Democracy: The government where its most praised practice is also the most dangerous one (Part 2)

About a week ago I posted talking about voting in democracy and why when we have low voter turnouts we begin to see the effectiveness decline. Inside of that post I briefly talked about Rousseau and his beliefs with representative democracy and here I would like to go into a little more of his thoughts as well as bring up some modern day views on the issue that is plaguing Genesee county.

Rousseau’s main argument discusses how when we give representatives power we are no longer free in any right. Those representatives make the decisions for us and because we are not making our own decisions we are giving up our freedom. That in a nutshell is his argument.

I believe that in modern practice democracy needs something like representation in order for it to be effective yet still holding some legitimacy in the democratic process. Let me break down what I mean:

·        Effective: In theory having representatives would make democracy move faster because there would be less people having to vote, this is especially important when decisions and laws need to be made and passed in a fast manner. Here is where Rousseau has a major problem with representative democracy as described above.

·        Legitimacy: Democracy with representation is legitimate only to the extent when the people can vote for those who represent and make decisions for them.

Because I believe this way we can see why voting is such an important topic for me and why I am advocating hard for change and attempts to increase voting inside of Genesee County. I am not the only one who thinks like this however, there are many people even inside of elected offices who think that voting needs to increase for our system to improve.

Flint is one of the largest cities inside of Genesee County and experiences the same troubles as the county. Former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling gave me his thoughts on the consistently low voter turnout inside the county. “Low turnout in any one election is probably not a problem. It is the pattern of low voter turnout that reflects a less engaged society. A less engaged society then experiences a politics more about personalities and entertainment.” It was this statement that got me to consider a wide range of issues that low voter turnout can have on a democratic society and are there any good ways to fix this issue.

As former mayor Walling pointed out above, “It is the pattern of low voter turnout that reflects a less engaged society.”  Well how can we tackle this ‘less engaged society’? Is there a way that we can confront it in a democratic manner? I think the answer is yes we can.

In a society in which there is representation and a disengaged society there are only two ways that I can think of to solve the problem. One is to get rid of the representative system as a whole. For some obvious reasons we wont consider this option very much. The other is to incentivize the voters into participating. These will each have to be talked about another time.