A meme from one of my Mastodon posts caught the attention of a political scientist:
This was a surprise. Nearly all political scientists believe the only way to govern democratically is with political parties. Having experienced a political party first-hand and how it warps your psyche, I don’t like political parties. I have devised a system without political parties. The academics will not be inviting me to their political science conventions any time soon.
But this political scientist believed that political parties need to go away. He invited me to his Wordpress group. So I joined.
But his reasoning was different than mine. This fellow is an advocate for direct democracy. His vision of a better world is about citizens making laws by voting on referenda. No need for political parties with this system.
Back in my political days, I did some study on direct democracy. My conclusion was that no society will function well with this system. My TDG book has a small section that addresses the failings of direct democracy. But with so few people thinking in this direction, my inspiration to write a Medium article about this topic is rather low. Maybe I should write such an article some day.
This Wordpress group had reasonable activity. I got about eight messages a day with new posts to the discussion.
A few times, the group wistfully mentioned Athenian democracy, where the men of Athens would deliberate all day on the issues of this Greek state. I mentioned that Athens was very much a slave economy, so the men could afford the time to deliberate. The group admitted that it already knew about that shady part of the Athens economy. But it seemed to me that the group was glossing over this fact — plus the fact that Athenian democracy did not last very long.
A few times, the group brought the Swiss cantons as a model for direct democracy governance. My knowledge on the canton structure is limited, so I asked a few questions. I found out that not all cantons are equal in their direct democracy and no more than 20% of any canton’s residents participate. This low percentage confirmed my understanding that the Swiss model is not a utopia. And for issues bigger than the canton, Switzerland is very much western democracy — with political parties. The canton politic never found its way to the national level.
Most of the group discussion was about what previous political scientists had said. My knowledge base of these academics was not there. Without being able to relate the TDG to the academic works, I had my doubts I could turn any minds here.
And having these extra email messages a day was only clouding my email account. It was better for my limited administrative energy to unsubscribe to this group.
Back to Mastodon
The direct-democracy political scientist found me again on Mastodon. I decided to further the discussion in this forum — and see what would happen. This time, he did read a little bit of the TDG website. He captured the TDG reasonably well. But he was not convinced.
The political scientist claimed representative democracy has some serious flaws. I had to agree with him. We are at our current political mess for certain reasons.
I tried to point that the current democracies have electoral units of 5,000 to 1,000,000 citizens, but the TDG will have units of about 200 citizens. The TDG granulation will change the relationship between the governors and the governed. He could not see how this could be so.
I also offered a few flaws I have had with direct democracy. Take, for instance, big money still having a big say in the referenda outcome. Then I mentioned successful referenda often conflict with previous referenda, leaving the civil service deciding between the two referenda. Anyways, he never addressed my points in a meaningful way.
It was time to put my limited political energy in another direction.
Published on Medium 2025
A Glimpse of Our Future Democracy
