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Comment by marta_morena_25 | Hacker News Reader

> We can fight it by electing the correct people.

Can we? Please explain how that would work... Your faith in democracy is admirable, although misplaced.

I had to stop and think about why the, "can we?" argument annoys me. I feel that it reflects (at its most extreme) a belief that if the system isn't perfect and the candidates beyond question, that there's no benefit in making a choice. However, I feel that there's an opportunity cost to perfectionism. We (in Western democracies) have been able to make some progress in some areas (while clearly acknowledging things are far from perfect, or even completely broken in some areas), while we're "in" an imperfect system. Surely, there's some possible benefit to making a "least worst" choice, while that choice still exists? And if not, what's the alternative?

This is not about perfection, this is about not supporting a system the is explicitly designed to exploit wedge issues to avoid having to make an significant amount of change to a status quo that is completely broken in almost every way.

I live in Australia where voting is mandatory. My belief is that this tends to mitigate the appeal to extremes because a majority of the voting public tends to be relatively centrist on most issues, meaning that a strategy of appealing to the extremes, will lose you the valuable middle. It tends not be as much of a winning strategy here as it does in the US. Of course, the downside is that change is often very incremental. As I get older though, I'm finding that's not such a bad thing. Democracy can withstand small perturbations and stay relatively stable.

Centrism is inherently conservative, and will lean towards whatever the current system is. A “centrist” party in the Soviet Union would be just another communist party, and a centrist party in Australia is likewise just another capitalist party. Likewise a centrist party in the USA would be another run of the mill capitalist, pro-military, pro-police. pro-surveillance. It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.

The Soviet Union was not a multi-party democracy so I agree with you but it’s not relevant to the point I was making. With respect to the US, my guess is what‘s happened is both parties have drifted in the same direction, so the position of the “centre” (in the absence of mandatory voting defined as the median between the two parties rather than the median of the population) has moved too. Of course, I only have remote observer status - I’m not living it like most of those present in this discussion are.

>It would basically just be the current Democratic party except it wouldn’t fight for immigration rights, abortion rights, nor gay rights. A lack of centrist parties is not what is wrong with American politics currently.

The reason the right has been so successful is because these policies have been made divisive in an ongoing culture war.

This is weakening the US as a whole.

To fix it, first dismantle the structures that are fueling the culture war. And the only way to do this is to co-op the middle.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time…

I am not suggesting to replace democracy... The thing is that we don't have a democracy in most countries. It's more like the government is throwing a bone to people. Real power comes through lobbying. So in a way, lobbyists have the actual power to elect, and therefore they are the actual electorate in our democracy. The "normal" person is simply just getting his bone as well to keep quiet. And looking at the fact that 40% of USA still support Trump, that may actually be a good thing.

The best way to ethically secure your rights are to secure everyone else's as well.

Democracy can both be not perfect and also conducive to a surveillance state. That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system (unless of course you are a nationalist, in which case any system which is adopted by us is by definition the best system because we are in it).

>and also conducive to a surveillance state

The thing that is conducive to a surveillance state is the centralization of power and information. In some cases this is a strong federal government, but Facebook is as big a problem as Sabre is as big a problem as Amazon etc.

But democracy is not more prone to the development of centralized power than any other system.

The issue today is large corporations as well. When Take Two can send private investigators to intimidate a youtuber at his home there is no way to have people's rights be secure.

>That being said, the experiment is on-going so we can’t definitively say Democracy is the best system

Whoever said this? It's directly contradicting Churchill's quote, so not really part of a response to what I said.

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