If you are tired of the fights, tired of the polarization, tired of politics infiltrating every institution, you can do two things; you can continue to be tired, or you can do something.
You should do something because if you don’t things will not get better. They will get worse because of the excessive power we give politicians allows them to accumulate more power, decade after decade.
Such power does not mean directly oppressive power, it often means control by executive decisions, laws, regulations, allocation of budgets, etc.
In a representative democracy, politicians have all the decision-making power. When we elect them we give them the authority to decide for us. Between elections, representative democracy has no formal, effective mechanism to have the will of the people prevail on any issue. Protests are not enough; they are the symptom of the problem.
If the politicians pass a new law, raise taxes, lower them, establish a minimum wage, remove it, nationalize health care or privatize it, the will of the majority has no way of being expressed and prevail on those issues.
All the majority can do in a representative democracy to reverse the changes, is wait for the next election and put another party in power. Hopefully, the new government will undo what the previous government did. Unfortunately, the new party in power rarely changes things; perhaps they prefer to avoid the controversy, or they find other issues more important. What they never do is reduce the power of government.
That is the weakest point of a representative democracy; the people do not control the decisions of politicians at the time they make them.
Democracy is “government by the people”, it should not be “government by the representatives of the people”.
The way it works turns representative democracy into an elected oligarchy. It is a tremendous improvement over totalitarian or authoritarian regimes, but is not real democracy.
Another problem of having politicians deciding is that politicians look at issues through ideology, and also to win the next election, or the interests of the lobbies who influence them, or both.
Because of that, in a representative democracy, it is very difficult for politicians to keep the common good at the forefront; the system forces politicians to behave the way they do. To change that, you need to change the system.
In a direct democracy, things are very different because the people directly decide the issues; they decide based on the interests of the majority, as it should be in a democracy.
Some people say that direct decision-making by the majority can turn into “the tyranny of the majority”. Switzerland, the only direct democracy humanity has now, shows decade after decade, how the majority does not fall into that mistake.
Most voters are intelligent and they know that if they use direct democracy to oppress minorities, it will be impossible to live in harmony and peace
If most of the people do not have the common sense to understand that fairness is crucial, representative democracy will not survive either. We have seen how representative democracies have turned into totalitarian regimes. We have not seen that in a direct democracy.
I repeat what I said at the beginning; if you tired of the fights, tired of the polarization, tired of politics infiltrating every institution, you can work to bring direct democracy to your country.
You can do what the Swiss did. The Swiss had representative democracy, but they switched more than a century ago; they have not looked back. You probably also know Switzerland is the most stable and prosperous democracy in the World.
