It's hard not to think that democracy could be on the way out. People losing interest in democracy qua democracy, rather than what they can get out of it; the hero-worship of entrepreneur barons like Musk and Zuckerberg. Maybe the best we can hope for in the future is a benevolent corporate-style government.
For all the current furore right now about whether we're "normalizing" fascism, note that communism (as practised in China) is already pretty well normalized. Other countries are judged on how friendly they are, not their political systems, so China and Saudi Arabia are okay.
It would be great to see some real willingness to repair democracy in the US. Ditching the electoral college would be a small but significant step. Almost nobody likes it, after all! If we can just keep the discussion clear and calm, and separate the proposal to improve the system from the result of this election, maybe we could make progress. I'm not holding my breath, though...
I would also love to see experimentation with really radical forms of democracy. For example, Arthur C Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth has a fun aside about random selection of leaders. The Venetian Republic apparently used multiple rounds of lotteries and nominations; incredible to think that such a complex system was used successfully for centuries. (Excellent writeup in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/win-or-lose)
Take this, and remove all references to "workers" and "proletariat", and it sounds like it could be a very workable system, more stable than direct democracy, but with a much faster feedback loop than any modern representative democracy (since any council can recall its delegate to the higher-level council at any point).
Yes, that's interesting! It failed pretty quickly in the USSR, though, so clearly additional checks and balances are needed:
Lenin […] issued a "temporary" ban on factions in the Russian Communist Party. This ban remained until the revolutions of 1989 and according to critics made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality.
In USSR, it was "workers' and peasants' councils" from the get go (so those not belonging to these two categories were excluded). And the real power was always in the hands of Sovnarkom. So I would say that USSR never really had council democracy other than in name - just like most "democratic people's republics" out there aren't democratic.
For all the current furore right now about whether we're "normalizing" fascism, note that communism (as practised in China) is already pretty well normalized. Other countries are judged on how friendly they are, not their political systems, so China and Saudi Arabia are okay.
It would be great to see some real willingness to repair democracy in the US. Ditching the electoral college would be a small but significant step. Almost nobody likes it, after all! If we can just keep the discussion clear and calm, and separate the proposal to improve the system from the result of this election, maybe we could make progress. I'm not holding my breath, though...
I would also love to see experimentation with really radical forms of democracy. For example, Arthur C Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth has a fun aside about random selection of leaders. The Venetian Republic apparently used multiple rounds of lotteries and nominations; incredible to think that such a complex system was used successfully for centuries. (Excellent writeup in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/win-or-lose)