What are your criticisms on a direct democracy?

What are your criticisms on a direct democracy?

Too time consuming. Would only work in smaller city states.

Populations in a country are usually divided into High Density Urban areas, Low Density Urban areas and rural areas

Each of these have their own environment that shapes the worldview of its inhabitants. Political, economical, social worldviews are all different between these areas.

At first glance this might not seem like an issue, but the population is not evenly divided within these areas.
The High Density Urban areas usually have a plurality or a majority of the total population, whereas the rural areas are almost always the smallest group.


In a direct democracy this causes High Density Urban areas to dominate politics, which can have disastrous results, as the rural areas are usually the source of agriculture and other bare necessities like clean water or energy.


This is why regionalism, which today can be seen in the American and Swiss systems, is the superior system.

If stupidity is implemented (See FDR, LBJ and Woodrow Wilson) it may never be reversed

People are fucking retarded and can't be trusted with the responsibility of choosing what is best for a nation.

All it comes down to is more kids=more power.

small states become vassals of large states

People are too stupid, especially when (((they))) are controlling the thoughts of the population.

>Hurr durr land should get a vote

Who cares about the rubes in the rural area? The Urban areas are the centers of industries, technology, education and everything good about a nation. Of course they should dictate what should go on.

t. innercity ghetto thug

>time consuming
How do you figure? We have to wait years to vote on politicians who don't agree with us on every issue, and usually vote just so the other doesn't win. Instead of voting on the issues in real time, live. Change your opinion, change your vote, at will.

Please elaborate

What you are arguing is the spectrum between county rights and federal rights. As most people agree with county rights, and laws of the land. The spectrum of the law, will match the spectrum of belief on this ideology

My city, the capital city of Sacramento, voted 33% for Trump. The issue is "winner takes all", and that will be solved in a direct democracy

...

with direct democracy, the USA would be socialist

What about the system where you keep the regions intact, but as for forming government, its the largest party who becomes government, and then for passing laws, that party needs to get a majority vote through?

In Denmark, the primary reason for our politics being shit is that the governing party has to bend over to the other parties who give that "wing" the majority. So for instance now, we have 4 parties who together have 51% of the mandates in parliament, which means the governing party has to keep those guys happy to get anything done, and if a party outside those 4 has the same stance of a particular law as the governing party, well thats tough, because you can't work with them if the 3 parties other parties backing you doesn't want that law passed, unless you cave to them on other issues.

Politicians are people, are they not? As the saying goes, two heads are better than one.

But in this case, 315 millions brains are better than the thousands of elected officials

Besides, people aren't going to vote on every issue, especially without knowledge. But we are forced to when we elect somebody

Works pretty good in homogeneous societies, where everyone shares a culture and values.

Would be a nightmare in places like the USA.

t. guy who believes food magically appears in the grocery store each morning

Mob rule is just as tyrannical as an any dictator.

america isnt a democracy, so this guy is a fucking retard. second, america is the wealthiest and strongest nation on earth and controls everything, so he would be wrong anyways

fuck off leaf

A whole bunch of idiots voting for shit they have not the foggiest of the rammifications if implemented. They will vote to give themselves money at the expense of tax payers, multiply ad infinitum until it becomes stupid to even bother working or paying taxes. Turns into a domino effect until the society collapses, most likely bloodshed.

Libs have conservaive kids

Conservatives have lib kids

What you say doesn't match completely

There are a lot more small states, even then, the power will match their size

Direct democracy in a real federal system is fine in my books.
However in a deeply centralized one like for example France it is a recipe for catastroph.

>america isnt a democracy

you don't know what a democracy is

It will only be as socialist as the people are, as fascist as the people are, as communist as the people are, as nazi as the people are, etc

it's not though, it's a democratic republic

not true

it would be as ideological as the majority of the population and that's it

the minority would not get anything through

The fact that 99% of people in my country have IQ below 90.

It is my belief, immigration is controlled by (((them))).

In a direct democracy, immigration will match the people's wishes with perfection

>america isn't democratic
That's why the merchants and leftists opened the border floodgates right? You are arguing semantics if you try to say America isn't a democracy.

a democracy is any form of government where the common man can exert political influence, typically through voting

you're not a democratic republic, btw, you're a federal one

in terms of democracy, you're a representative democracy

USA already has socialist policies.

Workers already don't get the compensation they deserve for their work, so balancing that out by giving them socialized services like healthcare etc. isn't going to decrease their standard of living. Rather it would increase the standard of living for most people.

Money being funneled to the rich does not create jobs or even help the economy. Eventually these rich people have so much money they just sit on it. That's dead money. That's wasted potential. Might as well use the evil of taxes to put it to use.

I am not a socialist or a capitalist or a communist. I don't think there is a "right" economic system, but the fact that Europe has such a better standard of living or at the very least baseline happiness than the United States might hint at the utility of socialism.

315 millions brains will run a society better than one dictator brain

as a European, you have no idea what you're talking about

especially considering my country has the best healthcare in Europe and it's not socialized
(Trump's plan actually looks a lot like the Dutch Healthcare model)

The general public are retarded.

It's a republic.

Depends on the dictator and his subjects. Some people are just irredemable retards that need a firm hand to guide them. IE: Muslims.

>A whole bunch of idiots voting for shit they have not the foggiest of the rammifications if implemented

33% of the capital city of California voted for Trump, but Hillary got all of the electorates. What you are afraid of, is coming true regardless with the current trends. This system gives people who share your opinion (which are a lot more than you think) gives you a fighting voice. Gives you power instead of an elected parasite who wishes to control you

Decentralize power, give it back to the people

republicanism and democracy are not mutually exclusive

California exists.

Food isn't even an issue anymore, lol. You're dumb. We're pratically living in a post scarcity society.

Pain in the butt to get everyone to vote, and using computers to do so leaves the vote open to tampering by whoever has or gains control of the computers.

And there's the issue of who decides what gets voted on. SOMEONE has to draft the legislation and if it's anyone can write a law, so much dumb shit can go wrong because of bad wording or some provision thrown in as a (likely petty) favor or conflict with an existing law without repealing parts of it, and I would imagine that most people are stupid enough to vote for something like banning criticism, or making families illegal, or dissolving the military because "we don't need that" if you phrase the law right. And the rich who own the press will quickly effectively run everything with no one to stop them, even more so than now.

And if the people who write the laws are elected you have to put in a huge set of checks and balances to keep them from doing the same shit but to even farther reaching extremes, which creates the possibility for more extreme class warfare, especially between everyone else and the privileged few chosen to enforce the law.

Basically, everyone has to personally know everyone for it to work.

I would rather say that the general public are easily distracted, and most will jump over where the fence is lowest, if given a fence with varying height.

>new challenger wants to argue semantics for no reason

About your electoral system, what you should do is give out Electoral Votes based on Congressional Districts (Like how Nebraska and Maine do it), with 2 state wide votes going to the winner of the vote over all

There are things I agreed on with Bernie, as well as Trump. But neither represented me perfectly.

315 millions brains will run a better system then two who are divided in extremes, only as a culture war

average IQ is 100

half the people are below that

need I say more?

>There are a lot more small states, even then, the power will match their size
wrong on both assumptions

Not really workable. We actually have the infrastructure to implement a direct democracy now with smartphones. Make it an app and the majority of the population could just vote on issues and you'd have the vote in within a day. The bigger problem is that the majority of people don't really care about the nuance of policy. If you wanted to implement a new tax code would everyone need to read the fine print of the new law? That shit is time consuming, and the main reason we have representatives do it for us

Not if you open the gates to low-iq brains. Democracy is better the higher quality your people.

>"We're pratically living in a post scarcity society."

I really hope you're Californian. Please tell me you're Californian

In case of Serbia, 99.9% of the people are below that.

/thread

i would not let even myself to make decisions, i would be corrupted af and just turn world into meme.

>315 millions brains will run a better system

no they won't, what the fuck are you basing this off of?

>half the people are below the average

thats not how it works

The main difference is that republics have a constitution that protects a minority even if a majority wants to take away rights.

The US constitution makes the US a republic in terms of the protection it gives its citizens as basic rights. Also the constitution can only be amended, but changed, another point towards the US being a republic.

how so?

Obama's cabinet destroyed the muslim-west buffer zone, why does America hate the rest of the world so much.

>how does a bell curve work?

Direct democracy = Mob rule

That's about it.

If you want to waste you breath playing with words democracy means power of he people, a republic is thus a subset of democracy.

At least you could be assured that the average voter IQ averages to 100 if everyone votes.

>only republics have constitutions

what the fuck?
both of us live in monarchies and we have constitutions too, what are you talking about

>implying the world population follows the bell curve

there's more niggers than whites, anons

>Pain in the butt to get everyone to vote,
This system will promote voting, Romney vs. Obama only turned 52%, this will get people feeling like they can actually change something for once

>tampering
There are many solutions and safe-guards that can be implemented, like multiple outlets and transparent votes

>SOMEONE has to draft the legislation
No, EVERYONE will draft the legislation

Let me go into detail

Abortion should be legal
STUMP - YES 60%
FULL BRANCHES
-Yes but not after (insert time)
-Yes but only if her life is...
-Yes and blah blah blah

STUMP - NO 40%
HOLLOW BRANCHES

The people will draft the law sentence by sentence. Vote on the yest no (or don't) and then vote on the branches, and the twigs, and the leafs

i don't really have any faith in the problem-solving capacities of people with 100 IQ... that's not exactly reassuring

>And if the people who write the laws are elected
No elected officials would exist, unless as department heads maybe (and that's a big maybe)

How do you keep the cost of healthcare down?

I can almost certainly guarantee you that it is with government intervention.

You might think it's due to the "free market" but I can guarantee 100% you do not have a free market AND that you haven't read anything about how things like medicine don't behave by the usual rules of supply and demand due to their often life or death nature.

While it's true I make generalizations of European nations, just because your country is different from the others in some ways does not make my generalizations wrong or misguided because that is the point of generalizations; to gloss over the details and give a brief overview.

I never said only republics have constitutions... I said only republics have written the basic rights for the people into their constitutions.
In a democracy, the rights of the people are defined by lawmaking, and is not a part of the constitution itself.

In reply to the posters arguing over America being a democracy or republic: it has failed at both. America was a madisonian republic balanced by federalism, which has over the years been destroyed by "populist" or "democratic" forces. It is the people who shortsightedly rallied for the popular election of state Senators because they felt that political machines were too corrupt, and rather than solve the root of the problem they instead cured the symptom, which would only lead to far worse implications for our future.

It is the same "democratic" movements that have allowed women to vote, that have installed corrupt representatives willing to steal from the populace in the name of collectivist redistribution of wealth. The weak and shortsighted masses have ruined the principles this nation was founded on.

Want to know what's wrong with democracy? Get a well spoken man with ill thought ideas into a room full of people, and he will convince the masses to agree with him no matter how disastrous his plan. But let this same well spoken man into a chamber of intellectuals and his ideas will be seen for the failures they are. Mob rule will always lead to destruction, and democracy inevitably ends in mob rule.

Let's say 1 = dumb as fuck and 100 = genius. You could have a population where everyone is about a 2, accept for that one guy who's a 100. And this would through the average way up, even though it's way more than half of the people being dumber than the average. And it would work the other way too, but we know that's not how it be like it do.

Scientific research done on group decision making (as individuals though, to avoid groupthink and such)

Universal suffrage in a representative democracy doesn't even work so why would a direct democracy work?

The majority is susceptible to subversion.

We recently saw how this bullshit works in Spain. Secessionists had to make a pact with a radical left small party to obtain a majority in the regional (sorry, "national") catalonian parliament.

Because these fuckers are "assambleary", the pact itself had to be voted. But remember, these people are an assembly. So they didn't just vote, because before that they had to vote to decide what the question of the vote was going to be. That alone took several votes. You know, it's not "true democracy" if it's not done that way, according to them. After deciding the question, they voted it, several times, because that's how true democracy works. All of this took several days to complete. Oh, and only a few hundreds of people actually attended the event and voted.

see

Referendums can be good for some issues but not everything.

Most people are against immigration, and the ones that are for it are for strong regulation. Your fear is based on very loud 16 year olds

who will process the laws?
who decides which laws to work on next?

It's literally because we have privatized healthcare
the few government intervention we do have is actually bad for us

but that's completely wrong, both the dutch and the british constitution have this

you're not even talking about republicanism or democracy, you're talking about constitutionalism

i can give you something better than your cherrypicked basic problem solving study

social media
twitter

all the billions of people in the world talking right past each other, never solving any issues

these are the perfect examples of why direct democracy wont work

see

Majority of the population are retards.

Direct democracy is fine if its on a local scale and only the oldest and wisest are allowed to vote

What are you arguing? You moved the goal posts all the way to another city man. I know that most people are against immigration but the 20's immigration act was overturned by leftists and Jews for the 60's immigration act in part to get more people to vote left. Also look at how pathetically lax the state has been on the illegal immigration problem for decades.
My original argument was that America is democratic, not direct democracy but democratic. Saying that it is a republic and implying that makes it not democratic is retarded and what I was arguing against in the first place.

none

I'll admit i wrote a bit to fast there, so i went and looked it up:

The main difference is that in a democracy, the rights of a minority can be changed by the majority (constitution can be changed), while in a republic, the constitution can prohibit the majority from changing the rights of the minority.
The US constitution cannot be changed, only amended, which means that the majority cannot change the laws protecting the minority, which makes the US a republic compared to the rest of us.

this entirely depends on the constitution itself

the American constitution can only be amended because that's what it says in the American constitution

again, this is just a matter about the constitution itself, not the form of government

The majority decides everything.

Under representative democracy people have to choose their most important issue or issues and vote based on it.

Under direct democracy the majority can decide every single issue regardless of how much they care about it.

The reason it's confusing is because we are "representative democracies", which make us near the same as a republic.
However here in Denmark, having 2/3 of the mandates means you can change any part of our constitution at will, which means we cannot be called a republic. I'm guessing this goes for the Netherlands and everyone else in Europe as well.

People who think a democracy is the best form of government are allowed to vote

Gr8 b8 m8

People are dumb as rocks. Also we vote for a Party with various policies. In these modern times we should have local voting for each and every community affecting major decision. Such as immigrant centers, construction permits, deforestation, and so on. This would of course never work but I fucking hate centralized power.

None whatsoever, direct democracy is the only type of democracy that's worth fighting for.

Either that or just give it up altogether and find yourself a Fuhrer.

the reason we're not republics is because we're monarchies

we have a monarch as the head of state, not a president

Switzerland, Austria, Germany and France are all Republics

Will crash and burn, because people aren't smart enough to create and pass legislation that will improve the country.
You need a single dedicated person who has a vision for the country and the knowledge of how to create legislation that will work together with other laws and rules to improve the country

Lack of accountability. If the majority screws up, there's no one to be held accountable.

Direct democracy can be a way to diffuse responsability of individual's choices. It's a means of legitimizing decisions without anyone being responsible for them.

For example,

I know France and Germany are, have no idea about the rest.

Let me reply specifically to your dumb ass whose ideas are the intellectual equivalent to a 15 year old high school student who just read Rousseau for the first time. A massive population does not function better through direct democracy than a representative government properly balanced. Hell, even an aristocracy whose powers are limited by a constitution and with transparency will function better than a direct democracy. Mob rule is warned against by Plato for a reason, and it's the fact that 500 common men who heard rumors throughout the Agorra condemned a man to death for a crime he did not commit. Furthermore, men condemned him knowing that he was innocent because they simply did not like him or lost an argument to him.

Do you not love liberty? Because there is no love of liberty in democracy, only tyranny. If direct democracy is the direct will of the people then you will find the unfiltered greed and desire for power that comes with every man. There will be no ideal community working hard towards freedom, rather every man turned against another trying to gain a leg up on one another to benefit themselves. This is what creates socialist policies that destroy the lives of hard working men because the many weak men redistributed their wealth to themselves.

Furthermore, not all people have the intellect, knowledge, or time to attain the previous in order to vote responsibly. Would you allow your four year old a say in politics? So why should the masses be trusted with that same responsibility, when very few actually know what they're talking about. I understand that this will fal on deaf ears because you are the utopian planner of society in your own mind. Democracy will work great because you believe it will work in your favor, you would be horrified to find that you are not respected by your fellow voters and they will just as quickly destroy your livelihood for their benefit as they would their neighbors. You are not better than any other man.

Direct? Impossible due to campaign costs. Indirect is the only feasible way in modern times. Its flaws are clear: most people never picked the candidate personally. They just vote on a certain political party.

Advantages: well, its sure as hell better than any form of fascist/communist/monarchic autocracy. At least the leader is accountable for and his "rule" doesnt last forever.

"The forest of laws"
EVERYONE will draft the legislation, allow me to go into detail
↓example↓
A tree in the forest of laws, will be an issue/question.
Abortion should be legal
STUMP - YES 60%
FULL BRANCHES
-Yes but not after a certain time(YES/NO) %/%
TWIGS
-? months(yes/no) %/%
-? months(yes/no) %/%
-? weeks(yes/no) %/%
-Yes but only if her life is... %
-Yes and blah blah blah %

STUMP - NO 40%
HOLLOW BRANCHES(encase the yes becomes a no there will be laws ready)
No, and for those that illegally abort will get a sentence of...
No, and...
No, and...

The people will draft the law sentence by sentence. Vote on the stump(or don't) and then vote on the branches, and the twigs, and the leafs. With this system in place, the 40% that voted NO will still have representation by making restriction in the YES tree that the 60% majority can find agreeable. Thus making the perfect median of representation.

most people are ignorant of most things going on and only do what people want without looking things up and becoming knowledgeable on the situation at hand
plus niggers and spics have kids like crazy and don't want to become useful members of society plus they would do everything they can to keep "whitey" out of power, even if it meant going against their best interests

>le sheeple meme
*tips fedora*

It's slow and everyone is required to submit themselves under some kind of vague contract which later on only serves the ones who wish to tell you what NOT to do.