Mass representative democracy
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Highlights
- The genius, in theory, of representative democracy is that voters hire specialists to do the information work for them. In a representative democracy, it is not really your job as an ordinary citizen to have a strong view about the details that actually get legislated, like how many tax brackets there should be and how the rates should be structured across them. Your job is one that you (and only you) are eminently well placed to perform — to know your own interests and values, and elect a person who reflects them.
- Absent the universal information work representative democracy exists to absolve us of, most of us cannot even evaluate whether the choices our representatives make are likely to further or frustrate our interests.
- Our institutions immerse our “representatives” among a class of electeds, bureaucratic staff, and professional courtesans. The burdens of the job keep them segregated from the publics they purport to represent. In an organic, social sense, they become bound and accountable much more to their comrades-in-arms within the governing class than they could ever be to the amorphous, conflicted group they call constituents.
- Modern representative democracy is simply a system whose predictable result is governance by competing coalitions of insiders, who develop deep relationships and thick connections to one another, while the electorate they notionally serve becomes an inchoate, threatening demon that must be flattered and appeased.
- The foundational error of the neoliberal period was the conceit that aligning financial incentives to social goods was easy, so market success and contribution to social welfare could, to a first approximation, be equated.
- The best work results from intrinsic devotion to excellence plus human relationships that help steer a person’s excellence towards ends a community values.
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People need to be well paid not so financial incentives direct their work, but so that financial anxieties and ambitions don’t misdirect, eclipse, distort, occlude the fragile foundations of real human achievement.