Direct Democracy

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Direct Democracy

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

silence_kit posted:

Well, if the majority of the general public has not seen the light because they have been tricked by The Bad Men, that still doesn't bode well for using direct democracy to achieve SA politics posters' political goals.

The vast majority of the full US populous is broadly supportive of instituing European style social welfare programs, just as an example, so I think this is less true than you believe.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 04:23

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 18:50

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

-Blackadder- posted:

The country's average knowledge about the issues is already laughable and that's with lobbying groups hardly bothering to target the masses because it's the politicians running things that have the power to give them what they want, yet half the country is literally this guy.

If you want to see a quantum leap in the science of corporate propaganda then go ahead and give direct democracy a try. The business world will pour entire economies worth of money into brainwashing the population. No one's going to listen to a handful of unkempt college professors who can barely give a speech (BECAUSE THEY'RE RESEARCH SCIENTISTS NOT TEACHERS,) because they'll be drowned out by the army of "experts" that wall street has cloned from Captain America's DNA, and raised to be the most affable, genial, tall, attractive, authoritative PhD's to have their education paid for by corporate sponsor since grade school.

Is this an argument for cutting corporate costs by ensuring they only have to focus their lobbying efforts on a small number of people???

# ¿ Jun 26, 2020 04:27

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Still Dismal posted:

"Liquid democracy" is literally just normal representative democracy with referendums and recalls once you scale it up to anything beyond the hyper-local level.

Again, you can't ONE WEIRD TRICK your way out of the principle-agent problem. Sooner or later you, the citizen, have to delegate authority to someone.

Letting the population vote on, and have a contest between, parties with differing postions on "should we have a bigger welfare state" (in a way that accurately represents every citizen, such as proportional representation) is good. Having them vote on every specific minutia of said welfare state is bad.

As someone who sits on the board of a large food cooperative whose staff collective of over 100 people makes most decisions through a full consensus process: yeah, I agree. I was just challenging the assertion that direct democracy is bad because people don't support the right stuff.

Also, literal representative democracy which meaningful refferendum and recall processes sounds pretty good to me actually, though I agree calling it Liquid Democracy is very annoying.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2020 22:03

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Baronash posted:

You keep coming back to this despite everyone telling you the million reasons it wouldn�t work. Experts are not going to spend their lives responding to every inane point made by some rando on the Internet. Even if they did, large companies/industries are just going to flood your system with their own �experts� pushing their brand of junk science.
Forget the experts for a moment, it�s almost laughable to think that a meaningful debate could happen between (potentially) tens of thousands of individuals. D&D is hard enough to remain on top of, and there are probably only a couple hundred regular posters here with active moderation.

But this has been stated before, which leads me to wonder if you are actually bothering to read your own thread.

In what way is it an improvement? You�re putting folks with little to no experience into a position, then hamstringing them with a term limit that prevents them from actually getting good at the job they�re being asked to do.

I'd push back on that last point because in a society that instituted direct democracy you'd also likely see things like workplace democracy, classriom democracy etc. flourish, and so by the time people got called up to serve they'd already have a lifetimes experience being accultured into governance, so the idea that everyone would have no clue what they were doing to start rings a little false. Studies show, for example, that societies with more co-operative enterprises also have higher rates of democratic participation and civic engagement, I don't think its a stretch to imagine this relationship working both ways.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 20:52

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Purple Prince posted:

The immortal philosopher god-king sounds good: unfortunately we can't invent them because the inventors would bring their own biases to the process.

Superman seems like he'd be a pretty good god-king to be honest, and given he's an alien he's not likely to fall prey to the same biases as an AI overlord. Failing that, maybe we should get started on making humanity into a proper superorganism with a hive mind?

I think the assumption in the debate is that democracy is perfectible, though, and evidence would suggest that democracy is probably the least-perfectible of all political systems. This is both a strength and a weakness. On the one hand you don't get the benefits of a benevolent dictatorship; on the other you don't get the problems of a genocidal single-party state.

So we're arguing how you could improve democracy: I don't think the problem with American democracy is that it lacks points of entry into the process. There's a ton of ways to get involved in democratic processes in the UK and America, and it's pretty easy for any citizen of those countries to 'have a say'. Whether it effects any meaningful change is another story. The problem with both of these countries isn't that politicians don't listen to the people (they do, albeit in a distorted way), the problem is that they listen to the people that mattern to them and don't govern in the interests of the people.

An autocratic regime is free to abuse the population, but they're also free to take unpopular and necessary decisions that most people don't understand the rationale behind.

Ultimately, what is the goal of a state: to be responsive to the population's wants, or to provide them with what they need?

The problem with American democracy is that all those entry points you mentioned are tunnels painted on the side of a mountain. Our government is responsive to the needs and desires of capital, not individual US citizens.

# ¿ Jul 5, 2020 20:54

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Friendly reminder thay societies that practice economic democracy, e.g. co-operatively own and operate enterprises and public assets have significanty higher rates of democratic participation.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2020 21:21

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Still Dismal posted:

Yeah, but if you're talking about places like Nordic Social Democracies here(which I assume you are because they have much higher rates of public ownership, etc), they do "direct democracy", stuff like referendums, etc. far less often than the US. They have them like once every decade or so on stuff like adopting the Euro, not every election cycle. They also have less elections total than the US, which is likely why they have higher levels of political participation, because you have more consolidated elections every few years rather than having midterms, primaries, off-year state and local elections, etc (To be clear, I think this is good, not bad. Things like off-year elections are basically designed to ensure minimal possible turnout, elections should be as consolidated as possible in order to reduce the amount of time that it takes for people to participate in the political process).

I'm talking about literally everywhere there is high levels of cooperstive ownership incl. Nicarauga, Chiapas, Basque Spain, Reggio Emillio, New Zealand etc. I dont actually know much about the state of the movement in Scandanavia, outside of Finlanf I guess. Also, I would argue that direct democracy becomes less neccessary the more widespread and diffuse democratic decision making is going on in general. The studies controlled for things like 'elections less often' and etc. But I don't have access to my hard drics with my Zotero save at the moment so I can't actually give you the citation. Pretty sure the UN did it back in the 'year of the co-operative' in 2012 or whenever.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2020 20:32

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 18:50

Crumbskull: Sep 13, 2005; The worker and the soil

Still Dismal posted:

Things like co-determination (with unions having seats on boards of directors), employee owned businesses, or state owned enterprises (when done right) are all good and cool, and if you said that they made the economy, or even society in general, meaninfully more democratic, I wouldn't disagree with you. But that's conceptually separate from the idea of direct democracy, which is generally understood to be the electorate voting directly on policy that effects the polity as a whole.

I don't actually think we really disagree, we're just using different terms. I think it's good for workers to have a vote in how their employer conducts business, whether through the mechanism of union board members or the business being directly owned by them. But that's codetermination or syndicalism. Direct democracy is me having to vote on poo poo like bond financing.

Yes, sorry I am saying civic participation period, not drawing a correlation to direct democracy specifically.

(as someome who sits on the board for anco-operstive whose staff collective of 100+ uses full consensus decision making I would be highly resistant to the idea of direct democracy for decisions at any level higher than the neighborhood probably lol)

# ¿ Oct 7, 2020 21:48

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Direct Democracy