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California’s billionaires pour cash into elections as big tech seeks new allies
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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The US is hardly a good example for democracy.
But it's the biggest, and look how corrupt it has become. You think that those big techs are stopping at the U.S.?
I can understand to not see India as a real democracy right now but not in the context of framing the USA as the poster child of how democracy fails. In that instance India is far larger still.
India is still holding remnants of feudalism since their independence, which can be seen in certain areas and way of thinking throughout India. India is also a far, far poorer country than USA, per capita especially, there's no competition.
Poorer countries are easier to corrupt and India will find it very hard to dig itself out of the hole it's in without outside interference and a lot of prosecutions.
But, corruption exists in (I would argue) every democratic country. They make up stats and skew them in their own favour in an attempt to hide it, but the people on the street aren't blind to what is happening and are very much aware of the corruption regardless of any statistics.
Trump has just taken a highlighter to everything and lit it up for those that haven't seen or didn't believe the extent it was happening.
In that sense (and I'm pretty sure it's the only sense), Trump is actually doing something good.
It's also one of the oldest (in the modern sense), an early adopter with little to no best practices to learn from. Not to mention that it kind of wandered into being a democracy through legal interpretations rather than being one by design.
Anyway, you're not looking at things structurally enough and missing the fundamental problem: excessive consolidation of power. By which I don't mean the "big government" conservatives like to complain about, because governments don't have to be monoliths, but simply what it sounds like: one entity having an excessive power at its disposal that it's able to use at its own volition. To prevent that in government you need to not only design it in a way that not one part of it has an excessive amount of power (through separation of powers, independent institutions etc.), but also have mechanisms in place to keep it that way, because it's ultimately people who are doing the execution. And any such mechanism that does not involve accountability to the public is doomed to failure, because that mechanism is, once again, executed by people, and the fewer people are involved, the easier it is to take over. In other words, it's not simply that democracy can work, it's the only thing that is structurally capable of working. Any other form of government is inherently more susceptible to corruption.
However, implementation details matter and a flawed implementation can cause it to fail. And basically every modern democratic state has one big flaw: it has political democracy, but not economic democracy. As a result, there is very little constraining private actors from accumulating as much capital (=power) as they can, based on the naive assumption that market forces are enough to prevent them from accumulating too much. And so once enough capital has accumulated in once place, that power can be used to undermine political democracy as well. So the problem here isn't that democracy doesn't work, it's that we don't have enough of it.
But we already know that democracy doesn't work. What it sounds like you are describing in much of that post is anarchism (yes, I know I have mentioned it a few times, before I read your post), and with technology, which we heavily already rely on, I see no reason to attempt to try it again. Obviously on a much smaller scale so that we can easily see where lies flaws and boundaries, but we should also be doing that with democracy on a daily basis.
We don't actually know that it doesn't work, because as I've said, all modern democracies have a particular flaw and we don't know what happens when that flaw is fixed. I would also say that what you're describing as "anarchism" is just another form of democracy; democracy is a set of principles, not a concrete system. And that anarchism would in practice not be as different from what we have today as you're imagining. Instead of top-down it would be bottom-up, maybe (which has some problems of its own), but you still end up with elected representatives at higher levels of governance, because even with modern technology it would be impractical to have all the stakeholders of the Rhine, for example, do consensus-building in one big meeting. And those representatives would need to be held to account, just like today.
I think it's far more fruitful to look at the actual problems we're having and what structurally is causing them and try to do something about those causes, instead of going on about what systems would or wouldn't work, because there's never going to be a perfect system, we're always going to have to solve problems as they come. Especially when clearly the problem here isn't the system itself, but the existence of power structures that exist outside of the system and are therefore not constrained by the system, allowing them to undermine the system. If solving that problem results in something that can be described as "socialism" or "anarchism", so be it, but one thing it absolutely has to be, is a democracy. Because again, anything that is not a democracy is going to be inherently more susceptible to corruption (and therefore be ineffective at solving problems) than even a mediocre implementation of democracy.
We do know it doesn't work.
Look up arrows impossibility theorem.
Anarchism is one of many, and while it is in some ways similar to democracy, it is less open to corruption and it doesn't have a handful of people deciding everything for us because they got the most votes based on a minority number of issues that they (at the time) claim they will fix.
That you want to stick with democracy and aren't willing to even be open to the suggestions of anything else, but surely that in itself goes against your beloved democracy, by just assuming that democracy is the best option. Many have thought that their 'solutions' were the best option for them in centuries gone by. Feel free to look up quite a few religions for example.
We also know what is causing most of the problems, corporatism and capitalism has been allowed to run limitless and therefore allow them to overspend their crazy profits on controlling the politicians. It's an endless loop, and it's a good enough reason to try something else. It's only going to get worse when all of the politicians are being paid by corporations to get what they want to unblock any other barriers that limit their wealth or earnings.
Arrow's impossibility theorem just states that strictly speaking, there is no system within a particular subset of voting systems that is guaranteed to be immune from spoilers affecting the outcome. So not only are you using an overly strict definition of democracy that doesn't even encompass all democratic systems implemented today, let alone all the ones that could be (which again, includes anarchism), but you're disqualifying things based on not meeting a level of perfection that is unreasonable to expect of anything. It's not like anarchism would be free of irrelevant factors affecting decisions; it would be a lot more affected by relationships between people and people's standing in a community for one thing.
None of the problems you point out are innate to democracy. The reason you associate them with democracy is not because of any inherent quality of democracy, but because of history. To simplify things a lot, the people who championed democracy back in the days of absolute monarchies and nobility also championed a liberal economy. At the time that would have made sense, since it was seen as more fair and meritocratic than an economy managed by the nobility. And compared to that it was, but ultimate it just ended up creating a new nobility in all but name.
But just because they were wrong about one thing doesn't mean they were wrong about everything. You can pick and choose ideas, and the anarchism you're promoting is one such attempt.
Again, you have skipped over the principal point or points that i am making.
Democracy is not working. An important difference to distinguish between anarchism and democracy is how easy it is to coerce and/or corrupt the central body in charge. That is what is happening now on a massive scale, it was always happening on a large scale we can assume, but now it's leaps and bounds above anything that we have seen before, just look at what is happening in South America as a result, for example.
My main point is still that democracy is not working now, and ANY alternative could help, if not least, to reset the whole thing.
A governing body made up of a very small minority easily corrupt with many career political families only benefits those already with the power and money.
Your points? You haven't been making any! All you've been doing is treating the assertions that democracy is susceptible to corruption and anarchism less so as almost axiomatic, backing it with little more than "look at how bad things are!" (while ignoring all other factors that created the current state of things) and a need for an alternative, while being dishonest about what democracy is.
All forms of governance, with no exceptions, require delegation. But as soon as you delegate, there is room for corruption, and therefore a need to prevent it. In other words, there is always going to be a minority of people mandated with authority and a need for mechanisms to ensure that they don't abuse that authority. And any system of accountability that involves fewer people than the public, is going to be more corruptible than one that does involve the public. Even anarchism would, without a democratic core, inevitably decay into a dictatorship in all but name. By insisting that anarchism is distinct from democracy, you're contributing to undermining the very thing you're trying to achieve.
If you're trying to say that there are some very fundamental problems with current implementations of democracy, I wholeheartedly agree. But do put it that way, then. Democracy is entirely too important to be reduced to a lure for replies.