The New York Times: Elections Are Bad for Democracy
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Unironically agree, just not for the same reasons they chose
Large scale democracy doesn't work because the bigger and more distant people are from direct consequences, the less responsibility they take for their actions so feel fine voting for a scumbag because 'they said nice things on tv'. Democracy should be limited to towns and possibly city districts, it'd be better if higher positions than mayor were chosen by a battle royale.
--G.K. Chesterton
incredibly based
I've been listening to a monarchist podcast for the last year or so which makes similar arguments.
I'm skeptical though that a system like a monarchy that relies on the benevolence of a king to do what's right for their subjects is a better option.
In the case of a monarchy, the rule of the king is balanced by the barons.
As long as everyone is doing very well under the king, the barons are very happy. If things go to shit because there is a bad king, then the barons raise armies and take the capital and install a new king.
It is a Mexican standoff. The barons have real power and means, but they are regional. A few times a year the king summons the barons to the capital, where they may only have a small bodyguard. If the king wants to have them killed, he has an army to do it.
The whole knighthood ceremony has a newly minted noble helpless, literally on their knees while their monarch has a literal sword at their neck. Both parties are vividly aware that events could take a turn. "Knighthood? lol, no. Execution!"
Monarchy absolutely isn't perfect, but real steps have been made away from the absolute rule of a tyrant.
The worst part about monarchism is that normal people are left with nothing but a patron they hope will protect them, and only does so if they are a great king.
If you get a bad one, you're stuck with that unfathomably bad one for centuries. Not just one generation of a bad king, but a bad king leads to more bad kings, and ruins the kingdom. You end up getting this 4th turning cycle among the elites that goes: Good king for 40 years, followed by "Meh" king for 40 years, followed by bad kings for 120 years, followed by a good king for 40 years.
We have that now, except the monarchs aren't publicly visible, so no one knows where to stage the peasant's revolt and who to stick in the choppy boi.
You don't have that, and you never have. As I said to CptLightning, even our shitty republican system has accountability where monarchism has none. Our aristocracies do change, and are even being challenged. Political change and accountability does and has existed to varying degrees. Feedback to rulers exists, where in a bad monarchy, it literally never does.
And that's different from our current system how? "Just vote out the bad politicians bro"? We've had generations of bad political rulers under a so-called repubilc
Tell me you've never read the experiences of people living under monarchy without telling me.
We've had political rulers you don't like. They've changed significantly over time, and their effects are limited. You have never, in your life, lived under the whims of an inbred idiot for 40 years of absolute rule. You don't know anyone who does (unless they lived in North Korea).
There is, actually, more accountability in our republican systems (shitty though they may be) than anything a monarchy would condemn us with. I literally did vote to change my state constitution after our state SC made a bad ruling. Even under the federal system, that single court case would have been precedent for 40 years. Now imagine that level of precedents, but for all policies, with no capacity for literally anyone to influence any policy or position for 1,000 miles in any direction. That's monarchism, and it's why we shot people to stop it.
I'm not sure any more. If the king feels "ownership" of the country/citizens, then it may well be more likely that a king actually cares about everyone, because people tend to value what they "own." Renters almost always fuck everything up.
Not saying that everybody that owns something takes good care of it, but people very rarely take good care of things that they don't own.
Yup that's exactly it. Distributism is the way to go.
But don't you see.
We had to end up here by giving the Federal Government the right to just fucking kill you in the bloodiest war possible if you didn't bow to them, meaning every other election below that was pointless.
Clearly every fucking awful thing that has followed from that was worth it to let Blacks be given their freedom! They have done so much for this nation!!
Don't blame the human shield for the actions of the man using them as such.
When you offer yourself gleefully to do someone's bidding, even if you aren't aware you are being puppetted, you don't get to be absolved of your actions. You still commit them.
Ve vas Just Following Orders™!
Blaming the slave means nothing. Liberating the slave denies the enemy a human shield, and makes a man out of a slave.
Slaves, by definition, aren't accountable of anything. They have no agency, that's why they are property. Freedom comes with agency, which comes with accountability.
If a slave picks cotton, that is beyond his choice because he is a slave.
If a slave commits evil on his own volition, his slavery means nothing to that. A slave can still be capable of sin, he can still burn, vandalize, kill all of his own free will. He still has choices to make every moment of every day independent of his slavery. He may not have complete freedom or control of his life, but he also isn't literally strapped to a chain every hour of the day being controlled for every second of it like a robot.
All you are doing is dehumanizing them further, just so you can pretend they are blameless and push all responsibility onto their masters, as you always do. Because nothing is ever anyone's faults ever. They were forced to loot, rape, molest, kill because apparently their impulse control is so low that some stuffy elite somewhere offering them the choice to do that immediately forces them to do so. Little more than beasts at that point.
You see how that's worse right?
No. Welcome to Liberalism. Slavery is not compatible with Liberalism, as you are always your own property, and ownership of that property can not be transferred.
No slaves should be allowed to exist, nor any masters. Both must be abolished. The slaves have no agency because they have either had it stripped from them, or they are nothing more than the property of the masters. If it's stripped from them, then they will seek liberation, and we should afford it to them. If they gave it up willingly, then we must strip their masters from them, whether they like it or not, whether they materially benefit or not. As for the master, all the slaves must be stripped from him. If not, then he can face the total responsibility of the actions of the slave.
So, let's say a slave commits a rape & murder, and for some unknowable reason we haven't abolished slavery yet.
Then the slave is a beast of burden that is out of control, because he is property, and the master is 100% accountable for his property's actions. You execute the slave for being a threat to society. Then you execute the master for murdering the slave's victim.
Seems harsh, but what we should probably do is be utterly intolerant of slavery so that the slave can become a man and face the consequences of being a murderer on his own. Then and only then can the master be allowed to live, because he has no slaves. Again, this is required because you can't be someone else's property. You must be responsible and accountable to yourself.
"But the slave should have some agency! You can't just murder the master by proxy!" Sure we could, because slaves have no agency. He takes full responsibility of his property, which happens to be a man.
"But by your logic the slave is a beast of burden, like a dog! If a dog bites a kid, you don't gas the dog owner". Sure, but dogs are dogs. They are lesser creatures. They can never truly understand the world in human terms. The human could, and the master failed. So that responsibility, full responsibility of a human, is transferred to him.
Not that it matters, because no one should have, or be, a slave anyway.
"But he wasn't willingly a slave!" Then he should have been trying to escape instead of committing a rape & murder.
But I'm willing to compromise on this: we could abolish slavery so this situation can't happen in the first place.
As for the actual comparison: no one's a slave here. People are seduced by a socialist clarion call. You don't let them off the hook for their bad actions, but you don't let the socialists off either. Seduction is not slavery.
And I don't think they do. You brought slaves into this discussion, whereas I don't give them the excuse to blame other people for their decisions.
Being led astray isn't the same as being forcefully directed. As long as they can chose to not commit the actions in question, then they aren't slaves. They are useful idiots. I do not give them the easy out of claiming to be "slaves" when they are completely free to not be one.
You know I had typed this exact point out and then erased it for not fitting, but glad to see we agree on that point.
And I'd never say otherwise. Multiple people can be guilty for the same crime in different ways.
To use an example I enjoy a lot for upsetting women. A serial killer is guilty of his crimes and deserving of punishment, but in the vast majority of cases his mother is also completely on the hook for what he ended up being and doing. All of them chose to kill and give in to evil, but in many cases their mother's committed such evil against them that they are absolutely responsible for the carnage caused. Women of course love serial killers but hate responsibility so that will fry their little brains.
In all these discussions I've never discounted the elites culpability for what they direct people towards, I simply reject the notion that their peasant workforce is any less to blame for their choices because an elite pointed them that way.
The founders kind of accounted for that but at some point we threw all of that out the window and let the plebs vote directly for every elected position, which has lead to questionable results.
tl;dr: Elections are bad because people they don't like might get elected. They want a "lottery" where they determine who's eligible. Also: Bolshevik councils are the best.
They will be totally fair and balanced lotteries of course
Look, it's a totally fair and balanced system. We get one ballot, one vote. I'm the man with the vote and I say it's going on the ballot to my candidate.
Looked at the authors photo and wondered if I should check his "early life" section... 🤔
I wonder who would administer that test? Let me guess the only question would be "Are you white?" at which point it just says you failed.
To give you a few glimpses how that's going to turn out:
In Germany the chancellor recently attended a citizens Q&A session where participants where "randomly chosen" by a "lottery". Turns out the people who were allowed to ask questions just happened to be politicians from far-left parties. What a random coincidence!
Also Germany: the federal government is forming its first Bolshevik-style council. People are selected "randomly". Except they somehow want to make sure all minorities are represented, e.g. vegans. Which means it won't be random at all.
If opposition was actually a real thing you could make it so that the opposition is in charge of the randomization. That could mitigate some 'coincidences'
[EDIT]At least for the Q&A-Session. If the lottery-government was real there wouldn't be a way to define an opposition anyway[/EDIT]
They would administer the tests the same way they think poll literacy tests were administered in the Deep South.
oh no, the question would be "are you a member of [list of ethnicities and sexual orientations]". so you still fail, but now it's "valid" and if you complain they seek legal action because you're a dangerous bigot.
Democracy is bad for Democracy.
As long as the pool for this lottery is:
I suspect this isn't what the commies at the NYT are thinking of, though.
Addendum: These would be my preferred requirements for being able to vote as well.
Ideally you could tack on "must have four American citizen grandparents".
You do realize that point three eliminates almost all women, right?
Not a bug, a feature.
As with a physical fitness test: the women who can pass it earn their place. Having standards means enforcing them regardless of outcome.
Sure, but the writer will have the same problem when someone to the right of Mao is randomly selected. The best thing we can do for democracy is destroy the Democratic party and make it a capital offense to belong to it or enable it like the Republican side of the uniparty does.
well, I thought the post was hyperbole, but they're just straight up saying it
As a reminder, this is what happened every time that the Socialists lost an election. (Suggesting to me they are scared about 2024).
Always remember: voting is unrelated to democracy.
Democracy is about "the people's state". The people's will can only be determined by the government. According to Rousseau, the final and true form of Democracy is something that is effectively a Fascist state. The state are the people, and the people are the state. So long as "The General Will" is represented, in whatever form, that is considered Democratic. The suspension of all further elections, and the use of unlimited violence, terrorism, and coercion are moral imperatives to maintaining The General Will, thus maintaining Democracy.
This is why every time the Fabian or Democratic Socialists would try to vote in Communism or Socialism, they would be rebuked by a proletariat that was far more reactionary that they'd ever believed. Lenin learned this the hard way, lamenting that he couldn't control "Private Capitalism". Trotsky figured out the same thing with what he called "The Petty Bourgeois". That is the lower-middle class, property owning, rural living, gold protecting, gun having, and God worshiping people who just won't "buy-in" to the Communist mindset. The Left trick themselves into thinking they represent everyone, and then are rebuked in an election they thought they were certain to win.
As a response, they absolutely freak the fuck out. Declare that elections and populism are the enemies of Democracy. They demonstrate that Fabians and SocDems are as revolutionarily violent as the most hard-core Maoists, and declare that true Democracy can only exist within the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat", nullify the elections, and use unlimited force to secure their power.
Also in other news: ignorance is strength, and freedom is slavery.
Well, from their perspective, sure. The bureaucrats are mostly on their side, so they just need some random body they can put pressure on.
Given how this lot love to corrupt language, this seems to mean "Randomly chosen members of the public will allow themselves to be pushed around by the civil servants - whom we own"
Also, I remember to have read somewhere that it was somewhat costly to be in a government-position back then (probably somewhat offset by whatever money you racked in through corruption)