I think the problem is democracy just doesn't scale very well because it requires empathy and altruism and that operates at the scale of human experience. You need some kind of commonality or shared experience to keep people together. In the 50s-80s you had the experience of the wars and cold war to keep people active. Since then, there hasn't been too much of that save maybe terror attacks.
For the US specifically, I think we should be going back to letting states take the lead on social issues like wellfare, gay marriage, abortion, drug decriminalization/legalization, gun control and whatnot instead of trying to do everything at the federal level - especially via ever more contorted constitutional interpretation.
The benefits from this kind of approach would be the ability to do quicker, more focused policy iterations with less controversy at the state level for the willing states before getting locked in federally and difficult to change as opposed to the opaque backroom deals and guessing games of today.
This only sounds like it would work if each state had some kind of physical and cultural separation. We already see in Illinois how state level gun control is failing. It doesn’t matter how strict Illinois sets its gun laws, they still pour in from the lax neighbors.
If we want to let human rights choices be set at the state level, we need to provide some kind of subsidized “get out of dodge” program for the people negatively affected by the state level decisions, as those people are usually the poorest and least mobile. Can you imagine trying to sell “your taxes are going to pay for moving gay people to California/NY” to the constituents in dark red states?
Democracy with universal suffrage has barely been around a century. In South Africa, it is just over 2 decades old. It's new, it's messy, it doesn't always go our way. What amazes me is that the USA can swing from one side of the political spectrum to the other and the country holds together and happily repeats the process every few years.
> What amazes me is that the USA can swing from one side of the political spectrum to the other and the country holds together and happily repeats the process every few years.
This is actually an interesting observation/fact. My assumption is that the sort of political life which hits the media is a thing of the (US) cities while daily life in rural areas remains largely unaffected and is defined by long-term evolved social relationships.
And in the US there are many more people living in rural areas than cities (although if agglomerations or "urban areas" are counted in, it's very concentrated)
I have a very cynical view of democracy but it turns out that these days it makes me more optimistic about democracy.
Democracy has never been about electing the brightest, never. Democracy is actually not at all about how we choose the person who will rule (as is demonstrated by US who elected twice this century someone who lose the popular vote). It is about the fact that in face of enough unpopularity, the current leader will be gone in less time it would take to overthrow them.
The goal of democracy is not good governance, it is civil peace.
When you look at it this way, from the outside, democracy is working perfectly well in the US. The big test will be to see if the next transition goes peacefully, impeachment or not.
As far as systems go, the main competitor for the US system is the Chinese system, that is a meritocracy. Well, as imperfect a meritocracy as the US is a democracy, but looking at the diplomas of the leaders there, you will see far more scientists and less lawyers. For decades, it has managed to offer transitions and to evolve its dogmas. Xi Jinping's power grab offers a similar test than Trump's US. We shall see what happens at the next transition. We, democrats (in the non-US sense), do not thing that a power structure like the PCC can stay decent without counter powers and elections but the PCC's endurance and success at managing the biggest country in the world is to be acknowledged.
Another system that could, unexpectedly, reappear and offer a competition is plain old absolute monarchy. I keep an eye on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the crown prince has decided to clean up some corruption and has (correctly, IMO) identified religious extremism to be the main reason his country lags behind. He has announced staunch reformism. It is yet to be seen if this will actually happen or if it just PR, but if it does, monarchies may come back in front of the scene too.
All in all, as much as I love democracy, I am happy that we seem to stop being complacent about our imperfect systems and may finally seek improvements. I believe that democracy is the most advanced and workable system but it is not the easiest to manage and our societies and cultures still have a lot of room for improvement.
>The goal of democracy is not good governance, it is civil peace.
It is neither. Democratic elections is a process that gives power to the politician whose plan / personality / promises appeals to the most people. In other words, it selects for the best propaganda. Which is why media personalities tend to be very successful at elections and why democracy looks very desirable. On the other hand, regarding good governance and civil peace, If you look at democracy in general, (and not just western countries), it is not that much better than alternatives.
IMHO the current problem is that the values previously selected by the democratic process have been equated with the process itself, and now that they are falling out of fashion, it is democracy itself that looks like it's taking a hit.
>The goal of democracy is not good governance, it is civil peace.
This is an excellent point.
On the other hand, though, it was 8 years of GWB, which was resented by the half of the country, then it was 8 years of Obama, which was resented by another half, and now, well, things are definitely not improving. My point here is that it seems that democracy getting weaker and weaker for solving that civil peace part of equation.
I often wonder, if the current situation is the lowest point, and politics will get more moderate from here. It should be, but then, so it was during GWB term...
The prospect facing democracy might be not death but mitosis.
In the US, the EU, India, and elsewhere, trust in the national-level institutions necessary to sustain any regime from democracy to dictatorship has been eroding. This seems to be part of a deliberate strategy, but that's less important than the result. In most of these places, there are moves toward fragmentation and separatism. In the US it hasn't quite gotten that far, but there sure is plenty of sniping between "red" and "blue" states. (It doesn't seem to matter that most states are really "purple" in actual elections because they still tend to identify one way or the other.) "States' rights" has been a theme on the conservative side forever, but now even liberal governors and state legislatures seem to be more inclined to defy the federal government on various policies. The sense of common purpose that others have pointed out seems to be missing at the national level. Maybe it can't be sustained at population levels of 300M or more. In the US, that might mean more decisions delegated to the states and a more limited federal government (which AFAICT is what the US founders actually intended even with their second attempt). Or maybe it will mean actual separate states with EU-like arrangements to facilitate migration and trade, and likewise elsewhere.
I may be naive but I think this is a tech problem.
The vast majority of us share a common set of ethical norms. We are also relatively savvy. If we know someone has acted against our interests before we wont be keen on working with them again. Eg. A dodgy Mechanic. And this goes for everyone, regardless of education level or armchair-economist status.
There is a technical solution out there that combats misinformation and riling people up against each other. And promotes educated decision making. So that we can approximate an optimal policy that complies with ethical norms and shared longer-term goals. And evaluate the impact of policy as best we can.
This probably wouldn't mean direct democracy (as there are very few experts in a given field), but rather in built in validation of expert opinion and evaluation of consequences of decision making. A little less prone to abuse than our current systems.
You can even see hints of how it could be done in online communities such as HN, where despite a relatively diverse community the shared goals of learning is still optimised.
I dont think this is head in the clouds, technology impacts governance all the time, from printing presses to pamphlets to socmed. And we have done some pretty impactful things with it recently, governance could be next.
First, I think it'd be good to separate the Western world from the rest of the world. The West has been meddling with other countries' governments for centuries, such that it's impossible to say that true democracy ever existed outside the West. Is it better or worse today than it was 50 years ago? Hard to say... What seems to be the case though is that more countries are escaping the West's sphere of influence than 20 years ago (after the collapse the USSR, only the West remained).
In Western countries, I think it's an issue to link the rise of national sentiment to a decline in democracy. Disinformation is certainly a thing, but for it to work, I believe there needs to be a general discontent with current politics such that people are using the urns for exactly what democracy has been designed to do: change government when people are unhappy with it.
US democracy will be in danger the day when access to some information is prohibited or some parties are forbidden, which is far from being the case.
These people at MIT forget that most republicans are fairly moderate, and a good chunk of Trump voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders if he had been nominated.
I'm not sure if democracy is necessarily dying everywhere, I—hopefully not too naïvely—think there's a little more diversity in worldwide politics than that.
Reading the article though, this seems to be US-centric. Perhaps the title could be changed to "Is US democracy dying?", in which case, at least to an outsider looking in, it seems that death happened quite a long time ago. I'm not sure if Buckley v. Valeo was as big a turning point as some make out, or if it was really that different before that, but certainly modern US political decision-making seems quite disconnected from constituent concerns.
I’m in Italy, we’re voting in our first national elections in five years today (despite having three/four governments in the intervening years, depending on how you count). Democracy definitely seems dead or at least mute here. As I made my way to the polling station, I was reminded of my favourite quote from Thomas Pynchon: “If they can keep you asking the wrong questions, they don’t need to worry about the answers”. I don’t mean it in the sense a conspiracy theorist might, but in some other ineffable or inexpressible sense whereby parliamentary politics has simply become to weak and ineffectual to contrast and compensate for other forces that act on societies (economic and financial ones, particularly). That might be why strident or extremist viewpoints of various kinds are more prevalent now than they used to be: because faced with a body politic that cannot effect change or even visibly affect the trajectory, many people just choose what they perceive to be a bigger rudder to steer with.
This question is explored in detail in the book "The Retreat of Western Liberalism" by Edward Luce (2017); it is one of the best books of the year according to The Economist.
I haven't finished reading it yet, never mind digesting it, but it is fascinating and though-provoking. The following paragraph should wet your appetite:
In Moscow’s view, history is back and nothing is inevitable, least of all liberal democracy. Others, in Beijing, Ankara, Cairo, Caracas, and even Budapest, share Russia’s hostility to Western notions of progress, as do growing numbers of apostates in the West. Are they wrong?
This book is my attempt to answer that question. Let me declare now that nothing is pre-ordained. To a person whose life has coincided with the rise of democracy, the spread of market economics and signs that the world had finally subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (even if much of it is paid only in lip service – hypocrisy, as they say, being the compliment vice pays to virtue), merely to pose the question is troubling enough. Wasn’t that debate settled a long time ago? Isn’t the march of human freedom unstoppable? Doesn’t the whole world crave to be Western? We can no longer have any confidence in that. It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script. Those who still believe in the inevitable triumph of the Western model might ask themselves whether it is faith, rather than facts, that fuels their worldview. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learned never to question.
> The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. There isn't any Sharia Law in North Carolina, but there damn well are US-style malls in even the most conservative Islamic countries.
> In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch —literally watch—the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day.
Think about this:
Looking at the past few years it's becoming more and more clear that data has an enormous value and grants a lot of power to the entities that are able to extract knowledge out of it. In turn, this knowledge could shape a policy that will yield the desired outcome much more reliably.
Up until now, democracy, with its distributed governance system has had a significant advantage over more concentrated forms of governance systems. Simply since making decisions involved more people, and therefore, the decision process was much more controlled.
Now, it seems like dictatorships is on the verge of getting the upper hand. In democracies, there are limitations on data accumulation (privacy laws) and data is distributed across government entities in a way that is (sometimes even intentionally) hard to consolidate.
In dictatorships, data for all entities could be concentrated in one location, granting the government a lot of power if it will use the data to its full extent.
China is a great such example, they are working towards this goal as we speak, by putting cameras everywhere, monitoring all Internet traffic, and more...
It's easy to view the past as some romantic fairy tale.
In reality the world has probably never been more democratic than it is today. The current political trends might flip in a few years. Things might be moving backwards, but the US might still have stronger oversight of it's intelligence agencies than it did in the 70'ties?
As long as people aren't silently outraged we'll be okay :)
About the US, it's not very reassuring when, in the same week, the President says "(Xi Jinping), he's now president for life. President for life. And he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll give that a shot some day.” just a while after saying "I like taking the guns early (...) take the guns first, then go through due process".
Even if he's joking about the US giving that a shot, he's pandering to a newly-anointed "president for life".
I've always wondered: is there a paper/thesis somewhere suggesting a better alternative to democracy? I don't mean the usual (monarchy, dictatorship, etc), but rather something entirely new.
I imagine there must be at least one political sciences/philosophy student somewhere who gave this a thought, but I never found anything.
There's demarchy - a random sampling of the population. Like democracy, it ensures that people have a way to change laws they don't like.
Unlike democracy, it doesn't suffer from the fact that the corrupt or power hungry rise to the top. Lobbyists would have less power.
There are also some suggestions that a random sampling of a population will lead to a better selection mechanism - similar to suggestions that promoting randomly would be better for organisations.https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education...
I am big believer of AnCap and we should see few successful ancap societies in 10yrs. French Polynesian Floating Island may even be completed before 2020.
The Sovereign Individual and Atlas Shrugged have interesting alternatives to democracy. Just work in ones rational self interest and watch the world collapse as you rebuild your own.
Not saying that’s a good alternative to democracy, but it sure is interesting
Yes, democracy is dying, assuming it was ever "alive" - barring small, token movements, the rich ruling classes have always been that. We, the people, are often presented with unpalatable choices and little hope of changing the actual status quo. Looking over a significant timeline, say the past 50 years, we see a trend of the rich getting richer, the poor remaining poor, and the middle classes sliding into poverty. The only relevant skillset most politicians are bringing to the table is "getting elected", so essentially democracy's leaders are the winners of a popularity contest.
As a species, we are ruled by special interest groups, greed, and lust for power. This has always been the case, and will remain to case for a long time to come. The only difference is that the ruling classes have learned that the best way to stave off violent revolution is to provide the masses with some creature comforts and the vision of "working hard (for them) to make more money (controlled by them) so you can buy more stuff (sold by them)". We live in a post-scarcity environment that is artificially kept under the thumb. The real problems we face - such as a rapidly approaching fresh water shortage, environmental calamity, and a rapidly changing production environment (robots and AI will eat the jobs) - are being ignored in preference to ever increasing profits.
It bums me out when I see articles and online discussions about democracy in the US (the article mentions both the US and the world) and I CTRL+F "republic," only to find instances of the word "Republican" and zero mentions of the fact that the United States of America is NOT and has never been a "democracy," but rather a federal republic.
No. It's true that democracy was weakened when the early "wild west" internet interfered with broadcast media's ability to steer public conversation. The temporary result was a rise of anti-democratic populism in the west.
However, democracy is already reasserting itself, as governments and capital learn how to shape consensus formation on the internet.
I think there are some real problems. Some constitutional, some cultural. Applicable to many countries, not just the US:
- We like to think that we keep our representatives accountable through transparency. Now we can no longer claim the information is too hard to get. Now tell me how often your rep voted in a way that suited your preference. Or tell me how many times he voted at all. Or tell me his name.
- Your representatives represent you on everything. Even things they didn't talk about in the election. And those things might actually matter to you.
- The space of politics has gotten huge. In the early days of democracy the state did not reach into every walk of life. Now of course there are political ideas about the size of government, but you can't deny the scope of it has massively increased. We're asking a lot of ordinary people to decide on things that they aren't experts on, that don't affect them because they are removed from that particular part of life.
- If you live in a country with multiple parties in parliament, your reps need to horse-trade issues they like for things they don't care so much about. Often this leads to them not being able to deliver on their program, with the excuse permanently being that they aren't a majority.
- Politics has become a career in most countries I follow. Especially in the European countries, it's almost like athletics: you have to have joined a party from a young age. Who makes it and who doesn't depends not on experience in the rest of society, but position within the party hierarchy. An old boy from my school was a UK MP, but he never made it to the front bench because he'd spent his whole working life doing an actual job in industry (rather than a job in media, which is a job in politics).
- Politics/career 2: once you're invested in a political career, the option to do a real life job is both closed and unappealing. There's some ordinary exits/sabbaticals: you get sent to Europe where you can hide from the media and spend lots of taxpayer's money without even showing up to work (they cheat and send their entry passes for one guy to scan), or you can work for a pseudo-government organisation like an NGO. But mainly you really, really want to just stay in your current position. Especially if you're a minister and you collect a lifetime pension after some threshold.
- Messiah Politics: If we elect Obama, a smart, educated guy who is a great speaker, everything will be better. He's so smart he'll know what to do about every issue. I don't have to do anything, he'll take care of it. And lets make the whole election campaign into a heartwarming movie.
- Organized interests: they're organized, and they know how to influence career politicians. Corporations that want to sell guns/butter, pollute the environment, and cheat the consumer. Trade unions who want unreasonable concessions. And so on. What can we do about this? And organized, specific interest group can win stuff because that interest is weighed against the diffuse interests of all other interests. To start with, we should probably make it completely clear who is doing the talking. Where is money coming from, and who have our reps been meeting with? I think the state of transparency varies a fair bit across countries, but I've never seen anywhere where it's completely clear and easy to discover this kind of information.
- Media culture: everything is sensational. Force the guy to say yes or no. Flip side of that, never say yes or no, just explain your position in a long winded way. Or talk around the question. Everything is myopic, there is no holistic impression, despite what I said about your rep being your rep on everything. Constant crisis: is this the issue that forces rep X to resign? Nothing is ever said that puts things into perspective, like the history of some topic (minimum wage, marijuana, gambling, everything...).
Potential improvements:
- Term limits. Ideas about how to govern, like liberalism or socialism don't die. But there's no reason a single person would have to stay in power to explain such ideas.
- Pay people what they made before. You don't discourage high earners from serving, and you don't encourage people for whom parliament is a huge salary increase.
- Complete transparency. Rep X will meet these people on these days. They represent XYZ organization, which is funded in these amounts by these people. Have an independent body review this, like the doping agency in sports.
Term limits tend to hand power to the beureaucracy because the newly elected official doesn't know enough policy to be effective.
Democracy needs:
Democracy needs smaller states and districts. Citizens per representative as a ratio is higher than ever, and we lose representation responsive to local concerns.
Media now focuses on national politics. State and local politics suffer because of it.
Increased State/Decreased Federal power provides a way for ideological divisions to be resolved at the local level , and thus lose potency as political red meat.
Move to a weekly news cycle so policy can be worked out and digested before being reported.
Foreign state powers ( especially geopolitical advesaries) should have very limited access to manipulate hearts and minds of citizens.
Mass microtargetting of citizens with personalized propoganda tailored to their personality and weaknesses should not be permitted or heavily regulated.
I think that yes, democracy is dying, and popular 'for all' democracy with universal suffrage has been a bad idea from the very beginning. People who don't own significant amount of property (say, sufficient to provide rent above poverty threshold), shouldn't vote, because their votes are irresponsible by definition, and they are too easy to manipulate. Worst case it leads to 'bread and circuses' mode of societal collapse.
Democracy isn't necessarily about voting responsibly. It's about giving people power over their government. When the government isn't serving the people, it needs to face some sort of consequence.
If democracy is failing, it's because this feedback loop is broken: people don't understand how their government works, or they don't feel able to make any meaningful change. It's not the people in poverty you should be blaming. In the last presidential election, for example, people at the lowest income level swung more toward Clinton than the average voter (https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-group...)
As a counter to your federalism revivalism, taxing land heavily would be the very beneficial to citizens and cities as you would incentivize the most valuable use of land in addition to providing a straight forward source of rent from the earth itself to "we the people".
People who don't own significant amount of property (say, sufficient to provide rent above poverty threshold), shouldn't vote, because their votes are irresponsible by definition, and they are too easy to manipulate
[+] [-] andromeduck|8 years ago|reply
For the US specifically, I think we should be going back to letting states take the lead on social issues like wellfare, gay marriage, abortion, drug decriminalization/legalization, gun control and whatnot instead of trying to do everything at the federal level - especially via ever more contorted constitutional interpretation.
The benefits from this kind of approach would be the ability to do quicker, more focused policy iterations with less controversy at the state level for the willing states before getting locked in federally and difficult to change as opposed to the opaque backroom deals and guessing games of today.
[+] [-] mvid|8 years ago|reply
If we want to let human rights choices be set at the state level, we need to provide some kind of subsidized “get out of dodge” program for the people negatively affected by the state level decisions, as those people are usually the poorest and least mobile. Can you imagine trying to sell “your taxes are going to pay for moving gay people to California/NY” to the constituents in dark red states?
[+] [-] mmaunder|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fenk85|8 years ago|reply
aside: Last time Europe had politics like above it ended badly for millions of people worldwide, except this time nuclear weapons abound
[+] [-] jhoechtl|8 years ago|reply
This is actually an interesting observation/fact. My assumption is that the sort of political life which hits the media is a thing of the (US) cities while daily life in rural areas remains largely unaffected and is defined by long-term evolved social relationships.
And in the US there are many more people living in rural areas than cities (although if agglomerations or "urban areas" are counted in, it's very concentrated)
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/03/us-urban-population-w...
http://www.theusaonline.com/people/urbanization.htm
[+] [-] Iv|8 years ago|reply
Democracy has never been about electing the brightest, never. Democracy is actually not at all about how we choose the person who will rule (as is demonstrated by US who elected twice this century someone who lose the popular vote). It is about the fact that in face of enough unpopularity, the current leader will be gone in less time it would take to overthrow them.
The goal of democracy is not good governance, it is civil peace.
When you look at it this way, from the outside, democracy is working perfectly well in the US. The big test will be to see if the next transition goes peacefully, impeachment or not.
As far as systems go, the main competitor for the US system is the Chinese system, that is a meritocracy. Well, as imperfect a meritocracy as the US is a democracy, but looking at the diplomas of the leaders there, you will see far more scientists and less lawyers. For decades, it has managed to offer transitions and to evolve its dogmas. Xi Jinping's power grab offers a similar test than Trump's US. We shall see what happens at the next transition. We, democrats (in the non-US sense), do not thing that a power structure like the PCC can stay decent without counter powers and elections but the PCC's endurance and success at managing the biggest country in the world is to be acknowledged.
Another system that could, unexpectedly, reappear and offer a competition is plain old absolute monarchy. I keep an eye on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia where the crown prince has decided to clean up some corruption and has (correctly, IMO) identified religious extremism to be the main reason his country lags behind. He has announced staunch reformism. It is yet to be seen if this will actually happen or if it just PR, but if it does, monarchies may come back in front of the scene too.
All in all, as much as I love democracy, I am happy that we seem to stop being complacent about our imperfect systems and may finally seek improvements. I believe that democracy is the most advanced and workable system but it is not the easiest to manage and our societies and cultures still have a lot of room for improvement.
[+] [-] fvdessen|8 years ago|reply
It is neither. Democratic elections is a process that gives power to the politician whose plan / personality / promises appeals to the most people. In other words, it selects for the best propaganda. Which is why media personalities tend to be very successful at elections and why democracy looks very desirable. On the other hand, regarding good governance and civil peace, If you look at democracy in general, (and not just western countries), it is not that much better than alternatives.
IMHO the current problem is that the values previously selected by the democratic process have been equated with the process itself, and now that they are falling out of fashion, it is democracy itself that looks like it's taking a hit.
[+] [-] nopriorarrests|8 years ago|reply
This is an excellent point.
On the other hand, though, it was 8 years of GWB, which was resented by the half of the country, then it was 8 years of Obama, which was resented by another half, and now, well, things are definitely not improving. My point here is that it seems that democracy getting weaker and weaker for solving that civil peace part of equation.
I often wonder, if the current situation is the lowest point, and politics will get more moderate from here. It should be, but then, so it was during GWB term...
[+] [-] notacoward|8 years ago|reply
In the US, the EU, India, and elsewhere, trust in the national-level institutions necessary to sustain any regime from democracy to dictatorship has been eroding. This seems to be part of a deliberate strategy, but that's less important than the result. In most of these places, there are moves toward fragmentation and separatism. In the US it hasn't quite gotten that far, but there sure is plenty of sniping between "red" and "blue" states. (It doesn't seem to matter that most states are really "purple" in actual elections because they still tend to identify one way or the other.) "States' rights" has been a theme on the conservative side forever, but now even liberal governors and state legislatures seem to be more inclined to defy the federal government on various policies. The sense of common purpose that others have pointed out seems to be missing at the national level. Maybe it can't be sustained at population levels of 300M or more. In the US, that might mean more decisions delegated to the states and a more limited federal government (which AFAICT is what the US founders actually intended even with their second attempt). Or maybe it will mean actual separate states with EU-like arrangements to facilitate migration and trade, and likewise elsewhere.
[+] [-] ian0|8 years ago|reply
The vast majority of us share a common set of ethical norms. We are also relatively savvy. If we know someone has acted against our interests before we wont be keen on working with them again. Eg. A dodgy Mechanic. And this goes for everyone, regardless of education level or armchair-economist status.
There is a technical solution out there that combats misinformation and riling people up against each other. And promotes educated decision making. So that we can approximate an optimal policy that complies with ethical norms and shared longer-term goals. And evaluate the impact of policy as best we can.
This probably wouldn't mean direct democracy (as there are very few experts in a given field), but rather in built in validation of expert opinion and evaluation of consequences of decision making. A little less prone to abuse than our current systems.
You can even see hints of how it could be done in online communities such as HN, where despite a relatively diverse community the shared goals of learning is still optimised.
I dont think this is head in the clouds, technology impacts governance all the time, from printing presses to pamphlets to socmed. And we have done some pretty impactful things with it recently, governance could be next.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] d--b|8 years ago|reply
In Western countries, I think it's an issue to link the rise of national sentiment to a decline in democracy. Disinformation is certainly a thing, but for it to work, I believe there needs to be a general discontent with current politics such that people are using the urns for exactly what democracy has been designed to do: change government when people are unhappy with it.
US democracy will be in danger the day when access to some information is prohibited or some parties are forbidden, which is far from being the case.
These people at MIT forget that most republicans are fairly moderate, and a good chunk of Trump voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders if he had been nominated.
[+] [-] lucideer|8 years ago|reply
Reading the article though, this seems to be US-centric. Perhaps the title could be changed to "Is US democracy dying?", in which case, at least to an outsider looking in, it seems that death happened quite a long time ago. I'm not sure if Buckley v. Valeo was as big a turning point as some make out, or if it was really that different before that, but certainly modern US political decision-making seems quite disconnected from constituent concerns.
[+] [-] qubex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlysl|8 years ago|reply
I haven't finished reading it yet, never mind digesting it, but it is fascinating and though-provoking. The following paragraph should wet your appetite:
In Moscow’s view, history is back and nothing is inevitable, least of all liberal democracy. Others, in Beijing, Ankara, Cairo, Caracas, and even Budapest, share Russia’s hostility to Western notions of progress, as do growing numbers of apostates in the West. Are they wrong?
This book is my attempt to answer that question. Let me declare now that nothing is pre-ordained. To a person whose life has coincided with the rise of democracy, the spread of market economics and signs that the world had finally subscribed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (even if much of it is paid only in lip service – hypocrisy, as they say, being the compliment vice pays to virtue), merely to pose the question is troubling enough. Wasn’t that debate settled a long time ago? Isn’t the march of human freedom unstoppable? Doesn’t the whole world crave to be Western? We can no longer have any confidence in that. It was remarkably arrogant to believe the rest of the world would passively adopt our script. Those who still believe in the inevitable triumph of the Western model might ask themselves whether it is faith, rather than facts, that fuels their worldview. We must cast a sceptical eye on what we have learned never to question.
[+] [-] ForHackernews|8 years ago|reply
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihad-hyperpanda/
> The truth about the clash of civilizations you hear people discussing is that it’s all the other way: The Mall is invading Islam, the Mall is taking over. There isn't any Sharia Law in North Carolina, but there damn well are US-style malls in even the most conservative Islamic countries.
> In Najran, in the most remote corner of Saudi Arabia, a state so afraid of Western contamination that it doesn’t even issue tourist visas, there is a mall. And, when I lived there, you could watch —literally watch—the conflict between Sharia Law and Mall culture, five times a day.
[+] [-] Protostome|8 years ago|reply
Now, it seems like dictatorships is on the verge of getting the upper hand. In democracies, there are limitations on data accumulation (privacy laws) and data is distributed across government entities in a way that is (sometimes even intentionally) hard to consolidate. In dictatorships, data for all entities could be concentrated in one location, granting the government a lot of power if it will use the data to its full extent. China is a great such example, they are working towards this goal as we speak, by putting cameras everywhere, monitoring all Internet traffic, and more...
[+] [-] jopsen|8 years ago|reply
In reality the world has probably never been more democratic than it is today. The current political trends might flip in a few years. Things might be moving backwards, but the US might still have stronger oversight of it's intelligence agencies than it did in the 70'ties?
As long as people aren't silently outraged we'll be okay :)
[+] [-] dictum|8 years ago|reply
Even if he's joking about the US giving that a shot, he's pandering to a newly-anointed "president for life".
https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/968953652483379202
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/04/donald-trump...
[+] [-] probably_wrong|8 years ago|reply
I imagine there must be at least one political sciences/philosophy student somewhere who gave this a thought, but I never found anything.
[+] [-] verbify|8 years ago|reply
Unlike democracy, it doesn't suffer from the fact that the corrupt or power hungry rise to the top. Lobbyists would have less power.
There are also some suggestions that a random sampling of a population will lead to a better selection mechanism - similar to suggestions that promoting randomly would be better for organisations.https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/education...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
[+] [-] wtfstatists|8 years ago|reply
https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
https://www.seasteading.org/floating-islands-project-in-fren...
[+] [-] AJRF|8 years ago|reply
Not saying that’s a good alternative to democracy, but it sure is interesting
[+] [-] singularity2001|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwtel|8 years ago|reply
http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html
it would probably not work because of Goodhart's law, and be generally rejected for being too weird. something for vulkans to try out, maybe.
[+] [-] Mononokay|8 years ago|reply
Really though, in government it died with Athens.
[+] [-] mdekkers|8 years ago|reply
As a species, we are ruled by special interest groups, greed, and lust for power. This has always been the case, and will remain to case for a long time to come. The only difference is that the ruling classes have learned that the best way to stave off violent revolution is to provide the masses with some creature comforts and the vision of "working hard (for them) to make more money (controlled by them) so you can buy more stuff (sold by them)". We live in a post-scarcity environment that is artificially kept under the thumb. The real problems we face - such as a rapidly approaching fresh water shortage, environmental calamity, and a rapidly changing production environment (robots and AI will eat the jobs) - are being ignored in preference to ever increasing profits.
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|8 years ago|reply
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonlovett/status/8899319641442467...
[+] [-] checker659|8 years ago|reply
Reminds me of Animal Farm
[+] [-] adamrezich|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YouAreGreat|8 years ago|reply
However, democracy is already reasserting itself, as governments and capital learn how to shape consensus formation on the internet.
[+] [-] mrwnmonm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|8 years ago|reply
- We like to think that we keep our representatives accountable through transparency. Now we can no longer claim the information is too hard to get. Now tell me how often your rep voted in a way that suited your preference. Or tell me how many times he voted at all. Or tell me his name.
- Your representatives represent you on everything. Even things they didn't talk about in the election. And those things might actually matter to you.
- The space of politics has gotten huge. In the early days of democracy the state did not reach into every walk of life. Now of course there are political ideas about the size of government, but you can't deny the scope of it has massively increased. We're asking a lot of ordinary people to decide on things that they aren't experts on, that don't affect them because they are removed from that particular part of life.
- If you live in a country with multiple parties in parliament, your reps need to horse-trade issues they like for things they don't care so much about. Often this leads to them not being able to deliver on their program, with the excuse permanently being that they aren't a majority.
- Politics has become a career in most countries I follow. Especially in the European countries, it's almost like athletics: you have to have joined a party from a young age. Who makes it and who doesn't depends not on experience in the rest of society, but position within the party hierarchy. An old boy from my school was a UK MP, but he never made it to the front bench because he'd spent his whole working life doing an actual job in industry (rather than a job in media, which is a job in politics).
- Politics/career 2: once you're invested in a political career, the option to do a real life job is both closed and unappealing. There's some ordinary exits/sabbaticals: you get sent to Europe where you can hide from the media and spend lots of taxpayer's money without even showing up to work (they cheat and send their entry passes for one guy to scan), or you can work for a pseudo-government organisation like an NGO. But mainly you really, really want to just stay in your current position. Especially if you're a minister and you collect a lifetime pension after some threshold.
- Messiah Politics: If we elect Obama, a smart, educated guy who is a great speaker, everything will be better. He's so smart he'll know what to do about every issue. I don't have to do anything, he'll take care of it. And lets make the whole election campaign into a heartwarming movie.
- Organized interests: they're organized, and they know how to influence career politicians. Corporations that want to sell guns/butter, pollute the environment, and cheat the consumer. Trade unions who want unreasonable concessions. And so on. What can we do about this? And organized, specific interest group can win stuff because that interest is weighed against the diffuse interests of all other interests. To start with, we should probably make it completely clear who is doing the talking. Where is money coming from, and who have our reps been meeting with? I think the state of transparency varies a fair bit across countries, but I've never seen anywhere where it's completely clear and easy to discover this kind of information.
- Media culture: everything is sensational. Force the guy to say yes or no. Flip side of that, never say yes or no, just explain your position in a long winded way. Or talk around the question. Everything is myopic, there is no holistic impression, despite what I said about your rep being your rep on everything. Constant crisis: is this the issue that forces rep X to resign? Nothing is ever said that puts things into perspective, like the history of some topic (minimum wage, marijuana, gambling, everything...).
Potential improvements:
- Term limits. Ideas about how to govern, like liberalism or socialism don't die. But there's no reason a single person would have to stay in power to explain such ideas.
- Pay people what they made before. You don't discourage high earners from serving, and you don't encourage people for whom parliament is a huge salary increase.
- Complete transparency. Rep X will meet these people on these days. They represent XYZ organization, which is funded in these amounts by these people. Have an independent body review this, like the doping agency in sports.
[+] [-] SubiculumCode|8 years ago|reply
Democracy needs:
Democracy needs smaller states and districts. Citizens per representative as a ratio is higher than ever, and we lose representation responsive to local concerns.
Media now focuses on national politics. State and local politics suffer because of it.
Increased State/Decreased Federal power provides a way for ideological divisions to be resolved at the local level , and thus lose potency as political red meat.
Move to a weekly news cycle so policy can be worked out and digested before being reported.
Foreign state powers ( especially geopolitical advesaries) should have very limited access to manipulate hearts and minds of citizens.
Mass microtargetting of citizens with personalized propoganda tailored to their personality and weaknesses should not be permitted or heavily regulated.
[+] [-] sdfkljs|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anovikov|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panic|8 years ago|reply
If democracy is failing, it's because this feedback loop is broken: people don't understand how their government works, or they don't feel able to make any meaningful change. It's not the people in poverty you should be blaming. In the last presidential election, for example, people at the lowest income level swung more toward Clinton than the average voter (https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/polls/us-elections/how-group...)
[+] [-] nosuchthing|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
[+] [-] mdekkers|8 years ago|reply
Can you back that statement up with data?
[+] [-] lgregg|8 years ago|reply