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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you completely, but this gets at a debate that's been going on since the ancient days about whether democracy is actually good or not. Whether a tyrant is elected by a fair majority or inherits the throne at best (or Divine Right of Kings, whatever) makes little difference IMHO.

That said, while I have criticisms for democracy and do enjoy pointing out it's imperfections when people talk about democracy as some self-evident ideal, I do think it's probably the best system of government in a sea of less than ideal choices.

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I'd argue the problem lies less with democracy, more with the media. Democracy requires an informed populace. The success of populist politicians shows you don't have that

I'd the cause is advertising-based business model of the media industry, then.

Too few people pay for news these days. So the news aren't the product and we ended mis- and ill-informed.

If it worked it would work.

If having an informed populace is required for democracy to work then it doesn't work. Especially when you ask the question, "informed about what"?

I'm tired of hearing that people aren't informed.

They were informed. Trump told them that science is crap, that tariffs are good, that we should punish immigrants, that he would pardon the jan 6th people, etc.

This is what people voted for and what they wanted. Hate and retribution.

When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.

Sure, they heard from Trump that tariffs would fix inflation. But they still aren't informed because they didn't actually know what tariffs are [1].

> When Democrats finally stop with this false narrative that if only people knew better, they'd vote for Democrats, maybe we'll start actually winning again.

Really do not hate to point this out. Democrats are really responsible for a lot of this mess. Both Republics and Democrats really love to blame the other one but they're really just the Father and Mother and when the child is having problems, it's both of their faults.

Personally, I think it's gotten this way because of the whole first-past-the-post so if you have a belief like "far right" or "far left" then your best bet politically is to run underneath Republican or Democrat and push out the "moderates" in a primary as opposed to making a new political party that actually has your beliefs.

[1]: https://thenightly.com.au/politics/us-politics/what-is-a-tar...

I don't think it's just FPTP, given that other countries that have it are nowhere nearly as polarized.

I think it's actually the combination of FPTP and open (or at least broadly accessible) primaries. In Canada and UK, parties generally have much more control over their primaries, and party elites generally try to exercise that power to ensure that candidates don't upset the existing arrangements too much. Not even necessarily as a deliberate strategy, but when you have to work your way through the "smoke-filled rooms" as a candidate, that filters out the purists and favors those willing to compromise. US was also like that for a long time, and notably we didn't have this degree of polarization then.

But once primaries are wide open and the party no longer controls the candidates, it seems inevitable that more extreme candidates will win. They appeal to the more ideologically motivated voters who are generally more likely to show up and vote (especially so in the primaries), and so any candidate who wants to win there has to appeal to them first.

US had cycles of polarization from the earliest years. When in your model did parties lose control to more ideologically motivated voters?

Cycles, yes, but what we have right now is more of a spiral - there's clearly some kind pf a positive feedback loop in the system that consistently drags parties apart, and that wasn't there before.

I think it started somewhere during the Reagan admin, going very slowly but steadily at first, but the wider the gap between the parties is, the faster the process goes, so it became really visible somewhere around Obama. The relevant rule changes wrt primaries and conventions date back to early 70s, though.

The problem is the Democrats aren't far left, they aren't even really left. There is no viable political counterbalance to the right wing in US politics anymore, the so-called left is moving right, and the right is moving further right. Kamala Harris' whole campaign (such as it was) was an attempt to court "moderate" Republicans rather than the base who was never enamored with Biden to begin with.

I agree that first past the post is a problem and this election was more lost by the Democrats than won by the Republicans, but I think it's a myth that any of it has to do with the Democrats going "too far left." Call me when any Democratic Presidential candidate openly calls for dismantling American imperialism and scaling back the military, or criticizes capitalism and endorses nationalized healthcare, education and UBI, or doesn't kiss the ass of police or curry favor with Evangelical Christians, or has immigration policies that actually materially differ from those of Republicans.

To be fair, we almost had Bernie which supported all of those policies and positions (other than UBI if I remember right).

And what happened to him? The party purged him so fast there's nothing left of him but memes.

Earnestly: do you have a sense of when and where such an informed populace existed?

Is it the media or unfettered capitalism? Traditional media (newspapers, and local news) is dying slowly, they cannot successfully compete with centralized juggernauts with global footprints sucking up all the ad dollars. Was it Thiel who remarked that capitalism may not be compatible with democracy? One guess on which he'll choose to keep.

It was worse than you remembered. Thiel said freedom and democracy were not compatible.

This is why early democracies limited voters to a subset which was perceived as better informed or more responsible - rule of any person passing thresholds (like e.g. land ownership) that proved a minimum level of capacity.

It would be more accurate to say that it was intended to (and did) limit voting to a subset that was perceived as more loyal to the social order, such as property laws and other arrangements that define who's on top of the social pyramid.

Considering it was a similar subset which in the US was largely responsible for the US revolution, I can't say that interpretation is persuasive.

The US revolution did not upset the foundational structures such as property rights, though. People who owned the most in US before it were still, by and large, the top dogs after. If anything, they improved their position - where previously they had to share with the metropoly, now they were fully in charge.

I do think a big part of the problem is the two party system. It makes negative campaigning far to effective. That way you get pathological choices, like Biden vs Trump when you wouldnt entrust any of them with running a small business you own.

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