paraphrased it a bit to negate doxxing risk but just finished :sicko-yes:

To have a truly democratic society, as Barber suggests, we would need to emphasize a balance between the participatory representative democracy we already have, as well as a widespread civic democracy which we need.

Democracy is an essential aspect of matching governance with the human condition. Undemocratic countries tend to have governance that grows increasingly out of touch with it as time marches forward. An example of an undemocratic country that embodies this point is America. Single-payer healthcare is a massively popular idea in America, but due to bribery, corruption, insider trading, and conflicts of interests, American healthcare remains privatized and routed through insurance companies.

One of the major issues with large-scale liberal democracy is that to obtain influence, airtime, and reach to voters, one must obtain capital. Grassroots campaigning is disincentivized by capitalism – sure, one could theoretically not accept the “I can’t believe this has caveats!” money from private interests, but unless you have a strong ideological hang-up, why wouldn’t you? As always, once issues are voted on, those donors will have their eyes on you, scissors hovering over the cash IV drip, hoping you’ve understood what you have gotten into.

In fact, representative democracy (when the only democratic method available) is notorious for allowing private interests to creep into the institutions of governance. Barber even argues that it’s baked into the liberal ideology that guides it. “If politics can be redefined as the public airing of private interests, public goods can be redefined as private assets. Thus, soldiers are now "hired" on the private market, public lands are sold off into private hands to be maintained by charging the public for goods and services once deemed to belong to the public, and private "incentive" systems are used to get private corporations to live up to public responsibilities. This pervasive privatization of the res publica (things public) has deep roots in liberal thinking, although finally it corrupts even the most liberal and indirect forms of democracy.” (Barber).

Barber’s argument is a very realist one. People like things. People like to be the ones better off than the ones who are dying. Under an individualist, liberal framework, this translates into wealth accumulation. If people feel they are constantly under threat of losing their stability and comfort, they will inevitably attempt to hoard things, stuff, and (sometimes draconic amounts of) cash. Therefore, people will usually take money if they aren’t harmed directly by taking it. Representatives are easily corruptible, as they too are participants in society and have a desire to maintain or improve their standard of living.

Barber’s Strong Democracy is fundamentally an argument for baking democracy into the very fabric of society. Instead of ‘doing a democracy’ only once every four or so years and then disengaging, Barber argues that we should constantly be participating in collective decision-making when decisions are to be made that directly impact our lives daily – from a local level, all the way to the top – if we wish to have a true connection to the societal institutions we participate in every day.

To this, I very much agree! We do need more democracy in our daily life. As humans with the ability to self-determine, it is our right to exercise that self-determination. Not being able to play a part in decisions that directly affect oneself is fundamentally dehumanizing, and dehumanization is an unjustifiable action.

To see an example of this dehumanization, one must look no further than the most widespread dictatorship of them all: the workplace. Workplaces are fundamentally a totalitarian institution by default under capitalism. What the boss says, goes. Work or starve. Fundamentally, work under capitalism is only maintained by a dehumanizing choice between exploitation and death. What justification is there for this ultimatum that does not fundamentally rely on the argument that meritocracy is an axiom of life (and this is where you pull out Michael Godwin’s trusty invocation as to have them defend the meritocratic basis of his tenure) and therefore the workers don’t deserve to decide because they’re either stupid and lower-class, or some mystical reasoning that ends up at that exact conclusion under inspection.

Barber is right. We do need a stronger democracy, now more than ever. If the past 8 years have not convinced you of the failings of liberal democracy, the next 8 years are more than happy to do so for you.

there's lib isms in there because i need to pass this course but i cannot resist agitation when possible