We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy. The founders simply had no option, you had to pick a person, put them in a carriage, and send them to the capitol to do your bidding (also why electoral college exists for reporting votes, but I digress).
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.
Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.
It's worse than the founding though because Congress has artificially capped its growth. If the house of representatives followed the per capital ratios of the early 20th century, we'd have more than 2x the representatives, if it went back to the 18th century ratios we'd have thousands.
Only, since the 1930 house appropriation, the technology has existed - the automobile, the telephone; by 1960 we had flight, by the 90s we had widespread Internet and faxes.
Theb, the Senate is only made to be like the house of lords, which by itself it now an antiquated concept.
Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide. I don't agree with everything passed on ballot in my state, but I respect that at least the majority voted for it.
I agree. I don't, and never will, trust politicians (of any party) to actually represent their constituents accurately. I understand everything can't be a direct democracy, but we need some sort of a middle ground.
It's really weird to think about. I am a straight white CIS male, with no extreme political or social views, my family has been in the US for 150 years, im financially well off, and I don't feel like I have accurate trustworthy representation in government at any level. I am the person that everyone says is over represented
There's a widespread misunderstanding about what congresspeople do.
They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents. Constituents, rather, elect those representatives whose agendas they most closely support. There's a subtle difference.
> Vehemently disagree. I would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
The problem with true direct democracy isn't how people would handle high-level issues that are direct reflections on people's basic values and principles, like the two examples you mentioned.
The problem with true direct democracy is that every single person becomes responsible for understanding the intricacies of mundane-but-critical details of administration, like the third-order effects of specific tax policies, or actions that are currently delegated to executive agencies.
Except in the extremely small scale, it quickly becomes prohibitive to reasonably expect all those people to be able to make informed decisions about all the necessary parts.
I'd like a hybrid system like we have in a number of states. A mechanism for nationwide initiative petitions would be nice. Then we can get nationwide consensus on the high-level issues and leave the rest for the people whose job it is to work out the details.
The worst laws come from direct amendments and petitions because only the stuff no lawmaker actually wants their name on (or could pass) goes there - and it gets gamed to hell.
See the CA propositions - they turn into insane population wide gaslighting competitions.
Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
> Why not a mixture of both? CA for instance had their populace vote to ban gay marriage in prop 8, CA then just told the voters to go fuck themselves and tied it up and overturned it in court.
> So you can see even if you literally amend the constitution in california by popular referendum, those in power can just tell the populace to go fuck themselves and they won't be recognizing it, no matter that the constitution is the supreme law of the state.
Your argument would make sense if the courts had overturned Prop 8 on the basis that it was unconstitutional at the state level. But that's not what happened.
The state case against Prop 8 was upheld by the courts. The federal courts ruled against it, in a completely separate case, on the basis of the Equal Protection Clause in the US constitution. Prop 8 amended the state constitution; it did not amend the US constitution.
It's also a moot point, because Prop 8 was also repealed by a subsequent ballot initiative, with 61% of the vote.
So you’re saying popular votes are not sufficient to avoid flip flops on contentious issues, and popular voting also can step on minority groups recognized rights on a whim?
What problem is it solving again?
And notably, California is one of the most consistently gay friendly states and still flip flopped on this exact topic.
The more direct the democracy (and the shorter the timeframes between elections!), the easier it is to game the population or poke people’s buttons and make them vote on things they later regret - or deeply enjoy.
The whole court system and bill of rights is to try to put guard rails, so there aren’t (for example) purges/genocides, removing a little under half the populations rights, etc. etc. but there is only so much rules can do.
So then it boils back down to 'most people are stupid' and the reason we have representative democracy is so we can cultivate a class of elites who are smart enough and have enough skin in the game to make good decisions for the rest of us.
People recoil at the idea, but isn't that sort of what the founders were doing? They had beautiful, lofty ideals on paper, but they were all wealthy, white, male landowners. Their idea of "the People" might have been a wee bit more limited than the generally accepted definition today.
It doesn’t require most people to be stupid. It just requires people to have other things they need to do, and pay attention to, and limited ability to give a shit.
If everyone has to be paying attention all the time (and it would be 150% of the time with modern society), everyone is susceptible to being drowned in bullshit and either checking out or being manipulated.
Even with what we have now, that is exactly what is going on. Direct democracy would be even worse.
> would much rather take our most contentious issues (abortion, M4A, etc) put them on a national ballot and let the general public decide
Those are actually great examples of where federalism plus direct democracy works better than aggregated democracy. There are fundamental worldview differencs on abortion that a plebescite can't reconcile. The failure of direct democracy is it short circuits deliberation. So to make it work, you need another layer where deliberation occurs.
The Swiss seem to have solved this neatly: the representative body deliberates, and then the population gets and up-down vote.
Granted, but the problem with direct democracy is that you either let issues be decided only by the most engaged voters or you require participation from all, and issues are decided based on who can present the most sexy case on otherwise very unsexy issues.
I'm not a huge fan of representative democracy, but for direct democracy to work, we have to change society sufficiently to let ignorant lay people become informed enough on various issues to have a meaningful opinion on them.
I'm ok with congress handling the day to day minutia of government, but we should take all the highly partisan crap and put it to the ballot, and be done with it.
You have a huge, huge misunderstanding of how direct democracy turns out.
Everyone with a job gets inundated with bullshit, even eventually stops showing up (or paying attention) because it’s impossible to live and actual do that.
So then you end up with nut jobs doing whatever they want while having the votes because they are the only ones who show up at 11am on a Tuesday when the daily vote is happening.
There is on average over 1 new bill a day that gets voted on in Congress. Those are the bills that get past committees.
Everyone still complains it is impossible to get Congress to actually do anything, since this is a huge country with 300+ million people.
If we didn’t have a ton of filtering (by whom? And who gets to decide that, is who has real power!) we’d probably have 10K+ new laws a day being proposed.
What do you expect the voting process to actually look like?
I don't know what I expect the voting process to look like, but you seem to be assuming the worst without even thinking it through very much. I'm not an expert, I just don't think we should throw out ideas based on poor strawman implementations.
I'm not saying we put every insignificant little thing on the ballot, but lets say once every 4 years we take the real hot button issues that congress perennially uses as political football, and put them on a ballot. Abortion legal before the age of viability, yes or no. Medicare for all, yes or no. Legalizing cannabis, ditto.
I am sick and tired of congress basically ignoring the will of the people because some rich dudes with superpacs feel otherwise.
They’re going to be the ones with the real power. Who gets to decide who they are?
The reasons these issues get used as political football is precisely because there is a lot less consistent belief on what ‘the right thing’ is to do on those issues than you’d think, which is why they can be polarizing. And trying to force everyone to follow the same rule is undesirable for a large portion of the population.
The problem is that proper legislation is a balance of interests and working through the details of the policy. If you put "abortion" on the ballot, what would that mean? There are a ton of different possible policies on what is or is not permissible.
The main thing the Swiss have that Americans don't are referendums that can seriously challenge federal action. And then there are the state versions of that. And they don't have to wait for "the cycle". Or have results made null by arbitrary veto powers.
Sure, but who is going to be elected who would do that?
And as has been quite apparent, since the most folks will do is peacefully protest if outside the voting system - and be ignored - how else is it going to change?
And if either of those were working, we wouldn’t be complaining about this online anyway eh?
I highly doubt the US system can be fixed peacefully. I really wish it were, since the US affects a lot of the rest of the world (including where I live).
That one definitely reflects that the founders tended to limit voting to those with higher level of stakes in society (usually land owners).
While I'm not defending the practice, the parallel here is lifelong NYC dwellers with family roots in NYC were far less likely to vote for Mamdani than more recent immigrants or residents. It was largely a vote of those with the least stakes in NYC voting to overpower those with the highest stakes in NYC.
> We do not live in a democracy, we live in a representative democracy
We live in a republic. Republics mix representative and direct democracy with other featurs to become larger, safer and more powerful than pure democracies have historically been able to be.
The American republic, in my opinion, oversamples representation and undersamples plebescite, lot and ostracisation. (In Athens, elections were assumed biased to the elites. Selection by lot, i.e. by random.)
In my opinion, a lot of the supermajority requirements for legislation are better replaced with plebescite. (We have national elections every two years.) In my opinion, Supreme Court cases should be allocated by lot to a random slate of appelate judges. And in my opinion, every election should have a write-in line where, if more than X% of folks write in a name, that person is not allowed to run for office in that jurisdiction for N years.
The first requires a Constitutional amendment. The second legislation by the Congress. The last may be enactable in state law.
I always wonder what they would’ve created if everyone had a device in their pocket to send their preferences directly to the capitol at the speed of light.