Is Democracy Working?

[loomer]

It's also worth remembering that some of the most corrupt and incompetent governments we've seen in recent years ran on fairly explicit populist-technocrat (which, yes, is usually contradictory) platforms - they promised to lead their countries by bringing to bear their special expertise in the field of business, by doing away with the influence of Political Elites to bring in people who'll Tell It How It Really Is from Outside The Bubble, and so on.

And on a personal level: Remember, I'm an expert in my field. Would you want me running your country?

[Jub]

I'm having trouble organizing my thoughts on this matter in a way that will promote discussion and not people attempting to nitpick my ideas. I'll try a few point form thoughts and see if that helps.

1) My idea with bringing in experts from other nations is to attempt to find as impartial a pool of candidates as possible. I understand that realistically this isn't going to solve much - perhaps even any - of the issues but it's the best thing I can think of.

2) I don't really understand how filtering experts through idiots - either the voting public or politicians - does anything to fix the issue of bad or biased experts.

3) I don't especially regard the will of the people as important nor do I especially value freedoms the way some people - especially Americans - do. I think most people, myself included, are pretty short-sighted and inept at seeing things on the scale needed to fix our world's current problems. I'd happily hand off control to an outside force if I was confident it was even a little better than what we have now.

4) My ideal system for running the Earth would probably be some impartial superintelligence that values keeping humanity alive with as much freedom as possible while also not really giving us enough control to mess things up too badly.

5) This could all just be a reaction to current events and playing a bit too much Cyberpunk 2077, so don't take it too seriously. I like to use these forums as a sounding board to spitball ideas and then I tend to get bored and take bait which turns things more hostile than I intend them to be.

[loomer]

Again, you may find Kelsen's The Essence and Value of Democracy helpful. Technomessianism is still messianism, and still prone to the same dangers.

[Jub]

Again, you may find Kelsen's The Essence and Value of Democracy helpful. Technomessianism is still messianism, and still prone to the same dangers.

If I can find it for less than $150, its listed price on Amazon, and preferably in audiobook form, I'll give it a whirl.

My parting thought is that it feels like any system is going to be damned in some way. Humans are pretty limited in our ability to grasp problems on the scales that we expect governments to solve and yet aren't so limited that we can't cause problems on the scale and larger. I don't know that there is a solution that would get the results I'd hope for.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I think the problem is that you are approaching this as if you think you are the first person to ever think of this and trying to build your notions of an ideal society based on absolutely nothing other than your own intuition. There is a truly massive amount of philosophy (both political and otherwise) from the Enlightenment to the present that is devoted pretty specifically to discussing these topics (I mean, hell, the entire field of political philosophy was founded in the 1650s SPECIFICALLY to discuss this topic).

Your political philosophy as expressed in this thread is more or less that of Thomas Hobbes, who also believed that people are inherently unsuited for political life and therefore must submit themselves to an authoritative body to enforce laws and resolve conflicts. I would recommend reading more of Hobbes work (notably "Leviathan") where he expounds on this. Then you should go on to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who countered a lot of Hobbes arguments in "The Social Contract" and "Discourse on Inequality". Then you should read "Das Kapital". Then "The Phenomenology of Spirit". Then dive into the works of Hannah Arendt. And there are a dozen other seminal works I haven't even mentioned that are all relevant.

I'm not even saying all of this to be flippant. I'm just saying what you are doing in this thread is the political equivalent of thinking you came up with a cool idea called "evolution" but having never taken a biology class. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, familiarize yourself with what has been written on this subject and try to form your opinions based on the wealth of empirical evidence and arguments that already exist. Maybe at the end of the day you find you're still a Hobbesian, but at least it is based on reasoned consideration rather than just idle "What if ..." daydreaming.

[Soontir C'boath]

1) My idea with bringing in experts from other nations is to attempt to find as impartial a pool of candidates as possible. I understand that realistically this isn't going to solve much - perhaps even any - of the issues but it's the best thing I can think of.

Rhetorical question: Seems we're just passing the buck then. Who gets to decide who these experts are that get the power to decide what being impartial means?

2) I don't really understand how filtering experts through idiots - either the voting public or politicians - does anything to fix the issue of bad or biased experts.

Rhetorical question: Again, who gets to decide who and what kind of experts we should be looking for? Because chances are, the powers that be, can happily decide we put in place experts from the Heritage Foundation.

3) I don't especially regard the will of the people as important nor do I especially value freedoms the way some people - especially Americans - do. I think most people, myself included, are pretty short-sighted and inept at seeing things on the scale needed to fix our world's current problems. I'd happily hand off control to an outside force if I was confident it was even a little better than what we have now.

This is assuming the outside force has a vested interest in "doing what's best for the population". What is to stop this outside force to decide Mitch McConnell is the best candidate for the job? Especially when the people of Kentucky already seems to believe he's the man for the job of US Senator. How would regular folks know any better?
__________________

A valid criticism about American democracy is that we do not elect people from the general populace that would have interest in the "common folk". Believe it or not, many of the politicians (Dems and Reps) in office are idiots and are there only because they come from money. And therefore chances are, has no real vested interest in helping people. Running for office in the Democratic Party inherently requires you to have huge sums of money or know people to fund raise off of which pretty much excludes working class folks from running; that's pretty damn elitist for a party with liberal values no? Also believe it or not, regular folks know how to hustle too (AOC immediately comes to mind). Acting as if this elite political class would know their way around Congress as if they don't hold orientation for every new class of elected officials is insulting. If we had more Cori Bush's, AOC's, Jamaal Bowman's, Bernie Sanderss, etc, perhaps we'd actually get somewhere and get more than $600 dollar checks.

[Elheru Aran]

A valid criticism about American democracy is that we do not elect people from the general populace that would have interest in the "common folk". Believe it or not, many of the politicians (Dems and Reps) in office are idiots and are there only because they come from money. And therefore chances are, has no real vested interest in helping people. Running for office in the Democratic Party inherently requires you to have huge sums of money or know people to fund raise off of which pretty much excludes working class folks from running; that's pretty damn elitist for a party with liberal values no? Also believe it or not, regular folks know how to hustle too (AOC immediately comes to mind). Acting as if this elite political class would know their way around Congress as if they don't hold orientation for every new class of elected officials is insulting. If we had more Cori Bush's, AOC's, Jamaal Bowman's, Bernie Sanderss, etc, perhaps we'd actually get somewhere and get more than $600 dollar checks.

Running for office, period, requires a considerable amount of money if you want to have any hope of success, regardless of what party you're with because of how American elections work. People have to pay for marketing, advertising campaigns, even to have a place on the ballot, and they have to do this starting as far ahead of time as a year or more before the election because everybody is doing the same thing.

I have a certain admiration for the British system where pretty much anybody who wants to run, can, and advertising time is split equally between the various candidates. Not that every candidate is *able* to take advantage of this or market themselves effectively, but at the very least it means that elections aren't so narrowly focused. Certainly typically the most visible candidates are the ones from the big national parties and those are usually the ones who get most of the votes in general, but nonetheless, there is something to be said for the optics of having Lord Buckethead alongside the other candidates as they announce the results...

Regarding the thread subject in general: frankly "is democracy working" is something of an absurd question to ask because a lot of the issues given can be ascribed to other things. In fact I might point at economics more than politics for quite a few of these problems-- climate change for example is mostly a result of lack of regulation on industrial and agricultural emissions. That's a political thing but it's also economic-- capitalists cry foul at regulation because it'll "hurt their business", and they pay the politicians to not regulate it. So whose fault is that, the politicians or the capitalists?

[Soontir C'boath]

Running for office, period, requires a considerable amount of money if you want to have any hope of success, regardless of what party you're with because of how American elections work. People have to pay for marketing, advertising campaigns, even to have a place on the ballot, and they have to do this starting as far ahead of time as a year or more before the election because everybody is doing the same thing.

Yes, and it is great that we now have tools such as ActBlue, social media like Twitter, and the internet in general to make it easy for people to donate money.

[montypython]

I always find this video insightful on the dynamics of political power regardless of system:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs