Democracy is dead, but there is still hope

Democracy is dead in the the United States. There are even scientific studies that show that this is true. There is absolutely no correlation between what people actually want and which laws get passed. Zero.

This isn’t something new that has happened with Donald Trump. This has been the case for many, many years. Princeton University made this study that included almost 2000 policy issues over a period of 20 years, and this is what they found:

The bottom axis represents how many percent of Americans want a specific policy to become law. The vertical axis shows the probability of this happening. In an ideal world, if no one wants a law it shouldn’t happen and if a 100% want something it should happen.

Unfortunately, this is not how things work today. In practice, regardless of how many of us want a law there there is a 30% chance of it happening. This is not a democracy.

We are run by the economic elites

On the other hand, this is what this graph looks like for the financial elite and lobbyists. If they don’t want something, there is a zero percent chance of that becoming a law. If they all agree on wanting something, the chance is higher that the law gets passed than if every citizen in America wants it.

Regardless of what you think of the president, he isn’t the main problem. The system is, and it’s clear that we need to do something about it. Just writing posts on Facebook won’t change things. We need to do real things. Build new movements.

There is hope

There is still hope. All over the world positive things are happening. New ideas are being born and the internet gives us possibilities to organize ourselves in ways we couldn’t even imagine just a few years ago.

• Our Voice is a great example. It’s an organization that helps ordinary people run for office and builds tools connecting grass root candidates with voters.
• Another example is Brand New Congress. They are aiming to replace every representative in congress with ordinary, talented, persons that actually serve the people.
• Progressive coders is a non partisan organization that brings together developers that want to contribute to projects that aids democracy in many ways. They’ve made some impressive progress in the past year.

These organisations are really great, but for them to succeed they will need a lot of publicity. Unfortunately, mainstream media isn’t exactly helping out. Probably because they are owned by the same people that also own our politicians.

This is why we are starting Newsvoice. We are building a completely independent, crowdsourced news platform, where we all set the agenda together. When there are enough of us, we will even redefine what is mainstream. You can become part of Newsvoice by just downloading the app, or even better sign up as a volunteer and join our community. Let’s fix the news. Together.