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Democratic Theory

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

This post was drafted by Claude Code with AI-assisted research, prompted by a YouTube video the user flagged. A human editor should review it for general accuracy and framing before publication. Verify specific claims against the linked sources.

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.

The small rooms: how DOD's podcast archive reads from 2026

The DOD podcast archive runs from 2017 to 2023. DOD is a discussion forum — these were working conversations among practitioners thinking through how democracy functions and fails, not policy proposals or predictions. Revisiting them from 2026 is an exercise in calibration: did the observations hold up? Where did the analysis prove accurate, where is it still unresolved, and what did it miss entirely?