CT Blue

If Camilo Casas is elected to city council in Boulder, Colorado, this November, he doesn’t plan to make any decisions himself. If he wins, Casas will instead give up his vote to Parti.Vote, a “liquid democracy” app he built to change how government functions.

This is how it will work: If more than 50 percent of people in his community vote “yes” on an issue through the app, Casas will vote the same way they do. Only in the event of a tie would he be forced to make a decision based on his own beliefs.

via Motherboard

First, let me thank Camilo Casas for giving me something to write about other than Donald Trump. It almost feels liberating.

That being said, I sincerely hope the man is a Republican, because this is one of the stupidest ideas I have ever heard from a politician, and this is the United State of America in 2017, so that’s saying something.

We all know that Winston Churchill said that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”, and if you didn’t know it, you know it now. But Winston was talking about representative democracy. Our founding parents, including my personal hero, Tom Paine, were well aware that there was a fundamental difference between representative democracy and the popular democracy that was tried and failed in Athens. If each and every voter that gave a thumbs up or down on Casas’s app actually went to the trouble to educate him or herself on the issues on which they voted, they just might make rational decisions, but to state that requirement is to refute the possibility.

In a representative democracy, at least in theory, we vote for people of proven character to whom we delegate the responsibility to inform themselves on the nuts and bolts of issues and to vote in our best interests. How is even a reasonably informed person with a full time job supposed to keep themselves informed on the arcana of budget issues, for instance? I mean, most of us (myself included) throw up our hands at the effort needed to pick the best phone plan. Sure we could do it, but we have a life to lead. Casas idea is a recipe for governance by the engaged nutjobs.

I won’t belabor the theory (a full discussion would exceed any responsible length blog post), except to point out that Casas’s proposal speaks to the failure of our educational system to educate the electorate, and in particular the Camilo Casases of the world. No reasonably rational political philosopher would argue that a popular democracy is anything other than a recipe for disaster, particularly in this internet age.

I won’t deny that representative democracy isn’t exactly covering itself with glory these days, judging by the quality of the people we’ve elected to the legislative branch of the United States government. But if Fox and the other right wing propagandists have done a good job of getting people to vote for representatives who vote against the interests of the represented, imagine the job they could do getting people to vote on specific issues that the voters know next to nothing about. As Krugman pointed out in his most recent column, the Republican argument for all its policies is based on lies, and they are damned good at getting people to believe them. In the end though, if things go wrong, we know who to blame and we can vote them out. How can you vote the bastards out, when the bastards are us?