I would say the concept of liberal representative democracy is a scam, because on one hand lobbying and media control will decouple votes and decisionmakers from the actual collective good decision, and on the other hand party politics and and corruption will skew the fairness and representation even further from what is good.
And it’s not like there aren’t better concepts out there, the problem is more that almost all groups in liberal democracy, so parties, companies, the government itself are at best partially democratic and at worst authoritarian in nature. Especially companies obviously aren’t usually democratic at all. So continued or deepening democratisation isn’t actually in these groups interest because they or their leaders would lose power.
Council democracy or other direct democracy approaches are goals to work towards, or in some places just more representative and less dishonest voting would be a start.
In essence liberals like calling things democracy that on the whole make very few honest attempts at pursuing democracy, while still calling themselves democracies. I find nowadays my personal definition doesn’t include these “democracies” and is more along the lines of “a continuous process that honestly tries to provide the most value for all people and pursues contious improvement toward that end.”
Big yes to the scam that is liberal democracy. One terrible use of libs calling things democracy when they aren’t is blanketly condemning everyone in some place bc someone got elected: Russia and every red state in the USA. These places are full of people who do not support the government and had no real chance of electing real representation nor would those elected officals really be useful.
I would say the concept of liberal representative democracy is a scam, because on one hand lobbying and media control will decouple votes and decisionmakers from the actual collective good decision, and on the other hand party politics and and corruption will skew the fairness and representation even further from what is good.
And it’s not like there aren’t better concepts out there, the problem is more that almost all groups in liberal democracy, so parties, companies, the government itself are at best partially democratic and at worst authoritarian in nature. Especially companies obviously aren’t usually democratic at all. So continued or deepening democratisation isn’t actually in these groups interest because they or their leaders would lose power.
Council democracy or other direct democracy approaches are goals to work towards, or in some places just more representative and less dishonest voting would be a start.
In essence liberals like calling things democracy that on the whole make very few honest attempts at pursuing democracy, while still calling themselves democracies. I find nowadays my personal definition doesn’t include these “democracies” and is more along the lines of “a continuous process that honestly tries to provide the most value for all people and pursues contious improvement toward that end.”
Big yes to the scam that is liberal democracy. One terrible use of libs calling things democracy when they aren’t is blanketly condemning everyone in some place bc someone got elected: Russia and every red state in the USA. These places are full of people who do not support the government and had no real chance of electing real representation nor would those elected officals really be useful.