Comment by username332211
2 days ago
The global issue is that elected representatives are becoming weaker.
The idea that a city hall would need to organize some sort of public meeting before approving a construction project is a fairly new one. The city council is elected to represent the people. If they need "community input" why are they even here? (Nevermind the obvious problem with such participatory process - sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy.)
If you told someone in the 1980s that the British parliament couldn't impose its will on QUANGOs and local governments to build a rail line, they'd look at you as if you were insane. Parliament's power is supposed to be absolute. Yet that's what's happening with HS2.
"Sane and normal people can't participate in every local government decision unless it's their job. Hence why we have representative democracy".
While true, times have changed. The information flow is orders of magnitude faster and have you seen any sane and normal people lately? The norm is spending hours scrolling social media. The argument that nobody has spare time/attention and thus we all need representatives falls flat to me.
We need to explore alternative forms of representation to allow people to choose their level of engagement in various levels of government. Perhaps I'm happy to delegate all national matters to a representative I trust but want to regularly weigh in on local decisions.
Between the technical challenge of trust/security and the inevitable political resistance to such ideas, I sadly don't expect to see them implemented any time soon.
Is this because the representatives are becoming weaker - or is it because we're asking the government to get involved in such a huge portion of what used to be free (as in speech) that it's impractical for them to pay attention themselves at the necessary level, and have to offload the work somehow?
That is, I'm claiming that government can't scale to the levels that the 20th Century escalated it to, with any degree of efficiency at all.