Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[Torco]

Bob Altermeyer defined it as a personality trait, as psychology:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

sure, but the question remains of which authorities, which conventions, which forms of political violence constitute aggression, etcetera. these are all, for the most part, value-laden terms, so the problem remains: for example, a commited kaiserist might say that a british soldier fighting in ww1 exhibits those traits: he submits to the established, legitimate authorities in his society in the king and his army, he exhibits high levels of aggression in their name, and, well, he's british, so the conventionalism is there. a commited libertarian, on the other hand, might join ICE and claim he's doing no conventionalism, as he is rebelling against the "establishment" [by allying himself with an outsider, the orange clown], he might claim he's not doing aggression but merely enforcing the laws [all my violence is defensive, since they invaded the country], and that he's not exhibiting any conventionalism [again, rebelling against the woke establishment blabla]

of course i would disagree with both, but then again i would: the point is good concepts don't depend on the political positions of the speaker.

My first reaction would say that enlightenement philosopheres weren't wrong either -- I think it's hard to picture a non-dictatorial regime without an independant judiciary, for instance.

it's always hard to imagine something different from the status quo as good, this is [to be zizekian about it] the way ideology functions [sniff]. but I mean, are judges really that independent in liberal democracies in the first place, though? the us is an obvious example of the executive determining the decisions of the judiciary, but even in my own country judges are established by the three powers together [through a moderately convoluted process: the judicial proposes 5 names, the executive picks one, and then 2/3rds of the senate ratify]. like, we say "independent judiciary" but in reality they're not thaaaat independent.

And like... do we really want judges to be independent independent? independence could just as well be collegiate autocracy, after all. it's much more convenient to buy one independent brach of the government than to buy one that isn't independent, and the wealthy or other actors buying politicians is perhaps the biggest threat to democracy.

and independent from what, exactly? not from class interest, or from ethnic interest, or from many other sociological factors: if in a given country which is non-authoritarian/a liberal democracy most or all judges are, say, people from some specific ethnic group and a specific social class, say white rich people from the kind of family where half of everyone sit on some corporate board or other, then an independent judiciary means that that subgroup's opinions are or might as well be law, which strikes me as very close to the definition of authoritarianism in the first place.

I think we should ask people what they want and help them achieve their goals. You could describe this as supporting an authority I like, but only in the sense that anything can be described as anything else.

everyone agrees with this until you ask which people, and which goals. politics, in a way, boils down to just those questions.

[Raphael]

My first reaction would say that enlightenement philosopheres weren't wrong either -- I think it's hard to picture a non-dictatorial regime without an independant judiciary, for instance.

it's always hard to imagine something different from the status quo as good, this is [to be zizekian about it] the way ideology functions [sniff]. but I mean, are judges really that independent in liberal democracies in the first place, though? the us is an obvious example of the executive determining the decisions of the judiciary, but even in my own country judges are established by the three powers together [through a moderately convoluted process: the judicial proposes 5 names, the executive picks one, and then 2/3rds of the senate ratify]. like, we say "independent judiciary" but in reality they're not thaaaat independent.

And like... do we really want judges to be independent independent? independence could just as well be collegiate autocracy, after all. it's much more convenient to buy one independent brach of the government than to buy one that isn't independent, and the wealthy or other actors buying politicians is perhaps the biggest threat to democracy.

and independent from what, exactly? not from class interest, or from ethnic interest, or from many other sociological factors: if in a given country which is non-authoritarian/a liberal democracy most or all judges are, say, people from some specific ethnic group and a specific social class, say white rich people from the kind of family where half of everyone sit on some corporate board or other, then an independent judiciary means that that subgroup's opinions are or might as well be law, which strikes me as very close to the definition of authoritarianism in the first place.

You're evading the question. How would a non-dictatorial regime without an independent judiciary look like, in your imagination? Waffling endlessly about the limitations of liberal democratic judicial systems doesn't answer the question, it just changes the subject. (Of course you yourself are in favor of completely openly dictatorial systems with no limitations on the abuses and atrocities of the powerful and their rich friends whatsoever, and in favor of spreading the power of such systems as far and wide as possible, so it's not as if you're talking in even remotely good faith on that matter, but let's leave that aside for a moment.)

[Torco]

I, too, don't think your question is posited in good faith, to be honest, not only on account of the vitriolic strawmen right after it but, also, because you're answering a "it's not clear actually existing countries that are, at least nominally, not dictatorships, do have really independent judiciaries" with "but what would a non dictatorial regime without an independent judiciary look like", demonstrating not having understood what you're replying to.

but i'll bite, lets conworld:

More: show

i present to you a republic, more democratic than the liberal republics we do have in the west(tm), with two powers and not three: the Federal Republic of Binergia.

the binergian executive is composed of 14 provincial representatives, one per provice, called Governors. these have two distinct roles (though individual states can, in principle, designate two distinct people for each of these two rules, only one provice does this, and they're generally from the same political party as a consequence of various features of that province's political system), president and executive councilor

the president role is what you would normally understand to be a president, but limited to each of the federal provinces (so governor is a better term maybe), where they oversee the carrying out of what public policies the constitution stipulates, trains and roads and drug enforcement and what have you. they have ministers and ministries and regional secretariats of the ministry of this and that, which interact with independently elected more local governments, mayors and municipal councilors, as well as three distinct other independently elected branches of the executive: the police, whose boss is elected by popular rule, economic council, which works as a sort of central bank plus, with functions including issuing currency and setting interest rates but the sort of things a ministry of the economy does in a western democracy, and the workers' aldermanry, which is an office explicitly designated to represent the worker's interest: you know, like a union of unions. this latter one is not elected by universal suffrage, people who own for profit businesses are disqualified from it, but not, say, independent tradesmen.

in their councillor role, they collectively constitute the ruling body of the federation, and jointly decide, according to various procedural rules which stipulate various quorums and whatnot, on matters of national interest, such as foregin relations, defense, and generally overseeing the various local authorities.

the legislative branch is embodied by the senate and the grand binergian supreme court, of which all provincial and local courts depend. the senate is what you would think, they get together and decide on what the laws are. half of the senators are elected by sortition, the way jurors are in common law countries (with some checks and balances from the other powers, who can veto picks) and the other half of the senators are elected by popular universal suffrage. generally, the randomly picked people are expected to listen to the elected guys and to the experts, especially in technical matters, and its considered unseemly (and reason for being fired from the position by the supreme court) for a random senator to make long speeches explaining matters to the senate, but oh well, people do sometimes. random senators are conventionally selected in virtue of being normal, as if you pick someone who is very "extreme", someone or other is going to veto them.

the judges are elected by the current senate from amongst former senators who put themselves forwards for the position of judge, judge candidates if you will. there is a number of judges that must be active at any point, and so the senate must nominate however many vacant seats are there by december. judge candidates must be lawyers or, if selected, be sent to study law. this clause is sometimes referred to the "most democratic of scholarships", but candidates are often lawyers already. the system is though of by the binergians as something like "the senate knows what laws to change, and the courts know what was meant by the laws that are already in the books". of course, judges rarely pass judgement regarding laws they themselves pass, as senate terms only last four years with reelection and judicial careers can last for a long time, but oh well, i don't know, they discuss it amongst themselves... as they discuss amongst themselves who sits in the supreme court. as they're all lawyers, no one really understands the rules by which they do this, but oh well.

this introduces a sort of bias towards more recent laws even beyond normal precedent.

provinces have their own legislative, though they interact little with each other. the executive and the national senate make sure they don't pass laws that are outside what the constitution says the provinces can legislate, and every four years any disagreements that persist as to whether or not a local senate can pass a law where the national senate says they can't are settled in the quatriannual plebiscite.

notable binergian laws include:

plebiscites every four years. every four years you have election of the executive, legislative, police and economic council/worker's alderman, and finally a plebiscite year. the binergians think this helps with organizing the political conversation (this year we're talking about abortion, the other we're talking about whether or not we want to joint NATO, blabla).

absolute ban on funding political campaings. indeed you must be able to live a year (the duration of a formal candidacy) without any employment or income if you're to run. you must be unemployed, and have someone to feed you and house you and whatever else at your own (or their) expense. this suits the right and wealthy people, with well off and above people being overwhelming overrepresented amongst candidates, and it appeases the left, who like the monastic vibe. it also appeases technocrats and people concerned with "governability", who see this is a guarantee that candidates, at the very least, aren't lone lunatics, but that there's some union or political party that pre-vetoes them. the workman's aldermanry and the police makes sure there's no funny business, like bot farms being funded by foreign megacorpos or whatever else. it's not a perfect system.

politicians can be former cops, but former cops can never be politicians. this is because the coppers are supposed to investigate politicians and judges [which is difficult, as judges, well, judge... they have to mount such a case that it's scandalous to rule any other way, which seldom happens. oh, well, not a perfect system]

stern prohibition that foreigners or people who live abroad be selected as part of the sortition processes.

(another system is Xeer, the traditional somali common law system, where judges make the laws as well as interpreting them... or english common law, where judges effectively legislate. neither is generally considered as particularly dictatorial, i think)

[zompist]

Conworlding is always fun. My initial reactions:

1. Binergia very clearly is a liberal democracy— or a republic, since you didn't specify how governors are elected.
2. It sure sounds like an independent judiciary, but that's because you haven't specified if the court can judge a law unconstitutional. (If it can't, who can?)
3. It's also unclear what the workers can do. If they can prevent anti-worker laws, they are an independent branch of government. If they can't, they're probably mostly useless. (Germany require 50% labor participation on the boards for large companies. I don't think anyone's under the impression that this created socialism.)
4. Sortition is fascinating and I'd love to see a wide-scale implementation. But this one seems half-hearted. Why have it if, as it seems, you don't trust it?
5. You seem to like lawyers even more than the US system does.
6. Rule by a combination of rich people and the unemployed is pretty quirky. This seems like a system that would produce, at the same time, the parodies left and right have of each other. Both groups are apt to hate workers, so you'd probably have free reign for business plus a huge dole.
7. I assume the election of the top cop is meant to keep the presidents from interfering with them. That seems... more protective of cops than any real-world cops have deserved. In the US, county sheriffs are generally elected; they are 71% conservative, 1% liberal.
8. I'm surprised there's no direct measures against plutocracy. If you're allowing billionaires to exist, nothing about this system seems to prevent plutocracy.

That may sound more negative than it's meant to be. The problem with designing con-constitutions is that we tend to imagine structures working as they are "supposed to work". The novelist, the conworlder, and the poly sci person should always ask, what can go wrong? Or more prosaically: what disputes will come up, and how are they resolved?

[Raphael]

The problem I see with sortition in general is that the people most likely to accept offices they've been given through sortition are probably the same kind of people who'd be most likely to run for office in elections, so you'd end up being ruled by the same "type" of people as under elections, except that they wouldn't even have to worry about pissing off voters.

6. Rule by a combination of rich people and the unemployed is pretty quirky. This seems like a system that would produce, at the same time, the parodies left and right have of each other. Both groups are apt to hate workers, so you'd probably have free reign for business plus a huge dole.

I'd say a huge dole indirectly benefits workers even if they're never unemployed, by reducing the leverage the bosses from the business class have over them. The worse the consequences of being fired, the more helpless you are in your dealings with your boss.

[zompist]

The problem I see with sortition in general is that the people most likely to accept offices they've been given through sortition are probably the same kind of people who'd be most likely to run for office in elections, so you'd end up being ruled by the same "type" of people as under elections, except that they wouldn't even have to worry about pissing off voters.

If you can turn down the job, it's not really sortition, just empowerment of an ill-defined but probably weird class of people.

6. Both groups are apt to hate workers, so you'd probably have free reign for business plus a huge dole.

I'd say a huge dole indirectly benefits workers even if they're never unemployed, by reducing the leverage the bosses from the business class have over them. The worse the consequences of being fired, the more helpless you are in your dealings with your boss.

True enough, but neither the rich nor the unemployed have any motivation to make workers' lives tolerable in any other way.

[Raphael]

If you can turn down the job, it's not really sortition, just empowerment of an ill-defined but probably weird class of people.

Yes, that's my point. And I'm not sure how making accepting a powerful public office mandatory would work.

[zompist]

Bob Altermeyer defined it as a personality trait, as psychology:

1) a high degree of submission to the established, legitimate authorities in
their society;
2) high levels of aggression in the name of their authorities; and
3) a high level of conventionalism.

sure, but the question remains of which authorities, which conventions, which forms of political violence constitute aggression, etcetera. these are all, for the most part, value-laden terms, so the problem remains: for example, a commited kaiserist might say that a british soldier fighting in ww1 exhibits those traits: he submits to the established, legitimate authorities in his society in the king and his army, he exhibits high levels of aggression in their name, and, well, he's british, so the conventionalism is there.

This seems like a misunderstanding of Altemeyer. Yes, of course someone over-committed to British authorities, because they are authorities, is authoritarian. He does not use "authoritarian" to mean "people I dislike", nor to mean "right-winger", and he is well aware that "authority" might stand for very different things in different countries. It's a personality type, not a political position.

[Travis B.]

If we're conworlding, what about this proposal:

Society is organized in terms of networks of councils. A workplace, a neighborhood, a software project, and so on fundamentally is governed by such councils composed of the people which make them up. These councils operate on a directly democratic basis and their decisions apply to those that make them up, the capital collectively held by them, and their interactions with other groups. Most people would be members of multiple councils, e.g. the council for the workplace in which they work, and the council for the neighborhood in which they live.

Companies would operate in terms of workers' ownership and self-management of capital, which in cases could be combined with partial outside participation (e.g. in worker-consumer cooperatives).

When vertical organization is needed, e.g. a company composed of multiple workplaces or a city composed of multiple neighborhoods, the people within each council that makes it up elects one or more delegates to a council at the next higher level with an agreed-upon mandate, and these delegates can be immediately and arbitrarily recalled and replaced (e.g. if they disobey their mandate) and are regularly rotated.

The very concept of law would be based on voluntary decisions made collectively by organizations' members that would apply to themselves in a binding decision. Applying 'laws' would be carried out either by councils themselves or people elected (and recallable) by the councils to do so in their stead, or some combination of both (e.g. an elected judge combined with a jury selected by sortition from the members of the relevant council). Certain areas of law (e.g. human rights law) would be regarded in terms similarly to what we currently call universal jurisdiction, where any council or set of councils can enforce them on anyone anywhere on the basis of that they are fundamentally universally-held principles.

There would be no right to property and in its place there would be a right to possession, as defined in terms of use rather than title. Consequently, things such as one's computer, one's toothbrush, one's car, and one's house would be personal possessions (note that if, say, multiple people live in a house it would be collectively possessed by all the people there) while capital such as factories would be collectively possessed by all the workers which work there or make use of it. There would be no landlords, and the place of rental properties, both long-term and short-term, would be taken by collectives in which one could be a member so as to make use of a unit and have a role in the decision-making behind management (e.g. an apartment building would form a collective comprised by its tenants who would together govern the apartment building).

The economy would be a mixed economy based partially on markets and partially on communism, with a dose of universal basic income. Things such as health care and education would be free to all. Production of consumer and creative goods with negligible marginal cost would operate in terms of everyone getting a vote they can divide any way they wish to determine public funding of such things.

Of course, there is the need for collective defense of this society, as there are those both without and within who would want to 'turn back the clock' by force if they had their way. This is done by having all consenting able-bodied adults within a certain age range being organized into militias (as defined as democratic armed formations) with elected and recallable officers and trained in military matters (I don't mean in the second-amendment sense of 'militia' -- these militias would take all the roles of militaries in other societies, and would be armed with everything from personal arms to tanks to aircraft carriers). (Strictly speaking there would not be conscription because it would be freely opt-out, but the goal would be to have as large a portion of the specified cohort as members as possible to avoid the existence of a self-selected military caste.) All high level decisions w.r.t. military action (starting military action, continuing military action, ceasing military action) would be voted upon by all of those who serve in them and would be regularly re-voted upon (e.g. at six month intervals). In the event of providing military aid to comrades elsewhere, such would be specifically limited to opt-in volunteers.

[Raphael]

with a dose of universal basic income. Things such as health care and education would be free to all.

Who would be in charge of running the institutions paying out UBI? Where would they get the money for that from? Who would be in charge of running the institutions providing health care and education? Where would they get the money to pay their employees and supplies from? What do I do if I need health care or education, but the health care workers or educators would prefer to make things easier for themselves by providing me with substandard cares, and the health and educational institutions are run by councils elected by these same health care workers and educators?

[Travis B.]

with a dose of universal basic income. Things such as health care and education would be free to all.

Who would be in charge of running the institutions paying out UBI? Where would they get the money for that from? Who would be in charge of running the institutions providing health care and education? Where would they get the money to pay their employees and supplies from? What do I do if I need health care or education, but the health care workers or educators would prefer to make things easier for themselves by providing me with substandard cares, and the health and educational institutions are run by councils elected by these same health care workers and educators?

Councils for things such as geographic areas, based at the lowest level on the neighborhoods, would manage the funding of such things, so even though, say, a university would be run by councils composed of faculty and students, funding would be from without them so they would be beholden to society as a whole rather than just their own members.

[zompist]

I'd love to see workers' councils, um, work, so overall I'm in favor of giving Travis a state to experiment on.

Such proposals, I think or fear, tend to address redistributing existing economic power, and not creating new wealth. Maybe that works in a medieval society, but a modern workplace needs capital. Even starting up a restaurant or a printshop requires money, and what if you need a power plant, a chemical factory, or a movie studio? An existing workplace won't be big enough to create them (unless perhaps all the workplaces are Mondragon-sized). Maybe the government supplies the capital, but then there needs to be a reasonable decision-making process, ideally not entirely centralized. How do you get an elected government to approve something quirky, like an LGBTQ bookstore or a vegan restaurant?

What happens if the workers' and residential councils conflict? If you're thinking that businesses and houses don't co-exist, I'd say you're missing the whole advantage of cities.

Who builds new houses? The people who need them rarely have the money to do so, and if there's a neighborhood organization they may want to keep new construction out.

The oddest idea here is the apparent attempt to get rid of "law". This could be a huge subject in itself, but I'd note that one of the advantages of law is predictability and uniformity. When everything is up for grabs and debated by councils, planning becomes impossible and the worst people end up setting policy. Take it from having spent the last 5 years in endless squabbling in a condo association: most people have no interest in running things; if you're a good person it's thankless and endless work, and if you're a bad person you can make a whole building unliveable. Or look at the Republicans' tariffs, among other things: giving up that predictablity, and putting everything up for negotiation, makes a mess, probably a corrupt mess.

[Travis B.]

I'd love to see workers' councils, um, work, so overall I'm in favor of giving Travis a state to experiment on.

Such proposals, I think or fear, tend to address redistributing existing economic power, and not creating new wealth. Maybe that works in a medieval society, but a modern workplace needs capital. Even starting up a restaurant or a printshop requires money, and what if you need a power plant, a chemical factory, or a movie studio? An existing workplace won't be big enough to create them (unless perhaps all the workplaces are Mondragon-sized). Maybe the government supplies the capital, but then there needs to be a reasonable decision-making process, ideally not entirely centralized. How do you get an elected government to approve something quirky, like an LGBTQ bookstore or a vegan restaurant?

One way for this is to have groups established to help provide capital to proposed new companies, funded by other councils such as those for geographical areas or companies, but in a hands-off fashion so as to allow them to specialize in their role of establishing new companies which other organizations would be less suited for, with councils for geographical areas acting in a more general oversight role, just like how municipalities in our present society control things like zoning and utilities.

What happens if the workers' and residential councils conflict? If you're thinking that businesses and houses don't co-exist, I'd say you're missing the whole advantage of cities.

I would say that the councils corresponding to geographical areas would get the last word if there were conflicts.

Who builds new houses? The people who need them rarely have the money to do so, and if there's a neighborhood organization they may want to keep new construction out.

Well, land development collectives, which would be funded partly by those acquiring the houses (just like people buy houses in our present society) and partly as a subsidy by other councils.

The oddest idea here is the apparent attempt to get rid of "law". This could be a huge subject in itself, but I'd note that one of the advantages of law is predictability and uniformity. When everything is up for grabs and debated by councils, planning becomes impossible and the worst people end up setting policy. Take it from having spent the last 5 years in endless squabbling in a condo association: most people have no interest in running things; if you're a good person it's thankless and endless work, and if you're a bad person you can make a whole building unliveable. Or look at the Republicans' tariffs, among other things: giving up that predictablity, and putting everything up for negotiation, makes a mess, probably a corrupt mess.

Law would be binding decisions made collectively by councils, generally but not necessarily (as, say, it would exist even at a workplace level with regard to workplace disciplinary rules), at a very high level upon all members of the councils under the level at which the decisions were agreed upon; while such law could be undone, it would likewise have to be agreed upon at the same level at which it was established. Yes, you could argue that people actually applying said law could simply ignore it or apply it arbitrarily, but the same criticism could be equally made of our existing legal system (e.g. the concept of 'jury nullification', and note how often that actually happens).

[Travis B.]

One note is that in practice it is likely that more specialized or day-to-day decision-making would be off-loaded to elected and recallable specialists rather than being constantly voted on by everyone all the time, especially, as you say, many people do not want to be constantly making decisions, and this would be particularly true of decisions that most people really are not all that qualified to make. But the key thing is that they would be beholden to those who elect them, who would be able to remove and replace them at a moment's notice need be.

[Ares Land]

My first reaction would say that enlightenement philosopheres weren't wrong either -- I think it's hard to picture a non-dictatorial regime without an independant judiciary, for instance.

it's always hard to imagine something different from the status quo as good, this is [to be zizekian about it] the way ideology functions [sniff]. but I mean, are judges really that independent in liberal democracies in the first place, though?
(...)

In my mind at least, it's not about the status quo or what we're used to.

I think the key point of an independant judiciary can be summed up as follows: the government shouldn't be able to dictate or influence court decisions, and courts should be free of government interference while making court decisions.
I don't see how you could have a non-dictatorial, non-authoritarian system that doesn't meet these criteria.

As to your other points, yes, I agree with them. Most extant democracies are flawed, no doubt about it.

[Torco]

Conworlding is always fun. My initial reactions:

1. it's a republic and a democracy, that much is for sure, but i don't think it follows the liberal template very well.
2. it can't, but the executive can send laws to the quatriennial plebiscite ballot for veto/ratification, just like the national senate can send local laws to the local ballot. lawyers bend over backwards to retroactively justify these results (this law was deemed unconstitutional in the plebiscite of 03, this means that the correct interpretation of article 9 is blabla) binergians like their plebiscites, kinda like the swiss. i'd call it a much less independent judiciary, at any rate, since the senate outright decides who is a judge (as opposed to the judges deciding who is a judge with some checks, which is i think the liberal way), and you would expect those nominations to be very political. (we can't pass the abortion law, but we can pick judges that will be lenient on people who abort, setting a precedent)
3. I expect that'd be the view of binergian leftists: the aldermanry is a toothless concession blabla. still, though germany isn't socialist (and neither is binergia), it's still got pretty good working conditions.
4. quite right, if i was binergian I'd absolutely vote for those ballot initiatives that ask for the percentage of sortition senators to be higher, there's always one or two: alas, none have passed yet at the national level.
5. binergians do, yeah. this wasn't an exercise in utopia but, rather, one of a million imaginable systems that aren't dictatorships but also aren't Liberal Democracies. the reasoning is that you can't have judges that aren't lawyers (which i'm not totally sure about, but is not a silly position to hold either)
6. it's not quite rule of the unemployed, more like rule by people who can afford to spend time not employed, either by virtue of their own personal wealth or because some organization or other, most likely political parties, is willing to, besides endorsing their campaign, feed and clothe them and pay their rent. you're right, though, i'd also expect the binergian senate to have a pretty high diversity in views... which, come to think of it, seems more democratic.
7. true, and again i'd expect binergian leftists and the worker's adermanry to agree, but consider that a) the top cop doesn't have to be a career cop, they can be just a guy, and b) there's no money in politics (or at least there isn't supposed to be). the police is of course going to be a more or less conservative force, but civilian oversight helps in them not becoming too tyrannical.
8. very true. the idea was for it be more democratic while still being firmly capitalist: the very rich still exert a lot more power than one might like through the media, for example.

I'd say a huge dole indirectly benefits workers even if they're never unemployed, by reducing the leverage the bosses from the business class have over them. The worse the consequences of being fired, the more helpless you are in your dealings with your boss.

very true

True enough, but neither the rich nor the unemployed have any motivation to make workers' lives tolerable in any other way.

not true of the unemployed. almost by definition, the unemployed are workers-without-a-job, and thus overwhelmingly have worker friends, siblings, friends and spouses, : if you don't have a job but don't need one you're not quite what people mean when they say unemployed [and indeed even national statistics institutes define unemployed as not-employed-but-also-looking-for-employment], you're either retired, a rentist, a businessman, a dilettante or something like that. of course the rich will be over-represented and exert a force towards eroding worker's rights, but then again, this happens in liberal democracies too.

Yes, that's my point. And I'm not sure how making accepting a powerful public office mandatory would work.

it seems very rude and arguably constitutes forced labour... we have forced labour through sortition in my country, so it's not crazy either. (vocales the mesa, the people who do the work for voting booths to operate, are selected and forced to perform those duties for two or three days. most people aren't happy to be selected when they are, but it is just two or three days after all, not four years. vocales de mesa aren't especially crazy, as a group, though, they're generally pretty normal folks, i've often found (i often oversee them in a capacity we call apoderado de mesa, a person who is there for the count and makes sure there's no funny business. i've never seen any funny business))

I think the key point of an independant judiciary can be summed up as follows: the government shouldn't be able to dictate or influence court decisions, and courts should be free of government interference while making court decisions.

what about pardons, though? it's not influencing court decisions, exactly, to revert them, but it's close.

______________________

I also really like workers councils. there's a lot of objections that aren't hard to appease: for example

Who builds new houses? The people who need them rarely have the money to do so, and if there's a neighborhood organization they may want to keep new construction out.

land in such a system wouldn't be expensive, as you can't profit out of owning it personally, and councils who own land have an incentive to, well, give them to their members (and, depending on the decisions made by provincial councils, might even be free), and having acquired a plot people could probably pick between building one themselves (it's not thaaaat difficult, especially if there's UBI to keep buying food while you build) or comissioning the construction of one to their local mason's guild in exchange for good old money.

but it seems to me that the general problem with it is, well, what do we do when a council has too much power? how do we make sure it doesn't devolve into feudalism? sure, general councils can keep lower councils at bay, but in return local councils influence and can capture general ones, especially when there WAAAAY too many political decisions being made for any one person to keep track of: then again, feudalism was stable for many centuries, maybe radically democratic feudalism, like plutocracy, isn't the end of the world either, and can be just a flaw in the system.

[Ares Land]

I think the key point of an independant judiciary can be summed up as follows: the government shouldn't be able to dictate or influence court decisions, and courts should be free of government interference while making court decisions.

what about pardons, though? it's not influencing court decisions, exactly, to revert them, but it's close.

Yes, absolutely. I think they're increasingly seen as violating separation of powers; I think Trump's pardon of Capitol attacker should be convincing enough.

One possible legitimate function of pardons is to make the death penalty more tolerable though that's still a dubious workaround.

[Raphael]

I think the key point of an independant judiciary can be summed up as follows: the government shouldn't be able to dictate or influence court decisions, and courts should be free of government interference while making court decisions.

what about pardons, though? it's not influencing court decisions, exactly, to revert them, but it's close.

Yes, absolutely. I think they're increasingly seen as violating separation of powers; I think Trump's pardon of Capitol attacker should be convincing enough.

One possible legitimate function of pardons is to make the death penalty more tolerable though that's still a dubious workaround.

Perhaps pardons might be replaced with the possibility of passing specific laws granting amnesties to specific people.

[Torco]

I think the key point of an independant judiciary can be summed up as follows: the government shouldn't be able to dictate or influence court decisions, and courts should be free of government interference while making court decisions.

what about pardons, though? it's not influencing court decisions, exactly, to revert them, but it's close.

Yes, absolutely. I think they're increasingly seen as violating separation of powers; I think Trump's pardon of Capitol attacker should be convincing enough.

One possible legitimate function of pardons is to make the death penalty more tolerable though that's still a dubious workaround.

totally. the point is that there's many ways in which independent judiciaries are not that independent, and those don't mean the system becomes immediately a dictatorsip or an authoritarian regime. they can even work as parts of a checks and balances system. plus, i'm always suspicious about judges as a group having too much independence: they are, after all, almost always from a very upperclass, upperethnicity, uppereverything background. (recently in my country there's been very many judges who have been shown to have been bought)

Perhaps pardons might be replaced with the possibility of passing specific laws granting amnesties to specific people.

don't we have those already?

[Ares Land]

totally. the point is that there's many ways in which independent judiciaries are not that independent, and those don't mean the system becomes immediately a dictatorsip or an authoritarian regime. they can even work as parts of a checks and balances system. plus, i'm always suspicious about judges as a group having too much independence: they are, after all, almost always from a very upperclass, upperethnicity, uppereverything background. (recently in my country there's been very many judges who have been shown to have been bought)

It's not binary, there's kind of a sliding scale. Trump's pardon didn't turn the US into an authoritarian regime... but it did bring it one step closer.

I do agree about the need of controlling and monitoring what judges are doing -- putting the executive branch directly in charge of that is an obvious path to disaster though.