[hayst4ck]

No, this is low agency. It wasn't other people that killed democracy. It was our own lack of response to billionaires enshrining money as legitimate political power that killed democracy. Oligarchy and monarchy are the default. Citizens willing to pay the cost of challenging those in power are what is exceptional. It is citizens asserting their own power rather than submitting to unjust power that creates democracy. It is an insistence that law applies to the most rich that creates democracy.

Democracy requires maintenance and responsibility. You can't expect nice things without paying the maintenance cost, and unfortunately, if you challenge power, power answers and it will hurt. If nobody is willing to die for freedom, then everyone will die a slave.

Blaming others rather than looking within fundamentally accepts authoritarianism, it presumes and accepts that others have power over you and that you can do nothing but submit.

Nobody is challenging power. We only have our own selves to blame for our cowardice.

[try_the_bass]

I disagree about what we failed to respond to, but fully agree that this is the fault of the population at large: if you refrain from putting forth your opinion, your opinion by cannot be counted in the democratic process.

The problem with democracy, more generally, appears to be that the population is wildly susceptible to apathy and complacency, meaning we've reduced the voting set to only this who care enough to vote. This turns politics into a game of disagreements between the most extreme voices.

In my opinion, in order for a democracy to work, voting must be compulsory.

[hayst4ck]

Democracy does not work without a culture of responsibility and we no longer have a culture of responsibility.

I am incredibly atheist, but what we are seeing is Christianity, a clear pillar of American culture, malfunctioning on a societal scale. What used to be the major cultural influence on this country has been weaponized for political purposes. There is a quote about how separation of church and state is to protect the state from the church... but now we are coming to understand that that separation exists also to protect the church from the state.

People are very susceptible to politicians lying to them, especially when it's a lie they want to hear or prefer to the truth. Compulsory voting does not address that at all. Education is a hedge on it, but education requires effort, openness, and resources. There is also a media ecosystem which acts as a sort of central nervous system for a country, which is how a country understands itself.

Culture and institutions (such as church/media/academia/police training, etc.) are the foundation of societies operations, and government is largely a manifestation of prevailing culture. Authoritarian governments are a manifestation of a culture that promotes self interest and lack of empathy, rather than one that promotes loving they neighbor and treating others as you wish to be treated.

[WillPostForFood]

And yet, in 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, we have highest percentage Voting Eligible Population turning out since WWII, and in two of the last three elections, the candidate who spent less won.

So at least at presidential level, there is neither apathy, complacency, or the ability to buy elections.

[try_the_bass]

I don't think it's quite this reductive. Turnout in 2020 is estimated at 65%, which is not quite two-thirds of the population. 2024 was slightly lower at 63%.

That's still missing a significant fraction of the population. Sure, you could make the argument that 2/3s is probably pretty representative, but I'm not sure I'd agree. I think there's good reason to believe that a voter who shows up is inherently not representative of a voter who does not. When elections are decided by such small margins in many places, that unrepresented third can easily change the outcome.

Maybe they truly don't care, and perhaps they should be given the option to vote as such, if they're required to vote.

I also don't think presidential elections are actually very meaningful when it comes to national politics (or politics in general!), but I feel like my opinion on that is changing given the current administration's efforts to maximize presidential power and their success in doing so.

[hayst4ck]

> the candidate who spent less won.

That is entirely unsubstantiated. There is no reasonable way to measure this and any measurements taken are inherently political.

I am amenable to the idea of that being true for official spending, but unless the twitter purchase, for example, were tabulated, or spending on our American "pravda" (Truth social which was clearly influenced by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pravda), I would be extremely suspicious of those numbers.

> so at least at presidential level, there is neither apathy, complacency, or the ability to buy elections.

Again, I completely disagree, and so does Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who argues that it is extremely hard to win a primary without fundraising, and fundraising is structurally an election where money counts as votes, and therefore nearly all candidates who make it to the primary have already been filtered through by those with money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g