this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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Like in the 2016 election? Or in 2000? The system is set up to prevent the will of the people from being enacted and it takes a massive crisis for everyone to be pissed off enough to do something. Add to that the control of nearly all media by the oligarchy and you get to where we are today.
The US government system was set up to be better than the monarchies its designers had grown up under. In this sense it has been wildly successful. But... it wasn't really designed to scale to the size it has, nor to account for the massive changes in technology that have occurred since it was written.
The leaders of the time decided to replace the first attempt only 6 years after it was ratified, and I believe they fully expected any future government to do the same if they found the current system wasn't working. They did try to make the new system more adaptable by adding the Amendment process, which was frankly genius and unprecedented in government systems prior to that.
I think it's very important to remember where and when the system we have came from, and to try to think like the people who wrote it, and to remember that at the time they had no other models for successful government beyond the writings of Enlightenment-period historians. It's very easy to criticize the current system. It's far more difficult (and substantially more important) to draft a better system.
I've often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.
But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we're still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We're the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc
Can you give any specific examples
I'm not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country's democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven't adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they'd require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.
A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I'm not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it's been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.
Basically, especially right now it's clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it's really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you on the probable outcomes if America did implement structural changes these days. That has like a 1% chance of actually being something positive. I think perhaps the most recent, best possible time for significant reforms was somewhere between 1930-1990. It depends mostly on the specific kind of reform (basically whether or not women or minorities were relevant to the change, farther in the past would be worse outcomes for them).
But some things like campaign finance reform, how many seats there are in the House, Supreme Court Reform, etc could've been accomplished with a relatively high likelihood of positive outcomes.
Basically before the complete collapse of proper journalism, when broadcast media was still king and most politicians still tended to compromise and were at least mostly interested in actually governing. It feels like post 90s, our governing body has passed some sort of tipping point where the majority of members are simply gaming the system, obstructing others from actually doing anything and shooting down any and all reasonable compromises. The actual productivity of Congress seems to be in total free fall. Bad actors pretty much always existed, but they only became a crippling number somewhat recently. (Or at least this seems true for the last 100 years, I have no idea if Congress was this dysfunctional in the early 1800s or something)
Everything you said is true, fair and I do agree. But I feel compelled to add that many of the issues built into the current structure of governance are a direct result of racism, white supremacy and slavery.
The reason the system is so incredibly resistant to change is that the anti-democratic parts of the Constitution are there because of slavery. Giving disproportionate power to the slave holding class then leads directly to a Senate that is almost always going to be 50%+ Republican today despite that party not winning a national majority in 30+ years.
I understand and appreciate that the system has safeguards against rapid and radical changes where 50%+1 can otherwise dominate the other half of the country. But we must acknowledge that the current framework is a poor facsimile of that and the reason is the original sin of this country.
Lastly, this is a bit of an aside, but this clip of Reggie Jackson (Hall of Fame baseball player) is really worth watching and remembering that what he experienced happened not that long ago and is indictive of the type of America that so many people on the right want to return to. https://youtu.be/R4mWOVy_02s?si=9irk_TD_JKWInMkt
Both elections exactly prove my point.
The federal system is set up to favor State power, which is why the US presidential election isn't decided by popular vote. By design, Wyoming and California are considered equals in many respects.
It's a bad system, but it's very much entrenched in the constitution.
And it also requires critical mass. It's basically impossible to enact meaningful change with a 50-55% majority. You need 60% or more to get big changes. And a majority of states.
There's the NPVIC which would cut the electoral college out of the process entirely.
Indeed - and I really hope it passes.
I thought about mentioning it in my previous comment. But basically, it's another example that States hold most of the power. The States actually have the power to effectively replace the current system with a national popular vote if they choose.
Other examples are the IRV in Alaska and the district system in Maine and Nebraska.