this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2022
2 points (100.0% liked)
Announcements
23304 readers
3 users here now
Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.
You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't think direct democracy is a good idea, at least not with our current structure. The problem is dumb and easily manipulated people, if you think them voting for representatives that work against their own best interests is bad wait until you see the damage done by voting for actual laws against their best interest. I'll even give an example: prop 22 in California. There are so many other examples but that one is just so clear cut and over the top.
What I think is better is decentralized federated models. The USA was originally a confederation and then federation of States. It's in the name. Thing is, back then states were only expected to be a couple million or less citizens. Now cities are that size. And yet even today there are states with less than 500k citizens.
I think a restructuring based on population and land area (territory) is in order.
It's ok if a small town votes that trans people can't use a certain bathroom, or they vote that some race is not allowed to move in. But when such laws affect large land masses or large populations then there is a problem.
Things like air particulates affect the entire globe, that should be governed at a global level. There are all kinds of things in between.
These bad laws happen with elected representatives too, but worse. At least with direct democracy, laws will not be made which are against the majority's best interest, and laws have a legitimate mandate.
For example it's hard to imagine a direct democracy starting a war of convenience, like representative democracies frequently do and are doing right now. All the most egregious crimes of government would stop.
But the quality of all the little laws is debatable. I would argue it's higher under DD but I can see why some people disagree.
But it's hard to discuss very specific examples, because they are always cherry-picked.
Finally, there are several forms of DD and the Californian style is probably the least beneficial.