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I am pleased to see conversations breaking out on the fediverse about democracy and how it might be implemented on Mastodon and other fediverse servers. Who knows, maybe this whole self-governance thing will catch on after all. I'm a big fan, myself.
But there's a really serious problem with democracy. I'm increasingly suspicious it's a key vulnerability to fascism.
The proponents of democracy have generally held that more democracy is better than less, and that's true – partially. Sure, more democracy means more people have more say in their own lives, and that's great. More democracy is better than less democracy for society. The problem is that more democracy is worse than less democracy for the individual.
Because democracy is an awful lot of work.
A fundamental and unexamined premise of the democracy bequeathed the US by its founders is that the labor of self-rule that would befall the voting public was simply not a significant burden on them.
There's something quaintly naive about how the Founders imagined democracy, as if they said, "Really, how much work could running a nation-state even be? It's not like King George does anything."
But running a country is actually rather a lot of work.
Now, there's a sense in which using representative democracy or republic is an attempt to address this problem, by establishing a legislature of what are basically professionalized government-runners, whom We the People vote into office to represent our interests for us.
That certainly helps, but we're still stuck having to watch our representatives like hawks to make sure they do what we want, and make our displeasure known when they don't.
Likewise, having an appointed, not elected, civil service under the authority of the executive branch can also be construed as an attempt to solve the problem of how much work democracy exacts from what are basically amateurs at government-running by professionalizing much of that work and making it full-time employment. But that is a solution to democracy's woes of having less democracy, which is not good either, and it just results in the control of those agencies' budgets or authority becoming political footballs in the hands of all three branches of government, reducing it to the previously unsolved problem.
We can't really just trust our elected officials to do the job without our oversight. This is that whole idea of needing an educated electorate and a free press: representative forms of democracy don't work if we don't stay involved and on top of the issues.
It's hard enough to stay up on everything that is going on at the national level, but we also have state level governments. And municipal level governments. Maybe more than one state or municipal government you need to monitor, if you pay taxes in more the one location, or care about regulations in a town you work in but don't vote in, e.g. And they're all democracies.
Maybe things really were simpler back in the day, and democratic self-determination wasn't so burdensome on the populace. Maybe when the only voters were rich, white, land-owning Protestant Christian males, the arguments in town hall were shorter and the controversies fewer, and their easy lifestyles supported their taking all the time they needed to do their democratic duty.
But at this point, in our society at this time, democracy has become unsustainable. The populace cannot afford the amount of time and effort being responsible citizens of a democracy demands for even one of their governments, to say nothing of all three basic governments we can expect an American to have – further governments and any democratic process in their labor unions or religious congregations or home owners associations or recreational organizations are just beyond the pale.
Looked at this way, it seems really obvious to me what a vulnerability this poses to our society. Self-dealing connivers have abundant opportunity to get up to shenanigans in the halls of power, from town halls to state houses to the Capitol, because the exhausted and stretched too thin populace can't monitor them all.
This is a catastrophic fault. This is all the opening opportunists need – especially of the capitalist class – to bribe, to plot, to manipulate the law.
Additionally, it is also a fault in equal representation, because it means people of more discretionary time – which generally means people of more wealth – get to have more say in politics. They can quite simply attend more town halls to speak more often than someone who cannot attend town hall at all due to working three jobs to make ends meet. We see this in the disproportionate engagement in political process of retirees, who have lots of time to spend writing letters and attending meetings.
We need to figure out a way to fix this. I don't know what the solution is, but this fault in democracy could very well be the end of ours if we don't.
We really are going to have to re-think how we run our governments – how we do democracy – to make doing democracy something that citizens can plausibly do. Because right now, citizens can't. It's too much. No one person could follow all the issues at all of governments they are constituents of. We need to figure out ways to bring democratic process back into the range of ordinary citizens' capacities of time and energy to encompass, so ordinary people have even a snowballs chance of fulfilling their civic duties adequately.
I am hoping this interest on Mastodon of having democratically run instances will result in a kind of laboratory of new ideas. It's an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and re-imagine what democracy could look like, and what changes we might find useful to make.
Link for sharing: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1800106.html
This post brought to you by the 159 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
I am pleased to see conversations breaking out on the fediverse about democracy and how it might be implemented on Mastodon and other fediverse servers. Who knows, maybe this whole self-governance thing will catch on after all. I'm a big fan, myself.
But there's a really serious problem with democracy. I'm increasingly suspicious it's a key vulnerability to fascism.
The proponents of democracy have generally held that more democracy is better than less, and that's true – partially. Sure, more democracy means more people have more say in their own lives, and that's great. More democracy is better than less democracy for society. The problem is that more democracy is worse than less democracy for the individual.
Because democracy is an awful lot of work.
A fundamental and unexamined premise of the democracy bequeathed the US by its founders is that the labor of self-rule that would befall the voting public was simply not a significant burden on them.
There's something quaintly naive about how the Founders imagined democracy, as if they said, "Really, how much work could running a nation-state even be? It's not like King George does anything."
But running a country is actually rather a lot of work.
Now, there's a sense in which using representative democracy or republic is an attempt to address this problem, by establishing a legislature of what are basically professionalized government-runners, whom We the People vote into office to represent our interests for us.
That certainly helps, but we're still stuck having to watch our representatives like hawks to make sure they do what we want, and make our displeasure known when they don't.
Likewise, having an appointed, not elected, civil service under the authority of the executive branch can also be construed as an attempt to solve the problem of how much work democracy exacts from what are basically amateurs at government-running by professionalizing much of that work and making it full-time employment. But that is a solution to democracy's woes of having less democracy, which is not good either, and it just results in the control of those agencies' budgets or authority becoming political footballs in the hands of all three branches of government, reducing it to the previously unsolved problem.
We can't really just trust our elected officials to do the job without our oversight. This is that whole idea of needing an educated electorate and a free press: representative forms of democracy don't work if we don't stay involved and on top of the issues.
It's hard enough to stay up on everything that is going on at the national level, but we also have state level governments. And municipal level governments. Maybe more than one state or municipal government you need to monitor, if you pay taxes in more the one location, or care about regulations in a town you work in but don't vote in, e.g. And they're all democracies.
Maybe things really were simpler back in the day, and democratic self-determination wasn't so burdensome on the populace. Maybe when the only voters were rich, white, land-owning Protestant Christian males, the arguments in town hall were shorter and the controversies fewer, and their easy lifestyles supported their taking all the time they needed to do their democratic duty.
But at this point, in our society at this time, democracy has become unsustainable. The populace cannot afford the amount of time and effort being responsible citizens of a democracy demands for even one of their governments, to say nothing of all three basic governments we can expect an American to have – further governments and any democratic process in their labor unions or religious congregations or home owners associations or recreational organizations are just beyond the pale.
Looked at this way, it seems really obvious to me what a vulnerability this poses to our society. Self-dealing connivers have abundant opportunity to get up to shenanigans in the halls of power, from town halls to state houses to the Capitol, because the exhausted and stretched too thin populace can't monitor them all.
This is a catastrophic fault. This is all the opening opportunists need – especially of the capitalist class – to bribe, to plot, to manipulate the law.
Additionally, it is also a fault in equal representation, because it means people of more discretionary time – which generally means people of more wealth – get to have more say in politics. They can quite simply attend more town halls to speak more often than someone who cannot attend town hall at all due to working three jobs to make ends meet. We see this in the disproportionate engagement in political process of retirees, who have lots of time to spend writing letters and attending meetings.
We need to figure out a way to fix this. I don't know what the solution is, but this fault in democracy could very well be the end of ours if we don't.
We really are going to have to re-think how we run our governments – how we do democracy – to make doing democracy something that citizens can plausibly do. Because right now, citizens can't. It's too much. No one person could follow all the issues at all of governments they are constituents of. We need to figure out ways to bring democratic process back into the range of ordinary citizens' capacities of time and energy to encompass, so ordinary people have even a snowballs chance of fulfilling their civic duties adequately.
I am hoping this interest on Mastodon of having democratically run instances will result in a kind of laboratory of new ideas. It's an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and re-imagine what democracy could look like, and what changes we might find useful to make.
Link for sharing: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1800106.html
This post brought to you by the 159 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.
Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 03:45 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 10:34 am (UTC)So your reform of democracy is in the hands of clowns, charlatans, and criminals, and is going to be retrospectively disliked because people are going to be poorer afterwards than they were before.
I think the simplification we're going to get is devolution, as remote government becomes increasingly distrusted. And we're going to get it badly (like Brexit, which is *not an improvement*) and it may not save us.
A simplification which might work better is the kind of Citizens' Assemblies proposed by XR, where you pick people by lot like for jury service and sequester them with a bunch of experts and let them come up with policy proposals. They're much less vulnerable to subversion that career politicians, because you can't tell who they're going to be in advance and it's much easier to subvert people gradually. But you still have the problem of who picks and pays for the experts.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 12:46 pm (UTC)I don't know what's happened since then. Were the salaries raised? Were people still damaging their lives? Maybe the jobs are taken by retirees?
The reason I'm bringing it up here is that it's a measure of democracy getting harder.
One possibility is that there's a limit to the size of democracy. Another is that an increasingly complex legal code makes things harder. The level of hostility which has been normalized is driving people out of politics. I have no plausible solutions for the short term, and if I'm right about what's going on, long term solutions will require a considerable increase of common sense.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 04:38 pm (UTC)I wonder if a way of voting which does not elect the most popular, but the least unpopular (some multi-level ostrakismos...) would lead to better results. Not sure if it would make selling hate even more profitable, though.
---
In dealing with the complexity of democracy, it seems to me that people tend to band together with others with similar aspiration and values. Parties, unions, churches, citizens' action groups... which is efficient, but also has its failure modes.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-02-06 12:32 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 12:48 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 01:51 pm (UTC)This is a special case of "complexity is expensive".
There's a lot of systems theory out there; the problem itself isn't inherently intractable.
(It's not trivial, either, but it's not inherently intractable.)
One of the core things is that money is used to ration agency, and that needs to be dealt with explicitly. Another is that collective organization to represent interests is in general constrained in very specific and not especially helpful ways.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 03:15 pm (UTC)And it's not just that we're exhausted. We're supposed to do this in our free time, while for those whose work it is to enrich themselves/their corporations at the public's expense, it's their day job. Even when we're not exhausted by all this, there's a significant power imbalance there. Add a decimated but corporate press, and in the USA, add Citizens United on top of this, and... whoop.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 03:48 pm (UTC)Regarding democracy and information overload - I know that for questions of both town and state government, I lean on what I'll call "informal proxies": people who I trust to read up on the issues and have well-thought-out opinions on them that are in fairly close alignment to my own. When I don't have a considered opinion, I go with theirs - or, often, an aggregate of several informal proxies, with disagreement among them a signal that I might want to look more closely.
(In theory this might be what representatives are supposed to be for? But if so, that founders on the shoals of how much population each rep represents, limited knowledge of the actual positions/views of candidates, and first-past-the-post voting making it likely that I'll never have a practical chance to cast a meaningful vote for a candidate closely aligned to my views.)
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-30 04:22 pm (UTC)And from the other side, of information: Capitalism does not want a free press. Capitalism does not want competition, it wants monopolies, it wants to use capital to breed capital, capital to buy power, power to breed more capital. A free press is not where the money is.
Maybe, probably, we have a lot more information. But it does not help us make better decisions.
OTOH, if one looks back, it seems fascism has happend since kings and emperors left that ecological niche unoccupied.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-02-01 05:01 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-31 02:26 am (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-31 10:03 am (UTC)By which I mean: everyone involved in a democratic system needs to be educated, everyone needs to be knowledgeable about government and governance (two different things there, by the way), everyone needs to be involved in the process of governance, and everyone needs to be interested in this. We all have to agree that the problems raised by the processes of governance are our problems to solve (we can't pass any of it off as "someone else's problem") and we have to be involved in the process of creating solutions. Which means we all have to be able to work together in goodwill with our fellows to resolve these problems, and figure out what the best solution might be, then implement this solution regardless of how it affects us personally.
And when you start to phrase things like that it becomes obvious where the problem lies - this is a system which might work with a population of aristocratic saints, but we're not going to get there from our bunch of status-obsessed social apes without a LOT of very hard work on cultural shaping.
There's also the issue where democracy is a solution which works best on the extremely small-scale - basically, it works best when everyone involved in the system knows everyone else. Which means a group of about 150 people or less is going to do democracy well, but it does not scale efficiently or effectively. Representative democracy is a way of trying to avoid the scaling issues, but it's subject to the same scaling problems overall - again, when the population you're representing is large enough that you can't possibly know each of them individually, self-interest starts to overtake community interest.
(At least part of the problem with nation-state level democratic systems is the whole "nation-state" part of things, in other words).
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-31 01:32 pm (UTC)Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-01-31 08:55 pm (UTC)I think more examples of different sorts of democracy is definitely useful, but I think we have quite a few already from how similar things play out in different countries already, I just don't know enough about the different countries.
It's very hard to draw any generalisations, but it seems like a lot of countries have problems with desperate people voting for opportunistic or vile populists in different ways :(
And I think there's a general theme that whatever the political system, people with power will end up drifting towards the places they can exert leverage on the fulcrum of the scales whatever those are.
And also a general theme that no system can reliably make a government better than people want, there's a lot of things that help make a system better (e.g. more open press, less scurrilous press, better access to voting, fairer restrictions and support for campaign materials and expenses), but a lot of things work only because of a culture of people choosing to have them work (e.g. distrusting politicians who lie, politicians resigning when disgraced, people voting in sensible ways, people preferring parties to negotiate rather than brinksmanship) and can't be fixed by rules, only by a culture developing healthily.
But there's also things that go wrong differently in different countries. The amount of effort required to stay on top of a lot of different elections is a example symptom of general complexity overload in people and systems, but is a complaint I've heard from America, and for different reasons in Australia, but not much from other countries. Whereas in the UK, it feels like the government normalised a lot of similar awful far-right-ness as the government in America did, but through breakdown of different norms, not the same ones.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-02-03 04:16 am (UTC)I hope the Fediverse serves as a lab to try out new ideas. But I also wonder how important scale is. My 1500-person congregation makes decisions more easily than a true democracy at even my city level could, let alone state and nation. People in my congregation can talk with each other; people in the US form coalitions and voting blocks and rely on delegates. While the Fediverse remains small, with democracy at the level of individual servers, I suspect it'll operate more like my congregation than like an actual government. I will be interested to see how things change as it grows.
Staying on top of issues is, as you say, impossible for almost anybody. Complexity is a factor, but I also wonder about volume. How many and how big were the issues being resolved by the white male landowners shaping the early US government? Did they leave more to lower levels or even to individuals? It's hard for me to separate that question from the sheer increased complexity of the modern world. If those early government-runners had had our level of development, would they have been legislating social media and school curricula and speed limits and pharmacists and clean-energy incentives and an impenetrable tax code to the level that ours do today?
I'm having trouble framing the questions, let alone working out any answers.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-03-01 05:52 pm (UTC)HOWEVER. It's also the case that the US is set up to make it difficult to participate. One of the cases which Judith Brett makes in "From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage" (extract here) is that Australian governmental systems differ from other Westminster system because, for complicated historical reasons, we came to view democracy as a *service which is provided to us*t. Compulsory voting, for instance, evolved from systems for universal enrollment to vote, and everywhere those were instituted it arose from a sense that the government's job was to *provide* the opportunity to vote, much as it provided roads and such. We do still have problems of disproportionate enfranchisement, of course! But nothing on the US scale.
Brett calls our system of government "majoritarian and bureaucratic" rather than Democracy in pure form, and she's... not wrong. It has significant downsides! But the ease of participation is one of the up-sides.
Re: Comment catcher: The Problem with Democracy
Date: 2023-03-02 02:25 am (UTC)I think you slightly misunderstand what's going on in the US re voting, because it's not like we're forthright about it. Americans also see – sort of – opportunity to vote as something the government is supposed to provide, like roads and such.
But in the US, there is this large faction that thinks that things the government provides – very much including roads, and schools, and health insurance to the poor, and housing for the poor, etc – should only go to some Americans.
You know, the white ones.
It would be hard to overstate the extent to which American racism has dismantled all government entitlements, rather than let them come to people of color.
Which is what is happening to voting, with voter suppression. In case you hadn't heard, there's an all out war being waged by the fascists here on the public's right to vote, conducted by making it as inconvenient or logistically difficult as possible – if not downright impossible, where they can pull it off.
Like a state here passed a law making it criminal to give food or water to someone standing in line to vote. And then closed most of the polling places in predominantly Black neighborhoods to guarantee there would be enormous waits – in some places over 8 hours.
The difficulty voting isn't some sort of negligence or accident: it's engineered, with malice aforethought.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-30 10:36 pm (UTC)1) One of Oscar Wilde's many bon mots (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7499001-the-trouble-with-socialism-is-that-it-takes-up-too) applies here: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.”
2) I live in NH with a 400 person lower house of the legislature: annual pay is $100 (!!!), plus some expenses for mileage (driving to & from Concord?) and perhaps staying overnight on occasion. It was designed when agriculture was important and farmers had an off-season or 2 (between harvest and sowing, and perhaps sowing and harvest). Now it is more nearly full time. Who can afford to serve: the wealthy, retirees, and "non-working" spouses.
I had a 3rd point which has slipped my mind. If it comes back to me, I may be back to mention it.
3)