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I'm libertarian and generally think most things should not be subject to democratic control.
I think there is a philosophical and somewhat legitimate case to be made that common goods, and public goods should be subject to democratic control. I think in practice this still kind of fails, but its at least gestures at a philosophically sound argument.
I have objections to democratic control, but they fall into philosophical categories more than policy categories.
Objection #1: Individual Sovereignty
The idea that there should be democratic control over individual decisions seems self-contradictory to me. A democracy is supposed to invest political power in the individual. To then turn that power towards restricting the individual seems odd to me. As if a monarchy spent all its time just writing laws about what the monarch is allowed to do ... laws that could easily be overridden by their predecessor. It seems to undermine the whole thesis of democracy. If an individual is smart enough and sovereign enough to make decisions about their government, why would they also not be smart enough to make decisions about their personal consumption and interactions? I feel like anyone subject to nanny-state like protections should also be stripped of their voting power in a democracy.
Objection #2: Defining the Polity
There is an issue with how government is run that different functions of government make sense to be run at different levels. A national defense strategy makes sense to run at a national level. A fire department makes sense to run at a local level. Who gets to vote on these things? A national level of democratic control over a national defense makes sense, but national level of control over all locally run fire departments? Its not as clear to me that this makes sense.
But even supposedly straightforward votes like national defense can become confusing. Someone in Nebraska might not care at all about how well the coast of Hawaii is defended. Someone in Hawaii might reasonably ask "why does some yokel in Nebraska get to determine how much money we spend on our coastal defense?"
There aren't logical or philosophically correct ways to determine who gets to vote on what. Its all a matter of practical and political maneuvering. And just because a system manages to screw over everyone equally doesn't mean it has made the correct allocation of governing power.
Objection #3: Voting sucks
Until we all get hooked up into a giant AI that determine what everyone wants and how to get it ... we will never get democratic control. Instead we just get voting. Which is a rough and terrible approximation of democratic control. There is an old saying: "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner". The majority of voters joining together to screw over a minority of voters is a winning strategy. When these minorities try and pool their resources together to fend off the predations of the majority we have a dirty word for it: lobbying.
Much of the western world seems to be under some strange impression that the solution to the problem of voting is to add more voting. Vote for representatives who then vote for things. It changes little, especially when you make those representatives barred from accepting bribes from minority groups.
The "one person one vote" rule squashes all strengths of preference into a single level of difference, so many supposed "subversions" of democracy are really just attempts to correct this fundamental problem of voting.
Whats the alternative and better way to get democratic control? I don't know, and it probably doesn't exist.
No, the individual focus comes from classic liberalism, not democratic theory. Democracy vests sovereignty in the people, collectively, and starts from the premise that you have a society to begin with. It is a conflict-resolution device for making collective decisions. Every individual person has some sort of view of the world he'd like to live in; democracy is one method of transmuting those individual views into a larger system.
"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult. The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want. Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.
Yes, it is, and that's in fact the whole point.
This is not "the practical implementation of democracy," it is democracy itself.
Pure democracy has no government layer; it's decision-making by a committee-of-the-whole, so to speak. Past a certain size, this is impractical, therefore governments exist to solve the scaling and coordination issues. They necessarily do so imperfectly, though some instantiations are better than others, in terms of their fidelity to the expressed collective will of the demos.
I feel like this is just rephrasing what I said, and that none of it changes my original objection.
Governing other people is harder than governing yourself. So to say that a person is incapable of governing themself but capable of governing others is a bit insane. Which is exactly the conceit of a nanny state in a democracy.
I think what has actually happened is that some people have recognized that some other people are sometimes incapable of governing themselves. They have stripped the incapable of the responsibility to governing themselves, but left them with the responsibility to govern others. We are left with children and the criminally insane to rule over us.
Eh, I think this depends on cases enough that neither this statement nor the reverse is usefully true. It is true that very few people are fit to rule others unchecked, without becoming corrupted by having more power than is wise.
Fundamentally, what a government--any government--is, is a methodology for figuring out what rules will be enforced within a society. Absent a completely anarchic state of nature--which can exist, briefly--there will be rules that are enforced. Democracy is that class of methodologies where that authority is spread most broadly, unlike, say, monarchy, where the authority is very concentrated.
In a democracy, you get to determine the rules that your neighbor must live by. But the same applies in reverse, and hashing out what that means in practice is part of democratic negotiation such that the demos arrives at a conclusion. Can you set some questions aside, such that each follows his own path? Yes! And you really really should do that in a number of cases, history is quite clear! But the agreement to set questions aside, and not make an enforced rule, is itself a rule that may be revisited.
There are a number of ways to decorate decisions-not-to-decide, and paint "we really mean it!" on them. "This is locked behind a supermajority requirement" or "this concept is culturally set aside as special." Even then, those protections may erode, and what was once settled becomes unsettled again.
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