Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

- Winston Churchill [disputed]

What's your alternative?

I'm serious.

(Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).

One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic.

The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.

Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.

It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.

It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).

> Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment.

Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.

Can’t get into details in a forum comment, but I’ll say that whatever we have in most of the Western world ain’t very democratic. It is a spectrum, that currently skews very hard towards plutarchy.

The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887634

I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.

"Democracy" is the form of government; you are speaking of voting systems, which are an implementation detail, and not in the same natural category. "Alternatives to democracy" are things like despotism, monarchy, communism, fascism etc.

> only one head to cut when things got out of hand.

History has been showing time and again that it's an illusion. Bad governance structures and corruption get entrenched, and gladly plead allegiance to a new king.

Aristocratic republics have been doing quite well for some time: Florence, Venice, Genoa in the Mediterranean, much of the Hanseatic league and places like Novgorod, and later the Dutch Republic, in the north.

I was handwaving around the exception for criminals, but I concede your point: it's an oversimplification to say slavery is strictly illegal.

(One can also make some interesting arguments around the notion of the draft).

It's a spectrum. If we're being pedantic, the US is already not a Democracy, but a Democratic Republic.

> The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process.

Yes, but there's an alternative 'significant process' which is to simply have a political party capture the body which interprets the constitution, and then an elite group of powerful insiders captures the political party, and then you're just an oligopoly but with additional steps.

Definitely. But, for what it's worth, that's a process that takes decades and requires an electorate profoundly asleep at the wheel. Like one that fumbles an election during a pivotal year that decides the timbre of their judicial system for a generation.

Certainly not impossible though.

I don‘t think it is a spectrum either (if we are even more pedantic), or at least no a linear scale spectrum, but rather a system of government where democratic institutions ensure certain rights and privileges to common citizens and residents. So maybe a multidimensional spectrum where if you fail to meet a vaguely defined and constantly evolving threshold you are not a democracy.

The USA today will probably (and hopefully) not be considered a democracy by some future standard. Disqualifications may include:

* limited suffrage,

* limited or unequal access to health care and education for a significant portion of the population,

* convoluted voting system where certain demographics have little to no chance to pursue public office,

* large constituencies,

* non-state territories/districts with little to no representation at the national level,

* unincorporated populated areas, with little to no representation at the local level,

* a lack of clear separation of power between the different democratic institution,

* failure to enact popular policies,

* police violence,

* the death penalty,

* a large wealth gap,

* a lack of consumer protection,

* a lack of worker rights,

* failure to prosecute the rich and powerful for their crimes,

* a large nuclear armed military which constantly engages in imperialist actions,

* failure to respect the sovereignty of other states,

* etc.

I think describing this system as a Democratic Republic offers no insight into whether it is democratic or not (or how democratic it is on this spectrum). Republic just means that there is a president which holds some the executive power.

There is far more insight into calling the USA a capitalistic aristocracy, a two party state, a militaristic imperial superpower, a flawed, unequal, and underrepresented democracy, a police state, etc.

well for whom?

Reading between the lines of your question, I'll pre-empt you: nowhere, not even in our so called democracies are the poor doing better than the rich and powerful.

It has always been a constitutional republic by design; its status as a representative democracy is the result of a tradition of electoral college voters deciding to be "faithful" and listen to their constituents (overriding them is to my understanding a constitutional right).

> Disqualifications may include

I don't see why; many of those have nothing to do with what I would understand the concept of "democracy" to entail.

I am predicting (and hoping) that the concept of democracy will continue to shift towards ever greater inclusion and increased human rights as it has in the past two centuries, and a future vision of democracy would disqualify the current system as undemocratic for some of the points above.

Just like how we don’t view pre-civil rights USA as democratic by modern standards. For example, we would never consider a country with legalized slavery to be democratic today. Similarly a future concept of democracy is unlikely to consider a country which practices the death penalty to be democratic by that hypothetical future standard.

I would consider a country with universal suffrage, direct democracy, and legalized slavery to be a Democracy. It's unlikely and pretty shitty, but it's certainly a Democracy.

This twisting of definitions is the same thing happening to "racist". Some people only consider what was previously called "systemic racism" to be the singular definition of "racism" and pretend the old definition does not exist.

I wouldn’t, and neither would most people, and neither would most in academia. At some point (probably around the 1960s) both human rights and equal rights became integral to the concept of democracy. You may not like it, but that is how most people (and most academics) use the concept. The standards for human rights and equal rights are also evolving and today includes stuff like indigenous rights, equal access, universal education, etc.

In the 1970s people were debating whether Apartheid South Africa was democratic or not (it obviously wasn’t; not even by the standards of the time) and today people are debating whether Israel is a democracy (again; it obviously isn’t) but if we apply the standards of the 1940s to both Apartheid South Africa, and today’s Israel, they would both be considered democratic.

And just to clarify, the concept of racism is equally evolving. Much of what we consider racist today would not have been considered racist in the 1980s. The (then considered non-racist) behavior of the 1980s was equally harmful as the same behavior today. But humanity has simply learned, and updated the concept of racism to include this behavior. This is the nature of knowledge and the human experience, we learn more things, and adjust our concepts to fit with our ever increasing knowledge.