> How can a representative democracy function when all the candidate representatives are liars?
I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy.
When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one.
But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.
Democracy happens, it's just rather indirectly related to voting. The coin of political power is public passivity - a resisting public will seriously ruin a politician's day, democratic or autocratic. Elections have the effect of forcing politicians to rely on public opinion to create passivity, because using terror in the authoritarian style would get them ejected. Therefore democratic politics consists of efforts to push (or be pushed by) public opinion.
(This democracy/autocracy contrast recurses to population subsets, cf: the civil rights era.)
by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one
It's worse than that. You can replace every politician in Washington DC and you'd still be left with a massive bureaucracy of unelected officials who will go right on doing what they're doing, oblivious to the needs of the voting public. Their numbers are legion, they have a great deal of power, and they are entrenched beyond comprehension.
I'm happy more people are finally becoming aware of the fallacious nature of labeling it a representative democracy.
When the implementation of a system is providing massive amounts of power to a tiny group of people, in exchange for non-binding promises. In the rare event someone is held accountable for lying, they get replaced by another politician who over time is indistinguishable from the last one.
But everyone keeps trumpeting the idea that voting and replacing politician x with politican y is the solution to a broken democracy. I'm not buying it.