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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

There is a recurring trend of interpreting democracy to mean "leaderless consensus-based decision-making", which really doesn't work and never has. That's why Occupy and pretty much every other similar bottom-up movement failed: leaders are necessary. People follow other people, not algorithms or groups.

"Making democracy work" should be about training better leaders and getting them into the system.

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You are confusing "democracy as used colloquially for government" and "democracy as used by computer scientists to design systems that still work on failure prone networks"

Occupy did not fail, it successfully shifted the entire national political conversation of the United States toward considerations of the class warfare being waged by the wealthy against the general population in ways that are continuing to publicly echo in campaigns and policy discussion ever since

The fact they get brought up in such conversations still is proof of that, however i would counter that they failed in their main stated objectives and were dismantled, beaten, even ridiculed in public for it. They became a stark reminder that the rich are far too powerful.

Ridicule is part of the process of folding a series of ideas into mainstream thought

> "Making democracy work" should be about training better leaders and getting them into the system.

AND fixing the (fundamentally broken) system by reducing the influence of money.

"Reducing the influence of money" is fairly inconsistent with what money is. If anyone can influence anything in any way then having money is going to help them do it.

What you need is a way to reduce corruption, i.e. create a structure where diverting public funds to special interests or passing laws that limit competition can be vetoed by someone with the right structural incentives to actually prevent it.

I can't tell if you're being pedantic, or somehow misunderstood my point. To be painfully crystal clear, I meant "reducing the influence of money [ON ELECTIONS, via eg campaign finance reform, and/or related measures designed to correct the structural problems that currently make it corrupt by default]"

I think EU federation is pretty good, but I feel very dumbfounded every time dumb decisions that do not benefit member states are made, too much empathy too early I guess.

The EU is pretty good at its intended purpose, which is to tie together European countries in a non-hostile and economically-productive way.

But it seems pretty obviously not very good at any real executive action. Which is, again, by design.

not having elected 'idiots' run a highly complex government structure

I wouldn't say so. The first years of the largest war in Europe since WWII have shown that a leaderless EU is incapable of making important decisions crucial to its own survival, as a fallen Ukraine would have led to a divided EU where many countries would be governed by authoritarian fascist regimes, such as the one in Hungary led by Orban.

I feel like you're a bit tendentious and exaggerated in your assessments.

People don't get a say in the people's decision that they didn't elect. I thought it's pretty spot on.

How do you think the EU (con)federation is pretty good given the remaining of your comment?

Democracy which is all about "leaders" is not democracy. Find another word.

Electing or choosing leaders is how democratic systems have functioned, in one way or another, since the beginning of the concept.

Then it has never existed.

It is commonly recognized that Democracy could not exist at a granularity where everyone verifiably gets to contribute to every decision (even if only to abstain), including throughout the resolution of unsettled downstream decisions during implementation of settled upstream decisions.

This is very much not a surprise to anyone.

For any Democratic system to work, it must include systems of delegation.

One can usefully talk about tradeoffs of different kinds, granularity, processes and limits of delegation.

Is this democracy according to the math department? This does not conflict with the claim I made.

Exactly and that's why the US should be called a Constitutional Republic. At state level it's often much more democratic but federally, the US is not a (direct) democracy and shouldn't be called so by the media in matra-like manner. Watching CNN or MSNBC with bourbon shots on "democracy" is a drinking game that typically won't last the evening.

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