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Given post war history, can you say it would have been much worse than what we've had? The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democrac

Given post war history, can you say it would have been much worse than what we've had? The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy while making a dictatorship of the billionaires.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy while making a dictatorship of the billionaires. The political system was even more run by the elites 60 years ago. For one example, we raise issues now that party insiders or elite-written election rules may somewhat distort the results of the primaries (and caucuses that are open to most party-registered voters, though they are more time consuming and for that reason exclusionary than primaries), 60 years ago we had the same partisan duopoly, without even a fig-leaf of meaningful primary elections, where caucused were much more limited in participation.
- zeth___ 8y ago
  Yet today we have a system that benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958. This is what I mean by the forms of democracy. We have even quantified it [0]. That we got the vote for blacks in the south isn't much of a win, from then on the poor blacks along with the poor whites have been disenfranchised through other means. That we don't elect representative in smoke filled rooms doesn't mean much when the control has moved to selecting who gets to vote in the primaries [1]. [0] www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary-voter-problem-polls-sanders-de-blasio/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary...
  - jngreenlee 8y ago
    This is an incinderary comment: "benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958." First, that would require a tremendous amount of data and an inherently biased framework of benefits valuation to support. Second, you can't demonstrate the opposite, namely, that without the first happening, all others would have been better off. Sometimes wealth and structural freedoms benefit all participants, not to the detriment of the lower end, even when opportunity costs are included. Not saying you are wrong, but your argument is.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> The last 60 years have been a study in how to keep the forms of democracy while making a dictatorship of the billionaires. The political system was even more run by the elites 60 years ago. For one example, we raise issues now that party insiders or elite-written election rules may somewhat distort the results of the primaries (and caucuses that are open to most party-registered voters, though they are more time consuming and for that reason exclusionary than primaries), 60 years ago we had the same partisan duopoly, without even a fig-leaf of meaningful primary elections, where caucused were much more limited in participation.

zeth___ 8y ago
Yet today we have a system that benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958. This is what I mean by the forms of democracy. We have even quantified it [0]. That we got the vote for blacks in the south isn't much of a win, from then on the poor blacks along with the poor whites have been disenfranchised through other means. That we don't elect representative in smoke filled rooms doesn't mean much when the control has moved to selecting who gets to vote in the primaries [1]. [0] www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary-voter-problem-polls-sanders-de-blasio/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2016/04/19/politics/new-york-primary...
- jngreenlee 8y ago
  This is an incinderary comment: "benefits the rich far more than the one in 1958." First, that would require a tremendous amount of data and an inherently biased framework of benefits valuation to support. Second, you can't demonstrate the opposite, namely, that without the first happening, all others would have been better off. Sometimes wealth and structural freedoms benefit all participants, not to the detriment of the lower end, even when opportunity costs are included. Not saying you are wrong, but your argument is.