Paul Waldman reflects on what many Americans protesting the Trump regime really want:

"As mad as they are at Trump, people are after something deeper."

#Trump #NoKings #resistance #solidarity #democracy #EconomicElites #ParticipatoryDemocracy #SocialJustice
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https://paulwaldman.substack.com/p/what-democrats-have-to-learn-from

"Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.

Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/03/team-mirai-and-democracy.html

#AI #Japan #TeamMirai #AIPolitics #Democracy #ParticipatoryDemocracy

Democracy is better than Authoritarianism and way better than Monarchism. However, Representative Democracy is a Fraud. Participatory Democracy is way better than Representative Democracy.

"The fact is that any selection mechanism for representatives based on human choice (and in fact any selection mechanism other than random selection) will have inegalitarian consequences. Why is that? Because human choice is inherently discriminatory and homogenizing. Whether the skew is rational or not, choice is biased toward salient traits, or traits that are seen as superior in some ways, typically because they are rare and unevenly distributed. Those include wealth and social status, of course, but also charisma, confidence, eloquence, and height.

As a result, elections are bound to generate an inegalitarian distribution of power that is not empirically contingent but structural. So even assuming ideal conditions, which are never found in real life, not even in Scandinavian countries, elections will send to power an unrepresentative group of people over-sampling certain traits, including those that are associated with being a confident elite, and under-sampling the shy.

Am I suggesting that giving people a choice of representatives is a bad thing? No. It is plainly an improvement over rulers imposed by tradition or force. At best, however, it yields a liberal oligarchy: the rule of the few, legitimized and constrained by popular consent. That arrangement is preferable to its alternatives, but it falls short of genuine democracy—and therefore of the quality of governance we should reasonably expect from it. The alternative is not to abandon representation, but to reconfigure it."

https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/13/helene-landemore-representative-politics-democracy-politicians-citizen-rule/

#Democracy #RepresentativeDemocracy #Oligarchy #Liberalism #CitizensRule #Politics #ParticipatoryDemocracy