Comment on California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies
HetareKing@piefed.social 22 hours agoIt’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 20 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.
HetareKing@piefed.social 17 hours ago
We don’t actually know that it doesn’t work, because as I’ve said, all modern democracies have a particular flaw and we don’t know what happens when that flaw is fixed. I would also say that what you’re describing as “anarchism” is just another form of democracy; democracy is a set of principles, not a concrete system. And that anarchism would in practice not be as different from what we have today as you’re imagining. Instead of top-down it would be bottom-up, maybe (which has some problems of its own), but you still end up with elected representatives at higher levels of governance, because even with modern technology it would be impractical to have all the stakeholders of the Rhine, for example, do consensus-building in one big meeting. And those representatives would need to be held to account, just like today.
I think it’s far more fruitful to look at the actual problems we’re having and what structurally is causing them and try to do something about those causes, instead of going on about what systems would or wouldn’t work, because there’s never going to be a perfect system, we’re always going to have to solve problems as they come. Especially when clearly the problem here isn’t the system itself, but the existence of power structures that exist outside of the system and are therefore not constrained by the system, allowing them to undermine the system. If solving that problem results in something that can be described as “socialism” or “anarchism”, so be it, but one thing it absolutely has to be, is a democracy. Because again, anything that is not a democracy is going to be inherently more susceptible to corruption (and therefore be ineffective at solving problems) than even a mediocre implementation of democracy.
Babalugats@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
We do know it doesn’t work.
Look up arrows impossibility theorem.
Anarchism is one of many, and while it is in some ways similar to democracy, it is less open to corruption and it doesn’t have a handful of people deciding everything for us because they got the most votes based on a minority number of issues that they (at the time) claim they will fix.
That you want to stick with democracy and aren’t willing to even be open to the suggestions of anything else, but surely that in itself goes against your beloved democracy, by just assuming that democracy is the best option. Many have thought that their ‘solutions’ were the best option for them in centuries gone by. Feel free to look up quite a few religions for example.
HetareKing@piefed.social 3 hours ago
Arrow’s impossibility theorem just states that strictly speaking, there is no system within a particular subset of voting systems that is guaranteed to be immune from spoilers affecting the outcome. So not only are you using an overly strict definition of democracy that doesn’t even encompass all democratic systems implemented today, let alone all the ones that could be (which again, includes anarchism), but you’re disqualifying things based on not meeting a level of perfection that is unreasonable to expect of anything. It’s not like anarchism would be free of irrelevant factors affecting decisions; it would be a lot more affected by relationships between people and people’s standing in a community for one thing.
None of the problems you point out are innate to democracy. The reason you associate them with democracy is not because of any inherent quality of democracy, but because of history. To simplify things a lot, the people who championed democracy back in the days of absolute monarchies and nobility also championed a liberal economy. At the time that would have made sense, since it was seen as more fair and meritocratic than an economy managed by the nobility. And compared to that it was, but ultimate it just ended up creating a new nobility in all but name.
But just because they were wrong about one thing doesn’t mean they were wrong about everything. You can pick and choose ideas, and the anarchism you’re promoting is one such attempt.