this post was submitted on 15 May 2026
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Me trying to figure out if OP means true left or Tankie bullshit before commenting:
I see a lot of people on Lemmy recently claiming to be left but also trying to tell me how democracies are bad. -_-
Are they literally saying "democracy is bad" or are they saying American "democracy" isn't worth preserving?
Democracies exists?
They do
My country of Australia isn't perfect, but it's pretty good
My birth country of New Zealand has MMP, which is a great system
Wrong metrics are used to make it look like Australia is a strong democracy. Suppression of anti establishement protests, strong lobbies, lack of political accountqbility are serious anti democratic metrics.
Probably the case, although it's important not to dismiss people for criticizing liberal democracy - the system that has repeatedly put us in the mess we're in now. There are plenty of issues which are wildly popular regardless of political alignment but which liberal democracy fails to deliver, so to consider it a democracy at all, simply because most people get voting rights to pick representatives, is very debatable.
There are plenty of other forms of democracy, many which have been successfully run in communities of hundreds of thousands of people (consider Zapatistas, Cheran, and more).
The more I think about democracies the more I realise they're flawed by design. Asking people for vote as now synonymous with essentially marketing. Most people are unable to understand when they're being marketed to.
A benevolent dictator would be sooo much better, but then even by miracle you get a benevelont one, chances of the next one being benevelont are shit.
So I don't know what the solution is. But we sticked to the flawed solution for now.
Athenian democracies solve a lot of our current issues. It's a bit like jury duty. You put your own name down and can be picked for roles in government.
France did that after the yellow vest protests. They randomly picked 100 citizens to lead a citizens Senate to propose solutions, and Macron promised to implement their suggestions (he lied. Only partial implementation happened)
One of the emergent properties to picking 100 random citizens is you get close to a random sample of society. Rich and poor, left and right all with different perspectives and life experiences. They all have to argue their perspective and back it up with evidence for it to function properly.
They also can't be bought out the same way as entrenched parties. The candidates are random. Nobody knows until the results are announced.
It also results in a much stronger sense of civic duty for the average citizen when you participate in the civic process regularly like this.
This video does a far better job than I can making the case for them
The idea is nice, except that if you allow the rich to participate, they will just buy their way. As was the case with every non-socialist political system in history.
Sortition?
This is the catch that the greek philosophers warned about. Democracies are vulnerable to manipulation, demagoguery, and shortsightedness. A functional democracy requires maintaining a high level of societal quality, education, ethics, stability, and aggressively restricting consolidation of wealth and power. The US failed to do any of these things, and has descended into neofeudalism, where the govern_ed_ no longer have any influence over their govern_ment_.
The US didn’t fail to do those things, it never had any intention of even trying to do those things. This is because the people in power fundamentally do not want actual democracy. They want a system where those with wealth are able to dictate the rules. And funnily enough, the system they created is perfectly designed to allow them to do so.
If the people actually want political democracy, then they need to democratize the economy first. No more private ownership of the means of production, no more rampant inequality, no more capitalism.
Democracies need a system to set long term goals and kick out any politicians violating the goals.
I think it will be a lot better if we could punish liars. If the population had access to trustworthy information and an accessible way to vote, we could have a true democracy.
The question is, who is allowed to point out that RFK is a mass murdering liar, without opening the way for someone to declare that Sanders is a liar. Would a board of doctors, however big, have the authority to demote and lock up RFK? Do they file a complaint to a higher court that the Supreme Court will throw away? You'd have to revamp a lot of shit like not having the top court in the country be nominated by the president and such.
I mean how you determine objective truth would be tricky, and then would someone count as a liar if they were misinformed themselves, or if they're talking about potential from a gamble and lose. Its never actually going to happen, I just wish we could.
Anarchists argue against democracy for their own separate reasons. I am only beginning to grasp the nuance, but there is a distinction.
I suggest engaging an anarchist/somebody versed on the topic to learn more, or read up here on the fediverse ~~or shudders on Reddit.~~ EDIT: Actually, don't go there.
https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/books/from-democracy-to-freedom/from-democracy-to-freedom_screen_single_page_view.pdf
I see a lot of "leftists" in Lemmy trying to tell me how capitalism is totally a democracy despite systematically ignoring the wishes of the vast majority and only de facto governing for the ruling class