King thinks democracy is a great idea. Everyone rejects it. King institutes it anyway.
Wait a second...
replies(3):
Wait a second...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/10/72-of-ame...
Interesting how a process based on the will of the majority can also be disapproved of by the majority.
There's a reason that when we (anyone, really, but even the US) let the policy nerds set up a democracy somewhere else, they usually don't model much or any of it on the US. The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century, as it became clear that not only does it have serious problems, but some of those are extremely resistant to repair.
> The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century
The Supreme Court was recognized as super-dangerous at the founding and the solution some of our much-revered founders provided was "I guess we can just ignore them when they do really bad things?" which definitely seems not great.
Lack of a defense against gerrymandering is extremely bad, but file under things that jettisoning FPTP would largely fix without further specific action. The many ill effects of FPTP are why it's so bad.
There's some evidence that common law significantly increases the overall cost of government administration over continental systems of jurisprudence, though that's a more-recent and developing area of potential weakness.
Democracy has a fascinating "self-refuting" quality to it.
If we take "a healthy interpersonal relationship between people with mutual respect, self-knowledge, and strong communication skills" as a model, we can see how two or more people continually grow into the kinds of lives they want to lead by working together, and that's the kind of democracy I'd like to have.
Obviously, this doesn't scale. But that doesn't mean we just give up and take the lazy, clearly bad option. We ought to evaluate the situation we're actually in and adapt.
I mean, FPTP is obviously bad, but if we're being honest, we should expect a plurality if not majority of people to be unable to recognize a bad decision even when it's presented to them as such. We know that if you run enough emotionally-triggering ads and you will get supporters of virtually any idea - this is basically the concept of manufactured consent. And I think our society can't really evolve in a healthy way until we accept that more widely. (By accept, I mean "beware of", not "exploit".)
If you want a program to run efficiently and give you good results, you don't just keep taking lazier and lazier approaches and delete functions you don't understand. You carefully refactor. It's a continuous process. That's what we're supposed to do with our democratic institutions, but unfortunately, we're stuck focusing on specific outputs so much that we can't even understand the root problems.