I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy. If this is true and POSIWID, then mass democracy only ever nullifies any real extent of democracy. As I see it, the only real solution is to replace power. I don't know how to do that. Do you?
This is why it's so important to have guardrails that limit what the government can do. The US tried to do that, and has probably been the most successful at it - though there's still been a lot of scope creep outside their constitution already. And that's probably a one-way street.
Most of Europe is far more successful than the US at restricting what the government can do, it's just restricted differently.
Lol you must be joking. Most individual rights are long gone in Europe.
By what measurements? It seems most of Europe has such unrestricted government that it is borderline fascism.
LBO maybe. Optimal governance would fix all bad mechanisms e.g. incentive traps, shooting self in the foot stuff, obvious inefficiencies, etc. - so it would result in a better future with more growth and wealth.
The difference can be used to bargain with incumbents to compensate for their current position, while installing a new type of government in its place that is better. It's a pretty hard problem but I don't think it's impossible. I'm pursuing this kind of thing in Finland presently.
You’re pursuing a leveraged buyout of Finland?
> do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy
They don’t need to. When the informed minority on an issue gets lazy, stupid or cynical, however, the system dies.
This sounds like an interesting argument, but it's damn hard to parse. I think you're saying that real democracy needs political (in the widest sense) engagement, which can't be got from the majority of people, so letting everyone participate without regard to such engagement gets in the way of real democracy, and therefore you suggest to "replace" (redistribute) power?
Anyway, this really needs an explanation of what your idea of "real democracy" is, and what "replace power" is supposed to mean.
Anyway, the answer to your question of "how" is likely: at your own peril. ;)
Voting for every little thing is compulsory in Australia and it’s honestly really annoying.
It also hasn't stopped Australia's descent into tech authoritarianism either.
By what logic it is supposed to stop descent into authoritarianism? Сompulsory voting is an instrument to build authoritarianism, not to prevent it.
> Compulsory voting is an instrument to build authoritarianism, not to prevent it.
On what basis does someone make this claim? Authoritarianism is a broad stroke. Most of the time, they eliminate voting, not make it compulsory.
Classically, an authoritarian power only care about voting to initially take hold of power. Every attempt to coerce voting (one way or the other) after that is performative, not instrumental.
> Most of the time, they eliminate voting, not make it compulsory.
No, that is totally not true.
Even North Korea doesn't eliminate voting. People there still vote, just very controllable by the government. Compulsory voting is one of the instruments that makes voting more controllable for the government. Voting in North Korea is mandatory.
I think because it stops only stupid people from voting for stupid leaders. It forces smart people to participate.
I have noticed that the list of potential leaders is made up of a disproportionate number of stupid, ignorante or corrupt people.
> Voting for every little thing is compulsory in Australia
Like what?
> I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy.
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
Size is important (heh). Democracy in ancient Athens had a "demos" only two or three orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number.
Let's ignore the "massification" of democracy (by which I mean entrenched power gaining leverage over the "demos" by targeting propaganda at the low-agency portion of the population, but this may be controversial?). Population scale has changed but Dunbar's number hasn't, and if the 0.1% of the population that is deeply invested in a topic manages to organize, there's a high likelihood that they can get critical reach. However, population scale has changed and Dunbar's number hasn't, so the first step of actually organizing 0.1% of the total population becomes a lot more difficult with scale.
Arguably, my distrust of modern democracy doesn't help, but I have no idea how anyone could manage to find and fish out 20k specific individuals from a pool of 20M people. And that's what needs to be done, IMO, not signing petitions (and in Canada, there's already a little bit of debanking-based chilling effect re: out-of-band political organization).