I came across a variety of thoughts on democracy this week. Here are some excerpts.
Bryan Caplan wins the Ms. Conry Award (she was my 4th grade Social Studies teacher) for democratic naiveté for these thoughts:
Every few years we’ll have a free election. Anyone who wants power can run for office, every adult gets a vote, and whoever gets the most votes runs the government until the next election.
For something more . . . grown-up, try some Nydwracu, who describes our democracy as:
A one-party state that decisively crushed the last traces of opposition forty years ago, with an impotent, Reaganite right and a thoroughly liberal left concerned not with class or caste but with atomistic individual identity
Or, visit Studiolo:
Individuals also make public policy. Susan Rice and Lootie live in a democracy, but only the former is a policymaker. There is no contradiction. Universal-suffrage elections do not define our democracy. Rather, one is free to express political information to the extent one proves its merits. Democracy is guaranteed by a free press, free speech, social mobility, universal education and abolition of hereditary offices.
Elections are but a “basic income guarantee” for political involvement, and a powerful filter—necessarily so, since the lower classes are often misguided. Elections are a minor driver of change, if not an impediment, and irrelevant to technocratic governance. They remain a potent symbol. Especial policymakers have to ascend a complex ladder of academe and status, through which they prove the merits of their political information.
There’s also Felix Salmon by way of Moldbug:
Dare I suggest that Fido understands 21st-century democracy perfectly? “The population of the entire country, as represented by the government.” And hence, transitively, by J.P. Morgan. I would love to have made it up. Crap, Orwell would love to have made it up.
If you need more, here’s a picture and some comments from Nick Land.
