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> I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance.

The best way to do this is through a combination of subsidiarity and constitutional rights.

You have a central government but its primary purpose is to set out and uphold fundamental rights. It essentially sets out what the local governments can't do, so you can't have ex post facto laws, censor speech, detain people without trial, try to enforce local laws on actions performed in remote jurisdictions, etc.

In particular, the central government should not be in the business of regulating private conduct. Only the local governments do that.

Then you don't have to be worried about appropriations for road maintenance in some other county because you don't live there. Whereas the appropriations in your county are coming out of your pocket, and aren't such a far away thing that your vote is being diluted into irrelevance, so then maybe you want to be paying some attention to that.

A solution is “liquid democracy”, or instantly revocable delegation of your vote. With good UX, you could build a system that allows you to have a nominal representative you trust for different types of votes, with manual override for votes you want to make yourself. It would require some procedural changes to ensure that people have time to read and debate bills.

(This otherwise great in theory idea is mooted by the fact that remote legislative votes are a terrible idea, as security is a shitshow literally everywhere.)

> Direct democracy is cool, but also impractical. I do not want to vote on every counties appropriations for road maintenance. So what's a level of direct democracy that's "good enough"?

This particular question has an extremely simple answer - derived from the decades of practical development of consensus based systems in democratic spaces (art spaces, leftist political groups etc). You vote / participate in the consensus decision making of the issues that are most important to you. It's that simple. Every issue is democratically decided, and you just 'tune in' to the ones that matter to you.

In terms of brigading / trolling are harder. In consensus institutions they're usually dealt with by limiting the amount of blocking (forcing tabling of an issue) and ensuring that voting / consensus participation is limited to those who are actively involved in the community. This is obviously far more complex on a societal level.

Overall this requires a bigger investment of time, but you're in no way required to care about everything. Over time though, the group / institution / society, is forced to grow up. Or at least grow out of the learned helplessness that dominates contemporary representative democracy.

I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

But a lot of countries are somewhere on the "direct" vs "representative" spectrum. The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms, for example. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_by_country

> The US actually abnormally lacking in direct mechanisms

only on a federal level. states like california or texas are more direct than a lot of western europe in some ways. like the fact that ballot props are binding law or sheriffs and state attorneys are elected.

>I think everyone can agree that having O(100M) people vote on every local initiative is absurd.

I'm one of those everyones, and I don't agree.

Except if you mean local initiatives that don't concern 100M people, but e.g. some regional municipality. Of course then just the locals can vote, be they 100K or 1M.

Yes! I meant local issues that don't concern 100M people. Local issues that concern a few thousand people can be (and often are) resolved by direct democracy.

I guess I could argue that putting a stop sign at a particular intersection in rural Kansas could concern me, even though I don't live in Kansas, but I think very few people would make that argument in good faith.

>Is there such a thing as "unbiased public opinion" at all though?

Doesn't really matter except philosophically. There's something close enough to unbiased public opinion when there are no government propaganda campaings, censorship, press owned by conglomerates, and corporate messaging.

In most political systems the two functions of government are rationing and ideological control for the poor and profiteering for the rich. The media provide marketing and propaganda support for both.

It's very hard to have truly independent media.

The Swiss succeeded in this, maybe we should look at their model and improve.

Switzerland is a country with a total population approximately the size of the state of New Jersey. This being too centralized for most things, they then further divided that population into 26 cantons ranging in size from approximately the size of New Hampshire at the high end to "that number of people would be classified as a town rather than a city" at the low end.

The median size looks to be around 200,000 people, so maybe start by dividing the US population into cantons of around that size and doing most of the rulemaking at that level.

The best level of democracy is no democracy. The problem of voting for road repairs is a problem we created by democracy. We voted ourselves into a system we can't escape, just because people back in the days couldn't fully comprehend side effects of their collective decisions.

Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

I know this is unpopular opinion. The system is designed for this to be unpopular opinion.

But the problem is not the democracy, but the level of power we give to the government. If the only power of government would be to pick flag colors and national anthem, no one would care about it.

No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

> The best level of democracy is no democracy.

That's a quite fatal view. I'm not going to defend the shortcomings of democracy as a system or the issues all real implementations have. But democracy has a feature that is unique about it: as long as it actually is a democracy, as soon as things go a way that the people don't like, they can do something about it and change course. For better or worse, but they can. That's the main point of democracy.

Besides, having votes or electionsor is really just a minor detail of the concept of democracy. There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc. The will of the people doesn't fall from the sky or is set in stone. It's a permanent conversation which needs all the other mechanisms. If all that happens is a vote every few years, that's not at all indicative of a democracy. Neither is democracy synonymous with majority rule.

> Very few people realize that there is option to not use government cohersion as a solution to everything.

What is "cohersion"? There are "cohesion" and "coercion". Assuming the latter, what does this have to do with democracy? An autocracy or dictarship or whatever non-democratic system you can imagine also likely has a government, and their coercion mechanisms tend to be worse than in democracies. In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.

>There is much more to it, like a free conversation in society, strong independent education, journalism, justice, protection of minorities, etc.

All in theory. Otherwise we wouldn't debate this. Historically none of these traits are unique to democracy, but developed society. US had a civil war over protection of minorities even though it was considered a democracy.

>In a democracy you have an independent judical system that you can use against government overreach.

Which can only follow laws passed by the government. Separation of powers is not unique to democracy. Again the coercion mechanisms doesn’t matter, but the severity of it.

> No one cares about UK having a king, because it doesn't change a thing.

Which is the position the Monarchy absolutely wants you to have, and they definitely don't want you to know that they have veto power over all laws, and regularly intervene and get laws modified so that they're not included in scope.

Meanwhile they just gave themselves a massive pay rise, at a time when government is cutting public spending in all areas.

The BBC is monarchist to the core. A lot of people say the BBC is biased in one political direction or another, but they often forget about monarchism.

One notable example of their privilege was when Andrew George MP dared to ask a question in parliament about the Duchy of Cornwall, only to be told he wasn't allowed to. (The Duchy of Cornwall is a kind of slush fund for the heir to throne. Charles had it before he became king. It has tax breaks, and also the ability to seize property and mine on people's land.)

In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign. His unofficial ability to influence government policy is the real issue, but one that is definitely not limited to that one guy with the special blood.

> In theory the King can veto any law he wants. In practice he couldn't without causing a monumental constitutional crisis that would probably end his reign.

His mum Lizzie2 had no problem doing it without causing any problems:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que...?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/royals-vette...

I think it's likely that Chuckie3 is continuing this grand tradition with impunity.

You can benefit much more as a corrupt politician, as the blame is diluted between the whole government. Single king is responsible for it's actions and we even have a word for throwing them out of the window if they misbehave.

It's much rarer for politicians to even get into jail.

Actually quite a few people care about the UK having a king, in the UK. In Northern Ireland, there is a considerable republican (small "r" population) for political reasons.

The BBC promotes the monarchy heavily as it is under royal charter.

There were significant protests at the Queen's funeral cortege and the current king's coronation. The state clamped down hard, in one case arresting someone for holding up a blank bit of paper.

I admit UK wasn't the best example as now it's freedom of speech is maybe worse than in Russia or China. But I feel like public does not trat it as the biggest issue of the UK at the moment.

Let's say Denmark for example.

Thing is that freedom of speech was not good back when I was growing up. There were many groups that were heavily monitored by Special Branch. Some of this has been declassified now. I do not wish to downplay the atrocities of the IRA, but there certainly was another side to the Troubles which the BBC wouldn't report on fairly and tried to claim it was an internal religious conflict.