LogFAQs > #971936318

ParanoidObsessive posted...

As an aside, there is an argument that democracy is itself inherently and fatally flawed - which is why we don't live in a pure democracy, as much as a representative democracy that is meant to minimize the injustices of the masses. "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch."

"The Tyranny of the Majority" is a concept that exists for a reason. We tend to implicitly accept the idea that the largest group shouldn't be allowed to simply inflict all of their expectations and principles onto everyone else against their will, but the freedoms of smaller groups should be respected and maintained even if they conflict with the much larger majority. In a pure democracy, where "The People" voted on every issue directly, the minority on every issue would be utterly fucked. Hence, the purpose of representatives (in theory, anyway) is to take into account the wishes of the majority while still respecting the rights of the minority, and attempting to find a balance that does the maximum good for the maximum number while doing minimum harm. But as history shows us, this doesn't always work as intended.

Disagree, sort of. Representatives aren't any more likely to respect minority rights than the general populace. To see this demonstrated in painful clarity, one need only look at the pre-Civil Rights-era United States. The rights of minorities were not only not considered, they were actively suppressed. Even when suffrage was extended to minorities, few would argue their rights were properly respected until the point was forced via protest and mass unrest. Representative democracy did nothing to solve that particular problem (a problem that, at least on some level, remains unsolved even today).

Democracy *does* have a built-in mechanism for respecting the minority, but it's got nothing to do with representatives. In a system where majority consensus has to be secured, the prudent politician will aim to get as close to 50% as possible without going too far over or, especially, under. That gives him the best use of resources available to him and maximizes his chances of election and getting his proposals passed.

To put it in a facile example, let's pretend two candidates were running for office, but the only thing they were permitted to campaign on is how to divide up a payment of $1,000,000 that was slated to go to the 100,000 taxpayers that live in the city. Candidate A states that the fairest way to divide the money is to simply give everyone $10 and be done with it. But Candidate B suggests that, instead, he will give $20 to the 500,000 oldest people in the city, not including himself. The end result is that the 500,000 oldest people will vote for Candidate B, because even though they see benefit in Candidate A, they see *more* benefit from Candidate B - those 500,000, plus Candidate B's personal vote will be just enough to secure him the win.

Now Candidate B could, in theory, hedge his bets a little bit (what if someone he was giving money to died or was sick or otherwise rendered unable to vote?), but he doesn't want to thin out the money too much or else Candidate A could revise his own plan and snipe enough of Candidate B's votes away by concentrating more money in a smaller majority's hands.

Thing is, since it's in a politician's interest to appeal to as narrow a majority as possible, that makes those majorities inherently unstable and ensures you don't want to piss off the minority too much, because it doesn't take much for them to become the majority. For instance, in the above example, what happens at the next election when some of the voters who weren't amongst the 500,000 oldest the first time around have reached that status due to old people dying? They're going to remember what Candidate B did and probably won't be too likely to support him as a result.

Hence, at least in theory, democracy does have some natural defence mechanisms against a tyrannical majority - not great ones, but they exist.

Beyond that, I agree with most of your analysis. Democracy has many structural issues and not ones that are easily solved. One of the biggest problems, at least as I see it, is that politics, by definition, is a zero-sum game - if I'm running for office, I can only win if all my opponents lose. Unfortunately, in the world of party politics, that means that once I'm in office there is almost no incentive for me to help politicians of another party, even if doing so would be to the benefit of the country. Again, this is most vividly illustrated in democracies like the US, where the legislative and executive branches (and even different components of those branches) can be held by opposing parties. When Republicans are in opposition, not only is it not in their interests to help the Democrats in ensuring the country runs smoothly, it is actually in their interests to sabotage the country and make it run badly because it makes the Democrats look like incompetent administrators and improves the electability of Republican candidates next election; and the same is true when the parties switch.

On paper, elections are one of the most reasonable solutions to the age old problem of how you get rid of people in power after they have outlived their usefulness to the collective (given that most other ways involve copious amounts of violence and destruction). In practice, though, politicians have learned that rather than treating elections as being a referendum on their performance in office, it is far more effective to treat re-election as the entire reason to be in office in the first-place, which is completely backwards.

There's also the issue (admittedly not uncommon in methods of power succession) that the skills needed to win election are vastly different from the skills needed to administer a country and elections largely don't account for that. Thus, someone who is popular and charismatic but has terrible ideas generally outperforms someone who is highly competent but awkward.