On a small scale, direct democracy is great, the problem is when you try to scale it up, direct democracy transforms into its opposite and becomes the greatest hindrance to democracy.

The problem is, and I know leftcoms don’t like to hear this, but regular people are not omniscient! The large the scale of the election, the more difficult it is for a person to even grasp the full scale of what they’re voting for.

Take, for example, the US presidential election. If Joe Biden had a 5 minute conversation with every single American of voting age, it would take almost 2000 years to complete. It’s not physically possible for regular people to come to know a candidate on an election of this scale organically.

How do they come to know them, then? Simple, through media institutions. You cannot vote for someone without knowing who they are, and hence, whoever is placed on the media will be the first step in the nomination process to decide who can get elected, since it will be impossible for voters to even know who they are voting for without the media.

Who ran for president in the US last election? You can probably say Joe Biden, Donald Trump, maybe if you followed it closely you’d know some less known candidates like Bernie or Howie.

In reality, 1,216 people ran for president in 2022. Yet, you don’t know of almost any of them. Because you only know of who the media told you about. And it’s even worse in the US because the media is controlled by money so a candidate’s viability is directly linked p with how much money they raise to appear in the media.

In practice, large-scale direct democracy always just devolves into a dictatorship of the media. Whatever small group has control over the media will control all of society, because regular people are not omnipotent and won’t understand how to run a country as big as China with over a billion people, and will rely on the TV to tell them how to vote, not because they’re not smart, but because nobody is that smart. You aren’t either, nor am I.

With some exceptions like national referendums on issues people might actually generally know about, in general, all elections should be very small in scale, or else they will be easily susceptible to manipulation.

Yes, for a large society, this requires many layers of elections, but it originates from small scale direct democratic elections at the base, and every layer going up is subject to the right to recall by the one below it. Each election is small enough so that people know who they are voting for at every step, so it is a rational system and not a chaotic one, producing efficient government that has its roots in the public.

This is far more functional than some chaotic direct democracy where 1+ billion Chinese people vote on every single issue. Such a thing would be a complete disaster and not democratic at all.

It also adds a benefit of making it rather difficult to climb to the top. To be president, you have to constantly prove yourself on every layer. You have to start small, directly elected at the root, and prove yourself at a local level, and eventually work your way up until you eventually prove you can manage towns, cities, whole provinces, until you can even be considered to be at the helm of the entire nation.

Adding these layers not only makes it more democratic and rational as a system but it also has a benefit of inherently injecting merit into the process.

The obsession over direct democracy for everything needs to go. It works well for somethings, small-scale elections at the base for the first layer of representatives, and occasionally on natural referendums where certain issues affect everyone. But it is not some cure-all silver-bullet for everything and is in fact a complete disaster if you try to apply it to everything.

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by u/aimixin