The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for…

The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1 https://t.co/eIQ2kNV1Pp

The Teals are just the latest way to try to address the problems popularity-based politics creates. The whole reason they exist is to force action on agendas popularity politics had shut down. Without elections, there are just the issues to be dealt with. /2

No need to ‘build support’ to do basic things, like fix water, roads, electricity etc. No manufactured consent for whatever the manufacturer wants for themselves. No consent needed at all, just work on the problems that need fixing. This terrifies us because the libertarians…/3

…have spent years getting us to believe democracy and elections are the same thing. Foreign aid becomes dependent on ‘free and fair elections’, as if that makes a country a democracy. Free and fair elections are a thin veneer on top of actual democracy. /4

If you zoom out from the daily team sports of popularity politics (including on Twitter), where the obsessive focus is on who wins, on getting your people up and criticising the other team. And the disappointment when an election doesn’t change much. /5

How could popularity *ever* be a stable foundation for government? There is no area of life that works using popularity. You couldn’t raise your kids or run your business with it. In fact parenting and business are fundamentally about managing what ISN’T popular. Otherwise…/6

…we wouldn’t need either, parents or managers. We’d just let everybody do what the majority felt like doing. We’re electoral fundamentalists, totally blindsided by this populist mechanism. /end