I hate democracy. Most voters aren't informed at all. Attractive candidates win 2.5 times more often than less attractive ones. Money and crappy 30 second ads apparently influence the outcome. First past the post voting means no one can even vote for what they really want to begin with.
It wouldn't be so bad if the president didn't have enormous power. And they aren't supposed to. But it's been growing so much over the years. Maybe now people will understand why its so important to limit it.
The true advantages of democracy are things that are rarely talked about and which people are mostly unaware. In my opinion, they are:
1. The availability of non-violent ways to push for change and seek redress.
2. A way to reliably and peacefully transition from one leader to another.
These are big problems with non-democratic governments. If people don't feel like they have a chance to change the system from within, they'll eventually resort to violence. If there isn't a widely agreed upon way to choose the next leader and transition power to them, then there will be succession struggles.
In a healthy democracy, people are encouraged to seek change politically, and the people accept the outcome whatever it may be.
As Scott Alexander put it in his Anti-Reactionary FAQ: "If you remember nothing else about the superiority of democracies to other forms of government, remember the fact that in three years, we will have a change of leadership and almost no one is stocking up on canned goods to prepare for the inevitable civil war."
Note that these advantages do not depend on making good choices. They only require the availability of choices, and widespread acceptance of the outcomes. Obviously, making good choices would be really nice, but they aren't the best feature of the system.
This is actually what troubles me most about Trump. Bad policies and terrible morals are one thing, but he directly attacked the very notion of democracy itself. All the talk of the election being rigged and perhaps not accepting the results is setting up his followers to reject the entire system, not just his opponents. And I find myself sincerely wondering if he'd willingly leave office in 2021 if he loses the next time around, or in 2025 if he wins.
No I agree. Democracy is better than monarchy. But that's a super low bar to pass. Not something to be proud of. I think there are alternative systems that are even better.
Just as a start, switching to an alternative voting system would be amazing. It's been shown that systems like approval voting are a better improvement over plurality voting, then plurality voting is over monarchy (http://rangevoting.org/UniqBest.html#HugePos). And that still works in the framework of democracy. I'd ideally like to get rid of voting entirely and replace it with something like randomly sampling representatives from the population.
You just hate crappy democracy. Actually, the U.S. isn't even a democracy anymore. If anything, Trump winning is a return to the lost democracy, although it remains to be seen whether the country will be more democratic or even less than when he became president, after he leaves office.
But I think the US model of democracy (or republic, whatever) is a pretty bad one, and the country is in a dire need of top to bottom electoral reform. But I barely even see anyone talking about this.
Also, in more democratic countries, the media is significantly more regulated during elections. For instance, they have to give all parties equal time on TV, and other stuff like that to ensure the media bias is limited.
So if you think the U.S. is a democracy, it's a dysfunctional one at best.
The country was designed initially so that the Federal branch (i.e. the remote branch) of the government was limited in its scope and power. The State and local branches of government are supposed to be the ones with the power as it pertains to everyday citizens lives. If that were really the case, people wouldn't feel as though their personal well being is so directly tied to the outcome of these national elections and, hopefully, they wouldn't end up being the circus they are today.
You hear about it talked about all the time with regards to large technology organizations. The supposed best ones have small, autonomous teams focused on their little slice of the organization, collaborating with other teams as need be while upper management aggregates the best ideas from all teams and presents those to the rest of the organization so that other team leads can decide on whether or not those ideas would work for them.
I believe the Federal branch of the government absolutely has a role to play in the success of our country, I just think we'd be better off if it was a much reduced role.
Whether or not spending actually influences elections, most politicians certainly believe it does. Or they wouldn't spend so much effort on fundraising, and wouldn't bother with the stupid ads. They clearly believe it works. Surely they know. Modern campaigns track this stuff religiously with polls, statisticians, and A/B tests. And this belief corrupts our democracy.
One example doesn't disprove it anyway. Clinton lost. But she might have lost even worse without the spending. It's impossible to say the spending had no effect. As the election was pretty close in many states, even small effects can make a world of difference.
It wouldn't be so bad if the president didn't have enormous power. And they aren't supposed to. But it's been growing so much over the years. Maybe now people will understand why its so important to limit it.