The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.
"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.
I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.
The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.
Pure democracy as you describe it, even if technically feasible, would still result in tyrannies and terrible outcomes. The biggest problem isn't lack of influence on the laws, it's lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy. And that problem exists whether it's x number of people influencing the outcome, or 1,000,000x. Every negative influence that politicians are open to, the masses are also open to (though scale may vary e.g. wrt corruption). The overwhelming evidence across the globe is that people are easily fooled, easily misled, easily manipulated, prone to illogic, prone to responding emotively, prone to selfishness, and can be corruptible, destructive and suicidal. They routinely will sacrifice advances to their own cause in order to exclude, punish and exorcise others.
No, technically direct democracy would lead to no better outcome, though I'm sure at some point in our history we'll try it.
Don't get me wrong, I love the Swiss model of lots of referenda, very strong regional (canton) govt and a seven person executive, but also.. Swiss women didn't get the vote at federal level until 1991. Some changes are hard to pull off through referenda, others less so.
> Swiss women didn't get the vote at federal level until 1991
To be pedantic it was one Canton (Appenzell Innerrhoden) that the supreme court finally forced to let women have full voting rights, as in the rest if the Cantons, in 1990 [0]. So it was part of the state forcing this rather than through their direct democracy, which makes the issue even more interesting.
The other states were still slow at granting universal suffrage, Vaud being the first in 1959.
That's the other side of the book I guess. There are plenty more examples like this.
Imagine getting only men to vote yes to lose 50% of their voting power. Imagine getting a million farmers and their family's to vote for a drastic new way in ecological farming. Same issue, different times.
And yet, the Swiss women pre-1991 were probably more free than women in some communist country who technically had the right to vote decades earlier... but they were only allowed to vote for the Communist Party, because there was no other option on the ballot.
There is at least 1 place where it works in some extent for 800 years - Switzerland. Public votes few times every year on basically anything enough people decide to vote on (100k signatures needed in 8m population and you have a public vote). You want to ban mosques, or join Nato or have 6 weeks of paid vacation? Have a say. Also weak central government, and strong cantonal ones with their own rules and laws. THAT is true freedom in the hands of people, to decide on your lives, to have freedom to improve it or mess it up.
Every effin' politician knows it, yet they conveniently ignore it, or even outright attack it when they are spewing words like freedom and democracy. It doesnt matter if EU or US or any other place.
As another poster pointed out: Swiss women couldn't vote in national elections until 1991. Democracy isn't a perfect system, it is just that having a system with some democracy in it is the best we've come up with so far.
Any minority will never truly have a say. It doesn't matter if you can vote if you don't have enough numbers to make a difference. Your best bet would be that folks tire of voting on these - but that's only if you can get enough signatures. Hope you can work and get signatures at the same time and that you aren't in too poor health to do this.
It isn't 'freedom', it is just another way to be tyrannical and claim there is "freedom". It isn't like folks born in a country/region can just move somewhere else. Heck, folks fleeing actual war have some issues with this.
This so much. It works for us and there is no reason it wouldn't work for others.
Politicians here have a completely different role in society. They ain't hero's, they ain't badman's the are just smart people doing their democratic jobs.
And society talks about concrete topics and not politicians.
You've just made an anti-argument to your own claim.
As people are people, real democracy would not be worse than the status quo as we're already ruled by people with lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
But you can't for example corrupt the majority of all people. So real democracy would be at least in this point better.
By no means worse, but better in some regards is a clear win imho!
> lack of knowledge, reason, understanding and empathy.
I'd love to agree with you but people in general are easily manipulated on mass.
Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything, making them even easily to manipulate. I'll include myself in this.
For real democracy to work it's more than giving all people the right to vote on all things. They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand. That I'd say is impossible.
The point of democracy is not that everybody is perfectly informed to come to the logically best outcome. The point is that it gives a people agency over their own future. If they choose to be ill-informed and pick bad candidates, they own the consequences. Democracy does not lead to the best outcome, but to the most fair one.
The only real value I can see with democracy is in being able to pull the lever and get a new set of dice to role if things go bad.
Beyond that it seems to be mostly mythology and nonsense. You either have smart good rulers or you don't. At least if we don't they only have so much time to do damage and we try again.
The idea democracy gives people agency over their future I would put in the category of mythology.
The most fair, yes, probably. The fairest? No. Though I’ll admit I’m stumped (though in good company I suspect) as to how to possibly achieve the fairest outcome. I suspect it’s a platonic ideal, barring a Star Trek reality coming to life.
Not having the solution ready doesn't mean it wouldn't exist at all.
Humans are very diverse in their abilities and society needs to account for that. Division of labour is key here.
Not everybody needs to decide on or be informed about everything. What is necessary is transparency, accountability and the resulting trust in those responsible.
Our societies are so messed up in that regard, we don't even consider that being possible anymore. But it is.
No. None of this stuff works without people. There's a reason we have representative democracies instead of true democracies. Why we elect people to make those decisions.
I'm not saying it's working but I don't think true democracy would work any better either because the underlying issue with democracy is you're relying on ill informed people, people who don't understand either the issue upon which they vote or the consequences of a vote either way, to make decisions.
People easily manipulated by social media filter bubbles and ridiculous slogans. Or in our current democracies just money.
I think democracy is probably the best we've had to date but it's showing its flaws.
> I'd love to agree with you but people in general are easily manipulated on mass.
It's even easier with single persons or small groups… Just given them a little bit money or alternatively aim with a gun at them or someone they love. This method wouldn't scale to a whole society.
> Currently the majority are too I'll informed to make appropriate decisions about anything […]
> They need to all be informed about all the issues in an impartial way in a way that those people can fully understand.
And you really think the "decision makers" are anyhow better informed, smarter, more altruistic and don't just think about their own well being most of the time? That's a very naïve stand, to be honest.
> And you really think the "decision makers" are anyhow better informed, smarter, more altruistic and don't just think about their own well being most of the time? That's a very naïve stand, to be honest.
At no point did I say anything of the sort, and I'm not sure how you've extrapolated that from what I've said.
I keep saying that what we are currently living through is a surprisingly accurate reflection of how democracy began. In the city state of Athens, all free men had the vote. The definition of "free man" just happened to exclude approximately 97% of the population.
Our governments have since figured out that you can merrily hand out the privilege, as long you remain in control of what is allowed to be put on the vote in the first place. I'm not alone with my view, btw. Lessig has made the same point in his "Country of Lesters" talk.[0,1]
> Electronic voting machines and vote counting machines are hackable.
Sure. And elections in general aren't malleable? In a lot of cases that's even simpler than hacking a distributed cryptographic system.
The problem with electronic voting is not the security. It's "just" the secrecy. That's the only hard problem.
> I wouldn't trust anything other than hand-counted paper ballots.
So you should stop trusting in any decision made in most parliaments on this planet. Almost all of them are made by primitive and completely nontransparent "press the button" electronic voting, which can be trivial hacked. But "voting" in parliaments is anyway just show for the dump masses. All the decisions are pre-made behind closed doors, of course.
"I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how."
Direct democracy scares me more than a corrupt government. I can imagine a group of americans voting for $2,000 a month basic income, not realizing that the total is greater than our GDP. I can see racism creap in, denying entry to the US to foreign natioals.
Watching the UK vote on "Brexit", without an understanding of what that actually 'means' or if it's possible, shows the failure of democracy.
Whose corruption is better? Whose corruption is worse? The collusion of bureaucrats, politicians, media, corporate elite is WORSE than any corruption whatsoever resulting from direct democracy: in the case of brexit, people who voted for it face the consequences themselves. In the case of collusive elite, normal public (except bureaucrats, politicians, lobbyists, corporate elite) bear the brunt. Definitely, people don't mind taking their own medicine, than the ones prescribed by the collusive elite.
The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.
"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.
I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.
The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.