Just like sex, any kind of power exchange needs consent.
This whole idea that people are led or need to be led is wrong. Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine. What politicians are is decision makers, not leaders.
We don't have time to vote on every single law personally, so we appoint temporary assistants who do it for us, based on our preferences. That's how it should work.
These assistants should work for us, not lead us. We should always have the power to override their decisions and to remove and replace them at any time. Of course, making this work in a practical manner, while satisfying constraints such as secrecy of votes, is difficult. I don't dispute that but we should be striving to find ways to get as close to this ideal as possible, not making politics into a career or treating it as a reality show.
And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
Personally I would still call that leading/being led*, nonetheless that is a great reframe and I agree.
It also helps make the point of what it means to say “society is breaking down” or “democracy is at stake” or “faith in institutions in decline.” What it really means is that those whom were thought of as leaders no longer have the consent of the followers, who are making their own decisions now- often to ill effect of any strangers around them
*cf servant leadership as one particularly clear conceptualization
Voting isn't necessarily a better system. The majority of people will very frequently give up rights in any given specific case that, in general, they hold dear. We're not rational actors.
And there are a lot of really weird discussions to be had about "consent," too. If we allow unlimited speech, that means that we're all subject to marketing and propaganda, and that's another thing that people are quite vulnerable to. Being convinced to vote via propaganda isn't really a great example of consent. But banning any speech that resembles propaganda is rife with problems.
Anyway, my point is that democracy/voting and free speech isn't necessarily the most free/consented-to form of government. I'm not sure what would take its place, though. I certainly wish I knew.
Dunno where parent said anything about democracy. Democracy and voting aren’t the same thing also they rejected the idea of voting on every law (democracy).
It seems inherent in your worldview that you lack faith in people to self govern (that is, for a person to govern themselves. Which would explain why you are at odds with the parent. I suggest you read a bit of Jefferson’s ideas of self governance, education, etc. There are tradeoffs as with everything else, I do think based solely on your short commentary here that there may be an opportunity for your perspective to be enriched however
> And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.
Whether they pick them or you pick them, you still have the same problem.
Bad people often get into office. Politicians lie, major parties both run bad candidates, sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo.
Expecting that never to happen is a lot less pragmatic than setting things up ahead of time to mitigate the damage when it does.
> sometimes voters are of the inclination to just elect whoever they think will mount the strongest assault on the status quo
This is absolutely a thing and it's a thing because at some point, people notice how little power they actually have.
Every person's opinion is a point in N-dimensional space.
Representative democracy is describing that point (expressing their political opinion) by picking 1 point out of a handful of pre-determined options (parties/representatives). Some countries only have 2 real choices.
That's absolutely insane, no wonder people feel like their vote doesn't matter, they often can't even find a choice remotely close to their real preferences.
But the people in office need some power, enough to cause problems if they're bad. Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
Hence the root problem, that we haven't discovered a way to consistently have "good" government, whether it's a dictatorship or democracy. Perhaps with technology, we can invent a better form of government, e.g. a "super-democracy" where people vote on individual decisions (though even today I can imagine issues that would cause).
Until then, the key point I make is that you can have a government where some people ("leaders") do have more power than others, but not enough power for total control. The hopefully-realistic ideal is that the government has enough power to defend itself against an external threat always, and coordinate large projects when functioning well; but not too much so that, when functioning badly, essential internal systems are preserved, and when it's replaced (because as mentioned it will eventually collapse) the transition is minimally disruptive.
> But the people in office need some power, enough to cause problems if they're bad. Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
You can prohibit the government from doing things it should never do (e.g. mass surveillance) without prohibiting it from doing things it ought to be doing (e.g. enforcing antitrust laws).
The problem is we currently do the opposite: The government is doing mass surveillance but not antitrust enforcement.
>Otherwise you have the failures of no government: "might makes right", no coordinated projects, no defense, etc.; or another group (e.g. corporation) becomes the de-facto government.
We're pretty f-ing far from even having to think about those problems.
> Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine.
In aggregate most people do need leadership. The kind of technocratic/managerial approach you suggest has led to the current societal problems we have: a vacuum of real leadership being filled by people willing to do it.
Whether it "should" or "shouldn't" be your problem is irrelevant to the reality.
Functioning democracies do yank out their elected representatives. Not randomly or even arbitrarily of course, but when they step egregiously out of line. Votes of no confidence, recall elections, impeachment, general strikes demanding resignation, and a smattering of other measures are crucial checks on the abuse of power. Electing someone to be untouchable for a set period of time is a recipe for malfeasance with examples going back as far as the invention of the term "dictator".
Re-read the comment I replied to and check if that comment was referring to everything being great already because those systems are in place or if they were calling for some kind of ad-hoc popular vote at any point during a mandate based on not liking the policies, rather than for egregious actions as you described. Your reply is theoretically correct but not what I replied to.
This whole way of thinking makes my skin crawl.
Just like sex, any kind of power exchange needs consent.
This whole idea that people are led or need to be led is wrong. Perhaps some people do but that's their problem, it shouldn't be mine. What politicians are is decision makers, not leaders.
We don't have time to vote on every single law personally, so we appoint temporary assistants who do it for us, based on our preferences. That's how it should work.
These assistants should work for us, not lead us. We should always have the power to override their decisions and to remove and replace them at any time. Of course, making this work in a practical manner, while satisfying constraints such as secrecy of votes, is difficult. I don't dispute that but we should be striving to find ways to get as close to this ideal as possible, not making politics into a career or treating it as a reality show.
And most certainly, these assistants ("leaders" as you call them) should not be picking their successors without our consent.