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Comment by yasp | Hacker News Reader

Where do the limits that are supposed to govern the behavior of a democratically elected politician come from? I will tell you. They must either come from law, or from ethical philosophy that has been reified, for lack of a better word, by the state into law. For this to be so, one of two things must have happened. Either the state imposed these restrictions with disregard to the will of people, or they were imposed in accordance with the will of the people. If the former, they are illegitimate. If the latter, they are arbitrary (the product of a particular people at a particular time) and therefore subject to change.

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There is a lot of gray area between the extremes here. What has worked, historically, is a system where ultimately all power derives from the people, but the process is designed to be somewhat slow, to moderate strong emotions, and to add subject matter expertise to the process.

The two most obvious features here are elections (not referenda), and the judicial system. The latter adds an element of “village elders”, while the former makes decision-makers confront hard choices and their consequences.

That’s why direct democracy is considered rather harmful: just look at the clusterfuck that is Brexit for an idea of what happens when people are allowed to make fantasy decisions while disregarding their actual implementation.

As an analogy, consider trial-by-jury (managed by a competent judge) with having all of the locals decide all criminal cases once a month based on what they read in the (disappearing) local paper and on nextdoor. Who would you want to decide the punishment when the neighbor boy accuses you of touching him in funny places?

> That’s why direct democracy is considered rather harmful: just look at the clusterfuck that is Brexit for an idea of what happens when people are allowed to make fantasy decisions while disregarding their actual implementation

Brexit wasn't direct democracy; the public vote was a non-binding referendum submitted as an electoral strategum by the elected government, which then quit in favor of a new government of the same psrty, which decided—though in no way legally compelled to—to treat the vote as if it were a binding order in order to pass responsibility off onto someone other than itself.

In an actual direct democracy, the people would vote on the actual policy details, not vague generalizations only if and when it seemed likely to serve the political strategy of the ruling officials.

In any democracy, most people ultimately vote on what's put in front of them by somebody else. It can just as well be "vague generalizations".

In a direct democracy it can't be vague generalizations that the actual rulers, who are distinct from the electorate, get to choose whether and how to apply and whether or not the electorate can reconsider it, because if there are actual rulers distinct from the electorate it's not a direct democracy.

Brexit is not a failure of direct democracy.

How does a democracy (or any governance system backed by public will) survive if there is a 50/50 split in public will ?

If that split is over something with no middle ground, that every person considers more important than everything else put together (including survival of the democracy), then it quite simply doesn't.

Otherwise, if it's to survive, it does so by compromise, tradeoffs, bargaining, and leaving many people at least a little unhappy but not enough people unhappy enough to dismantle the system.

There is no pure direct democracy at scale. You're still going to delegate authority to people doing things, and rely on their expert opinions when it comes to what to vote on.

But in any case, in a direct democracy, if enough people want to vote on something, they can, regardless of how stupid it is. That would include Brexit etc.

You can come up with this, and yet not know what populism means?

Here, Wikipedia has a decently long article on it[0] to get you up to speed.

When you're done reading, maybe you can stop prevaricating in this thread and just state whatever case you're trying to make.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism

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