Transcript
Intro
0:02 · [Commentator] We're in a situation that we in America never thought we would find ourselves in, that is, democratic backsliding.
0:08 · [Commentator] ... for the people it robs and rules. America was founded as a constitutional republic, not a democracy.
0:15 · [Commentator] ...but this would certainly be one of them. I think democracy is in trouble.
0:22 · The average voter doesn't know how to vote, and that's why democracy doesn't work. (buttons clicking) Hi. - Hi. So listen, I know we've made videos about fascism and oligarchy, all these words, that we hear this stuff all the time, but we don't understand it. Well, I have another one. - Okay.
0:44 · Democracy.
0:47 · I know it's like the most basic one.
0:50 · Yeah, do you not know what it means?
0:51 · I know what it means.
0:52 · I know what democracy is, but I don't really know. I mean, let me show you some of these clips.
0:56 · Okay.
0:57 · (buttons clicking) Democracy means the right to vote for your leaders.
1:01 · It's so simple.
1:03 · Okay.
1:04 · Well, no, I mean, I agree.
1:05 · What is confusing about that?
1:07 · I agree with that.
1:08 · Okay, but look at this one.
1:10 · Democracy is more than voting in an election or getting registered to vote in an election.
1:17 · Okay, okay, I get it.
1:18 · Okay, so, right, democracy is not just voting.
1:21 · Is that what you're trying to say?
1:22 · No, no, no.
1:23 · I have more.
1:24 · Listen to this guy.
1:25 · Democracy means that the majority is limited by your rights. You know, the government can't censor you. They can't throw you in prison. There's certain things it can't do.
1:34 · Okay, so it sounds like you're saying democracy means different things.
1:40 · It seems to.
1:42 · Like this started because I've been hearing people use the word democracy all of the time. People are saying that democracy is in trouble. People are saying that the US actually isn't supposed to be a democracy. It seems like when different people use the word democracy, it sounds like they're talking about totally different things.
1:58 · Should we just like edit in a montage right now of different people using the word democracy in all sorts of different ways?
2:05 · Yeah, I think that would be good.
2:06 · Democracy means equal access to power.
2:08 · Democracy means modernization.
2:11 · Democracy means the people rule.
2:12 · Democracy requires compromise.
2:14 · Democracy means choice.
2:16 · Democracy means nuance and differences in perspectives.
2:19 · Democracy means you shut up.
2:21 · The point of democracy is that we vote all the time.
2:23 · Democracy simply doesn't work.
2:25 · Democracy and inequality is completely at odds.
2:29 · This is democracy manifest.
2:31 · There is no democracy.
2:33 · What is democracy?
2:34 · (intense music) So my first question was, does democracy have a useful meaning?
2:44 · And then, instead of answering my question, Adam sent me this. (upbeat music) And he said I can't open it.
2:57 · So did you get the package?
2:59 · I did get the package.
3:01 · I have not looked inside, but I am increasingly curious about what is going on here with these numbered boxes.
3:09 · All right, so open up Number 1.
3:12 · Okay.
3:13 · (upbeat music continues) What?
Electoral
3:16 · What am I looking at here?
3:18 · You are holding our first principle of democracy.
3:24 · [Johnny] What?
3:27 · I have no idea where this is going.
3:29 · Okay, so basically what I've been doing the last few weeks is I've been talking to like any smart person who will agree to talk to me about democracy.
3:34 · And you came back with this? (laughs) What I learned, first off, is the data actually does back up the thing that we are noticing, right? - Good.
3:41 · People actually do use the word democracy to mean a lot of different things, right?
3:44 · So there's this study, this is from 2024, and it asks, what do ordinary citizens mean by the term democracy?
3:51 · In other words, what do you need for it to be democracy?
3:55 · The answers are in this graphic that is extremely hard to read. But basically, all the things on the left, people rated these things from one to ten.
4:04 · How important are they to democracy?
4:06 · And the different shades of squares are different numbers, one to ten.
4:10 · But one way to look at it is like, how many people, for each of these, rated them six out of 10 or higher, in terms of each thing's importance to democracy?
4:18 · If we do that, we can take that data, flip it around, and it becomes a bar chart that we can read, right?
4:21 · So the most common answer of what is necessary for democracy is...
4:25 · Free elections is what they say, which is not a surprise. That, to me, is like the sort of quintessential feature of democracy. But, very close behind it is gender equality. Very close behind that is civil rights. Close behind that is state aid for the unemployed. And then taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor, not too far behind.
4:44 · People often use democracy as a term that means whatever they think is good government.
4:49 · Which is what got us down this rabbit hole in the first place. Honestly, this is where I get so confused because civil rights, gender equality, taxing the rich, like, in my mind, democracy is like a system of government. It's not like a bunch of good things. So I don't really get it.
5:04 · Yeah, I mean, this was confusing for me too, right?
5:06 · And the study, it does seem to support the idea that democracy means almost whatever you want it to mean. But I think what I have found is that democracy actually means five things.
5:19 · Is that what we're going to call this video, "Democracy is Five Things?"
5:22 · I mean, I don't think everyone would agree, but of all the interpretations and answers that I have come across, “democracy is five things,” for me, is the version that I have found most helpful for understanding this. And it starts with the literal definition of the word.
5:36 · Do you remember what that is?
5:37 · Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:38 · That's like the basic, people, to rule, or have power. So it's like power to the people, the rule of the people.
5:45 · [Adam] Yeah, that's the dictionary definition.
5:47 · So the people rule. The people have power. As opposed to, say, a monarch having power over the people.
5:54 · The problem is, that idea, of people having power, what does that look like?
5:59 · That leaves open a whole lot of questions.
6:01 · Which people govern?
6:02 · How do people govern?
6:03 · How do you know that they're governing and not somebody else?
6:06 · What we're going to talk about in this video is five ways to interpret that idea, of people ruling. And it starts with the one that is in your hand right now, which is going to take us back to that very first thing that we said, which is, democracy is elections. (upbeat music) So if we go back to that basic idea, right, of the people ruling, people have power, the best known ancient form of that was in...
6:28 · [Johnny] Ancient Greece, question mark?
6:30 · [Adam] Yeah, Athens, specifically.
6:31 · Yeah, direct democracy where the people themselves, or I guess men, would assemble in some form, and they would sort of vote on governmental questions.
6:43 · Yeah, and for a long time after that, even though it was a long time ago, that was though of by many as, that's what democracy is. Back in the 1700s, we have our friend James Madison, US founding father.
6:54 · He says, "In a democracy, people meet and exercise the government in person," right?
7:00 · Because that was the definition of democracy that he was working with, direct democracy.
7:04 · And it confuses a lot of people today, right?
7:06 · Because if you believe that the definition of democracy basically never changed after that, we are not a democracy.
7:11 · Because direct democracy would be like we all show up and hash it out, and we don't all show up and hash it out.
7:17 · Right, and, by and large, no large societies govern themselves that way today. You don't really do that at scale. What might sound more familiar is what Madison says in the very next sentence in the same essay. He says, "In a republic, they administer government by their representatives," because that obviously is what we do today. We elect people to make government decisions on our behalf. The people rule by choosing who rules.
7:46 · And Madison said, "Well, I don't think that's democracy. I think that's something else called a republic." But today, political scientists, if those representatives are chosen by the people, they call it electoral democracy. Our first, most basic way of defining democracy.
8:00 · Cool. Nice.
8:01 · I think we can move on to Number 2.
8:03 · Actually, no.
8:03 · So, sorry, we're not done yet. So watch this clip.
8:06 · Vladimir Putin is expected to win a further six years in power. His only serious opponents are either in prison, in exile, or dead.
8:15 · (laughs) Geez. Okay. Yeah, I see.
8:19 · The idea here is that elections alone are not enough to be an electoral democracy.
8:25 · Yeah, because it seems like for it to be a legit electoral democracy, you have to be choosing who rules. But in Russia, as we just heard, it's not a real choice. You're not actually choosing.
8:36 · [Adam] The elections need to be real competitions.
8:39 · Not like Putin eliminating all of his rivals and taking out any competitors.
8:45 · That's the first thing.
8:46 · And if there are elections, but only some people can vote, that's also not enough either. We need to have broad, equal voting rights.
8:54 · A free press, also under this umbrella, because, again, think about Russia, right?
8:57 · It's a place where there's not a lot of freedom of the press.
9:00 · It's like if you don't have a free press, the information that you need to choose your leader is not available, so it's not actually a choice.
9:07 · It needs to be an honest, real choice, right?
9:09 · This first principle, electoral democracy, it's closest to what political scientists, they have this word for it, it's the “thin” definition of democracy. Like the bare minimum. It's what most political scientists consider to be the base.
9:22 · We consider electoral democracy essential or fundamental for any kind of democracy.
9:27 · There's no way to have a democracy unless you have elections.
9:31 · That's...
9:33 · Not everyone agrees with that. We're going to come back to that idea, but most Western political scientists agree with that. And so what you're holding right now is, today, going to be our base. It's our first and most important piece. (upbeat music) Working on this video, I've been thinking a lot about rights, the rights that we have and what it actually takes to use those rights.
9:57 · One right I've become increasingly interested in is the right to have data privacy, meaning to have some control over where my personal data ends up. Turns out there's hundreds of data brokers buying and selling all of our information, things like our address, and our name, and our phone number, and our shopping habits. And it turns out you and I have a right to delete that information from these data brokers' databases.
10:20 · And even though we have this right, doing it ourselves becomes incredibly cumbersome because there's just so many data brokers. That's why I use Incogni, who is the sponsor of today's video. I've used them for literally years. What I did is I signed up for Incogni. I gave them permission to act on my behalf to go make requests to remove my information from these lists. And that's what they do.
10:42 · They go out and they send removal requests to these data brokers over and over so that as my name continually shows up on these lists, Incogni is there helping me strip it away. All I have to do is open up a dashboard and watch the progress as it happens to see what they've removed and what they're still working on. They've been successful on like 1,000 of these lists, which is very satisfying to watch for me.
11:05 · I'm on the Incogni Unlimited Plan, and I have their exposure scanner, which actually scours the web and shows me where my personal information is exposed. I can choose what I want to be removed with the click of a button, and they handle the removal.
11:18 · And if I find a specific link myself that I believe my data is being bought and sold on, I can send it to Incogni through their custom removal feature, and they'll work on removing it as well. If this sounds interesting to you, and you want a big discount, use the code JOHNNYHARRIS and get 60% off the annual Incogni plan when you go to my link.
11:36 · It's incogni.com/johnnyharris.
11:39 · Use the code JOHNNYHARRIS. You get a 30-day money back guarantee so you can try it out and see if this is actually useful for your life. Again, that's incogni.com/johnnyharris, code JOHNNYHARRIS. The link's in the description. Thank you Incogni for sponsoring today's video. And now, let's get back to democracy.
11:54 · Another reason, besides being the base, that this is important is that when we look at countries around the world, this criteria, electoral democracy, this is like basically how we distinguish what is a democracy from what is not a democracy. Because a lot of countries have called themselves democracies, or they've had “democratic” in their name, but they're not broadly considered to be actual democracies.
12:11 · [Johnny] The Democratic People's Republic of North Korea.
12:15 · Right, exactly.
12:16 · And they have elections. You can Google North Korea elections, but they're not real. You get one choice.
12:21 · Or you have like the former East Germany, right?
12:23 · German Democratic Republic, similar deal.
12:25 · They had elections.
12:25 · They were not actual choices. Those “Democratic” names of those countries are just using a different concept. It's a Marxist-Leninist concept, a party that's supposed to represent the working class' interests. The only thing is that that party does not win power through competition or elections. It's just kind of in charge.
12:43 · What would a Western political scientist classify those places as?
12:48 · Let me bring up this map, right?
12:50 · This is using data from a project called V-Dem. It's short for Varieties of Democracy, and it's basically like a bunch of prominent political scientists, they got together, and they decided to sort of try to measure the amount of democracy in the world.
13:05 · They were important to this project, so we're going to come back to them later, but what the map is basically showing is, it's color coding every country according to this question of, how competitive are their elections?
13:18 · So this first color is going to be all the countries where there are no competitive elections, right?
13:24 · So they might have elections, but the elections don't even pretend to give you an electoral choice, if they have them at all. And we should say, this is not our judgment of which countries are in which category.
13:35 · Probably, people will disagree with some of these, right?
13:38 · These are places that have elections, but those competitions are just not completely fair or free in the eyes of these scholars.
13:46 · So these are not technically electoral democracies.
13:49 · You got Russia.
13:51 · You've got Iran.
13:52 · [Adam] And then, finally, we have this set of countries, which is what they deem countries with mostly free and fair elections.
13:58 · [Johnny] Okay, wait, hold on.
13:59 · What's this fourth category?
14:02 · I have sneakily hidden the name of this fourth category, because now you can open up drawer Number 2.
14:09 · (suspenseful music) Where is this going?
Liberal
14:17 · All right, so this is going to be our second principle, right?
14:21 · And it's also going to be our first big step into this brave new world of, what is democracy besides elections?
14:30 · (suspenseful music continues) Ah, yes. Our good old friend, liberal democracy.
14:37 · To explain this one, I'm going to show you a YouTube comment that is very, very common. You will see this posted under lots of videos, and I want you to read it to me.
14:47 · [Johnny] "'Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner.'
14:52 · Benjamin Franklin."
14:54 · Did he actually say that?
14:55 · Well, what does the quote mean to you?
14:56 · [Johnny] Like democracy is like majority rule, and so if you're a sheep, it's bad for you because the wolves will choose to eat you.
15:05 · The point is usually that democracy is just a way for the strong to dominate the weak. To answer your question, Benjamin Franklin extremely never said it. As far as we can tell, the first use of this quote was in a newspaper column in 1990. And I would say, typically, if you see a quote in a YouTube comment attributed to Ben Franklin or like a famous historical person ever, just assume that it's fake.
15:25 · Like, the person posting it may not know that it's fake, but assume that it's fake.
15:29 · Okay, but the quote actually has some resonance to it in terms of, like, if the majority gets to rule, the four wolves will always get to eat the sheep.
15:36 · That kind of is democracy, right?
15:38 · It is, but only in this really particular way, right?
15:43 · Because what it is describing is what democracy can be if you don't have any rights- Yeah. - Any protections.
15:51 · Any freedom. - Right, exactly.
15:53 · Freedom, rights- - Freedoms.
15:54 · Liberties, right?
15:56 · And this is where we are going to get to the idea of liberalism, the idea of individual freedom.
16:02 · Liberalism.
16:02 · Okay, this is a word that I've heard my whole life. Liberal, here in the United States, also kind of means like, woke, like left. Like, if you put liberal on an online profile, it means that you are left-of-center here in the United States and probably a lot of other countries.
16:16 · This is something that I know you and I have been both confused about for a long time.
16:20 · This idea of, liberal democracy, does it mean woke democracy?
16:24 · We're going to take a side quest because in researching this, I realized I was confused about it, and the reason that I think we're confused about it is because...
16:32 · At a certain moment in its history, liberalism really breaks off into two streams.
16:38 · (energetic music) So the short and oversimplified version, just as a caveat here, right?
16:47 · Liberalism is always about individual freedom, right?
16:50 · And this question of what needs to be done in order to protect that freedom in society?
16:56 · Early liberalism was very concerned with government that safeguarded individual rights. So it was about a kind of a constitutional system.
17:05 · [Adam] So a constitutional system is a system that basically puts limits on what a government can do. It's this higher law that no one is sort of above.
17:12 · Because we're talking about what?
17:15 · The 1700s, the 1800s. And one of the big fears and risks that people were aware of at the time was the big, scary, oppressive king, maybe like a Napoleon type, who just is sort of above the law.
17:26 · Yeah, and another element of that at the time is that free markets are considered one of the things that make us more free.
17:33 · So if you want general prosperity, if you want freedom for many people, then you advocate free markets.
17:41 · And then, something happens.
17:44 · (energetic music continues) The Industrial Revolution, right?
17:54 · The Industrial Revolution happens, and it changes the world, right?
17:58 · Like it changes the economy. It changes where people live. People move to cities. It changes how people work. People work in factories. And it changes the stratification of wealth. It creates massive wealth concentration at the top and extreme poverty at the bottom.
18:12 · The Industrial Revolution is totally transformative and in some ways, disastrous, right?
18:18 · And by the late 1800s, some people are beginning to feel like, maybe this free market that we've been venerating, is actually like, maybe it's a little bit dangerous if left untouched.
18:29 · New liberals look at the situation and ask, "How can these poor people really be free?
18:35 · How can we allow the market to do what it's doing to these workers?
18:40 · They're not being raised by this freedom, they're not becoming freer, they're stuck." And so what the state should do is provide conditions for freedom, and that takes a little bit of intervention.
18:54 · And so this is the big split, right?
18:57 · Some liberals stick to their guns. They say, "No, sorry, the market is not the problem. The people's freedom still needs to be protected from an oppressive state." But other liberals, they call themselves new liberals, they say, "No, it's the unregulated capitalist machine. Industrial capitalism, this is the big threat to freedom. And what the state needs to do, what the government needs to do is put safeguards on that in order to protect people's freedom."
19:23 · And that's where they get more of like a big-government liberal, which is like left-of-center modern American politics.
19:30 · We're already in a side quest, but let me sidebar even further, right?
19:34 · In the 1800s, the new liberals are not the only people noticing that industrial capitalism is causing some problems. There are people, there are very well-known thinkers, who are also noticing that, and offering solutions for that. But to the new liberals who are pointing that out as a problem, they want the government to protect people from capitalism, but they're still basically just saying capitalism can be tamed. It can be regulated.
19:56 · It does not need to be dismantled, right?
19:59 · Because after all, they are...
20:01 · Goddamn liberals.
20:02 · So you get this liberal split, right?
20:04 · And I think the best way to see that today is you look at the Liberal Party of Australia, and you look at the Liberal Party of Canada. These are two of the largest political parties in those countries, and they have the same name. But if you look at Australia's Liberal Party's platform, it talks about things like free enterprise, private property, minimizing the regulatory burden on business.
20:27 · The platform of Canada's Liberal Party talks about things like a just society, human dignity, equality of opportunity, diversity.
20:35 · Wow, it's like two totally different versions and interpretations of the word liberal.
20:41 · But how does this understanding of “liberal” help us understand what liberal democracy means?
20:48 · Isn't that the point of the side quest?
20:49 · The way to understand the liberal part of liberal democracy is that it is closer to this one. (suspenseful music) Really, it comes from the early 1800s meaning. It's a system that limits the power of the government. People need rights and freedoms that the state cannot violate.
21:09 · Okay, so liberal democracy does not mean woke democracy. It means a democracy, which is a voting thing, that also gives people rights, even if they're in the minority.
21:21 · Right, it means the wolves cannot vote to eat the sheep. The sheep is a citizen. Eating the sheep is illegal. It means the government cannot throw you in jail for no reason, basically.
21:28 · You have rights.
21:30 · And if we go back to our diagram of the people ruling, right, if electoral democracy says the people rule by choosing who rules, liberal democracy says the people rule by staying free, by having rights that no government can take away.
21:47 · [Johnny] Yeah.
21:48 · And partly because there are limits, checks, right, on the power of the government.
21:51 · No one in the government can get too powerful to act alone. Like the fact that we are ruled by law that protects us and not by someone's whims.
22:00 · [Adam] Exactly.
22:01 · Rule of law, like this basic thing that we all sort of take for granted, right?
22:05 · It's actually, that's what you call a liberal democratic idea.
22:08 · Some basic guarantees that constrains the government in between elections so that you don't end up with an elected dictator.
22:17 · Okay, so wait, this is a puzzle.
22:19 · So now I have electoral, and I have liberal democracy, right?
22:25 · That's what you got.
22:26 · Kind of looks like we're building something now.
22:28 · What else do we need to build this?
22:30 · Go ahead and open up Number 3.
22:31 · (energetic music) What's this?
Egalitarian
22:39 · Well, what you were saying, like what else do we need besides free and fair elections and liberal rights?
22:46 · A lot of analysis of democracy does stop there. You can vote, you have rights.
22:52 · What more is there?
22:52 · And that's kind of where I was. But then I talked to this Harvard professor, and she was basically like, "Okay, the law can say all of these things..."
23:01 · You know, you can say you've got a right on paper, but if there's no actual, practical way to make it real, then it's just a fake right.
23:08 · Think about how our elections in the US actually work in practice, right?
23:14 · And we have made a video about this.
23:16 · In the United States, we have these organizations called super PACs, right?
23:19 · And what they do is they basically collect and spend money to help a particular candidate. And anyone can legally give as much money to one of these organizations as they want. And most Americans do not give any money at all in elections, but some billionaires, including people you've never heard of, give sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.
23:39 · Even though we all get one vote, our ability to actually impact the democratic process and decision making is actually not equal at all.
23:47 · Right, it's an example of inequality outside of politics translating into democratic inequality.
23:55 · This is the idea that if the people really do have the power, that means that the power needs to be equally shared among the people, right?
24:04 · So the people rule by having equal access to that rule.
24:09 · We're all equal, and we're equal in this very basic way of being decision makers. (upbeat music) Egalitarian democracy. Take me through it.
24:20 · [Adam] First is just like, are your needs met?
24:24 · People cannot really participate as free and equal citizens in a democratic system unless they have a roof over their heads, they have enough food to eat, they have some minimal education.
24:36 · But one level up from that very basic idea, even if you aren't poor, are you in a situation that limits access to your own rights?
24:44 · You know, does your employer give you the day off on election day?
24:47 · In America, in most states, somebody could be fired for expressing political opinions that their boss disagrees with.
24:56 · Egalitarian democracy basically says, material conditions should not impede those things, right?
25:02 · So one level up from that is this idea of your democratic rights really being equal, right?
25:08 · We all have one vote, but when it comes to the other ways, like we talked about before with super PACs, and there's lots of ways to influence democracy besides your vote, are we equal in those ways?
25:19 · Our little green guy, egalitarian democracy, this is the tradition within democracy that is most opposed to oligarchy, right?
25:28 · It's the one that says that extreme inequality and democracy are each other's enemies.
25:33 · Material inequalities, if they get too large, do undermine democracy.
25:39 · Okay, that makes sense.
25:40 · Egalitarian democracy.
25:43 · You've got voting.
25:44 · You've got liberal protections for everyone, including people who are not in the majority. And you've got equality in your political power. (upbeat music) Okay, cool. This thing's starting to come together.
25:59 · Now what?
Participatory
26:00 · [Adam] So the next one, it basically says that representation, can't mean just handing over power, and then shutting up. We need to participate in our own rule.
26:12 · When more ordinary people get to exercise voice and influence over some set of decisions.
26:21 · Okay, so this goes back to that one clip I showed you where that guy explicitly says- Democracy is more than voting in an election.
26:29 · So go ahead and open up Number 4. (upbeat music continues) Democracy is not just showing up to elections.
26:41 · What could it be?
26:42 · (upbeat music continues) Particip...
26:45 · Pa-pa-particip...
26:47 · You say it first, actually.
26:49 · Participatory. - Participatory.
26:51 · This is participatory democracy.
26:54 · So have you ever seen a protest and people are chanting something like...
26:59 · Show me what democracy looks like.
27:01 · [Crowd] This is what democracy looks like.
27:03 · Show me what...
27:04 · [Activist] Democracy looks like.
27:05 · [Crowd] This is what democracy looks like.
27:07 · Show me what democracy looks like.
27:10 · This is what democracy looks like.
27:12 · Yeah, every single one.
27:14 · Every protest I've ever been to, people chant that.
27:16 · Well, the confusion that I had, right, was like, before we made this video, I was like, again, democracy is voting, right?
27:23 · Yes, that's always my confusion as well when I hear that. I think my interpretation, why protesting is what democracy looks like, was always like, we have the right to protest and that right, which is more of like a liberal thing, is democracy. We're showing off our democratic rights.
27:39 · So what I know now is that we were working with a kind of a thin definition of democracy.
27:45 · Democracy is elections.
27:46 · Maybe democracy is rights. But what I was missing was that protesting, yeah, it is a way to exercise our right to free speech and our right to assemble, but it's also a way of telling our leaders what to do. - Okay.
27:59 · Participatory democracy is protesting?
28:04 · [Adam] Protesting, advocacy groups, being active in a political party, joining a union, like anything that might be called organizing or action, that's a big part of what participatory democracy is.
28:16 · Okay.
28:17 · And, again, I'm thinking back to that clip.
28:19 · It's about showing up in front of your school board, going to the city council meeting.
28:24 · [Adam] Like a town hall where officials hear from citizens or any opportunity for public comment, right?
28:31 · The places where regular people get to have input on what the government is doing.
28:37 · Okay, so when we vote on a referendum, like in Switzerland, they have a really direct democracy because they vote on everything, like a ballot initiative in California, right?
28:48 · [Adam] Yeah, direct decision making.
28:50 · That's the other big piece here.
28:52 · Okay.
28:53 · The idea here is, ideally, we elect leaders, and they govern perfectly on our behalf, but that's an ideal.
29:05 · I would love for there to be hundreds of thousands of empathetic, non-self-interested elites who are making decisions with my best interests for me and mine, right?
29:16 · But like, show me a couple of them.
29:17 · Yeah, like I guess, in theory, our leaders that we elect are supposed to be our representatives, but...
29:25 · So often these other tiers of decision making and political leadership or agencies or whatever are not making decisions in our best interests or effectively advancing our welfare, either because they're trying to do other things, like get reelected or raise political donations, and we don't happen to have significant amounts of money for that, or they just don't know what some people's lives are like.
29:53 · Hey, there's something exciting happening over at newpress.com, which is our platform for creator-led journalism. It's the only place where you can watch videos like this one a week early and without any ads or interruptions. You won't want to miss this. It's not just my videos. It's also the incredible roster of creator journalists that we have here at Newpress, which is Max Fisher, Sam Ellis, and Christoph Haubursin.
30:15 · You get access to these videos and more for 60 bucks annually or five bucks a month. That money goes directly to support this work. It allows us to make more ambitious work, to tell more ambitious stories. And it gets you all kinds of perks in addition to early and ad-free videos. So head over to newpress.com now and sign up. Click the link in the description to get started. Thanks to all the supporters over at Newpress.
30:36 · You really do make this work possible. So I'm going to add this to our puzzle. Participatory democracy, that adds to our elections, to our liberal rights, to our equality to actually exercise those rights within the real world. And now, our ability to actually participate, to go to the city councils, to go out onto the street, and make sure that our representatives that we elect stand accountable to our interests. (upbeat music) But wait, I have a question.
People are stupid
31:16 · I had a conversation once with a Swiss friend of mine. Switzerland is a place that like does direct democracy better than anyone. They vote on everything. And he was like, "Yeah, we vote on everything, but like half the stuff I see on the ballot, I don't even know what it is." And, you know, like I hear that, I see that in California.
31:35 · I see stuff on my ballot sometimes, and I'm like, "I'm voting on this, but I don't actually know what it is." It feels like not the healthiest thing, even if, in theory, it sounds good.
31:44 · I actually have an example, an American example, of what you're talking about, right?
31:48 · So this is a ballot question from 2025 in Ohio in the US.
31:56 · And I am going to read it to you right now, okay?
31:58 · [Johnny] Okay.
31:59 · [Adam] "This proposed amendment would: 1. Authorize the state to issue bonds or other obligations to finance or assist in financing public infrastructure capital improvements for local governments and other governmental entities. Capital improvement projects would be limited to roads and bridges..." "Employment opportunities and improve the economic welfare of the people of Ohio..." "Ensure public health, safety and welfare..."
32:21 · "Any amount that could have been issued in any prior fiscal year but was not insured now later than 30 years after..."
32:27 · Do you have one of the All Maps Are Wrong posters?
32:31 · So couple questions.
32:32 · Do people even understand what they're voting on when you give it to the masses like that?
32:37 · And number two, who the hell is going to take the time to read all of that?
32:42 · So those are exactly right questions, right?
32:44 · It's this question first of like what is actually expected of us as voters, but also like if we don't understand it, right, how are we supposed to trust that anybody else does?
32:55 · So you haven't just hit on one of the major questions about participatory democracy. This is one of the big questions that people have about democracy in general, especially on YouTube.
33:06 · The average voter doesn't know how to vote, and that's why democracy doesn't work.
33:12 · I mean, the idea is basically in practice, people are kind of idiots, right?
33:17 · We lack all sorts of knowledge. It's a very common sentiment. And here's another very common YouTube comment that I want you to read to me.
33:27 · Okay, "'The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.' Winston Churchill." (laughs) Winston Churchill absolutely never said that. As far as we can tell, it is from a message board post from 1992.
33:45 · Anyway, the point of the quote is that democracy itself has this fatal flaw, right?
33:50 · And the fatal flaw is that people are stupid.
33:53 · But the actual idea at the core of like giving the masses the reins on the decisions, the technical, difficult, complicated decisions of governing a country, it has some big issues.
34:08 · So it's a legit opinion to have, I think.
34:11 · This is where we have another study that is going to be helpful to us, right?
34:14 · This one is almost 50 years old, but it looms pretty large in the field, right?
34:19 · And it asked a large group of people the following question.
34:23 · "Do you agree or disagree with the idea that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed?"
34:29 · Wait, sorry, what is the 1975 Public Affairs Act?
34:33 · We'll get to that.
34:34 · But, basically, 16% said, yes, repeal the 1975 Public Affairs Act. 18% said, no, do not repeal it. A full two-thirds of people had no opinion whatsoever.
34:47 · Okay, so I'm seeing here, it's just like sort of public ignorance about what the 1975 Public Affairs Act is, which I feel that too.
34:58 · Right, so can I tell you what it actually was?
35:00 · Please. Yeah, what?
35:01 · There is no 1975 Public Affairs Act.
35:05 · They asked about a fake law, right?
35:07 · And that should actually change how you see these results a little bit.
35:11 · [Johnny] Yeah, it totally does because two thirds of the people said they didn't know because it didn't exist, and they truly didn't know. But then, you have one third of people who pretended to know.
35:22 · It was shocking because you had a legitimate survey where people responded to it, and people were too embarrassed or just didn't have the time to tell the interviewer, "Oh, I actually don't know."
35:37 · One of the major takeaways from this study for political scientists, it was not that people are stupid. It's that when you ask people to weigh in completely cold on questions like this, the problem is not that you're getting the opinions of dumb people. It's that you're not really getting real opinions at all.
35:59 · Our very expectations for what people know and what they have informed opinions about is wrong.
36:05 · That is exactly the problem with public opinion. If regular opinion is going to get you lies, then we need to actually educate people, inform people, and give people the opportunity to actually engage.
36:19 · In other words, the problem of the low- information voter is real, right?
36:24 · But it's not this innate problem with democracy as a whole. It just means that there's this one element of it that we're not doing that well. So in the same way that the wolves voting to eat the sheep is a problem that liberal democracy can address, the fact that we are all apparently dumb idiots is a problem that the next principal of democracy can address.
36:45 · The question is when people go and cast their ballots, what are their decisions based on?
36:51 · Is this time for me to open Number 5?
36:55 · [Adam] Go for it bebe (suspenseful music) Let's talk about it.
Deliberative
37:07 · What am I looking at here?
37:08 · [Adam] Okay, so this principle says that the people ruling means the people making decisions together, and it requires us to understand not just the issue at hand, we actually have to understand each other. It means that the rule of the people emerges from a public process.
37:31 · To have the public actually deliberate and engage with each other before they go to the ballot box or provide their thoughts to their governments and policymakers.
37:45 · They have to listen and not just decide.
37:48 · [Adam] This is deliberative democracy.
37:50 · (upbeat music) You know, in contrast to participatory democracy, which doesn't require you to necessarily engage with others, you just participate, or in electoral democracy, you just cast your ballot, in deliberative democracy, the intent is that you actually engage with your fellow citizens.
38:10 · So in my opinion, this might be the one where I think we're faring the most poorly because when we engage with each other on politics, it tends to look like this.
38:23 · You're lying. You're lying.
38:24 · (people shouting over each other) So give me evidence to prove that.
38:27 · Can I say that you're a fat piece of (bleep) You can call me fat all you want. (people shouting over each other) [Host] Guys, guys, guys, guys, guys.
38:35 · You don't respect the constitution.
38:36 · No!
38:37 · Point of order, point of order.
38:39 · Can you stop interrupting me?
38:40 · I'm talking. I'm talking.
38:42 · Yeah, I mean, more and more I hear people say they hate politics.
38:46 · Right.
38:46 · - And this is why.
38:48 · It brings out the worst in us and it incentivizes us, especially these days, to just like, dunk on other people. And it's like, that's no fun. And I understand why people opt out.
38:58 · Instead of trying to make us smarter or more informed, anytime people are engaging with each other on politics, it feels like it's actually all about winning, right?
39:06 · Not convincing, not listening.
39:09 · We have been socialized to accept that there is a winner in debates and deliberation is trying to get everyone to think about what others think, what others' lived experiences are, and then, reflect and figure out what our views on those issues are. So nobody is winning.
39:29 · I'm curious what that actually would look like.
39:32 · What would it mean to be good at it?
39:35 · In the case of Article 40.3.3 being replaced with a constitutional provision, who would be the author or authors?
39:44 · Wait, what's this?
39:45 · So this is footage from Ireland from 2016, and the group that you're looking at is made up of 99 basically randomly selected Irish citizens.
39:56 · The idea of randomly selecting a group of people to form a body is called sortition, right?
40:03 · This is an idea from ancient Athens. It's related to how we choose juries. So Ireland, at the time, had one of the world's most restrictive abortion laws. It's comparable to the law in Idaho today. But Ireland is not Idaho. There was enormous pressure within the country to change the law. But it was the kind of issue that, you might not be surprised to learn, Ireland's politics, like, couldn't handle. It was extremely divisive, extremely heated.
40:33 · They couldn't figure it out. So the country convened what they called a citizen's assembly. It's those 99 people. They got in a room, and they met on the weekends. And over the course of a couple weekends, they basically acted like a big jury. They heard evidence, testimonials. They got to ask experts questions. They argued with each other. A ton of it was just recorded and made public on YouTube.
40:59 · And in the end, the people in that room still didn't agree, but it was like the country had had this national conversation in miniature, and it helped break the political deadlock.
41:10 · The Irish people have voted in favor of scrapping a constitutional ban on abortion.
41:15 · The point of the story is not “hooray abortion.”
41:18 · It's that this is an example of a country being able to work through this logjam, right, this gridlock, and democratically decide something in a way that felt legitimate, right?
41:29 · There was conversation.
41:31 · It was a genuine sort of public discussion with multiple viewpoints, but also expert input. So there's opinions in the mix, but also like real facts.
41:39 · What we're trying to get people to understand is why people are on either sides of the scale. And a lot of what deliberation is, is thinking about what other people's lives are like.
41:55 · [Adam] There was reflection, so you begin to understand other people and why they believe what they believe, and that also leads to more informed opinions.
42:06 · And we're not saying, I'm not saying that when people get into deliberation, people flip. They don't go from supporting abortion to against abortion in just one deliberation, but rather say, "Well, I understand why the other side would vote the way they do, and that's okay."
42:24 · And then, this might be the most important part, is that by the end of that process, everybody in that room had been exposed to a ton of information, multiple viewpoints, which means that whatever their opinion was at the end of it, they could justify it.
42:38 · It was based on something, right?
42:40 · And instead of watching politicians with pre-set opinions just bash heads on TV, the country watched these regular people come together and figure it out, and then the country voted.
42:51 · I got a couple questions.
42:52 · First off, they heard from experts, but who decides which experts?
42:57 · Like whose story do they actually hear?
42:59 · And then, the sort of broader question, it's like, what legitimacy is there in giving 99 random people the right to decide for the whole country?
43:07 · So a citizen's assembly is not deciding, right? - Okay.
43:11 · They made a recommendation, and then, the entire country voted on a referendum and made the final decision.
43:16 · At the same time, all of those questions that you have are exactly the right questions to ask about a citizen's assembly, right?
43:22 · And the answer to those questions are basically like, well, the people who organized it chose the experts, and they chose whose stories they heard, and they chose what evidence was presented, right?
43:30 · And the people who organize an assembly can have biases, for sure.
43:34 · Absolutely.
43:35 · That is a big vulnerability with this thing. It's not perfect, so I don't want to over-romanticize it.
43:40 · But I think a big part of this is that there weren't politicians in the room. Politicians are from a certain class.
43:47 · They're from an elite class, and their incentives are often not totally aligned with like the majority of the people, you know?
43:54 · And so when you have like just actually the majority of the people represented randomly through this sortition thing, I imagine you get a different set of incentives from those people that you don't get when you have professional, attention-seeking politicians as the ones making the decisions.
44:13 · So deliberative democracy...
44:17 · We talk to each other. Boy, I'm in big favor of this. We figure it out together, which I think is like, that's the most enlightened version of what this was supposed to be. (upbeat music) And now my friend, the bomb is armed. You have 10 minutes to answer the following riddle.
44:46 · [Johnny] What...
The Cube
44:47 · What I want to add, right, what I think we should say is that even though I think this is a powerful metaphor, there are other ways to show the five dimensions, the five principles.
44:57 · Like you could think of like character attributes, like when you're building a video game character, right?
45:02 · Each of these could be one slider that you can sort of move back and forth.
45:06 · And the point being that we should try to shove all of them as far to the right as possible?
45:11 · This is the thing, right?
45:14 · That in some ways, the five principles fit together in beautiful harmony, but in other ways, they're not 100% compatible with each other. In some ways, they actually work against each other.
45:26 · Like think about if we were to maximize opportunities for participatory democracy, more town meetings, public comment opportunities, who would show up for those meetings?
45:37 · Think about that, right?
45:37 · Like who has time to participate?
45:41 · Yeah, I mean, old people, rich people.
45:43 · I see what you mean. If you max out one of these, like the participatory one, then, you cut against the egalitarian one because people with the loudest voices are often the people who have the most economic resources and privileges outside of politics.
46:01 · The point is just that the cube metaphor is not meant to be perfect, right?
46:05 · The goal is not to do each of these things perfectly and to have the perfect democracy as a result.
46:09 · They're like ideals, but they're also trade-offs.
46:14 · And the one other thing that is the other asterisk on this cube, right?
46:19 · Do you remember what we said about the blue piece, the electoral piece?
46:23 · It's the base.
46:24 · It's like everyone has to have that to be a democracy in the first place, right?
46:28 · Yes. Yes.
46:29 · And the truth is that, actually, not everyone agrees with that.
46:32 · [Johnny] Wow.
46:34 · How do you have a democracy without elections, and why would you even want to?
46:38 · So the idea here, right, is that like by electing representatives and giving them all the power in our society, we've actually created like a class, a permanent politician class, and some people call that a kind of oligarchy, right?
46:55 · And they suggest that like randomly selecting people the way that you choose people almost for a citizen's assembly, but choosing those people to serve as our representatives, might actually be more democratic.
47:07 · Wow, so, actually, our leaders are chosen through the sortition idea that they did in Ireland.
47:13 · That is what a lot of people actually advocate for.
47:16 · We need to stop having all elections, and we need to choose all of our politicians and leaders through a completely randomized lottery system.
47:24 · One of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life.
47:27 · What are you afraid of if you do that?
47:29 · That we might get bad politicians?
47:31 · I think that's a bit of an extreme version, to just say our leaders will be... no elections, leaders will just be chosen all randomly. But the idea, at its core, is that maybe electoral democracy isn't actually the base. Like maybe it belongs here, but maybe it's just another piece.
47:51 · Interesting.
47:52 · Okay, so the cube isn't perfect. It is a metaphor to teach us. And these five principles...
47:59 · Yeah, so these five principles are actually V-Dem's five principles of democracy. I just took it from them. It's not the five commandments from God or the five scientific laws of democracy.
48:09 · It's just one way to look at it, right?
48:11 · It is all of these things together that express themselves sometimes in conflict, but sometimes in harmony. And if you have at least some version of all of them, you have what I would call a democracy. (suspenseful music) It's a nice cube.
48:31 · I like it.
48:32 · Where are you going to keep it?
48:33 · I don't know.
48:34 · I mean, it's kind of big.
48:37 · Do you want it?
48:39 · I do not.
48:40 · (upbeat music) Okay, well, I feel like we just covered a lot. Five different ways to interpret this pretty vague but important thing. And now we have this.
49:00 · But I think one thing I've learned as we've gone through this is that, yes, obviously, democracy can mean many things, and maybe they all add up to one big idea, but that there's really no single way to do democracy, and that any given society might be very democratic in some ways and not others.
49:21 · V-Dem, that organization that we mentioned earlier that we used for this video, actually scores every country in the world on these five dimensions that are here in this cube. They do that every year, and it's worth checking out if you want to explore that data. So I certainly have a much better sense of what democracy means now.
49:42 · And the more I learn about it, the more I realize that we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do as a system, as an idea, as a tradition. I came into this video wanting clarity on what this single word actually means.
49:59 · And I think, ultimately, it comes down to a kind of faith, a faith in people, that people can make good choices, choices that benefit the collective, and that we individual people deserve rights and freedoms to be ourselves, to express ourselves, that we should have an equal voice to decide how we are governed, that we should be listened to, and that we actually have a lot to learn if we listen to each other.
50:29 · Democracy is a system that admits that we won't necessarily get it right, but that if we keep trying, and keep talking, in the long run, we can.