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Direct Democracy Is Our Destiny: via Tilting At Quixote.
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Many people are against direct democracy because they fear mob rule and such. That fear is derived from a static idea fallacy; only what democracy was, is what democracy can be. There are no extenuating circumstances where democracy can be more direct than it is, and still be successful. Blah. Blah. Blah. While we have been a republic with democratic elements, or democracy with republican checks and balances, the belief system surrounding these ideas is an 18th century relic. Is it possible that our democratic system has not changed in the 234 years since our Constitution was written, or cannot be improved?
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Yes, human behavior has changed little since then. Yet, no matter what people and our nation were like centuries ago, our ability to run government since then with more democratic involvement has improved many lives. Specifically, our laws, and enforcement of them, have greatly curbed much of the mob violence and actions from 100 years ago, and reduced another degree more over the last 50 years. Mob actions have evolved in some ways as well, but many obvious elements of it are suppressed.
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The insurrection of January 6th, while not successful in its main political aim, overturning the election, sure looked a lot like a mob. But we have had many mobs actually thwarting laws before, like the school busing riots in Boston, mainly in the 1970s. School busing has ended, helped in some part by those mob actions. And other more prevalent racial incidents occurred before 1970, for example in housing, where white mobs got the result they wanted.
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Who We Really Are, At The Wrong Times.
On the other hand, we know significantly more about human nature and behavior today than we did fifty, let alone 250, years ago. Keith Payne’s 2017 book, The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Affects the Way We Think, Live, and Die, is an example of our collective knowledge in how humans actually think. Books by Robert M. Sapolsky, Behave; Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased; George Lakoff, Whose Freedom?; Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, and Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain, also delve into how we…
