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Comment by alkonaut | Hacker News Reader

If politicians in democracies can survive without serving their constituencies, that means their constituencies are letting them get away with that. For example: the voters might have failed to vote for sensible campaign financing reform so that politicians serve financial interests more than voters.

In the end these possibilities are always given by voters, and they can only be taken away by voters.

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In the real-world countries often referred to as "democracies", most meaningful choices involving voting are on too large a scale (country-wide, and decade-long time horizon), and rigid (binary choice, irreversible), for voters to get any taste of democracy (other than the average citizen being mostly protected from extreme abuse).

In the end, decisions are taken by a republic. If this republic doesn't serve its constituency, there isn't much the constituency can do apart from waiting for the next term and then vote for the second most popular party.

This is well examplified by the fact that protests are still a thing in countries thought to be democracies. Historically, protests are a tool against dictatorships. If citizens had proper democratic agency, they would not have to disrupt their own country's economic activity in hopes to bend their leader's arm. It's a very inefficient and fuzzy decision-making mechanism.

That's why the proper term for the current popular government system is "democratic republic", not just "democracy". An actual democracy on the scale of a country would be way more complex than what we have now. It would probably be closer to the economic market in terms of complexity. We might get there one day, but calling our current systems "democracies" is proper newspeak.

> An actual democracy on the scale of a country would be way more complex than what we have now. It would probably be closer to the economic market in terms of complexity.

In fact, it would be exactly the economic market. The ultimate form of democracy is 100% economic means ("vote with your wallet") and 0% political means (force).

... which implies there is an option on the ballot that has a hypothetical, "good", surveillance-free candidate.

There is not.

That is again something the constituency can easily change. It just needs one of the many anti-surveillance voters to be willing to run for office.

Voters don't vote on particular decisions, or even on decision makers for particular issues, they vote on one decision maker for all issues.

How likely is it that an anti-surveillance candidate also happens to satisfy more than 50% of voters on aspects other than surveillance?

Since surveillance is low on the list of priorities of most people, it's a rational choice for them to ignore the candidates' stance on surveillance while choosing their preferred candidate.

As such, the stance of republican leaders on low-interest, non identity-defining aspects like surveillance is mostly unaffected by democracy.

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