This is what happens when people figure out their “representatives” only represent the ruling class.
One problem in the US is that the purpose of the House of Representatives has been completely subverted. It was supposed to scale up with the population so the representatives really would be part of the community they represent. But we stopped increasing the number of representatives and that lets the ruling elite control them better. The representatives no longer come from their community and the wealthy have less candidates they have to prop up. And the lower count means that gerrymandering is far more effective.
The main problem though is that the US government was built intentionally and from the ground up around representing wealthy landowners. The entire system was never meant to represent the common person and it never will.
Exactly. It wouldn’t matter how many representives you add if the while system is designed for and by the oppressors
Another problem in the US is the Senate working as intended
Agreed
A lot of people are saying that bourgeois democracy is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
BBC, 2014: Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
The US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
So concludes a recent study by Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens and Northwestern University Prof Benjamin I Page.
This is not news, you say.
Perhaps, but the two professors have conducted exhaustive research to try to present data-driven support for this conclusion. Here’s how they explain it:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Well yeah, bourgeois “democracy” is only really democratic for capitalists and not workers.
glad to see someone gets it 
We need direct democracy tbh.
Democracy: Dictatorship of the majority. Mob rule.
Yes, and that’s good. How’s your aristocratic pseudo-democracy, authored by elites (possibly slavers, depending on your country) who feared real democracy and passed down your present system, doing for you and the world?
Like, do you really look at how there’s massive popular consensus to fight climate change, have better healthcare systems, stop genocidal wars, all of which your aristocratic politicians ignore, and then say “We need less democracy because muh mob rule”??
The capitalist class, Walter Lippmann, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission’s The Crisis of Democracy would be proud (emphasis mine):
Al Smith once remarked that “the only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.” Our analysis suggests that applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames. Instead, some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem from an excess of democracy […] Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation in democracy.
Game theory would like a word.
Considering the smallest non-fragmented group has resulted in the current 2-party system in most western countries, and results in tribalistic xenophobia, I’m quite content stating democracy is not the egalitarianism it is purported to be.
And I quite resent the insinuation I’m a lapdog.
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Ah, yes, the Athenian Method.
The problem with democracy is that people can be manipulated.
that’s why education of the people is a core pillar of a democratic nation.
It’s still the best way even if it’s bad. Ranked choice voting would make it better.
It’s demonstrably not, but westerners just keep clinging to their failed system lacking the courage and imagination to try anything different.
What’s better?
Proletarian democracy
What definition of proletarian democracy? It’s not well defined and means vastly different things to different people.
Democracy in which the bourgeoisie are denied political agency as class relations are in the process of being dissolved. The problem isn’t actually democracy, the problem is that in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (democracy where capitalists are in control) capitalist interests override democracy.
Not that democracy doesn’t have problems inherently, but they’re pretty minor compared to the problems we are facing.
But the alternatives that people are proposing leaves people with no representation at all. You can’t have representation when you aren’t even allowed to discuss ideas that the government already disagrees with.
The people of China and Vietnam have vibrant discussions of ideas, and they democratically steer their governments. Their voices have more effect on their states than ours here at home. There isn’t a ban on Winnie-the-Pooh in China, and the people are generally vastly better informed on the 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots than we are.
- The Tian’anmen Square ‘Massacre’: The West’s Most Persuasive, Most Pervasive Lie.
- 1989 Tian’anmen Square riots
- A Note on the Tiananmen Protests
- Images from Tiananmen 1989 the West never shows (NSFW / CW: violence and death)
- Tank Man video footage. Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989
.
You seem to have uncritically accepted every single thing you’ve been told, which, to be fair, I largely had as well, until I witnessed in real time how obviously fabricated the justification for the Iraq War was, and how seemingly credulously the media propagated it. It took me the last 20 years of investigation to dig myself out from under a lifetime of imperial core propaganda.“Not allowed to discuss ideas the governments disagree with” in a myth, a fairy tale told by the kind of people who get banned from everywhere they go for “just having different opinions.”
What are the opinions? What are the ideas? The US Civil War, by these terms, could be boiled down to “a clash over different ideas”, it’s not a useful metric. The fact is, no government on Earth is going to let you actively advocate for their violent overthrow, especially not when theyve just clawed their independence from, in many cases, centuries of colonial rule. And when you actually look into the historical events that anticommunists gesture vaguely at as examples of “communist authoritarianism”, that’s what it always turns out to be. The cycle goes like this:
Western capital foments fascism–> western capital arms fascists—> western capital directs fascists against socialist state, attempts to topple government for sweet natural resources–>socialist state cracks down on fascism–western capitalist press goes into overdrive about the plight of the poor fascists–>“Actually socialism is as bad as fascism, haven’t you read this article in the Bezos Post?”
What are you even talking about? Communism is democratic
A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about “human rights” and “freedom” being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.
Democratic centralism 👀
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
It’s literally how communist states are organized, how is it not a political system?
It’s it though. It’s a principle applied to Chinese communism. It’s not a required part of communism and it isn’t form of government on its own. It’s not even the most major part of a government system.
It’s not required for communism per se, but it’s certainly a form of government organization. It’s how the People’s Congress works?
Communism
What they do in Cuba, or the PRC, or the former USSR
Almost any other kind of democracy. Representative democracy is better than fascism but it is the worst form of democracy
Worse than what form of democracy exactly?
Everything else people have mentioned in the comments. Proletarian democracy, democratic centralism, participatory democracy, etc.
Well, the first two are really just a way of saying socialism.
Democratic centrism is more of a rule or process or principle. It isn’t even a form of government and it’s compatible with many forms of government.
Proletarian democracy isn’t well defined so I can’t say anything since it means 1000 different things to 1000 different people and often does include representative democracy.
Participatory democracy similarly is a spectrum and is compatible with representative democracy.
So to actually talk about this you would need to be more specific about how the “better” form of government would work.
All the others?
Name one. One actually concrete form of democracy that would work better.
Whatever its called that cuba does where national representation is organized and chosen at the local level. Idk im not a political scientist.
But also name ten that are worse
How do you define “working”? Otherwise I don’t know how you’re measuring it. Would you say that a system that allows for literally one of the most unpopular genocides in history is “working”? Or a system that is working overtime to increase income and wealth disparity rather than reduce it? Is that working? I certainly wouldn’t but I’m guessing you think that’s working swell
Participatory democracy
Ask the people of El Salvador, and they’ll say having a dictator is better because democracy has demonstrably failed them.
El Salvador under a dictator actually has less gang violence than Mexico under a democracy.
Westerners will blind themselves to this reality, though. They always do.
When dictatorships go badly, they go extremely badly. Far more badly than even a broken representative democracy. The odd of having a sold string of reasonably good dictators are vanishingly small. A good dictator is the best form of government. Good luck maintaining that though.
When a bourgeois democratic state goes badly, it tears off its liberal mask and reveals the fascism beneath. The capitalist class dispenses with democratic theater and rules by naked dictatorship. Western liberals shouldn’t wonder why fascism is on the rise in the West: it’s because Western monopoly capitalism is increasingly going mask-off. Monthly Review, 2014: The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
China is totalitarian and becoming more autocratic by the year.
Of course we’re told that: it’s a given that the US will call a country it wants to browbeat or regime change “authoritarian,” and corporate media will repeat it.
The Western concept of “totalitarianism” was constructed by Hannah Arendt, who came from a wealthy family and so unsurprisingly was anticommunist. Her work was financially supported and promoted by the CIA. It’s a bourgeois liberal, intentionally anticommunist construct that lumps fascism and communism in the same bucket.
Monthly Review, The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the “Democratic Left” and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell.
LMFAO
Go on. Enlighten us.
consider yourself enlightened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
edit: love how you can state basic facts and libs start seething
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
Everyone can see that the US government is ossified, incapable of changing course (or of representing the people). And it’s no accident: it was designed to be so. The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You’re talking about an implementation of representative democracy and you’re not offering any concrete alternative. So I refer you to my first comment where I said that representative democracy is bad, but still better than the others.
I was talking about bourgeois democracies, which have only ever represented the capitalist class. A concrete alternative has already been suggested, socialist democratic centralism, a form of proletarian democracy, but you dismissed it as not even being a political system, despite it having been practiced in various countries throughout the last century. Capitalist states and corporate media label socialist states as “authoritarian,” because the capitalist class doesn’t want us to consider any alternatives that would usurp them.
This is demonstrably false because in the real world Chinese system has proven itself to be far more flexible and adaptable than any western regime. That’s the reality. In fact, it’s obvious that multiparty parliamentary systems are the ones that have hard time changing course. They’re literally designed to prevent that. It’s not possible to do any sort of long term planning when governments keep changing and people keep pulling in different directions. The horizons for planning become very small. And of course, it’s pretty clear that western systems do a great job silencing opinions that fallout of the Overton window. Entire books have been written on the mechanics of this.
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China is in the process of ethically cleansing their own population
This is not true at all, despite what our governments and corporate media keep feeding us. As part of China’s affirmative action policies, the Uyghurs and other ethic minorities were excepted from the One-Child policy, and in Xinjiang they have grown in numbers relative to Hans as a result, and this happened similarly with other ethnic minorities. The “Uyghur genocide” (“cultural” or otherwise) psyop is BS.
- The Xinjiang Genocide Allegations Are Unjustified
- The Uyghur Human Rights Project is a product of the National Endowment for Democracy, which is the American government’s main regime change NGO.
- Uyghur genocide allegations
- US-Funded Uyghur Activists Train as Soldiers of Empire
- A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
- The blueprint of regime change operations
We see here for example the evolution of public opinion in regards to China. In 2019, the ‘Uyghur genocide’ was broken by the media (Buzzfeed, of all outlets). In this story, we saw the machine I described up until now move in real time. Suddenly, newspapers, TV, websites were all flooded with stories about the ‘genocide’, all day, every day. People whom we’d never heard of before were brought in as experts — Adrian Zenz, to name just one; a man who does not even speak a word of Chinese.
Organizations were suddenly becoming very active and important. The World Uyghur Congress, a very serious-sounding NGO, is actually an NED Front operating out of Germany […]. From their official website, they declare themselves to be the sole legitimate representative of all Uyghurs — presumably not having asked Uyghurs in Xinjiang what they thought about that.
The WUC also has ties to the Grey Wolves, a fascist paramilitary group in Turkey, through the father of their founder, Isa Yusuf Alptekin.
Documents came out from NGOs to further legitimize the media reporting. This is how a report from the very professional-sounding China Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) came to exist. They claimed ‘up to 1.3 million’ Uyghurs were imprisoned in camps. What they didn’t say was how they got this number: they interviewed a total of 10 people from rural Xinjiang and asked them to estimate how many people might have been taken away. They then extrapolated the guesstimates they got and arrived at the 1.3 million figure.
Sanctions were enacted against China — Xinjiang cotton for example had trouble finding buyers after Western companies were pressured into boycotting it. Instead of helping fight against the purported genocide, this act actually made life more difficult for the people of Xinjiang who depend on this trade for their livelihood (as we all do depend on our skills to make a livelihood).
Any attempt China made to defend itself was met with more suspicion. They invited a UN delegation which was blocked by the US. The delegation eventually made it there, but three years later. The Arab League also visited Xinjiang and actually commended China on their policies — aimed at reducing terrorism through education and social integration, not through bombing like we tend to do in the West.
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thanks for letting us know that you’re a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect
And we’re the ones clinging to a failed system? You’ll have to dig a little deeper for your credibility if you want to stick to this imperious schtick of yours.
If you can’t see that the west is failing then you need to start engaging with reality. China is running circles around you losers.
While the West is certainly struggling I fail to see how China is the preferable alternative from a political perspective. Care to enlighten me as to why it is better for its citizens which must be the goal and purpose of government no?
A socialist state that has
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consistently decreased poverty in the country; lifting 800 million people out of poverty so far,
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consistently increased homeownership rates; 90% right now,
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and prioritizes worker interests over capitalist interests (the complete shutdown during the pandemic for example unlike many capitalist countries like the US, or the current refusal to bail out real estate developers, letting them go bankrupt)
does indeed have the superior system yes.
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If you’re failing to see how China is preferable then you should spend the time educating yourself on what China has achieved instead of trolling here. Here’s one example that you can educate yourself on https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
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Read another book.
Ranked choice voting
Libs are constantly going on about this. A different voting scheme isn’t going to solve the real proplem which is that the oppressor class controls the government and not the people. It’ll just be a new way of having the illusion of choice to allow people to pretend the US is a democracy
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https://piped.video/yhO6jfHPFQU?si=x7aHPIT1KL7n_JPg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
That could be a nice improvement to the US’s representative democracy also. The nice thing about ranked choice voting is that it forces people to have more than one choice. People may only approve of exactly their favorite choice.
As Churchill once famously said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I guess one of the nicest things about democracy is that it has a built-in mechanism for removing a government. It may not be reliable at getting good leaders in place, but at least when there’s a bad one it has a way of getting them back out again without having to go in shooting.
Do you have any idea how long senators serve? Racist, violent, war hawk, regressive leaders stay in office in the USA for decades. How about family dynasties? The number of years American and European democracies are managed by family dynasties is terrible. And then of course you have fascists getting elected to high office in Italy.
All the evidence shows that Western democracies are going to end in violence.
Interestingly, Cuba has more democracy than anything ever experienced in the North Atlantic. Because the point isn’t to use democracy to get representation, it’s to use democracy to change society in the interests of the people.
How about family dynasties?
Wait, did somebody say Kennedy?
I’m not seeing anyone removing Biden or Netanhitler from power though?
The fact that you think that genocidal scumbag had good ideas means your opinion can be safely discarded.
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fair point
Lol, what?
Churchill oversaw one of the biggest genocides in history in India ignoramus.
That means everything he says is false?
ignoramus
Oh, the irony.
the only irony here is you comment 😂
Not really.
it’s clearly what you believe
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Any chance you can share your ideas without personal insults?
It makes you look flustered and insecure.
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For real though, please dial it back. You didn’t have to turn Churchill into an attack on someone who may not even be aware of Churchill’s crimes, and then continue to ratchet up the personal insults. It’s bad even by Reddit debate bro standards, and it doesn’t invite anyone to explore alternatives to bourgeois democracy.
I think it’s awesome how on Lemmy the mods actually treat their users like people to correct and not like subjects to control.
fair enough
No I didn’t.
I spent way more time than i’m willing to admit trying to figure out what swear the filter was removing.
