The trouble with this post is it seems to equate liberalism and the left with the Democrat party, and liberalism with neoliberalism, which isn't the same thing at all--neoliberalism is the essence of conservatism.
As to the utility of five million people participating in No Kings rallies (while Trump's obscene birthday military parade turned out to be a sad, pathetic affair)--one would have to be naive to think the rallies were intended to right the wrongs and depose Trump. (While saying Trump is the culmination of the trajectory we've been on for a long time and not the sole problem is quite accurate.) The utility of big rallies, of the Occupy gatherings lies in what they prepare for. Those who attend get their morale boosted, see that they're far from alone, learn from each other, and network. This piece seems to imagine a protest that attempts to actually wrench power from those who have it, and impose a change of rules. That would be a violent revolution, and those rarely end well.
What has a chance of actually reforming this system is a general strike, in which people refuse to work OR buy anything for extended periods, which issues a clear set of demands (she's right about that). For this to be effective it needs mass participation, which takes time to organize. The rallies could be a key means of doing this, handing out flyers naming the dates and the demands--after representatives from hundreds of environmental, BIPOC, labor and other groups convene to hash out the details, notably the demands. The enemy plans to replace most of us as workers with AI anyway, so the refusal to buy is more important than withholding labor; to be able to participate fully, people need to prepare by stockpiling necessities in advance, but critically must also make changes such that they will be able to cease buying many things permanently. This change toward relocalizing economies and self-sufficiency--better, collective self-sufficiency in a community-- is necessary regardless of governance, because we are hurtling toward civilizational breakdown and possibly extinction due to overshoot, too many humans consuming too much. Almost nothing is being done about the climate crisis; meanwhile the equally urgent crisis of biodiversity loss is rarely even named. Then there's the proliferation of plastic, PFAS, and other longlived chemicals life is not equipped to process. These environmental issues are the most important because they will still be reverberating thousands of years from now when Trump is long forgotten--and because they may very well cause human extinction so questions of governance are moot. Along with the risk of nuclear war, which is a real and rising risk, and could cause the extinction of most advanced life on Earth.
Neoliberalism is the economic playbook of minimal government regulation, and freeing global capital…it promised a rising of all boats…but delivered enormous global inequality. No political party can resolve this mess without the burning of this playbook and government remembering how to govern again instead of just governance.
I think you are exactly right, Mary. The protests were the first step. Now, action is needed. A general strike needs to be enacted urgently. Coalitions need to be formed. Existing Unions need to be strengthened and new ones formed. So much work to be done. We, the people, have to take our country back.
Where is anything you’ve talked about gotten us in the last 40 years?
Clinton and the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism— along with scapegoating Monica Lewinsky, which is why I didn’t vote Democrat until 2004 – –and they were warned we would end up here, and here we are.
I absolutely cringe when liberals and progressives pat themselves on the back for not being like Republicans when they have not delivered either.
We don’t have maternity leave, we don’t have childcare, We don’t have quality education, our medical services too often aren’t worth paying for, but it would at least be nice not to be bankrupted by them.. We don’t have we don’t have— and the Democrats have colluded with the Republicans to get us to this point.
Now liberals and the DNC hide behind Trump for their own failings.
Feminism pats itself on the back for strides made that only benefit the upper classes. Women are still being thrown under the bus in Family Courts both monetarily and having to share custody with domestic and sexual abusers. When women lose everything because he decides to leave, they’re told that’s what you get for being a stay at home Mom, and you should’ve had your own bank account. Nobody told you to have children – – and these are comments from feminists to these women.
Roe V Wade did not give women bodily autonomy, it gave doctors the right to perform a procedure without being arrested. If a woman wants to take that baby to term, very few people think she should have bodily autonomy then.
Women are more distant from and afraid of their bodies than they were 60 years ago. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate amongst the industrialized countries and it’s not just about race. White women in America have poorer outcomes than their European and Canadian sisters.
Homeschooling came out of left-leaning education reform movement of the 50s and 60s, because our industrial model schools, which was never about educating, but training for the Corporatocracy, have been failing students for over 100 years.
Liberals didn’t notice until handful of books were banned from libraries and schools, but not stores—and when they found out how poorly educated our populous is, it was just more fuel to call the working class stupid.
The Patient’s Rights Movement, which began in the 1970s, came out of both Second wave feminism pushing back against patriarchal medicine, and the Civil Rights movement.
Now labeled as conservative, the highly educated liberals worship the experts of their humanist religion and say only stupid people question “science”.
Farming, back to nature, baking your own bread, raising your own children started as a Liberal leaning movement in the 60s and 70s, is now portrayed by liberals as MAGA brainwashing of women. I know a minimum of 500 liberal and progressive women of all ethnicities that would love to stay home and raise their kids and bake that bread, but this economy won’t let them.
We bought into vote blue, no matter who, while they all got rich
I'm not sure what you're talking AGAINST here. Many essays suggest that if only we can get rid of Trump and bring back the Democrats, everything will be fine. No one here is saying that.. Most of your post is about the failure of feminism; i largely disagree, i think women have won great strides. But I do think feminism took a wrong turn when it concentrated solely on winning women the right to act like, be like men, rather than bringing what had been considered women's values into society as a whole (nurturing, prioritizing the wellbeing of children. striving for harmony rather than domination). We have more women in positions of power but it makes no difference, because they'
re chosen for being willing to "act like men," that is, focus on winning and domination and wealth acquisition.
By the way, I stayed at home and raised my kids, along with my ex--we had a home crafts business--and I still bake my own bread and raise my own fruits and vegetables--not because I'm a woman but because I'm a homesteader.I think the mommy wars are stupid--why assume the question of who does childcare is solely on the women, and that the options are he works for money and she does childcare and housework, or they both work for money and SHE pays someone to raise her kids--when they're equally his kids, and there are dozens of ways a couple can manage the need for money, childcare and everything else the household needs.
Keep an eye out on the NYC mayoral election. An upstart politician has activated a ton of grassroots energy/organizing and is now the target of the establishment. Not a savior, of course, but if he beats Cuomo a step in the right direction. Terrific IG rap video supporting Zohran Mamdani by hilatheearth https://www.instagram.com/p/DK4--vMOjqu/
Mamdani is a rich nepo baby. He is from Uganda and his family fled when the Ugandans got rid of White settler rule. The man has been a citizen for 3 years and in government for 2 and now wants to be mayor. This man is doing the same performative controlled opposition for the Democratic elites - "rent freeze on rent stabilized apartments" - those are the rich people apartments and applies to apartments built before 1974 ONLY. The mayor cannot "tax the rich" and not one person on the city council has supported his free bus agenda. Mamdani is a racist as far as I am concerned - bump all that anti-Zionist rhetoric, the man has no Black people in his campaign and is just playing a two-tiered voter campaign. The DSA is a part of the DNC. II am tired of silly liberals champing more silly people. Disgusting. I am more Anti - Mamdani than anti-Zionist takeover of NYC.
Spot on, Evelyn. The main placard I recall from the 'No Kings' protest was one showing the message 'If Kamala Were President We'd Be At Brunch'. Jesus Christ.
The excerpt below is taken from the book How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. He wrote this passage in the context of the climate movement, but the distinction drawn here between protest and resistance is apropos, I believe, to the Hands Off and No Kings rallies.
Recognising the direness of the situation, it is high time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance: 'Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too,’ as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist. There will be no shortage of objections to such resistance.
This was very good, especially in its recognition of the performative aspects of this kind of resistance. After a span of a few decades, I am back to reading Althusser and, especially, Poulantzas to make sense of US politics (and to a lesser extent European politics too). I never thought I’d return to their turgid, structuralist prose but with some perseverance I now see they had something important to tell us. In fact, their interpretation of the state and the power blocs that compete to capture describes our world far better than 1970s Europe.
Althusser’s so-called ideological state apparatus has been captured by an authoritarian-leaning capitalist bloc from the liberal-leaning capitalist bloc. The former has trashed the cultural baggage (“ideology”) of the latter and replaced it with reactionary and ethnonationalist cultural trappings of its own. But the underlying material relations have changed little. The class structure is the same; only foreign labor out, foreign capital demoted, white nationalist labor up, national capital right on top. This battle of ideologies (cultural values) will be fought through the institutions and I have no idea who will come out on top as each side genuflects before that warped and hideous notion of the American Dream. But the economic “base” is still intact. And that is the most dispiriting part of the story
So: "The Revolution Will Not Be on TikTok"; to Very Badly misappropriate the magisterial Gill Scott-Heron? 😃
Lovely article and thank you: and it does beg for myself a perennial question of "how democratic is this 'democracy'?" Does it really reflect and react nimbly to a swathe of our human beliefs, experiences and opinions? Or is it a leaden and sub-representative juggernaut which is more suited to sustaining a coterie of cynical elites through being suitably engineered to undermine the spark of popular thinking coming up from the kitchen, the street, the factory; thus reducing the mass of us to the roles of observers (of spectacle!) and consumers, but barely active agents in engineering this world in which we are striving to thrive in?
Sending warmest solidarity wishes from here in the "United" Kingdom... 😃🏴☠️
Well, the whole response, actually. Sortition is the alternative to being a mass of observers, even if it is still a representative vs. a direct democracy model.
Hmmm... yes indeed: sortition has its merits, but the downside for me is that it seems to assume that chance scores higher than popular consensus, thus also inhibiting our growth as participatory beings (albeit not even nearly as much as the current stultifying apparatus, I am Very Happy to acknowledge)? On my side of The Big Pond, the receding opportunities for people to participate in any meaningful choices - such as the decline of participation in labour unions and the like, plus the ossifying nature of our "Democratic" model - has (temporarily) increased our political stultification. The circular argument of to what extent we make our systems versus to what extent our systems create our personhood seems increasingly skewed by the increasingly undue disproportion of power in the latter case. Having said that, no-one is coming to save us: they never do - nor will!
All best wishes from the Dis-United Kingdom of post-industrial dystopia! 😃
"... chance scores higher than popular consensus ..."
Do you mean a sufficiently large group of randomly chosen representatives wouldn't be a statistically valid representation of the population?
You can use online sample size calculators to generate the required sample size for a given population size, desired confidence level and margin of error. It will a be valid representation (subject to the input parameters) of all facets of the population without “needing to have” a certain number of whatever characteristic. FYI, once the population gets to be a certain size, the sample doesn’t get any bigger. Statistics is funny that way. (FYI, I’m no statistician.)
For example, for a 95% confidence interval and 4% margin of error, a sample of 601 is sufficient. For 98% confidence and 5% margin it’s 543. For 99% and 5% it’s 666. All these work for large populations (>2MM).
Yes, it’s almost double the current size of parliament. I say it would be worth it to get rid of professional politicians.
So, yes, randomly selecting representatives can provide a statistically valid result for population representation, which is really the whole point behind elections isn't it?
What we would get: real people who don’t consider how their decisions will affect their chances of getting re-elected; people who deliberate meaningfully (the advantage of representative over direct democracy) and make decisions that fit the problem at hand, rather than some ideological straight jacket; drastically reduced costs; and, governing would become more participatory as more of the general population are chosen and visualize themselves as eligible. There's also the possibility (hope?) that a sortition selected body would be more open to input from the general population, further enhancing the participatory angle.
Sure, competence matters, but do you really think that elections provide any increase in competence vs. random selection? Isn’t it obvious how ill-suited the people who actually want to be elected are for the job? (One could be forgiven for thinking it's almost a disqualifier ...)
"post-industrial dystopia" reminds me of a pig balloon flying over Battersea Power Station ... 🙃
'"post-industrial dystopia" reminds me of a pig balloon flying over Battersea Power Station ... 🙃'
- PERFECT! ((😁))
Sorry, yes: I take your point; I was probably looking at sortition from a narrower and far more, too reductive viewpoint; it is a broad discipline and there are some very good models - and arguments - as you have comprehensively illustrated. With regard to "Isn’t it obvious how ill-suited the people who actually want to be elected are for the job?"; with too very few honourable exceptions, this seems to apply ever more convincingly the further up the pile we cast our gaze... So I'm not quibbling as we seem to be basically on the same page over this organisational conundrum.
The late Tony Benn's five questions of democracy all seem to apply here -
“What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
And how can we get rid of you?” 😃
I'm also rather fond of the idea that democracy - an infinitely more responsive and versatile model - should be applied more along industrial lines; we need to administrate resources (the invisible hand of the global casino is sorely wanting in my analysis) far more imperatively than we need the geographically-based administration/control of people?
And on that note I'm off to fly my pig... 🐖
With my very best wishes from the jaded, faded Imperial heartland! 😃
The protest (and all the rest) was funded by the DNC and their many front not for profit groups. The Democrats only want to govern when they can't "do" anything. I wish more people cared who was funding their government, their party, etc. Fascism comes when democratic means fail. What bigger sign of a failing democracy is one that bankrolls a faux revolution to get the masses to demand their own subjugation, economic inequality and racial tensions.
The democratic ideals of the Founders—which were lofty but ignored from the get-go—were completely discarded in the last fifty years. The Republican backlash to civil rights, womens’ rights, and LGBTQ rights proves that America Nice is a mirage.
And now the new bogeyman: immigrants.
There is now but one ideal for the American majority, defined not by voters, or legislators, or pastors, but by corporate boards:
MORE.
For some.
If you don’t get yours, you’re a loser.
Can’t keep winning, winning, winning if we have a ballast of losers!
So we throw them overboard.
America is a sick, pathetic husk of a nation, sucked dry by vampires.
Part of the problem is the false dichotomy tendency to treat the "left" socialism and the "right" individualistic capitalism as the only two options with no third middle (or continuum).
I see individualism as a natural outcome of civilization, a trend away from tribalism, which, in my opinion has few redeeming qualities.
HOWEVER, individualistic capitalism cannot stand alone in a society without tax funded societal props, education and security (police/defence) being just two examples.
I strongly believe that our tax/welfare system is to blame for much of the inequality (reduced rates on capital gains as just one example), and that a basic income (NOT a liveable income, individual responsibility is still a goal) integrated into the tax system (as negative income tax) would provide a much needed balance, in addition to being a far more efficient and humane way of helping those who need it.
It is a dismal irony, I think, that the US so-called evangelical right has forgotten "who is my neighbour".
I think many people, protestors and orgs ARE making the demands you mention – housing, higher wages, ending surveillance, etc. – but they aren’t policy-makers, and most don’t want to become politicians (who can blame them?) How do you demand these things from a power structure that cares for nothing but its own survival and the maintenance of power? What’s the leverage, other than mobilizing millions of people to March, boycott, strike, etc.? (Assuming you don’t want violent revolution) asking these questions in earnest.
"How do you demand these things from a power structure ...?"
Not to be uncharitable, but we get the democracy we deserve.
On a more positive note (I hope), I suggest that sortition based representative democracy is the only real option for reformation. At least electoral politics offers a path towards this goal.
Which is why I personally try to insert the idea into discussions of this type whenever I get the opportunity. Sorry if that's becoming irritating ...
Fascinating piece. Your examples of 'narrative maintenance' put me in mind of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the transformation of dissent into image in the service of capital.
The trouble with this post is it seems to equate liberalism and the left with the Democrat party, and liberalism with neoliberalism, which isn't the same thing at all--neoliberalism is the essence of conservatism.
As to the utility of five million people participating in No Kings rallies (while Trump's obscene birthday military parade turned out to be a sad, pathetic affair)--one would have to be naive to think the rallies were intended to right the wrongs and depose Trump. (While saying Trump is the culmination of the trajectory we've been on for a long time and not the sole problem is quite accurate.) The utility of big rallies, of the Occupy gatherings lies in what they prepare for. Those who attend get their morale boosted, see that they're far from alone, learn from each other, and network. This piece seems to imagine a protest that attempts to actually wrench power from those who have it, and impose a change of rules. That would be a violent revolution, and those rarely end well.
What has a chance of actually reforming this system is a general strike, in which people refuse to work OR buy anything for extended periods, which issues a clear set of demands (she's right about that). For this to be effective it needs mass participation, which takes time to organize. The rallies could be a key means of doing this, handing out flyers naming the dates and the demands--after representatives from hundreds of environmental, BIPOC, labor and other groups convene to hash out the details, notably the demands. The enemy plans to replace most of us as workers with AI anyway, so the refusal to buy is more important than withholding labor; to be able to participate fully, people need to prepare by stockpiling necessities in advance, but critically must also make changes such that they will be able to cease buying many things permanently. This change toward relocalizing economies and self-sufficiency--better, collective self-sufficiency in a community-- is necessary regardless of governance, because we are hurtling toward civilizational breakdown and possibly extinction due to overshoot, too many humans consuming too much. Almost nothing is being done about the climate crisis; meanwhile the equally urgent crisis of biodiversity loss is rarely even named. Then there's the proliferation of plastic, PFAS, and other longlived chemicals life is not equipped to process. These environmental issues are the most important because they will still be reverberating thousands of years from now when Trump is long forgotten--and because they may very well cause human extinction so questions of governance are moot. Along with the risk of nuclear war, which is a real and rising risk, and could cause the extinction of most advanced life on Earth.
Neoliberalism is the economic playbook of minimal government regulation, and freeing global capital…it promised a rising of all boats…but delivered enormous global inequality. No political party can resolve this mess without the burning of this playbook and government remembering how to govern again instead of just governance.
I think you are exactly right, Mary. The protests were the first step. Now, action is needed. A general strike needs to be enacted urgently. Coalitions need to be formed. Existing Unions need to be strengthened and new ones formed. So much work to be done. We, the people, have to take our country back.
Where is anything you’ve talked about gotten us in the last 40 years?
Clinton and the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism— along with scapegoating Monica Lewinsky, which is why I didn’t vote Democrat until 2004 – –and they were warned we would end up here, and here we are.
I absolutely cringe when liberals and progressives pat themselves on the back for not being like Republicans when they have not delivered either.
We don’t have maternity leave, we don’t have childcare, We don’t have quality education, our medical services too often aren’t worth paying for, but it would at least be nice not to be bankrupted by them.. We don’t have we don’t have— and the Democrats have colluded with the Republicans to get us to this point.
Now liberals and the DNC hide behind Trump for their own failings.
Feminism pats itself on the back for strides made that only benefit the upper classes. Women are still being thrown under the bus in Family Courts both monetarily and having to share custody with domestic and sexual abusers. When women lose everything because he decides to leave, they’re told that’s what you get for being a stay at home Mom, and you should’ve had your own bank account. Nobody told you to have children – – and these are comments from feminists to these women.
Roe V Wade did not give women bodily autonomy, it gave doctors the right to perform a procedure without being arrested. If a woman wants to take that baby to term, very few people think she should have bodily autonomy then.
Women are more distant from and afraid of their bodies than they were 60 years ago. The US has the highest maternal mortality rate amongst the industrialized countries and it’s not just about race. White women in America have poorer outcomes than their European and Canadian sisters.
Homeschooling came out of left-leaning education reform movement of the 50s and 60s, because our industrial model schools, which was never about educating, but training for the Corporatocracy, have been failing students for over 100 years.
Liberals didn’t notice until handful of books were banned from libraries and schools, but not stores—and when they found out how poorly educated our populous is, it was just more fuel to call the working class stupid.
The Patient’s Rights Movement, which began in the 1970s, came out of both Second wave feminism pushing back against patriarchal medicine, and the Civil Rights movement.
Now labeled as conservative, the highly educated liberals worship the experts of their humanist religion and say only stupid people question “science”.
Farming, back to nature, baking your own bread, raising your own children started as a Liberal leaning movement in the 60s and 70s, is now portrayed by liberals as MAGA brainwashing of women. I know a minimum of 500 liberal and progressive women of all ethnicities that would love to stay home and raise their kids and bake that bread, but this economy won’t let them.
We bought into vote blue, no matter who, while they all got rich
I'm not sure what you're talking AGAINST here. Many essays suggest that if only we can get rid of Trump and bring back the Democrats, everything will be fine. No one here is saying that.. Most of your post is about the failure of feminism; i largely disagree, i think women have won great strides. But I do think feminism took a wrong turn when it concentrated solely on winning women the right to act like, be like men, rather than bringing what had been considered women's values into society as a whole (nurturing, prioritizing the wellbeing of children. striving for harmony rather than domination). We have more women in positions of power but it makes no difference, because they'
re chosen for being willing to "act like men," that is, focus on winning and domination and wealth acquisition.
By the way, I stayed at home and raised my kids, along with my ex--we had a home crafts business--and I still bake my own bread and raise my own fruits and vegetables--not because I'm a woman but because I'm a homesteader.I think the mommy wars are stupid--why assume the question of who does childcare is solely on the women, and that the options are he works for money and she does childcare and housework, or they both work for money and SHE pays someone to raise her kids--when they're equally his kids, and there are dozens of ways a couple can manage the need for money, childcare and everything else the household needs.
Excellent article-thank you 👏
Keep an eye out on the NYC mayoral election. An upstart politician has activated a ton of grassroots energy/organizing and is now the target of the establishment. Not a savior, of course, but if he beats Cuomo a step in the right direction. Terrific IG rap video supporting Zohran Mamdani by hilatheearth https://www.instagram.com/p/DK4--vMOjqu/
I have a piece on this coming out later in the week!
Mamdani is a rich nepo baby. He is from Uganda and his family fled when the Ugandans got rid of White settler rule. The man has been a citizen for 3 years and in government for 2 and now wants to be mayor. This man is doing the same performative controlled opposition for the Democratic elites - "rent freeze on rent stabilized apartments" - those are the rich people apartments and applies to apartments built before 1974 ONLY. The mayor cannot "tax the rich" and not one person on the city council has supported his free bus agenda. Mamdani is a racist as far as I am concerned - bump all that anti-Zionist rhetoric, the man has no Black people in his campaign and is just playing a two-tiered voter campaign. The DSA is a part of the DNC. II am tired of silly liberals champing more silly people. Disgusting. I am more Anti - Mamdani than anti-Zionist takeover of NYC.
Spot on, Evelyn. The main placard I recall from the 'No Kings' protest was one showing the message 'If Kamala Were President We'd Be At Brunch'. Jesus Christ.
The excerpt below is taken from the book How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm. He wrote this passage in the context of the climate movement, but the distinction drawn here between protest and resistance is apropos, I believe, to the Hands Off and No Kings rallies.
Recognising the direness of the situation, it is high time for the movement to more decisively shift from protest to resistance: 'Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too,’ as one West German columnist wrote in 1968, relaying the words of a visiting Black Power activist. There will be no shortage of objections to such resistance.
My brother living in Silicon Valley pointed out the unfortunate irony of No King's protestors carrying placards primarily made from Amazon boxes.
Reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle…
But will they continue to purchase from Amazon?
Not I.
This was very good, especially in its recognition of the performative aspects of this kind of resistance. After a span of a few decades, I am back to reading Althusser and, especially, Poulantzas to make sense of US politics (and to a lesser extent European politics too). I never thought I’d return to their turgid, structuralist prose but with some perseverance I now see they had something important to tell us. In fact, their interpretation of the state and the power blocs that compete to capture describes our world far better than 1970s Europe.
Althusser’s so-called ideological state apparatus has been captured by an authoritarian-leaning capitalist bloc from the liberal-leaning capitalist bloc. The former has trashed the cultural baggage (“ideology”) of the latter and replaced it with reactionary and ethnonationalist cultural trappings of its own. But the underlying material relations have changed little. The class structure is the same; only foreign labor out, foreign capital demoted, white nationalist labor up, national capital right on top. This battle of ideologies (cultural values) will be fought through the institutions and I have no idea who will come out on top as each side genuflects before that warped and hideous notion of the American Dream. But the economic “base” is still intact. And that is the most dispiriting part of the story
What’s the difference between a neocon and a neo Lib? Both ate the wrong pill.
Neo libertarianism… and a reminder to the original poster—> no kings is plural not singular.
So: "The Revolution Will Not Be on TikTok"; to Very Badly misappropriate the magisterial Gill Scott-Heron? 😃
Lovely article and thank you: and it does beg for myself a perennial question of "how democratic is this 'democracy'?" Does it really reflect and react nimbly to a swathe of our human beliefs, experiences and opinions? Or is it a leaden and sub-representative juggernaut which is more suited to sustaining a coterie of cynical elites through being suitably engineered to undermine the spark of popular thinking coming up from the kitchen, the street, the factory; thus reducing the mass of us to the roles of observers (of spectacle!) and consumers, but barely active agents in engineering this world in which we are striving to thrive in?
Sending warmest solidarity wishes from here in the "United" Kingdom... 😃🏴☠️
I could have pasted my response to Amy here also ...
Sorry: do you mean the bit about getting the democracy we deserve, Mark?
Well, the whole response, actually. Sortition is the alternative to being a mass of observers, even if it is still a representative vs. a direct democracy model.
Hmmm... yes indeed: sortition has its merits, but the downside for me is that it seems to assume that chance scores higher than popular consensus, thus also inhibiting our growth as participatory beings (albeit not even nearly as much as the current stultifying apparatus, I am Very Happy to acknowledge)? On my side of The Big Pond, the receding opportunities for people to participate in any meaningful choices - such as the decline of participation in labour unions and the like, plus the ossifying nature of our "Democratic" model - has (temporarily) increased our political stultification. The circular argument of to what extent we make our systems versus to what extent our systems create our personhood seems increasingly skewed by the increasingly undue disproportion of power in the latter case. Having said that, no-one is coming to save us: they never do - nor will!
All best wishes from the Dis-United Kingdom of post-industrial dystopia! 😃
"... chance scores higher than popular consensus ..."
Do you mean a sufficiently large group of randomly chosen representatives wouldn't be a statistically valid representation of the population?
You can use online sample size calculators to generate the required sample size for a given population size, desired confidence level and margin of error. It will a be valid representation (subject to the input parameters) of all facets of the population without “needing to have” a certain number of whatever characteristic. FYI, once the population gets to be a certain size, the sample doesn’t get any bigger. Statistics is funny that way. (FYI, I’m no statistician.)
For example, for a 95% confidence interval and 4% margin of error, a sample of 601 is sufficient. For 98% confidence and 5% margin it’s 543. For 99% and 5% it’s 666. All these work for large populations (>2MM).
Yes, it’s almost double the current size of parliament. I say it would be worth it to get rid of professional politicians.
So, yes, randomly selecting representatives can provide a statistically valid result for population representation, which is really the whole point behind elections isn't it?
What we would get: real people who don’t consider how their decisions will affect their chances of getting re-elected; people who deliberate meaningfully (the advantage of representative over direct democracy) and make decisions that fit the problem at hand, rather than some ideological straight jacket; drastically reduced costs; and, governing would become more participatory as more of the general population are chosen and visualize themselves as eligible. There's also the possibility (hope?) that a sortition selected body would be more open to input from the general population, further enhancing the participatory angle.
Sure, competence matters, but do you really think that elections provide any increase in competence vs. random selection? Isn’t it obvious how ill-suited the people who actually want to be elected are for the job? (One could be forgiven for thinking it's almost a disqualifier ...)
"post-industrial dystopia" reminds me of a pig balloon flying over Battersea Power Station ... 🙃
'"post-industrial dystopia" reminds me of a pig balloon flying over Battersea Power Station ... 🙃'
- PERFECT! ((😁))
Sorry, yes: I take your point; I was probably looking at sortition from a narrower and far more, too reductive viewpoint; it is a broad discipline and there are some very good models - and arguments - as you have comprehensively illustrated. With regard to "Isn’t it obvious how ill-suited the people who actually want to be elected are for the job?"; with too very few honourable exceptions, this seems to apply ever more convincingly the further up the pile we cast our gaze... So I'm not quibbling as we seem to be basically on the same page over this organisational conundrum.
The late Tony Benn's five questions of democracy all seem to apply here -
“What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you exercise it?
To whom are you accountable?
And how can we get rid of you?” 😃
I'm also rather fond of the idea that democracy - an infinitely more responsive and versatile model - should be applied more along industrial lines; we need to administrate resources (the invisible hand of the global casino is sorely wanting in my analysis) far more imperatively than we need the geographically-based administration/control of people?
And on that note I'm off to fly my pig... 🐖
With my very best wishes from the jaded, faded Imperial heartland! 😃
Excellent point.
The protest (and all the rest) was funded by the DNC and their many front not for profit groups. The Democrats only want to govern when they can't "do" anything. I wish more people cared who was funding their government, their party, etc. Fascism comes when democratic means fail. What bigger sign of a failing democracy is one that bankrolls a faux revolution to get the masses to demand their own subjugation, economic inequality and racial tensions.
https://anonymousblacknyer.substack.com/p/for-the-political-nerds-hot-times?r=5sqi0v
The democratic ideals of the Founders—which were lofty but ignored from the get-go—were completely discarded in the last fifty years. The Republican backlash to civil rights, womens’ rights, and LGBTQ rights proves that America Nice is a mirage.
And now the new bogeyman: immigrants.
There is now but one ideal for the American majority, defined not by voters, or legislators, or pastors, but by corporate boards:
MORE.
For some.
If you don’t get yours, you’re a loser.
Can’t keep winning, winning, winning if we have a ballast of losers!
So we throw them overboard.
America is a sick, pathetic husk of a nation, sucked dry by vampires.
Part of the problem is the false dichotomy tendency to treat the "left" socialism and the "right" individualistic capitalism as the only two options with no third middle (or continuum).
I see individualism as a natural outcome of civilization, a trend away from tribalism, which, in my opinion has few redeeming qualities.
HOWEVER, individualistic capitalism cannot stand alone in a society without tax funded societal props, education and security (police/defence) being just two examples.
I strongly believe that our tax/welfare system is to blame for much of the inequality (reduced rates on capital gains as just one example), and that a basic income (NOT a liveable income, individual responsibility is still a goal) integrated into the tax system (as negative income tax) would provide a much needed balance, in addition to being a far more efficient and humane way of helping those who need it.
It is a dismal irony, I think, that the US so-called evangelical right has forgotten "who is my neighbour".
I think many people, protestors and orgs ARE making the demands you mention – housing, higher wages, ending surveillance, etc. – but they aren’t policy-makers, and most don’t want to become politicians (who can blame them?) How do you demand these things from a power structure that cares for nothing but its own survival and the maintenance of power? What’s the leverage, other than mobilizing millions of people to March, boycott, strike, etc.? (Assuming you don’t want violent revolution) asking these questions in earnest.
"How do you demand these things from a power structure ...?"
Not to be uncharitable, but we get the democracy we deserve.
On a more positive note (I hope), I suggest that sortition based representative democracy is the only real option for reformation. At least electoral politics offers a path towards this goal.
Which is why I personally try to insert the idea into discussions of this type whenever I get the opportunity. Sorry if that's becoming irritating ...
Fascinating piece. Your examples of 'narrative maintenance' put me in mind of Debord's Society of the Spectacle and the transformation of dissent into image in the service of capital.
You're preaching to choir with me
True. There are surface issues, but you've described the Core.