Is Democracy really the best form of government or we have an alternative?
The US and UK do not have democracy, they have an oligarchy. People are allowed in theory to choose whoever they want but in practice they can only choose from among people in the elite bourgeoisie to make decisions on their behalf and only ones from a couple parties at that. If we had instant runoff voting, required strict caps on campaign fund raising and/or required public campaign financing, abolished the US Senate, and had compulsory voting we’d put a lot more power in the hands of the voting public and less in the hands of the wealthy elites. There was a study on this done in Indonesia. It found that villages with democracy made more or less the same decisions as the ones with an oligarchy of village elders and such. The difference was that the people felt more pleased and had more faith in the democratic villages even though the outcomes were the same.
Yes. But democracy doesn’t guarantee good government, it only guarantees that the leaders are relatively popular with a majority of the electorate. There are a lot of possible systems and modifications of them. We don’t really have a democracy, we have a democratic republic. Our electoral system is modeled on Fredrick the Great’s, and it promotes two parties because minority parties cannot form coalitions to elect a prime minister as they do parliamentary democracies. Socialist democracies elect delegates who elect those higher up, but they are apt to become dictatorships since the electors are dependent upon the top level. We could have a meritocracy without changing a thing, if the people always elected the best representatives. To help insure that people aren’t tricked, and that representatives don’t cater to special interests, we could prohibit private campaigning and contributions and go to public funding and equal time. But we prefer to allow some corruption and biased decision-m
