A Digital Direct Democracy For the Modern Age

New submitter lordofthechia writes "Last month the White House created an online petition system through which constituents can directly voice any grievances and concerns to the US government. Any petition that reaches 25,000 signatures (5,000 originally) is promised an official reply. This weekend the first petitions will be closing, and already many have far exceeded the required number of signatures. Is this the way for the voice of the electorate to gain more weight in modern politics, or is it the web version of a placebo button? Will the President's office really consider the top pleas, which include petitions to Legalize and Regulate Marijuana, Forgive Student Loan Debt, and Abolish the TSA?"

Comments

Simple rewriting

[Caerdwyn]

Allow me to summarize how this works:

• VOTE: Shall the US Government give you free money, taken from anybody except yourself without consideration for law, fairness, effort, contribution, or the damage done to the economy and future generations?
  • [ ] Yes
    [ ] Gimme!
    [ ] I'm entitled!
    [ ] Anybody who earns more money than me must have cheated, so yeah
    [ ] Hanging chad

I think that sums it up nicely. Or, to quote someone a hell of a lot smarter than most people:

• A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
  --Alexander Tytler

But I don't want a democracy

[gewalker]

A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, if you can get 51% to vote for taking you life, your liberty, or your property -- you lost under mob rule. What I want is a rule of law, wherein government is limited by law and in practice to the domains in which it is permitted to act. You know, like a constitutional republic for example.

Neither the Democrats or the Republicans seem to be interested in this form of governance though.

Re:That's not direct democracy

[SlippyToad]

Context aware voting, open 24/7 continuous to distribute the resources and fluidly change policy is what we should've had since a decade ago.

Our democracy was explicitly designed so that in theory it could not be run away with by zealous whackaloons. The only experience the Founders had in this regard was history, the disastrous self-destructive "direct democracy" you mention earlier as having been invented two fucking thousand years ago. Maybe you skimmed that section of history -- the original Greek Democracy experiment was considered a catastrophe because the mob ran away with the government.

This was to be avoided in our system by giving conservative tendencies greater weight than progressive ones. Thus the Senate which originally wasn't even meant to be elected by the People, and whose sole purpose is to slow-foot the ideas the hotheads in the House come up with.

Although at the time of the ratification of the Constitution the true horrors of the French Revolution were still in the future, the Founders also had the experience of the weak central government established by the Articles of Confederation to guide it.

Recently, zealous whackaloons came up with this idea that they'd be extra-ultra-super conservative, and use all of the built-in tendencies towards PREVENTING change as a way to lock in their ideology.

At any rate, one must plan and design a government very carefully. Just shouting a bunch of ill-concieved libertarian principles into the air is not going to cut it.