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I want everyone to feel represented and like they are part of society. People who feel like they aren't part of society tend to make for poor neighbors and sometimes attempt revolutions.
And I think that politicians that feel like they have to convince more of the population to vote for them are more likely to enact policies that are good for everyone as opposed to a narrow section of the population. Even if I happen to be part of the narrow slice of the population my elected politicians happen to decide is worth listening to (I don't seem to be currently), I'll always live near people who aren't.
What if there is a trade off between good governance and representation? What do you pick and why?
I'm suspicious of the concept of "good" governance divorced from asking who it is good for. Although I'm pretty comfortable drawing an age line somewhere and declaring everyone younger than that is a child and too immature to know what's best for themselves. Politics involves a lot of balancing competing interests and the interests of people who are not represented are unlikely to be given much weight. I see people talking about that in this thread about poorer people voting less so not needing to worry as much about their political opinions. I see people in left-leaning spaces complaining young people don't vote enough so politicians don't have to care about the future (read: climate change). The point of the OP's proposal is to more strongly represent parents so their interests are more strongly weighted, with the idea that those interests would hopefully align with their children's future interests and therefore the future of the society as a whole. None of these groups' interests are a priori the "right" interests for a "good" government to focus on.
But in a democracy, I think it's important that the people believe they are represented, even if everyone would be happier with the policies chosen by genius dictator @token_progressive. (Please don't make me dictator. I'd be really bad at it.)
Do you think direct democracy is preferable to republican democracy?
No, although I'm not sure how strongly I feel about that as it may be possible to design a direct democracy that doesn't have the problems that stem from its simplest form.
Part of making sure everyone feel represented is to structure the government to 50%+1 can't overrule the rest easily and not having direct democracy is part of how we do that. Although I suppose there's no reason you couldn't have non-representative democracy but still require a higher threshold than 50% or a more complicated threshold like 50% of every region for some definition of region (or some other way to slice the population?).
Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy and I do think they give a good alternative for when elected legislators fail to be representative... but they also don't provide a way to negotiate details or amend the text, so they often result in poorly written laws. For instance, for the states that voted on recreational marijuana via ballot initiative, those initiatives weren't just "should recreational marijuana be legal", they were "should recreational marijuana be regulated by rules X, Y, Z". Maybe you could have a technological solution to that looks something like liquid democracy and Git forks/pull requests on legislation... but no one has done that, so it's hard to know whether there's actually something feasible in that design space.
Well, it seems to me of the concern is about protecting minorities you do that by taking certain things out of the political process (eg bill of rights); not by how you decide the political process. Agree or disagree?
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say. I guess civil rights is a bare minimum I'd hope minority interests being represented in government to accomplish. But there's a lot more to representation than not having basic rights withheld from you.
Well, it seems you have two options.
Option 1 is remove government control of society so that minorities can rely on Beckerian economics of discrimination.
Option 2 is you have to give minorities outsized representation in the political scheme.
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No, not at all!
Democracy doesn’t have to make the perfect decision. It makes a decision, and then gives (the) people a reason to feel bound by the outcome. Revolution can’t provide that on its own.
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