In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone, but rather serves as little more than a moral battering ram that the 51% can use to impose their will on the 49%. Perhaps one day people will realize that democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric.
Maybe technology will render nation-states obsolete within my lifetime. I can only hope.
I don't think that they were wrong in this regard. If we look at the demographics of the house of representatives, they do not come close to making a parallel of the demographics of the country. If representatives were selected at random, we'd have 51% women in the house, we'd have people from all economic backgrounds according to the current wealth disparity instead of only the wealthy. We'd need to actually focus our resources on education if we agreed that really anybody can be selected for representation. If the pool of representatives was large enough (larger than we have now, which is a limitation put in place to make party control easier), then random selection should always result in a representative body that is actually representative.
To be fair to American democracy as originally described, supermajorities were required to make big decisions (Constitutional amendments). And power was decentralized between branches of government and layers of government (state and local governments had more authority than the federal government on some matters). This design was amended and eroded over the years. One of the consequences of the movement toward a simple-majority democracy is the 'battering ram' effect you're (justifiably) complaining about.
Or just create new ones …
You say 'democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric'. Does your "quote" rebut itself as you seem to suggest? What is your non-barbaric alternative to democracy?
The literal consent of the governed is necessary for government to be legitimate.
i have been in it also, and it works just fine. i certainly do not like to be in a minority where the majority gets what it wants and the minority is steamrolled.
Imagine Hal doesn't want Bill to build a fence (to make it fun, let's say Hal isn't even going to be impacted by the fence, he just doesn't like Bill).
How does consensus handle this?
Our current system tells Hal to sit down and shut up about what Bill does on his property. If consensus is the norm, Hal has a veto on Bill's fence.
An answer about requiring people to be reasonable in a consensus government is not very satisfying, people aren't reasonable.
our current system does NOT allow Bill to do whatever he wants on his property.
Of course not. My point was that it doesn't give Hal a veto over anything Bill might want to do.
the solution is to make the pie arbitrarily large.
In Denmark, we never have to wait for long. Whenever those in power want to pass something big or important in parliament, they seek a broad support - otherwise, it'll just get repealed whenever they lose power.
Everything certainly isn't perfect here (yes, it can be darn annoying when center parties hold too much power - but then again, it is a stabilizing factor), but healthy mechanics can get you a long way with democracy.
I feel a lot of people in this thread point out cases where democracy doesn't work. That's easy. But maybe it would be better to look for cases where it does work and learn from it.
To take your example of Denmark; Denmark has less population, and half again as much area as Massachusetts. Comparisons between the US as a whole, and individual European countries don't always make the most sense; the more appropriate comparison would be to the EU, to have the same kind of multitudes of disparate people under a common banner.
We have again a situation where 51% crushes the 49%.
Also, in some countries, there are way more than 3 factions (over a dozen in Belgium and the Netherlands), making it less likely that the same subset of parties will find itself in agreement every time.
The effect of having that many factions is that the majority part of parliament will always take the minority opinion into account because they know that, in the next vote, they may be part of that minority.
Of course, that is not a guarantee; I think it is part of a nation's culture. Other countries may value the short-term "let's win this vote" way above the longer term "we have to live in this country together".
That certainly seems the case in the USA, where "in four years time, we might end up with the shorter straw." doesn't seem to play a big role in politics (?anymore?)
Democracy and religion share beds, occasionally, I might even say they were married on upon a time. Barbarism indeed.
Science says that a human being is a collection of genes which are formed at conception; it can't say anything about abortion, murder, capital punishment or self-defense. Those aren't topics on which it is competent: all it can do is inform discussions thereon, by affirming, 'yes, we are talking about a human being in this case, but in this other we are not.'
You simply can't address every issue with an appeal to science.
I honestly think social science is only slightly more scientific than astrology.
But even were it not, science is not capable of answering questions like what one ought to do. Sure, A & B disagree; it's interesting why they do; maybe they're both wrong; maybe they're both partially-correct; but what should be done about it? Science can only say what is, not what ought to be.
You have to make some philosophical assumptions (e.g. utilitarianism) in order to even think that science can provide direction, and even then you will get bogged down in questions like, 'what is the greatest good for the greatest number?'
As an aside to the downvoters: don't downvote if you think I'm wrong; please share how you think science can answer a question like 'ought we execute murderers.'
We can already see a similar thing happening in America with different ethnic groups not getting along well together. I think this will only get worse over time.
Pro Trump and anti Trump camps are really about how a significant number of whites are not getting along with a significant number of Hispanics (and other ethnic groups).
Please stop. I dont want to have disagreement. I dont want to have this endless debate. I want to be left alone. I dont want people to make descision for me. I want to spend my brain cycles in my work. Not this. Please stop.
If I could reach into peoples' heads, there's a solution: "mind your own damn business". If we didn't care so much what other people did, then we wouldn't disagree so much. And in general, I think the world would be a better place if more people did this. But some fraction of issues will always affect multiple people (that's the whole point of government, after all).
And besides, nobody's yet invented a mind-control ray, and it would be pretty icky if they did. (There's a certain irony to altering peoples thoughts so that they care less about what other people think...)
Supermajority voting on all legislation & referenda? After all, 2/3 of the population forcing 1/3 to obey a law is much more reasonable than 51% forcing 49%.
And making amendments take a 3/4 vote is even better: if 75% of people think something is a good idea, then it probably is.
(I think) In democracy, voters are less likely to compromise. This is result of weak discussion between >1m.
But likely technology (as always) will come to rescue before democracy. This is in reference to rise of renunciations, AirBnB etc.
For instance, any decision that will last for generations and impact profoundly in everyone's life, like secession or a "Brexit" should require slightly more votes than a majority one. Unfortunately it's only typically used by parliaments, courts and senates for constitutional change, never for popular vote on issues.
Simple majority has the advantage that it's fair. If you're going to start claiming that decisions that will "profoundly impact everyone" need higher than majority you're just going down the road to totalitarianism. Anyone can claim a decision they think they're on the losing side of is too important to leave to majority decision making. Then it's just about ramping up the threshold until you win.
Secondly, for spectrum decisions (e.g. what tax rate we should have, how much to spend on defense and education, etc) getting as close to 51v49 for the decision is probably the most equitable outcome.
America (and the few other remaining non-proportional systems) suffers from this problem much more than the more advanced democratic systems. If America is all you know, you shouldn't generalize too much.
Objectively, it can be seen that this is completely untrue. No understanding or empathy is strictly required by democracy. Democracy only requires that you obstinately stick to your preferred viewpoints and shout down those who disagree with you. This can be seen in the legislative chambers of nearly every Western-style democracy on the planet. Specifically:
- in Canada, the hallmark of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper's rule was a complete rejection of anything outside his personal ideology, even when his ideology flew directly in the face of fact or public opinion.
- in the US, we are seeing someone who most certainly suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder not only excelling in politics, but may soon come to hold the highest public office and command of the world's most powerful military.
The days of good-old collaboration and working together for the common good back in the 1950s were a short-lived phenomenon created by the shared experience of surviving the deadliest conflict in human history.
Those days are over.
Yes, it's required. Democracy is compromise. The people need to be highly intellectual to make their roles in the society balance between what they want and what society (other people) want them to be. Without understanding of difference, everything breaks down easily. See what happened when us bomb other countries with simply unbelievable execuses. You can see that people having no understanding of outside world basically do not afraid to use violence to make their thinking a reality...
Being "Highly intellectual" is therefore not a requirement to participate in a democracy.
Just look around you, man. There are stupid people everywhere.
If Clinton wins the election in a few days, then at the end of her first term, you're looking at 32 years of only three families in the Whitehouse. If she wins a second term, then that's 36 years - almost two whole generations. It's symptomatic of how little things change at the top.
To be a big gun in US politics, you need so many connections and so much money that only a few people can do it. This election has had a two-year electioneering cycle, a ridiculous expense. The notion that 'anyone can become president' just doesn't pan out in reality.
Several years ago I helped cofound a worker owned for-profit software and design cooperative. Its constitution was formulated around a mix of product incubation and consulting in support of labour solidarity through cultivation of progressively more interesting/motivating/challenging work. It was founded after we had all quit our high-performing and very profitable agency whose non-technical/non-creative ownership cut one too many corners on the sustainable systems that we were working on. Typical anti-flow type management decisions with arbitrary deadlines, death marches, and silly promises to clients despite solid contracts (which I had written and negotiated directly with the clients and our lawyers).
In the new co-op that us engineers and designers from the old company formed, there was growth early on, and a plan to expand to new cities/markets because the cost structure was horizontally scalable by design. This was before boutique remote app studios and incubators became commonplace (at least before all the really big agencies tried to get in on it, e.g. Sid Lee, Ogilvy).
Lo and behold, it turned out there were just barely enough members who wanted to take a more employee/entitlement oriented tack (as opposed to entrepreneurial) vs the other half. These members were of the same local cultural and linguistic background (the socially dominant one), whereas the rest of us were from all over. The locals formed a "cabal" of sorts and pushed for spending lots of money on a swanky office, vetoed horizontal expansion and denied the right to work for one of the members who had just moved to a new city as part of the previous plan (by voting to refuse to allocate some of our mandated work to him).
The original vision fell apart and was replaced by something more parochial. The more "ambitious" cofounders all left and the co-op continues to thrive in its own way today but as a shadow of the dream we had in the beginning.
An autocracy would not have endured these trials so early on. In top-down mode, the boss gets to enforce focus. Certainly not good if the dictator is not benevolent, but the experience provided for a lot of reflection on governance.
Reminds me of this explainer video I saw recently from CGP Grey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs&t=344s
No matter the exact loci of power, there are always gradients between the points, and forces that can bring imbalance are very hard (perhaps undesirable) to control.
But I'd much rather have it than any system of forced social roles, where there is one person or small cabal of people who make the decisions and everyone else knows their job is simply to obey.