This is probably a much more difficult question to answer than you might expect.

If you asked me, I think liberal democracies all around the world are going through a legitimacy crisis. People have not been feeling, for a while now, properly represented by their politicians so they are always seeking to vote for someone that seems like the outsider. Right now, that is represented by these sort of authoritarian, big demagogue politicians.

I think a lot of the problems of the modern world require much more innovative ways of doing politics and our liberal democracies which are based on this concept of the "vote for your representative" are at the limits of what they can do. The systems we have are slow and inefficient in a world that changes rapidly and requires politics to adapt much more quickly than they can.

For this reason, imo, people have grown dejected from politics and the response of the electorate is a sort of self-destruction where they will vote for anyone that can resonate with a message of "i can fix it". Whatever that character might be. It's easy for politicians to play certain cards; say, immigration is the problem and the fix is to stop it. That seems like a simple solution and it's a message that can be understood pretty easily.

But what are the real problems of the 21st century, in Europe, in the USA, in the rest of the world? I think a lot of people might hyper-focus on certain problems and offer solutions just for those problems and act as if that could solve a much more systemic failure. Ultimately, it is my opinion that the problem is politicians/politics itself and so it is rather difficult for politicians to solve it. Politicians are quick to say "we've failed you" but they don't really mean it, it's true though.

A couple books that have really changed my perspective on how politics should be and why our systems are failing are: Systemic Corruption by Camila Vergara and Open Democracy by Helene Landemore. If you wanna know more.

Part of the problem is just scale.

National governments were formed to solve nation-sized issues (trains, taxation rates not changing every 50km, consistent languages and education systems, etc). Modern problems are bigger than that: globalized production chains, tax havens, climate change, migration flows, and superpower conflicts, simply cannot be fixed at the national level.

I can guarantee that all the boats in the Mediterranean and the North Sea will be shot on sight by my navy, but people will still get into Europe from somewhere else. I can ensure all the manufacturers in the country respect stringent pollution laws, but people will still buy cheaper and more polluting Chinese goods. And so on and so forth.

So we move to a super-national, continent-sized model, and we have a better chance to address these problems - but then we're adding more layers of indirection between citizenry and representatives, and we get an issue of legitimacy. It's a thorny subject.

Personally I think we can make good use of sortition to inject legitimacy into the system. Kind of like what has been done in ireland, france, belgium...

Sortition is very scalable and private citizens are actually much "cheaper" a resource than career politicians while imo being more legitimate and more interested in actually solving problems rather than furthering their careers.

It's an underrated social technology. It's why I recommended Landemore's book previously.

But a lot of people in government, even among the EC consists of what is effectively lifers. I don't think citing "outsiders" as the culprit is accurate.

The person who introduced CSAR most recently has been in high government positions for decades, I believe the previous iteration was as well.

Average tenure in the US senate is pretty close to the 2 term limit combined at 12 years, US house of representatives is also a bit over 4 terms combined at 8 years. Junior politicians are definitely not proposing their own legislation, especially with the existence of party whips and similar roles that exist across the world.

If its dejection, OK I can understand that. If it's seeking an outsider, yeah that's likely among the population. Authoritarian demagogues, well you're just labeling politicians what they are inherently, so no push back from me.

But combined together I can't accept. The people doing things like this are people who are familiar to us.

This sounds like voters are not responsible for voting. But in the end they are.

The thing is, the kind of people who become politicians at all are predisposed to this -- they are the kind of people who want to be in charge, to control, to decide.

(It's not just the EU, it's everywhere.)

Without pushback, politicians will just naturally move toward increasing their own authority. The new technology has opened up a new opportunity, so of course they are making their push.

Democracy, as messy, inefficient, and imperfect as it is, is the only form of government that gives all us non-politicians a reasonable chance to push back.

Let's keep doing that.

EU citizens don’t directly elect these politicians. They’re made up of heads of state, so people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government, and those resulting heads of state go to the council.

Also the EU isn’t some homogeneous entity, it’s made up of many different countries with many different views, that don’t all align. Asking why EU citizens vote for these types of politicians, is equivalent to asking why some Americans vote for abortion banning republicans. The answer as always is complicated, and there are many different issues that might feed into someone’s vote, and this specific issue might not have been the most important.

> people are voting for whoever they think is their best state government

It's even more complicated than that. For instance, "head of state" of Latvia in the Council which nominated current EU Commission president in 2019 was Karinsh, the prime minister of Latvia. Not being directly elected, the prime minister of Latvia gets nominated by president (not directly elected as well, BTW) and approved by coalition in the parliament. The punchline is that he was the leader of a party that got the least number of votes (and hence, number of seats in the parliament — 8/100) in the corresponding election. The party that got the most votes (and most seats) was not included into the coalition at all.

The fundamental problem with any representative democracy is that people want to vote on issues, but they are instead only given the opportunity to vote for whoever will "represent" them on those issues. Worse yet, it comes as a package deal where you have to basically select the policy package that comes the closest to what you want - which in practice often means "the least bad".

When the UK was in the EU we didn't care about the EU elections. Turnout peaked in 2004 at 38.9%, but could be as low as 24%.

If you asked the average UK citizen who their MEPs were, they wouldn't be able to tell you. And if we didn't care enough to know their names, we certainly weren't paying attention to the policies they voted for.

That makes MEPs very susceptible to lobbying, and the EU system very susceptible to corruption in general.

I wrote to all the UK MEPs when the awful Copyright Directive was being proposed, with its completely impractical technical demands and chilling consequences. Most of the MEPs didn't have a clue what was going on, and they didn't seem to care, because they just parrotted the talking points that the Commission had put forward when it pushed the Directive through, and the MEPs planned to obediently vote for the Directive. The only ones that didn't plan to support the Copyright Directive were the Euro-skeptic MEPs, and thank goodness they were there in the mix.

Because if you don't want to vote for them you are immediately branded far-right and a racist, and Europe will fall into a slippery-slope of re-Nazifying itself.

I don't think this is the right approach.

In fact, I think this kind of effort alienates people and turns them precisely into a direction where they vent their frustration with the system on wrong avenues.

In many ways, the people are voting for far-right politicians because there's been an intellectual elite that has told them again and again "your concerns don't matter, so just shut up for a moment". It turns out, they do matter. We ought to respect each other and listen to each other truthfully to be able to reach agreements.

Overall, I'd say, large groups of people are more than capable of reaching reasonable outcomes. The problem is our system of politics are not really encouraging dialogue and change of mind. In fact, a politician changing their mind is seen as a bad thing and is usually punished. But that's just how the system is set up to be, of course, a politician is supposed to represent an electorate so the politician needs to be rigid in their views and the electorate is the one that needs to change. But this comes with the problem that electorate cycles are slow and "the people" have a much harder time accessing and parsing information than a politician might have.

Ideally we'd ought to have a system where our representatives are capable and encouraged to come into an issue with an open mind, and upon deliberation decanting into a certain position. Regardless of political color.

And I think that's kind of completely the opposite to "these people should shut up", no, they should speak up and be heard. But it should be done in a context that allows for a fair and reasonable debate.

I'd prefer a society where when people say something stupid they are pointed out where they were wrong and why, instead of encouraging people to shut up

Right, but the hall monitors don’t grant that benefit of the doubt to others in the first place. Otherwise what parent pointed out wouldn’t be the case.

You may also be branded far-left too. The authoritarians in the 'center' are also afraid of a strong leftist movement taking their power and money away, not just a rightist one.

You can tell because different pro-surveillance arguments are concocted depending on the audience: for conservatives they say "think of the children, Islamic terrorism, drugs, etc." for leftists they say: "toxic content online, disinformation, right-wing-terror, hate crimes". And because everyone is terrified of the other side, and the Internet and mainstream media can be used to target these messages, we have what we have today.

Nobody cares about being branded far-left. It's not a smear. Afterall, "Antifa is just an idea", said the centrist ;)