Interestingly, this is how the original Greek democracies worked. They considered voting to be anti-democratic, because it facilitated mob rule and the oppression of minority groups. I'm not endorsing the idea, but it's food for thought:
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/forget-elections-lets-pick-reps-by-lottery/
It is easy to feel that what you do won’t make any difference. Recycle that can, bike or drive, buy from this company not that one, march in the streets against the factory closing or the looming war. It’s never enough: the forces are large and anonymous, and there aren’t enough of us. Or there are too many of us. Vote, petition, protest. It can all feel pointless: a kind of precious dancing around, keeping a low causal profile, with an eye on some imaginary Future Judgment. How clean my hands are! How little of the world’s horror has been made by them!
But we don’t care about that. We care about the horror: the steady-warming planet; the children born into hard, sad futures; the millions of homeless, and hungry, and unjustly imprisoned; the growing gap between the rich and the poor in Philadelphia, Kansas, and Kentucky, in Moscow, Ghana, and Paris. The problem, at bottom, is that we feel that we can’t make a difference. Ethically and politically, we are ghosts in a machine.
The celebrity comic Russell Brand is gesticulating wildly, urgently, in a hotel room, under the bright lights of a television interview. ‘Stop voting, stop pretending, wake up. Be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.’ He is responding to his interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, who is taking him to task for never having voted.
We are brought up to think that voting is important, that it is a necessary condition of being a politically serious person, that we can’t complain about politics if we don’t vote. This last principle has echoes of the more reasonable parental admonition, said of lima beans or cauliflower: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. But that principle is based on sound epistemological grounds: you might, for all you know, like cauliflower or lima beans. The voting thing is, as Brand argues, stupid. There are ways of participating in public affairs other than voting. For example, one can become a celebrity and call for revolution in a television interview.
More to the point, the inference from not voting to not caring is a poor one. As Brand points out, you might care a lot about what happens and what the system is doing, but still realise that voting doesn’t affect what happens or what the system does. In most elections, the chance that your vote will make any difference to who wins is much smaller than the chance that you will be hit by a car on the way to cast your vote. But people still turn out to vote. They even drive through snow, miss work, and wait in line for hours.
This has puzzled political scientists and economists. Why do people vote? This is an empirical question; it concerns our actual motivations. Many answers have been given: we vote because we enjoy it; because we think others will think badly of us if we don’t; because we want to express ourselves; or cheer for our team; or because we believe that we have a duty to do so. One worry about all of these answers is that they seem disconnected from what makes voting seem so morally significant, something that it might be worth fighting and dying for the right to do.
In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the following situation. I know that whether I do X rather than Y won’t make a difference by itself. I also know that everyone else knows this about me and about themselves. I also know that if all of us do X, rather than Y, it will make a difference. And everyone else knows this, too. So it’s striking and surprising that a celebrity such as Brand would come out and say, to millions, ‘Don’t vote,’ rather than ‘Vote for X.’ That was the revolutionary part of the interview. A thousand lefty celebrities have gone on TV and advocated for causes. Very few have gone on TV and said ‘Don’t vote.’ Very few have gone on TV and said, essentially, X and Y can both go fukk themselves.
One reason not to vote is that your vote — your one vote — is unlikely to make a difference to who wins the election. Another reason not to vote is that it doesn’t matter who wins the election, that there is no difference between X and Y, republican and democrat, Tory and Labour. An extreme version of this thesis — which is obviously false — is that there is no difference between our Xs and our Ys. Much more plausible versions of this thesis are that there is not enough difference between our Xs and Ys, or that with respect to some important issues there is no difference between our Xs and Ys.
Brand’s view is clear: ‘I’m not [refusing to vote] out of apathy,’ he says. ‘I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations.’ Brand says that many of us don’t engage with the current political system, because we see that it doesn’t work for us, we see that it makes no difference. ‘The apathy doesn’t come from us, the people,’ he says. ‘The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They are only interested in servicing the needs of corporations.’
Is this true? Why would this be? Wasn’t the whole point of democratic elections to ensure that power would be in the hands of the people?
The theory of modern representative democracy goes something like this. Each of us is fundamentally autonomous and of equal moral worth, so that we have a claim to self-government, self-rule, to the extent that such self-government is compatible with an equal right to self-government of others.
This suggests something like direct democracy, in which each of us would have an equal say in determining whether we go to war, what policies and laws to adopt, what should be taxed and how much taxes should be, and so on. But — we quickly realise — modern politics is very complex; it is a full-time job to be even modestly well-informed about political issues. Ideally, one would spend all of one’s time doing it, in addition to having staff and resources to help. This suggests a move from direct democracy to representative democracy, where we would each have an equal vote in choosing that individual whom we think will best represent our interests and views. That person will act as our representative — and not as an elected tyrant — because to stay in power, she or he will have to be re-elected. If our representatives do things that we don’t like, we can vote them out. That’s the theory, and its simplicity and power — and the successes of actual electoral representative democracies — have led representative democracy to be the ascendant and unrivalled political system around the world.
So, what’s the problem? The problem is that despite the elections, elected representatives are not actually accountable, not meaningfully accountable, to those over whom they govern.
There are logistical hurdles to keep poor, marginalised citizens from successfully registering to vote
Even in established democracies there are concerns about the openness and fairness of elections. There are huge financial barriers to running for office, and considerable advantages to incumbency. Corporate money and television advertising have an outsized influence. There are logistical hurdles to keep poor, marginalised citizens from successfully registering to vote, and gerrymandering reduces competition, considerably. These difficulties all reduce how accountable our representatives are to us.
Even if these problems were addressed, they would succeed only in making elections fair. But meaningful accountability requires not just open and fair elections; it also requires that we are capableof engaging in informed monitoring and evaluation of the decisions of our representatives. And we are not capable of this. Not because we are stupid, but because we are ignorant: ignorant about what our representatives are doing, ignorant about the details of complex political issues, and ignorant about whether what our representative is doing is good for us or for the world.
Our ignorance means that representatives can talk a good game, and maybe even try to do a few things that benefit the majority of us, but the basic information asymmetries at the heart of the representative system ensure that, for many issues — defence manufacturing and spending, policy that affects the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, agribusiness policy and regulation, energy policy, regulation of financial services and products — what we get is what the relevant business industries want. In the presence of widespread citizen ignorance and the absence of meaningful accountability, powerful interests will effectively capture representatives, ensuring that the only viable candidates — the only people who can get and stay in political power — are those who will act in ways that are congenial to the interests of the powerful.
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/forget-elections-lets-pick-reps-by-lottery/
It is easy to feel that what you do won’t make any difference. Recycle that can, bike or drive, buy from this company not that one, march in the streets against the factory closing or the looming war. It’s never enough: the forces are large and anonymous, and there aren’t enough of us. Or there are too many of us. Vote, petition, protest. It can all feel pointless: a kind of precious dancing around, keeping a low causal profile, with an eye on some imaginary Future Judgment. How clean my hands are! How little of the world’s horror has been made by them!
But we don’t care about that. We care about the horror: the steady-warming planet; the children born into hard, sad futures; the millions of homeless, and hungry, and unjustly imprisoned; the growing gap between the rich and the poor in Philadelphia, Kansas, and Kentucky, in Moscow, Ghana, and Paris. The problem, at bottom, is that we feel that we can’t make a difference. Ethically and politically, we are ghosts in a machine.
The celebrity comic Russell Brand is gesticulating wildly, urgently, in a hotel room, under the bright lights of a television interview. ‘Stop voting, stop pretending, wake up. Be in reality now. Why vote? We know it’s not going to make any difference. We know that already.’ He is responding to his interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, who is taking him to task for never having voted.
We are brought up to think that voting is important, that it is a necessary condition of being a politically serious person, that we can’t complain about politics if we don’t vote. This last principle has echoes of the more reasonable parental admonition, said of lima beans or cauliflower: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. But that principle is based on sound epistemological grounds: you might, for all you know, like cauliflower or lima beans. The voting thing is, as Brand argues, stupid. There are ways of participating in public affairs other than voting. For example, one can become a celebrity and call for revolution in a television interview.
More to the point, the inference from not voting to not caring is a poor one. As Brand points out, you might care a lot about what happens and what the system is doing, but still realise that voting doesn’t affect what happens or what the system does. In most elections, the chance that your vote will make any difference to who wins is much smaller than the chance that you will be hit by a car on the way to cast your vote. But people still turn out to vote. They even drive through snow, miss work, and wait in line for hours.
This has puzzled political scientists and economists. Why do people vote? This is an empirical question; it concerns our actual motivations. Many answers have been given: we vote because we enjoy it; because we think others will think badly of us if we don’t; because we want to express ourselves; or cheer for our team; or because we believe that we have a duty to do so. One worry about all of these answers is that they seem disconnected from what makes voting seem so morally significant, something that it might be worth fighting and dying for the right to do.
In the modern world, we often find ourselves in the following situation. I know that whether I do X rather than Y won’t make a difference by itself. I also know that everyone else knows this about me and about themselves. I also know that if all of us do X, rather than Y, it will make a difference. And everyone else knows this, too. So it’s striking and surprising that a celebrity such as Brand would come out and say, to millions, ‘Don’t vote,’ rather than ‘Vote for X.’ That was the revolutionary part of the interview. A thousand lefty celebrities have gone on TV and advocated for causes. Very few have gone on TV and said ‘Don’t vote.’ Very few have gone on TV and said, essentially, X and Y can both go fukk themselves.
One reason not to vote is that your vote — your one vote — is unlikely to make a difference to who wins the election. Another reason not to vote is that it doesn’t matter who wins the election, that there is no difference between X and Y, republican and democrat, Tory and Labour. An extreme version of this thesis — which is obviously false — is that there is no difference between our Xs and our Ys. Much more plausible versions of this thesis are that there is not enough difference between our Xs and Ys, or that with respect to some important issues there is no difference between our Xs and Ys.
Brand’s view is clear: ‘I’m not [refusing to vote] out of apathy,’ he says. ‘I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations.’ Brand says that many of us don’t engage with the current political system, because we see that it doesn’t work for us, we see that it makes no difference. ‘The apathy doesn’t come from us, the people,’ he says. ‘The apathy comes from the politicians. They are apathetic to our needs. They are only interested in servicing the needs of corporations.’
Is this true? Why would this be? Wasn’t the whole point of democratic elections to ensure that power would be in the hands of the people?
The theory of modern representative democracy goes something like this. Each of us is fundamentally autonomous and of equal moral worth, so that we have a claim to self-government, self-rule, to the extent that such self-government is compatible with an equal right to self-government of others.
This suggests something like direct democracy, in which each of us would have an equal say in determining whether we go to war, what policies and laws to adopt, what should be taxed and how much taxes should be, and so on. But — we quickly realise — modern politics is very complex; it is a full-time job to be even modestly well-informed about political issues. Ideally, one would spend all of one’s time doing it, in addition to having staff and resources to help. This suggests a move from direct democracy to representative democracy, where we would each have an equal vote in choosing that individual whom we think will best represent our interests and views. That person will act as our representative — and not as an elected tyrant — because to stay in power, she or he will have to be re-elected. If our representatives do things that we don’t like, we can vote them out. That’s the theory, and its simplicity and power — and the successes of actual electoral representative democracies — have led representative democracy to be the ascendant and unrivalled political system around the world.
So, what’s the problem? The problem is that despite the elections, elected representatives are not actually accountable, not meaningfully accountable, to those over whom they govern.
There are logistical hurdles to keep poor, marginalised citizens from successfully registering to vote
Even in established democracies there are concerns about the openness and fairness of elections. There are huge financial barriers to running for office, and considerable advantages to incumbency. Corporate money and television advertising have an outsized influence. There are logistical hurdles to keep poor, marginalised citizens from successfully registering to vote, and gerrymandering reduces competition, considerably. These difficulties all reduce how accountable our representatives are to us.
Even if these problems were addressed, they would succeed only in making elections fair. But meaningful accountability requires not just open and fair elections; it also requires that we are capableof engaging in informed monitoring and evaluation of the decisions of our representatives. And we are not capable of this. Not because we are stupid, but because we are ignorant: ignorant about what our representatives are doing, ignorant about the details of complex political issues, and ignorant about whether what our representative is doing is good for us or for the world.
Our ignorance means that representatives can talk a good game, and maybe even try to do a few things that benefit the majority of us, but the basic information asymmetries at the heart of the representative system ensure that, for many issues — defence manufacturing and spending, policy that affects the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, agribusiness policy and regulation, energy policy, regulation of financial services and products — what we get is what the relevant business industries want. In the presence of widespread citizen ignorance and the absence of meaningful accountability, powerful interests will effectively capture representatives, ensuring that the only viable candidates — the only people who can get and stay in political power — are those who will act in ways that are congenial to the interests of the powerful.
You nikkas are scary as fukk. You scared to take a stand for anything because you scared of thought police.