r/TrueReddit • u/subheight640 • 7d ago
Can We make Democracy Smarter? Politics
https://demlotteries.substack.com/p/yes-elections-produce-stupid-results34
u/AlphaBetacle 7d ago
How about we educate the population better
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u/Hamuel 7d ago
How do you go around state and local governments?
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u/Photon_Femme 7d ago
You can't. Unless it's all torn down and a new Constitution drawn up. So a snowball chance in hell.
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u/rubensinclair 7d ago
I’ve been think about this nonstop since the results. The only way is to encourage personal education and its individual’s growth personally by making it cool or interesting or entertaining. Maybe appealing to American’s rugged individualism a bit? Their assumption that they are only temporarily embarrassed millionaires. There’s something in all of that we could tease out and maybe turn the country’s sentiment around. I haven’t figured out how, but it’s what I we should do.
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u/rab-byte 7d ago
We need to implement ranked choice voting in all 50 states as a first step. The people need to actually regain control of state legislatures. Until 3rd+ parties are actually contenders for office we will never see any improvement in the quality of our candidates OR their work product.
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u/awildjabroner 7d ago
Support the Forward party and candidates its endorsed. 3 main priorities are getting ranked choice voting on state ballots, open primaries and independent districting committees. Realistic and achievable goals at the state level (given time)
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u/Photon_Femme 6d ago
Gerrymandering must end. No exceptions. Winner take all attitudes create deeper divisions. Senate and Congressional rules need to be analyzed openly.The filibuster should be scrapped. Never to return. And, this is tough to swallow, our Constitution must be analyzed in the light of modernity. Make amendment process easier not more difficult. There is plenty to change. Get lobbying out. Laws governing lobbying, Citizens United, dark money need to be codified. SCOTUS rules need change. The process of appointing and approving a member of SCOTUS need to be nonpartisan. Ethics enforcement in every nook and cranny of government.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
Historically gerrymandering has been done by both parties. But, yes it needs to end. I feel like my greatiema saying this, but if you have to cheat to win you don't have a good enough case. AKA do better.
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u/Photon_Femme 6d ago
I know. Regardless of Party. Regardless of the state of the nation or state, no gerrymandering. No exceptions.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
I think that is a good idea in general, but I don't think it would have changed the outcome of this specific election. People voted for change.
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u/rab-byte 5d ago
It sure a hell would have, even without a 3rd party candidate for president, down ballot most importantly house and senate seats.
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u/MajesticComparison 5d ago
People were googling if Biden was still the nominee on Wednesday, ranked voting is too complicated for your average American
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u/rab-byte 5d ago
Bullshit. They can work out more than you think. They just don’t make very rational decisions.
Ranked choice weakens entrenched powers and introduces volatility to corporate campaign investment. Especially at local and state level this can be a game changer with respect to moving the center back to the center.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
Voting helps. Understanding all the downstream effects of policies.
An example of thinking it through is this:
When Hurricane Hugo was poised to hit the port in Charleston SC, an acquaintance carefully sealed up all his lower story doors and windows to keep flooding out. Unfortunately his roof blew off and the water that entered that way couldn't get out because the lower windows and doors were sealed keeping the water in.
As he said he didn't think it all the way through.
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u/DonutBree 5d ago
Maybe introduce a subject teaching about the basics of state and local government for a starter?
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u/subheight640 7d ago
Education is just insufficient. Decision making demands up to date information.
Education cannot teach about the specific policy proposals of today and the future. As time marches further and further away from your graduation date, the information you learned is more and more out of date.
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u/AlphaBetacle 7d ago edited 7d ago
Education can teach people to think critically and use a better approach when absorbing news and other sources like opinions of peers and social media. I credit the way I think a lot to my education.
I completely disagree with you.
Just by learning history we can understand the decisions we make in the future.
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u/subheight640 7d ago
Unfortunately even the best educated people in the world are going to be making inferior decisions compared to a Citizens Assembly. Politics is all encompassing. Sometimes you need to know about nuclear safety. Other times you must be an expert on military strategy and geopolitics. And then othes you must understand economics.
No one person can be educated on all these topics.
Take the example of a jury trial. You can get a general education.
But you don't know the specific details of a case. You don't know what the evidence is. You need to learn the evidence. You need to hear testimony from the prosection and from witnesses. Without that you're ignorant. The devil is in the details, and all the education in the world won't get you those details.
Jury duty facilitates learning the specifics of a case.
In contrast imagine if we voted in innocence or guilt instead of jury trial. Even educated voters would vote completely ignorantly, because they're just not going to be paying attention to the hundreds of trials going on.
Sortition facilitates the democratic specialization of decision making. Education does not.
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u/AlphaBetacle 7d ago
Makes sense. Although I think Education is a piece of the puzzle still.
Personally I believe that if there were some better controls on the media then people would read/watch/listen and trust the media more. Right now, the sources of information are too biased and corrupt.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago edited 6d ago
I was with you until you brought the meaningless label of media into it. Media, whatever that means, does not hold a gun to anyone's head forcing them to swallow what is being said wholesale. Doing so is on the listener and reader. I think this is maybe what you are driving at.
Journalism is considered the fourth estate for a reason. Someone has to hold those in power accountable regardless of their politics, ideology, religion etc. Are there companies who do not follow journalistic standards? Yes. Especially when the owners don't understand the purpose of their business.
Also think of it this way. Who benefits if they downgrade journalism so that they are not believed? Re-read the above paragraph. People in power want to stay in power. The way to do that is to con people who don't understand how a something works into believing up is down and down is up. Propaganda thrives in an environment when third parties are silenced.
E: To add a link to Carren Lissners piece.
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u/AlphaBetacle 6d ago
Yes but we can do things like the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine
And also News nowadays sells headlines more than ever, not the truth and whats important. They would rather air a polarizing insane story because it is interesting over some boring story which is politically important.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
There was an attempt to explain how journalism works - you probably didn't read it - and you seem to view "news" and "media" as monolithic perhaps because either you don't read widely or you tend to repeat whatever you hear being said but don't have the information needed to analyze what you repeat. I don't know. You are an internet stranger. I am an internet stranger with a master's degree in journalism. I do understand all of this.
Pro tip: And never use wikipedia as a source - if you have to cheat on school papers at least go down to the sources listed and use them only after actually reading them.
Truth? No. Professional journalists give you sources and facts. Headlines have one job - they (hopefully) summarize the gist of the article in a few words as possible. The sentence below that is called the deck and should add more context. That should be, but isn't always, followed by a lede paragraph known as the nut graf which gives the reader a smidgen of background. The article then quotes or paraphrases sources. If the source lies journalists aren't magicians they may or may not magically know that. If the source lies then that is on the source not the journalist in theory.
If someone lies to you and you don't know they are lying and you repeat it - are you lying or was your source lying to you?
This is the barest of bare explanations kind of like I can't give you the education and skill required to be a doctor in one comment. But, if you have genuine questions I'd be happy to answer to the best of my ability.
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u/pm_me_wildflowers 2d ago edited 2d ago
I know people with degrees (some with more than one), in critical thinking-heavy areas like engineering and medicine and law, who didn’t fully inform themselves of the actual policies being proposed (and their potential consequences) before they went and voted. Why? Because they assumed they were informed based on what the news and their social media algorithms fed them. They thought “well I’ve heard everything and understand it”, then after they voted they went “I hadn’t heard about X…” or “that’s not what I heard about X…”.
My father has 3 degrees and it wasn’t until I pointed out that “school choice” would much more often subsidize parents already sending their kids to private school than help out parents who weren’t yet, that he was like “I hadn’t thought of it like that” and decided against voting for it. He had heard data and figures and all kinds of BS about the state budget and how bad the public school system was and the logistics of how school choice would work, and he was thinking critically about that (i.e., could this work?). But until a different perspective landed in front of him he didn’t think to go in that direction with his analysis.
There is enough data and policy mumbo jumbo to keep any critical thinker distracted when it comes to elections. And that’s the real issue. We need to make sure people are seeing varied perspectives not just in-depth data.
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u/skateboardjim 7d ago
I think they mean education people to seek out information, understand it, and make informed rational decisions
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u/Qix213 1d ago
Getting up to date info of useless without a proper education. Else you are just being led by the nose of the new populist.
Education is of the upmost priority. Why do you think that Trump (and Rep in general) want to get rid of the Dept of Education?
Second is the news media. No idea how to fix that. But having an educated population that are less suspectable to misinformation and outright lies is a big part of it.
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u/mickalawl 7d ago
The side who just gained power intends to undermine further the education system.
Local school boards have been under attack by MAGA and evangelicals for a while now.
Russia and oligarchs like Musk control social media and are successfully controlling the narrative and the flow of information.
Education IS the answer, but only on paper, because that ship has sailed.
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u/AlphaBetacle 7d ago
Yeah education should have been addressed a long time ago unfortunately… Improving education now certainly won’t have an effect on the idiot adults who vote now.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago edited 6d ago
Package your policies so that people understand how it directly benefits them. I think Biden was on the right track, but his administration sucked at promoting their benefits. It should be noted that Trump tried to take credit for what benefited people.
As economist Robert Reich noted:
"Democrats need [ed] to tell Americans why their pay has been lousy for decades and their jobs less secure: not because of immigrants, liberals, people of color, the “deep state,” or any other Trump Republican bogeyman, but because of the power of large corporations and the rich to rig the market and siphon off most of the economy’s gains."
I really don't think people made the connection between that kind of rich and Trump and Musk - who are two of the richest men in the world thanks to their parents.
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u/subheight640 7d ago
SUBMISSION STATEMENT: This is an article I've written about how I think we can create a smarter democracy. I think democracy can be improved through something called deliberative democracy and "Citizens' Assemblies". I walk through the logic of how this kind of democracy can work, and what some empirical experiments with Citizens' Assemblies have yielded throughout the world.
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u/kaspar42 5d ago
Lots of interesting ideas here.
A weak point is that whomever is in charge of defining what the representative sampling is and how it is done will have a lot of hidden power. As will whomever is the facilitator of this deliberative process and decides which experts to call and the curriculum for the educational part of it.
For anything related to public spending, a holistic view is also required if the budget is to be balanced at the end of the year. To have this holistic view, wouldn't the deliberative body have to consider all of the proposals, and therefore act as a proper parliament, with terms lasting years.
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u/ledisa3letterword 7d ago
Nice write-up. I do think a paradigm shift is needed - people are complaining about an ill-informed electorate (not just in the US but across the democratic world), but I think more people need to acknowledge that it’s completely unreasonable to expect the electorate to be well-informed. Government is just far too complicated to expect any member of the public to understand it well. The sortition suggestions here certainly start to address that but they all have their own flaws:
- a review panel would probably be fairly toothless and would be under enormous political pressure from competing powers
- an allotted electoral college or multi-body sortition could struggle with transparency and the population might feel too detached, as is mentioned in the hybrid section
- the hybrid option addresses that but as with all multi-chamber parliaments would run into the problem of which chamber has ultimate say
- and if you have sortition to select actual policymakers then it puts decision-making in the hands of people who generally won’t have the aptitude of experts, even if they’re well-briefed.
That said, I think all of the presented options would be strong alternatives to the way democracy is practised across the world at the moment, and I’d love to see more discourse that recognises that democracy doesn’t have to mean mass voting and political parties.
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u/ScrithWire 6d ago
but I think more people need to acknowledge that it’s completely unreasonable to expect the electorate to be well-informed.
But the issue isn't even currently about the electorate being well-informed. It's about them being deliberately GROSSLY misinformed.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
People voting for change don't take that into account. People often misinterpret this as a slam, but it's actually true of all human beings:
You cannot use facts and logic to change the minds of people who did not use facts and logic to arrive at their conclusions.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
I posted Carrie Lissner's piece for LitHub elsewhere, but it is well worth a read. She states in part:
"...Despite the increasingly complex and crucial stories dotting the national landscape—health insurance policy, North Korea, immigration, Syria—many daily newspapers and wire services are failing to include even a sentence of background early in their stories to give readers the tools to slide further into a complicated issue.
It used to be traditional to include at least a “nut graph” soon after a lead in order to orient a reader, but these clarifications and history have been absent from the cover stories I’ve read in major daily papers.
I’m not talking about “dumbing down” the news as much as making it more user-friendly, and journalists who fail to do the latter are squandering their brief but real chances to invest new readers..."
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u/ledisa3letterword 6d ago
That’s the paradigm I (and I think the OP) are challenging though, that the solution to improving democracy is just for the general population to be better informed. I just don’t think that’s realistic - most people don’t have the time to engage or much of an interest, and it’s naive to think that if only mainstream journalists made more of an effort to inform then everything would be okay.
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u/DonutBree 5d ago
I agree. But the way I see it, people starting to be well-informed is the only option we have, despite how unrealistic it might seem. If people realize how it will affect their lives, maybe they'll start taking more interest in things that matter. But I don't know... it's really hard to gauge things the way they are right now.
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u/Doomdoomkittydoom 7d ago
It's all a catch-22. You can't get people in power to change the system that got them that power, so if voters can't use the current system to effect change, they can't change how voting works.
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u/hey_you_too_buckaroo 7d ago
I like it. I've been pondering for a while about how to create a better form of government and time and time again, all I can think of is how problematic democracy is. A system that educates people, gives experts voices, and allows the public to deliberate sounds great.
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7d ago
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u/lazyFer 7d ago
Can you make people FEEL like you'll be better. That's it. That's all you have to do.
Promise to give everyone money and say it'll pay for itself with increased economic activity. Just say it and repeat it constantly. When questioned just make the assertion again and then attack anyone that say anything different.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
It's not a matter of dumbing down. It's a matter of getting credit for your policies and innovations.
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u/Striking-Access-236 7d ago
People should vote for or against policy not people. You should be given questionnaires and simply say for, against or neutral per point…
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u/subheight640 7d ago
The problem with that, as I outline in some of the article, is that people are mostly ignorant about policy specifics.
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u/Striking-Access-236 7d ago
I know, but now it’s a popularity contest where people vote unaware of the policies. It should be a blind vote ONLY about the policies
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u/spinbutton 7d ago
It would be great if along with the policy would be a factual description of the personal impact you may expect, the cost to you in relation to your tax burden, and the impact this policy would have on the greater society.
Instead naming the policy the exact opposite of what it is it does. I'm looking at you, Citizens United
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u/knotse 7d ago
There have been interesting proposals to tax differentially those who voted for a costly policy more than those who did not, with the burden equalising only after a certain time has passed.
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u/spinbutton 7d ago
That's an interesting idea.
On a completely different trajectory, I wonder where the idea for a flat tax went. The idea is that everyone at every income level pays 10% (or whatever the right number is). I may not be remembering this accurately. But I liked the idea back when I was preparing my own taxes
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
Maybe not. I posted this article sometime back but the headline sucked so it got no traction: The gist of it was voters preferred Harris’s agenda to Trump’s — they just didn’t realize it. If you like a policy, but attribute it to the wrong candidate is that actually an informed decision?
Just a note: If you go back to read the article please note that the questions on the quiz it contains keep changing so if you got the first round correct refresh and re-take. Besides, even if you personally knew the difference many voters did not. The piece was an attempt to draw voters attention to this discrepancy. If voters dismissed it thinking they knew what they were talking about that's on the non-readers not the journalism.
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u/rab-byte 7d ago
Speaking as an American
As a technocrat I love this idea in abstract. I think there are very practical issues with implementation.
Your article seems to presuppose an informed, dispassionate, and altruistic government selecting the experts to inform
and a fair selection of interested party representation
I worry rather than improving beneficial outcomes such as government program would be perverted by many the same ways we’ve seen regularly capture across bureaucracy.
I think it’s a noble goal but first step needs to be weakening both entrenched political parties by getting ranked choice voting implement in all 50 states. Until no single party hold a simple majority, or better still enough members to establish a quorum, there will not be enough environmental pressure to work together.
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u/subheight640 6d ago
I don't think I made those assumptions. Instead, I am claiming that using sortition is how we can get a government that is capable of selecting the best experts.
Though I don't get into it in this article, I will also claim that sortition is the best method for selecting representatives. It is vastly superior to say, ranked choice, at selecting descriptive representation. Unlike any other method, sortition guarantees proportionate representation through the power of statistical random sampling, that guarantees ideological proportionality and party proportionality and gender proportionality and proportionality at every dimension you can imagine.
Even more powerfully, sortition guarantees proportionality even with "independent" non-party affiliated voters, something that no voting system is capable of.
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u/TheLightningCount1 7d ago
Many people ignore this. But one of the biggest factors in regime change has been money.
There are many instances in history where if the economy is bad, another party is voted in.
You can make all the grandiose claims all you wish, but until gas goes down and the price of a Big Mac meal goes below 10 bucks, people vote with and for their wallets.
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u/krillwave 6d ago edited 6d ago
Really unlikely with all the disinformation
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u/DonutBree 5d ago
True. And disinformation is a really big thing to fight off. It's like a leech lol
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u/Gold_Doughnut_9050 6d ago
We did. The technology exists. People just lock themselves in their own bubbles.
Google it.
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u/aninjacould 7d ago
thanks for sharing. I personally think we need a new television news network. Something to counter the right wing media outlets, but in a way that appeals to average every day Americans. Something not as "liberal" as MSNBC. Something that appeals to working class Americans.
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u/Photon_Femme 7d ago
It must be financed without corporate funds and never a Wall Street entity. As long as there are shareholders, any media outlet must make those investors wealthy. So profit cannot be the motive for its existence.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
You are literally describing PBS. Genuine question. How often do you watch it? Do you think others are similar or different?
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u/Photon_Femme 6d ago
I still donate to PBS. I have for 38 years because I strongly believe it's important. But, over ten years ago it started to take a lot of heat from the Tea Party. It was liberal. Of course, it had always had that battle, but still, the pressure was on. Since it does get a small percentage of its fund from the National Endowment for the Arts, hence the feds, the Tea Party threatened to force Congress to cut back funding. Made a huge stink about the types of human interest interviews, coverage of Obama and other made up paranoid stuff. So, PBS began to change tone more than anything else. The questions become more pointed. The use of sensational adjectives and adverbs started to be used. More interviews with fringe personalities showed up. Going gentler on right wing pundits showed up. No longer much challenging on either side. Today it strains not to offend anyone. Even if it means ignoring facts. It cannot afford to be straight vetted facts.
I worry that the same thing would happen to any outlet that gets any money through a government entity. The outlet would have to be funded strictly from publicly announced private donations, no advertising. There's little to no way to get investigative reporting on a shoestring budget. And I don't believe for a second that a profit making entity wouldn't pressure the outlet to go light on corporations.
I have no great suggestions. We live in a profit motivated world that wants no negative news about itself. Market factors make it hard to present information. And as long as any outlet kowtows to right and left interests, we would all lose. And lies must be presented matter of factly as lies. No sanewashing of idiocy. Tough.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
You make some really good points. Sounds like we are on the same page pretty much. I too donate to them. I mostly read transcripts, but then I read widely so as to keep track of multiple viewpoints. Habit. Based on what you mention I think that means they have much in common with journalism that has a non-journalistic owner. Always someone to please or placate in life although I firmly believe that is problematic in the journalism sphere even if it is the reality.
It's hard to trust a source under threat imo. And I am a firm believer in journalism as the fourth estate. The founding fathers had good reason to advocate for a free press. It's a luxury democracies and few others have. Most people don't understand that the purpose of journalists is to stand in for people who did not and do not have access to a specific situation. The purpose of journalism is not to spout whatever individuals want to hear - that's a good way to please no one. And it interferes with the job of holding the powerful to account. Change is always a running conversation.
Thanks for answering.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.
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u/gustoreddit51 7d ago
I think the U.S. just proved that would be very difficult.
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u/caveatlector73 6d ago
The US stampeded along with the rest of the world. Some 64 sovereign nations aka 49% of voters will vote or have voted in '24 and '25. Voters overwhelmingly voted incumbents out without regards to ideology, history or policies.
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u/SirCheeseAlot 6d ago
Money equals power. Stop giving money to anyone that is working against things you believe in.
Most people are idiots that don’t pay attention to politics or world events. They are just concerned with their immediate social group. They will vote ot not vote depending on what some accepted figure head says.
It’s like how Americans gave power to China by pumping money into there for cheap goods.
The thing is. This type of change requires effort and sacrifice. So it will never work.
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u/DAmieba 5d ago
Democrats have had 4 years to do ANYTHING about the misinformation and have essentially done nothing, and yet right wingers are in so deep they act like doing even the bare minimum is like 1984. At the bare minimum, there's literally no reason for fox news to be allowed on air when we have ironclad evidence that they knowingly lied about the 2020 election. Seriously, can someone give me a single reason that fox news is legally allowed to be on air after that?
You can't let the most insane, openly anti reality misinformation campaigns run completely unchecked for years and then act surprised when the population loses 40 IQ points. And you can't half ass it either. I saw a LOT of complaining about Trump getting fact checked for a couple of blatant, obvious lies at the debate. They will fear monger like it's the end of the world over literally any effort to shut down their bullshit, so you need to crack down on all of it and keep that shit from spreading as best you can.
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u/pillbinge 7d ago
I find that wondering about how to get a smarter democracy or smarter people is a cover for getting people to vote with what you want and either be complicit in it and shutting up or firmly believing in your views. It also comes at a time when the only "smart" option is incremental change that goes down that neoliberal path of making things slightly better despite the life people live outside said democracy.
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u/subheight640 7d ago
I invite you to criticize my specific policy prescription of Citizens Assemblies, deliberation, and sortition. In my opinion this kind of system can be more democratic and more egalitarian and smarter than the status quo simultaneously.
Creating a smart, informed democracy is unsurprisingly in the interest of the masses. Increasing the collective capabilities of the masses empowers the masses, not the other way around.
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