Alereon,
As it should not be and never should have been.
I have no objection in principle to having those who are currently called “representatives” acting as executive officers in governing, but they should be fully accountable to real representatives of the people.
I believe that the people should have as their representatives 5 men and 5 women chosen at random from those who voted at the most recent election.
A different jury being selected at 2-3 week intervals during the year, or every time new legislation is being considered, for example.
That the jury should have the right to fire a congress critter or high government official for unsatisfactory performance or abuse of power.
The jury to have the sole right to approve all legislation, section by section, clause by clause. The elected one being merely a transmitter of a particular jury’s wishes, or an “agent” not a “representative”.
(It should be unconstitutional for any item of legislation to be longer than, say, 4000 words, incidentally).
Ah, but the jurors have no expertise in government, I hear you say.
I agree.
Before attending for jury duty, a government tutor shoud give a short course to explain the system of government to the jurors. About 15 minutes should suffice.
I have worked in government most of my life. I assure you, it is not difficult to understand how it functions.
The people elect them, so how are they not the “real” representatives of the people?
This might help, and it might also get you a lot of complete idiots having a direct effect on the government. Restricting it to the voting public does kinda make it selective, but still, a lot of the voters are not competent to have a vote, much less a direct say in their governing.
We do have that right, it’s called a recall.
Oh yes, let’s make all our legislation simple enough that the billionaires can drive their yachts through the loopholes!
I see you have much more faith in the average person than I do. The thought of actual voters having direct control over the country is terrifying. We’d get wildly different, morality-based codes in each jurisdiction. Every time someone said “There oughtta be a law!” there would be.
The American system of government is based primarily off of being so slow that the group in power can’t significantly screw up the country before the next party has time to fix it. It’s a delicate balancing act between efficiency and meeting the people’s wants, and buffering the nation from the stupidity and just plain malevolence of many.
I don’t think that’s “as it should be”, although as Franklin said (cited in the OP) it’s the best we’ve implemented.
There is plenty of room for improvement (and increased equality, democracy, would be an improvement) over “which of these two idiots do you want to make all your decisions for you for the next x years?”
We could, for example, gradually move to a system in which our elected Senators and Represenatives present issues, debate them, argue in favor or against, counter-propose, and then call for a vote on the bill, and then the citizens cast their votes on the measure from their home terminals.
Our democratic government is not designed to let every person add their 2 cents to how the country is run. It is designed so that if the president screws up enough, there is an established mechanism for removing him from power without sending the country into a civil war.
As for having the people decide issues, I’ll quote Superintendent Chalmers from the Simpsons - “who do you want to ask first? The man in the bee suit or the guy with a bone through his nose?”
“My opinions are as valid as the next man’s”, says Sideshow Mel. So… if not people, then who? Is there somehow a subset of the population that are fit to rule the rest?
My first debate topic in college went something like this:
“RESOLVED: The electoral college is detrimental to democracy.”
Sounds like an affirmative-biased topic, doesn’t it? Don’t kid yourself. I could define democracy fifteen different ways to Sunday.
The biggest problem with “democracy” – def one – is the Tyrrany of the Majority. There are no “true” political democracies that I know of. That’s actually a good thing.
Yeah I hate it when people are allowed to rule themselves. They’re all idiots. I should rule them, because I am not an idiot. If they don’t see that, well, more proof that they’re idiots and we can’t trust them to run the country.
To paraphrase the US army: I’ll be a democracy of one!
… And after a reasonable period of time, I will be obligated to ask them: “Did you like my performance?”
And if they don’t like what they see, they’ll throw me off the throne, and no army will be there to protect me. Every idiot, every single one of them, will be able to judge me.
I think you forgot this part of the story. It’s the most important one.
If we had the average Joe to start casting votes for every measure that comes before Congress, I’d probably have reason to wince at the first batch of outcomes.
Why? Because the average Joe hasn’t arrived at an informed opinion because his opinion doesn’t count for much. But once it did, I’d anticipate a long steady rise in Joe’s political literacy.
Meanwhile, our politicians vote as they do for sufficiently silly and egregious reasons (to contribute to the crafting of an overall image in hopes of getting reelected or elected to a higher position; to appease wealthy contributors and lure more contributions from them; to go along with whatever the party leadership wants; to serve themselves as individuals w/o reference to representing any constituency) that I doubt the average Joe would have to attain a whole hell of a lot of additional political literacy before the situation would constitute an improvement over the current situation.
That’s some unbelievably facile analysis to what I wrote, if you addressed that to me.
It’s how quickly you let the people govern themselves. In a true democracy we would all vote on whether or not to push the buttons in the presidential football. We’d vote on all legislation. We’d vote on everything. We would have little time to do anything else.
We have a representative democracy to keep the masses down? That’s ridiculous. It’s to keep the masses on their jobs and not running to quorum calls.
In history there are many cases of good government which was not democratically elected.
But nobody can govern against the wish of the majority, no matter what. Governments always have the support of the majority. What differentiates them is how they respect the minorities who disagree with them.
Countries who are better governed are not necessarily better governed because the people participate more but because they have better leaders. people elect leaders, they do not vote on every little policy detail. Great leaders have led the people to great feats which were not necessarily where the people wanted to go. The enacting of civil rights legislation in the USA is a good example. It was legislation which had great opposition in great segments of the population but was passed due to the leadership of great leaders. Great leaders lead, they do not follow, the people. Great leaders can lead a people to glory or to disaster.
Well, considering that everyone is someone else’s “idiot”, that’s hard to say.
I guess the ideal ruler would have a combination of identifying with the needs of his constituents while having the wisdom and leadership to guide them.
Not you specifically, no. Of course I was hyperbolizing.
This sounds more reasonable to me.
We have a representative democracy to keep the masses down? That’s ridiculous.
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Tell that to the people here who feel that a man isn’t good enough to decide what is good for himself.
On the electoral college thing (PURELY hypothetically I will use 2000 as an example, don’t want to debate that specific election really).
If there were substantial changes made to the electoral college they could run the gamut from a pure popular vote to some middle ground between there and what we have now. For example, one could split the state’s EC votes – ending the winner-take-all system within each state.
Some of the problems with getting rid of the EC – just your basic law of unintended consequences analysis. I could spin this around and attack the EC, but everyone already knows those arguments.
Fraud. Each popular vote would be in play always. The EC allows a great deal of fraud to have no effect. In NY, let’s say, the Republicans had managed to create 80,000 votes for Bush out of nowhere. I’m not sure that would have swung the state election. If it would have, whoops, bad example.
OTOH, that’s about 1/6 of the total gap in the popular vote I think. Hence, the incentive to commit fraud will be omnipresent and all fraud will be successful in affecting the outcome.
The net effect of all this fraud is chaos in every election. In 2000 – just for example – there would have been recounts in all 50 states. With such a tight margin in the popular vote it would have behooved Bush to recount every state.
Then, of course, the incentive to commit fraud during each recount would be even greater.
WITH the EC, there is no guarantee that voter fraud will even affect the outcome of your particular state (winner-take-all).
Participatory and true representative democracy would be hurt. The “red states” or “flyover country” would be ignored even more than it already is. Pure popular vote favors tight concentrations of humans, but ignores the needs of the rest of the country.
The EC guarantees a result before inauguration day. 2000 is the closest we’ve come to having a game show moment. To wit, the CJ of the SC gets up and announces, “I’m sure you’re all here wondering who gets to put their hand on this bible.” commercial break
And I used to think you were a highly intelligent contributor and debater! (Perhaps you still are, but certainly not in this instance!)
What I quite clearly said, oh apparently disingenuous and/or comprehension-challenged one, is that PURIST democracy – in which EVERYTHING is decided and controlled by the majority, even including the power to arbitrarily deny minimal basic human rights and even LIFE to any minority or member of any minority – would be a nightmare to live under!! Yet you deliberately ignored the clear and vitally important qualifiers I used to set the context for my post, and instead you quite absurdly over-reacted as if I was talking about our own much more fair and rational form of constitutional democracy – a democracy in which the majority fortunately does NOT have such power!
Did I miss something? Please inform us of the purist democratic election in which the choice to vote for or against arbitrarily killing all African-Americans was on the ballot.
Thanks so much for stating the very, very obvious. I think you’d make a fine grade-school civics teacher.
But if you had bothered to actually read my post with any care before attacking me and pontificating so arrogantly based on your flawed interpretation of what I’d written, you would have learned that I was talking about the nightmare of purist democracy in which the majority rules absolutely over EVERY issue and no minority has any rights at all that cannot be denied by the majority, however capriciously.
Sigh…
Again, if you had bothered to actually read my post with any care at all, you’d have understood from the context that when I referred to the dangers of granting too much power by allowing the populace the vote on too many issues, I was obviously referring (again, given the context) to the nightmare of a purist democracy in which the majority is granted the power (too much power) to control (too many) things, such as whether or not a law-abiding citizen of a racial or other minority should be allowed to vote or speak or even live!
Now, erislover, are you going to admit that you read my post too hastily and wrote your replies based upon a misunderstanding of it, or are you going to continue to insist – quite staggeringly falsely – that my post supported denying voting rights already held here in the U.S.?
Since when we were talking about minorities proper? I assumed, since the context was “democracy” and “voting therein” the minorities in quesiton would be voting minorities, ie, minority opinions, not minority ethnicities.
But if the topic is ethnic minorities, I will appeal to the civil war and the years of Jim Crow laws for all the proof the enlightened republic can offer. A democratic republic still has the same perils of direct democracy in these terms, only that people actually have less say over their own affairs.
For example, the issue of minority representation is clearly a concern for you. Am I to believe it is only a concern because we live in a republic, or should I grant you what I grant most people, a constancy of opinion and belief, such that even in a direct democracy you would vote according to the same standards?
I am sorry your imagination or grasp of history is not up to the task. The majority might as well be in favor of minority representation, especially since, as I thought we were discussing, everyone hold minority opinions and wish them to be heard. The same mechanisms that enable us to elect representatives on a platform of supporting minority opinions are present in a direct democracy.
Both. By creating representation over direct action you clearly limit the scope and power of my vote, whether you can fathom that possibility or not. And I hope I illustrated my misinterpretation above, but if it wasn’t clear, I didn’t think we’d taken the conversation to discussing ethnicities.
To claim that all fraud will affect the outcome of a popular vote is to miss the point of one, that being to identify the most popular candidate. While no fraud is unimportant changing a vote here or a thousand there doesn’t become a major problem so long as the popular candidate still wins. The problem with the EC is that in dividing the polity up into different electoral districts ( states ) it creates cracks for the defrauders to operate in. A little fudging in the right place can go a long way. It can turn the entire electoral vote of a key state from one candidate to another. In a popular vote a fraudulent vote only contaminates that single ballot. Enough fraudulent ballots can add up to a fraudulent election but none can ever be multiplied by being stuffed in just the right ballot box.
A nationwide votecount doesn’t have to devolve into chaos. The French can do it. So can the Mexicans. There are people in those nations interested in seeing their candidates win yet they manage to hold sucessful elections. We could too if it were important enough to us. We have the resources to count and recount every vote as many times as need be. The question is never: Can we? It has always been: Why aren’t we?
** Do you really believe that giving every citizen an equal vote would make the government less participatory or representative? The EC is a vote of states. A popular vote is a vote of people. Identifying which is more democratic is a child’s exercise.
Though the claim is often made, in all the EC debates I’ve followed I have never seen anyone able to demonstrate that the middle of the USA is ignored politically let alone that a popular vote would excaberate this supposed problem. You are welcome to attempt to be the first.
It should go without saying that what a popular vote favors is a popular candidate. Population density matters not in the vote. Whether you live within a mile of only 10 people or ten thousand every vote is equal.
No, it doesn’t. There are very few guarantees in life. There is no guarantee that the EC will produce a majority or hell, even that a quorum of Congress will show up before inauguration day to count the EC votes. The EC usually produces a winner. We don’t know how often it produces the right winner, that is: the most popular candidate.
Robert Heinlein said, “Democracy is doomed the day the citizens learn they can vote their own bread and circuses.”
There is a dangerous trend for modern democracy - as more and more of the tax burden gets carried by a wealthy minority, you wind up in a situation where the majority can vote for benefits which they do not have to pay for. This disconnect can have grave consequences.
However, I don’t buy the argument that the public is ‘stupid’. I think that argument is arrogant and elitist. It’s also flat-out wrong. In the aggregate, the public tends to make rational decisions. The problem is that ‘rational’ and ‘right’ are not synonymous. If you can vote for a tax cut, and the cheque won’t come due until you’re dead, it might be ‘rational’ to make that choice. If you can vote for free day care for your children, and the tax to pay for it will come from someone else, that also might be a rational choice. That doesn’t mean they are moral choices, or economically sound choices from a macro perspective.
Arrow’s paradox says that if you have more than three options (presidents, policies or whatever), there is no way to decide them based on a vote from each person, meeting certain basic criteria (EG. If everyone prefers A to B, B doesn’t get elected.)
Sucks, don’t it? Still, don’t tell anyone, it’s working just about ok for the moment.
It’s no secret that life will never be perfect.
Yeah that sucks but it doesn’t mean we stop working to make it better.
I’ve seen the facile Heinlein quote many times without ever seeing anyone sucessfully apply it to the American experience or any other for that matter. Where are the historical examples?