The USA Presidential Election Is Democracy In Action
Why the forthcoming debacle isn’t a bug, it’s a feature
People are strange. On the one hand, ask most people about democracy and you’ll get the usual noises about it being the best system of governance ever created, it’s better than dictators or monarchs, and all the other soundbite responses that let people avoid having to make any effort to attempt to think about something important. On the other hand, ask them about particular candidates or political Parties and you’ll likely get a litany of complains, moans, and grumbles.
Yet the candidates and Parties are the result of the systems of democracy we’ve created. These people are, in tech parlance, not bugs but features. They’re exactly what you’d expect to get from any qualification-free system of representative democracy. So grumbling about candidates and Parties is like insisting we build motor vehicles without brakes and then blaming the drivers for all the inevitable crashes. Because we all know that motor vehicles are superior to horses and therefore the blame must lie with the humans driving them, right?
Supporters of universal franchise qualification-free representative democracy don’t seem able to join up the dots and see that the Farages, the Liz Trusses, the Trumps, the Bolsonaros, the Putins, the Erdogans…
