5 ms·

I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal b

I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.

BoxOfRain 5y ago
This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones. There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting. There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government. > There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement. I just think it's insanity to let essentially private and unaccountable organisations have this much power over ordinary people's lives. Laws should be made as part of an authentically democratic process that at least tries to involve the whole socio-economic makeup of the country, not as a result of private intrigues in the party's membership and leadership which represents a much smaller fraction of the population and obfuscates everything to the point that the vast majority of us won't hear about what actually happened until years after the fact when memoirs are published. Would there not be far more democracy if it were exercised directly rather than through the distorting lens of a party? I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates. Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
      - BoxOfRain 5y ago
        I'm not American, but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence? Either way, I get that they're regulated in theory as part of the public sphere but that's not the point I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests and as a result I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments where they can be scrutinised more transparently.

I think that would just cause issues like with the debt ceiling, but instead of a "government shutdown" we could have critical laws expiring and their renewal being held hostage.

BoxOfRain 5y ago

This would fit quite nicely into another fairly radical idea which is to reform our countries as "zero party democracies". It strikes me that a lot of political ills come from within parties rather than governments due to the gulf between "party" and "country" and all the conflicting loyalty it causes. We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents, who would in turn appoint the executive branch from among themselves for a fixed period of time. We could even deprive the media of their ridiculous circus around general elections by abolishing them too and instead just having rotating by-elections in each seat which gives you the same amount of democracy but far less artificial conflict. Admittedly, this would work a lot better in parliamentary systems and would need to be adapted for presidential ones. There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". This approach immediately takes the poison out of the barb and makes politics far less adversarial. Politicians would be forced to rely on the strength of their arguments and the quality of their local representation rather than the colour of their rosette to get re-elected, and it also makes corruption more difficult as it's far easier to bribe a few members of the party top brass than it is to bribe 50% + 1 of a parliament. Of course informal alliances will form between politicians but that's fine as long as it happens transparently and within the public institutions which are accountable to all, this is very different to a party which is only accountable to its members.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> We could abolish parties altogether and instead elect all our representatives directly as independents No, we couldn't. I mean, we could eliminate formal parties, but making factionalism less transparent doesn't eliminate it, it just makes it harder for voters to know what they are getting. There's plenty of research about both better proportionality of results and more supported parties improves most measures of health of democracies, including popular satisfaction with government. > There's no "us versus them" in this scenario, just "us". Just because the labels associated with “us” and “them” don't appear on formal organizations or besides names on the ballot doesn't mean they don't exist. (You can see that within parties now—the harsh divisions between the progressive and neoliberal wings of the Democratic Party don't need separate formal parties, or even entities of any kind, to exist; further, the well-defined factions that became the original US parties existed and were widely recognized before formal parties did. Parties are a product, not the source, of factionalism.)
- BoxOfRain 5y ago
  We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement. I just think it's insanity to let essentially private and unaccountable organisations have this much power over ordinary people's lives. Laws should be made as part of an authentically democratic process that at least tries to involve the whole socio-economic makeup of the country, not as a result of private intrigues in the party's membership and leadership which represents a much smaller fraction of the population and obfuscates everything to the point that the vast majority of us won't hear about what actually happened until years after the fact when memoirs are published. Would there not be far more democracy if it were exercised directly rather than through the distorting lens of a party? I'll be honest, I've followed politics in my country since the age I could vote and I'm struggling to think of anything positive other than perhaps improved decisiveness in a crisis that parties bring to the table that couldn't be achieved more transparently and efficiently in a non-partisan system. What they do bring to the table is an enormous attack surface for egotism, corruption, and intrigue.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > We'd be bringing it into the public sphere where it can be regulated better at least, that's already an enormous improvement In the US, political parties are in the public sphere and extensively regulated, unlike private entities that are not political parties but engage in political campaigning independent of formal parties and individual candidates. Abolishing formal parties in the US would increase, not limit, the role of unaccountable entities driving political factionalism.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      I'm not American, but wasn't the US government itself a non-partisan entity prior to and in the period immediately after independence? Either way, I get that they're regulated in theory as part of the public sphere but that's not the point I'm getting at, the point I'm getting at that in practice these parties often behave as vehicles for private (and often fairly elitist) interests and as a result I think their useful functions should be carried out more directly by democratic parliaments where they can be scrutinised more transparently.