Nobody really advocates for Direct Democracy. It isn't viable: 'tyranny of the majority' etc.
Most Western governments are Liberal Democracies - where some issues aren't subject to a vote - partly so that the mob can't persecute outnumbered subgroups.
You have an implicit assumption that the delegates are going to be smarter and better people that are going to lie to the majority to get elected and then will valiantly protect the subgroup.
But that have not happened anywhere. In fact in every case it is the delegates who organize persecution of various subgroups, even in situations when the share of population truly wanting to persecute subgroup is far from being a majority.
There is no foolproof system that can guard against it, however declaring 'rights' and delegating the responsibility to protect them to the judiciary at least is a mitigation.
Can you bring one example where the public wanted to treat a group unjustly and parliament elected by that same public have defended the group?
Direct voting does not replace judiciary or even senate, it only augments the house of congress.
If that is the Direct Democracy you had in mind, than we have no disagreement.What I originally commented on was this:
So do you believe in democracy or not?
I take issue with the implication that it's all or nothing. If we characterize anything less than a direct vote on every issue as anti-democratic, then the only people left standing will be kooks.The representative democracy has a problem with delegates not faithfully representing the people they are supposed to represent. It allows politician to be elected by campaigning for issue X which is popular with majority, then do Y and Z that almost no one wants, and then campaign again on other party undoing X, leaving people no way to communicate that they want X and not Y Z.
Social media have greatly increased the impact of this instability, the only way to improve situation is adding some elements of direct voting that would improve efficiency of communication between people and the government.
No one in this thread have suggested to completely replace everything with direct voting, and yet many people vehemently argue against that. Meanwhile there is a much more interesting discussion: how to make cooperation between people more efficient using the new technologies that we have.
It’s never meant that.
So people can “believe” in Democracy just fine and still think direct voting is bad.
Also, Democracy doesn’t even mean “if a majority of people believe X, therefore X”.