Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Non-Representative Democracy

Nobody's favorite answer is "yes and no" but it's too often true and, well, what do you expect when considering a non-representative democracy, a seeming contradiction in terms reflecting a compromised, imperfect reality. Some of the compromise--the gap between pure democracy and what we have--is planned and inherent in the electoral aspect of it and, in that sense, a pure, direct democracy is not representative. 

But, damn, our democracy has headed headlong in the other direction, becoming bizarrely unrepresentative of anybody. We live in a nominally representative democracy but it isn't representative of our aggregated will--pure democracy with the edges rounded off--but representative of the edges, the fringe, the should-be-rounded-off part. That fringe doesn't even get what it wants, non-democracy, but an unintelligible mess. 

The system has collapsed only partially and landed in a distorted democracy, a ridiculous neverland that doesn't serve the longer term interests of anyone. So it's a "yes" to being representative in that it embodies our failure and confusion, that people are voting against their own interests, but "no" in that they have been deliberately duped and misled, wherein is the failure on our part, in detection, in seeing that we are fools.

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