> Your vote is good if you vote for good people and good policies. Yes. But if a person votes for bad people and bad policies, then I don't see what's so good about it.

Democracy is a means of securing regular, peaceful power transitions. Whether the outcome is particularly good or bad is not relevant, because all power is transient.

The alternative is a civil war/revolution every now and then.

Voting as a simulated war where the armies show up, get counted, but don't actually fight makes sense to me as an analogy, but doesn't this break down when you add the notion of universal suffrage to the equation? That is, if you have large fraction of the voting population who would be worse than useless in an actual battle, doesn't the output of the simulation start to drift from reality?

I wonder about term limits.

I wonder if they should apply to all positions, or would it lead to a somewhat poorly run country because all people in charge are all noobies?

Is there good or bad voting? I think democracy is about representing interests, if a number of people have an interest that is against the interest of someone else, does that make it wrong or bad? yeah I mean bad from your interest point of view, but not from a global point of view

I think the woke culture is a bit flawed, because if there is something that is objectively bad, and something that is objectively good, why even have democracy at all? Let's just put there the sun king and move on?

> But if a person votes for bad people and bad policies...

The entire point of voting is that you are allowed to vote for whoever is running. Of course, the notion of a "bad policy" is as old as voting itself, but the noblest democracies are those which don't judge people for voting as they see fit, or else what's the point of voting at all? Just appoint a righteous elite to do all the political appointments for you.

However, just as there's been no consistently wise electorate, neither has there been a consistently wise elite class. In the end, in both cases, the best you can do politically is build a bulwark against corruption because you can't avoid it, which is why the stablest governments are the ones that make the job of the highest political seats as difficult as possible to actually do anything and put the bulk of the power in the hands of committees that have to argue about things to come to a decision.

> And so, if voting is good, maybe we should have more voting.

Voting on its own is not inherently good. Plenty of dictatorships operate under the guise of voting, where either candidates opposing the ruling party are entirely absent or voting for them is punishable in various ways (which is why the political polarization in the west is particularly chilling). There are plenty of "People's republics" out there that are neither republics nor representative of the people (unless, perhaps, you narrowly define "people", as the US originally did).

What is arguably good (at least in the liberal western mind) is maintaining a system of political friction (checks and balances) that ensure different parts of the government are effective limiters on each other's authority to make it as difficult as possible for a tyrant to seize control. IMO Trump was a pretty solid litmus test of the resilience of the American government against tyrannical takeover.

The downside of this, as we're seeing the recent competition between east and west, is that tyranny can be much more effective at getting stuff done than democracy can hope to be, at least in the short term. However, strong tyrants still die and eventually a weak tyrant takes their place and the country falls apart.

The (theoretical) strength of representative government is that it outlives any one or handful of strong rulers. I say theoretical because technically ancient Egypt's history spans more years than the entirety of human history after Christ (so far), but as can be seen in their history, they had plenty of royal family squabbles and foreign invasions in that time. How they retained national cohesion through it all would be an interesting study.

> The entire point of voting is that you are allowed to vote for whoever is running.

There’s the rub. In the United States we’re permitted to choose from either one or two candidates, both of whom have been sponsored by one of two national private clubs or one of their local chapters. You will not see any mention of nominations or political parties anywhere in the US Constitution, and yet that’s the system that determines who is eligible to run. In California a single club controls who is permitted to run for most local and all national offices.

It’s so obviously kayfabe that I’m baffled that there are rubes out there who think this is a real choice anymore than picking “any” card from a magician’s deck is.

It also ought to make one wonder who exactly the first person plural is in that overworked phrase “our democracy.”

> ancient Egypt's history spans more years than the entirety of human history after Christ (so far), but as can be seen in their history, they had plenty of royal family squabbles and foreign invasions in that time. How they retained national cohesion through it all would be an interesting study.

Generally attributed to Egypt's relatively high population density at the time. They grew a lot of grain. They had a lot of people.