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."
#Democracy #RepresentativeDemocracy #Oligarchy #Liberalism #CitizensRule #Politics #ParticipatoryDemocracy
"We are ardent believers in the power of government to improve people’s lives, and appreciate the frustration with unnecessary delays. In some cases, especially exclusionary zoning and other land use rules in wealthy suburbs, the current legal restrictions are in fact excessive. However, the proper answer to government dysfunction and the authoritarian threat at home and abroad is largely the same today as it was during the New Deal: Rather than railroad the public with top-down directives or megaprojects imposed by Washington and state capitols, we must renew our national commitment to democracy and public participation with ambitious acts of bold economic governance.
The Trump Administration’s ability to move with lightning speed to impose unwanted infrastructure like Alligator Alcatraz on unwilling host communities, militarize cities with masked police and troops, and increase surveillance of Americans makes clear the urgency of balancing the state’s capacity to act decisively with the need for democratic legitimacy. “State capacity” is not inherently good: The what and how of state action matter.
Moreover, in the medium and long term, the tradeoff between state capacity and democratic participation disappears—and even reverses. Public input into government decisions, including in environmental review procedures, not only restrains the worst tendencies of unaccountable state power but also enhances the capacity of the state itself, by providing valuable feedback to state technocrats about what is working and what isn’t. While turning off these feedback channels may generate a sugar high of quick results, doing so, as state capacity liberals propose, dooms effective governance further down the road. Top-down technocracy is brittle, and availing ourselves of shortcuts around the public is ultimately self-defeating."
https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/79/rethinking-state-capacity/
#StateCapacity #Bureaucracy #Abundance #DemocraticParticipation #ParticipatoryDemocracy #Democracy
Charles Duhigg distinguishes "organizing" from "mobilizing" in a way I did not know before, then proceeds to classify a series of movements/campaigns as one or the other.
The real criterion seems to be how much decentralisation and local autonomy/focus a movement allows and fosters.
Reminds me of #Wikimedia chapters, which can be extremely varied and contain all sorts of people as long as we all believe in free licenses.
Reel Tubes
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Llewelyn Pritchard
Nemo_bis 🌈
15-15-15 - Rss Bot