Progressive Politics

a problem with direct democracy is that it still only ends up measuring the plurality rather than the majority. Now, I'd be curious to see a system tested that counts the silence so that a vocal minority can't always act with impunity as if all the people who WEREN'T heard simply don't exist, whether they chose to abstain or were otherwise prevented from participating through systemic phenomena (or just being overwhelmed with life).

I don't think we can rely on there being some sort of compulsory system that forces participation, but rather one that keeps in mind the rate of participation so that if only 10% of the population votes one way and 9% votes another way, that measly 10% doesn't get to act as though they have some kind of mandate.

Rather I'd have liked some kind of non-crypto-sludge ledger system where your votes are pseudonymous--only YOU can be certain of the identity of your vote but you can SEE where it is in the system and you have the ability to CHANGE it if your understanding of the stakes evolves--such that realtime polling approaching any given decision's deadline can actually be tracked and campaigns can have a better idea of what their blindspots are in terms of who they're reaching and what information is actually having a measurable impact.

Authenticating the veracity of this information and ensuring some system that actually manages to serve as a functional fairness doctrine is a separate problem that also needs to be solved.

It's too easy to whip up hate against minorities, especially against marginalized minorities (I'm sure the rich would still find a way to profit, despite being a minority themselves). When our western political systems were still working somewhat, minority protections was one of the major arguments for them.

e.g. Brexit was decided via direct democracy.

Seems to work for Switzerland, though Switzerland isn't exactly a utopia of progressive politics (could be worse, but e.g. AFAIK being poor sucks a lot in CH).

People, at least Americans, today aren't capable of it for multiple reasons, most of them systemic and intentional.

Decades of cuts to education and the social fabric have rendered most of the populace too ignorant about everything for giving them a say being a good idea.

Like term limits. How many people would vote for term limits without doing any research to find out they basically always make things worse because they keep out the people that want to spend their lives in faithful public service while there are no shortage of stooges corporations can push through.

So, you have the third of the country that voted for fascism. Pretty bad...

But then you have the other third that's convinced voting for Democrats that spent 50 years empowering fascism will save them.

Then you have the third that's completely disengaged because they don't care.

Direct democracy can't work as long as people believe capitalism serves anything other than the ruling class.

It's difficult. A large amount of people don't even vote once every few years, so they won't be involved in the first place. More people don't have time to get into the details. And I mean how would you even know what do do in details about the economy, impact of laws and complicated consequences? Which decisions about the infrastructure like the electricity grid are neccessary now to yield the proper result in 5-10 years time? Do you even have the time and motivation to study all of this? And the masses can be influenced easily. We can see that even with the Swiss. So it's questionable whether it even yields better results than the indirect approach. It's certainly more democratic. But not necessarily better even if done properly.

Won't work. Too many people don't care about politics enough to even go to the voting every few years. How can you expect a significant amount of the population to involve in everyday politics, enough not to let control slip into the few hands paid for doing this for their masters?

I like the idea! I feel like there are a ton of policies that have been really popular for a long time (legal weed, single payer healthcare, abortion protections) that elected officials have failed to sufficiently act on. I'm also pissed about politicians getting elected and suddenly changing their politics (looking at you, Fetterman). Don't get me started on the electoral college or gerrymandering.

Folks in this thread seem to complain that the average voters is too disengaged / ignorant for this to work, but I don't see how representative democracy is any better with that. I cannot imagine any form of democracy that can do better than garbage in, garbage out.