Was universal suffrage a mistake?

scathefire

scathefire

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What's the benefit of giving almost every single citizen in a nation the right to vote? It's not that I believe certain demographics of people shouldn't vote, my main concern is whether or not the people who vote are informed enough to make decisions for the country that are actually good. Should there be some way to prove that you're qualified to make those types of decisions beforehand? Because the vast majority of voters seem to have no idea what they're doing.

Granted, I can see how gatekeeping the right to vote based on "knowledge" alone can also result in an authoritarian government restricting it to only people who agree with said government. So, I'm not sure what a good solution would be to the massive amounts of uninformed voters. Though this seems to be less of a problem among local elections than it is with national ones, because if people bother to vote in their local elections, they generally have a good grasp of what's going on with those candidates.
 
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What you're describing is called a "Geniocracy". The flaw there is equivocating intelligence with knowledge of political matters and sense of politics. There's tons of smart people who know nothing about current events, running the government or who's the best choice.
If say only people with an IQ above 110 voted, there would be heavy biases and it would lean more liberal. This wouldn't really fix any of the problems of democracy and in fact it makes it worse as the lower classes would have literally no say or representative.
Do people who have to work to get by have the time to turn on the news? Of course not, but this doesn't make the problems they're facing any less valid even if they can't always quantify it the same way.
 
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The Founders were correct in their observation that the average person cannot understand the issues well enough to make sound decisions.

There's no stopping it now though, it's now going to be a race to the bottom to see who can give the citizens more free stuff than the other. Don't get me wrong, I like free stuff. But it's not sustainable in the long run if limits are not put in place.
 
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Vulva Gape said:
Right wingers: COMMON MAN!!! WORKING CLASS!!!

the second they vote the wrong way: You are literally subhuman scum that doesn't deserve the right to vote

We need a stonetoss comic sir :story:
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Left wingers are at least as guilty of this. Possibly even more so, given some of the current zeitgeists.

Universal suffrage was a mistake.

Why was it a mistake?

Because it hinges upon people being universally educated enough to appreciate the gravity of voting decisions, it hinges upon people being intelligent enough to think ahead more than a week, it hinges upon people researching, reading and doing things that aren't really entertaining but rather like work or schoolwork in a way. A constituency is ideally invested enough in their country, state, city etc. to want to make informed decisions about candidates, ballot measures and propositions, and to seek out this information of their own volition. Making a country function as a governed entity requires a will to work towards making it function, towards addressing issues that crop up and requires the ability to consider possible long-term ramifications of decisions made in a voting booth.

This is before you even get into matters like how our system ACTUALLY works, and why it's not a democracy and hopefully never will be. One of the things universal suffrage does is balloon the pool of voters to a size that most individuals can't actually comprehend. It lets a government hide all kinds of things in a massive blanket of numbers, and lets said government dodge accountability in so many ways it BOGGLES THE MIND.
 
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imo if you want to restrict the vote in a way that's positive for society then you'll have to do it based on criteria that correspond to productivity and personal investment in society's long term well-being. something like "you get to vote if and only if you are married, with children, and your family is not receiving welfare or benefits of any kind"

but in my personal opinion that's still not enough. democracy means public opinion decides who gets into power, and public opinion is dictated by mass media, so a democracy is effectively an oligarchy: those who own and control the mass media have indirect control over the entire power structure.
in theory one could maybe counteract this by consolidating the entire mass media under state control and putting extremely tight regulations on how it operates? but in practice the exact opposite is done: 'free press' is part of the dogma of liberal democracy, which means that the greatest of powers is in the hands of private interests without any public oversight, free to pursue whatever political agenda their owners decide to push.

tl;dr fuck democracy, it's nu-aristocracy in everything but name, journalists and academics have replaced the nobility as ruling class, otherwise it's the same thing.
 
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No Exit said:
Might as well, no difference at this point.
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Having an absolute tyrant, a dictator running the country who makes no bones about what he/she is and what they are demanding of you (and what they'll do if you don't comply) is at least HONEST and there can be no mistake about what you are seeing, no mistake about your options for courses of action... it washes away all the muddy ambiguities that let people become complacent, fat, stupid and lazy. You are now being lorded over by a tyrant who doesn't even pretend to be accountable and will probably kill you if you try to hold them accountable. What are your options? Comply, feign compliance and undermine/overthrow, or openly rebel. There. Done. You know what you're dealing with, you know at least in the general sense what your options are, and now you can start making decisions. But you know you need to do SOMETHING. Nobody's going to make the hard decisions for you. Nobody's going to say "don't worry, it'll be taken care of" - it's on YOU now.
 
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If not everyone gets to vote, who should vote? Should the right be inheritable, or should there be a selection process for it?
 
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