"Our" politicians? What makes you think I am American? Of course Switzerland is less dysfunctional than the US, that wasn't the point of discussion at all (and an extremely low bar to begin with). It was to show that direct democracy has lead to undesirable outcomes.
> Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist.
Well, it's good thing I did not do that. I said the average person cannot begin to comprehend every facet of the modern world they live in. Your limited reading comprehension is not making a very compelling counterpoint here.
In my many years of living here, I have never seen a Swiss person treat their own illnesses, design their own trains, hunt their own meat, and do their own plumbing all at once – they delegate tasks they understand themselves to be incompetent in to specialists. Yet somehow, at the ballot box, their otherwise healthy and productive understanding of their own limited competence makes way for a strange form of celebratory group hubris, landing them in a constitutional crisis like a drunk driver in a ditch.
Maybe instead of trying make decisions they have no hope of truly understanding in an incredibly slow and inefficient process, they can just elect people they trust to be specialists in narrow fields to make these decisions for them for a fixed time span? Wow, exciting, we just fixed a flaw in democracy the Greeks knew about 3000 years ago by resorting to the same god damn system everyone else already uses: representative democracy. Which also sucks in its own, different ways, but at least it is much less likely to set the entire f-cking country on fire over night. That's kinda neat.
42 homicides year 2021, so an extremely safe country too.
Calling people too dumb to handle democracy sounds a tad facist. They are literally in top 10.
I can tell you our politicians where usually picked up from high school, never been to college, and had worse grades than the general public.
So direct democracy might be like capitalism… the worst system besides all the others.