Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done

• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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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    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s interesting to me. I learned some things from the link about democratic confederalism. But yea, “exhausting” is a pretty good word for it over the long term, I often don’t really engage with it. The whole pattern of “I’m going to tell you what YOU think, and what you said, and why the strawman is all wrong” is pretty difficult to interact with, and requires this incredibly tedious process of endlessly clarifying and repeating what it was that I actually said.

      I have had it happen where after going through that process for some time, someone realizes that we’re actually largely on the same team as far as some big issues, so maybe it is worthwhile. That’s definitely a minority of the times, but it does happen.

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