[mmoustafa]

We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).

I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.

[astroflection]

Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.

[swarnie]

Impossible, we must interpret the intentions of some blokes who died 220 years ago and try to assume what they would have wanted.

Its the only way.

[Towaway69]

It’s a blockchain moment - finally a use case ;) /s

[smileysteve]

It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.

Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.

Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.

[lazide]

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

[wing-_-nuts]

Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.

[sershe]

Federalist papers were very explicitly against direct democracy, so... Not much?

[Aperocky]

Could it actually be worse?

[cheschire]

I absolutely think so. Can you imagine if voting was influenced directly by whatever memes were on Tiktok?

[Razengan]

You could have actual semi-immortal magic users claiming to be the Senate.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy

We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.

The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)

In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.

The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.