Hacker News Reader

Comment by lokar | Hacker News Reader

They have fair and competitive elections, no?

Western democracies have fair and competitive elections in the same way they have fair and competitive markets for things like internet access or mobile phones. You are effectively only allowed to choose between a very carefully managed set of choice that are provided to you. This set of choices is often so dire and distant from people's actual desires that many just don't bother voting at all.

George Carlin used the analogy of restaurant to modern democracy. You have the appearance of choice because you are handed a menu where you can choose liberal or conversative or green party, etc. But all of the actual policies and laws are drawn up by the same chefs in the back and you eat what you are served.

This is my point. You need to identify the source of the problem if you want to take action. Blaming bureaucrats is not helpful.

> Blaming bureaucrats is not helpful.

Bureaucrats are the ones making the rules of the game we have to play. So why shouldn't we blame them?

Chain of events is the lobbyists write the policies that are handed to the politicians who vote them in, then to the bureaucrats to execute them.

But the lobbyists work for the rich and the power. They are ultimately the chefs and ones who decide what the rules will be.

You are correct. But I don't see how we can fix this. Revolutions or rioting, is not the right idea either.

A successful and well functioning democracy requires constant monitoring, involvement and pressure from citizens to hold it accountable, otherwise it gets captured by monopolies and malicious actors with money, who will steer politics in their favor instead of the citizens' favor.

The problem with that is that most citizens today are too burdened by the cost of living and sorting their own lives to have time and energy for political activism. The only ones who do are retired boomers and they only care that their pensions and house prices are going up.

Democracies can and do correct. It takes time and effort, but it happens. For example the progressive movement in the US.

>Democracies can and do correct.

Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.

>For example the progressive movement in the US

Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

our two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power.

The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.

It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.

Popular politicians tend to do the most damage.

I'd say it is the other way around. -- Support for the Tories/Conservatives has collapsed to the point where they are 4th or even 5th place! Reform have benefitted most from this shift. [1]-[4]

The left wing is seeing Labour voters shift to the Lib Dems, Greens, Jeremy Corbin's new party, and Reform.

[1] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/services_lsdm.html (April)

[2] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_vipoll_20250625... (June)

[3] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/prediction_main.html (July)

[4] https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_rrose_20250731.... (August)

First past the post, and not proportionally representative - so could be improved a lot.

The People’s Republic of China has elections, no?

First past the post, so no, not really.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com