Democracy works when you have an educated and informed group trying to make rational choices in a limited context.
It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state - manipulated by industrial narrative management techniques engineered by small privileged castes fighting hard to keep and enhance their caste privileges at the expense of everyone else.
They're not comparable situations. There is no sense in which democracy can ever be a solution in the latter, because it doesn't exist in the first place.
You need relative equality of power between participants and groups for democracy to be viable, and as soon as that disappears - it's gone.
I still buy into the rational choice theories. Despite the growing evidence to the contrary. Democracy for Realists, folk theory of democracy, and all that.
As I said upthread, I focus on process and feedback loops. Blame my tour of duty as a SQA manager.
I empowered my teams thru delegation. They owned the product. Not me. It was their success. Not mine.
I built trust over time by honoring their decisions. And probably more importantly, fending off attacks on their efforts. Like the helpful SVP PHB giving "suggestions" and shaking the ant farm.
I'm currently totally on board with Stacy Abrams' view of democracy. People buy-in when they see their actions have impact, consequences. They check out when they're ignored.
My own former teammates told me as much. Next manager comes in, asks for input, does their own thing. Completely alienated the team. They never leaned in again.
It takes time, real effort, commitment. Trust is so hard to earn, so easily lost.
> Democracy works when you have an educated and informed group trying to make rational choices in a limited context.
Madison:
> Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163
> It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state
I'm not sure that inequality is any worse now than it was, say, during the Gilded Age. Certainly more people have the vote now than ever in the past (especially because of the Civil Rights Act, which the USSC conveniently neutered a few years back).
It falls apart as soon as you have huge disparities in privilege, wealth, and education in a nation state - manipulated by industrial narrative management techniques engineered by small privileged castes fighting hard to keep and enhance their caste privileges at the expense of everyone else.
They're not comparable situations. There is no sense in which democracy can ever be a solution in the latter, because it doesn't exist in the first place.
You need relative equality of power between participants and groups for democracy to be viable, and as soon as that disappears - it's gone.