[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

[mothballed]

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.

[chimeracoder]

> 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.

[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.

[lazide]

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.

[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.

[lazide]

It’s well trod history, hah. The founding fathers directly wrote about and considered it too.

There are reasons why literally nobody does it, and it isn’t because it works too well.

[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#...

[lazide]

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?

[oblio]

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).