My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.
The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they have now become the weapons .. and if they are smart, they can use that power to influence which actions of the warring factions are needed for their supremacy so that they are more inline with the interests of the people. (2) the entry requirements and risks to become one of the factions are much lower which can help with (1)
The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.
Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move through water. That's it". The two lead to very different consequences!
>The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on.
It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible.
> The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. > The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.
The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people
I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a different way.
(I also think democracy is good, but however in the end both democracies and dictatorships rely on violence to be effective. I think that's quite basic lesson on how society works.)
All forms of government to some extent or another have to maintain a monopoly on legal violence and use force.
The distinction with democracy is that the government secures and maintains the consent of those being governed.
> What has been created by this half century of massive corporate propaganda is what's called "anti-politics". So that anything that goes wrong, you blame the government. Well okay, there's plenty to blame the government about, but the government is the one institution that people can change... the one institution that you can affect without institutional change. That's exactly why all the anger and fear has been directed at the government. The government has a defect - it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect - they're pure tyrannies. So therefore you want to keep corporations invisible, and focus all anger on the government. So if you don't like something, you know, your wages are going down, you blame the government. Not blame the guys in the Fortune 500, because you don't read the Fortune 500. You just read what they tell you in the newspapers... so you don't read about the dazzling profits and the stupendous dizz, and the wages going down and so on, all you know is that the bad government is doing something, so let's get mad at the government.
-- Noam Chomsky
It is possible for both the government and the private sector to be corrupted, especially if the latter exerts corrupting pressure on the former.
No, you're trying to speak for him. Consent to, say, physical assault being illegal, is a whole different ball game than manufactured consent to the Vietnam War, and all that is entailed in this wishy-washy stuff about "consent" in this context. Not to mention "democracy reacting by force to protest" -- as opposed to what, exactly? Non-democracies? Companies? People clicking buttons on HN? Nobody bothers to say, making it all an exercise in throwing shade at the one means of self-defense we have left.
> The neoliberal era of the last generation is dedicated, in principle, to destroying the only means we have to defend ourselves from destruction. It's not called that, what it's called is shifting decision-making from public institutions, which at least in principle are under public influence, to private institutions which are immune from public control, in principle. That's called "shifting to the market", it's under the rhetoric of freedom, but it just means servitude. It means servitude to unaccountable private institutions.
-- Noam Chomsky
> It is possible for both the government and the private sector to be corrupted
Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be. The government is responsibility of the citizens in a democracy, not something purely external they get to just complain about.
I still don't see the obvious difference between consenting to "typical" law enforcement (read: "physical assault being illegal") and consenting to imperialistic wars all over the globe. In both cases the government employs its monopoly on legal violence and is empowered to do so by our consent.
Of course the distinction between reasonable law enforcement and horrible wars of aggression is obvious, but when the exact same mechanism used to manufacture consent for the latter is also used to manufacture consent for the systematic oppression of racial minorities through law enforcement, it absolutely is not.
> Obviously, but the private sector isn't "corrupt" when it's a tyranny, that's the best it can hope to be.
Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?
> Is the officially accepted purpose of a private enterprise specifically and exclusively to create wealth for its owners, or have we just resigned ourselves to that reality? Isn't this supposed to be the most effective mode of production?
Maybe you did, but then make the argument.
> There are plenty of people who don't consent on a daily basis. The actions range from peaceful protests to traitorous acts. How does a democracy deal with them? Force.
Let's say for the sake of argument that I am an American citizen and that I do not consent to the tear gassing and pepper spraying of college aged young adults, nor do I consent to Chelsea Manning being jailed and Snowden being in exile. Does that make me a sociopath? I'm only scratching the surface here.
In any case, I recall saying that "much" of the consent was manufactured and not "all" of it.
Even in anarchy, humans form groups because it's better than being alone. Every group has rules. Members can choose to follow them and enjoy the benefits or leave the group and lose the benefits.
Governments don't follow this logic. Nobody consciously decides that they want to be governed, they just happen to be born on a particular territory. Most people can't just reject the laws and leave, and those that can are really just choosing between other governments. They can't simply create another country with their own laws and invite people over.
The social contract isn't really a contract, it's an imposition.
Note: I'm not talking about whether Democracy is good or bad, just about my "consent".
edit: fixed typo
In democracy, your country is your property, so you were given your share of your country at your birth, with corresponding benefits and obligations.
In despotism, country, including citizens, is owned by despot, so citizens inherit obligations only.
No, you voted at the democratic election. There is no question on the ballot asking whether or not you consent to be ruled by the resulting government.
For example, it's Ok for Russian Federation to kill their own or foreign people (e.g. British citizens), or start a war just to increase their profit from their natural gas.
What's different about their armies and ours ? I mean when was the last time citizens of a democratic republic gave their input on what assassination to carry out or war to wage ?
There is definitely a point about overt, extreme abuse against their own citizens being mostly prevented by representative democracy. But nothing about general consent or agency.
- No eternal leaders. - Freedom of expression - Separation of powers that limit each other
Oh? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_monarchy_referendums
>Freedom of expression
You were born without your consent too, therein lies the rub.
The poor have few places to go and no resources to go anywhere.
That a candidate is elected, doesn't mean they have anything close to 50% real support in the population. They just need to embody the one set of decisions that the largest homogeneous group of people agree with. That could very easily be a low single digit percentage of the population.
Smaller scope, heterogeneous governments with protected passageways in-between them would be a way to make things more consensual. If people can chose between multiple governments while still staying in similar climate and language-speaking areas, then you could say they really "chose to live in their country".
The agency situation for the average democratic republic citizen is not great right now. Exercising the negative side of consent requires huge sacrifices that many rationally can't make.
The jackboots come down just as hard.
Not necessarily. Some dictatorships do enjoy genuine support. (Obviously they make it easier for themselves it by controlling the media etc.)
> There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.
By the same token it's also possible to topple a dictatorship. At some point even your security forces will say "no". A good example would be the failure of "Plan X" in East Germany, when Stasi agents boycotted the orders, since they realized the cause was lost anyway.
MAGA types would, for instance, would never participate in a syndicalist general strike.
I would hazard a guess that a lot of us, that see it this way, are from culture backgrounds that still have historical recollection of "not democracy".
The definition of state is it's monopolisation of violence. But the difference is if it uses violence to keep the specific section of the ruling elite in power ... or just to keep the state (i.e. the entirety of the ruling elite) in power.
I've been in politics for close to 10 years - didn't get far, but far enough to accrued a lot of cynicism about humans and our organisational system.
>an you see how that is not the same thing at all?
My position is that a democratic system simply provides a proxy platform for the normal political struggle and it's only real effect is that less(no) people die when powers shift.
Most of everything else is propaganda as a weapon within this proxy war. As a result, my opinion is, that the only reason democracies do better economically is because it provides a safer, more stable, more reliable environment for more people to take risks and acquire extra resources they would otherwise be unable to.
> It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible.
You will probably not be surprised if I state that in my opinion no one in power gives a sit about consent. Or about win-wins. Everyone within a democratic system is trying to win at the expanse of everyone else. But because participating in the struggle is safer and easier more groups do .. which leads to somewhat better results ... but only as long as there ARE more groups active. My critique is that we've become complaisant and are participating in the struggle less and less ... with predictable results.
> The first sentence describes the removal of democracy.
Only if you define democracy as anything more than I do. If that sentence is the removal of democracy ... than just about every democratic system is experiencing "removal".
> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people.
I agree and have said so myself. But my point is that democracy is good for people because people don't die AND nothing more. The problem is that people somehow believe that democracy will also, by it's very nature, provide social services, healthcare etc.
I find the post you're responding to be an amusingly phrased and more reasonable interpretation of democracy than most, and will with the remainder of my post attempt a proportionate defense from the imposition of will you intend in representing your self-interest as moral truth.
> can you see how that is not the same thing at all?
I believe this phrasing is unnecessarily dismissive of the viewpoint you are responding to. A micro-imposition, if you will.
> [Democracy] also opened up the field for consent on all sides
Democracy does not transform or create consent, consent existed in the same form prior to democracy. If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent. There is one point of the original post I will disagree with: the vote does not impose on the governed in democracy, the people with "swords/bullets" who find that vote to be an agreeable imposition and resistance to be a disagreeable imposition do. Voting may often be an adequate proxy for the use of violence to coerce, but it is nothing other than a statement of one's willingness to use violence or see violence be used for coercion towards a specific end.
> Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible
I disagree. Democracy enables aspects of reality to be classified by criteria which do not convey moral meaning, and for those classifications to become parameters in the function that allocates violence for the purpose of coercion. The closest approximation of a "true win-win" within the constraints dictated by reality is when all parties minimize their imposition. Voting in regards to which arbitrary classification of reality shall be imposed on in the interest of some other arbitrary classification is a statement of violent intent which is so far detached from moral meaning it amounts to a random walk in that metric space.
> There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt.
It is not possible to exist in such a way that all things which do exist or could possibly exist win. Physical reality is inherently adversarial: conservation of energy suggests that a quanta of energy released by one process can only and will only be consumed by exactly one process. One may strive to maximize the entropy of reality, to allow the largest number of contending states to be occupied, and this is moral. Democracy, again, moves with no discernible direction in relation to moral meaning.
> The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people
Democracy is exactly ruling by force. Resist the imposition of the will of the majority, or something which is fraudulently misrepresented as the will of the majority unopposed, and you will be coerced by violence. The only thing that is inherently good for the people is for every individual person to minimize their imposition to that which is necessary to survive and seek truth, and only then if that does not require a greater imposition than they would resist. Anything more is an immoral act of self-service.
No sir, I certainly will not.
> If you do not resist an imposition of will, you consent.
Thousands of victims of date-rape drugs say you're wrong.
> Discontinue consumption of substances offered to you by someone who has previously intoxicated you without your consent.
So you agree there wasn't consent the first time. Sounds like refuting yourself to me.
If the option to resist the imposition is not presented, the question of consent has not been called.
The act occurs without consent but also without dissent.
When likely future intent is made known by past actions, the question of consent has been called and may be answered.
You raise an interesting challenge and it is a scenario I haven't considered before. I am happy to discuss it and any other issues you find with my morality, but I would prefer if we could please agree that language is an approximation of meaning, attempt to seek clarity before semantic assertions, and that I be allowed to speak for myself.
If the alternative is swords and bullets, I would think most people prefer democracy. It’s the worst system, except for all the others attempted so far.
With democratic country everyone has some minimal effect on how those tools of violence are used, unlike in dictatorships or monarchies. So I think also it is a better system.
Democracies have other benefits, but stability does not seem to be one of them.
PS: I am ignoring assassinations and power struggles as we have lost 4 sitting US presidents without it being considered a civil war.
Just look at the Constitutions of pre-civil war Southern states. https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/suppressedbooka0...
IMO, what defines a democracy is large segments of the population having a meaningful vote rather than requiring some ideal implementation.
How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co...
By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.
But yes, if you exclude all the civil wars then England had no civil wars during that time period.
Hundred Year War is hardly a civil war existing as it did between multiple countries.
Smaller conflicts like Buckingham's rebellion are excluded much the same ways as I ignored most of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rebellions_in_the_Un.... Along with a host of unmentioned smaller slave revolts.
The War of the Roses was is arguable if it’s a civil war. I and many others disagree (see above Wikipedia link).
In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)
That's why the true test of a country's switch to democracy are not the first democratic elections, but the first democratic change of power.
Under democracy you optimize for just a single metric - popularity. If leader is terrible and popular no garbage collection will occur.
Rise of populism is inherently built into nature of democracy itself.
But a consequence of the states being able to independently decide how those electors are chosen lead to every state basically having a law that says that "you vote for the candidate instead of the elector, and the elector's don't actually matter and must follow the popular vote."
I really dislike the system as it exists now because the people directly electing 2/3 of the government in a checks and balances system kinda ruins the whole thing.
This isn't quite true. People are killed over regional political struggles in democracies. The difference is one of scale, not of absolutes.
Not just inherently good, but unquestionably good. It has so many flaws, yet it's goodness is assumed as unassailable.
The design of a Republic serves to address some of the most obvious flaws. The biggest issue I see with the way republics currently operate is that there isn't a clear mechanism for handling bandwidth and processing constraints.
When the US was founded for example, congressional apportionment was one representative per 57,169 people. Today it is 747,184. The problem here is that it becomes impossible for a representative to effectively represent the disparate interests of that many people and it's also difficult for the representative to adequate sampling the interests of that many people. There are bandwidth constraints between representatives and constituents and there are processing constraints with handling more constituents.
Having a mechanism to manage apportionment for better outcomes seems like one key overlooked feature. We should have far more representatives and we should have more senators per state. This would also create more processing power for those representatives to spend time refactoring and improving existing laws instead of merely serving as commit generators.
Today we discuss the power of the 1%, but that's nothing in comparison with the power of the 0.00016% (538/327.2 million).
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...
I'm being more and more convinced of this because in my experience it is much better at explaining and predicting reality.
It's not pleasant and I didn't want to accept it. But here I am.
Democracy is neither evil nor good. It is just a popularity contest. Merit doesn't matter - only popularity does.
It is popular, but useless.
I do not have a better system, but i do not lie to myself that democracy is perfect.
Why stop at bullets, why don't you say aircraft carriers or something
Tell that to the family of a friend's friend that was ambushed and decapitated in the middle of the night by an opposing political party because they made statements denouncing a political party during elections in a Democratic country.
ETA:News story to clarify what I'm talking about.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-ne...
We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.
What? Absolutely agree that we have a ton more resources than previously. However, as has always been the case, they're not equitably distributed. Plenty of people are removed from resources they want or need.
Look at the US. We still have homeless people. We still have people dying of curable diseases. The fight for resources is real to plenty of people.
As the Federal bureaucracy grows and as elected politicians stay in office longer the regressions become more severe though.
If it gets bad enough you end up with a massive centralized apparatus which inevitably implodes and takes out the nation it governed with it.
As seen in China every 100-200 years throughout it's history, as seen in the USSR, Rome, etc.
Lots of small sadnesses are always better than one or two big ones (which is the central premise of Nassim Taleb's books)
So they're no good. He touts the extreme federalism of Switzerland. Small, local governments which can only affect and are only responsible for their immediate constituent
Concentration of power => concentration of fail points => fragile to catastrophic events.
Distribution of power => distribution of fail points => majority of system will survive catastrophes.
Or, in VC speak:
single investment in single start-up => fund will not survive a failure.
Many small investments in many start-ups => 75% fail, 10% break even, 10% make 2-3x, 5% return 10x
Thank you for clearing that up.
The most convenient part for the the ruling class is that we have been tricked into thinking it is about red vs blue or left vs right. People talk about politics in a very "us vs them" vernacular. In the meantime, the corporate interests rob the middle class blind. It is a game of misdirection and self interest.
The only way to ever really solve it is a more representative and distributed democracy model. This kind of setup also forces a lot of the money out of politics. Alas, the rulers have no appetite for giving up the corruption they have worked oh so hard for.
Definitely how I felt in pre-Macron France, where the presidents were just telling idiots impossible dreams why the whole country was managed prudently.
Maybe this time I am the idiot in the demographic targeted by the president, so I feel hopeful again ahaha
Since the 1970s, military spending has decreased as a percentage of government spending and as a percent of GDP, while "for the people" spending - social security, healthcare, etc. - have risen dramatically in both measures.
See http://metrocosm.com/history-of-us-taxes/ and scroll down to the spending breakdown.
One reason is that spending is often dictated by need. Military spending, for example, is hugely influenced by the current political environment so a reduction in military spending from the levels of the 40s-80s is not really a "for the people" change as it is more a "we don't need to fight the Axis/Soviets anymore" change. Similarly spending on social security and healthcare is something that is hugely impacted by the age of the population.
The second big factor is revenue generation. "For the people" spending might not be a huge benefit to the middle and lower classes if that program is funded by revenue from the middle and lower classes. If you only look at that spending chart you do see a dramatic increase in social security spending, but there is also a large increase in the social security revenue side that helps pay for it.
Interesting.
To go deeper, take spending (here's another link - https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/04/what-does-t... basically 65% of federal spending is now for social welfare, rising from about 5% of GDP in 1970 to 15% of GDP in 2016) and add in who pays the majority of taxes (the top 20% pay almost 70% of taxes https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/who-pays-taxes).
The progressivity (rate of upper income taxes vs lower income taxes) has also increased in the time period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Average_US_Federal_Tax_Ra...
So the upper classes pay more taxes in both rates and absolute dollars, those rates have increased, and the social welfare programs are the largest and increasingly largest categories of spending.
See also the growth in income of the various quintiles after taxes and transfers, and the trends over these decades: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55413#section2
To credibly assert "Post 1970s...austerity for the people, largesse for the military, corporations, and ruling class", you'll need to provide some strong opposing facts.
Also that Wikipedia link you included conveniently doesn't start until the very late 70s just after the top rate saw a huge drop from the levels established in the post-depression era.
Lastly you need to factor in growing income inequality in these numbers. It is possible for the top tax bracket to collectively pay both a higher share of taxes in both percentage and absolute dollars while each individual person in that tax bracket sees their tax rate decrease.
OP asserted "Post 1970s", so starting in the late 1970s is the appropriate starting point (quibbling?).
The progressivity rate link above was tax rate, not percentage of taxes paid.
OP's point was that a change was made during the 1970s. You therefore need to look at the period before the 1970s and compare it to after the 1970s. You were just looking at the time period after the largest change in the top marginal tax rate was already made. Here[1] is the top marginal tax rate during a larger time frame.
[1] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Historical_Marginal_...
The parent seems to assert:
1. the parties function as controlled opposition
2. the Democratic Party is pseudo-left
3. after the 1970s, the two parties have had ideological continuity
4. one example of this ideological continuity includes some (preference for? belief in? rhetorical advocation of?) austerity* "for the people"
5. another example of this ideological continuity includes largesse (i.e., generosity) "for the military, corporations, and ruling class"
6. the ideological continuity is obvious, but obfuscated in public discourse through various culture wars
* I'm not clear on what definition(s) of austerity the parent has in mind here. This could be the general pol/econ definition, but the direct contrast with largesse makes me wonder if the more general "severity" definition is also important.
The theory being that if the two sides can find common ground, it's actually a good idea.
I'm not sure that's a great thing, but you're never going to find a consensus that's both palatable to a majority and the right thing to do (of course, "right thing" being what I'm arbitrarily deciding is "right" based on my own values).
What's the compromise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery? Thank god argument to moderation wasn't the solution here.
The slavery compromise was exactly that. First the 3/5th agreement, then the Missouri compromise, then finally, when one side got all of the power (which is what the system is supposed to mitigate the chances of) a shooting war.
Lincoln likely wouldn't have gone quite so agro on slavery if not for succession.
And there likely wouldn't have been a United States if there hadn't been any compromises on slavery. The two sides would have split at the outset, and either 1) neither would have been able to amass enough influence on the continent and they'd have been reabsorbed by a European power 2) after a hundred years of independent growth and simmering hatred, the two nation's would have had a war even more disastrous than the American civil war.
And the important thing is often that decisions don't happen in isolation. A moderate middle ground solution that fails often lends a lot of weight to the next round of negotiations when people decide what to try after compromise solution #1 fails.
The system survives long enough to make it to the next round of negotiations
Which, given that the US Constitution of "minimize the damage one person / group can do" is the longest standing constitution currently, I think it's one of the better solutions.
Democracy (or perhaps bureaucracy) just de-risks the chance that your government fails you through diversification of parties involved, similar to diversifying your investment portfolio. Given that human nature tends to lead people into the "asshole" column, I can understand why democracy would be the preferable of the two approaches.
I'd deeply love an analysis about the effectiveness of voting / political systems in relation to goals/results. We would probably choke on the accountability issue right away.
You'd just need some Bene Gesserit types keeping the bloodlines, so you don't end up with the grandsons of Victoria or Charles II of Spain.
It does seem that the election cycle is comprised of 1) promises, 2) elected based on promises, 3) failure to achieve promises, 4) kicked out of office because the other candidate is promising us stuff we want and we believe he will deliver.