I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Its the only way.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p
So before dreaming about 100% democracy, maybe the US could slide away from "flawed democracy", first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
There is no free lunch.
Notably, imagine direct democracy and the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanic_panic]!
Without guardrails on the levers of power, a lot of people would have died. As it is, a lot of lives still got ruined.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
Yet another thing I vehemently disagree with.
If a rep basically says ‘I don’t care what y’all say, I’m doing z’, and they get elected.
Does that mean they got elected because everyone wants z? Or they got elected, and plan to do z?
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
Apps just tiktok’itize the whole process.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
There are reasons why literally nobody does it, and it isn’t because it works too well.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
Why would they vote to be stomped on?
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
The gov’t shutdown was precisely using the day to day crap to get leverage!
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.