One measure of democracy is how much say you have in issues which affect you, the running of your neighborhood, your government etc.
If you look at decision making at high levels, the general population usually gets ignored. Instead, powerful special interests dominate the government.
Particularly with regard to foreign affairs of the USA, the oil lobby and weapons manufacturers. And look who's benefiting from the current state of affairs in Ukraine, Iran and Venezuela: US arms manufacturers and oil companies.
On the other hand in many ways people in the USA are extroardinarly free, there's pretty good protection of freedom of speech.
>One measure of democracy is how much say you have in issues which affect you, the running of your neighborhood, your government etc.
We've intentionally reduced everyone's say in everything with state/fed regulation and the whole "make it cost too much to be viable on its face but then give them a grant/tax break/other favorable treatment to make it work if they jump through the right hoops" paradigm that's permeated damn near everything.
This is a direct outcrop of the winner-takes-all electoral district system which forces parties to merge to have a chance at winning. I personally find it an undemocratic, archaic and meritless system.
It relates to the two-party system, not whether the U.S. is an oligarchy.
The article implies that the U.S. is not a democracy, but oligarchy and democracy aren't mutually exclusive. I'd say the U.S. (and most Western countries) is both and always has been. Voters certainly have influence in the U.S. but it's limited, just like everywhere else.
I remember reading an economics paper that showed you need at least four suppliers in any market to get real competition. I can't see why politics is any different.
In the us, political groups for coalitions before the election happens. This is in contrast to most European countries where they set up the coalitions afterwards. Groups occasionally migrate between the parties and the us is in one such realignment now.
Not sure whether you're serious or joking, but in the realm of economics, I think that duopolies are actually worse than monopolies, because everyone recognizes that a monopoly needs to be strictly regulated and/or broken up, whereas when there's a duopoly, that's supposedly "competition" and thus the duopolies largely escape regulation or breakup, even if they implicitly or explicitly cooperate and coordinate to crush any other competition.
In the same way, the obvious solution to a one-party system is to overthrow the government, whereas with a two-party system, you're supposed to fight within the system... and mostly accomplish nothing, because those in power have overlapping interests.
While i agree in theory, in practice multi party systems still end up with only two sides where the biggest/most influential party on either side exerts its power over the others regardless.
Going away from parties to actual individual person voting on each topic/decision would be actual democracy but not like that has no drawbacks.
We hear a lot about what is or isn't a democracy but the reality is that very few countries today would ever be above the bar set. Even Athenian democracy wouldn't, as it was a demos of the male citizens only, supported by a large slave class.
What is more important is: is it working? And if not, why not?
Which is why, instead of "democracy", it's more useful to quantify democratic. One traditional measure of such is the degree to which political power can be gained through free elections. But the research in TFA instead uses a novel measure: the weight a population has in its country's policymaking. Which yields fascinating results.
Because, per the linked research, in present-time USA that weight is ~zero.
Which is especially interesting considering the USA's narratives about itself. And how, it seems to me, its population is so invested in said narratives that it will defend those even in the face of contrary research. You'd think a culture so invested in its self-determination would be angry about this result and endeavor to do something about it.
I don't think it is obvious that measure is meaningful though. The US has always been explicit that it doesn't trust the majority of the population to make decisions and has built intentional systems to keep them out. That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down.
It is pretty safe to say that the US could be more democratic. It is probably reasonable to compare it to other countries in terms of how democratic it is. But saying it is "not a democracy" is a fairly trivial observation. Republics aren't technically democracies if democracy means that the people make the decisions and win on all the disagreements. Republics are modelled on places like Rome that had a very visible and powerful oligarchy.
Isn't this partly a question of sheer size of countries like the US and India?
In Slovenia or Denmark, there may be two degrees of separation fewer between the regular voter and, say, an ordinary MP, because the parliaments and government are about the same size, but the population is in single millions. Even here in Czechia quite a lot of people actually know personally some high-ranking politician.
How many Americans are on friendly terms with their Rep or Senator?
This works in smaller countries as well, though. I would expect that our local tycoons know half of the Parliament and most of the ministers. And given that there is fewer very rich people here, they may individually have bigger impact on the legislation.
agree, but do you think are there any working examples? is it working somewhere someway? could we learn and take example from it? or is all chaos and corruption?
Reading about the way democracy was done in Athens, both are at 0.
In Athens, they had some 5000 people gathering together to vote every week on various matters out of the total population of around 20000 (the others were women, slaves and immigrants).
The judicial system was organized into 10 courts of 500 randomly assigned people from the above 5000.
They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emigrate so that they do not become excessively influential.
Once Sparta took over Athens, the decision-making was restricted to 500 people first, then to the 30 tyrants.
P.S. IIRC, they had both secret and public voting.
P.P.S. Most public jobs were assigned randomly, except those that required specialized skills.
Representative democracy is by nature oligachic. Practically, there was no other way to organize a large state until modern communications technology, so that's very understandable, the critical issue is that the US is becoming less and less democratic and more oligarchic over time while we are more and more capable of democracy (instantaneous communication across the world, very fast travel, universal education, etc). The end of proportional representation in favor of a fixed-size Congress was the beginning of the end, IMO.
"All politics is local", which used to be true until perhaps 50 years ago, was the only thing that kept the oligarchs in check. Now the oligarchs can use modern communications technology to organize and consolidate power at the national and even international level. Consider how Rupert Murdoch for example was able to spread his political propaganda from Australia all the way to the US and the UK. Consider also how Jeffrey Epstein organized a global social network of oligarchs.
Hasn't this been obvious for a while ? The US is about 1/5 of the way down an ever-more-slippery slope towards a fascist state. Its much-vaunted "checks and balances" have been shown to be paper tigers, and the constitution it heralds far and wide doesn't seem to be worth the paper its written on.
The US already has one of the weakest social safety nets in the Western world, it has military-spec weaponised police with little to no oversight, it has a political system ripe for abuse with the electoral college and gerrymandering running rife, and it has a political legacy of "it doesn't matter what you do to win, as long as you win", which allows racism to dictate voting rights. It's an attitude (along with a lot of the other political institutions) that hasn't been updated since Victorian times.
There's a lot of things I would not agree with, with any of the political leadership of the UK, but I wouldn't expect any of them - even the worst in my eyes - to separate children from families, prevent them from taking their medicine, lock them up in desert camps where rape and abuse are rife, and then remove them to remote locations with no record of where they went. Human trafficking, organised by the US government, for the profit of the rich. Not content with legal slavery for the imprisoned, they implemented it for migrants too. Migrant children.
I'm genuinely not sure if the US is capable of reversing its current course. I'm not even sure it's worth trying without a huge shift in opinion for the public who vote these rat-bastards in. Again. After the human-trafficking came to light...
I think that deep down many people often believe that they could have a say in policy if only they tried hard enough, so their lack of influence is a kind of personal failing.
In reality these systems are designed to absorb your effort and direct it into time sinks that either serve those in power
Want to change things? First "we" need to take back the house by phone-banking for this blue dog
Chip in $5 today to help Chuck Schumer win back the Senate
or avoid putting pressure on anyone
We're going to "show Trump" with a big attendance at the next No Kings rally
It's similar to how people are led to believe anyone could have a billion dollars if only they were smarter and/or worked harder.
These things do help but only very slightly, not sufficiently. The main function of a protest is not to effect change, but to help people who support a cause meet each other.
A reverse would violate three red lines that the current oligarchy will not budge on:
* More sharing of political power with ethnic, class or cultural outgroups
* Less revenues for the oligarchy from land ownership, investment in healthcare and investment in finance (other investment sectors would do better, however)
* Greater civil and criminal penalties for civil or criminal wrongdoing by oligarchs, their loved ones and their class allies (e.g. the affluenza case)
Even installing something like Juche and losing internationally to China in every way is preferable to having any one of these go forward, at least to their perspective.
> Its much-vaunted "checks and balances" have been shown to be paper tigers, and the constitution it heralds far and wide doesn't seem to be worth the paper its written on.
The Constitution was oligarchic by design of the founding oligarchs, who stated explicitly that the point of the "checks and balances" was actually to stop majoritarianism.
The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms.
Otherwise it will probably slide in to being a full Oligarchy like Russia.
To me this crazy thing is the complete lack of alarm or sense of urgency from Americans on this. They seem very subdued and very complacent regarding this change.
> The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms.
Considering TFA is from 2014 and knowing the Democratic Party, I think instead of a 180 you could at best expect a 20
I see this written here as a good representation of the current media view imposed on people ( and apparently well received ) that is actually leading to things like trump or fascism.
Trump is part of upper class oligarchy in the United States and his election is the direct result of the concerns of his constituents regarding immigration.
It doesn't look like it got any better since 2014.
One measure of democracy is how much say you have in issues which affect you, the running of your neighborhood, your government etc.
If you look at decision making at high levels, the general population usually gets ignored. Instead, powerful special interests dominate the government.
Particularly with regard to foreign affairs of the USA, the oil lobby and weapons manufacturers. And look who's benefiting from the current state of affairs in Ukraine, Iran and Venezuela: US arms manufacturers and oil companies.
On the other hand in many ways people in the USA are extroardinarly free, there's pretty good protection of freedom of speech.
>One measure of democracy is how much say you have in issues which affect you, the running of your neighborhood, your government etc.
We've intentionally reduced everyone's say in everything with state/fed regulation and the whole "make it cost too much to be viable on its face but then give them a grant/tax break/other favorable treatment to make it work if they jump through the right hoops" paradigm that's permeated damn near everything.
If high levels are ignoring the general population and dominated by special interests, that's an oligarchy. You agree with the article.
How can a country be democratic with only two parties?
This is a direct outcrop of the winner-takes-all electoral district system which forces parties to merge to have a chance at winning. I personally find it an undemocratic, archaic and meritless system.
electoral district system? this seems to be very specific and a subset of the topic/problem
It relates to the two-party system, not whether the U.S. is an oligarchy.
The article implies that the U.S. is not a democracy, but oligarchy and democracy aren't mutually exclusive. I'd say the U.S. (and most Western countries) is both and always has been. Voters certainly have influence in the U.S. but it's limited, just like everywhere else.
It was revolutionary and progressive, in the 13th century... Now, not so much.
I remember reading an economics paper that showed you need at least four suppliers in any market to get real competition. I can't see why politics is any different.
You should think of it this ways.
In the us, political groups for coalitions before the election happens. This is in contrast to most European countries where they set up the coalitions afterwards. Groups occasionally migrate between the parties and the us is in one such realignment now.
I'd like to think that it's twice as good as a one-party system.
It’s double plus good!
Not sure whether you're serious or joking, but in the realm of economics, I think that duopolies are actually worse than monopolies, because everyone recognizes that a monopoly needs to be strictly regulated and/or broken up, whereas when there's a duopoly, that's supposedly "competition" and thus the duopolies largely escape regulation or breakup, even if they implicitly or explicitly cooperate and coordinate to crush any other competition.
In the same way, the obvious solution to a one-party system is to overthrow the government, whereas with a two-party system, you're supposed to fight within the system... and mostly accomplish nothing, because those in power have overlapping interests.
>because everyone recognizes that a monopoly needs to be strictly regulated and/or broken up
And who's gonna do that when the government has a monopoly?
While i agree in theory, in practice multi party systems still end up with only two sides where the biggest/most influential party on either side exerts its power over the others regardless.
Going away from parties to actual individual person voting on each topic/decision would be actual democracy but not like that has no drawbacks.
And starting to smell like a kleptocracy given the rampant insider trading and leveraging military to influence market outcomes
We hear a lot about what is or isn't a democracy but the reality is that very few countries today would ever be above the bar set. Even Athenian democracy wouldn't, as it was a demos of the male citizens only, supported by a large slave class.
What is more important is: is it working? And if not, why not?
Which is why, instead of "democracy", it's more useful to quantify democratic. One traditional measure of such is the degree to which political power can be gained through free elections. But the research in TFA instead uses a novel measure: the weight a population has in its country's policymaking. Which yields fascinating results.
Because, per the linked research, in present-time USA that weight is ~zero.
Which is especially interesting considering the USA's narratives about itself. And how, it seems to me, its population is so invested in said narratives that it will defend those even in the face of contrary research. You'd think a culture so invested in its self-determination would be angry about this result and endeavor to do something about it.
The linked research was 12 years ago during the Obama regime. Have things changed since Obama?
The research covered policies from 1981 to 2002.
I don't think it is obvious that measure is meaningful though. The US has always been explicit that it doesn't trust the majority of the population to make decisions and has built intentional systems to keep them out. That is still democratic, the people could change those systems if they really put their mind to it, because the power does technically flow from the people if they really put their foot down.
It is pretty safe to say that the US could be more democratic. It is probably reasonable to compare it to other countries in terms of how democratic it is. But saying it is "not a democracy" is a fairly trivial observation. Republics aren't technically democracies if democracy means that the people make the decisions and win on all the disagreements. Republics are modelled on places like Rome that had a very visible and powerful oligarchy.
Isn't this partly a question of sheer size of countries like the US and India?
In Slovenia or Denmark, there may be two degrees of separation fewer between the regular voter and, say, an ordinary MP, because the parliaments and government are about the same size, but the population is in single millions. Even here in Czechia quite a lot of people actually know personally some high-ranking politician.
How many Americans are on friendly terms with their Rep or Senator?
> How many Americans are on friendly terms with their Rep or Senator?
I would imagine if you limited this to folks with $100MM+ net worth, the percentage wouldn't be so low.
This works in smaller countries as well, though. I would expect that our local tycoons know half of the Parliament and most of the ministers. And given that there is fewer very rich people here, they may individually have bigger impact on the legislation.
When asking if it's "working", you need to ask "for whom?".
> What is more important is: is it working? And if not, why not?
It's always “working”, the question is for whom.
agree, but do you think are there any working examples? is it working somewhere someway? could we learn and take example from it? or is all chaos and corruption?
I still think about the Bonobos a lot.
To complete the circle: The definition of working is vastly different among humans, and that's why we have (or trying to have) democracy.
This sounds like a more elaborate version of Whataboutism.
Hm, so study discovered hot water, what is new ?
Democracy isn't absolute. I'd rate US style democracy 6 out of 10, while Russia is 2.
Why not 4 and 1 respectively?
Hah!
Reading about the way democracy was done in Athens, both are at 0.
In Athens, they had some 5000 people gathering together to vote every week on various matters out of the total population of around 20000 (the others were women, slaves and immigrants).
The judicial system was organized into 10 courts of 500 randomly assigned people from the above 5000.
They regularly forced the most prominent politicians to emigrate so that they do not become excessively influential.
Once Sparta took over Athens, the decision-making was restricted to 500 people first, then to the 30 tyrants.
P.S. IIRC, they had both secret and public voting.
P.P.S. Most public jobs were assigned randomly, except those that required specialized skills.
Representative democracy is by nature oligachic. Practically, there was no other way to organize a large state until modern communications technology, so that's very understandable, the critical issue is that the US is becoming less and less democratic and more oligarchic over time while we are more and more capable of democracy (instantaneous communication across the world, very fast travel, universal education, etc). The end of proportional representation in favor of a fixed-size Congress was the beginning of the end, IMO.
"All politics is local", which used to be true until perhaps 50 years ago, was the only thing that kept the oligarchs in check. Now the oligarchs can use modern communications technology to organize and consolidate power at the national and even international level. Consider how Rupert Murdoch for example was able to spread his political propaganda from Australia all the way to the US and the UK. Consider also how Jeffrey Epstein organized a global social network of oligarchs.
Hasn't this been obvious for a while ? The US is about 1/5 of the way down an ever-more-slippery slope towards a fascist state. Its much-vaunted "checks and balances" have been shown to be paper tigers, and the constitution it heralds far and wide doesn't seem to be worth the paper its written on.
The US already has one of the weakest social safety nets in the Western world, it has military-spec weaponised police with little to no oversight, it has a political system ripe for abuse with the electoral college and gerrymandering running rife, and it has a political legacy of "it doesn't matter what you do to win, as long as you win", which allows racism to dictate voting rights. It's an attitude (along with a lot of the other political institutions) that hasn't been updated since Victorian times.
There's a lot of things I would not agree with, with any of the political leadership of the UK, but I wouldn't expect any of them - even the worst in my eyes - to separate children from families, prevent them from taking their medicine, lock them up in desert camps where rape and abuse are rife, and then remove them to remote locations with no record of where they went. Human trafficking, organised by the US government, for the profit of the rich. Not content with legal slavery for the imprisoned, they implemented it for migrants too. Migrant children.
I'm genuinely not sure if the US is capable of reversing its current course. I'm not even sure it's worth trying without a huge shift in opinion for the public who vote these rat-bastards in. Again. After the human-trafficking came to light...
It's been obvious to anyone who pays attention to all the details and thinks hard about their meaning, but that is a small fraction of people.
I think that deep down many people often believe that they could have a say in policy if only they tried hard enough, so their lack of influence is a kind of personal failing.
In reality these systems are designed to absorb your effort and direct it into time sinks that either serve those in power
or avoid putting pressure on anyone It's similar to how people are led to believe anyone could have a billion dollars if only they were smarter and/or worked harder.These things do help but only very slightly, not sufficiently. The main function of a protest is not to effect change, but to help people who support a cause meet each other.
yes kinda obvious now for many, but I've never seen it so nicely summarised and also from 2014!
I always try to consider a possible biased view, but again seen it summarized it like this makes it extremely simple and clear.
A reverse would violate three red lines that the current oligarchy will not budge on:
* More sharing of political power with ethnic, class or cultural outgroups
* Less revenues for the oligarchy from land ownership, investment in healthcare and investment in finance (other investment sectors would do better, however)
* Greater civil and criminal penalties for civil or criminal wrongdoing by oligarchs, their loved ones and their class allies (e.g. the affluenza case)
Even installing something like Juche and losing internationally to China in every way is preferable to having any one of these go forward, at least to their perspective.
> Its much-vaunted "checks and balances" have been shown to be paper tigers, and the constitution it heralds far and wide doesn't seem to be worth the paper its written on.
The Constitution was oligarchic by design of the founding oligarchs, who stated explicitly that the point of the "checks and balances" was actually to stop majoritarianism.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/75/V-Dem_Institute_Democracy...
The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms.
Otherwise it will probably slide in to being a full Oligarchy like Russia.
To me this crazy thing is the complete lack of alarm or sense of urgency from Americans on this. They seem very subdued and very complacent regarding this change.
> The US has slid below Hungary in democracy, Hungary was also straight sliding towards dictatorship. Hungary did a 180 though by electing Peter Maygar. Hopefully the US can do a 180 in the midterms.
Considering TFA is from 2014 and knowing the Democratic Party, I think instead of a 180 you could at best expect a 20
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I see this written here as a good representation of the current media view imposed on people ( and apparently well received ) that is actually leading to things like trump or fascism.
Trump is (mostly) not the problem. He's the canary in the coal mine. He does what his constituents want.
Other politicians were simply too thick to hear what people's concerns were so they voted for someone else.
The article is about oligarchy. You've somehow redirected it towards immigration. How are you making this connection?
Oligarchy is whenever you're free to travel, apparently.
Trump is part of upper class oligarchy in the United States and his election is the direct result of the concerns of his constituents regarding immigration.