Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloudie78 | Hacker News Reader

Ah yes, let’s give the EU and its undemocratic system in which policy formation is heavily filtered through a relatively narrow professional political class, ordinary voters have weak or almost no direct control over major policy choices, dissent encounters administrative/economic punishment, and central institutions possess and use powerful financial means to discipline peripheral governments should have even more centralised power?

And no, just because voting for MEPs is bolted on there as a pressure valve doesn’t suddenly make it all okay when most of the real decisions happen behind closed doors and adherence to the passed laws, no matter how damaging is ensured through financial coercion.

Not a single person voted or agreed to this law, and yet here we are.

View on HN

Yeah, that's always been my concern with the EU (I'm American, for context): the long worrying practice where the legal concept of the EU is assembled by a small group who very much want EU citizens to go back to sleep and only wake up once all the laws and regulation has been created.

A federation makes sense to me: I live in one. But how the EU has assembled itself in a way that seems to unrepresentative has been worrying to watch over the last couple decades.

US House term is 2 years, European Parliament is 5 years. The latter is actually proportional at least but you can see how they’d only feel pressure every so often

But it seems relative immune to the current rise of populism.

Not a bad tradeoff, all included.

It seems you have an issue with representative democracy.

Quite the contrary actually. I take issue with systems LARPing democracy.

There is no such a thing as "representative democracy", that’s antinomic bullshit throw at people to lower it down to powerless populace.

Either citizens have the power, exercise it continuously in practice and are supplied with everything it takes to assume that role properly with all the duties it implies, or there is no democracy beyond empty words.

Has such a system ever existed anywhere? How would citizens even have the time?

Switzerland

Continuously exercised and on everything as a matter of course? Not all is done via direct democracy there (even though it is the ultimate backstop in a way), it also has representative democracy.

You cannot compare 10 million people with 450 million people when talking about direct democracy. It cannot be done I think. But if you know a way propose it here.

Just saying lets vote directly on everything will put everything on hold until all goes down.

Direct democracy doesn't mean everyone votes on everything.

At the extreme you could do something like localized e-voting: citizens vote on issues that affect a given geographic radius of where they live. Because the boundaries are purely distance-based, gerrymandering is impossible.

Maybe we could have a decaying distance boundary by some measurement like population density or something like it?

Or just decentralize power where it makes sense.

Switzerland is also a representative democracy

Switzerland has a very direct form of democracy thanks to its constitutional referendums. If Swiss representatives pass unpopular bullshit like the EU bottle cap rule, their work can be permanently undone by a citizen initiative writing a constitutional resolution overriding said bullshit. This means that the representatives are on a tight leash and would not even attempt to write the unpopular regulations that the EU gets away with.

One day you piss off the voters with your poorly conceived cookie law, couple years later there's a line in the constitution saying "no cookie laws" and your hands are tied forever.

First let's acknowledge that "Has it ever existed before?" is not helping with conclusion outside "it proved not physically impossible for some time in some historical specific context". It would not tell anything about "is that possible now or in near future in this or that specific geopolitical context at such a scale". And if it never existed before, a first in history is always possible.

Now what get often cited as direct democracy is ancient Greek city-states and nowadays Switzerland, which are two vastly different implementations.

> How would citizens even have the time?

That's actually the exact opposite mindset of what it takes to think democratically: how one could be called a citizen when they are not equipped with everything it takes to properly accomplish citizen duties. Of course accomplishing civil duties should be fairly compensated for the time invested. Such a compensation is generally existing and expected by current politician, so the only difference with direct democracy on this regard is that it should not be reserved to a small cast.

Funny how this questioning of democracy never shows up in topics about USA, UK or any other country - it's always EU that gets assaulted by sudden political theorists despite mirroring pretty much every other democracy on the planet.

UK is a monarchy. It’s actually in the name: United Kingdom. Democracy added as decorum on top of it is not there to change the principle of inequality that is deeply engraved in its underlying core.

USA is definitely described as a mix of plutocracy, kleptocracy, and oligarchy in many sources.

Not sure where this idea that the critics should be exclusive to Europe. TFA is about Europe, so comments will target more specifically EU, but that’s all.

https://parliamentnews.co.uk/is-the-uk-a-constitutional-mona...

https://josricardomartins.substack.com/p/is-the-us-a-democra... https://www.citizenscount.org/news/united-states-democracy-r... https://cirsd.org/horizon-article/democracy-or-plutocracy-am... https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/03/25/america-kleptocracy-tru... https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/olig...

Congratulations, you've redefined democracy to mean something very different to the dictionary and colloquial definitions. That's not very useful though, unless your goal is to confuse people.

Yes, as sure as the dictionary and the colloquial definitions were first altered by propaganda. War is peace, Freedom Is Slavery. Ignorance Is Strength. Democracy is delegation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com