I’ll admit for context that I’m not personally convinced by your argument. I’m in the less but better camp on fixing democracy, not the more and often camp. More democracy, more often doesn’t really fix the biggest issues with democracy as it stands (populism, low levels of policy understanding, desire satisfaction short-termism, politicians not having enough time to actually deliver policy agendas before the hounds are set on them for not delivering and they are subsequently voted out, niche powerful interest groups being overrepresented...)
That being said I think this is a really interesting direction to explore—and have a lot of respect for the significant amount of time it is clear you’ve invested into this project.
My biggest takeaway from your amended webpage (the one linked at the top) is that it still really needs a ‘This is what Persistent Democracy would mean in practice and this is how it would change your day-to-day life’ section right at the start. Your writing is incredibly rich in its exploration of PD in relation to specific causes you regard as important but I really needed an early grounding without having to skim through to understand it. Hard to effectively evaluate your arguments otherwise. Clear that you’ve understood your most likely critics and created clear distance between yourself and obvious contemporaries.
Would be interesting to see how this fits with the other big trend in the more and often camp of democracy fixing which is arguments for people’s assemblies and more direct referendums.
This feedback is very helpful! It’s definitely become clear I’ve forgotten my opinion that “true democracy is an unambiguous good” isn’t widely shared, and I need to better elucidate why I believe that’s true. Similarly for concrete walkthroughs of how this would work.
Expect to hear from me when I have responses I’m happy with :)
I don’t think what we and others in the comments are disagreeing on boils down to a disagreement on ‘true democracy’ (not entirely clear what you mean by that) being an unambiguous good.
On my side, I’d say our disagreement is that you believe that more and continuous input = better democratic outcomes and experience for voters while I’m arguing that it is more important that the quality of engagement is good (informed, lots of reasoning time, only engaging at a level people can be realistically expected to understand with the end goal of appointing aligned experts to make most more complex decisions) vs quantity.
If you want to make the true democracy argument you’d need to go some way to prove that my conception of democracy, and the conceptions of democracy held by other competing theorists, are somehow less true to democracy.
You might be better off trying to argue that direct civic choice and personal input into decision making is the ‘good’ of democracy—so more of that is more good democracy.
I’ll admit for context that I’m not personally convinced by your argument. I’m in the less but better camp on fixing democracy, not the more and often camp. More democracy, more often doesn’t really fix the biggest issues with democracy as it stands (populism, low levels of policy understanding, desire satisfaction short-termism, politicians not having enough time to actually deliver policy agendas before the hounds are set on them for not delivering and they are subsequently voted out, niche powerful interest groups being overrepresented...)
That being said I think this is a really interesting direction to explore—and have a lot of respect for the significant amount of time it is clear you’ve invested into this project.
My biggest takeaway from your amended webpage (the one linked at the top) is that it still really needs a ‘This is what Persistent Democracy would mean in practice and this is how it would change your day-to-day life’ section right at the start. Your writing is incredibly rich in its exploration of PD in relation to specific causes you regard as important but I really needed an early grounding without having to skim through to understand it. Hard to effectively evaluate your arguments otherwise. Clear that you’ve understood your most likely critics and created clear distance between yourself and obvious contemporaries.
Would be interesting to see how this fits with the other big trend in the more and often camp of democracy fixing which is arguments for people’s assemblies and more direct referendums.
This feedback is very helpful! It’s definitely become clear I’ve forgotten my opinion that “true democracy is an unambiguous good” isn’t widely shared, and I need to better elucidate why I believe that’s true. Similarly for concrete walkthroughs of how this would work.
Expect to hear from me when I have responses I’m happy with :)
Happy to help!
I don’t think what we and others in the comments are disagreeing on boils down to a disagreement on ‘true democracy’ (not entirely clear what you mean by that) being an unambiguous good.
On my side, I’d say our disagreement is that you believe that more and continuous input = better democratic outcomes and experience for voters while I’m arguing that it is more important that the quality of engagement is good (informed, lots of reasoning time, only engaging at a level people can be realistically expected to understand with the end goal of appointing aligned experts to make most more complex decisions) vs quantity.
If you want to make the true democracy argument you’d need to go some way to prove that my conception of democracy, and the conceptions of democracy held by other competing theorists, are somehow less true to democracy.
You might be better off trying to argue that direct civic choice and personal input into decision making is the ‘good’ of democracy—so more of that is more good democracy.
Hello! Just making sure you see the edit with this talk: https://youtu.be/wOW6_DwA87c