More Perfect Unions - On the Disintegration of Democracy and the Rise of Something Better by Rebecca Solnit

“For many, voting is the one true rite of democracy, never mind who you get to vote for, or whether your vote gets counted . . . which is to say that our hopes and views are not likely to ever be represented in this representative democracy . . . It’s as though in an era of unsatisfying choices, the electorate refuses to choose. Perhaps electoral democracy is crumbling before our eyes.”

“But how on the scale of the nation-state do you find common ground rather than majority rule — Literally find it through open, participatory discussions so that you reach a synthesis, rather than end up with one or another predetermined result? . . . Real democracy, not representative or misrepresentative democracy, is much more possible on the smaller scale of a functioning community. And maybe only possible on that scale. Direct democracy is another term for it: the desire for the purest, truest form of rule by all and over none.”

“These glimpses of direct democracy, of horizontalism, of truly cooperative self-government are visible in many parts of the world, part of a new era in democratization that may leave the electoral democracies and maybe even the nation-states behind.”

Read the full article at Orion Magazine

 

Keywords : democracy, representative democracy, electoral democracy, participatory democracy, direct democracy, dialogue, consensus, co-intelligence, synthesis, community, self-governance, self-organization, institutional diversity, policentricity, resilience
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