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Why was universal suffrage voted into being when it's an obvious moral hazard?
>“The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a ‘warm body’ democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction. It depends solely on the wisdom and self-restraint of citizens… which is opposed by the folly and lack of self-restraint of other citizens. What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it… which for the majority translates as ‘Bread and Circuses.’
>‘Bread and Circuses’ is the cancer of democracy, the fatal disease for which there is no cure. Democracy often works beautifully at first. But once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader—the barbarians enter Rome.”
How was it pitched and accepted into society? Was there an event that changed people's minds? Old timey propaganda? How did such a flawed idea become a commonly held ideal?
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If the fundamental flaw with a democracy is that humans are flawed, do they stop being flawed if they become kings?
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Suffrage was handed out piecemeal. In the beginning the new western states had universal white male suffrage to encourage people to immigrate. The Eastern seaboard states, apart from SC and Virginia, followed suit to try and stem their citizens from leaving. Then it was extended to all males, though voter repression for blacks and others were common in certain areas.
Female suffrage followed after several decades as the arguments against it began to seem more and more arbitrary and with that you basically had universal suffrage.
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In the USA at least Andrew Jackson removed the traditional property based voting where it was done by heads of families and put in its place the "democratic" system whereby property owning blacks could no longer vote as it was a system of universal suffrage, but for white men only, by virtue of their being white men.
Then we come to the civil war era where we have universal suffrage for all free men, blacks are given the right to vote because they were now technically free men, and many in the north felt it would be an injustice to not allow blacks who had fought for the union to vote in it, not to mention the added benefit of a large north supporting voting block in conquered southern lands. Feminism starts as splinter groups of abolitionists with guys like Frederick Douglas standing by to sign their manifestos. Eventually feminist agitations come out on top and now everybody can vote.
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>>2954721
Democracy works fine when the people in it have to pay net taxes
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>>2954762
>Democracy works when people vote for reasonable policy
Yeah, about that...
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