this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
577 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37724 readers
545 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That’s actually the opposite of the foundation of democracy. Democracy spreads the power out through as many people as possible in order to lessen the potential for abuse by any individual actor. Electing representatives who have near unlimited power and no recourse for constituents isn’t democracy, its oligarchy.
Well, that's not our democracies work. We don't let people vote every law by referendum, that would be spreading power as much as possible.
In ancient Athens it was common, as was common for judiciary decision to be made by 3-4 hundreds people drawn at random. But that's something almost universally considered stupid now, we have a judge, who we consider an "expert" in law.
By your definition, we don't live in a democracy, on the contrary, democracy is extinct on this planet
There are indeed democracies on the planet that work in a way that both allows the use of representation and maintains the power in the hands of the constituency by allowing easy recall processes and mandates that officials follow the will of their constituency. We just don’t have them in liberal democracy, which was created, in part, to specifically guard against the possibility of majority rule, as mentioned in multiple of the Federalist papers, including but not limited to Federalist 9 and 10.