Why democracy?
First of all: this system brought undeniable historical advances in the West (formal equality, freedom of speech, universal suffrage). There's no way to deny this when compared to monarchies and the civil-military authoritarian regimes in Latin America. However, even so, current democracy inherently carries the objective of preserving the economic order. The political structure is designed so that economic elites (whether bourgeois or corporate) maintain control through campaign financing, legislative influence, and media dominance.
With this in mind, I decided to bring up for debate why democracy is considered the ultimate and best system we currently have, leaving no room for criticism of the system itself (representative democracy). This system derives from a stratified one (Greek) that has been refined over centuries to take power away from monarchs and transfer it to the bourgeoisie. Today, we live in a bourgeois-liberal democratic state that restricts any minority group’s access to the center of power. Everyone notices this, but since proposing or thinking of something distinct from representative democracy is dangerous, most people aim to patch a system that was designed to be this way: exclusionary and elitist. In the end, this term (democracy) has been elevated to an absolute moral ideal, leaving no room to question its central premise (the maintenance of centralized power in financial capitalism, which now finances the most radical right-wing movements).
By the way, it’s worth considering how the right gained power in the world (money). And how it maintains its hegemony over cultural thought worldwide (money). Who funds this? Who benefits from this? Why couldn’t a decentralized yet ~autocratic~ proposal (I understand the difference between autocracy and the lack of checks and balances, but I fail to see why the current system is inherently better) be superior to a centralized government defending the interests of a dominant class? (Hint: the right maintains its hegemony because it controls financial resources and the means of cultural production; it’s not just about governments but a machine operating at multiple levels where the dominant ideology reflects the ideology of the ruling class.)
Continuing, there are no decentralized and autocratic proposals (in the sense of concentrating power efficiently for certain decisions while decentralizing access to power overall) because these challenge the traditional logic of checks and balances, which ironically has been more effective at blocking structural changes than preventing abuses of power. For instance, the concept of distributive autocracy (a model in which power is temporarily centralized to carry out rapid structural reforms, followed by mechanisms of redistribution and decentralization of power) is rarely discussed because the tripartite and bicameral system locks this debate in place to maintain control through financial power (amendments) of the country.
We remain hostages to a system that has become humanity’s manifest destiny, where no questioning can be raised without the individual being labeled as morally inferior. It’s not that representative democracy is inherently superior, but that it was historically designed to be acceptable within the context of bourgeois power. The question, therefore, is not simply "autocracy vs. democracy," but how we can create inclusive, participatory, and redistributive systems where power structures are transparent, accessible, and fair for everyone.
I think you fundamentally misunderstand one of the main selling points of representative democracy, which is handling the transition of power.
Lets start with a perfect government. Dictator, democracy, communism, doesn't matter. Imagine whatever you want, it's perfect. Everyone in power is great and things are great.
So.....what happens in 100 years when literally every single person involved is dead? How do you select new people?
Historically, it was basically "rulers choice". "I rule absolutely so my kids will or my favorite general will or my concubine will or whatever".
There's a couple of problems with this, but one of the BIG ones, is it's very inflexible. You're hoping that the new guard will understand things as well as the old guard, and be able to adapt and shift to the times.
The problem is, if they CAN'T be flexible (like say there's a huge fucking war brewing and no one knows if they should get involved or not), there's really not a whole lot of options for the populace. In general as much as rulers rule, they've needed people. The more people you have, the more output you can produce, and perhaps as importantly, the more likely you are to be able to defend your country from those who have a difference of opinion on who's land it is and what rules they should follow and who should be allowed to continue breathing.
So...we have our neighboring war, and a pissed off populace, and some form of absolute leader who refuses to do what the populace wants, to their detriment.
Well the classic release valve for this is all sorts of civil issues, with the most extreme being full out civil war. Civil wars are often really really really bad for the country involved as you are only weakening yourself, making life worse for EVERYONE, and making you more attractive to be attacked by foreign powers (who will get involved one way or another). There are few worse outcomes for a society than all out civil war.
And this is where things like democracy come in. It's a release valve that splits power. Don't like the current regime, well rather than having to take up your pitchforks and have everyone dead in the street in a months time, you just ride it out to the next election and vote them out. Huzzah, movement is made on getting a different outcome.
The details get fuzzy from there because there's still LOTS of different ways to do this, and because ideally you also want to split power so one election doesn't occur and then end in "and guess what i'm NEVER leaving". Further countries have a desire to flexible, but only to a point. You can't make trade agreements with a country who's changing their laws and rules every day, so ideally you stagger your elections so there's some level of short/middle/long term offices to help ease transitions.
Of note, all of this is premised on the idea that you really really really don't want the populace shooting each other and your military because you CAN'T win at that point. People often point out how impossible it would be for a country to defeat a modern military, but at the point any significant % of the populace is fighting the modern military, that country is in serious shit. Sure bombs, tanks, and helicopters and what not are nearly impossible for some citizen with a rifle to deal with, but it doesn't matter when your entire infrastructure is completely choked due to a lack of workers (as they're shooting you and the other workers) and you're deploying forces to blow up your own assets.
So, is this preserving economic order? Arguably, yeah, because the real goal is to preserve the average people not burning the entire place down. There are absolutely regimes that accomplish this by being autocratic and keeping their populace divided and weak. While I take issue with some of the points, I do think The Dictators Handbook is a relevant read for the discussion. The short version is "if your country is already in the shit, keep it there. Starved people with no infrastructure have a much harder time rising up vs your well fed and happy military"
With all that said, to more directly address your post-
Bluntly, I think your framing is horribly slanted and working backwards. You think "the right" has power because of the current system and that it was designed for that. I don't agree, and think that's a very very shallow view of governmental systems, doubly so on a global scale.
Further like many people trying to propose a "better" system, you seem to start from "well if we just did this it would be better", but the problem is if you had a populace that could reasonably do "that" you could probably do ANY political system and be fine, because your populace isn't the self destructive ignorant scared but sometimes well meaning masses that humans actually ARE.
My analogy, as always, for these things is that you've been given a plot of land on a gorgeous beach. So many people propose some beautiful resort that has all the amenities and is gorgeous, and is going to be fucking GONE when that first hurricane/flood/tsunami/whatever hits. Democracy is the political equivalent of a bunker. It is designed to try and prevent the worst case, not assuming the best case.
Finally, i'll say that you are judging modern democracy on its corruption and then presupposing and comparing your system assuming it has none. This is often the issue with conversations about communism/socialism/whatever, as they point (correctly) to how democracy has slowly been eroded by financial interests and power over the many years, but what is the mechanism in your decentralized autocracy that prevents the same thing from happening to it?
At the end of the day power IS a thing and distributing and controlling that power is important. One of the best things about the successful democracies has been that they've mostly manged to get the military OUT of politics, and in theory tried to keep money out as well (obviously both have been eroded). A system that starts with some "all powerful authority" with the ability to seize assets or whatever for the state, is of course going to be the huge target for the next corrupt person in the system who decides they can run things better. History is littered with governments that started as X but very quickly converted into "Military dictatorship" or something akin because oops they have all the guns and a very good argument when it comes down to "you and what army".
That is a very good answer. Thanks.
With all due respect, I don’t think you actually understand the differences if this post is the conclusion you came to.
Elections, term limits, and institutional checks and balances are designed to prevent any single entity or group from consolidating power indefinitely.
In contrast, other systems—like the “distributive autocracy” you describe—rely on the assumption that a central authority will act virtuously, achieve its goals, and voluntarily relinquish power afterward. History offers numerous examples where this promise has failed. Once power is concentrated, the incentives to maintain control often outweigh the original intent, leading to authoritarianism.
This is the key problem. The idea of “temporary” centralized power is appealing in theory but consistently dangerous in practice. See: every dictatorship ever.
Ultimately, democracy’s greatest strength is its unique ability to self-correct. This feature is what does in fact make it inherently superior to other forms of government. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the system most capable of evolving to meet the needs of its people. The challenge isn’t to replace it but to ensure it lives up to its ideals.
I think this is a good summary of the whole post. I don't normally want to be snarky like this, but in this case I wouldn't even know where to begin with a response. Ain't nobody got time for that.
It seems like an example of seeing the downsides of the current system because we live in it and it's not that hard, but being unable to give a remotely similar amount of scrutiny to the fictional alternatives.
But this is not what we see every day. Today we have a rigged democracy. It's in the hands of a few billionaires who can control states through financial capitalism. The idea of checks and balances is beautiful. But it does not work the way it should. It is the same problem you pointed out about temporary autocratic powers. In theory it is supposed to work, but it is not what we are seeing day in and day out in the democratic world.
I can see your point about democracy IF democracy worked that way. Same with any other political system. I'm just trying to think about this idea of an ultimate system (democracy) that has shown some clear signs of stress.
Or, to put a question about it: how can we solve the problem of a democracy that is only accessible to those with (a lot of) money? Can we exchange a dictatorship of the military for a dictatorship of the businessmen? Is it so different?
That’s a strong claim to make which is not the consensus option of political scientists https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study
But above anything else “Why democracy” The answer is anything else that has ever been tried has turned out worse. That’s not to say democracy is the final state of governance for the rest of human history. But if you’re going to propose something else, you need a compelling case that’ll actually be better and not fall into the same traps as previous utopian failures that we saw endless examples of in the last century.
This is a 2016 text, a lot has change worldwide since then. I guess nowadays we have way more problems with the options pout int the table.
I agree. But democracy is no longer even questionable. Anyone who wants to ask the question "what if ... not democracy?" will be dismissed as a lunatic.
I guess I reject the central premise here. I think what we really have is a collective decision of citizens that has chosen a government that differs from your preferred outcome.
Several reasons to accept the central premise of "rigged democracy", even if we're not at full 'elections are a lie' state:
In short, we have a system where 'vote with your dollars' is a central tenant of life. It's just, you know, that means whoever has the most dollars has the most votes. You'll notice there is a very, very strong correlation between 'most money spent' and 'won election'.
That's not to say that hope is lost, nor that the answer isn't just "a much better democracy taking lessons learned from the last one."
Gotta remember America is still basically running the alpha build of modern democracy. Lot of exploits came out that never got fixed. We're due for a proper ground-up rewrite of the code base.
Ideally a new version would have better scale of representation and/or more pathways to direct democracy. Also eliminating voting in favor of random civil service (sortition), but that's a bigger discussion and a harder sell. I particularly like this suggestion:
At this point, I'm not sure "random drunk schizophrenic pulled out from under the bridge" would be a worse option than Trump V2.
I was thinking about access. What are the real chances for an ordinary person to have access to politics? People are limited to voting for a candidate chosen by a party. Usually the candidate is just an avatar for a powerful group (media, tech, etc). What is the real choice in a democracy controlled by a bunch of old rich people?
My mistake, military democracy is not an option. English is not my first language, so I might have been a little imprecise in what I was thinking. As a sudamericano, the military dictatorships are always a threat, but also, these military are always connected in some deep way.
Every society that's ever existed has been under some level of control of rich old people. In a market economy, money is a proxy for power, and so it's inherent that powerful people have power.
A pretty telling key indicator that points against your central thesis is looking at how many US presidents became billionaires due to their presidency. I can't personally think of any.
Presidents remain fairly wealthy and powerful after they leave office, but if you made a list of the top 100 most powerful people in the country, former presidents wouldn't have a chance of scratching the surface (excluding trump, who on top of maintaining a cult of personality that's mostly divorced from the political system, was already a billionaire before he became president).
As far as ordinary people having access to politics? Yes, regular people in the US have extremely high access to politics. You can attend and speak at city council meetings, ordinary (non wealthy) people run for local and state office and win in literally every election, and some of those people go on to have a role in federal politics. Most people (understandably) don't want to get involved in politics as a career though.
Aside from professionally, you can obviously vote in general elections, but you can also vote in primaries, which is how political parties choose candidates. "The party" isn't some external group of people, everyone who is registered to a political party makes up the voting body of that party.
It mostly sounds like your issue with democracy is that the majority of voters disagree with you, which I guess you could view as a flaw, but wouldn't you rather have a system that at least takes the will of the people affected by it into account?
Agreed. But politicians are the representatives of businessmen, so businessmen don't have to get dirty in politics. Presidents (and other congressmen) don't have to be rich because they serve other people's interests.
OK, but who chooses the politicians who run in the primaries? The system is too internalized for you to see that access doesn't really exist, it just looks like it does, because this democratic system is made to look like it gives you choices, when in reality it surrounds you with the same people, with the same opinions, and gives you similar answers.
My main question is: is it the people's opinion? Foucault believed that power is exercised through institutions, and that institutions have the ability to deny people their individuality. This power is omnipresent in society and operates at every level of social relations. The deeper we get into the system, the more we can't see that it is flawed because we can't see any other solution or alternative to it. We believe that the system is the best we have because we have been denied the idea of any other material alternative. We become so obsessed with the idea of a bourgeois democratic society that we believe people defend these ideals because they want to, not because they are bombarded with common sense all day long in every place (schools, businesses, the media).
My point is more like: do people want this? Have people chosen this? How much individuality is left in a system with such omnipresent institutions that always deal with and defend the same people and the same interests?
We just saw in 2016 that someone who was a complete outsider that no one in the establishment wanted to hold the mantle of power became the most powerful person in the GOP since Reagan. He was able to seize power because he said outlandish things that effectively stirred up a base and despite all of the insiders you're talking about hating it every step of the way, he was able to go from a complete joke to the president, and now has the entire party toeing his line.
It's very possible for an outsider with enough influence to get to the presidency. Despite all of his attempts to dismantle it since he gained that power, the fact that Trump was able to get elected in the first place proves that democracy still functions. Yes, he was obscenely wealthy, but there are quite a lot obscenely wealthy people who would like to be president, but aren't. And there are a hell of a lot of "insiders" with strong political connections that would have loved to be president in 2016, but weren't able to. So the idea that every political choice is pre-ordained by a secret cabal of insiders who dangle elections in front of our faces as a distraction doesn't really hold water.
Trump is not an outsider.
The same goes for every other right-wing politician in the world (Milei, Bolsonaro and the whole Banon gang). They sell themselves as outsiders? Of course they do. But they are not. They are politicians or businessmen who are already involved in political games.
No one is an outsider if you expand the definition of insider wide enough. Trump wasn't involved in politics before his 2016 run though. He didn't have a whole lot of close ties in Washington, he didn't have the support of the Republican party until it became clear he was the overwhelming popular choice, and he actively went to war with the Republican establishment at the time. It's hard to be more of a political outsider than that.
Yes, he was obviously a businessman, but business is not the same arena as politics.
It's very hard to believe that a bilionaire is an outsider on politics. The whole purpose of maintaining his wealth is linked to his ability to make policy and influence people and institutions. The idea of an outsider would be more like the idea of a person outside the axis of (financial) power, capable of breaking with the system. This is not the case for any billionaire today, mainly because their wealth depends on their ability to be eloquent and capable political actors.
I think you're confusing the ability to be and do politics with being a professional politician (making a living from it).
Wasn't he explicitly not a billionaire prior to Truth Social? He lied about it, but the common perspective was he was full of shit, and owed oligarchs money iirc
If you're making the argument that rich people, simply by virtue of being rich, are political insiders, you're free to use that definition I guess, but that's not how the term is commonly used. What people mean by political insider is someone who has had a long career within the sphere of politics and as such has people they owe favors to, who owe favors to them, they have back channel contacts, relationships, loyalties, and enemies within the political system. A random rich person doesn't have that, even though they obviously have a different type of influence. Saying someone is a political insider has a certain connotation, both good and bad. It means they understand the system and how to navigate it to get their priorities met, and people loyal to them that will help them, but it also means they have baggage, they have people they owe favors to which need to be repaid, they have a legacy that will always follow them and rivals they'll always have to fight off.
You don't need to be a politician to be a political insider; lobbyists, NGO executives, high ranking bureaucrats, and military officers, diplomats, and certain rich people that specifically have a lot of dealings with the government as a supplier, or with close personal ties (like Elon Musk is angling to become) would be considered political insiders too. Just being rich doesn't automatically make you one though.
The US presidency has been won by the opposing party for the last three elections. That’s not how it typically goes In countries where the elections are rigged.
The alternation of power between two very similar ideologies controlled by the same people sounds very rigged to me ...
What same people control both parties in your view? They largely have entirely different voting bases, different politicians, different pundits, different donors, and different policy proposals.
If you're making the argument that they have similar politics because they're both moderate with respect to the American political landscape, well, yeah, they're both big tent parties, thats the whole point. Neither of them are radicals because radicals are... radical, and thus by definition a small minority that won't have a lot of pull in large scale politics.
The same rich Americans control both parties, the oligarchy. If it is a different set of oligarchies in each party, I can't tell.
Disagree, the parties are pretty much the same. They differ on some minor points of civil and individual liberties, but in the end they are almost the same. There is no difference between them and the system is designed that way. The idea of a progressive x a conservative party, it's not true. They are both conservative with, as I said, minor social and economic differences (mainly for the minorities).
Progressive versus conservative are relative terms. The democratic party would be considered a centrist party by western european standards, but in the scope of American politics is a left leaning liberal party.
I can cite hundreds of policy platforms where the parties disagree, so I have no clue how you can say they're pretty much the same, or that one party supporting a woman's bodily autonomy, while another does not, or one party embracing and supporting NATO membership, while another does not, or one party supporting LGBT rights while another does not are minor points. They're pretty major issues that would massively impact your life if you were a woman, gay, or Ukrainian, as examples.
If by "pretty much the same" you mean the democratic party doesn't radical leftist politics, yeah, like I said, both parties are big tent parties, meaning they're moderates, on average. That's fundamentally how two party systems work.
I understand these differences, but at the same time you can see that they are essentially the same side of the same coin?
In any other country they are both conservative capitalist parties with a very strong protectionist economic culture. But you make a very good point about the minority issues, which are a big difference. But again, it is very narrow to say that these parties are not essentially the same.
Every country has a protectionist economic culture. I think you can argue that only the Regan era offshoring was the only time that wasn’t the case and we can see the results of that experiment today.
Have you been paying attention? The MAGA party is only interested in what their dear leader tells them.
If you think current day republicans are the same as the one from even 20 years ago, I’m not sure what to tell you.
If you assume the US system, it isn't rigged. It is flawed. This is because the amassed wealth of the few has created the chance of controlling power. Wealth consolidates wealth through power. Through large crowdfunding and donations there are no actual alternatives to red or blue. A two-party system creates a them vs us, truth and fake news, winning vs stolen elections, in short, polarization. This has been a long time in the making and the system is showing cracks.
To restore democracy as intended, the US needs to set limits to party spending on ads. It needs to stop turning political parties into a business. Politics is about vision, about ideology.
Well I typed out a long response and accidentally deleted it, so I’ll try to be more concise here:
It’s very tempting to look toward autocracy as an answer to a struggling democracy. I would love a benevolent dictator to step in and save us from ourselves and deliver us nationwide high speed rail, single payer healthcare, and a clean energy economy with little inequality. Then I’d like that dictator to give up power while reforming our democracy as they leave. As fun as a fantasy as that is, it’s just not going to happen. Autocracy and democracy are more than just systems of government, they are reflections of our cultural beliefs and ideals. It’s part of the why right wingers are on the rise everywhere; the systems aren’t delivering ideal outcomes for the majority of people and so their belief in the system is wavering (as seems to be the case with you). I strongly believe the answer is a stronger, reformed democracy, not autocracy in any form. The path to that is unclear and filled with challenges, but I think it’s the only realistic one. The HRE did of course have its dictators in times of emergency, and that sometimes worked out well, but they also had a cultural understanding that one who didn’t give up power would be exiled or executed; they also weren’t a constitutional republic with a modern military and global economy.
There’s no reason our system has to preserve the current economic order as you say. Was it designed to do so initially? Sure to an extent, but that vision and reality has changed over the last two hundred or so years. Today it’s because it’s been captured and deregulated by oligarchs. It can and has been undone before (see: America about 100 years ago).
Also since when can’t people criticize the system? Seems like that’s all people do. Which is great, we should criticize it but I think throwing the whole system out is unlikely to ever happen and frankly would just open the door to a traditional autocrat. I don’t see how a “distributive autocracy” would realistically operate. It sounds like you just want a better functioning democracy.
Democracy is hard and takes constant vigilance. Most people don't want to worry about that so they focus on their personal lives and problems. Meanwhile there are insidious groups of people (such as the Federalist Society) that spend decades undermining democracy and taking away the rights of individuals.
Also, it appears to be a natural state for most people (maybe about half?) to be authoritarian followers. They really want a father figure to fix the problems so they don't have to. I've been thinking about this more recently with respect to the presence of kings and superheros in fiction. Lord of the Rings, The Legend of Zelda, The Marvel Universe: They all have unelected leaders who fix problems through force or birthright. The general populace is just there to be led. Our culture and our language is completely saturated with the concept of an authority who punishes those who are wrong. Also most cultures are either directly religious or arose out of religion. All the Abrahamic religions are fundamentally authoritarian and undemocratic.
Recently I've been reading Nonviolent Communication. One of the points in the 2nd or 3rd chapter is about how we use language to assign blame to others and avoid responsibility for ourselves. This language favors hierarchy and central authorities. BTW I'm not advocating anarchy or questioning the existence of evil. I'm just saying we are in a world and in societies that make democracy and self governance an uphill battle and it's not surprising that it is constantly under attack.
This is the power of myth.
But I was thinking of a much more communitarian society where you don't have to obey a system that is rigged (the "why" is debatable, but nowadays it is) and you don't have access to change (the financial barrier is too high for any normal person) because "it's the better we can think now". I'm not changing anything, I'm just trying to understand why so many people defend a rigged democracy with so much enthusiasm and don't want to imagine anything else.
Violent revolution is a coin flip and probably won't end with my ideal utopia. While our current systems have problems, it's very possible that the fascists would take power and crush civil rights. I'd rather reform our current institutions than bet on a maybe.
As an individual example, if you've ever worked at a job you didn't love, why didn't you change jobs? More than the risk of unemployment, most people have some justified fear of the unknown. It's always possible the new job will be significantly worse.
Also, most democracies have successfully weathered huge changes since their founding and adapted appropriately. The same can't be said for most autocracies (peaceful transfer of power eventually breaks down).
We have a lot of revolutions that have failed in other countries over time. But we also have a lot of revolutions that have significantly changed the status quo. And we have a lot of popular revolutions that have been defeated by the power of finance capitalism (as we saw in Haiti). The possibility of other groups using the revolution for other means is always a threat, of course, but I don't think it's a threat to people's ability to change.
Agreed. But I don't know if this can be extended to a community view.
It can. As you said, many revolutions have ended in ways that are much worse than present conditions. If we assume everyone is acting in a way that makes sense for them personally, current society seems to be kinda okay for most people in developed countries. Living standards right now are really good compared to the past, and I personally don't think I'm smart enough to set-up a new state from scratch without creating new problems. I do think I'm smart enough to propose and implement solutions that will improve our current system (like voting for politicians that will improve the status quo).
I don't know about that. But even so, the idea is to improve the lives of people around the world. And for that we need another system that is not tied to the central (financial) power that controls and exploits.
Id say the main think that would turn me off to the idea of "a model in which power is temporarily centralized to carry out rapid structural reforms, followed by mechanisms of redistribution and decentralization of power" is that it sounds like its vulnerable to someone saying "Im going to enact martial law and take total control, but only because I need to to solve this big problem I see with society, and Ill totally give up power once the job is done" and then they will just spend the rest of their life coming up with excuses to say the job is not done.
Beyond that, a lot of people support "the establishment" because they want consistency. They dont care as much that the law isnt always good, so long as they can anticipate whats going on in the world and can olan around it. That becomes harder if other people are constantly reinventing and reimagining the system without them.
I don't have anything to add right now to the discussion surrounding this, but I did want to recommend the anime/Japanese novel series that has the theme of "what is better, a corrupt democracy or a benevolent autocracy" throughout the series. It has an OVA from the 80s-90s and a new adaptation of it that is currently airing.
I still need to watch it fully but I think based on your post it may be right up your alley.
Edit: I was typing this quickly yesterday and realized I did not include the name of the series. Legend of the Galactic Heroes