If a democracy is following the choice of the majority, is the majority's view always the right one? Even if the majority asked crazy things like said "Hey lets not bother helping the poor" etc.
No, the majority just has a louder voice than the minority.
I wouldn't know what you mean with "right". "Right" for whom? Under what perspective?
>>3 is correct; "right" is subjective. Of course, the majority is always right for the members of that majority, but if you're in the minority, then the majority is clearly wrong.
That being said, groups and nations in which the majority make decisions are usually pretty healthy, so long as the opinions of the minority are respected as well.
>>4
A key part of democracy is the protection of the minority from a tyranny of the majority; that's why we have things like the First Amendment in the US.
I wouldn't say that's a part of democracy per se, but it sure is important to a stable one.
Unfortunately, one of the things you learn as you grow older is that the majority of people are dumb
No, that's what you convince yourself as you grow into a teenager who substitutes cynicism for insight.
>>7 Maybe one thing you learn as you grow older is ... Everybody (including you and me) is dumb in any way. And we have to admit that the world is not perfect. We can't have a perfect democracy with unperfect people, uh ? Let's only try to have a better one.
BTW, we could dump any "winner take all" principle ;-) No democratic at all !
I just noticed that my ID in >>7 was incredibly depraved and incestious.
Suprise! It's Mommy!
>>12
Don't you dare drag in rewrite catchphrases in here.
Cue quote about two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch.
Another relevant quote:
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right."
-- Eugene V. Debs
He's got a point.
>>7 is both wrong and right: People are not dumb. However, the decisions they take are frequently dumb if only because the subject matter is so complex.
People en masse aren't stupid, per se. They're ignorant and uninformed. This is why education is important. Although that's just the beginning.
Please commence, Herr Engels, your comment is most interesting but you did not conclude your contribution. In the meantime let me consider this question: Given a common western country, would it be reasonable to judge the people en masse to be ignorant and uninformed?
When taking the average of the population, this is most likely true although on an individual level there is ample skill and knowledge, albeit in a particular direction only.
The aggregate population knows plenty, thanks to education which you mentioned. In many western nations the state provided educational level keeps descending. Even so, over the last 40-50 years education has been provided to the masses, causing a shift in the national level of information and information handling.
However, the whole society's capability to make informed decisions does not benefit very much from this shift since information flows very slowly from different sources. This is caused by lack of communication. The insufficient communication again, is caused by indifferent people: If people do not care about their environment, they will not gather information.
Thus education and information intake depends (mostly) on individuals desire to receive education and to collect information. So what does this desire depend on? How could the decision-making capability of the populace be improved?
People are ignorant when they don't know the things you do nor view the world the way you do.
I think the majority of cynical teenagers are dumb, they will believe anything that cool theatre teacher tells them, and anything System of a Down sings.
>>18 people are not confined to just one point of view. That is the sole reason why people are able to understand each other, the underlying principle of empathy.
Ok sorry! it's too phony. Can't express it much different though.
we live in a democracy yet for the most part its a two party system because the majority votes for them that means that i'm realy restricted to point of views when in reality there are many varied point of views. i belive that the goverment we have now is curpt and dosent work at all.
we live in a democracy yet for the most part its a two party system because the majority votes for them that means that i'm realy restricted to point of views when in reality there are many varied point of views. i belive that the goverment we have now is curpt and dosent work at all.
I'm going to assume the 'we' in >>24-25 is America and run with it.
America doesn't have a two party system because the majority vote for them. The two party system is in place because the two parties have done their best to make it really hard for another party to get a candidate elected. There are the obvious things such as the election laws and gerrymandering the district lines to the more subtle ones such as stealing the thunder of any third-party candidate if their issues ever get traction.
If you do not like the current system, you can always look at Italy to see how well they manage to pull off a plethora of parties system.
>>26
Or we could look at parlimetary systems (like the ones the US has been setting up since WWII.)
>>26 I'm not all too familiar with the US political system but from the way I look at it the two party system were supposed to represent the two majority/main (albeit generic) ideologies in the US, it is now somewhat divided into the left and right wing of US politics, although you have to keep in mind that the reason why the US has "adopted" a two party system is because these are the two largest political group in US politics with enough cash to run regularly run campaigns and you're right about these two parties trying to shut down independent/third party groups any way they can.
i have a brilliant idea.
when big elections come up, our ballots have no names of any candidates anywhere on them. instead our voting ballots are turned into questionaires, getting a profile of what each voter wants, and needs from their government. our electoral college (which is defined as a group of people meant to deliberate about voting someone into a particular office ~_~). actually lives up to their definition and votes candidates into office which have the voter's best interests in mind. what do you think? crazyness? or BRILLIANCE!
Social democracy as practiced today is based on systematically stepping on, marginalizing and demonizing select minorities for political and monetary gain. The only reason those people stay in power is because first, they don't dare step in the majorities or the pensioners and second, if you didn't vote for the soc dems then the conservatives or the centre party might win and that would be doubleplus ungood. And besides, they're just junkies/whores/niggers/criminals/nerds/wops/servants/spics/whatever, why should you care unless you're one of them?
So yeah, a political system that isolates the common man from things that rightly concern him is pretty much made of lose and fail, except for the ruling elite. Whether it is representational "vote once in 4 years, and shut the fuck up in between! have you no respect for democracy??!?!?! filthy anarchist." para-democracy, a republic system, feudal rule or dictatorship.
>>1
The swedish voted to give up nuclear energy. Now they are buying it from russians' who make it in their Tshernobyl type reactors. - Indeed, the majority are idiotic for making such policy decisions, and so is the swedish government for letting them. Independent expert boards and open scientific investigations should be used to make important policy decisions that are not fit for every moron to decide. Majority should only be consulted to decide what color is swedish flag to be. Not important issues such as joining the euro, or whether to give up nuclear energy. This is so because stupid results and stupid laws will only have to be ignored, or everyone will end up suffering like the stupid swedes. Lesson of the story: We now hear of problems in russian nuclear reactors. Will the swedish hunger for energy be the cause of next Chernobyl? Why not use solar and wind energy instead, swedes? That is what you wanted, is it not? Maybe because those are just so much bullshit? Now you can't use nuclear energy that would save us from global warming yourself because of the vote, but it is OK for Sweden to secretly buy it from Chernobyl type nuclear reactors next to Finland. MANY THANKS TO SWEDISH IDIOTIC MAJORITY FOR THIS!
>>31
Why is the majority ignorant? Why can't they be educated better? That's the real problem here. And failing that, at least those who vote should know what's going on. What if people were required to attend meetings with local groups of voters to talk about things, and to demonstrate knowledge of current events and important issues? Less people would vote, but those who did vote would know what they were doing, and they wouldn't have just been drawn out by a TV ad.
that's a poll test ~_~ and it's not fair. our educational system is just too fucked up. even i'll admit to not learning an adequite amount about politics until i was well into college. but the government has to answer to the people as a whole, even if it's been abstracted, that's why i like my idea so much.
The narrow meaning of democracy, from the original Greek concept, is the government according to the will of the majority (demos kratia = rule of the majority).
But the modern concept of Democracy is an evolution from the philosophies of the enlightemnet era to the experiences of the 20th century and thus consist of much more than just the rule of the majoirty. In fact in most democracies of the modern concpet, there are many ways to go against the will of the majority.
When I was younger, I had often found that the majority of people are normal and boring. Normal and boring people tend to vote alike on various topics, and normal and boring people are the majority, so therefore the majority is not always the best choice. There were times when it may have been the best, but those choices were the more fun ones like picking whether to go slowly up a winding path on a hill, or to just run up it and exhaust ourselves out (and that was fun). Politics ain't fun, though. Voting ain't choosing whether to walk up a winding "baby" path on a hill or to go up the "extreme" way at a fifty-something degree angle. Voting is more serious, and the majority can be completely terrible, as with >>1 's "let's not help the poor" example.
I think I'd be a better leader than Bush, but almost no one would vote for me for being nuts. That's the stupid majority for you.
Are you talking about Democracy??? Where every citizen of the state has a vote in a council? or are you talking about Representative Democracy were upon each citizen elects a representative to vote on said council?
Ironically a lot of countries have provisions against mob rule why is that?
The romans had a similar system we have nowdays, although they didnt call it democracy, rather Res Publica (the public thing). However they had a very complex system which had a lot of councils and houses to rule, all designed to run a city-state, however as time went by a lot of these became purely ceremonial, and only two houses really remained, the plebian assembly and the Senate. The Senate is where the nobles sat perse, and as time went by the Senate accumulated most of the power. However it was still second fiddle to the real rulers of the city, as it roles was mostly advisory >_>;
The banners they carried had S.P.Q.R. - Senatus Populus Que Romanus (Senate of the People of Rome bad latin translation).
However Westminster (British parlimentary system) is not quite a direct copy of that (its more evolutionary taken many years to form), where as the US is a cross from Westminster and Rome.
Australia's cross from the US and Brittish, why government is formed in the lower house, where as the US its a seperate entity from the houses (perse government of the day)
Western democracy is not democracy except in a very narrow, limited sense. To wit, you get to vote for your favourite asshole from among tens or maybe even hundreds of other assholes, alongside your asshole neighbour who adores NASCAR and thinks that killing them damned niggers is a good policy for improving the employment situation. Then your votes get counted, tabulated and so forth and before the night is over, the set of new assholes in the parliament is known. Repeat once every couple of years for the varied levels of government, local elections, EU reps' elections, etc.
Regardless of whether the end result is exactly the same as before, this is democracy only in the sense of voting for representatives who'll decide things for you, and only in the political system. In the economical side of society you are either employed by Big (or at least bigger than you) Money, and do what you are told or you live on the street or are humiliated routinely on the dole with the idea that perhaps humiliation will make you want to be sat on 40 hours a week. No one is obligated to ask your opinion and much less care about it. Indeed, it's considered bad form to voice your opinion because it's Ordinary and Expected that we follow the Boss, who is Clearly there due to Merit rather than elbow and/or brown tongue skills.
I tried to introduce a meme-phrase for this concept a year or so back, "parademocracy". Not quite as nasty as "quasidemocracy", but contains the nuance that this may look and quack kind of like an obscure breed of dog-duck on a Pacific island might quack like to someone who's never seen one, but it's not really a duck regardless of what it declares itself to be.
So basically, you don't like democracy because a) the people are stupid and b) the people don't get to decide.
So tell us, is your proposed solution for this to give the stupid people more power, or to remove power from the people?
Looking at the two party system it set up that way due to the way the government was set up in the beginning. Ideologies are as numerous as individuals. The two party system exists because of the "winner take all" system we have in the US (as for other countries sorry, I'm not very familiar). Which forces the parties to be moderate.
If we allow say, representatives to exist according to the population where if 6% of the US votes for the Green party the green party gets 6% of the say in policy then the power goes to the minority groups.
An example. If you were one of the big parties and you had 42% of the vote and another big party had 41% of the vote and everything else is broken up into the remaining percents then the large parties are forced to make concessions to the smaller parties in order to effect policy. What if 9% wanted to ban air travel on Sunday and told the party with 42% of the vote, hey, if you don't ban air travel on Sunday we'll give our vote over to your enemies. We then get policies that are only wanted by 9% of the population! That's FAR less democratic then a two party system which forces policy into the moderate zone.
>>38
My proposed solution would be to give the people more power with regard to matters that, you know, matter. Extreme local democracy (via delegation instead of fixed-length term all-or-nothing representation) would be a good start, but that wouldn't help with the economic aspect... so I guess collectivization and formation of spontaneous communes would be my ticket. Too bad that the anarchists don't have a party, eh?
For a nice look in between with regard to limiting the power of the parliament, check out Switzerland. They actually have their people vote on regular, run of the mill legislation, and the people can submit a law proposal if they get like 15000 verified signatures. None of this "well you elected us for the full 4 years, suck it up!" crap. I'm not quite sure but I think there's some mechanism over there that lets the people force a referendum on whether the parliament should be kicked out wholesale, which requires like 50000 signatures to get started.
>>40 California does the same thing. Get enough signatures and ANYTHING can be brought before the ballot. The problem is people are uninformed and yet try and enact legislation. Once again you end up with exactly what people here have been saying all along. You can't give power to the masses because the masses are ignorant and lazy. They get most of their information from talk shows.
We NEED a system where the common man is seperated from actual legislation or we end up with a system like California. Hey, let's pass legislation where you can't build any more power plants in California, then enact legislation that we need to lower power costs! Because we're complete morons we think this'll work! Hurray!
You still didn't explain what to do about your asshole neighbour who adores NASCAR and thinks that killing them damned niggers is a good policy for improving the employment situation.
I'd do two things
1.) Any party can get members on any ballot in the union provided that they can get a presidential candidate on the ballot in all 50 states.
This should open up the field up to other candidates, which does several important things. First, no candidate can expect to get much support without an actual agenda of some sort. No more "Vote for me 'cause my opponent drowns kittens!" ok, so what -- there are 6 more people running for office who don't drown kittens -- why should I pick YOU? Secondly, it should cut down on campaign contributions. Both parties get corprate sponsors, but if the same company wanted to fund all 7-8 candidates, he can't do so at the current rate -- he'd go broke trying to fund 7-8 people for $2 million. So they'll restrict their contributions.
2.) No candidate could run for public office unless they'd worked in a non-government field for at least 5 years. They need real world experience. Without that, they don't understand what it's like for their people.