Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done

• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Tell you what: Tell me more about the other democratic alternatives you say I am missing. I didn’t think that my examples at all presupposed the existence of a parliamentary democracy, but if I know more about your counterexamples, I can better make sense of whether or not I overlooked them.

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  • Prunebutt@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    While I don’t have a perfect plan on democratic governance (sorry, I’m just a small, little boi), these examples came to mind right away:

    • Democratic confederalism
    • Soviet Republic

    What I also want to adress is that the things you’re criticizing in your first comment are structural problems of a liberal democracy. That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up. Members of parliament have a free mandate and are under no direct obligation to enact policies on which they ran in elections. Yes, they can not get elected the next term, but this can also be an incentive to “get away with it” by e.g. manipulating the media landscape, lying, covering your tracks, searching for excuses, etc.

    Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.

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    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      So I think I said “voting,” and you heard “the current system of parliamentary democracy.” I am all for changing the current structure of political establishment in the United States, because the one we’ve got sucks ass. I am simply saying that:

      1. The concept of having individual people tally up their opinions, and formalizing the idea that the sum of those tallies is what we all agree to do, is a good idea.
      2. Refusing to engage at all with the current system of liberal parliamentary democracy (in theory), in the United States, won’t make it go away, and we need a strategic decision about what will best remove it and replace it with something better. We can’t just use a panacea “if we don’t vote then they won’t be able to get away with it.” They will. People not voting is completely fine with them. I definitely don’t think voting is enough, in general but in particular in our current corrupt-to-the-brink-of-disaster implementation of a theoretically voting-based system.

      That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up.

      This, in particular, I agree with a lot. I would actually expand it a little bit further, and say that the nature of power and manipulation in human beings naturally will tend to try to abuse any “system” that is set up for deciding who gets to take charge. I think the history of large-scale human state power is that however good it sounds at the beginning, people who want to abuse it will inevitably be able to figure out how to bend it to their own ends and corrupt it. Which I guess is the whole point behind anarchism+friends wanting to do away with state power at all.

      Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.

      They sure voted the system away in Germany, in 1932. This part of your statement seems to have some very obvious counterexamples. Plenty of places in the world have had a parliamentary system that then went away, and in quite a lot of cases, voting was involved in how that got done. It wasn’t enough. It was involved.

      I think the important questions are firstly, how would we go about changing the parliamentary system in the US? How has it worked when people have tried that in other places in other times? And, when they did try it according to whatever strategies and principles, how did it work out? What happened next?

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      • nomy@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Bravo for spending your time arguing with a pedant, truly more patient than I would’ve been. People like that make lemmy insufferable. They’re just looking to score a point in a debate and will find any angle to do it. Productive discussion isn’t as important as SLAMMING the “opponent” with a gotcha, it’s exhausting.

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  • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    A successful form of democracy is Swiss style direct democracy. They also have a parliament and political parties, but public votes on all kinds of things happen very regular and are binding.

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    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I feel like a necessary prerequisite for that is a public which is well-informed and well-educated enough that they will make good decisions. As it is now, that would be more or less like Twitch Plays Geopolitics with about the same successful results.

      Idk, maybe it would be a good thing in the long run, if people got the controls and fucked everything up every day for a couple of years, and then realized that this is real life and understanding what’s going on and acting on it is a necessary and good thing to do.

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      • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The public has other things to do than read about politics all the time. Most people only care about it, once it affects them. Even today those news junkies and activists who follow politics closely aren’t necessarily knowledgeable or well informed.

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