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It is both.
Voting is a good system. The alternative is "let's just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there's a disagreement."
The problem is that we delegated the process of informing people what to vote for, to absolutely rotten media. And we delegated the process of figuring out the details of putting some candidates forward, to an absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don't give a shit about the people.
We need to fix those things. And yes, getting organized labor to fight back whenever they are fucking us, which is pretty much every day, to add some bite to all those polite ballots we're sending in, sounds great.
But voting, as a concept, is good. It doesn't have to be either or. It can be a 10-day general strike, and also voting to get rid of the guy who wants to nuke Iceland, and also organizing our politics better, for some candidates that aren't so shit as these ones generally are. Each one will help the others get done.
There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.
Yeah. That's why I agree with the general strike. Like I say, we've delegated the details of wielding political details to a whole class of exclusively-political people, and they've been rigging the game and keeping all the power for themselves. Fuck that.
4 Boxes of liberty, use in order.
Maybe some amendment after the first ome need to be considered 👀
The media will always exist and people will always base their decisions on the information they receive in the media. This is inevitable in any society with the degree of complexity we have today. It is just not possible to gather all the information ourselves about any but the most personal of topics. That is why free, unbiased, and independent media is an extremely important part of liberal electoral democracy. And for the greater part of the past two centuries, this is what we more or less had. Yes, major media outlets have always been somewhat controlled by the upper class (whether in the form of media companies or local media magnates), but until quite recently, most of them didn't care about using those outlets as propaganda pieces; they just cared about continuing to collect their subscription money, which is likely the best-case scenario for privately owned for-profit media. It is astonishing that this system lasted as long as it did.
There used to be a requirement of giving equal air time to opposing opinions - that was one of the earlier things Republicans successfully targeted. I've no idea how to make that work with the virtually unlimited possible sources available today.
That just opens you up to false balancing. See: the media landscape on climate change for the last 70 years.
And also only works when there are only two sides to represent to begin with, so it would reinforce the two party system
I think you're opening up a false dichotomy here: it's not about voting vs. the law of the fist. It's about how the democratic systems are set up to keep the powerful in power.
The system is set up to promote those "absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don't give a shit about the people". And "fixing" the media to not promote those things is like trying to teach a cat not to hunt mice.
There are more ways to have a democratic stucture of politics than "we decide onsour ruler every four years".
“We need both” “It doesn’t have to be either or”
“I think you’re opening up a false dichotomy here”
Voting is a good system. The alternative is "let's just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there's a disagreement."
Show me how this is not a dichotomy. Why are these the only options?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy. I am very clearly discussing why both voting and also using other means of people power, together, is the way.
What do you think is my main argument? If not that both together are the way?
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy
Yes it is. It presupposes that parliamentary democracy is the only way of democratic governance.
You are literally demonstrating the effect of the media landscape that you're criticizing: you're acting like there's no other democratic alternative than a parliamentary democracy.
Tell you what: Tell me more about the other democratic alternatives you say I am missing. I didn’t think that my examples at all presupposed the existence of a parliamentary democracy, but if I know more about your counterexamples, I can better make sense of whether or not I overlooked them.
While I don't have a perfect plan on democratic governance (sorry, I'm just a small, little boi), these examples came to mind right away:
What I also want to adress is that the things you're criticizing in your first comment are structural problems of a liberal democracy. That means that they don't stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up. Members of parliament have a free mandate and are under no direct obligation to enact policies on which they ran in elections. Yes, they can not get elected the next term, but this can also be an incentive to "get away with it" by e.g. manipulating the media landscape, lying, covering your tracks, searching for excuses, etc.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you're voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That's why I don't (or at least not completely) agree with "it needs both". A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
So I think I said "voting," and you heard "the current system of parliamentary democracy." I am all for changing the current structure of political establishment in the United States, because the one we've got sucks ass. I am simply saying that:
- The concept of having individual people tally up their opinions, and formalizing the idea that the sum of those tallies is what we all agree to do, is a good idea.
- Refusing to engage at all with the current system of liberal parliamentary democracy (in theory), in the United States, won't make it go away, and we need a strategic decision about what will best remove it and replace it with something better. We can't just use a panacea "if we don't vote then they won't be able to get away with it." They will. People not voting is completely fine with them. I definitely don't think voting is enough, in general but in particular in our current corrupt-to-the-brink-of-disaster implementation of a theoretically voting-based system.
That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up.
This, in particular, I agree with a lot. I would actually expand it a little bit further, and say that the nature of power and manipulation in human beings naturally will tend to try to abuse any "system" that is set up for deciding who gets to take charge. I think the history of large-scale human state power is that however good it sounds at the beginning, people who want to abuse it will inevitably be able to figure out how to bend it to their own ends and corrupt it. Which I guess is the whole point behind anarchism+friends wanting to do away with state power at all.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
They sure voted the system away in Germany, in 1932. This part of your statement seems to have some very obvious counterexamples. Plenty of places in the world have had a parliamentary system that then went away, and in quite a lot of cases, voting was involved in how that got done. It wasn't enough. It was involved.
I think the important questions are firstly, how would we go about changing the parliamentary system in the US? How has it worked when people have tried that in other places in other times? And, when they did try it according to whatever strategies and principles, how did it work out? What happened next?
Bravo for spending your time arguing with a pedant, truly more patient than I would've been. People like that make lemmy insufferable. They're just looking to score a point in a debate and will find any angle to do it. Productive discussion isn't as important as SLAMMING the "opponent" with a gotcha, it's exhausting.
It's interesting to me. I learned some things from the link about democratic confederalism. But yea, "exhausting" is a pretty good word for it over the long term, I often don't really engage with it. The whole pattern of "I'm going to tell you what YOU think, and what you said, and why the strawman is all wrong" is pretty difficult to interact with, and requires this incredibly tedious process of endlessly clarifying and repeating what it was that I actually said.
I have had it happen where after going through that process for some time, someone realizes that we're actually largely on the same team as far as some big issues, so maybe it is worthwhile. That's definitely a minority of the times, but it does happen.