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I think democracy was always problematic. Its original form, direct democracy, was vulnerable to the tyranny of the masses. Representative democracy, long desc

I think democracy was always problematic. Its original form, direct democracy, was vulnerable to the tyranny of the masses. Representative democracy, long described as the solution, really isn’t. Representatives are self-interested, just like everyone else, and so we cannot expect them to be purely faithful executors of their respective mandates. What we did not expect, and perhaps are now beginning to, is that human beings are endlessly resourceful when personally motivated. Laws, norms, and institutions are static structures, simple obstacles for people to overcome when they really want to. It has always been far more difficult to build defences than it has been to build new weapons to overcome them. This is the great challenge for lawmakers, judiciary, law enforcement, and anyone who is interested in the preservation of a free and open society.

techslave 7y ago
> Representative democracy, long described as the solution, really isn’t. Representatives are self-interested, just like everyone else, and so we cannot expect them to be purely faithful executors of their respective mandates. That’s irrelevant isn’t it? You elect based on your own self-interest and expect your candidate to follow theirs. There isn’t a single “what’s best for society” anyway so the pull between competing ideas means the most popular ones win. With a tempering effect from the courts. What we did not expect was political parties. These are in effect conjoining at least the legislative and executive branches. Also the electoral college ruined things. Not for the trivial reason you may think but by eliminating runoff elections.
- SamBam 7y ago
  I think the parties part is the key, especially how it has infected the judicial branch as well. Madison claimed that the defense against the tyranny of the majority was that "...the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights [...] consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects." It seems that parties, and particularly blind obedience to the head of the party (whether the president, the speaker, etc), has diminished the "number of interests and sects." (Note, this is my understanding of Madison, but not as a scholar of US history.)
- chongli 7y ago
  There isn’t a single “what’s best for society” anyway A lot of people believe that though. They see democracy as the key to discovering this idea and bringing everyone on board with it. I’ve heard this position described as “mistake theory,” in contrast to conflict theory [1]. In other words, for some people the goal of government is to find the right balance of incentives and disincentives. For others, government will always be a power struggle between mutually incompatible interests. Democracy makes little sense in such a situation. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  > What we did not expect was political parties The founding fathers did. They saw how political factions brought about the bloody English civil wars, and many feared they'd tear the new nation apart. But some people like Jefferson saw them as a part of human nature, a necessary evil. As of our second president (1797) we had a two-party system. But by 1812, the Democratic-Republican party gained control of both Congress and the presidency, and effectively destroyed the Federalist party, giving us effectively one party control of government (the "Era of Good Feelings" in which nationalism flourished in the afterglow of the war of 1812). But in 1830 the new Democratic Party gained control, and we've had two since then.
coldtea 7y ago
>I think democracy was always problematic. Its original form, direct democracy, was vulnerable to the tyranny of the masses. Who deemed that a problem? The elites wanting specific decisions out of the masses.
- peterwwillis 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure the Jews have something valuable to say about tyranny of the masses.
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Exactly the opposite! For one, Germany too had a representative system and elites governing. So what happened there wasn't some issue with "direct democracy" and tyrannical masses that a representative democracy would stop. Second, even within Germany's non-direct-democracy system, the masses last voted for the various parties in 1933 in iirc, the Holocaust started much later, almost 8 years later. In fact, masses wise, Hitler didn't even democratically won 1933 elections. The last time the public had a chance to say anything, was a referendum in 1938, which wasn't on that matter at all (and which result was tampered by the party anyway -- there was "widespread intimidation of voters"). Hitler's Germany is hardly a case against direct democracy and the "tyranny of the masses". If anything, if people voted directly, Hitler might not have even gotten in power -- and his actions would be much more controlled and constrain, as in a direct democracy (ancient Athenian style) people decide for all matters, and can vote someone out of office at anytime, they don't give a blank check to some "representative". And of course, the same horrible crimes could happen in the total opposite of a direct democracy, a downright dictatorship. And indeed, they did in Stalinist USSR or Maoist China. So, thus far, we've ruled out representative democracy (Hitler), and dictatorship (Stalin). Maybe direct democracy looks better now?
    - peterwwillis 7y ago
      You're right, that was a bad example. So let's look at Athenian-style direct democracy. You have the ecclesia, an assembly where any male citizen can vote on proposals and elections (like a more ad-hoc city council meeting and election in one). You have a bureaucracy of 500 randomly selected men who run the city government. Once a year, you can vote to exile any leader for 10 years. Slavery was big business and women had no rights. There were very few elected officials and they were chosen randomly for the highest offices. Think of random people with conflicting, crazy ideas being voted in and out regularly, as judges, as bureaucrats, as heads of state. There was uneven representation because you had to show up regularly to voice your concern, only about a quarter of the people had this time/convenience luxury, and of course most people weren't very educated, so their opinions and positions were often.... dumb. But anyone who was a male citizen could show up and vote on just about anything, and simple majority was the winnter. The assemblies weren't held accountable to themselves, and could vote to break their own laws. Trials lasted one day; arguments were given, and then an immediate vote by the jurors. Out of 1100 citizens chosen by lot to (effectively) govern, 100 were elected. There were age restrictions and short term limits. It changed over time. Over 300 years they went from having a king to having 3 Presidents who were aristocrats elected every 10 years, to elected every 1 year, to literally assigning the Presidency to a random citizen by lot, with the military overseen by 10 elected generals with varying degrees of social/political power in addition to total military command. If the people didn't like the job they were doing, they'd be voted out, fined, possibly executed. Originally the 500 civil servants were chosen by class, with the highest class (richest) getting the top positions, and the poorest class couldn't be selected; but later they could be selected and even got paid (partly because the "random selection" just happened to represent a lot of rich dudes). Eventually laws were not just things decided by assemblies, but small pools of lot-assigned citizens who decided what the law would be. Some researchers have suggested that direct democracy like this wouldn't work over a very large area. It can work in towns and cities, and small city-states, but there's just too many factors for it to be practical in a large scale diverse modern nation.
0xB31B1B 7y ago
To be fair, this issue was much debated at the creation of democratic rule in Greece. Their solution to the problem of ambition and resource guarding is “sortition”, which is a lottery in which a large fraction of the democratic body is chosen by chance rather than by popular election, skill or ambition. This was meant to be a check on the development of the type of permanent ruling oligarchy we see developing in the US.
- samename 7y ago
  Is the sortition method effective at combating this problem?
  - chongli 7y ago
    I have heard about sortition and its supposed benefits but I have never read anything about it used in a real life context. However, perhaps something related to sortition is the concept of visibly random groups [1], which is being tested and used in classroom settings. The paper goes into a lot more detail, but the essential benefit is that the usual cliques and friend groups get disrupted and everyone feels way more comfortable working together with all of their classmates. [1] http://www.peterliljedahl.com/wp-content/uploads/Visibly-Random-Groups.pdf http://www.peterliljedahl.com/wp-content/uploads/Visibly-Ran...
    - cameldrv 7y ago
      South Korea had a very interesting experiment last year. They randomly selected about 500 people to decide what to do about nuclear power in South Korea. They were drafted to spend several months learning about the pros and cons of nuclear power and then voted on what the country should do. This is an extremely interesting model to me. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-South-Korean-president-accepts-public-decision-2310175.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-South-Korean-president...
dehrmann 7y ago
> tyranny of the masses Seeing California's proposition process, I agree. It also shows how disfunctional representative democracy is.
- 0xB31B1B 7y ago
  Interestingly, the ballot prop exists in its current form today because in the early 1900s the southern pacific railroad basically controlled the entire state government. The ballot prop was used to solve the problem of capture of the government by a group of unaccountable elites.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Which works until the 'unaccountable elites' decide that the proposition is unconstitutional. Like Prop 187 [0], a (successful, at ~60% in favor) 1994 proposal to limit services provided by the state to legal residents only. (Agree or disagree with the proposal, "no your constitutional amendment is unconstitutional" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And yes, this was federal court, but the incoming California governor aborted the appeal) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_187 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...
- greglindahl 7y ago
  While the California proposition process has had some terrible outcomes, it has also been a way for the people to force the legislature to do popular things that career politicians hesitate to do, like prison reform and legalizing weed. And that's a good thing.
the8472 7y ago
> What we did not expect, and perhaps are now beginning to, is that human beings are endlessly resourceful when personally motivated. Laws, norms, and institutions are static structures, simple obstacles for people to overcome when they really want to. I wonder whether the staffers of politicians engage in game theoretic modeling, have red teams etc. to try to anticipate these kinds of exploits.
jdkee 7y ago
In the U.S. we can trace a lot of the damage back to Citizen's United v F.E.C. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html
- DuskStar 7y ago
  The problem is that without Citizens United, all that kept the FEC from banning reporting on political candidates was that the law didn't extend there yet. Because what is a front-page article on a candidate if not an in-kind contribution? Why should the Wall Street Journal be allowed to run an article praising the most recent Republican candidate, if the Sierra Club can't publish a documentary condemning their policies? People throw a lot of hate towards Citizens United. But the alternative was worse.
  - jdkee 7y ago
    There are reasonable solutions to that problem such as extending the FCCs fairness doctrine to print media, etc.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      Which was also ruled unconstitutional. And probably still wouldn't fix the Sierra Club documentary issue.

techslave 7y ago

> Representative democracy, long described as the solution, really isn’t. Representatives are self-interested, just like everyone else, and so we cannot expect them to be purely faithful executors of their respective mandates. That’s irrelevant isn’t it? You elect based on your own self-interest and expect your candidate to follow theirs. There isn’t a single “what’s best for society” anyway so the pull between competing ideas means the most popular ones win. With a tempering effect from the courts. What we did not expect was political parties. These are in effect conjoining at least the legislative and executive branches. Also the electoral college ruined things. Not for the trivial reason you may think but by eliminating runoff elections.

SamBam 7y ago
I think the parties part is the key, especially how it has infected the judicial branch as well. Madison claimed that the defense against the tyranny of the majority was that "...the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority. In a free government the security for civil rights [...] consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects." It seems that parties, and particularly blind obedience to the head of the party (whether the president, the speaker, etc), has diminished the "number of interests and sects." (Note, this is my understanding of Madison, but not as a scholar of US history.)
chongli 7y ago
There isn’t a single “what’s best for society” anyway A lot of people believe that though. They see democracy as the key to discovering this idea and bringing everyone on board with it. I’ve heard this position described as “mistake theory,” in contrast to conflict theory [1]. In other words, for some people the goal of government is to find the right balance of incentives and disincentives. For others, government will always be a power struggle between mutually incompatible interests. Democracy makes little sense in such a situation. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/
peterwwillis 7y ago
> What we did not expect was political parties The founding fathers did. They saw how political factions brought about the bloody English civil wars, and many feared they'd tear the new nation apart. But some people like Jefferson saw them as a part of human nature, a necessary evil. As of our second president (1797) we had a two-party system. But by 1812, the Democratic-Republican party gained control of both Congress and the presidency, and effectively destroyed the Federalist party, giving us effectively one party control of government (the "Era of Good Feelings" in which nationalism flourished in the afterglow of the war of 1812). But in 1830 the new Democratic Party gained control, and we've had two since then.

coldtea 7y ago

>I think democracy was always problematic. Its original form, direct democracy, was vulnerable to the tyranny of the masses. Who deemed that a problem? The elites wanting specific decisions out of the masses.

peterwwillis 7y ago
I'm pretty sure the Jews have something valuable to say about tyranny of the masses.
- coldtea 7y ago
  Exactly the opposite! For one, Germany too had a representative system and elites governing. So what happened there wasn't some issue with "direct democracy" and tyrannical masses that a representative democracy would stop. Second, even within Germany's non-direct-democracy system, the masses last voted for the various parties in 1933 in iirc, the Holocaust started much later, almost 8 years later. In fact, masses wise, Hitler didn't even democratically won 1933 elections. The last time the public had a chance to say anything, was a referendum in 1938, which wasn't on that matter at all (and which result was tampered by the party anyway -- there was "widespread intimidation of voters"). Hitler's Germany is hardly a case against direct democracy and the "tyranny of the masses". If anything, if people voted directly, Hitler might not have even gotten in power -- and his actions would be much more controlled and constrain, as in a direct democracy (ancient Athenian style) people decide for all matters, and can vote someone out of office at anytime, they don't give a blank check to some "representative". And of course, the same horrible crimes could happen in the total opposite of a direct democracy, a downright dictatorship. And indeed, they did in Stalinist USSR or Maoist China. So, thus far, we've ruled out representative democracy (Hitler), and dictatorship (Stalin). Maybe direct democracy looks better now?
  - peterwwillis 7y ago
    You're right, that was a bad example. So let's look at Athenian-style direct democracy. You have the ecclesia, an assembly where any male citizen can vote on proposals and elections (like a more ad-hoc city council meeting and election in one). You have a bureaucracy of 500 randomly selected men who run the city government. Once a year, you can vote to exile any leader for 10 years. Slavery was big business and women had no rights. There were very few elected officials and they were chosen randomly for the highest offices. Think of random people with conflicting, crazy ideas being voted in and out regularly, as judges, as bureaucrats, as heads of state. There was uneven representation because you had to show up regularly to voice your concern, only about a quarter of the people had this time/convenience luxury, and of course most people weren't very educated, so their opinions and positions were often.... dumb. But anyone who was a male citizen could show up and vote on just about anything, and simple majority was the winnter. The assemblies weren't held accountable to themselves, and could vote to break their own laws. Trials lasted one day; arguments were given, and then an immediate vote by the jurors. Out of 1100 citizens chosen by lot to (effectively) govern, 100 were elected. There were age restrictions and short term limits. It changed over time. Over 300 years they went from having a king to having 3 Presidents who were aristocrats elected every 10 years, to elected every 1 year, to literally assigning the Presidency to a random citizen by lot, with the military overseen by 10 elected generals with varying degrees of social/political power in addition to total military command. If the people didn't like the job they were doing, they'd be voted out, fined, possibly executed. Originally the 500 civil servants were chosen by class, with the highest class (richest) getting the top positions, and the poorest class couldn't be selected; but later they could be selected and even got paid (partly because the "random selection" just happened to represent a lot of rich dudes). Eventually laws were not just things decided by assemblies, but small pools of lot-assigned citizens who decided what the law would be. Some researchers have suggested that direct democracy like this wouldn't work over a very large area. It can work in towns and cities, and small city-states, but there's just too many factors for it to be practical in a large scale diverse modern nation.

0xB31B1B 7y ago

To be fair, this issue was much debated at the creation of democratic rule in Greece. Their solution to the problem of ambition and resource guarding is “sortition”, which is a lottery in which a large fraction of the democratic body is chosen by chance rather than by popular election, skill or ambition. This was meant to be a check on the development of the type of permanent ruling oligarchy we see developing in the US.

samename 7y ago
Is the sortition method effective at combating this problem?
- chongli 7y ago
  I have heard about sortition and its supposed benefits but I have never read anything about it used in a real life context. However, perhaps something related to sortition is the concept of visibly random groups [1], which is being tested and used in classroom settings. The paper goes into a lot more detail, but the essential benefit is that the usual cliques and friend groups get disrupted and everyone feels way more comfortable working together with all of their classmates. [1] http://www.peterliljedahl.com/wp-content/uploads/Visibly-Random-Groups.pdf http://www.peterliljedahl.com/wp-content/uploads/Visibly-Ran...
  - cameldrv 7y ago
    South Korea had a very interesting experiment last year. They randomly selected about 500 people to decide what to do about nuclear power in South Korea. They were drafted to spend several months learning about the pros and cons of nuclear power and then voted on what the country should do. This is an extremely interesting model to me. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-South-Korean-president-accepts-public-decision-2310175.html https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP-South-Korean-president...

dehrmann 7y ago

> tyranny of the masses Seeing California's proposition process, I agree. It also shows how disfunctional representative democracy is.

0xB31B1B 7y ago
Interestingly, the ballot prop exists in its current form today because in the early 1900s the southern pacific railroad basically controlled the entire state government. The ballot prop was used to solve the problem of capture of the government by a group of unaccountable elites.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  Which works until the 'unaccountable elites' decide that the proposition is unconstitutional. Like Prop 187 [0], a (successful, at ~60% in favor) 1994 proposal to limit services provided by the state to legal residents only. (Agree or disagree with the proposal, "no your constitutional amendment is unconstitutional" leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And yes, this was federal court, but the incoming California governor aborted the appeal) 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_187 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...
greglindahl 7y ago
While the California proposition process has had some terrible outcomes, it has also been a way for the people to force the legislature to do popular things that career politicians hesitate to do, like prison reform and legalizing weed. And that's a good thing.

the8472 7y ago

> What we did not expect, and perhaps are now beginning to, is that human beings are endlessly resourceful when personally motivated. Laws, norms, and institutions are static structures, simple obstacles for people to overcome when they really want to. I wonder whether the staffers of politicians engage in game theoretic modeling, have red teams etc. to try to anticipate these kinds of exploits.

jdkee 7y ago

In the U.S. we can trace a lot of the damage back to Citizen's United v F.E.C. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZS.html

DuskStar 7y ago
The problem is that without Citizens United, all that kept the FEC from banning reporting on political candidates was that the law didn't extend there yet. Because what is a front-page article on a candidate if not an in-kind contribution? Why should the Wall Street Journal be allowed to run an article praising the most recent Republican candidate, if the Sierra Club can't publish a documentary condemning their policies? People throw a lot of hate towards Citizens United. But the alternative was worse.
- jdkee 7y ago
  There are reasonable solutions to that problem such as extending the FCCs fairness doctrine to print media, etc.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    Which was also ruled unconstitutional. And probably still wouldn't fix the Sierra Club documentary issue.