[mmoustafa]

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.

[astroflection]

Too bad there are no technologies that would allow the citizenry to communicate nearly instantaneously and cast their votes in a pseudo-anonymous manner.

[swarnie]

Impossible, we must interpret the intentions of some blokes who died 220 years ago and try to assume what they would have wanted.

Its the only way.

[Towaway69]

It’s a blockchain moment - finally a use case ;) /s

[smileysteve]

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.

[lazide]

As the Greeks found, the only think worse than representative democracy is direct democracy.

[wing-_-nuts]

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.

[jdc0589]

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

[SoftTalker]

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

>They are not elected to represent the views of their constituents.

Yet another thing I vehemently disagree with.

[lazide]

I guess it’s a question of semantics.

If a rep basically says ‘I don’t care what y’all say, I’m doing z’, and they get elected.

Does that mean they got elected because everyone wants z? Or they got elected, and plan to do z?

[QuercusMax]

why do you write 'cis' in all caps? It's not any kind of acronym, initialism, or otherwise; it's a Latinate prefix.

[jdc0589]

I didnt know, its not a term I use frequently/ever

[chimeracoder]

> 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.

[rootusrootus]

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

Exactly. Stop playing political football with issues. Put them to the people at let the voting public decide, and be done with it.

[lazide]

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

I'd rather have CA's props than an elected congressman who ignores the will of the people

[rootusrootus]

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.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[petsfed]

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

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.

[lazide]

Sufficiently framed, the highly partisan crap is the day to day.

The gov’t shutdown was precisely using the day to day crap to get leverage!

[lazide]

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.

Apps just tiktok’itize the whole process.

[QuercusMax]

You seem to have a very particular idea of how direct democracy might be implemented; there's no reason it has to be "show up at 11am on a Tuesday".

[lazide]

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?

[QuercusMax]

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.

[QuercusMax]

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.

[wing-_-nuts]

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.

[lazide]

Who gets to decide what is insignificant or not?

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.

Why would they vote to be stomped on?

[kyrra]

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.

[oblio]

Haven't the Swiss solved this?

Maybe you Americans should figure out the first step of engineering, which is to look at existing solutions and learn from them :-p

[gsf_emergency_4]

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.

[lazide]

The Swiss have a representative democracy with a slightly different way of ‘representing’.

[oblio]

We can move the goalposts as much as we like, but the Swiss have the closest approximation of a direct democracy in the world, right now.

So before dreaming about 100% democracy, maybe the US could slide away from "flawed democracy", first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index#...

[sershe]

Federalist papers were very explicitly against direct democracy, so... Not much?

[Aperocky]

Could it actually be worse?

[cheschire]

I absolutely think so. Can you imagine if voting was influenced directly by whatever memes were on Tiktok?

[godzillabrennus]

Given how Mamdani won in NYC I think we are already at that stage.

[mothballed]

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.

[Razengan]

You could have actual semi-immortal magic users claiming to be the Senate.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.