"The fact that the regular replacement of leaders has turned out to be democracy’s strongest feature underscores"
That also assumes power is concentrated in the Leader as much as it is in Russia/China. In the West the President/PM is more of a face than the person with the final say.
If we look at US Policy, the policies that effect the common man, hasn't changed much between Republican/Democrat leadership - especially contentious policies - Erosion of wealth of the lower/middle class, Regime change/Expeditions in Middle East, Reduction of civil liberties/press freedoms/internet.
In the post-9/11 United States, power is much more concentrated in the Executive than you think.
Remember that in the classified 2012 Inspector General's report that Snowden leaked it states clearly that President Obama asked the Director of the NSA that if the warrantless wiretapping program were deemed to be illegal, would he continue it on the President's orders and that the Director's answer was "Yes, Sir."
Absolutely true. It is a huge problem to have so much power among unelected career officiates. At the bare minimum we need to walk back the Patriot Act, the FISA amendments, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think any elected officials will commit to that.
These agencies have quite effectively infiltrated our media[1] as well to the point that it can't really be considered anything other than State Propaganda anymore.
The sad thing is that we pretty much all know it. Some turn a blind eye because they think "same team". But the term "National Security" has transformed from the benign "Public Safety" to "State Integrity/Consistency" right under our noses. The current systems are built to entrench those who already control the reigns of power. And will continue to do so.
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1: Not that they even need to anymore with both groups pulling from the same class of people for membership. Media used to be a very blue collar job that is now the passion-playground of those seeking wealth, connections and favor.
Has the goal ever been anything else but "State Integrity/Consistency"? I don't think so, states are evolved beings and self-preservation is their basest, strongest instinct. Public safety, order and prosperity are just some of the strategies to get human cooperation, very often totally illusory.
> Absolutely true. It is a huge problem to have so much power among unelected career officiates.
The problem is election in the first place. Power is delegated to power-hungry sociopaths instead of being exerted by the people directly. Whether an executioner or secret service agent is elected or not doesn't matter: these roles are profoundly inhumane and anti-democratic per se.
We need actual democracies in which no State, no Federal Government, and no secret agency can decide what's best for us and assassinate or imprison anyone who disagrees.
Which is a point where, say, Westminster system or similar really starts to move ahead of the US system - not only do you have reasonable multi-party options (to varying degrees) but also issues don’t boil down to a single person - the douche or turd sandwich - because whilst the modern media state does actually distill everything down to that single person as a figurehead, you still have to win 50% of electorates (or form coalitions to get there) and power is more devolved
The Westminster system is pretty close to the American one, and the fact that there are different parties is a bit by luck. A representative parliamentary system is much better for that - you don't disenfranchise up to half of the electorate, compromise is forced due to the need of coalitions, etc.
There are lots of ways to do democracy. I used one example because I am most familiar with that one example - australia has the Westminster system but it also has preferential voting which forces many of those same compromises and deals.
For all those reading, because this is a place where pedantry is a rule, can they please appreciate that these replies of mine are sweeping and vague which necessarily recognises that there are both good and bad characteristics of all systems, as demonstrated by the history of those systems
And yet despite compromises, Australia still has concentration camps for immigrants on the northern coast. Ask ordinary people if they support such inhumane treatment and they'll tell you hell no, yet your political system still produces and legitimizes that. Australia is not a democracy, and i don't know many democratic systems in the world (except maybe for the Zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas or democratic confederalism in Rojava).
Not judging, i'm myself from a colonial Empire masquerading as a democracy (France). It's just that changing the complexion/conditions of who exerts power is the wrong solution to a real problem: abolishing power is in my view a much more reasonable policy.
Australia's democratic system is vastly superior to first-past-the-post.
And yet, here we are - indefinitely detaining refugees, eye-watering corruption that vanishes from public discourse so quickly you can hear a doppler effect (half a billion dollars given without competitive tender to 6 randos to supposedly save the barrier reef), country is run by a member of a Pentecostal cult who brought an actual lump of coal into parliament (where do you even get one? what sort of logistics were involved in that stunt?)
It's either the people, or the Murdoch-monopolised media (not to mention, the de-clawed ABC), or both. I'm never sure. I don't know if altering the voting system would help; many of the independents and minor parties set to take office in this year's election are worse than the two major parties - which are milquetoast evil vs actual evil. They're a bunch of stooges, religious extremists and anti-vaxers. If anything, I want less of them.
We just need a good recession to shake us up. We’re so comfortable that no one is motivated to make good decisions (or advocate for them). Murdoch definitely has a lot to answer for though.
I don’t know - I feel positively about a bunch of the independents that I’m aware of - I have a friend working with a group to try and get 4 elected, the thinking is they would hold balance of power and climate would be back on the agenda in a big way (and hopefully a bunch of other things).
Also, the nutters are out there. We import shitty ideas from the US and everyone is comfortable enough in their bubble they don’t have to be confronted with reality. Having minor parties with shitty ideals, and the horse trading on preferences or even if they end up in parliament, is actually beneficial. Infinitely better than having the crazies infiltrate your party and take it over, like in the US. It’s a pressure release valve whichever way tou look at it - lip service must be paid to the shitty ideas because they represent the (outrageous) views of some proportion of the electorate
The problem with abolishing power is if there's a power vacuum some other "person"/group rushes in to fill it. even blockchain works on a 51% vote. 100% consensus and/or compliance isn't achievable.
> The problem with abolishing power is if there's a power vacuum some other "person"/group rushes in to fill it
Good point. I should probably have phrased it as "abolishing authority", i.e. power from above. When there is authority to grab, there are incentives to game the system. When there is no authority and power is actually distributed, there is way less incentives and it's technically harder to subvert processes.
Also a good point! 100% isn't possible under any system, but we can get much closer. Local consensus building is much easier than on a Nation scale, because the numbers of peers to reach an agreement is smaller (so education/debates/compromises do matter) and there is an existing set of trust/inter-dependency relationships which form an incentive to look for fair solutions.
Consensus-building is super important, and majority rule systems don't account for that. Usually, our interests as neighbors aren't inherently opposite, and taking time to address issues raised on every side results in better outcomes for everyone. I've personally witnessed that in self-organized communities i've lived in over the years: we do have some problems and drama, but nothing comparable with the widespread/institutionalized injustice there is in wider political systems.
> reads post with disclaimer that I’m not trying to make any overly virtuous statements, then makes reply about that anyway
Sorry i'm not a native speaker and i don't understand this sentence (promise i'm not GPT-3 ;)).
> What do you mean by abolishing power? Like some sort of anarchy?
Yes, exactly. As long as power is concentrated in some hands (authority), there's many incentives for injustice, and the attack surface to take over the entire system is much bigger. And when you have police, prisons and military to impose the rule of the few by force, you end up in the worst timeline we're currently in where we have an abundance of resources and yet screaming poverty, and our ruling elites keep on fucking up the planet even more instead of redistributing resources so that in the end our entire species (and millions of others) will be wiped out.
If you want to see how alternative political systems could look in practice, i strongly recommend to check out the zapatistas (and their caracoles) in Chiapas or to some extent democratic confederalism in Rojava (which is less centered on horizontal power and more centered better representation of multi-cultural societies [0]). While much of the world is seeing setbacks on political freedoms and economic justice, these two regions are going in the opposite direction.
Also, on principle i'm not opposed to some technology helping collective processes. But blockchain as we know it (PoW, PoS) is deeply flawed, and whatever digital system we'll come up with will never be as accessible and auditable as local public decision-making. I understand that public votes in a local-first world could exacerbate some inequalities locally (eg. with an oppressed ethnic/religious/sexual minority in a given commune), but i'm convinced the overall gains would far outweigh those downsides including for oppressed minorities (and can argue on that point if someone is not convinced).
The problem with Nation States is comparable to blockchain. Consensus building is hard but can be done with a limited set of peers (a commune) in which there are existing trust relationships. Trying to build a wide-scale consensus among untrusted peers is doomed to failure and in the best scenario results in "dictatorship of the majority" which is not a good outcome for minorities, and more realistically ends up with an oligarchy controlling much of the network. In that sense, i would argue DHTs and Bittorrent-like protocols are more anarchist than blockchain: there is a notion of global consensus (content-addressed storage enforced by cryptographic hashes) but neither the DHT nor trackers (who federate between autonomous nodes/communes) end up dictating what your local computing/politics should be like.
Does that make sense to you?
[0] Rojava is under constant military threat by Daech and turkish military, and the influential PKK while undergoing anti-authoritarian self-critique has decades of authoritarian Marxist-Leninist practice to deconstruct. Both point don't help to build true local democracy (anarchy), although i would argue the region as a whole is moving in a better direction than most Nation States around the planet are.
I’m very aware of the possibility and methods of a number of different organisational structures, but mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things (probably the biggest and most well done example I would think would be the Mars Trilogy, but also anything by Ken MacLeod, Ursula K Le Guin).
I take your points but am not convinced that the scale of the decision making entity, or the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking. I also think the transition to some such state would be messy as hell (but mostly for reasons tou identify like the desire of groups to maintain authority). You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities).
I’m also not convinced at all that we are living in the worst of all possible worlds. Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions, and some places are vastly worse than others, but such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter, etc that it’s hard to make an argument that this isn’t the best point to be alive in all of human history.
> mostly from sci-fi which has always been a breeding ground for these things
That's cool! But if you want to do some more reading on actual anarchism, i would recommend for example to read about the zapatistas in today's Chiapas, or the spanish revolution, or the ukraine commune. Or maybe read on the history of anarcho-syndicalism in your area, for example the history of the IWW in north-america.
Anarchism takes many forms across the places and ages. Some people even make connections in their anarchism to much older ideologies such as christianity or taoism (among others). I personally find it important to recognize that anarchism is not a single ideology but an axiom (abolishing authority) with which to build specific political frameworks. In that sense, it's a very rich and diverse body of thought that's worth exploring in my view.
> [i am not convinced that] the important capabilities an entity must have (ie territorial defence) are capable at the scale you’re talking.
I believe it is. The antifascist militias in revolutionary spain in the 1930s and the Makhnovshchina in Ukraine in the 1910s are good examples. They both were crushed due to being heavily outnumbered and outgunned. Franco's army was heavily supported by both Hitler and Mussolini. The peasant's self-organized army in Ukraine had been successful at defending territories from both German troops (WWI) and the white army (royalists supporting the ousted tsar).. it's only after being weakened by all that, that the Red Army led by Trotsky was successful in betraying (they had an alliance) and defeating them.
> You can see how A potential collapse of the US could lead to these sorts of groups (ie well armed local communities).
I may be naive, but i personally think well-armed local communities cooperating for mutual interest is a much better situation than the current generalized injustice we live in where local populations are mostly powerless against State-backed industrial projects to expropriate them from their land or pollute their territories. I'm happy to elaborate on that topic (ZADs, forret occupations, etc) if you will.
> Things could be significantly better if the cowards in power made better decisions
I personally think things would be better if there was no people in charge. Without a centralized police apparatus to arrest/imprison people, there would be zero homeless, given that there's an abundance of empty dwellings and that the vast majority of the population supports fighting homelessness (instead of fighting the homeless as our governments are doing). If there was no police and no State apparatus, we could almost literally snap fingers and have everyone housed: well that's a metaphor of course we'd need drills or lockpicks ;)
> such a stunningly large number of people compared to all of human history now have education, electricity, food, shelter
I think this is a very reductionist and dangerous argument. I'm not arguing that the past was a golden age of happiness and leisure, but there's certainly countless metrics that have significantly worsened over the years, as well as an unmeasurable "quality of life" that's also worsened.
We could for example mention free time (peasants from the middle ages had a lot more of that), clean environment (1/3 of the world population now drinks lead, and there's a lot more pollution sources than lead), as well as environmental changes (desertification) due to industry and monoculture. Just because some communities are/were poor in a materialist understanding of the world does not mean they have a poor/unhappy life.
I understand that the argument for "progress" is appealing, but i personally believe it does not stand scrutiny. There's a lot of great advances (for example in medicine) that i wouldn't want to live without, but there's also many social/technological developments that i personally believe to be entirely hostile to humanity and countless other species not threatened by what some people refer to as "capitalocene".
My point that we live in the worst timeline does not imply that everything is going bad, but rather that for some measure of some things going good, there's countless other things going really bad, bad enough to threaten a new massive extinction of species. How is that not the worst timeline? ;)
In a Multi Party First past the post system, u can disenfranchise much more than 50% of the population. In fact if there are N parties, it’s theoretically possible to have a majority government with 0.5*(1/N+epsilon)+epsilon of the votes (e.g. 12.5% in a 4 party system).
I'm not really sure the Westminster system is that different to what the USA, or Australia or any country whose system is to divide the country into small pieces each of which elect a single member. They all evolve into two party system.
The reason is pretty simple. If your country is divided into say 4 groups 40%, 30%, 20% and 10%, then it's likely highly either the 40% or 30% are going to win in every electorate. The 20% and the 10% won't get a look in. The 40% and 30% then become your two parties, and competition for the centre tends to make them look very similar.
If you want you parliament to reflect that 40%, 30%, 20% and 10% ratio, then one way to do it is get rid of electorates. Instead ask the 40%, 30% ... parties to nominate candidates in ranked order, and appoint candidates to parliament in proportion to the votes the party received across the entire country.
Mixed-member proportional representation [0] does that in a complicated way, mostly complicated because they keep electorates. It's been remarkably successful for countries that have adopted it, eg Germany, New Zealand, South Korea. And remarkably successful includes financial outcomes. (New Zealand was a mess before they adopted it.) Australia has it for it's upper house, and as an Australian I think that's what keeps the place sane.
The Westminster system has proven its utter failure to provide any measure of accountability for its executive when it emerged that the person who gets to decide whether Boris Johnson violated the Ministerial Code is one... Boris Johnson.
US Presidents have been impeached, and in the case of Nixon forced to resign. French Presidents, probably the most powerful executives in the West, have been successfully prosecuted for crimes committed in office. Same with Helmut Kohl, the King of Spain, or Italian Prime Ministers. British Prime Ministers get a free ride for war crimes like Tony Blair or gross corruption like Boris Johnson.
That might be true in the US (where the president is leader of only the executive branch, and there is a two party system with not much difference between the two parties), but it's decidedly not the case in other systems. For example, here in the UK we also have a two party system but a greater difference between the two, and the Prime Minister also largely controls the legislative agenda.
> But the PM in your country doesn't have unilateral authority to commit to military action, which is not the case in the big powers.
They actually do:
"Constitutional convention requires that the declaration of war or commitment of British armed forces is authorised by the Prime Minister on behalf of the Crown. Parliament has no official constitutional role in the process.[7] However, ministers are still accountable to Parliament for the actions they take.[8]"
In practice they may not remain Prime Minister for long if they tried to use those powers in a manner that parliament wasn't happy with (unlike in the US, the UK prime minister can be deposed by parliament at any time), but in the first instance that power does lie with the PM.
But a prime minister is not remotely as powerful as a president. A prime minister has no independent power as he was not elected by the people but by the party or coalition he/she leads. That party/coalition can in principle remove the prime minister any time they want. You cannot remove a president. Look at the attempts at removal of Trump. It requires an impeachment which proved near impossible.
A vote of no-confidence is contrast is a very simple procedure.
The US has had numerous pointless wars of attrition that turned out to be awful ideas and spanned multiple presidents and congresses. I don’t disagree with the premise but really, who was held accountable for anything on our side?
Nobody. That's the beauty of democracies. When you spread power over a clicque of background characters without any clear tyrant to blame, you can get away with anything.
I don't know what kind of accountability do you expect? Presidents who started these wars are no longer presidents. Also, Americans wanted and supported wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even withdrawal from Afghanistan was politically costful for Biden.
>Presidents who started these wars are no longer presidents.
That's unrelated though. They're limited to 8 years, and Bush served all 8. Obama carried on the wars and he served all 8 as well. There has been no accountability.
Presidential immunity helps defend against Trump-like situations. Who knows, maybe he would not have attempted the coup if there weren't so many lawsuits hanging over him. American democracy almost failed. I actually think we need a system that retires every billionaire for life with honors and a luxurious lifestyle but not power. Sort of a "congratulations you won capitalism" award, after which they have to give up their money and power but get to be cool and get like 100k per year to blow on a lavish lifestyle.
Is there a concept for the psychological phenomenon where, after you have identified an assuredly bad guy, you see a good guy appear?
I just don't understand how we can attribute this strength of democracy to the United States in particular. I think it's very clear the rotation of leaders we get all come from the same batch of people, and all of them, within their party lines, say the same things over and over. Pervasive problems in gerrymandering are widely known. The conditions and conciliations under which you can even enter and be supported by a political party to become a leader, seems to preclude a lot of the benefits of the democratic rotation of leaders. Not even to mention the economic requirements.
I think its good to be hopeful I guess, but I just really really don't understand. It seems like so many valid issues with our country have just disappeared from people's mind the past month. Just a few years ago, all these pundits were going "democracy dies in the darkness" and articulating how fragile all this is because of interests ultimately alien to the common person. Now? It seems like we truly manifest the superpowers of democracy. I just don't understand why we can't handle the minimum of nuance such that we don't devolve into naive moral stories about the world.
I think people are looking for a bad guy all the time. The difference is that they often blame those who they should be friends with. Once you have a cartoon villain the infighting stops.
I sometimes think that human beings are not meant to be rational in the long-term, and this is why democracy is good. Let me explain, get ready for some crazy hypothesizing...
The premise is that the only thing we consistently do is manifest our personality. Personalities can be described quantitatively and they follow an approximate multi-dimensional normal distribution. Personalities shape how we see the world and in turn how we act. This means that, as a society, when faced with a challenge, we will respond on average as the average personality would respond. Every once in a while, novel challenges come and they are faced in a way that extreme personalities would act. We don't know in advance if this is the most effective personality to deal with the issue, but we have to try something new as the average personality won't do anymore. Thus we approach novel problems in a trial and error basis, with extreme personalities taking the charge. Since new members of the species are constantly being born, and random mutations in their genes, plus environment, assure that their personalities fall more or less randomly somewhere in the distribution of personalities, we can be assured that we will always have a very big supply of average personalities to tackle average problems, and a smaller supply of exceptional personalities to tackle exceptional and novel problems.
Given the above paragraph, democracy is a way, in theory, to make all personalities heard, in the exact proportion in which they could be effective at dealing with problems.
This is crazytalk indeed - but I like it. The role of personalities in society is certainly underestimated and understudied. My favorite "proof" is how certain societies favor certain personality types, i.e. how a certain personality probably won a culture war that took place in the formative years of that culture. Which could explain why som introvert westerners feel at home in in the restraining culture of Japan, and why some extrovert and freedom-needy Japanese feel more at home in the US culture.
And I agree that democracy should better allow for peaceful coexistence between personality types - it is not always the case though, at least not hitherto: even democracy has a history of repression against people with certain personality types: introversion (shyness, modesty) is still regarded as borderline pathological in many western societies.
With that said - there is much more going on in a culture than things predicated on personalities. But it has a certain influence, I'm sure of it.
bad authoritarian leaders are killed all the time. Me personally I'd give up a little of that sweet, ultimate power for a better outcome on the backside. But, like they say no guts, no glory.
Regular fair elections are a mechanism for dissuading governments from making catastophic errors. By manipulating elections or by making oneself president for life one disables this mechanism thus make it more likely that you will make a catastrophic error (like invading a neighboring country). Karl Popper explained this all a long time ago. This view of elections an essential mechanism for preventing catastrophic errors is a liberal principle worth fighting for.
Elections incentivize governments to prevent errors that result in not being elected any more.
Errors that result in the entire planet warming by a couple of degrees, or that generally just screw the country over on a timescale longer than an election cycle, are collectively shrugged off by wider society and a complicit media apparatus.
If anything, the war is showing the weaknesses of democracies. Authoritarian governments can push their agenda without distraction, while most politicians in democracies are fighting a popularity contest. In the race to get elected, politicians will embrace short term economic wins, and avoid hardship at all costs. It took a brutal war for Europe to realize that they have limited ability to defend themselves, and that they've made themselves dependent on Russian energy.
A war with Xi's China will be a wholly different matter. In peace time, democracies shifted a large part of their manufacturing capacity into a dictatorship. And funneled trillions into their economy; a part of which is being spent on creating a powerful military. Democracies will continue to do this, since in the short term doing business with dictatorships may be good for their local economy. And It'll help with reducing emissions, because the factories are out of sight. Doing business with dictatorships will improve the prospects of getting re-elected, and getting re-elected is a politician's job.
> Authoritarian governments can push their agenda without distraction, while most politicians in democracies are fighting a popularity contest.
Correct. But i personally would argue if we had actual democracies in the global north, such dictatorships could not last. If we had power to the people, and everyone was housed, fed and healthcared (as we claim in our neocolonial propaganda), the West would appear like a suitable model for many people around the planet and everyone would rise for freedom. The truth is many people living under those dictatorships despise the USA and France (and others) for what they truly are: neocolonial oligarchies abusing people and destroying the environment. There is no freedom or equality here, we just have a different brand of authoritarianism than they do.
> "Inability to push with horrible ideas is many times more valuable than ability to push with good ones."
The electorate's disinterest in addressing climate change could be the thing that breaks that rule. Seems far too likely that the word megadeath won't just be the name of a band anymore within our lifetimes.
That is true but the population as a whole wants things this way. If you ask them whether they would accept higher gas prices or more expensive meat they would flat out tell you no.
All those liberals aren't dreaming of upright and honest politicians with a conscience that are forcing their population into doing the right thing.
You can argue that capitalism makes a lot of people desperate and unwilling to make small compromises I disagree because of the very same reasons. Capitalism is a choice that people actively make. Everyone is against allowing the market to actually express negative interest rates. Everyone is against fair land value taxes. Just those two things alone would get us so much closer to the end of capitalism but there is a complete lack of interest because everyone thinks that they will become the abuser at some point.
Even Marx admits that the middle class, which has the vast majority of its needs met, would rather have the chance at becoming part of the "owning" class than give up that chance and let the lower classes have a better life even if the existence of an upper class that does not derive its wealth from work is actually against the interests of the middle class.
Democracies are better at war because they don't need to coup-proof their armies. In authoritarian regimes, army is always a threat. Secret police, which often is a controlling force in the regime, doesn't trust the army, neutralises talented generals and doesn't give officers on the ground authority to act autonomously. Sky-high levels of corruption and outright theft are also crippling the military capability.
There's an excellent Russian historian and blogger Kamil Galeev, whom I've known long before he started a twitter account, and his threads on Russia's internal affairs are 100% legit. (Source: I'm born in Moscow, lived in Russia most of my adult life and have been somewhat active as a political activist, as have two previous generations of my family). His threads are very instructive if you want to understand what's actually going on: https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1498377757536968711
When power is distributed, entrenched corruption can build a malaise.
Democracies and autocracies have their own serious flaws, with the scale tipping only slightly in favour of democracies.
The fundamental issue is himan nature. Power, Money, Pleasure are the drivers of human behaviour when it comes to administration.
It is difficult to overcome human nature. We seem to be destined to be a mixed bag of cyclical governments, lumbering towards whatever our ultimate destiny is.
> The fundamental issue is himan nature. Power, Money, Pleasure are the drivers of human behaviour when it comes to administration.
I strongly disagree with this assessment, despite agreeing with your analysis of what's wrong in the current system. Power and money are products of a specific culture and not natural traits. Some human communities have existed without either, and some exist to this day.
We need a strong cultural shift to abolish power and money in order to build a more fair society.
I agree, the democratization of land has still not been started despite the fact that hundreds or thousands of idealists have come up with good enough solutions that could be implemented today.
If we followed GP's reasoning then democracy wouldn't be so widespread. But for me a land reform is just a matter of time. If you can maintain peace in a society long enough e.g. avoid wars over land, then at some point, people will have to figure out how to share land peacefully.
> If you can maintain peace in a society long enough e.g. avoid wars over land, then at some point, people will have to figure out how to share land peacefully.
I agree with the rest of your comment, but i personally think you're wrong on this part. I do not believe peace leads to fairness, but rather that fairness leads to peace: how do you ensure peace when there's an abundance of resources and yet many people who struggle to survive?
One of the stunning things to me in the last few years was our collective inability to explain why democracy is a good thing.
The best short statement I can come up with is that a functional democracy is the best system of accountability that we have come up with. It is the system most likely to keep morons from positions of power. It is the system most likely to eject corrupt leaders.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
In my opinion that's a stupid saying because democracy isn't a "form of Government". In reality there is an infinite range of forms of Government and people can argue for ever about which form is more or less democratic than which other forms.
I also find that the conclusions, if there are any, from that kind of argument are often not very useful. For example, the UK is in some ways a great place from a constitutional point of view, but that's despite having a totally crap electoral system (I usually don't bother voting: it makes no difference). What makes the UK's constitution great is the way the judiciary really is independent and really can rein in the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Miller)_v_The_Prime_Ministe...
Is that part of democracy? Probably, but it's all very vague and subjective.
I'd say it's a property of forms of government, or of constitutions: some of them are more democratic than others. Sometimes it's obvious which of two systems is more democratic; sometimes reasonable people will disagree. There can be different opinions on which criteria are most important. For example, how much does it matter if convicts are not allowed to vote, or if homeless people find it almost impossible to vote in practice? But also it's not really the formal rules that matter. How things work in practice can be more important. How are the rules interpreted? Do people really follow them? What would happen if the government broke the rules? How would people behave in a crisis?
Like I said, my feeling is that the UK has a relatively strong culture of democracy despite having a very bad electoral system and a monarch that could theoretically refuse to give royal assent. I think a government that was really hated by a big majority of the population would be removed without violence before too long. I think that's how one philosopher (Karl Popper?) defined democracy. But I'd still like to see things improved.
(not that I want to engage in pedantic discussions of definitions, but I think there is a point, that in most democracies, there is no more power for the demos, once the government has been elected, until the next election. There are exceptions and nuances of course, but direct democracy like in switzerland is quite rare)
>not that I want to engage in pedantic discussions of definitions
Sir, this is a Hacker News thread. Pedantic discussions, heck yes!
I see your point. We seem to be talking about representative vs direct democracies. I would argue both are systems of government. I can see why most implementations are representative. A truly direct democracy would not scale well, would it? But the Swiss example is interesting. I need to read up on that more. Some factors for the Swiss model may be a much smaller and more educated population? On the face of it direct sounds ideal. I would love to hear a Swiss HNer's gripes.
Agreed. The fact that it's so easily winner-takes-all in the UK means that there is a real lack of representation of the plurality of views in the country, and a minority can basically run what amounts to a temporary dictatorship.
Is that the only form of democratic government? Thankfully, not, but this isn't talked about as much as it should be.
If there was some kind of filtering for voters it wild be even better.
Since you are supposed to choose someone who will lead your country, it means you understand what that person says. Some su PO er basic test on that would be welcome.
Then a second part on general culture, such as name a country we have a border with. Or who is the current prime minister. Or is your country part of nato or the eu.
Sure this is not democracy anymore, but the vote makes more sense because you know what you vote for. Specifically it does not matter of I find your candidate good or not.
When democracy regresses to essentially a 2-party system, then accountability is pretty limited. Essentially an omerta is established between the two main parties. Then, the ruling party knows that they can rule however they want, and they're pretty much guaranteed to bounce back in power eventually.
That could be even worse than the accountability of a strongman/autocratic leader. An autocrat may be harder to dispose of, but at least you know they're not very likely to bounce back.
> When democracy regresses to essentially a 2-party system, then accountability is pretty limited.
I agree with that one hundred percent. I am not arguing that any one implementation of democracy is The Way, but that the concept is generally superior to other known alternatives.
> Omertà
Thanks for the new vocabulary word! That's a great one.
Many of the professional politicians in Sweden doesn't have any formal degree or professional career, they are uneducated broilers, i.e. morons.
The ruling political party in Sweden, Socialdemokraterna, has given themselves their own lottery system, A-lotterierna, a system filled with filth and corruption like selling lottery tickets on credit (against the law) to poor people, and at the same time legislating on lottery in general. Socialdemokraterna has made over 3 billion SEK on their lottery system.
Democracies strength has been not to go to war against other democracies. But the corruption is still there. And the morons.
I should not have said “morons.” I am not formally educated beyond high school, does that make me a moron? Well, maybe. I meant no insult there. Not sure what better word to use.
I am repeating myself in the thread, but perfect is the enemy of good. Just because there are easily citable instances of corruption does not make the entire concept of democracy invalid, does it?
What would be a better system in your view? Would it still involve elections?
In Sweden broiler is common political term for a person that has their entire career and life within the same political party and many of that political party's suborganisations like for youth, religion, students, women, scouts etc.
They have lived their entire life in a fake world, made up of political strife between different factions and political scheming against opponents, often within the same organisation.
This is far from reality where the rest of us live, thus that is why I also mentioned professional career as well. When people get contact with reality usually they shed the most stupid ideas they have. And a professional career can even be a stronger antidote against "moronism" than a formal education.
The thing is that the "better system" is never a choice, you have the system you have and the system we (you) have now was never by choice either. "Constitution" is a series of compromises, historical events, traditions and fads.
Thus you have to look where you live a change things depending on that, a system that works in one country will fail in another and so on.
Specifically in Sweden I would revert some parts in the 1974 constitution to the 1809 constitution. The 1809 constitution favours separation of powers whereas the 1974 constitution favours popular sovereignty.
OK, I just read a bit about the Swedish 1809 constitution. It was still democracy, correct? So with all due respect, you do in-fact still seem to be in favor of democracy, though as any rational citizen you have some complaints.
Sweden was not a democracy when the 1809 constitution was adopted, however Sweden gradually became a democracy over decades with that same constitution. That happened by moving decision making from the King to his cabinet, which was already regulated in the 1809 constitution. Much of the 1809 constitution regulated what the king couldn't do (separation of powers). There was a also a lot of other legislative work that happened outside of the constitution.
What this shows is that you can have democracy without formally having one, and likewise you can have a dictatorship with democratic constitution like the Soviet union. Constitution is more than the paper it is written on.
Discussions about democracy today has a tendency to focus on what the liberal definition what a democracy is. For instance during the middle ages Kings were elected in Sweden
My criticism against what you wrote was more about what democracies do well, I didn't agree with your points on that and instead gave an alternative, democracies strength has been not to go to war against other democracies.
> Putin’s blundering and brutal behavior has accidentally highlighted democracy’s greatest superpower: the trait that insures that, for all of democracy’s flaws, it will triumph over autocracies in the long run.
> Russia’s debacle in Ukraine underscores the fact that democracy’s guarantee that leaders are regularly replaced is actually the system’s most important advantage
I don't understand this premature triumphalism. The war is not over yet, and although the campaign is not running as Putin planned, Ukraine is exhausted too and no other army has chosen to intervene, so I would say if Putin wants to push to the end (and looks like he does) the odds are in his favour in general.
Economic war is not over yet too. Sanctions did harm Russia's economy, but Russia also introduced some countermeasures and works hard to adapt. Looks like the West can't introduce more meaningful sanctions in the near future, so whether military threat from Russia is neutralized by these sanctions remains open for me too.
I personally see no evidence Ukraine is exhausted, although their country has, and continues to receive a pummeling - ironically largely in the more Russian speaking parts to the south and east.
Russia on the other hand will of course work hard to adapt, but they are about to learn that they will be ostracized and blocked at every turn when they try to reintegrate with the rest of the world. No longer will their oligarchs get to jet around the world with their outsized wealth, no longer will Russian propaganda be accepted as 'valid discussion' and their activities overlooked and hopefully no longer will Russian money be accepted to influence politics.
The mask is off now and the snarling beast underneath can be seen - hopefully now by all.
> I personally see no evidence Ukraine is exhausted
There are news of a few fuel stores blown up by Russians every day. This limits Ukrainian mobility greatly. Ukraine has not been able to regain any significant territory despite the majority of Russian army being concentrated around Mariupol. Russian army makes advances in Mariupol step by step and after that will be free to attack other parts of Ukraine. Whether it will is going to be a decision of one man.
> they are about to learn that they will be ostracized and blocked at every turn when they try to reintegrate with the rest of the world
With the rest of Western world to be precise. Yes, isolation of Russia from the West is likely to succeed (although I see threats to this as well in Hungary, Germany and France). But it is open whether it will be enough to restrain Russia's military power in the long term.
Isolation was just the start of the first Cold War, and is probably a start of the new one. Winning it was, and still is a non-trivial challenge.
Piece has a rather simplistic view of western democracy. Regular replacement of leaders isn’t useful if they all believe the same general doctrine and work toward the same goals over many decades. The will of the people is not expressed in the western system either.
A huge problem with western democracy is that even if the leader is replaced the political party remains. This breeds corruption and entitlement ("we are the only proper ruling party!")
A few examples of political parties over a hundred years old
Norwegians correct me, my understanding is that Venstre used to be part of the ruling parties up until the war and then after that faded. Høyre and Arbeiderpartiet are still.
UK
Conservative 1834
Labour 1900
The two ruling parties obviously.
Interesting is that France is somewhat the exception where younger political parties are quite common.
I can't speak to the other countries but in the United States there are in fact more or less 2 political parties. It's a winner take all system which tends to drive that for good or ill.
I wouldn't take too much from that. What if for example the Republican party changed it's name tomorrow to the Democracy party. Would anything change from that? No, not really - it's all the same people with the same ideas. The politics are all the same.
Now, what if the politics changed. What if the people who actually voted for the Republicans changed? What if these different people had different ideas and different interests? In that case the name would be the same but the party would be different.
> What if the people who actually voted for the Republicans changed
They probably have, but the party haven't (or changed in another direction).
E.g. during the G.W. Bush years the republican base was more neocon, thus in line with the party, but during the Trump years the base was more anti-war and therefore not in line with the party establishment.
What does it mean that "democracy has failed"? In my opinion, the failure of democracy is that it appears unstable, and its superpower of kicking out lasts only so much.
In that light, the surveys showing that people want military rule highlight the failure of democracy: it isn't likely to last despite its advantages.
You'd think that the continuous replacement would make the public opinion more favourable of the system compared to rulesrs for life, and yet some prefer autocracy. Why is that? I think that's the missing question from this article and the real insight to be gleaned.
> But Russia’s debacle in Ukraine underscores the fact that democracy’s guarantee that leaders are regularly replaced is actually the system’s most important advantage. It turns out that our power to throw the bums out could end up saving not just the West, but the world.
That's not necessarily a "superpower" exclusive to democracy. You can get it with a competitive oligarchy as well (e.g. I'm thinking of pre-Xi China). It's also one that any system can lose (e.g. the democracy elects a strong, ruthless leader who abolishes it).
> Democratic virtues like the supremacy of law, independent courts, and the protection of human rights are all important
cough, Canada, cough
The problem with your whole point of view is that there's quite a few so-called democracies that are not behaving like democracies anymore, making your whole point moot.
Bit of a confused piece. First it sounds like hes arguing for democracy or is it about a renaissance of western imperialism? Then it turns out to be about term limits. Then he turns around and praises Lee Kuan Yew.
I would say the situation is more foreshadowing of what could become of the U.S. Russia's problem is one of autocracy and oligarchy, which the U.S. seems hell bent on moving towards. Furthermore, the U.S. is not a democracy, even on paper.
It's a bit like infrastructure as code. When you rebuild the infrastructure from code regularly, you don't accumulate in-place changes. Hmm, that reminds me of a biological version...
> Gabuev added, Putin never had to do what a normal leader in a democracy would: go to his national-security establishment and say, “‘Hey guys, I want to invade Ukraine, so let’s start thinking through the scenarios and debate the economic costs.’
Didn't we do exactly that with the Iraq War? In particular, Colin Powell's notorious UN speech that contradicted the State Department's INR reports on Iraq's weapons capabilities [1].
As others have stated, the problem is deviance from Constitutional checks-and-balances. The Executive branch is far too powerful, wantonly exercising judicial and legislative powers.
it's less about democracy and more about the economical systems and hierarchy in use. i suspect an encounter with china for example would go quite differently
> Wasn't it the same situation with Trump, democratically elected POTUS?
> Or, in my country, with Berlusconi?
Yes it absolutely was. Neither of those leaders were very pro-actual democracy, were they?
Perfect is the enemy of good. Just because we can cite examples of specific failures doesn’t mean we should throw out the entire concept. What is a better alternative?
> Yes it absolutely was. Neither of those leaders were very pro-actual democracy, were they?
I'm not sure they were/are anti-democracy, I think they have a very different opinion on how to exercise power in a democracy than mine.
There's no "one true way" in a democracy.
Of course they were pathologically bad and it's easy to agree, but bad is a spectrum.
> What is a better alternative?
There are a lot of them, democracy is not the better alternative, democracy only real advantage is that every position of power has an expiration date attached to it and sooner or later the people behind them must be replaced (theoretically of course, there are many examples of powerful people influencing democracies for decades without ever being subject to the voters' judgement) .
EDIT: many smaller to medium communities could benefit a lot from running them under some form of socialism/communism. For example circular economy is a marketing term to express the same concept, that cannot be used in many "free market" countries due to years of propaganda against them.
Close to no debt, self sufficient country, seems like it's for the best of their people
This can't be said for the said supposed to be "democratic" countries in the west, poverty and inequalities growing, debt out of control, dependency to totalitarian countries for energy, food, and industries (china)
> The answer is that Putin’s blundering and brutal behavior has accidentally highlighted democracy’s greatest superpower: the trait that insures that, for all of democracy’s flaws, it will triumph over autocracies in the long run.
IMHO that's some serious copium.
Russia (briefly) had a modicum of democracy and now doesn't. It's suffering really because it's in decline [1]. Compare it with China, which by any objective measure is an autocracy, and it's doing just fine.
Democracies historically have been few and far between and they've thus far not lasted that long comparatively. Some examples:
- Roman Republic may well be the longest lasting and I'm not sure you'd call it strictly a democracy but it's close and it lasted several hundred years before being swept away into empire;
- Weimar Republic -> Nazi Germany. Let's not forget in 1933 when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Nazis held the most seats through elections;
- Athenian democracy -> (briefly) a territory of an empire and then a Roman province
- Turkey is now effectively an autocracy
- In completely honesty and seriousness, the attempted insurrection of January 6 (yes, that's what it was) foreshadowed an end to American democracy. It's a race against time between evangelicals trying to institute a fascist theocracy through subversion of every institution meant to protect the republic vs demographics making them irrelevant [2].
Democracies just have different failure modes and nothing lasts forever.
> - Weimar Republic -> Nazi Germany. Let's not forget in 1933 when Hitler was appointed Chancellor, the Nazis held the most seats through elections;
Let's not forget also that Hitler did not rise to chancellor by democratic process but by state of emergency measures, and that all the seats he grabbed was thanks to his friends from big industry campaigning for him because he promised to rid them of unions. See also the documentary Fascism Inc on the relations between historical fascism/nazism and corporate power.
I'm certainly not arguing otherwise. Some would argue that fascism (as Mussolini explained, the merging of Corporate and State power) is the logical continuation/byproduct of "social democracy" when the oligarchy feels threatened by popular movements.
In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person--Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates--ask them five questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?” If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.
> The U.S. model has been tarnished by hyper-partisanship, gridlock, fake news, the rise of Trump, his mishandling of COVID, and Biden’s inability to push through his reform agenda.
This is a very local view of politics produced by commercial news storytelling based on nationalist sentiment. First, what's the US model? Is it laissez-faire capitalism with oligarchy controlling every aspect of politics (as it is today, and as it was in the times of the robber barons)? Is it planned centralized economy without unemployment like in the time of Roosevelt? Is it legal slavery (not wage slavery) as it was even before? The USA is a mix of all those things, and plenty more. If you talk about "the US model" you need to be very precise about what you mean, unless you mean the model the CIA/NSA have exported all over the world since 1945 which is private property (massive poverty) and political dictatorship (no power to the people).
If you're not talking about a specific model but USA's reputation as a brand around the planet, it sure has been tarnished. Anti-USA sentiment is more alive than ever, but is completely unrelated to any of the points you quoted. I would personally say it's more because of:
- 9/11 turning into a mass hysteria of killing/pillaging millions of people in Iraq/Afghanistan (who had nothing to do with 9/11?!) in the name of "freedom" because that's exactly what freedom means apparently... then the USA government hunts down and prosecutes the journalists responsible for the public knowing what the government is doing (eg. wikileaks & friends)
- the much-predictable collapse of the .com bubble, the subprime crisis, and the formation of a new bubble with VCs giving billions of dollars to startup based on cash burn rate no matter what value they actually produce for society ; in every crisis, the government intervenes to bail out the big fish but lets poorer people to die on the streets, or as people coined it "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor"
- the consolidation of economy in the hands of a few corporations: from an outside perspective it appears anti-trust regulations don't exist in the USA anymore... how can you allow Bayer and Monsanto (two of the most despicable firms producing chemical weapons for war) to merge? or Microsoft and Github? I'd be tempted to say the authorities are corrupt, but it seems the whole system is broken
- inequalities and injustice are more visible than they ever were previously thanks to widespread internet and cameras: people all around the world know that the USA police is a terrorist organization slaughtering innocent black people, and that the USA is a country in which many people sleep on the streets despite an abundance of empty dwellings (this fact only is inconceivable in many parts of the world)
- the government waging war against its own population: FBI's CoIntelPro was dismantled on paper but equivalent programs exist to this day and most people advertised in the media as domestic terrorists were in fact setup by the FBI (as outlined by The Intercept in its most glorious reporting), or were legit radical activists fighting for a better world ("ecoterrorism")
- the price of healthcare climbing up even for well-established medicine that we know to mass-produce since over 100 years like insulin: people from countries with free healthcare are shocked that this is a thing in a country that pretends to lead the world by example
- massive pollution in the cities (Flint?) and in the countryside (fracking turning water taps into flamethrowers of sorts), an ever-growing list of environmental disasters, and industry and government who continue to produce more useless industrial projects that negatively impact most people
- women's rights regressing significantly with anti-abortion abortion centers, thriving anti-gay/trans conversion therapies, and constant legislative pushbacks against anything that's not workplace discrimination
And probably many other things that don't come to mind right now. The american dream was always a lie (read some socialist/anarchist critique from the 19th century if you doubt it) but the scam is now more apparent than ever.
> Let us know what you think
You outlined an important fact that people in the global north are concerned with Putin's dictatorship and value peace and multi-party decision making now more than ever. But in doing so, you forgot to talk about actual politics and that ordinary people don't hold any political power (democracy) in the USA: no, delegating your power to whichever brand/party of psychopaths is gonna fuck up your life is not democracy (power to the people). I bet life would be better for everyone if we all lived in actual democracies (autonomous communes without a centralized Nation States) and not in a TV reality show where oligarchs who own all mass media communication "engineer consent".
I personally recommend you read some political sciences books. You may realize we struggling people have more in common across all borders and cultural divides than geopolitical analysis (which ruling psychopath gets which part of the pie) will ever tell you. You may then produce analysis which resonate more with people outside of your corporate US media bubble who believes the problem is "partisanship" and "fake news".
Greetings from France, another colonial empire who's worked hand in hand with the USA (since before the USA was even a thing) to fuck up the lives of the entire (neo-)colonized world.
That also assumes power is concentrated in the Leader as much as it is in Russia/China. In the West the President/PM is more of a face than the person with the final say.
If we look at US Policy, the policies that effect the common man, hasn't changed much between Republican/Democrat leadership - especially contentious policies - Erosion of wealth of the lower/middle class, Regime change/Expeditions in Middle East, Reduction of civil liberties/press freedoms/internet.