Sure. But not everything in one system can be dropped in so easily, especially when we’re talking about parliamentary systems. (After all, the creators of the US already had an example of a parliamentary system which they were actively trying to not be like.)
My favorite example is voting systems. I teach voting systems, and am well aware that FPTP voting is widely considered to be truly terrible. So why not replace it with something like STV? Among the answers is this simple but compelling one: FPTP is completely transparent, and can be verified by mathematically illiterate people sitting at tables examining hanging chads. STV requires confidence in computer program verification. FPTP is therefore more appropriate for a system which is founded on deep mistrust of people in power.
But is it working? Are we getting a government that humans naturally support that’s better than just random citizens? Or an old Jurist type system or something?
I get that new ideas are scary, but our current system is abso-freaking-lutely terrifying to anybody who’s not a white male.
Yes, I would say this aspect of the system does more-or-less what it is supposed to. It makes it nearly impossible for 3rd parties to rise up, which is a bad thing, but the 1st party candidates we’ve had (even Trump!) have been pretty reflective of party values, which are set at the grass-roots level. The bits that are broken are things like the ability of monied interests to influence the system through back doors, as well as the concentration of the media and consequent power of organizations like the disgusting Murdoch organization.
Our system is also maddeningly slow, but sometimes that too isn’t a bad thing - just look how quickly the UK broke itself because of one idiot trying to placate another idiot with an ad-hoc referendum. If Trump wins we’re all going to be exceedingly grateful for the inertia in the system.
Everyone hates the long US presidential election cycle, but without it we wouldn’t have had Obama, and Sanders wouldn’t have had a shot.
There are many things I envy in some other Western systems, for example PM Question Time in the UK, proportional representation in several countries, and the small ratio of constituents to representative in most of the parliamentary systems. Of these, the latter probably has the most impact on the legislative process, but I don’t see how to fix that in a country our size. (The UK, for example, has 1/5 our population and 650 MPs in the lower house. Do we want to grow Congress to 3000 members?)
I’d add an asterisk to that first clause: war. We are really good at quickly rolling out the caissons even if it’s based on intel solely from one guy who may or may not have totally lied to the White House about whether Iraq had stockpiled weapons that could turn Kurdish territory into glass. As an example.
Yeah. This is technically an abuse of presidential power, but we’ve been doing it for decades, and it is a problem. Unfortunately, in those countries which separate the commander in chief from the head of government you can get things like coups. Strengthening the War Powers Act might be a solution; paradoxically, if it had force, Congress might not be so quick to vote against authorizing action, which they’ve done as a matter of course for political reasons even when they secretly wanted the action to take place.
The Obama administration has added a nuance to the United States’ history of an itchy trigger-finger with the greatly expanded stealth drone assassination counter-terrorism program. No Congressional declaration of war required. It’s like someone at the Pentagon had read Ender’s Game growing up and two decades later still thought ‘hey, this is a great idea’.
The creepy drone assassination program has wide public support. Whatever the growth of this program reveals, it isn’t a flaw in the democratic process.
This isn’t the only thread where I’ve defended the US political system as not being as broken as everyone says it is, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think the country is kind of broken.
Agreed. This is the same strain of optimism that informed the Reagan administration’s push to dismantle the (admittedly awful) mental illness care facilities, send the brain-cootied* out into the streets, and assume churches and uh, nice people would take them in. Or something.
*As someone with brain cooties, I can assure you that this is an affectionate term.
Well, it IS a problem with our specific system…it’s unfair to just say ‘political’ because that system exists in context, but the combination of our governance, our commerce, and other foundational and legal constructs is NOT something to rest our laurels on. I think it’s important to admit that and look forward (and find evidence-based ways to improve it or come up with ways to experiment with better options) rather than just say ‘it’s the best we can do’, much less throw out an eyeroll when somebody offers man excellent and well tested solutions.
There are plenty of people who can govern themselves without adventuring overseas and murdering other people, and no, almost none of our wars or ‘police actions’ have been ‘necessary’ and those that have had some justification were more often than not caused by failures of our own in the past (i.e. the fact that we keep turning farmers and students into terrorists) or else could have been solved by giving the refugees a place to be (since they’re better citizens than we are on a consistent basis) rather than dehumanizing and endangering them simultaneously.
Even in the context of our designed Nation (which itself has some flaws) there are a TON of things we could do better, and I’d advocate…
1) An immediate move towards basic dignity and a decent standard of living for all citizens. Our safety nets are crap and trap people in poverty. 2) A return (and then some) to the post-robber-baron taxation that for a time did a decent job of preventing absurd income inequality (if somebody has more wealth and power than your average EMT, odds are they didn’t earn it they just got lucky). 3) A complete and utter end to foreign interventions as quickly as possible. We can still have policing and such, but no risking endangering innocent civilians, and no ‘kill first’ attitudes. Almost every ‘terrorist’ we kill was fully redeemable and could have been a productive human, and instead we leave a mess behind.
Gah, there’s just three, I could add another 20 to that list easily enough… and @Wanderfound had a post full of solutions too.
He really didn’t. For example, the political boundary issue is a non-starter, because that is a state matter. I’m all for campaign finance reform and spending limits, but that is a matter of legislation, and it never passes or aspects get shot down by the Supreme Court. Federal election monitors is solving a non-problem; the only people in the US who think voting fraud is a major issue is the GOP, and study after study show they’re wrong. Mandatory voting? I’d only support that if it includes a placement exam on the issues, otherwise its Trumps all the way down.
All these countries that are supposedly much better than we are - they’re not. They’re not worse, just not better, and if you look at the people they elect into office they’re no great shakes either. The issue with the US is that we’re big and powerful, so everything we do has massive global repercussions. When the UK was the dominant power, their political system didn’t keep them from “adventuring overseas and murdering other people,” that wasn’t an artifact of their system it was a consequence of their global position and ambitions.
When you have a democracy that is supposed to be “of the people,” and the legislators it elects and the actions the government carries out are supposed to reflect the will of the people, then the system is working. You and I might not like these legislators and actions, but a government designed to represent you and me rather than the mass of the people, that would be the broken system. To effect real change requires changing the will of the people.
Even long, loud political campaigning, one of the things that drives many of us nuts, is helpful for that. Before the primary season voters in the US were 5-2 in favor of TPP, with the Democrats supporting it even more strongly than Republicans. The fact that we’re now all opposed to it is the campaign’s doing. It isn’t the ideal way to educate the electorate, but it does seem to be one of the few times voters pay careful attention to such things.
You seem certain that none of these things wouldn’t work, I’m not convinced they should just be disregarded so casually, and I FIRMLY think that if ‘real change requires the will of the people’ (and the effort and coherence that is required yet is often absent) then we’re making progress unnecessarily difficult.
How long did we have slavery? How long until women could vote? How long until we had marriage equality? How long do we have to wait until women and minorities have equality?
You also didn’t address any of the three nice and simple examples I gave. If our government can’t get us there then what’s it good for? Is it better to be wasting tons of resources creating terrorists, giving a tiny number of people absurd amounts of power when they’re often the most dangerous when wielding it, and leaving millions without basic dignity or the ability to productively contribute to society?
Well, I certainly addressed the third. I don’t see the other two as things that require a change in our political system, only in our legislation and our will. We were moving in the right direction (or what I would deem the right direction) on both before Reagan took office. American politics has been laboring in the shadow of Reagan ever since, with some cracks finally appearing the last 8 years. Trump is the reductio of post-Reagan conservative politics, and if he gets soundly defeated we have a real shot at getting back on track, even with a Clinton in charge. (A sufficiently sound defeat might require people on the left to stop saying she’s just as bad as Trump, and to vote for her instead of irrelevant candidates, even in deeply red states.)
That’s the inertia issue I addressed upthread. Here’s the thing: the same inertia that makes it take longer than we’d like to address the things we’d like to see in place tomorrow (or yesterday) also works against our enemies. I don’t think Trump is going to win, but surely you agree that if he does it is nice that he won’t be able to put his ideas into place in a matter of days? Nimble systems can do a lot of harm very quickly; just look at Brexit.
I guess we’re just not going to be on the same page on this. I see the words you’re saying, and I understand what you’re trying to say, I just don’t see even Brexit (which is a singular rare event and it would be easily reversed by the people if the government wasn’t doubling down) as a relevant response to the question.
I think the agility more in the 90% positive 10% negative standpoint, and I don’t think disregarding the fact that we’re murdering innocent strangers for no good reason as well as leaving people here homeless and hopeless when we have plenty of resources is viable or ethical.
The people who are currently alive don’t have time to wait for us to get our acts together. Generations of people live and die while we’re collectively stuck in ‘inertia’.
So, while I suppose you feel you addressed them, I just don’t see them as addressed adequately in the context of humanity as a whole. You just dismissed them and IMHO you dismissed them without validity or accuracy. We clearly have working examples of better systems in many nations, and it’s never necessary for us to actively ruining lives. Similarly, I strongly disagree that no other country has ‘better’ solutions than we have. We don’t solve income inequality with ‘political will’, we solve it with a system that serves the people across the board…one that gets people better than random toddlers in charge.
The Northern European countries are way ahead of us in many fronts, including local law enforcement, prisons, education, safety nets, and health care. New Zealand has had full welfare since what, 1940 or so?
You just keep saying ‘no’ to everything, or just ‘it needs us to have the political will’, and I think somebody who’s a minority, transgendered, homeless, hopeless, in absurd debt, or is in a country overseas that we’re ruining with our interventionism has every right to say ‘bullshit’ to that fundamental concept.
They shouldn’t have to wait for us to get our shit together, especially since half the time we’re actively pissing in their Cheerios.
Well, I’ve lived in Norway and I’ve lived in England, so I have some firsthand experience of how some other governments work. I think there is a lot we can learn from them w/r to policy: functional free higher education in Norway proves that that is possible, and the excellent health care system in England proves that single-payer can work. What I don’t see is any evidence that their political systems are the cause of the better policy. There are parliamentary systems that elect socialists and pacifists, and there are parliamentary systems that elect Berlusconis and Theresa Mays. Hell, you cite tiny New Zealand, but their PM John Key is almost indistinguishable from HRC in political views.
I’m not saying “no” to everything, I’m saying that the problems with our country are not going to be changed by adopting bits of other country’s political systems. If you think that, say, mandatory voting is going to lead to local law enforcement reform, then make an argument to the effect, otherwise you are falling prey to post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Ahh, gotcha. Note that I never said that mandatory voting was a good idea (I don’t think it is). I’m more focused on solutions that are actually viable, and my argument was more that our political system was a barrier to progress in many of the issues discussed…not that there was a single magic bullet.
Also, to re-emphasize a point, I fully recognize that the context is not JUST the political system, the economic system, the media, and the entire scope of a nation’s operations is what’s a factor here. For example the two-party system becomes more polarizing as the media moves away from the old 60 minutes model and towards the news-entertainment 24-hour news cycle model. Nothing happens in a vacuum and if we don’t adapt to that we end up trapped in exactly the sort of mess we’re in.
I’m also, to be honest, not the greatest believer that democracy (Science says we’re not good at it, as does evidence, so let’s just admit it and look for other options)… at least from the standpoint of large groups (over 50K people or so)… is something that is the best way to go for us humans. Once that accountability gap gets too big then parliamentary systems also have their flaws. I personally think a variant of the old Jurist system (where a small randomized group of citizens with a smaller group of SMEs with a maximum group size of 150 is tasked with much of the decision making) would be better with larger groups…but that’s just one idea out of a field of thousands…many of which are completely untested. We THOUGHT democracy would work after all.
Laws are also an issue. They shouldn’t be soulless things. They should, at a minimum, start with ‘here’s the problem we’re perceiving’ followed by ‘here’s the evidence that it’s actually a problem we should solve’ followed by ‘and here’s what’s been done so far to try to solve it’ and THEN ‘here’s the current attempt to solve that problem’. With a clear and transparent process that ties the whole together to make sure that things are still on track.
Accountability/transparency-wise, obviously we’ve got it backwards. The greater the influence and the greater the resources impacted the greater the transparency should be. Not the other way around.
Election-wise, the ‘gotcha’ moments are a major issue. Perhaps a proxies-and-pennies system would work better (everybody has a limited number of resources to allocate between basic governance and ‘causes’, and they get assigned to proxies, and the more significant the issue the bigger the lag between declaration and implementation so those proxies can be revoked if the people feel that somebody’s gone off the rails. So if I want to weight some of my focus towards nature and the environment and David Attenborough is a possible proxy then I can assign to him, but he knows that the bigger the impact of his decision making the more it’ll be eyeballed…so a generic mutual trust generation mechanism is developed)… certainly we’ve seen enough cases where a politician (I was in Wisconsin during the Scott Walker debacle) says one thing to get elected and then turns on the radical once they’re in.
Governance-wise, something with more regional focus combined with more possible mobility is pretty much necessary for us to function sanely (Dunbar’s number is painfully real), and we have the technology to make something like that work now. The idea of everybody being on the same page based on the chunk of dirt they’re born on is SUPER naive and clearly isn’t working. We’re tribal and we change a lot throughout our lives, so allowing ‘governments within governments’ would be an amazing approach for increasingly more local issues. That requires a much more complex set of processes but given the stakes (again … institutionalized murder, etc.) what’s wrong with being as creative as possible and setting up a bunch of test beds? See what works, let people choose what they like and literally let them vote with their feet.
There are problems, and each solution adds new ones, but the rate of new solutions GREATLY exceeds the rates of new problems. It’s basically logarithmic vs. linear.
But we’re stuck in the 1700s if we’re just waiting for 320 million people to agree on anything.
I don’t think it’s radical anymore to say ‘holy shit, we need to try a lot of different things so they’re not a bunch of thought experiments because this is NOT working’. I think it’s radical to say ‘let’s just hold the course!’.
If we need a test bed, how about the refugees? Give them a huge chunk of land, let them choose from a bunch of ‘seed’ options, and use an open-source forking structure to let them show us what works and what doesn’t? Way better than just leaving them in tents, right? And they can be just as productive as any of us. A brain is a brain and we’re wasting resources.
Oh, yeah, and we’re tormenting humans and destroying the easy viability of the planet. Milquetoast has seen it’s time. I’d rather let somebody like Jane Mcgonigal come up with some options than wait for the Democrats and Republicans to stop the drone strikes and treat the refugees like a resource again, y’know?
(sorry that was long… but that’s a lot of bases to cover)
Fair enough. I agree that we have a ton of problems, and that there are silly barriers in the system to adopting policy that is certainly better than ours.
My eye-rolling above wasn’t to the idea that we should consider change, but rather to someone from another country saying, “You Americans with your arrogant nationalist notions that your system is better; you should consider this stuff from my better system.” The lack of self-awareness in this kind of thing is staggering.
It drove me nuts when I lived in England during the Thatcher/Reagan years and friends would tell me how screwed up the US was for electing an idiot like Reagan, and then defend Tatcher on the grounds that she was smart…but then later complain how Thatcher was doing everything Reagan told her to do, and that too was the US’s fault.
This kind of thing goes back at least to de Toqueville, who at least had the good grace not to argue outright that the problem with the US was that it wasn’t more like France.
[quote=“William_Holz, post:1095, topic:72574”]
But we’re stuck in the 1700s if we’re just waiting for 320 million people to agree on anything.[/quote]
Yeah, our size is kind of the problem. I said that above. The reason we were able to pressure the two senators in my state to vote against the Iraq war is that they each represented only 500K people. In Texas the two senators represent 13 million people apiece. In the UK the largest constituency is just over 100K, and the target is 75K. In New Zealand it is around half that. We would have a lot more influence on our government if we could get closer to our legislators, but more legislators is not the answer either: the UK is already finding 650 MPs unwieldy, and there are efforts to reduce that to 600. We would need thousands to get their ratio.
I’d rather let somebody like Jane Mcgonigal come up with some options than wait for the Democrats and Republicans to stop the drone strikes and treat the refugees like a resource again, y’know?
I’ like to agree, but who decides who the “somebody” is? You like Jane Mcgonigal, but there are a whole bunch of people out there who like Donald Trump.
