You need a congealed working class before you can have a democracy. Right now, we have a fractured and alienated working class, so all we get are the motions.
Gigantic voting districts where elected officials are lucky to know one constituent in 10,000.
Systematic disenfranchisement of young voters, poc, and the internally displaced.
Strict limits placed on individual bureaucrats who must pander to the broadly empowered private business interests.
A fully captured court system that can tip the scales of an election.
No regional autonomy. No public civil defense. No guarantee of political education. No right to free association of labor.
How do you engage with a democracy on those terms? What democracy is there to engage with? An election that is simply another consumer choice isn’t democratic. You still have no control over what you’re being offered and no participation on how the system is administered.
What you’ve listed are critiques. I agree with many of them. What I’m asking specifically is if not democracy, then what instead?
On paper, the United States is a federal republic, that votes for representatives for a bicameral parliamentary system that derives jurisprudence from English Common Law.
In practice, it’s a plutocratic oligarchy.
For context, I consider myself to be a market socialist who still wants a representative
federal republic for the United States.
I have my own ideas for re-enfranchisement for the working class:
abolish “first-past-the-post”
restructure gerrymandered voting districts
implement ranked choice voting
constitutional amendment for term limits for every elected position
allow cross-party voting in primaries
abolishing Citizens United (what a cynically ironic name for what it actually allows for)
These points are only achievable by voting for candidates who advocate for such policies which is admittedly a long shot, given the average citizen’s knowledge of civics, political theory, economics, and statistics but it’s what I believe can work.
Or would you prefer autocracy? The “dictatorship of the proletariat”? Monarchy? Theocracy? Anarchy? Oligarchy? Syndicalism?
My ultimate point is that you seem to still want “democracy”, but you want it in practice, not just on paper, despite your claim of the point of democracies is to “keep capitalists in power”.
Again, My question to you is if not democracy, then what? Or do you actually want democracy? Please propose your alternative to democracy, given your claim about its purpose in “keeping capitalists in power”.
You need a congealed working class before you can have a democracy. Right now, we have a fractured and alienated working class, so all we get are the motions.
How do you engage with a democracy on those terms? What democracy is there to engage with? An election that is simply another consumer choice isn’t democratic. You still have no control over what you’re being offered and no participation on how the system is administered.
What you’ve listed are critiques. I agree with many of them. What I’m asking specifically is if not democracy, then what instead?
On paper, the United States is a federal republic, that votes for representatives for a bicameral parliamentary system that derives jurisprudence from English Common Law.
In practice, it’s a plutocratic oligarchy.
For context, I consider myself to be a market socialist who still wants a representative federal republic for the United States.
I have my own ideas for re-enfranchisement for the working class:
These points are only achievable by voting for candidates who advocate for such policies which is admittedly a long shot, given the average citizen’s knowledge of civics, political theory, economics, and statistics but it’s what I believe can work.
Or would you prefer autocracy? The “dictatorship of the proletariat”? Monarchy? Theocracy? Anarchy? Oligarchy? Syndicalism?
My ultimate point is that you seem to still want “democracy”, but you want it in practice, not just on paper, despite your claim of the point of democracies is to “keep capitalists in power”.
Politics is the art of the possible. The entire job of political leadership is to advocate for policy change.
Again, My question to you is if not democracy, then what? Or do you actually want democracy? Please propose your alternative to democracy, given your claim about its purpose in “keeping capitalists in power”.
I want good policy.
If my democracy is producing bad candidates and bad policies, what purpose does it serve?
Capitalism is serviced by the illusion of choice in a functional monopoly. The solution is to break up the monopoly.
But that’s a Herculean task.