Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id844793931
Just as market society turns “people” into “consumers,” competitive democracy turns “citizens” into “voters” (or combines both degraded forms into “taxpayers”).
id844793852
The liberal privatization of political participation degrades the character of citizenship and destroys the social solidarity that used to be called patriotism. The liberal voter is denied the ability to participate in public affairs, once thought to be the essence of freedom; denied the opportunity to excel in public life, once thought to be the purpose of politics; and denied the public happiness and public freedom that was once pursued by the republican citizen.
id844793258
If no party reflects your values, this isn’t a failure by elites to earn your vote but a sign that you aren’t sufficiently included in public decision-making. The solution isn’t to launch a vote boycott until the invisible hand of electoral competition delivers better options but to seek a redistribution of power. Achieving this will require democratizing our parties, but such reforms won’t be paternalistically granted from above: member control must be enacted by members.
id844794027
trade-offs between participation and fairness: maximizing member control risked empowering those with the free time to participate while sidelining those with onerous work or family responsibilities. However, new and emerging e-democracy tools, natural language processing techniques, and other computational methods allow for deliberation to occur at massive scales without becoming prohibitively time-consuming, allowing people with limited free time to meaningfully participate. Today’s democrats are better equipped than at any point in at least 250 years to replace the antiquated social technology of electoral representation with true self-government.
✏️ This is getting at the whole thing of educating everyone and also opens up the question of, how can each person be on equal footing with every other person? How do we empower and educate every person to be able to contribute to public discourse and governing? #followup #addto/questions 🔗 View Highlight