The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter. It was a vote of contempt not on the matter. If more referenda were held, the contempt for the lack of democracy would fade away as it's in Switzerland.

Just what we need. More spite votes until the system somehow magically fixes itself.

>The result of Brexit referenda can be attributed to caging away citizens from a democratic decision-making process on the things that matter.

To be fair, the EU is partially responsible for that. Even if the UK had a form of direct democracy, EU rules would still dictate on many issues. Switzerland can only do what it does because it isn't part of the EU.

(Now, if the EU itself had a direct democracy (setting aside the practical issues with that) it would perhaps be different.)

I agree that the EU has contributed to outlawing democracy on several issues and has replaced it with bureaucracy. Like a silly thing where the city can't directly manage parking fees and needs to instantiate an independent profit-seeking business for that.

However, now after Brexit UK now opened itself to profit-seeking international relations which can be worse than EU-dictated bureaucracy.

Many states have referendum style systems, such as California.

Heck, a county voted to split from California. That won't happen though.

And those systems have created some massive problems. Prop 13 is one of the worst laws in the country, but the state is unable to fix it.

Actually, Prop 13 has millions of proponents and polls suggest that most are appear to be fully aware of the consequences.

https://projects.scpr.org/prop-13/history/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+popular+is+prop+13+in+ca...

Obviously if people didn't support it then it would be repealed. That doesn't make it a good law. It is directly responsible for the housing affordability crisis in california. That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else. Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.

> That's good for homeowners so they won't repeal it, but it's very bad for the state and everyone else.

Homeowners are a big part of the state. "everyone else" must be a small minority. If you think it is a big enough part of the population, feel free to bring a prop to repeal prop 13. My bet is that any attempt to repeal it will lose in a landslide based on what happened in 2020[1] when they attempted a partial repeal.

[1] https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_15,_Tax_on_Co...

> Which is the whole point here, direct democracy leads to 51% of the population shafting the other 49%.

Notice that prop 15 lost by 4%... It is not good for the state as a whole, but it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home. So now 48% of the state and everyone that wants to move to california is fucked because 9 million people want their home value to keep increasing.

If 52% of people in alabama wanted to bring back slavery should they do it?

> Notice that prop 15 lost by 4%

And it targeted only commercial and industrial properties, with proceeds going to education and local govt funding. That is, as sympathetic setup as it could be. It didn't touch any residential homes, neither primary nor secondary nor rentals. And it still lost.

> it is good for the 52% of the voters that own a home

It seems you didn't read what prop 15 was about. If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.

Prop 15 failed because people were worried that if it passed prop 13 would be repealed next election. It had nothing to do with people wanting commercial properties to have tax breaks and everything to do with signaling how devoted the voters are to prop 13.

> If it included homes, the vote against it would have been much higher than 52%.

Source?

No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13 it's still the wrong policy in the exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is. Laws that exist solely to siphon money from poor people to rich people are bad. Doubly so when they destroy economic value to the extent prop 13 does.

> Source?

https://www.ppic.org/blog/who-likes-proposition-13/ (at least until 2014, ~65% Californians think prop 13 is a good thing, similar to original support levels in 1978).

> No matter though. Even if 70% of voters support prop 13

Moving goalposts now? Upthread, you were talking about 51% shafting 49% and that was a pure hyperbole which I called out. Prop 13 support is much more massive (more like 63-27 per my citation above).

> exact same way 70% support for enslaving minorities is

Nope. Enslaving someone is forbidden under the US constitution and personal freedom is recognized as a basic right, backed by the full force of the state. Prop 13 merely affects prices in some small areas of a giant state and there is no constitutional right to "own a home in the most expensive area of the country".

Again, comparing that to slavery is another hyperbole meant to evoke emotions?

> comparing that to slavery is another hyperbole meant to evoke emotions?

I really don't think it is. Prop 13 turns non homeowners into wage slaves. It makes housing prohibitively expensive. It is a deeply unjust law. I'm not trying to make some case about the legality of forcing non homeowners to pay exorbitant amounts for housing, I'm saying it's morally and in many ways economically comparable to slavery, or at least serfdom.

I don't really think I ever moved the goalposts. My take was always that direct democracy leads to the majority shafting the minority and that's exactly what prop 13 does. It doesn't matter that the majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority, it's a bad law for the state because it destroys economic value and is obviously unjust.

> I really don't think it is. Prop 13 turns non homeowners into wage slaves...It makes housing prohibitively expensive.

Barring a few pockets, housing is cheap even in California. Now, if your claim is that everyone who wants to should be able to afford a home in SF or Palo Alto, then that is something else.

> majority supports enriching themselves by taking money from the minority

How is majority taking money from minority in this case?

Democrats regularly win the popular vote so we would have avoided trump and bush at least

You can't judge the outcome of elections by standards under which they were not held. Popular-vote-wins would result in very different campaign efforts, and different voting patterns.

It's like holding a baseball game and then, after the fact, declaring that the winner isn't the team with the most runs, but the one that got the most hits. Sure there's some correlation there, but both teams would have played differently if they'd known that's how they'd be judged, so you can't be sure who would have won if they'd known that's how they were supposed to be playing.

I think Brexit can also be seen as an argument for more direct democracy: if there had been a referendum in the UK on one or more of the major changes in the EU treaties in the previous 25 years, I think it's likely that Brexit wouldn't have happened, or else that it would have happened much earlier with less damage as a result.

Brexit wasn't based on actual harm caused by EU treaties. It was caused by bigotry, fear over economic issues being very deliberately misdirected due to propaganda, and a host of outright lies on the part of the Leave campaign.

I see you're getting downvoted, but as an American who followed the whole mess remotely, that sounds about right to me. The only thing I'd add was that I think it started as intra-party infighting and political dramatics that got wildly out of control.

Speaking as a Californian, where our ballot is always filled with propositions [1] [2], I can confidently say this is a bad idea. I think it works tolerably well for issues that are something an average citizen can understand with a little research, but otherwise just ends up as dueling propaganda campaigns.

For example, this year San Francisco voted to decide whether one of the major streets through Golden Gate Park should remain mostly car free after we tried that for the pandemic. That seems like a fine use. But there was a state prop titled "REQUIRES ON-SITE LICENSED MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL AT KIDNEY DIALYSIS CLINICS AND ESTABLISHES OTHER STATE REQUIREMENTS. INITIATIVE STATUTE." This was some sort of high-dollar fight among vested interests fought via sketchy ballot proposition and it absolutely should not have been on the ballot.

(You also can quickly run into tyranny-of-the-majority issues. E.g., famously liberal and tolerant California in 2008 voted to strip an already-existing civil right from a minority. [3])

For complex issues, I think it's better to have the decision-making concentrated in the hands of highly supervised professionals with staffs who have the time to understand the issues enough so that they have a chance of understanding the impacts. Rather than more direct democracy, what I'd like to see is more transparency and accountability for those professionals.

[1] In our most recent election we had 7 state propositions: https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/ballot-measures/qualified-b...

[2] And 15 local ones: https://voterguide.sfelections.org/en/local-ballot-measure-a...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_California_Proposition_8

In the short term:

- rapid action on climate change

- legalized abortion

- universal health care

- right to privacy

- improved internet access

- cleaner water + food

- bank reform

- DACA

- Social Security funding (returning funds stolen by previous congresses)

Heck, we might even go completely nuts and actually finish banning slavery.

Not sure what would happen in year two.

I wish I could have this level of optimism. If US voters actually wanted all of these things, there is absolutely no way that the margins in congress would be as razor thin as they are, gerrymandering or not.

Literally the effect of gerrymandering is that a set of people who share both ideology and party get more voting power.

It's pretty clear that the average Republican in the US has been galvanized into partnership, so the members of that party will very likely vote cohesively with each other.

It's also pretty clear that the same is not happening in the Democratic party. Most Democratic voters I hear from disagree with one another ideologically, and do not feel effectively represented by their party. It is not likely that voters in the Democratic party will vote cohesively with one another.

The effect of that applied to gerrymandering is that districts over-representing republicans take advantage of the average Republican voter cohesion, while districts that over-represent the Democratic party do not.

Voter cohesion is the strongest vector for outcomes I can think of in our first-past-the-post representative voting system.

It's my contention that changing the structure of our voting system or factoring out gerrymandering would have a drastic effect on legislative outcomes.

That would be great, but it assumes that there wouldn't (continue to) be massive voter suppression by the right wing, guaranteeing that their pet issues win in most of the south and midwest.