I'm not entirely sure. I know that's what people think, but I think it's very simplistic to think that you have power simply because you're able to elect people who enter a given office once every X years.
In an ideal state, election power would be sufficient. But in practice, it isn't, and it isn't anywhere, which is why everyone who ends up in office ends up doing basically the same thing.
First of all, your choices are very limited. As the Machiavellians wrote, those who have a chance are those who are championed by organized minorities - i.e., people with power.
Secondly, there are the pressures of office. Just how much power do you wield with your one vote every 4 years, when there's an army of lobbyists trying to sway the politician the other way and has an unlimited budget? That's just one thing. There's also the bureaucracy. There's the party. There's the donors.
All this just means that ordinary people have zero influence on what happens, found by the Princeton study in the US and by some other studies in European countries.
I actually had almost instantly deleted my comment because it was largely repeating what you'd already stated previously.
As for your follow up comment, I wasn't exactly referring to power through democratic measures so much as power that people as a group actually have. Power that they seldom care to employ. Not alluding to any specific kind of action either, because public engagement on just about anything has nearly ground to an absolute halt.
Which is understandable given how the methods and tools employed have left people almost totally demoralized and nearly impotent. (IE, an almost totally corrupt media industry and the ever expansive reach of tech companies)
In some ways I think democracy was a bandaid fix, repeated desperate attempts to curtail the issues of power, only to be mired in a convoluted and bureaucratic mess. Which both serves as a useful delay in how power can be abused but also makes it easier for creeping abuses of power to sneak in with minimal detection and almost zero effective response.
Modern Democracy was a form of pacification to discourage violent and - sometimes necessary in the course of human events - uprisings of the people to overthrow their government. Instead the rulers can engineer a set of problems and solutions and let us think we are making the choice. Whatever the result, there's a sense of collective ownership. If we don't like it then "well the people voted for this" and "we just gotta vote harder next time."
In the US we had two large revolutionary uprisings. The second one failed and the Northern states imposed "American Democracy" on the losers forever. (though many of its worse aspects weren't put in place until the 1960s) Elements of this pacifying force were borrowed to create the "Liberal Democracies" of Europe. Neither form has anything to do with liberty or less tyrannical forms of governance.
So all I'm adding to your comment is that the implementation went the other way. The US Constitution wasn't perfect but it already solved many problems of government. Increasing the scope of "Democracy" as a bandaid to fix problems was itself an adaptation of the State to prevent a real cure to our ills from being pursued.
The public have no power. That is the real problem.
But let's say that they do have power. Then the problem would be that the media decides what people's views are.
I'm not entirely sure. I know that's what people think, but I think it's very simplistic to think that you have power simply because you're able to elect people who enter a given office once every X years.
In an ideal state, election power would be sufficient. But in practice, it isn't, and it isn't anywhere, which is why everyone who ends up in office ends up doing basically the same thing.
First of all, your choices are very limited. As the Machiavellians wrote, those who have a chance are those who are championed by organized minorities - i.e., people with power.
Secondly, there are the pressures of office. Just how much power do you wield with your one vote every 4 years, when there's an army of lobbyists trying to sway the politician the other way and has an unlimited budget? That's just one thing. There's also the bureaucracy. There's the party. There's the donors.
All this just means that ordinary people have zero influence on what happens, found by the Princeton study in the US and by some other studies in European countries.
I actually had almost instantly deleted my comment because it was largely repeating what you'd already stated previously.
As for your follow up comment, I wasn't exactly referring to power through democratic measures so much as power that people as a group actually have. Power that they seldom care to employ. Not alluding to any specific kind of action either, because public engagement on just about anything has nearly ground to an absolute halt.
Which is understandable given how the methods and tools employed have left people almost totally demoralized and nearly impotent. (IE, an almost totally corrupt media industry and the ever expansive reach of tech companies)
In some ways I think democracy was a bandaid fix, repeated desperate attempts to curtail the issues of power, only to be mired in a convoluted and bureaucratic mess. Which both serves as a useful delay in how power can be abused but also makes it easier for creeping abuses of power to sneak in with minimal detection and almost zero effective response.
Modern Democracy was a form of pacification to discourage violent and - sometimes necessary in the course of human events - uprisings of the people to overthrow their government. Instead the rulers can engineer a set of problems and solutions and let us think we are making the choice. Whatever the result, there's a sense of collective ownership. If we don't like it then "well the people voted for this" and "we just gotta vote harder next time."
In the US we had two large revolutionary uprisings. The second one failed and the Northern states imposed "American Democracy" on the losers forever. (though many of its worse aspects weren't put in place until the 1960s) Elements of this pacifying force were borrowed to create the "Liberal Democracies" of Europe. Neither form has anything to do with liberty or less tyrannical forms of governance.
So all I'm adding to your comment is that the implementation went the other way. The US Constitution wasn't perfect but it already solved many problems of government. Increasing the scope of "Democracy" as a bandaid to fix problems was itself an adaptation of the State to prevent a real cure to our ills from being pursued.