What do you think about our current democracy?

Question

1. Worthless mob rule controlled opposition 2. Communism 3. Socialism 4. Democratic socialism 5. Genuine democracy 6. Capitalist democracy 6. Democratic Republic Hw can we make it better

sawno · Accepted Answer

I am very curious what your definition of 5 is.
Current democracy in my country is a working system mostly, but there is one flaw that needs to be fixed and thats such a severe flaw that I don't think it can be fixed and causes all other issues. Other "democracys" are worse off.

This flaw is consistent with every so called democracy in the world and its the fact that there are not enough people voting on the issues. There are a fixed number of seats and the number of seats is to small. So what happens is that wealthy / powerful entities can buy off the politicians trough lobbying efforts and then you end up getting rule that doesn't benefit the people at all. I call them democratically elected dictatorships because we vote on our dictators and then are being dictated to often not along the promised lines.

So what's the fix? Direct democracy. But I already know what the critics are going to say, direct democracy is just majority rule, it will lead to a disaster. People aren't smart enough to vote, etc. This is exactly why I say that the current system is mostly functional, we just need to bring it to a country wide scale with the right safeguards in place. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to fix it, so here's the ready made solution.

First of all we keep the current system around, we don't need to replace it or really mess with anything, all we need is direct democracy on top of it in case the regular system doesn't do what we want it to do. In this direct form of voting we ban any outcome that doesn't apply to everyone with anti discriminatory measures so that people are forced to vote on solutions for society as a whole and not things like "All black people must do X, only the immigrants must Y, etc".

Up next you introduce staged polling where each stage is increasingly easy to participate in. Anyone is allowed to participate in each stage, we just make you work for it. Here's the stages.
0. Enough votes are gathered that indicate something as an issue that needs to be dealt with trough this direct democratic system. You only petition in favor of it needing to be changed, you don't get to vote for a solution at all. That way the only thing that matters is if enough people want the current situation to change.

1. At a few places in the country a convention is held, the barrier of entry here is travel effort and time required. You spend all day or maybe even multiple days submitting your preferred solution, debating the solutions, etc. Solutions that end up being the same solution can be combined. The group's vote will count to the solution they proposed or they get a first say on which solution needs to be voted for if they got convinced if another one is better. Everything here is public and documented, no anonymous voting. The solution "Everything must stay as it is" is automatically added as well, so that at any stage people can vote in favor of the current situation in case only bad solutions were proposed.

2. All solutions get classified in subgroups based on how similar they are to each other. That prevents flooding one specific solution with multiple variations and gaming the system. People can now travel to more locations in the country to vote on their preferred solution, this is not anonymous and you get to speak openly why you think this solution is the best. You also comment on the solutions you think are not good.

3. All the commentary is analyzed, published and indexed so now the wider population can read all the arguments for and against so they can make an informed decision on what to vote for. Because everyone in phase 2 got to comment from their own views you now have an unbiased list of arguments for and against and can make your own minds up which arguments you find believable and what risk you wish to take. In this stage its the usual polling location near you, but it won't be a combined vote you have to travel a short distance to actually vote. This weeds out all the people who have no clue about the subject, they can't be bothered to vote. Only if they care about the issue will they take a few minutes of their day to vote on what they want. Your vote is not made public, but registered with a unique anonymous passcode that allows you to change your vote in the later stages should you want to if you don't vote in the later stages your existing vote will carry over.

4. If there is an overt winner this is now the solution that gets implemented in society. However its probable there wasn't a clear victory. In this stage we pick the most popular solution of the two most popular categories. If one category had more than 50% of the vote we pick the two most popular solutions from the winning category. Everyones earlier vote counts towards the solution / category they previously voted for, and if you voted for something different than the top 2 your vote is discarded. Everyone can now go to the same polling place to change their vote, or cast a new vote if it got discarded.

5. We now have a majority solution that 50% of the country supports and it gets implemented.

Couple of additional remarks:
1. It should never be a combined vote in any case for anything.
2. We should never encourage people to vote because this encourages uninformed people to vote, voting should happen because your passionate about change.
3. There should always be minimal effort required to vote such as minimal travel, it should never be totally effortless as a barrier to keep unmotivated voters out and prevent ballot harvesting.
4. Minimal effort also means you can give someone your voting pass with your signature to vote in person on your behalf (We have this in the netherlands, they have a limit on 3 votes per person to prevent fraud and your only allowed to do this if you also have your own voting pass).

RebelinSteel · Accepted Answer

If you live in a country where you are freely able criticise your government and elected officials, where being gay, bisexual does not result in death or a prison sentence or open discrimination, where you have open and free elections, where elected officials can and do lose their jobs for breaking rules, where women can vote, where women can be elected officials, can even leading the elected party, where upto a point you can peacefully demonstrate against the government without fear of being arrested. Well then yeah it’s fine.

now,, imagine countries that do not allow criticism of the government or nations leaders, where being gay, bisexual does result in death, imprisonment, does prevent you being able to get work if openly gay, where women have no or greatly reduced freedoms, where women must obey rules that are not applied to men, where you cannot demonstrate or if you do, you might be arrested for no reason other than demonstrating or your family gets a visit in the early hours.

Now what type of country would you prefer living in, when people criticise western democracies, they often fail to look at the other side of the fence, while not perfect, they are a huge level better than what other people have to put up with.

When we freely criticise our respective democratic governments, we have that freedom to do it. Only arseholes from non democratic countries that now live in democratic critisise them lol.

Skinhead-1979 · Answer

I've copy/ paste this a lot lately from Wikipedia... so here I go again Oligarchy is a conceptual form of power structure in which power rests with a small number of people. These people may or may not be distinguished by one or several characteristics, such as nobility, fame, wealth, education, or corporate, religious, political, or military control. Throughout history, power structures considered to be oligarchies have often been viewed as coercive, relying on public obedience or oppression to exist. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as meaning rule by the rich, contrasting it with aristocracy, arguing that oligarchy was the perverted form of aristocracy 
 
 
 
 
 
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

_piotr · Answer

Democracy is a system in which two drunken boors have more to say about state than a professor of university. Democracy is only good when people have values. Otherwise it is better to have monarchy. King/Queen can be good or bad, but democracy is mostly corrupt and stupid.

Anonymous · Answer

The first problem is the United States is a federal republic, not a democracy. The word democracy doesn't appear even one time in either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. But the uneducated masses have been duped into believing we're a democracy, and that we have a say in everything. We don't. We are subject to our rulers, and what they decide, which is not at all what the people want.

Serkee · Answer

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

noohair · Answer

As fucked up as it is it is still the best game in town.

dudegreat91 · Answer

In my country its rigged Democracy/autocracy with a US installed puppet regime

smurfwrangler · Answer

ineffective at governing a decaying country

Dargil · Answer

It is in great danger by AI.

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