Comment by robonerd
4 years ago
> The real undemocratic institution in the US is its most powerful, the US Senate. It should be directly democratic.
I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress has to deal with, so thanks for the offer, but no thanks. Direct democracy is a shitfest for anything much larger than a canton; representative democracy is much better for running large countries with a diverse set of serious matters to address.
I think you misunderstood what they meant.
The problem with the Senate is that tiny states like Wyoming have the same power as huge states like California.
That means that people living in rural areas (or just small states) have far more power and representation in the Senate than people in urban areas.
Well first off, the Senate is only part of Congress and the other half has more proportional representation. But more to the point, I was responding mostly to the remark about direct democracy. But it seems some people don't mean direct democracy when they say direct democracy. The voting for congresspeople in the House of Representatives is not direct democracy, that's representative democracy (isn't the name a clue?)
It's not the only two options. You can have direct democratic assemblies at the lowest level, and then use the delegate system to form assemblies above them, scaling as high up as needed. It's still radically different from representative democracy as we practice it today, because delegates are delegates - they receive explicit instructions from the assemblies that send them on how to argue and how to vote, and they're instantly recallable if they disobey those instructions.
And yes, those systems do exist in real world. AANES (Rojava) has been operating under such a system for over 10 years now.
> I'm not qualified to vote on 95% of the stuff Congress has to deal with
But are they? We're constantly hearing how nobody reads the bills and nobody can be expected to really understand them.