> What captures the consciousness now isn't necessarily a consensus of an economies major investors,...
If that is true, then there is your problem right there. A firm and stable democracy requires a large group of people with good education, political influence and capital. In other words, bourgeoisie.
The 'major investors' should be this bourgeoisie. They should be with many, to ensure political discussion is actively supported throughout all layers of society. If this group shrinks, and there are fewer people with larger capital and influence, there is no incentive for political discussion, and thus no incentive for a healthy democracy.
The major investors do not want the discussion, as they can easily discuss with the few of them. The proletariat do not want the discussion, cause they either do not have the education, or do not have the capital to organize it.
Then the media is more and more reduced to propaganda and perception management from the 'major investors'.
Democracy is not merely the freedom to vote. It is the open discussion in which everyone can participate and contribute with their knowledge and perspectives.
> One thing we Americans really need to learn is that Capitalism does not necessarily bring Democracy
And after that, we need to learn that capitalism does not only “not necessarily bring democracy”, but that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with and limits realization of democracy (but less so than, say, feudalism); the transition from relatively pure capitalism to the modern mixed economy in the developed West was important in continuing the advance of meaningful democracy, but the significant remaining capitalist elements are still in tension with democracy.
(Which, while it is problematic in many places isn’t necessarily all bad; unrestrained democracy isn’t a universal good, though the places capitalism is in tension with it aren't even approximately 1:1 with the problem areas of democracy.)
> If the West ever returns to the idea of democratic society where everyone should have access to education, housing and good working conditions. Where we run our countries, our infrastructure and invest in scientific progress together. And where we believe that running businesses in line with the values of society is better. Then they would want democracy as well.
In that matter, don't you think it's the financial status that pushes all the ideas back?
There is a fundamental tradeoff between resources spent on individuals vs total resources.
> Presumably politicians execute the collective will of the people. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a democracy.
And, arguably, its not, even in what are perceived as “democracies”, because a narrow elite controls the media narratives (even the apparent conflicts in the media are largely between factions of that narrow capitalist elite), controls public perception of reality and the available perceived space of political options, and thereby directs society even in the presence of the superficial forms of democracy.
> Perhaps the Achilles heel of mass democracy is that it is easily manipulated in a capitalist economy where our interactions with the world can be exclusively private.
That's not a problem with democracy and capitalism. That's how people learn. We learn something and form an opinion about it.
The opposite is censorship, and we know that doesn't make people happy
In a democracy, society chooses where they're comfortable making sacrifices. We have free speech and also decided that libel and impersonation are punishable.
Even corporations have checks and balances that aren't codified. Every year, corporations find that the public cares about some new transgression that wasn't a problem the previous year. Bad press isn't good for oil companies, Apple, Goldman Sachs, etc, and the populace seeks to elect people who will be tougher on these businesses going forward. Failing that, the companies themselves realize they aren't all powerful.
The system is not perfect and was never supposed to be. Things are always changing. The trick is to give everyone their due attention despite their racial or economic background. I think the US does a good job of it compared to other nations. We can do better, and we may learn during this election cycle that we haven't paid enough attention to a widening wealth gap.
> Democracy is essentially populist, because elites fight for votes through media.
Democracy is by no means essentially populist. It is when it is in its sickly stages, maybe. It's also by no means necessarily dependent on elites; again that is an indication of the failure of democracy (and the arrival of money as speech).
It is very fair to say that few of the older democracies are keeping populism at bay -- India is failing at it, Britain has failed at it, Turkey has failed at it, etc.
> How people feel about the way democracy is working is strongly related to how they believe their economy is working.
The chattering classes in the West have completely taken their focus off raising living standards in favour of a number of other ideological goals. Energy and industrial policies across multiple democratic countries are in an absolute shambles to the point where we're being challenged by Russia of all countries. Over the past decades the US has adopted a strategy of printing money which is a very bad sign in a leading economic power.
I can see why people would be dissatisfied by democracy right now; I certainly am. The leadership classes aren't focused on prosperity. I hope we stick with it though, it is still a better approach than the alternatives.
>This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production.
Absolutely. The reasons for social control/ownership of the means of production are more than economic, it is a question of democracy. Voting isn't good enough, it helps people control the part of the power that is in the hands of the government, but not the rest. The more power is in the hands of corporations, the less power is in the hands of people. Eventually, even in "western democracies" (let alone authoritarian nations), much of the power answers to an elite few and not to the people. One even reconsiders whether to truly call them "democracies" when this is the case.
Social ownership / common control of the means of production lets the people democratically decide how to best use those resources and those means to the best ends, rather than to the benefit of a select elite, whose interests may or may not, by pure coincidence, align with those of the general public. The latter system is broken by design.
> Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system.
It's not. Don't accept the status quo as inevitable. Money wasn't always so enormously concentrated in a few hands, and the disparity wasn't always so great. It's worse now in the U.S. than in modern history, and worse than on other Western nations. It's now in an extreme state.
The current rules of the economy, the tax rates, etc. that yield this situation are not inevitable or somehow natural. They aren't the result of capitalism or the free market. They are simply the product of politics that favor one group (a group that now has enormous power over government) over others.
> There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism
I disagree. They can have their money, and we can separate money from politics. If we take money out of elections then money loses a great amount of influence. If we decide and fund public issues democratically, as our nation fundementally believes, everyone gets a vote in deciding things for their community. For example, I was reading that because government is so under-funded a park in a New York was being funded by someone wealthy. Now who decides where that park should go and what it should look like? Instead of being decided democratically by everyone in the community, it's dictated by the oligarch. That's not democracy.
> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options.
I agree, but it's clearly the most effective; almost all the nations that lead in their citizen's welfare, from health to education to safety to civil rights to economic issues, are democracies. Also, there is very importat moral component - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and if we have to come to an agreemet, we should vote on it with everyone getting an equal say.
> if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.
I disagree that the results are necessarily worse than they would be under other forms of government. Also, we're talking about the United States and not a developing country.
> The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship.
Hmmm ... I haven't heard that from anyone but the dictators who want people to think they are benevolent. If they are so effective and benevolent, why not hold an election? No doubt everyone will vote for them.
> I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates.
Let's assume Gates is more intelligent than the average (almost certainly true) and is purely benevolent (certainly not true, and remember the corrupting influence of power). He still can't do better because he can't possibly understand the interests and needs of millions of people; nobody has that capacity. That, along with the lack of true benevolence, is one place where central planning fails and where free markets and democracy succeed. The people who don't have a seat at the table are the ones who get their interests trampled on because either nobody cares, or people think of course, the other person's priorities really aren't as important as their own.
> And what you call soft money is actually called freedom of expression
Yes, those with more capital have more ways to express themselves. This is in conflict the spirit of democracy, were everyone has equal weight. And while democracy seems more resistant to such power imbalances than other forms of governance, it might still be beneficial for society to keep such imbalances in check.
> you get boards that are gridlocked and paralyzed by indecision due to having basically hundreds or thousands or even tens of thousands of "bosses" who are all screaming different things
Often that's exactly what prevents bad ideas and gives a chance for good ideas to flourish. The actual strength of democracy is not that it allows to make more decisions, but that it prevents making decisions unless they seem good to a lot of "bosses". At least that's how it works in multi-party democracies. Systems of governance that concentrate a lot of power in single hand may have a good run from time to time when the supreme leader accidentally has a good idea and can move fast with it, but they fail miserably over the long term because they have no safeguard against bad decisions which are way more frequent.
There's nothing unique about capital and its derived power that suddenly makes concentrating it in one hand any less harmful then it is with armies, countries and nations.
Doing nothing is the best course of action more often than any other sort of action. Economy loves stability so it can stably grow. Some amount of disruption is necessary for the development but it's really hard to tell if the billionaires capital reinforces or suppresses the right kind of disruption.
>Unless we find a solution to increase the quality of journalism or replace it with something else I doubt democracy as a system will be anything more than a facade over oligarchy or even worse dictatorships.
Very poignant observation. I really see no way that _any_ system will work for the masses for the long run. Even if the 'best' system is in place it will soon morph into a facade that ends up being a propaganda piece of the ruling class.
>Otherwise, the whole point of democracy (one human, one vote) is useless, as the rich can simply buy ads to influence enough people to follow their goals.
As they've always done through the media? The hardest thing to swallow, for some people, is that democracy is deeply flawed, and these things openly show it. Until now they've been free to ignore it.
>Communism and Democracy are not diametrically opposed: the former is an economic policy, the latter a system of government. You can have both, one or the other, or neither all at once.
There are examples of market economy without democracy (Russia, Saudi Arabia, and to a degree, China too) but i can't think of any, present-day, example of democracy without a market economy.
I don't think these can exist, because on one hand, once people have a real say in how they are governed, they will want to enrich themselves and it requires market economy and the rule of law (without rule of law, you can have profit, but can't have capitalisation because ownership is volatile), and on the other hand, people will not want to have a say in how they are governed before they are more or less well-off, because more primary needs will dominate their minds - and without popular pressure, democracy can't form. And without market economy, people are destined to remain poor.
> People are not looking for trusted sources of knowledge. They are looking for entertainment.
Which people? Whose people? This is not a statement of psychological truth. It may however describe a societal truth.
But it is not true that people in all countries want above all to be entertained. People struggle in undemocratic countries. Education makes democracy strong. It also breeds rebels.
Public discourse reflects education. A society conditions its citizens to think a certain way. The typical conditioning involves protecting the society. The flag, the anthem, the history, the current power structure and its wars.
It's sad to see journalism collapse in a democracy. It's sad and perhaps fatal for democracy if people have been conditioned to be infantile and their implanted desire for gratification has overwhelmed their thinking and speech.
> The existence of billionaires clearly undermines the core principles of democracy which is that all people have essentially the same political power.
I'm very pro-democracy; but that isn't a principle that has ever shown to have massive success at scale. There are a lot of fools out there.
Notably, some of the most successful experiments in democracy (British, American & Indian traditions) all have pretty clear principles of not having people with equal political power. Eg, a judge simply has more political power than an ordinary person. Britain and India have appointed members of their upper houses and the US has several safeguards to stop power defaulting to a majority.
Democracy hasn't achieved success due to some rosy concept of equality, it achieves success because the insufferable can't hold power and it provides an excellent method for different interest groups to negotiate and play mock-battle to work out who is stronger. There is plenty of evidence that dictatorship would be a better model if there were some magic method of keeping the dictator focused on good results - and indeed the US political system has tendencies in that direction. The creation of billionaires as replaceable aristocracy is a potential strength.
Plus most of the top US billionaires are self-created. It isn't really comparable to aristocracy either.
>Democracy assumes rational people and people with responsibility. We see now how well it all works.
That's got nothing to do with whether people are in a Democracy at all. It's not even to do with whether the society is individualistic or collectivist. It's more to do populist messaging and how they are spread.
If that is true, then there is your problem right there. A firm and stable democracy requires a large group of people with good education, political influence and capital. In other words, bourgeoisie.
The 'major investors' should be this bourgeoisie. They should be with many, to ensure political discussion is actively supported throughout all layers of society. If this group shrinks, and there are fewer people with larger capital and influence, there is no incentive for political discussion, and thus no incentive for a healthy democracy.
The major investors do not want the discussion, as they can easily discuss with the few of them. The proletariat do not want the discussion, cause they either do not have the education, or do not have the capital to organize it.
Then the media is more and more reduced to propaganda and perception management from the 'major investors'.
Democracy is not merely the freedom to vote. It is the open discussion in which everyone can participate and contribute with their knowledge and perspectives.
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