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We Need to Rethink Democracy: An Anarchist Critique, and What It Means for DOD

Thumbnail for Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" Thumbnail from Andrewism's video, used here for editorial commentary — click through to watch on YouTube.

Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" (June 2026) argues that democracy — even "real," direct, consensus-based democracy — is not a fellow traveller of anarchism but one of its obstacles. It's a substantial, well-sourced essay, and the argument is worth engaging with directly, including the parts that cut against how DOD itself talks about its work.

Main lesson —

  • The critique's strongest points (manufactured majorities, hidden representation in direct democracy, voting-theory results) aren't anarchist talking points you can dismiss on ideological grounds — they're genuine problems every democratic model has to sit with, agnostic-about-models or not
  • The critique's weakest point (what happens when free association fails on a non-exit-able shared stake like a river or a pandemic) is where binding mechanisms tend to reappear under another name — anarchism doesn't have a better answer, but naming that gap honestly matters more than scoring points
  • Holding a fundamental critique of democracy without flinching, on a site named Designing Open Democracy, is the difference between a landscape that does the work and one that just curates comfortable ideas

The core argument

The video's claim, in short: demos + kratos means "rule of the people," and the "rule" part is not incidental. Etymology aside, the historical record of democracy — Athens, the American republic, every system that has called itself democratic since — has always meant binding collective decisions enforced on people who didn't consent to them, and a demos drawn narrower than everyone actually subject to that rule.

That gap between the demos and everyone subject to it isn't a footnote — it's the structure. In Athens, roughly a third of the population were enslaved people with no political standing whatsoever. Women were excluded from formal participation. Resident foreigners (metics) — people who lived, worked, and paid taxes in Athens for generations — had no voice in the assembly that governed them. The demos that produced Pericles and the Parthenon was maybe 10–15% of the actual population subject to its rule.

This pattern doesn't stop being relevant after antiquity. Democratic states today define and enforce demos boundaries with life-and-death consequences. People are rendered stateless by legislative definition — their existence simply written out of the category the democratic system recognises as its constituency. Indigenous communities whose relationship to land and governance predates the democratic state by millennia have no vote in the parliaments that authorised their dispossession. Populations subjected to military force, displacement, and genocide by governments elected by a demos that explicitly excludes them are, in a structural sense, experiencing the same logic Athens applied to its slaves and metics: binding decisions made by people who do not consider you part of "the people." That democratic states have expanded their franchise over time is real, but expansion is a concession the demos makes to people it previously excluded — it doesn't negate the founding violence of the exclusion itself.

Several writers are cited to build the case:

  • Bob Black, Debunking Democracy (2011) — there is no self-evident, neutral set of voting rules (majority vs. plurality, quorums, who sets the agenda), and "preference is more or less, consent is yes or no" — majority rule overrides intensity of preference with raw headcount.
  • CrimethInc, From Democracy to Freedom (2016) — representative democracy is "the great achievement of two and a half centuries of democratic revolutions: instead of abolishing the means by which kings governed, they rendered those means popular."
  • David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (2004) and There Never Was a West (2007) — credits stateless societies (Haudenosaunee, Amazigh, Sulawesi, Tallensi) with consensus-based collective decision-making predating and outside the Greek term, while still treating "democracy" broadly enough to include non-majoritarian consensus process.
  • Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (1998) — even sympathetic democratic theorists concede that direct democracy collides with basic arithmetic: at any scale, a handful of "fully participating members" become de facto representatives of everyone else, "yet nothing insures that the fully participating members are representative of the rest."
  • Historical anarchists — Proudhon, Bakunin, Lucy Parsons — are quoted rejecting democracy (including direct and universal-suffrage forms) on the same grounds they rejected the state: "no man has any right to rule another man."

The video singles out Murray Bookchin's communalism as the clearest case of "anarchist democracy" actually being majoritarian rule by another name, and pushes back on contemporary anarchists (citing Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Wayne Price, Kevin Carson) who use "democracy" to describe consensus-based, non-binding collective process. The argument isn't just etymological pedantry: it's that calling consensus process "democracy" imports the connotation of binding, enforced collective will — and risks reproducing it in practice. "What begins as a compromise in language risks becoming a compromise in practice."

The proposed alternative is anarchy: no demos (no boundary of who counts), no kratos (no enforced collective decision), free association as the organising principle, and agreements that bind only as long as participants freely affirm them.

Where this lands relative to DOD

DOD's Philosophy page is explicitly agnostic about which democratic model is correct — it doesn't take a position on direct vs. representative vs. sortition-based vs. liquid democracy, and treats "democracy" as a broad, contested family of governance experiments rather than one fixed institution. This critique sits one level up from that agnosticism: it isn't arguing for a better democratic model, it's arguing that the category itself — any system that produces collectively binding decisions enforced on dissenters — is the thing worth rejecting.

That's a genuinely different claim than anything DOD's existing concept pages cover. direct-democracy, deliberative-democracy, and democratic-confederalism all describe ways of organising binding collective decision-making. The video's argument is that binding is the load-bearing problem, independent of how participatory or consensus-driven the process getting there is.

A few of the critique's sharper points are hard to wave away even from a pro-democracy vantage:

  • The majority/minority framing is itself manufactured. Voting compresses individual, varying-intensity preferences into a binary bloc structure that didn't exist before the vote was taken. This is a real cost of any majoritarian mechanism, not just a rhetorical flourish.
  • Direct democracy doesn't escape representation, it just hides it. Dahl's point — that participation time limits mean a small subset of "fully participating members" end up speaking for everyone else, with no guarantee they're representative — describes a failure mode that shows up in real assemblies, not just theoretical ones.
  • Voting-theory results (Condorcet cycling, the McKelvey-Schofield chaos theorem) are a genuine practical problem, not an anarchist talking point — they're standard results in social choice theory that mean majority-rule outcomes in multidimensional policy spaces can be manipulated via agenda control to produce nearly any result.

Where the critique is more contestable: it treats "binding decision enforced on non-consenters" as inherently illegitimate regardless of how the decision was reached or what it's protecting (the video doesn't address, for instance, how an alegal society resolves a case where one party's free association directly harms another who hasn't consented to that harm — only that "best practice will entail consultation and negotiation"). That's the standard anarchist response to the standard objection, and it's an old argument; this post isn't the place to adjudicate it, but a human author publishing this should decide how much space to give that tension.

Where it actually meets DOD's framework: scope, not mechanism

DOD's assessment standard (the "load-bearing axiom" of the Philosophy page) is about scope, not mechanism: accountability is owed to everyone subject to a governance system's power, regardless of how that system organises participation. The framework is explicitly agnostic on how — majority vote, consensus, sortition, vanguard consultation are all "in scope" as long as the system is genuinely trying to govern for and with the people it has power over, in good faith.

The anarchist critique doesn't propose a different how. It proposes there should be no governance power in the relevant sense at all — no kratos, so no scope question to ask in the first place. That's a real gap between the two frameworks, not just a difference of degree: DOD's standard presupposes that some entity will hold power over others and asks whether that power is accountable; anarchism's answer is to dissolve the entity holding the power, which would make the question moot rather than answer it well. Anarchist and anarchist-adjacent experiments (consensus process, sociocracy, free association networks) still fit inside DOD's landscape on their own terms — they're governance experiments worth understanding — but the framework doesn't have a ready answer to "what do we do when there's a non-exit-able shared stake and free association alone hasn't produced agreement," because the video's own answer (negotiation, consultation) is the same answer democratic theory gives for the easy cases. It's the hard cases — a river two communities both draw from, a shared atmosphere, a pandemic — where binding mechanisms tend to reappear under some other name, and where the critique is thinnest.

That's worth being explicit about, rather than papering over: this isn't "anarchism is wrong," it's "anarchism's account of what happens after free association fails to produce agreement on a non-exit-able stake is the part doing the least work in the argument," and the parts doing the most work — the manufactured-majority critique, the hidden-representation-in-direct-democracy critique, the voting-theory results — are genuine contributions that any serious account of democratic legitimacy needs to sit with, agnostic-about-models or not.

Why this might be worth a DOD post at all

DOD monitors organisations and concepts "regardless of ideological label," per the curation standard on the Organisations page — anarchist and anarchist-adjacent governance experiments (consensus process, sociocracy, free association models) are in scope on the same basis as electoral reform groups, provided they're not purely abuse-documentation without governance engagement. A critique this substantive, aimed squarely at the category DOD is named after, is the kind of thing the landscape should be able to hold without flinching — and a published post is one place to do that holding visibly, rather than only in private discussion.