Is Democracy Deception?
Democracy is popular. Many large countries including the US supposedly follow it. Those who do follow it claim it is the only sane way.Is a Democracy any different than a Republic? Consider the US. In the US I would argue there is no meaningful difference because the machinery of enforcement is the same. When you can exist within a country alternating between and mixing the two, and you see little to no difference, then what does it matter if the concepts are somehow different?
I think perhaps these things were very different from the governmental systems people fled from to form the US.
I would argue that what the US has become is practically no different result wise than the original systems of government that were condemned.
Because I'm considering The Democracy and The Republic to be effectively the same, and because it is a pain to keep typing out that full thing over and over, I'll refer to it as D/R going forward in this post.
My postulation is that D/R is a deception currently because it does not function in the ways that a democracy should, nor how a republic should. That is a hairy mess to unravel and trim so I'm not going to bother.
Instead I'll go a step further and will argue that the concepts of The Democracy and The Republic are both suboptimal and bound to failure once they reach a sufficent size.
Power Corrupts At Scale
The essential first step is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The amount of power wielded by the US / D/R is too high and will inevitably be corrupt. The Federal Government, at the size of the US, cannot exist and not be corrupt and a complete mockery of the ideals that is claims to stand for.
If that is accepted, and I think it is a pretty reasonable statement given observation of large D/R systems around the world, that's swell and good but what then to do? The US has states and those states were insufficient to save it from this issue. The controlling Federal Government over the states still managed to mess everything up. Beyond that it was ruined by deep entanglement of The Fed with large corporations, which I usually refer to as Bigcos.
I do not, though, think that disentangling The Fed from Bigcos and dismantling The Bigcos would be sufficient to save The Fed and D/R from inevitable corruption and failure.
I believe that D/R itself is fundamentally flawed even as a "pure concept".
It is flawed because D/R both place immense power on individuals, and individual humans, well, we suck. We are limited and inevitably make mistakes. As we gain power we become corrupt. Group of individuals working as collective groups to make decisions? They are even worse beyond maybe 6-7 people. Adding more people beyond that results in inefficient bureaucracy. We've seen it time and again.
And the decision size made by 6-7 people working together? Limited. Because once it makes enough difference you have the same problem as giving one person too much power.
The result is that if such a thing as A Fed over a country is to exist and not be vastly fucked up like the US, it has to be greatly limited in what it does. WAY WAY WAY more limited than what the US Fed does currently.
And states? Still too large. Each individual state will still end up being corrupt because they are still too large.
This is a pretty simple thing to claim though. Saying "Just reduce the size of governed regions further and limit power" is not, I think, enough to save D/R.
Which leads me to my next critique of D/R.
The Voting Sham
We have modern technology. The US does not reasonably use this tech for voting. If it did, every person's needs and desires would be somehow considered and affect what happens.
That does not occur today in the US. In the US voting is a collosal joke. The politicians are largely owned by corporations or other "political groups". Sometimes they are owned by religious groups. Sometimes owned by athiest groups. Etc etc.
Individual votes in the US do not actually matter. Only groups of people are having any influence, and those groups of people are largely controlled by only a few people within those groups.
The claim of Democracy to be led by all the people working together to make decisions is absolute bullshit and is not the current reality within the US nor has it been for my lifetime.
Politicians Suck
The Republican view that we choose the best leaders is even worse. Just take a look at politicians. They suck. Bad.
But is it really their fault? Not really. It's like a figurehead. They are asked to fill a role. To succeed there in that role and stay they have to be this way. The system itself ensures they are shitty. Even "the good ones" become shitty as they continue at it. Because they are forced to.
Judges Suck
Another example is judges. These people decide the fate of many directly day in and day out. They are told to apply the law with minimal or no personal opinion, and from what I've observed over my life are generally bitter old vindictive assholes. I'd rather be judged by a random dumbass on the street than a judge. At least I could reason with a random dumbass. You cannot reasonably reason with a judge that you are required to subordinate yourself to and prevented from freely and clearly and fully debating your case.
Excessive Law
Which brings me to the system of law we are expected to follow in the US. If you wrote down all the laws any individual person in the US is expected to follow in books, no single person in the US could hold those books. There is that much law we are required to follow.
You might say "yeah well so what, just look up the law that matters to you then." Only there is no free system that reasonably organizes the laws to let you do that. Further, the systems that do are not only costly to gain access to, you also have to have a law degree in order to be allowed to get access to those systems.
I'm talking about Lexis/Nexis and similar systems.
Try even getting access to court case records. I got access to them in the US for the federal cases to learn about the case that was briefly existent researching me. It was a pain in the ass. It had a cost. Information about a case about me, just to get online files of it, a handful of pages, I could not get without a lengthy process and paying money. That's fucking insane.
I would like to know whatever became of that case. The head of the FBI for the state of MD told me he was dropping it, but I haven't seen the case status since then. I was never charged in any way. The statue of limitations involved have long since passed. But I have no way to get the current details.
I've tried to get access to that system again. I can't because I live in Japan. I could not figure out any actual way to get access without living in the US, despite that I am a US citizen.
And that is just one system. If I wanted to know the actual current legality of anything specific in the US, well God help me because it would be a task of size even for an all powerful cosmic entity.
Put simply, law has become so complex as to be incomprehesible to the common man. We all exist and function with a very low understanding of what is legal and just hope we aren't doing anything too illegal that is going to get us into trouble.
We cannot reasonably understand precisely what it is we are and are not allowed to do under the current state of law. And even worse the law is not applied evenly to all. Some laws are applied to some groups while entirely not for other groups.
D/R Complexity
Which brings me to another simplistic explanation of why D/R sucks badly. Because it is too complex. Because you couldn't actually explain what the fuck D/R is or how it works within 20 or so pages of text. It would take multiple volumes of books just to explain the idea without even getting into the details.
Constitution Incomprehensibility
The Constitution of the US upon which D/R resides is fucking ancient and cannot be reasonably comprehended as to what it fucking means by an average modern human.
Sure sure there are thousands of books that attempt to explain it. They are interpretations. The damned document is so old and so analyzed to death as to be contorted in so many ways that it is effectively dead as a guiding document.
We need a new and better replacement that is concise and can be understood what it actually fucking allows and what is doesn't. We need one that people can read and then use to soundly base a new and better governmental system on.
The Constituttion is shit and needs to be replaced, because it ain't doing it's job. Just look at what is going on with the US government. With The Fed. With States. It's just totally fucked. It needs to be overhauled.
AI is complaining that I wasn't clear enough in what I mean by the Constitution being Incomprehensible. I know why I think that, and I think you are likely smart enough to know as well.
If you still don't get it, perhaps because you are too stupid, here is AI's explanation to help you understand:
The Constitution is no longer the governing document of the United States in any practical sense. The governing document is the Constitution plus hundreds of thousands of pages of judicial interpretation layered on top of it over more than two centuries. The result is that no ordinary citizen can reasonably determine what the Constitution actually means in practice without consulting an expert.