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Questioning Democracy *With Poll*

Steeplerot

Steeplerot

Lifer
From a bit more "In depth" political forum I frequent:

I hear endlessly about democracy here and it seems people are dead set and really believe in democracy, Then why shouldn't we abolish the representative democracy?

Why aren't everybody above 18 years of age automatically a member of the government? That is, every american above 18 years of age, is automatically a member of the White House.

Every british citizen who is 18 years of age or more is member of the Parliament.

Every danish citizen who is 18 years of age or more is member of the Peoples Parliament.

Then instead of having a president or Prime Minister, the people simply appoint the ministers. And it is the people who discusses the laws, not only the elected leaders. This is real democracy. Anybody who is not in favor of this, is not for democracy, but for populist hypocrisy.
So what say you on this question if we really have a rule of the people?

Representative democracy is against everything. It is anti-scientifical. It is anti-democratic. It is populistic.



We all know the two party system we are stuck in a rut with is not representative of mainstream public views, but how much power can individual people be responsible for before someone else should step in to speak his/her mind for them?
Your thoughts?
 
populist hypocrisy works because people are stupid.so you want the same people to govern directly? 🙂
 
Originally posted by: albatross
populist hypocrisy works because people are stupid.so you want the same people to govern directly? 🙂
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I am neither for or against either really, it is obvious the system is broken seeing the two party system we are stuck in but at the same time I am not so sure that someone uneducated should have as much say in a issue as a person with a PHD in said subject.
 
Do you realize the crazy sh!t we'd see if we switched to direct Democracy? Abolish the electoral college for sure, but I don't want average voters having anything to do with the daily business of running our country.
 
Direct democracy is impossible for.... so many reasons. First of all, if you look back to athens you would notice that while they had a form of direct democracy (I know, with tons of restrictions still on who voted) the only people who had time to participate in government were the rich. I bet you would encounter similar things here too.

Frankly though, the best way to see why direct democracy is crap is to look at the ballot initiative situation in california. That's direct democracy. What happens here is that people don't understand what the propositions mean, the people who write them insert a few lines of crazy special interest ****** that nobody notices into the bills, etc.. etc. It is a disaster. Now imagine what would happen if this was like that for every spending bill that came down the pike. Ughhhhh.
 
Originally posted by: sandorski
Not sure of the Danish system, but the claim about the British system is just wrong.
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I think he was saying "in theory" that's how it would work in those respective countries.
 
You know what's "anti-scientifical"? Forming an opinion about something without looking at the practical problems. Yeah, sure, in a perfect world perhaps direct democracy would be better for the reasons you suggested...but we don't live in a perfect world. The old physics joke about "assume a spherical cow of uniform density" only works because the ideal model is close enough to how it practically works that the difference in results is minor. Not so when you're talking about implementing a government.

The most obvious problem (and there are MANY) is that there is no way to run a country where 200 million people have to make a decision on everything. Even if every single person of voting age was a genius with enough political knowledge to make an informed decision (or perhaps especially if that were true), we'd have millions of different opinions pulling every issue in all directions. NOTHING would get done, even the things government needs to do. Think about that many people trying to write the tax code, for example. We'd either end up with no tax code at all or something so obscenely complex and riddled with special cases that it would make our current tax code look like a model of simplicity by comparison.

Of course there is another problem with direct democracy, the assumption I mentioned above. Most people do not have enough knowledge to make informed decisions about things, and they don't even realize it. I know it's popular to beat-up our elected representatives for being stupid, and truthfully a lot of them deserve it, but they look like Einstein compared to the average person discussing political issues. Of course you could argue that a big part of democracy is the right to be ignorant, or even that representative democracy results in the same uninformed decision making, but at least in representative democracy you have the opportunity to be smart enough to support someone smarter than you are.

You call representative democracy an exercise in "populist hypocrisy", but I'd argue that the "populist stupidity" position is supporting direct democracy because it gives you an intellectual warm-fuzzy to do so without addressing any of the practical problems with such a system. If this is the kind of thing being discussed in your more "in depth" political forum, I'd stick with P&N, personally.
 
I don't know about the rest of you, but I think our country runs rather well looking at the rest of the alternatives.
 
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