I would love to see some bus posters put up around Brussels naming the idiots most responsible for this. I'm tired of public servants (elected or otherwise) pushing bullshit and then getting to disown it later on.
I doubt the likes of Ursula, who come form extremely privilege backgrounds and have been groomed since childhood for high ranking leadership positions, see themselves as being any kind of "servants".
The term come from the days when public servants were elected from the general public, but those days are long gone and now we're bickering which members of the wealthy elite do we elect to screw us over for 4+ years without any accountability or repercussions.
Well, you got that wrong, especially for her. I know some of these people and in fact they do see themselves holding high office as a public service. Their reasoning is something like this: I'm already wealthy, don't have to work for a living. But I can make myself useful by running for public office or by taking a crappy paycheck (by their standards) for some high level bureaucratic position and so make myself useful. And here are some helpful connections that will help me achieve that goal.
And so they convince themselves that they are not in it for the money but merely for the public good, as wealthy people they are hard to bribe (somewhat true) and better this than loafing around doing nothing all day.
Whether it is the best for society is another matter, but this is a fair representation of some of the people in those circles that I know. They would rather see it as a sacrifice than as them holding power for power's sake because that's not what you're supposed to do.
It's loosely connected to Noblesse Oblige (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/noblesse%20oblige ), as in that you should strive to do good deeds and to use your station in life wisely if you are wealthy or in a position of power (but then you first have to obtain a position of power...).
>And so they convince themselves that they are not in it for the money but merely for the public good, as wealthy people they are hard to bribe (somewhat true) and better this than loafing around doing nothing all day.
Here's where you blew it. Wealthy people aren't immune to greed. The wealthier you are, the more wealth you wan to amass because that's what everyone else around you is doing.
I doubt Donald Trump got into politics because he got bored of being rich and became soooo interested in helping the common man. Wealthy people go into politics because politics means more power, more connections and networking, and ultimately more wealth.
Also, people born in opulent wealth have no idea of the struggles of the common man you're claiming they want to help. I doubt Ursula knows how much is the price of groceries, gas, electricity, plus the average wage of the common folk.
> Here's where you blew it. Wealthy people aren't immune to greed. The wealthier you are, the more wealth you wan to amass because that's what everyone else around you is doing.
No, you didn't get what I wrote, the sentence you quoted starts with 'And so they convince themselves'. Whether it is true or not has no bearing on it.
> I doubt the likes of Ursula, who come form extremely privilege backgrounds and have been groomed since childhood for high ranking leadership positions
Not sure that she's the perfect example for what you're trying to say
Are you referring to a particular era when public officials (in Europe?) were elected from the general public or just thinking of halcyon days?
In the U.S., the main issue is that the House has had 435 members since 1929. It's become so obscene that representation was better, on paper, for colonial Americans in the British Parliament than today.
I keep hearing this, and I think a charitable explanation is that scaling government becomes really hard past a certain point.
I would argue that 435 Representatives is already too much. Humans can only keep track of around 100 people. With so many representatives there is barely enough time for each of them to speak and engage with each other. Increasing the number for "better representation" will just worsen the problem.
A more cynical take is that since they just vote along party lines anyway, the number does not matter too much.
Are you saying the country has too many people, or that Americans don't deserve representation (population per seat) in line with, say, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, or Australia because it's "really hard" for some reason? Are you advocating for dividing the country into smaller legislative districts?
Remember when we used to do things because they were hard instead of falling back on lazy cynicism and convenience of status quo?
The U.S. seems stuck with the two party system primarily due to the mathematics of the Electoral College and lack of ranked choice voting. These require changes at the state level, not federal.
16 states and DC have now opted out of the Electoral College (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...). RCV is now in place for state-wide elections in Maine and Alaska, but recently banned (seemingly as a partisan protectionist measure) in Florida, Tennessee, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho.
Gerrymandering and lack of a mixed electoral system also seem major factors for the political duopoly, with less clear solutions to me.
Japan and South Korea are not federations. US already has multiple levels of representation increasing the number on the federal level wouldn't be that useful. The electoral system and gerrymandering seem like much, much bigger issue than the number of people per representative.
Congress can't do anything about the electoral system or gerrymandering. The only beneficial structural change that Congress could make constitutionally is to repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
I'm not well versed on political subdivisions in Japan or South Korea, but there appear to be prefecture/province level officials that don't sound too far out of line with states. Looks like if the U.S. had the national representation (population per seat) of Japan we would have over 1000 reps, South Korea almost 2000.
I am certainly not saying Americans don't deserve representation. I am saying that when you're governing 330M people it becomes almost impossible to have proper representation. What good is it to add more Reps? So people can have easier access to their Reps? Good, except if the Reps are now drowned in the noise of all the other Reps you haven't really increased representation. As you hinted the solution might be some new layer of abstraction, but that's not a silver bullet since people tend to focus on national politics above all. I am not denying progress is being made (and we should strive to keep it that way).
But party lines are set by leaders who are themselves representatives. If they had to interface with fewer constituents, they'd engage with them in a different way, probably listening more; having higher and higher numbers of constituents to care for inevitably shifts representatives into "cattle-herding" territory, setting them further apart than they already are.
Also, the more constituents, the more difficult it is for third-party candidates to run and meaningfully affect the debate.
In the end, continent-sized superpower government is really hard. Even in the "good old days", you often ended up with people like Nixon.
I appreciate your point about the cattle herding. But if we were to increase the numbers of Reps to stay in line with population growth we would need close to 1200 of them. Which in my opinion introduces more issues than it solves.
On the other hand, you could say that 435 is too few, because they represent a lot more voters these days than they used to. Can they represent them without being able to hear them out?
In 1900 Congress had 357 representatives for a population of 76 million.
Today Congress has 435 representatives for a population of 331 million.
I now have a mental image of all the world's spy agencies doxxing and demonising each other's agents in the eyes of the electorate of the governments that those agents work under.
Careful, you're touching on the core of Euroskepticism within the EU itself. These are not elected officials, nor are they public servants in the usual sense.
This, meaning chat control? Ylva Johansson is primarily responsible and also the head of the Comossion. Basically the whole EU executive is responsible for this. The Balkan Insight article has named several people and orgs.
I think the crux of the problem is really the undemocratic nature of the EU. For any member-state, the decisions and laws at the EU level are almost as important—and in some things even more—than the ones at the national level. Yet the institutions are largely non-democratic. It is unacceptable.
I like to remind people that the French (and I believe a few other nations) voted against the current EU constitution in a referendum before their governments went ahead and ratified it anyway.
What ended up being passed wasn't the same treaty, so that's not entirely true.
Complex situations like this can't just be reduced to a yes/no decision. What does a "no" vote even mean? Does it mean that nothing like that treaty can ever be passed? What about something which resembles the original but tries to address the concerns that were raised by the people who voted against it? What about just certain sections?
Simply "yes/no" is a very crude measurement to actually know what people think or what a good solution would look like. I was somewhat in favour of Brexit, but for very different reasons than Farage (basically: "fuck the fuck in or fuck the fuck off", but not this "we want all of the benefits but none of the costs"). This is why parliaments can amend bills and the like. Maybe we should choose people to represent each side so they can debate each other and reach a compromise. Oh, wait...
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I don't know about the French one, but the Dutch one was rife with misinformation and nonsense. You know, like that Brexit one, or the EU-Ukraine association treaty one there was a few years later. Except worse because there was bullshit and nonsense on both sides (the amount of "if you vote no" fear-mongering was pretty ridiculous).
Also, like Brexit when asked many people voted yes/no depending on how much they liked the government, or other factors which had little to do with the actual treaty being proposed.
One can say "a vote is a vote, and you shouldn't police motivations". There is something to be said for that. But on the other hand it's hard to ignore that the vote was made in the context of misinformation, and people didn't actually vote on the asked question.
In general I'm actually hugely in favour of more direct democracy, but every single referendum I've seen up close (in Netherlands and when I was living in the UK) has been nothing short of a clusterfuck, in addition to the more fundamental problems I mentioned. I didn't vote in any of them as I didn't think they were valid tools for good decision-making.
> What ended up being passed wasn't the same treaty, so that's not entirely true.
But then you only have indirect democratic legitimacy at best.
> Complex situations like this can't just be reduced to a yes/no decision.
Perhaps. Usually it should be retried. But you cannot just turn around and say you suddenly have legitimacy because the executive of a government once thought to ratify a constitution.
You also cannot just say voters were misinformed. Perhaps you are misinformed? This just displays a concerning understanding of democracy. To me that was the propaganda of that specific time in which they needed to ratify something without popular support, against democracy in that case.
> You also cannot just say voters were misinformed.
If people are stating things that are factually incorrect then you can, I think. Like I said, I'm not hugely comfterable policing people's motivations for voting one way or the other, but at the same time I also think it's foolish to ignore, especially when you're considering how to better organize these kind of more direct democratic measures: you need to evaluate how well they went.
For example "the treaty will allow Turkey to join the EU" was factually just incorrect: it didn't say anything about Turkey, and changed nothing meaningful about the EU entry procedure (and entrance of Turkey was never close in the first place). This nonsense was repeated in the association treaty with Ukraine.
How do you measure the "general line"? And how do you know if you've addressed something like that? What exactly is your definition of "representative democracy" in the first place?
This is really my point: you can't really have a conversation like that via a referendum. Repeat referenda are not really an option as your results will be increasingly biased towards the people with the strongest feelings/motivations.
Furthermore, the EU more or less worked the same before the treaty, and this treaty didn't really change that. In that sense it was a rather poor way to voice the specific criticism that the democratic nature of the EU should be reformed. I actually agree with that! I just don't think the referenda's were meaningful. If anything, it was counter-productive as the amount of nonsense mixed in with the better arguments just makes the criticism easier to ignore, and people who "just say no all the time" are generally easy to ignore in the first place (voting "no" is not a constructive way to improve things).
A referendum involves more than just filling in a ballot; there is a literal public debate involved, as I'm sure you know.
As you surely also know, the debate around the Lisbon treaty is a matter of public record. You can pull a random sampling of articles op/eds and political speeches from the time and see that this point is made again, and again, and again.
>Furthermore, the EU more or less worked the same before the treaty, and this treaty didn't really change that.
Yes, and it seems most of the governed weren't too happy about it.
Also, what point are you trying to make here? Are you suggesting that referendums should be ignored if the people vote against the status quo?
Oh come on now, the Lisbon treaty was just a way to bypass the will of the people.
The people answered and the government of France should have listened, instead they came back with this treaty, changed a few tidbits and called it a day.
It was a slap in the face of democracy that was denounced by the right as well as by the left.
To say that this is a complex topic, so surely people don't know how to make up their mind because they may confuse the issue at hand with something else is laughable.
In a presidential campaign, it is perfectly valid to vote for someone because they speak well, wear nice clothes, say the right thing, or promise anything under the sun.
But a referendum should only be valid if people voted only for the question at hand and nothing else? That's very disingenuous.
If a government triggers a referendum and people vote no either because they don't like the proposal or because they don't like the party/government that brings the proposal forward, then this vote is as valid as any.
Is it allowed to be said publicly now? Just a year or two ago such comment would have been downvoted to oblivion, perhaps even risking a ban from whatever platform it was posted on.
I wonder where does it come from, treating EU as some sort of divine deity not capable of any wrong doing and such an effort to sweep its flaws under the rug while chanting "EU is great!".
It's probably the most corrupt and undemocratic organisation on this side of the planet.
As someone who has spent a fair bit of time both in the EU and the US, one thing that continues to puzzle me about the average Western European voter is his unshakeable trust in government institutions. Given what happened in living memory, I would expect a very different relationship with Big Government.
"Unshakeable trust" is stating it rather strongly; I think almost no one has that. Also "EU" is far too broad to generalize: Sweden is very different from, say, Spain, which is very different from Romania.
But in general, compared to average US views, there is probably more of a recognition that a government is needed, and that it's better than the alternative. But to be honest it's kind of hard to really say too much meaningful without specifics.
In my experience it goes a fair bit beyond that. There is a high tolerance for the involvement of government authority in such things as (to sample from recent history): "you shall slaughter your cattle to reduce greenhouse gases", or "you shall not leave your residence".
This is positively unthinkable in other parts of the word. Puzzlingly (or perhaps not-so-puzzlingly), large swaths of Western Europe are comfortable with this, despite having recent experience with totalitarian states that were positively brutal.
Say what you will, I do see a connection between the two.
Actually, no. I spent most of my time in France, Italy, Spain and the UK. I insist: most upper-middle class (and above) voters are stuck in what I can only qualify as a "govern me harder, daddy" mindset.
For years now, the people who tried to say that the EU in its current form is not working have been silenced by the media or labelled as conspiracy nuts.
Maybe so but it wouldn't be the case if the other parties did their job and denounced the abuses from the EU when those happen.
Instead, it leaves the parties on the fringe as the only ones doing the criticizing.
Why should it be controversial to say that the EU is not perfect and that leaving it could work out better for certain countries?
Instead it's like no one can imagine a time where the EU did not exist and it's almost like we have forgotten that the EU is not the end all be all of everything.
It’s okay when the EU goes after those evil American BigTech companies since the only thing that the EU can “innovate” on when it comes to tech is legislation
Maybe it was spillovers from "Brexit" arguments where some UK people thought any critique of the EU was in support of Tories? I mean, since when is complaining about the EU controversial otherwise? You can still see some bitterness regarding Brexit where brits are mocked for choosing the wrong path etc.
I distinctly recall that the omertà on this particular issue predates Brexit ... by about 15 years. There was a brief outcry when the EU constitution was ratified before the topic suddenly and mysteriously vanished from public discourse (at least, insofar as such discourse took place on mass media).
Ye ok I was too young at the time to notice. I agree with the phenomena though. Unless you look you don't notice really. It is like if someone presses a switch and the consensus changes for no reason at all.
The 'institutions' consist of the Parliament (directly elected, but with limited powers), the Commission (effectively the Civil Service, develops policy but has no power other than what is delegated to it), and the Council (where each country is equally represented, and is the real decision making body of the EU).
So in fact the institutions are entirely democratic, and arguable more democratic (and less dysfunctional!) than their counterparts in the US and China (the other two super blocks).
Even if we had a perfect democratic process, she is decently well loved by
council members because they don't understand what she is saying. The is doubly true for EU citizens, although the parliament couldn't even influence this proposal in any kind.
That's not how it works though, they represent people in their EU member states, posters should go up in every capital because those clowns were elected by people everywhere.
I doubt the likes of Ursula, who come form extremely privilege backgrounds and have been groomed since childhood for high ranking leadership positions, see themselves as being any kind of "servants".
The term come from the days when public servants were elected from the general public, but those days are long gone and now we're bickering which members of the wealthy elite do we elect to screw us over for 4+ years without any accountability or repercussions.