Comment by rootusrootus

> Democracy requires suffrage as a right, not a commodity

There are plenty of "democracies" where suffrage depends on one having the appropriate citizenship.

Full disclosure: I have permanent residency - and pay my taxes - in a country where I'm neither allowed to stand for election nor allowed to vote...

The system was designed around the idea that people take voting seriously. Sadly, we're not there. We're in a country where 1/3rd of the population thinks a rebellion against the government is needed. Not because they are being downtrodden, not because the government is taking their food, not because of mass slaughter by the military...nope. They want a world where only whites are allowed to own property, where there are strict rules for everyone except themselves, where other people's lives and choices are subject to their big magic beliefs, which are somehow better and more accurate than the 3000 other religions on the face of the Earth...somehow.

Voting is problematic when voters are either apathetic or worse, callous, like little children mad because they were denied 3rd dessert.

That bug has always been "fatally" easy to exploit.

Stupids having a vote isn't as misguided as it seems, as if we imagine instead the smarts simply stopped the stupids from having the vote, the smarts would neglect the needs of the stupids. The Trump election resulted on a bipartisan realignment on trade which was arguably tilted towards elite interest (access to markets, maximising GDP) over popular interest (Maximising domestic jobs and wages) before that realignment. The whole democratic vision from that time to ignore domestic low skill job losses and focus on retraining people to do new high skill jobs was something that sounded sensible to a smart person as it’s how smart people would personally react to such circumstances - but it lacked common sense and an understanding of the impact of such a plan on the common person.

Democracy almost intrinsically is going to give you middle-of-the-road quality leadership. You can do better and worse than a New York con man who at least had the marketing genius required to get so famous in the first place - many dictators are nothing more than thug lords or spoilt failsons. The promise of democracy is in setting good incentives and mitigating extreme worst case scenarios through elections and means to obstruct bad leaders.

Of course, viewing Mr. T as an anomaly is scapegoating, a way for people to quiet their nerves, to avoid having a naive article of faith undermined. There's emotional investment here. The case is similar with Harvey Weinstein. He is guilt, absolutely, and he should be punished, but Hollywood is full of exploitation. A scapegoat doesn't have to be innocent. In fact, it's more effective when the scapegoat is guilty himself in some manner. That makes it easier to accuse him and to deflect from the filth elsewhere.

Ideally we want a democracy to be representative (in the statistical sense) and resistant to regulatory capture and low-information voting. Maybe it wouldn't work in practice, but it seems like we already have a system that attempts to tackle precisely these however flawed it may be: jury duty. Perhaps it could be applied to things like voting.