Yes, politicians do lack spine and are manipulated, but there's ample evidence that they can get "electoral fright" directly from the populace. We had an example of that just a few months ago when Musk threatened to fund advertisements against Republican senators who voted against some of Trump's bills. That's a specific, concrete, recent example of congressmen being afraid of their constituents' voting power - and there are many others.
"Beige democracy" is a term that I've never heard before, and searching for it lead me to Charlie Stross' article[1], which is extremely interesting and I'm glad that you brought up. I don't fully understand this concept, I'll have to think about it more.
I partially agree with
> Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan.
because,
> They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
...but I don't agree with it completely. It's still possible to use voting power to discriminate between candidates in a party - that's what primaries are for, after all - such that the citizens don't (always) have to choose between "betraying their party" (even though that's a concept which I think is somewhat harmful to democracy) and forcing their representatives to be non-corrupt and address a particular issue.
Sure, it's harder with the system that we have, but definitely not impossible.
I think that the root of the problem is this:
> Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
If people cared, we could have ranked-choice voting and get out of this vicious cycle of polarization that we're in. If people cared, they could threaten to vote out their representatives when they don't do the right thing - and they only have to do that once or twice a generation for it to work! If people cared, they'd could make "goodness lists" of how many times their representatives betray them. If people cared, they could bundle a bunch of small issues together into larger political movements that could get enough traction to get implemented.
I agree the system is "working as designed", but that the system's behavior is a function of the effort that the citizens invest (and the general moral character of the society (and other things), which is rapidly failing, but that's separate), and that the perverse behavior we're seeing is because the value we're plugging into that function is "people REALLY do not care".
Lobbying enables that more, sure, and I'm supportive of cutting it back, but the root problem is so much more important to address, that it's almost better to intentionally leave lobbying the way it is in hopes of forcing the populace to confront the root issue, because solving that is so incredibly important.
Yes, politicians do lack spine and are manipulated, but there's ample evidence that they can get "electoral fright" directly from the populace. We had an example of that just a few months ago when Musk threatened to fund advertisements against Republican senators who voted against some of Trump's bills. That's a specific, concrete, recent example of congressmen being afraid of their constituents' voting power - and there are many others.
"Beige democracy" is a term that I've never heard before, and searching for it lead me to Charlie Stross' article[1], which is extremely interesting and I'm glad that you brought up. I don't fully understand this concept, I'll have to think about it more.
I partially agree with
> Theres no way to keep a government accountable for the small actions that are near or completely bipartisan.
because,
> They just make the election about some big other thing and keep getting away with it. People are forced to judge parties as a whole, and it sucks.
...but I don't agree with it completely. It's still possible to use voting power to discriminate between candidates in a party - that's what primaries are for, after all - such that the citizens don't (always) have to choose between "betraying their party" (even though that's a concept which I think is somewhat harmful to democracy) and forcing their representatives to be non-corrupt and address a particular issue.
Sure, it's harder with the system that we have, but definitely not impossible.
I think that the root of the problem is this:
> Especially if 90% of the voters dont care about the issue.
If people cared, we could have ranked-choice voting and get out of this vicious cycle of polarization that we're in. If people cared, they could threaten to vote out their representatives when they don't do the right thing - and they only have to do that once or twice a generation for it to work! If people cared, they'd could make "goodness lists" of how many times their representatives betray them. If people cared, they could bundle a bunch of small issues together into larger political movements that could get enough traction to get implemented.
I agree the system is "working as designed", but that the system's behavior is a function of the effort that the citizens invest (and the general moral character of the society (and other things), which is rapidly failing, but that's separate), and that the perverse behavior we're seeing is because the value we're plugging into that function is "people REALLY do not care".
Lobbying enables that more, sure, and I'm supportive of cutting it back, but the root problem is so much more important to address, that it's almost better to intentionally leave lobbying the way it is in hopes of forcing the populace to confront the root issue, because solving that is so incredibly important.
Thoughts? Thanks for the great comment!
[1] https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politic...