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Whenever you see democracy, it means bourgeois democracy.
All that matters is 
. Don't think too hard about what happens before or after that!
“Aren’t you scared Trump will kill democracy??”
Dog what democracy? There are so many policies with mass public support that are nowhere near to getting enacted. If the ruling class just let everyone keep voting but didn’t count the ballots and picked whichever candidate they wanted to win would we even notice? Doubtful
''Democracy'' is just a religious ceremony.
The only people that still call the US a democracy were just told all their lives that it was and never looked into it themselves.
The moment they decided on a representative system was when people should have accepted that it was never a democracy to begin with.
if the accusation is always a confession,
then by contrapositive,
every self-claim is a contradiction
I canvassed for the greens once. It isn't so simple as "campaigning" for them, you have to gather thousands upon thousands of signatures for them first before they're really even allowed to run.
They paid $10 per signature, though. Not a bad gig lol. Selling democracy to the highest bidder!
Local GOP keeps posting a canvasing job on indeed and I keep thinking about it lol.
Game the system for my own financial needs because it's fucked anyway.
Of you look at American electoral history, because elections are carried out by States, and you're not voting directly for president, but instead for electors to go to the electoral college, each state had a wildly different way of deciding who these electors ought to be.
Some had elections (property owning white men, only), others had the state legislature decide. If a state chose via the state legislature, they couldn't even agree on how that shit was supposed to work!
And then, early on, there was no expectation that the electors had to abide by the will of the people who selected them. They were free to vote for whoever, like Cardinals picking the fucking Pope!
And any time an election, or anything else for that matter, didn't go the way a state wanted, they would threaten secession from the Union.
It's genuinely shocking that the US didn't immediately fucking implode, given how genuinely batshit its institutions are.
Edit: for more stupidity I just thought of: if the electoral college can't figure it out, how is the president chosen? It's totally vibes based. In 2000, the supreme court just snatched up the ability to do this, effectively stealing an election. But in 1824, when they couldn't decide, it went to the fucking House of Representatives, and they decided!
Its reaaaal 'Civic Religion' hours over here in the USofA.
If you actually wanted to do democracy (and I think one day we will want to do democracy for many if not most things, once the average person is not quite so steeped in false consciousness) you would treat it the same way you would treat a survey. I don't think each and every person voting actually matters, just like you don't have to ask every soul in America to find out, say, America's favorite pie. If only 1% were sampled to vote and it was done so in a reasonably unbiased way, your results would be 99.999% in line with the average American's opinion/wants.
Takeaway: We've been doing studies and combating sample bias for hundreds of years, including before "democracy" began in the US. We know how to do it, it's genuinely never been tried.
If only 1% were sampled to vote and it was done so in a reasonably unbiased way, your results would be 99.999% in line with the average American’s opinion/wants.
you are vastly overstating the accuracy of polling, and making a system with a hugely glaring way to game the system. if you thought the voter suppression in the us is bad now, wait until you see the stupid fucking political games being played with the sampling rules in your proposed system.
My point is that we know what introduces sample bias, that's it. it's already gamed to the point that it's hardly worth talking about.
I don't understand what you're responding to here. Vote by state?
But I also don't see the need to sacrifice accuracy by sampling votes for the sake of "efficiency". The voting method of the USA is a laughing stock here in Brazil, where we usually know the results within 12 hours of the polls closing. Their voting methods aren't inefficient due to some intrinsic property of polling the whole population, they're just doing their best to prevent non-white/working people from voting.
Either way, this post is just complaining about how the USA states have made it effectively impossible for parties like the PSL to compete in elections by denying them ballot access, then turn around and call that democracy. In no way did I intend to imply that voting is equivalent to democracy, which it is not. Voting is just a mechanism for legitimisation of a regime, whether it is democratic or not.
Clearly I'm not communicating this very well, and I only meant it as an off hand comment not a world changing statement. No, I wasn't concerned about efficiency, just pointing out that we know how to do voting, but bourgeois democracy chooses not to.
this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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