I went to the Wikipedia verson of “liquid democracy”:
Delegative democracy, also known as liquid democracy,[1] is a form of democracy whereby an electorate has the option of vesting voting power in delegates rather than voting directly themselves.
No, the TDG is not a liquid democracy. TDG citizens do not have the option to vote directly or assign their vote to a representative.
About 15 years ago, I ran into a fellow who had developed a system that is fairly close to a liquid democracy. We had a wonderful email chat for about a couple weeks. While I didn’t agree with him, I acknowledged that he is one of the few out-of-the-box political thinkers whose ideas are worthy of further discussion. I wrote about his system: Dynamic Recovery Proxy (DRP).
The DRP still requires a voter to assign voting rights to individuals, but that assignment can change hour-by-hour. It is still pretty “liquid” by my estimation.
I predict that if the DRP is ever implemented, maybe 10% of citizens would be active in following the bills going through the legislatures and casting votes to the influencers of their current preference. A substantial majority of citizens would assign their voting power to someone else, maybe changing that assignment a few times each decade.
Another fault of the DRP is that the citizens are unlikely to have a personal connection with their chosen representative. For instance, if I believe in no speeding tickets ever, I would find a person of this political persuasion. But he is likely to be live far away from me and I have no feeling for how he will handle himself in the meeting. In the other words, I base my assignment on his media image — which may already be unduly influenced by big money.
I think it’s important to understand that average citizens do not observe politics the same way as political junkies. We should not cater to those citizens who cling to the drama of power.
