House Republicans haven’t been terribly successful at many things this year. They struggled to keep the government open and to keep the United States from defaulting on its debt. They’ve even struggled at times on basic votes to keep the chamber functioning. But they have been very good at one thing: regicide.
On Friday, Republicans dethroned Jim Jordan as their designated Speaker, making him the third party leader to be ousted this month. First, there was Kevin McCarthy, who required 15 different ballots to even be elected Speaker and was removed from office by a right-wing rebellion at the beginning of October. Then, after a majority of Republicans voted to make McCarthy’s No. 2, Steve Scalise, his successor, a number of Republicans announced that they, too, would torpedo his candidacy and back Jordan instead. Finally, once Republicans finally turned to Jordan as their candidate, the largest rebellion yet blocked him from becoming Speaker. After losing three successive votes on the floor, the firebrand lost an internal vote to keep his position as Speaker designate on Friday.
The problem isn’t “other people make decisions”, it’s “not everyone has the time or energy to make good decisions”.
Take Brexit. That was as direct a decision as I can think of, yet no one knew what it really meant, and many were intentionally mislead. I’d love to live in a country were everyone has the time and will to research and verify all the facts, but that’s a losing proposition when people are working multiple jobs and still going hungry. Buying people’s votes could be even easier, especially for those who don’t care.
That’s what I pointed out when I said people can only vote for the bills they care about and ignore the ones they don’t.
Brexit is an example of the will of the people going against their own interests, but what about when Congress goes against the will of the people with a detrimental effect?
Is direct voting perfect? No. You will always be able to find issues with anything suggested. Is it better than a representative democracy? Probably, but not enough nations have implemented it so we don’t have much data to go on.
This is when you start going into fantasy world territory. There’s no way in hell it’s cheaper or easier to buy individual votes than lobbying and campaign contributions. First of all, it’s illegal. How would you set something like that up so it’s easy for people who ‘don’t care’ while keeping it away from law enforcement? You can’t. All that may happen is small-scale vote buying, which already can occur.
Anyways. Thanks for being a fine example for why we don’t make progress. Better the devil we know, right?
Advertising is how you biy the votes of people who don’t really care. If they wont read up on it, then you tell them such-snd-such bill is bad for them, just like attack ads about candidates today.
I’m not saying direct democracy is intrinsically bad, I’d love to use it more. A few yes/no questions alongside a normal vote could be useful. I’m saying direct democracy isn’t a drop-in replacement for representative democracy, especially a 100% direct version.
Direct and representative have shared weakpoints, and their own weakpoints, and we need to use each to cover eachother. Perhaps using a direct veto over representitive decisions, or direct decisions over representitive oprions.
With full direct democracy, laws won’t mean anything anymore, and it’s just mob rule. Controversies will get people executed, bad studies will get people killed, entire peoples and regions will be exiled, if not lynched. If you can whip enough people into a froth, you can control the whole country. Lots of people will listen to orhers for guidance anyway, basically recreating representitives but this time with no risk of responsibility on them; they can’t lose their job for giving bad advice, as long as their following likes them.
And that’s the problem I have with large amounts of direct democracy. We need more responsibility and accountability now, but removing representatives will give us less. If we can use direct democracy to hold representatives accountable, then sure, but who takes accountability for the majority when everybody pays?
Ultimately, I think a certain amount of funds should be set aside for social science experiments, where whole towns get their laws changed in radical ways for a decade, to see if something works without risking an entire nation. I’ve always be frustrated by how laws are rarely tested before applying to millions of people.