Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Has there ever been "too much democracy"?

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Fansy posted:

Whenever I read my "A Kid's Guide to the Constitution" coloring book and the author points out that the founding fathers didn't want a pure democracy because they feared people would execute a 51% attack on freedom, I become honestly curious. When and where did these pure democracies fail so miserably? Was this a known problem with democracy at the time?

"All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government." - Alexander Hamilton

Most of these guys were aristocrats or wannabe aristocrats. Some of them were very forward thinking for the time but they probably would not have intended the system we have now. Considering that the evolution of the system we have now is better than what they wrote down officially, I'd say on this one, who cares what they'd think; we must do the best we can, not live under the strict command of ancient dead men. (I may be sore from all the people who echo Plato's ancient snideness when saying 'thank God we don't live in this form of government that primarily existed in Greek city-states! I have clearly won a debating point by saying this.')

Most of the issues I see with having a lot of democracy are more or less addressed by elements of the national systems already in place - some room for review of laws, protection of minority rights, proportionate representation, etc. I don't think these make a system 'undemocratic' particularly.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2014 18:27

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:13

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This may sound ignorant but when people talk about things like "increasing the accountability of politicians," what does that mean, exactly? Like I see "accountability" used a lot these days and it seems to be one of those generic good things that is never clearly defined, except of course if you're talking about (say) teachers in a school, in which case it is used to put all blame for a complex social outcome on their shoulders.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2014 19:49

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Gantolandon posted:

As an immediate fix, this could include the possibility of removal current parliament/president through referendum and treating lying during electoral campaign as fraud. Politicians shouldn't be benevolent mini-kings, but executors of the public will. I would like to see every political party to have a clear program with tasks to be achieved, sorted according to their priority. They should do everything in their power to propose appropriate reforms and, provided they have a majority, make them pass. They also should oppose initiatives that contradict their program. If the situation in the country radically changes and they find their goal impossible to meet, they should clearly state this and explain to their nation why this is the case (and, possibly, be removed in referendum). Failing to do so should result in legal procedure - and, probably, punishing fines and imprisonment.

Who calls the referendum? How are we defining a "lie" in the sense that leads to fraud? Are petty mistakes of fact acceptable? Where is the line drawn?

How is the public will determined? If a poll determines that X% of a district supports action Y, should a representative from that district be bound to take action Y? Are there different action potentials (i.e. a policy with plurality support, but majority opposition/no opinion)? If these polls are the arbiter, who conducts them, and what is their methodology? Can that methodology be changed, and how?

with regards to political parties and their platforms, what happens if they break build order? Is that fraudulent, or would it be acceptable for them to start with small things, even if their greatest stated priority is a large thing? If they fail to make these things pass, how is that punished?

I mean I share your frustration but a lot of what this seems to be is creating a legal structure to attempt to control the behavior of politicians and political parties in a very specific way. Considering that judges, law enforcement officers, etc. are in significant part creatures of politics (by nature of the power to institute their beliefs if nothing else) this would seem, ultimately, to be less democratic than the present system. It further reduces the power of elected representatives in favor of plebiscites and a greatly empowered criminal justice system.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2014 21:05

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bobtheconqueror posted:

Holding politicians accountable to the public will is why we have elections in the first place, and trying to come up with other ways to make sure politicians are doing what their constituents want on a case by case basis sounds incredibly strange to the point of marginalizing politicians themselves. Why have a dude there, if his only responsibility is to translate public opinion into votes and legislation? Rather than trying to eliminate political judgement from their decision making, I think it's perhaps more important to make sure that politicians are accountable primarily to their constituents, and don't have loyalties to special interests that overshadow that responsibility as they do in the US.

Yeah I think it's sort of telling that like, people don't seem to even think or seriously consider "various known ways in which politicians are bought by special interests are outlawed, with various other adjustments to remove perverse incentives in the system, if necessary by Constitutional amendment." Instead it's like race hatred against politicians (not that a lot of them aren't scumbags, but so are a lot of people in general) which would do nothing to address the underlying causes.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2014 22:47

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Kalman posted:

Mostly because special interests "buy" politicians in ways that you either don't want to or literally can't outlaw.

Remember: to outlaw effective lobbying you literally have to ban politicians from being allowed to talk to people, and particularly to friends and former co-workers.

Well frankly if you're giving me a choice between "the system as it stands" and "a system where the actual ruling power is judges whose appointment method is unclear," the former might actually be preferable, because at least then my vote does SOMETHING.

Anyway, I think corruption cannot be perfectly eliminated. We will always have problems. However, I think you are taking an unwarrantedly extreme view of matters, and essentially saying "the current system is essentially inevitable, and any attempts to avoid it would require brutal fascism."

Personally I would be willing to go for instant runoff voting plus full public financing of elections (I do not believe outlawing campaign contributions represents, in practical terms, a meaningful suppression of free speech), along with stronger anti-bribery or corruption laws, and see where we would go from there. I am sure the money powers would find their ways to start weaseling around those too, but if we plugged up 80% of the holes, that's pretty good.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 17:27

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Kalman posted:

Public financing and anti-bribery laws won't do poo poo to limit the most common forms of influence that still exist, because the most common and best form of influence is your former friend or employee coming to talk to you, and that is constitutionally protected free speech.

Well, like I said, I don't expect it to be perfect - I would hope for it to be better. Do you think that there is no point in taking any reform, if that reform will not completely solve the problem? Because I don't think there will be any perfect resolution. But the perfect can be the enemy of the good, and in this case I think it is being exactly that thing.

# ¿ Aug 11, 2014 23:22

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Nintendo Kid posted:

Attempting to do financing limits was an experiment with reform we tried to do for about 40 years and it ultimately didn't accomplish much of anything.

I must have missed the period where we had a public election financing system a la Britain. When was that? That is what I am talking about. Now you may say "Ah but that will never be permitted by the Powers that Be," and you may be right, but I think this is kind of a tautology then: It's impossible, because it won't be permitted, and even if it was, it wouldn't work, and since it wouldn't work, there's no point in trying, and there's no point in trying because it's impossible.

Since the same can probably be said of everything other than total slavery to Wealth, and we obviously are at least somewhat short of that, I don't think it's the best way to approach the issue.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 00:21

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Nintendo Kid posted:

If you think that's what campaign finance limits means, I don't even know what to say.

Canada's done that though, turns out the parties game the system repeatedly and fairly frequently get caught taking private money anyway. Oh and in both Canada and the UK there's lovely hateful conservative parties in control. poo poo, public financed elections allowed Thatcher's reign and an ongoing orgy of privatization that continues to this day.

Well, when I said "full public financing of elections," that is what I meant. I apologize, I suppose, if that parsed differently.

And, OK: at a certain point the question is shifting to "how are conservative/regressive elements prevented from acquiring political power." This seems a very different question from "is there too much democracy?" I certainly oppose most of these conservative goals, but it seems that any democratic system presents the potential for them to gain power legitimately and keep it, either as long as electoral success continues or possibly permanently.

If you want to combine "a lot of democracy" and "ensuring conservative elements do not gain power," I think that will be an even harder row to hoe.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 00:43

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Oh dear me posted:

We do not have publicly financed elections in Britain. The Tories are largely funded by rich individuals, Labour by the unions.

I thought that you had a situation where if nothing else the television media access was allocated more or less equally, with the only threshold being that the really tiny parties had to actually win a few seats before getting equal time with Labour. Since the primary use of campaign contributions in America other than "naked graft and purchasing influence" is "to purchase advertisements" (primarily on TV, but in other formats too of course) I may well have conflated the two things.

Kalman posted:

That really isn't an important facet of lobbying - as I said, most lobbying is done by talking to people. "Saving someone a job" doesn't actually work in the way you imply unless they're ready to leave anyway, which means that that's the kind of lobbying you can only do once per person. Instead, it's usually the endpoint to a long process of building trust with a person by talking to them, at which point you presumably know them, like them, and know they have connections to other people who like and trust them who you want to influence, so why wouldn't you offer them a job?

Is this why the proposal for avoiding corruption seemed to be "put all politicians on lockdown," so that they can't make friends? This seems terribly strange to me. Obviously there is some of what you say but it would seem as though the main issue is that influence is very easily bought, often for very cheap - it is not that it is surprising that the Republican congressman for Houston is friendly with the oil industry, it is that for a few million dollars every year, the oil industry also gets the entire Republican party.

And like I said, or at least alluded to, the fact that we can't categorically eliminate all possibility for corruption seems like it's being used as an argument for not taking steps to eliminate some, or much corruption. It seems a bit like "well, because bacteria will inevitably evolve resistance, there's actually no point in using antibiotics at all."

Besides which we've introduced a second problem earlier. The goal, it seems, is not just democracy, it is also democracy which only, or at least primarily, gets certain results. I agree with these results (i.e. reactionaries not getting power) but this seems like you might have to pick one or the other.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 18:25

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Kalman posted:

If campaign donations were banned, lobbyist influence would be essentially unchanged. Campaign finance is not how influence is actually exerted. Staff generally neither know nor care very much about whether the person coming to see them is a campaign donor. The way to influence staff (which most of the time is the goal) is to talk to them and have them trust what you're telling them. That's why the whole emphasis on campaign finance has always struck me as misguided and a good way to burn time and energy on something meaningless.

Trying to provide meaningful reform to the actual avenues for influence is harder for the reasons I describe above, but at least you'd be targeting the actual problem instead of making yourself feel good about fixing a meaningless thing.

Okay, so like, what is the proposal here? Total sequestration of congresspeople, like jury members? Random selection from the populace? Do we still have to incorporate mechanisms to prevent conservative parties from acquiring influence? Or is this just that we happen to be at the end of history and the eternal triumph of the moneyed powers? Do we just accept that our rightful masters will always rule us because there is no way to modify these things?

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 20:30

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bobtheconqueror posted:

I kind of get your point, that these things will happen, but I do think the legislature actually trying to, I don't know, police itself, would be a valuable gesture in creating a more legitimate government, and putting layers between legislators and lobbyists would probably help, anyways. Also, forcing clandestine folks to pass loving notes like that is much more publicly shady and more likely to lead to actual scandal. Personally, I don't think public officials in charge of making laws effecting literally millions of people deserve a private life anymore than a soldier in the field deserves to be able to quit whenever they want to. Private dealings on public matters fundamentally undermine effective government.

At a certain point in this system, the actual government will probably be whatever party or parties are charged with the enforcement of the regulations on politicians.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2014 23:05

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asdf32 posted:

How is a foreign doctor supposed to compete with a local one? This doesn't make any sense. There are real differences between a factory worker and a doctor in terms of the ability of foreign workers to compete.

The foreign doctor comes to America and opens a medical practice, that's how.

And yes, the difference is that the doctor has more money and is therefore more valued by the government.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2014 21:58

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asdf32 posted:

So they have money so that's why the have money?

In a very real sense, yes, I would say so. While inherited capital is probably not the primary driver of this, at least on the level of a doctor (who, after all, is still working for a living), a doctor would still need to come from a background which permits them the opportunity to undertake medical training on that level, which probably does involve a fair bit of money.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 01:20

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VitalSigns posted:

Should we just legalize naked bribery then, since laws against bribery don't prevent me from making a perfectly legal campaign donation and making it clear that my future support depends on a vote going my way?

This seems to be the logical conclusion of this train of argument.

I think I should prefer to go to a country where Despotism can be taken pure, unalloyed by Hypocrisy.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 05:43

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computer parts posted:

The point you're missing is that trade policy can be determined by factors outside of that specific nation's political policies.

Yes, in theory everyone can be protectionist. That's not global trade, though, which is the situation we're discussing.

So is global trade some kind of absolute now? Or are you talking about some hypothetical free trade utopia that will never exist? I mean even Nazi Germany, noted for both its autarkic goals and less than friendly diplomatic posture, had to do some swapping for things like rubber and tungsten.

I begin to think that the real power this current system has had, is convincing so many yokels that it's a necessary and automatic evolution of events, rather than something which is in significant part the result of things being decided. You see this in the Silicon Valley stuff too, as if it's inevitable, unstoppable.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 07:09

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computer parts posted:

If you're in a capitalist system and the rest of the world (or at least enough of them) also is in a capitalist system, there's going to be global trade. If you're starting from some other assumption like "what if the US and Europe had a communist revolution" then obviously this model will not hold true*.

You're misreading my posts.

*Though even the Soviets conducted international trade, though it was not as well integrated as modern systems.

Could you elaborate on your point then? And, are you saying that nations engaging in protectionist trade policies are not capitalist? I mean, we had protectionist trade policies in the past. Many other nations usually held to be capitalist or at least capitalist-ish, such as the Asian tigers or England, also had protectionist policies, at least at some points.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 08:21

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I suppose I have two objections to this thesis.

One is political, or if you like, opinion based, and can easily be dismissed on those grounds, but I think it's fair to say anyway. If we say that the current situation is the automatic result of the prevailing conditions, this can easily be read as 'it is inevitable, and therefore there is no reason to change it.'

The other I think is more general, which is the statement that it is somehow the natural and automatic order of things. "There's X now, and Y and Z were contributors to X; therefore, if Y and Z exist, X follows and is inevitable." Or to use another analogy, Hitler's army used motor vehicles and aircraft; therefore, aircraft and motor vehicles will automatically cause world wars.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2014 19:40

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computer parts posted:

Because the most developed nations in the 19th century were themselves still developing.

Is there a particular point at which you would say a nation has become "developed," then? Arguably America is still "developing," albeit towards what, it is difficult to say. What is the metric?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 03:03

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rudatron posted:

This thread is in a transitional state, it is developing into a better one.

What happens when we hit the point of diminishing returns for improved posting though? Will that be... The End of (posting) History?

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 04:22

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Helsing posted:

I don't think you've actually addressed the underlying argument here. If we're better off opening up international competition in the manufacturing sector then why are we simultaneously making it harder to globalize professional services like medicine?

Keep in mind that American doctors make substantially more than doctors in other first world countries (i.e. Europe or Canada). Doctor's wages tend to be high but they aren't automatically as high as they are in the USA. The same logic that shows gains from greater trade in manufacturing also shows gains from reducing barriers to the immigration of highly skilled professionals.

It's almost as if one of those groups has power and influence that it uses to protect its privileged position and the other doesn't! Of course if I'm understanding asdf32 right, that is impossible, or at least irrelevant. I suppose there is the key difference that we can't, yet, ship people to China in a containerized shipping crate for their checkups and then receive them back the same way, but doctors are pretty portable and their equipment seems to be readily available in the US.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2014 17:35

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Fados posted:

But doesn't the fact that it IS being gutted imply that it does fail as a power structure when paired with capitalism?

I don't think that necessarily follows, though it may indicate a weakness of democracy as we understand it. (Indeed, the modern conception of democracy is pretty young, mostly comparable with capitalism in terms of age.) It could represent a weakness of the current system, either in part or fundamentally, but it could also simply mean that, for instance, democratic institutions are slower to react in the face of advanced dirty tricks on the part of capital.

I mean, Germany has its issues but has kept a social welfare state and (if you consider only West Germany) democratic institutions, if flawed. Germany isn't exactly a poor place, or a place without banks, rich people, etc.

# ¿ Aug 27, 2014 01:53

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asdf32 posted:

How can you say the economic system is external to the democratic political structure? It's constitutionally internal to it.

"Capitalism" in the sense of the efforts of various owners of capital hunting a return exist trans-nationally. Even the most powerful states such as the US do not have anywhere near the decisive influence in other nations that they do in their own territory, and what is more they may get bought off and so forth. Perhaps if democracy has a weakness, it is this: capital, like Dracula, is very powerful and very hard to uninvite.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2014 06:35

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 03:13

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asdf32 posted:

I'm not sure that's what Rudatron was saying. It's very much supposed to be the case that the economic system operates as a component of the larger political structure with the government controlling the market through laws and regulations from every angle.

More broadly the point of government is to protect against threats both internal and external. If it can't do that against categories of threats that will inevitably pop up then that's a fundamental problem with the structure - a boat that capsizes in any wave isn't a stable boat.

The case that needs to be made is that blocks of power like the ones that arise from pooled capital can be completely eliminated. I think that's a hard argument to make. And it's far harder to make if, as you suggest, democracy can't even stand up to external capital (though I think it can).

I don't think it is impossible for democracy to do, it is just very hard and possibly some hypothetical new institution or element needs to be introduced. This doesn't mean these states would not be 'democracies' unless we're going to be insufferable Platonic pedants, in which case they weren't democracies in the first place, they were constitutional republics, blah blah and so forth.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2014 22:05

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