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Nobody thinks that a president type figure appointing someone else to run a part of the government they are responsible for is an erosion of democracy. What, s
by wredcoll 7mo ago
Nobody thinks that a president type figure appointing someone else to run a part of the government they are responsible for is an erosion of democracy.
What, specifically, is the alternative? The president does literally everything? We have elections for each dmv clerk?
Or maybe we draw some kind of line and say some jobs should have elections and others aren't worth the effort.
(And no, you can't just say "the job of dmv clerk should't exist" because someone has to do it and I'd much rather that person be answerable to an elected government than a corporation or worse)
- rayiner 7mo agoWhat you’re describing is how administrative bureaucracies used to work in the U.S. before the 1920s and in Europe before the E.U. That’s consistent with democracy. The anti-democratic part is when the elected officials began delegating more and more power to those bureaucracies and those bureaucracies became more independent and insulated from elections. That when the backslide happened. In the U.S. that happened because of legislation and new legal doctrines in the 1930s. In Europe it happened because of increasing delegation of power to the centralized E.U. bureaucracy.