this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Yes but that's only true due to a suite of nefarious influences having to do with things like voter suppression, gerrymandering, dark money and manufactured voter apathy.
We have to accept that democracy is too easy to 'manage' and has been since its inception. We need local democracy badly.
There are various versions of democracy. Some are far more effective at implementing the will of their constituents than others.
In my opinion the problem isn't democracy itself, but rather, has to do with the many various ways in which it's implemented.
The US version of democracy, for example, is very old, clunky and buggy as fuck because it was created by 18th century white men, some of whom were slave owners, and all of whom were terrified of the possibility that in creating a new (to them) form of governance they might accidentally create a new mechanism for tyranny.
Accordingly, they deliberately created a system that by design would be almost impossible to change short of massive civil unrest and that to this day is very unresponsive to real public sentiment.
The key is that they designed it that way not because they wanted an efficient democracy, but rather, because they wanted to protect themselves and their rights against the rise of a possible tyrant.
What they created was very stable, but again, it wasn't responsive, nor was it meant to be responsive, to public opinion.
Since then, political scientists have figured out much better ways to run democracies.
One of my favorites is the Irish Republic which, in the 1920s, instituted a suite of reforms to the US model in creating its government with the result that Ireland has gone from being the last third-world country in western Europe, to now being a thriving and economically developed western European nation with a highly-educated English-speaking population that isn't obliged to take orders from any of the world's great powers.
Ireland did this by having a high-functioning modern-style democracy.