alt Hacker NewsDemocracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
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I enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise.
In TFA, the author wrote:
Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
This assumes ruling parties start out as “good” but becomes “bad” over time. A more pragmatic view is that different people and different interests have different ideas about what is good and what is bad, and politics is the stuggle between these viewpoints.
> But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
History presents us with far more examples of successful autocracies.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.