After a particularly disappointing night of election results for Republicans, former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) lamented “pure democracies,” where major decisions are left up to voters …
This is not an open question in liberal representative democracies.
You set the basic rules of the game and the minimun set of universal rights down at the constitutional level so they’re not accessible to change without massive consensus, then let the rest be subject to political legislative action under majority rule. People get the ability to express themselves under equal treatment from the law protected by consitutional rights while majority consensus sets the short-term decision-making.
If you want to actually have a functional one of those you also set a proportional electoral system, which makes smaller parties have a say through the frequent need to aggregate coalitions. This mostly works.
I swear, Americans have a fantastic knack for pretending it is physically impossible to resolve basic problems. “Sensible measurement units? If only we had the technology”.
The problem is that the US system is old and outdated, buggy as fuck, and was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change because that was what was necessary in order to get the slave states to join the union.
As for our measurements, we actually use a mix. In the military, science and engineering where it matters, we use metric. In everything else we use a kind of hybrid imperial system that in a lot of ways (not all) is much more intuitive than metric because it tends to be based on a human scale.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You’re doing the thing that I’m talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President’s set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it’d be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic “so fix it” switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn’t the case, but wishes aren’t worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that’s almost impossible to update because it’s full of ancient proprietary software that doesn’t play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
Yeeeeeah, I’m gonna ask you to stand way over there instead, if you don’t mind.
I may poke fun at Americans going straight from extreme conformism to violent revolution, but you and I are very much not in the same wavelength here. Even if you weren’t being obnoxious and rude I am clearly closer to them than you, politically.
Also, modern IP and copyright systems were profoundly broken before, but are entirely nonfunctional after the Internet happened, so… yeah, thinking you’re barking up the wrong socialdemocrat tree, friend.
This is not an open question in liberal representative democracies.
You set the basic rules of the game and the minimun set of universal rights down at the constitutional level so they’re not accessible to change without massive consensus, then let the rest be subject to political legislative action under majority rule. People get the ability to express themselves under equal treatment from the law protected by consitutional rights while majority consensus sets the short-term decision-making.
If you want to actually have a functional one of those you also set a proportional electoral system, which makes smaller parties have a say through the frequent need to aggregate coalitions. This mostly works.
I swear, Americans have a fantastic knack for pretending it is physically impossible to resolve basic problems. “Sensible measurement units? If only we had the technology”.
The problem is that the US system is old and outdated, buggy as fuck, and was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change because that was what was necessary in order to get the slave states to join the union.
As for our measurements, we actually use a mix. In the military, science and engineering where it matters, we use metric. In everything else we use a kind of hybrid imperial system that in a lot of ways (not all) is much more intuitive than metric because it tends to be based on a human scale.
Cool.
So fix it.
That seems like a good case for voting primarily on the basis of reform. Your Constitution is barely functional and barely contains hard rules on lawmaking. Individual states have a ton of power. You can change a ton of things, from the size of the Supreme Court to how elections are structured.
You’re doing the thing that I’m talking about right now. There is nothing in the US Constitution enforcing lifetime Supreme Court appointments or the current majorities. Fix that crap, then proceed to lock it in by constitutionalizing it ASAP. Why was that barely a blip after Trump effectively broke the Court and you spent the next few years learning about how corrupt the current batch of pseudo-aristocratic unaccountable magic people with power over the entire legislative corpus?
But nope, nobody knows how to properly set up a Constitutional Court (terms longer than a President’s set to renew partially so that every term you get some drift towards the current leading party but not a complete reversal-- it-s literally on every other liberal democracy), and it’d be impossible to accomplish anyway despite just taking a normal law, somehow. You should also change that part, by the way. Ideally before Trump wins again and gets any ideas.
You seem to have missed the part where I pointed out that the US system was deliberately designed to be almost impossible to change.
What part about this do you not understand?
There is no magic “so fix it” switch.
This is a part of our system because it was what was necessary to account for slavery.
We can wish that this wasn’t the case, but wishes aren’t worth shit when it comes to facing hard political reality.
If it helps you to make sense of it, think of US democracy as a very old and buggy operating system that’s almost impossible to update because it’s full of ancient proprietary software that doesn’t play nice with contemporary applications and that is supported by a large number of citizens who dislike the very idea of updating because they fear that it will somehow result in a net loss for them.
Removed by mod
Yeeeeeah, I’m gonna ask you to stand way over there instead, if you don’t mind.
I may poke fun at Americans going straight from extreme conformism to violent revolution, but you and I are very much not in the same wavelength here. Even if you weren’t being obnoxious and rude I am clearly closer to them than you, politically.
Also, modern IP and copyright systems were profoundly broken before, but are entirely nonfunctional after the Internet happened, so… yeah, thinking you’re barking up the wrong socialdemocrat tree, friend.