Democracy in America

What Hacker News says

1. rayinerJun 2026
   > What's unique about the nations for which democracy isn't the best form of government? What's unique about their people?

   It’s the other way around. Countries that are well suited to democracy are the exception. You need to have a state, rule of law, etc., before you have democracy. Then you need generations of people socialized in the ideas that allow democratic societies to function. For example, in many places in the world, people are socialized to put their trust in leaders of extended kinship groups and clans rather than in neutral institutions. You can’t effectively have a democracy under those conditions.

   On all those fronts, Americans were standing on the shoulders of giants. England has offices of civil government (like the Chancellor of the Exchequer) that have been in continuous operation for over 800 years. Many of the concepts of the constitution date back to the Magna Carta 800 years ago. There’s also the non-religious aspects of religion. Protestants were developing decentralized church governance 500 years ago. American democracy is the product of an 800-year long process where you’re slowly and incrementally molding the structure of society and the mindset of the people generation after generation.

   Read De Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” where he describes the organic, bottom-up self governance that prevailed in America 150 years ago. That description bears no response to how an Indian or Iraqi village is governed. Those societies, like most, are structured and hierarchical. An individual owes obedience to the layers above (father, clan or tribe elders, all the way to the top). And those at the top have obligations flowing downward, to care and feed their subjects and maintain order. These societies are much better suited for benevolent dictatorships.

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2. rayinerMar 2026
   It approves the laws but can’t originate the laws, which makes it unlike every other democratic legislature. That means that the European Commission actually in charge of steering the government, while the Parliament can only really approve or disapprove. Moreover, the Commission can directly promulgate regulations that have the force of law. So you have a putatively administrative organ that both initiates actual legislation and can itself enact regulations that are effectively laws. I don’t think there is any other democratic system that centralizes that much lawmaking authority in its administrative organ.

   Optimally, democracy is participative. People don’t just vote, they govern themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” does a great job capturing what that looks like. Today, the most democratic systems are what you have in the Scandinavian countries. Small, homogenous electorates can achieve social consensus on what their society should look like. And then they can act through parliament to effectuate changes.

   The E.U.-wide electorate is so big and fractious that it has basically zero ability to achieve social consensus. And the E.U. Parliament has no power to initiate legislation anyway. So “democracy” is reduced to rubber stamping the initiatives of the Commission, which are in turn largely decided by the permanent bureaucracy.

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3. lemnossosNov 2025
   The problem with this etymology based political argument is twofold:

   demos in Ancient Greek demokratia were blocks of assigned citizenship, so it is operationally closer to an electoral college than some idealistic "power to the people" interpretation of the term

   who are the people? in Ancient Athens, "the people" ruling the demokratia were the male land owners... about 60% of the people in the city were excluded, most of them being slaves

   Democracy now is a hugely complex ongoing negotiation, not some simplistic "dictionary says" naïvité. Go read Democracy in America, Aristotle is a bit outdated.

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4. nonrandomstringSep 2024
   > before we had technology

   There wasn't a time "before we had technology". Best to avoid that line of thinking if you want to escape the determinist (Veblem) trap and end up like Kaczynski.

   Postman is an author we enjoy but seldom acknowledge the wider genre into which he fits. It's called "tech critique".

   You can study it through the ages, comparing the outlooks and influences of Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Illich, Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford, Nietzsche, and Postman, as well as sci-fi writers like Wells, Forster, Clarke, Gibson, Le Guin, Dick...It makes a very good companion to a study of the philosophy of science.

   Some takeaways (at least ones that stick in my mind):

   Technology is inseparable from the human condition, There are no primitivist escapes, noble savages or gardens of Walden.

   By the same token there is not and won't ever be any golden age of Utopian technology.

   Technology most closely resembles a "drug" in all its manifest functions.

   Technology comes with an accumulative maintenance cost.

   It is monotonic/directional. There's no easy way back and we can't uninvent stuff.

   Minimising the _harms_ of technology while maximising the benefits and maintaining human dignity amidst it is the best we can do.

   Even if initially excited by new developments all people are ultimately ambivalent about technology. They fear it, use it begrudgingly and resent their dependency on it. Iron bridges and steam locomotives raised the same questions as GPS and iPhones do today.

   Many people romanticise and worship technology. It is a secular God.

   If we "love" it, it's the sick love of an addict or the sadomasochistic power glee (tech "dealers" like Ellison, Zuck, and Musk)

   A tiny few (that's us) enjoy a curious fascination that makes tech an "end in itself". Those people get used to create a supply for the dealers and addicts.

   Anyway you gotta love Postman, if only for exquisite use of "centrifugal bumblepuppy". What he describes in this passage is really the soporific control/domination effects of technology in the hands of tyrants/dealers who delight in the subjugation of attention - which I think is made best by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.

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5. nonrandomstringJul 2024
   Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" [0] is a good read on what he called the "restiveness" of the Western (meaning immigrant north American) mind - that being a frontier spirit. When compared to Schopenhauer's European pessimism over "despair" and stasis it's a good way to live and unsurprising that a vigorous "work ethic" grew from it.

   But it scales to a few thousand or a million people. A global population of 8 billion empty, needy "fickle and restless" minds "flapping like a fish thrown on dry ground"... we can't sustain that. There is not enough excitement, adventure, wild frontiers, amusement and frippery to satisfy it.

   Which is why religion, and the arts, and things people do to find meaning beyond toil and low pleasures not only travelled to America, they prospered there like never before.

   It's only relatively recently that we've started to use technology to undo that and work against creation of meaning rather than towards it.

   [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America

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6. badpunJun 2023
   Your life is only wasted in the paradigm where men are supposed to accomplish things through lots of work. This paradigm is very recent in our culture, a couple hundreds of years old at most. I recommend reading for example Alexis de Tocqueville "On Democracy in America", esp. the second tome. He was a Frenchman tasked with travelling the new American republic and later describing it to the French government, in the first XIX century. He saw the nascent paradigm of work and accomplishments through work, as it was emerging in the US. Reading about it could give you some perspective.
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