a new referendum that's trying again to force the political class to actually implement referendums the EU doesn't like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language

knock on wood

For a direct democracy you need a small population that is homogeneous in at least outlook if not in race. The countries that come closest to it are largely a single race.

I also think that republican forms of government collapse when you get 100+ million. The US has been straining for sometime to hold itself together. More and more people feel divided. If it wasn't for the inherent weakness to outside attack, I'd prefer to see the US divide into regional countries that are better able to manage themselves.

For example, a $15 hourly wage would bankrupt rural Florida. We hear more and more about that at a Congressional level. The same is true for most of the rural areas of the country. A better answer is for the States to move to minimum wages that fit their territories.

Perhaps experience with being consulted is why the Swiss appear relatively sanguine about a referendum vote to impose quotas on all immigration being creatively reinterpreted by its trade-prioritising government as just introducing job preferences for Swiss nationals in times of high unemployment and tightening residency permit criteria. That's certainly a course of action which would be expected to create much more unease in other parts of Europe; the furore over whether prioritising Single Market alignment in the UK's future relationship with the EU over an assumed preference for immigration restrictions that wasn't even on the relevant referendum ballot paper is a notable contrast. But I'd imagine there were aspects of the Swiss political psyche other than "maturity", "long term vision" or experience with referendums which made them relatively unenthusiastic about an impractically-high UBI proposal, high minimum holiday entitlement and supremacy of Swiss law over international law and relatively enthusiastic about banning minarets, allowing greater surveillance powers and [until remarkably recently in some cantons] restricting the franchise to men. Californians certainly don't have a particular shortage of referendums either.

Extremes in ideals. Kansas cut their tax base too much without cutting their spending accordingly. With the US most of its the process of taking on massive amounts of debt under a pseuodo-socialist/capitalist system of welfare programs. 80% of the US budget goes towards paying for welfare programs: medicare/medicaid, social security, and debt payments that came from mostly spending on the welfare programs. The Republicans never slash, or kill the programs. The democrats always expand them without correcting the tax issues. For example, when Obama had the majority of Congress, he did not seek to raise the cap on SS taxes past the existing 120-130k line where it is today. Increasing the line, while also limiting payouts to an income of 120k, would pay for the program. What I mean by this is that there should be no cap, but the system will only pay out a maximum regardless of how much you paid in.

Essentially both parties fail to observe the logical outcome of their philosophies. The Republicans are for a small government and a large military, which isn't really contradictory. The military is a specific power of the US government under the Constitution. The trouble with them is that they don't actually pursue the process of paring down the government. The Democrats are for large government. Their problem is they don't pursue the tax side the way they should. They need to increase taxes on the poor like the Scandinavian countries. In Finland, the average person pays 30-40% of their income to the State. They don't have a progressive tax system like we do. The Democrats don't pursue this. As a result, they go into debt.

A direct democracy doesn't protect against this. Look at recent Florida elections. There is less than a 1% difference between the gubernatorial candidates. Should the 49.9901 get ruled by the other side?

> Enough white votes, maybe, and trying to exclude people from the franchise is still a powerful strain in US politics.

The South didn't have, and knew it would only loose ground, to the Northern votes if it only leaned on its white population. The first industrial revolution was growing the North even in the early days of the Constitutional system. The South needed the white Democrats, at least the precursor, once the cotton gin was invented to support slavery. Before the gin, slave labor didn't help that much. Cotton was too expensive due to manual labor. With the gin, all those bails of cotton that usually rotted in the fields were useful and valuable as long as you had the labor to get them out in time. The northern bankers made the funding available to purchase the slaves and extend the cotton trade.

The founders were more afraid of direct democracy that led to the Athenians getting pushed to the sea when a demagogue rose to power due to sweet words. Again, unless you require a supermajority for all votes, direct democracy is easily swayed by political hacks like Colbert or Catiline.