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Fewer people now say representative democracy is a very good way to govern in many countries surveyed.
(www.pewresearch.org)
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2024
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It's demonstrably not, but westerners just keep clinging to their failed system lacking the courage and imagination to try anything different.
What’s better?
Proletarian democracy
What definition of proletarian democracy? It’s not well defined and means vastly different things to different people.
Democracy in which the bourgeoisie are denied political agency as class relations are in the process of being dissolved. The problem isn't actually democracy, the problem is that in a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (democracy where capitalists are in control) capitalist interests override democracy.
Not that democracy doesn't have problems inherently, but they're pretty minor compared to the problems we are facing.
A brutal crackdown on the ability of the bourgeoisie to influence elections, buy politicians, and hold office, such that liberals will crow about "human rights" and "freedom" being violated. We can draw fine distinctions between different systems, but fundamentally they still fall on the same side of the fence.
Democratic centralism 👀
Communism
What they do in Cuba, or the PRC, or the former USSR
Almost any other kind of democracy. Representative democracy is better than fascism but it is the worst form of democracy
Worse than what form of democracy exactly?
Everything else people have mentioned in the comments. Proletarian democracy, democratic centralism, participatory democracy, etc.
Well, the first two are really just a way of saying socialism.
Democratic centrism is more of a rule or process or principle. It isn’t even a form of government and it’s compatible with many forms of government.
Proletarian democracy isn’t well defined so I can’t say anything since it means 1000 different things to 1000 different people and often does include representative democracy.
Participatory democracy similarly is a spectrum and is compatible with representative democracy.
So to actually talk about this you would need to be more specific about how the “better” form of government would work.
Participatory democracy
Ask the people of El Salvador, and they'll say having a dictator is better because democracy has demonstrably failed them.
El Salvador under a dictator actually has less gang violence than Mexico under a democracy.
Westerners will blind themselves to this reality, though. They always do.
When dictatorships go badly, they go extremely badly. Far more badly than even a broken representative democracy. The odd of having a sold string of reasonably good dictators are vanishingly small. A good dictator is the best form of government. Good luck maintaining that though.
When a bourgeois democratic state goes badly, it tears off its liberal mask and reveals the fascism beneath. The capitalist class dispenses with democratic theater and rules by naked dictatorship. Western liberals shouldn’t wonder why fascism is on the rise in the West: it’s because Western monopoly capitalism is increasingly going mask-off. Monthly Review, 2014: The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism
Go on. Enlighten us.
consider yourself enlightened https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
edit: love how you can state basic facts and libs start seething
That’s not a political system at all. It’s a process that could be implemented in many styles of government. It is not incompatible with representative democracy either. It is a bad idea though. It means that a government has a hard time changing course, even when it needs to. Because it silences people from questioning decisions.
Everyone can see that the US government is ossified, incapable of changing course (or of representing the people). And it’s no accident: it was designed to be so. The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
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Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
The Separation of Powers is BROKEN, Here’s Why
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
You’re talking about an implementation of representative democracy and you’re not offering any concrete alternative. So I refer you to my first comment where I said that representative democracy is bad, but still better than the others.
I was talking about bourgeois democracies, which have only ever represented the capitalist class. A concrete alternative has already been suggested, socialist democratic centralism, a form of proletarian democracy, but you dismissed it as not even being a political system, despite it having been practiced in various countries throughout the last century. Capitalist states and corporate media label socialist states as “authoritarian,” because the capitalist class doesn’t want us to consider any alternatives that would usurp them.
Can you link something describing what that system of government looks like. Because all I’ve heard of is descriptions of the principles and the Italian party from history. And looking how, that’s all I can find also.
This is demonstrably false because in the real world Chinese system has proven itself to be far more flexible and adaptable than any western regime. That's the reality. In fact, it's obvious that multiparty parliamentary systems are the ones that have hard time changing course. They're literally designed to prevent that. It's not possible to do any sort of long term planning when governments keep changing and people keep pulling in different directions. The horizons for planning become very small. And of course, it's pretty clear that western systems do a great job silencing opinions that fallout of the Overton window. Entire books have been written on the mechanics of this.