> A business? No. A bank? No. A country? No.
In a modern democracy, only one of those three could conceivably have your interests at heart. Lumping them all together damages participation in democracy, which exacerbates the problem.
In a modern democracy, only one of those three could conceivably have your interests at heart. Lumping them all together damages participation in democracy, which exacerbates the problem.
Knowing that an participating in democracy without tying up your identity in the outcomes is critical.
Only if you’re a dictionary. Democracy as practiced routinely resists the will of the majority (eg attitudes towards climate, reproductive rights), and also routinely reinforces minoritarian protections once established (eg accessibility for people with disabilities).
Democracy is ultimately the same thing as any other governing philosophy, except it’s more malleable by people without concentrated power than most other systems. Certainly more than a bank or whatever.
> Democracy is ultimately the same thing as any other governing philosophy, except it’s more malleable by people without concentrated power than most other systems. Certainly more than a bank or whatever.
Sure, but the point is that regardless of governing mechanism, the government is not acting in your interest (unless you’re an authoritarian dictator and even then there is internal resistance).
The “reversed” case is because people don’t actually care enough to elect representatives that reflect those views. There is a Democratic majority house, senate, and president. Why isn’t abortion protected?
> and the other is protection of a vulnerable group regardless of majority status
It’s protected because the majority decided to protect it. The majority could easily remove that protection. They aren’t constitutionally protected.
Because voters aren’t prone to magical thinking, and they don’t elect unicorns. Why don’t we vote for the candidates who don’t exist? The world may never know.
In practice, it causes the rabble to redirect their grievances from a formerly monolithic leadership to each other, increasingly turning a blind eye to mounting corruption and abuses of privilege within their own ranks, while blaming all the evils of the world on the other side.
We typically round down small fractions to zero so a very niche opinion with a few hundred folks is still approximately zero.
20 years ago you couldn’t have 40% of a gay marriage, it was just no gay marriage.
It might, if we didn't split votes by district, then by county, then by state, and bundle them.
It might if our representation weren't purposefully skewed to favor states with let populations.
It might if there were runoff voting.
It might if there weren't an electoral college, circumventing all that already miserable voting procedure.
It might if voting we're a national holiday.
It might if we had a choice that wasn't "this pile of shit over here" versus "that mass of excrementt over there". Really, they're different!
It might if, after the elections were over, there wasn't a whole industry, made up of politician's former colleagues, making truckloads of money to peddle influence on behalf of big business and billionaires.
To believe that our democratic process does anything to connect the political zeitgeist of the people to actual policy is to believe in the tooth fairy.
For example, if the 'political zeitgeist' your referring to is comprised of 50 million eligible voters, and if the other 200 million are fence sitters on believe in another 'zeitgeist', then it's in fact correct for the U.S. as a country to completely ignore the 50 million. i.e. to block it from having any effect on 'actual policy'.
After all, minority rights are only guaranteed up to the 3/4 threshold, after which a constitutional convention could do anything, such as reinstating slavery, prohibition, or even abolish the existing constitution and all laws passed by Congress entirely, etc...
I'm talking about how many roadblocks there are between a vote and a policy change, of any stripe.
The fact is, if we all agreed on something, it still wouldn't matter. The process of voting would not see that idea through to any meaningful realization - which sort of defeats the purpose of voting, doesn't it?
So we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom and foresight of the masses. No wonder we're screwed.
Much like any political system you can imagine, a democratic system requires a complex web of rules and regulations to function properly. For one, so-called democracies always require more specification. Are you talking about direct democracy? Are you talking about deliberative democracy? Are you talking about representative democracy?
Democracy does not mean, by the way, the "rule of the majority" because "demos" does not mean majority but people. And for the common people to rule you need a system to encompass it. Of course, over time there have been a lot of criticism and a lot of work done in deciding which rules and which structures are the most appropriate to make the necessary compromises for our political systems to work.
To put things on perspective, in Switzerland for example they have decided that the will of the swiss people is above international treaties. And this does pose a problem, for example there was a referendum a couple years back for the banning of face covering; a policy which affects everyone, yes, but affects most a particular group (muslim women). But in most cases, swiss people have a very full participatory democracy and their political system is incredibly stable. It's not perfect, and a lot of experts in the field consider countries should never be above international treaties such as the human rights treaty that most countries have signed.
When you say "we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom of the masses" you're making a pro-elitism argument. In that the masses ought to be ruled by people better than the masses; and in many ways, this is the approach countries like China have taken. To me, a big problem with this approach comes from the ego of individuals. Is it really possible to change someone's mind who happens to be in a position of power such as that? Is it easy? Personally I believe this to be a much more dangerous prospect. A good example of this can be seen, I think, in Meta (the company) where Zuckerberg is pretty much destroying the company and everyone but him can see it. Yes, this man build the company, but does that expertise translate to every future challenge? It is why we tend to prefer collective decision making, usually smaller bodies, but could there be space to make better use of bigger collectives? I think so.
So in short, I think you should probably read a little more about political philosophy to be able to say something as big as "Democracy is incompatible with freedom". It's a pretty big statement.
I imagine you've never really engaged in political philosophy very thoroughly?
When you say "we are stuck relying on the intelligence and wisdom of the masses" you're making a pro-elitism argument. In that the masses ought to be ruled by people better than the masses
So in short, I think you should probably read a little more about political philosophy to be able to say something as big as "Democracy is incompatible with freedom". It's a pretty big statement.
But, say, in western Europe, a ton of things used to be run solely by the government (water, energy production, steel, carbon, telcos, radio, tv, train, local transport, air transport, postal services) and have now moved out of the government purview, isn't that the opposite of "government always grows"?
The idea that everyone has the same rights and noone can legally break them was the pre-political basis of our democracies.
One could argue that, as of late, we've been focusing more on collectives and less on individuals.
Collectives can't be all equal (i.e. per definition they might have different size, us vs. them) leading to them causing an unhealthy imbalance in social power dynamics, that wouldn't happen if we focused our attention to the individual.