The US is hardly a good example for democracy.
Comment on California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies
Babalugats@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
Democracy in action on a grand scale.
Time to change, as already proven, democracy doesn’t work.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Babalugats@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
But it’s the biggest, and look how corrupt it has become. You think that those big techs are stopping at the U.S.?
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I can understand to not see India as a real democracy right now but not in the context of framing the USA as the poster child of how democracy fails. In that instance India is far larger still.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 15 hours ago
India is still holding remnants of feudalism since their independence, which can be seen in certain areas and way of thinking throughout India. India is also a far, far poorer country than USA, per capita especially, there’s no competition.
Poorer countries are easier to corrupt and India will find it very hard to dig itself out of the hole it’s in without outside interference and a lot of prosecutions.
But, corruption exists in (I would argue) every democratic country. They make up stats and skew them in their own favour in an attempt to hide it, but the people on the street aren’t blind to what is happening and are very much aware of the corruption regardless of any statistics.
HetareKing@piefed.social 18 hours ago
It’s also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.
Anyway, you’re not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don’t mean the “big government” conservatives like to complain about, because governments don’t have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it’s able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it’s ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it’s not simply that democracy can work, it’s the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.
However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn’t that democracy doesn’t work, it’s that we don’t have enough of it.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 17 hours ago
But we already know that democracy doesn’t work. What it sounds like you are describing in much of that post is anarchism (yes, I know I have mentioned it a few times, before I read your post), and with technology, which we heavily already rely on, I see no reason to attempt to try it again. Obviously on a much smaller scale so that we can easily see where lies flaws and boundaries, but we should also be doing that with democracy on a daily basis.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 20 hours ago
Unlimited political donations and money as speech doesn’t work.
Democracy is better than every alternative.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
Which hasn’t been proven. But what has been proven, is that democracy doesn’t work. Mathematically or otherwise.
TheWeirdestCunt@lemmy.today 20 hours ago
What would you suggest instead then? Communism? Theocracy? Feudalism?
Babalugats@feddit.uk 20 hours ago
I would definitely suggest trying them, along with anarchy. Democracy is ripe for making corruption easy, not to mention how crazy it is to have a handful of people voting on just about everything in our lives because a few of their alleged policies at the time of their campaign we able to convince people to vote for them (without much alternatives). The truth is that nobody would ever agree with everybody’s policies and they put the important ones on the long finger to use in the next election citing how much they’ve done.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
Okay then. Come back when you find a provably better system.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 10 hours ago
Come back where? To text at somebody stuck in their ways? Why would I do that?