4 ms·

It will have to get a lot of worse in order to get better. Voters have to be in a lot more pain to give the non-crazy party control to actually fix fundamental

• Veliladon 8mo ago
  The electorate does give control but they get bored after a few years and want to wreck everything all over again. It's goldfish levels of political memory in this country.
• FranklinJabar 8mo ago
  We're going to need to, at the very bare minimum, fix campaign finance before we are able to produce a party that will fight for a stable democracy. Tbh, I don't see any way going back to democracy and rule of law is possible without completely rewriting our constitution.
  • chii 8mo ago
    > without completely rewriting our constitution. there is no need to rewrite it, because it's fine. What's not fine is people not observing it, and defending it with their lives, and making sure that violations are actioned with penalties, social stigma and disdain.
    • FranklinJabar 8mo ago
      > because it's fine. You are blind. The senate and electoral college and lack of clearly distributed powers have meant that we have never functioned as a liberal democracy despite our lofty rhetoric claiming otherwise.
      • allknowingfrog 8mo ago
        Everyone acts like the electoral college was a blunder. The founding fathers studied the democracies of ancient Greece, and they made a very intentional choice to guard against unfettered democracy. You were supposed to be involved in local politics, where you could actually know and evaluate your representatives. Those representatives were supposed to make national decisions on your behalf, including choosing the president. I'm not qualified to know who will make a good president. You probably aren't either. Pushing the process further into American Idol territory would make it worse, not better.
        • mastax 8mo ago
          Then we must repeal the state laws criminalizing electors not voting in line with the states popular vote allocation, and directly elect electors to ensure they are people of sound morals and judgement rather than partisan hacks. Because at the moment the electoral college serves no function besides distorting the popular vote. Any other possible function has been removed by law.
        • Marazan 8mo ago
          The Electoral College is part of the slavery compromise and the slavery compromise was a blunder.
          • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
            That doesn't really fit the math. At the time of the founding the largest colony was Virginia and of the original 13 colonies, 9 were in the North and only 4 were states that ended up in the Confederacy, i.e. it was the slave states that were underrepresented in the electoral college and the Senate.
            • garciansmith 8mo ago
              Virginia was a slave state at that time (I think it was 8 slave states to 5 non). The states that eventually joined the confederacy are different from those that had legalized slavery when the Constitution was signed.
      • lazide 8mo ago
        This is perfect as the enemy of the good. There have been plenty of times the country has functioned extremely well with the exact same setup as it is now. The issue is everyone being greedy cowards instead of actually fighting for what matters.
        • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
          I don't think everyone is being greedy cowards. Our system is designed to domesticate people through threat of poverty or state sanctioned violence. Resistance is difficult because it typically requires great personal sacrifice. It's hard to protest when you have to work to feed and shelter your family. It's hard to resist law enforcement when your life is the price. The working class's current inability to resist tyranny isn't an accident.
          • chii 8mo ago
            > resist tyranny it always takes sacrifice to resist tyranny. It's just that there's been less tyranny in the past half century, that the new generation raised have not had to make sacrifices, and thus don't feel they need to. Surely, somebody else will make that sacrifice when the time comes...
            • lazide 8mo ago
              Yup, and that ‘why doesn’t someone else do something’ while refusing to actually do the hard part themselves is exactly the greedy coward part. Which, given current incentives re: law and order does seem to be the sanest thing to do from a local minima perspective. However, it is also one of the worst outcomes from a global perspective.
            • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
              Millenials have been killed by the current admin, and both Gen Z and Millenials have been in the streets across the country consistently since the current admin took office. Not sure what news you're consuming that you would think the way you do.
      • ambicapter 8mo ago
        > please refrain from personal attacks.
    • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
      The fact that this conversation is happening at all is indicative that our current form of government and its founding documents were inadequate in preventing the existing situation. If the constitution was appropriate, the people would have the explicit legal means of remedying this situation without relying on elections several years after the constitutional crises was underway.
      • chii 8mo ago
        A piece of paper doesn't make any difference if what's written is not observed, nor the rules it laid out followed. The fact that the president can commit crimes - like declaring war without the approval of congress - and have no consequences, means that the problem isn't with the written text, it's in enforcing it. And citizens can only enforce it with elections, or with civil unrest.
        • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
          I would say that the constitution not enshrining a method of enforcement outside the auspices of the executive branch is an inherent failing of the document. Which would then indict its inability to be amended as originally intended over time. The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.
      • wrs 8mo ago
        The legal remedy is impeachment. That was tried twice, and in subsequent elections “the people” reacted by moving us even farther away from being able to use it. There’s no constitutional problem here; there’s a people problem.
        • sheikhnbake 8mo ago
          The fact that it was intended to be a living document and has not remained so, I would argue, is partially responsible for our current predicament.
    • bediger4000 8mo ago
      The "constitution is good, we just need to follow it" attitude missed out on the rot that occurred before Trump that enabled Trump and supports him to this day. That rot occured under both parties, when guardrails were followed and rules were in place and observed.
      • AnimalMuppet 8mo ago
        Agreed. And in my opinion, a big part of the rot was that Congress became progressively more dysfunctional. (When was the last time they passed an annual budget? That is the most basic job of Congress, and they haven't been able to do it for years.)
        • bediger4000 8mo ago
          I'm not going to argue the "progressively dysfunctional". The Hastert Rule has a lot to do with that. Individual members can't cut deals for votes any more. But it looks like there have been appropriations bills every year. Don't take this as disagreement with your basic assertion. Failing to declare war since 1941, failing to impeach and convict Clinton, failure to impeach and convict Trump at least once, the House checks and balances Dem presidents, and aids and abets Republicans. It's a gerontocractic farce.
      • FireBeyond 8mo ago
        The Constitution was expected - as described in the document itself - to be reviewed and revised and updated every 20 years or so. The last one proposed and ratified was in 1971, 55 years ago, the 26th, around lowering the voting age. (Yes, there is a 27th, but that was proposed in 1789 and just took two centuries to be ratified - guess what it was about? Prohibiting Congress from changing their own pay in the current election cycle...).
  • bwb 8mo ago
    I agree with you, but I don't see these things as possible. Maybe the D party will enact campaign finance rules if they got a super majority. Given gerrymandering I'm not sure that is ever possible though.
    • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
      People really need to understand the math here instead of listening to what politicians themselves self-interestedly complain about. The modern balance of power remains on a razor's edge and constantly flips because both parties have learned to run data-driven campaigns. That would be as true if neither party did gerrymandering as if both parties do as they do now. Whatever the district which is closest to being flipped, that's the one where they would concentrate their resources. If one party started to get significantly more than 50% of the seats and the other significantly less, the loser would change some of their positions until they were back in the running because getting some of what you want with 51% of the seats is better than getting none of what you want with 39% of the seats. The actual problem is not the electoral college or gerrymandering or The Despicable Other Party, it's first past the post voting, because that's what creates a two party system. Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens.
      • esseph 8mo ago
        > Have your state adopt STAR voting or score voting and see what happens. There have been ongoing efforts to ban things like ranked choice or other options at the state level and now it's being pushed federally (Make Elections Great Again act MEGA).
        • AnthonyMouse 8mo ago
          Ranked choice voting sucks anyway, and that section doesn't seem to prohibit score voting. You're not "voting" for more than one candidate, you're scoring all of them; you're not "ranking" candidates, you're scoring them (and you could e.g. give two candidates the same score); you're not reallocating votes from one candidate to another, you're electing the candidate with the highest score. It's also not clear that bill is going to pass. It seems full of other things Democrats have a major incentive to filibuster. It's not even clear that Republicans have any reason to prevent score voting. One of the failure modes of ranked choice is that you can end up with more radical candidates winning where one party already had a majority because it allows the majority party to run a radical candidate next to a moderate one, but then if the radical candidate gets more votes from their own party, the race becomes the radical vs. the minority party after the majority party's moderate candidate got excluded, and then the radical candidate wins. They saw what happened in New York and didn't like it. But Democrats should have exactly the same concern -- what do you think that does if you adopted it in the South -- and in general ranked choice makes polarization worse. Ranked choice actually does suck. Whereas score voting does something else. If you run a radical, a moderate from the major party and a minority party, the moderate from the majority party wins because there is no run off election, they just got the highest score because they scored better among the minority party than the radical and better among the majority party than the minority party candidate. And when more candidates than that run, the most likely to win is the one that best represents the entire district, which reduces polarization, and that's to the benefit of everybody.
• expedition32 8mo ago
  There have been competent Republican administrations. Take for example Eisenhower. Or Nixon who won the cold war with his China switch. But the GOP turned into the MAGA cult.
  • FireBeyond 8mo ago
    I mean Eisenhower was the Republican President immediately leading up to LBJ signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in 64-65 (i.e. the inflection point of the D/R "switch") and would realistically be considered a Democrat president: - Accepted the New Deal - Championed the Interstate Highway system (massive federal spending) - Pushed for higher marginal tax rates - Supported a regulated mixed economy - Warned against the military-industrial complex.
• kenjackson 8mo ago
  It’s not just the incompetence, it’s the meanness. If this administration were simply incompetent, it would be bad but not alarming or scary. It’s the fact that they want to hurt a portion of the population that worries me greatly.
• paxys 8mo ago
  Look around at the politics of the majority of countries on the planet. Voters being in pain doesn't mean they suddenly start making the right choice. Quite the opposite in fact. There's a long way to go on the path the USA is currently on. Ask anyone from India or Russia or Argentina or Egypt or Nigeria how democracy actually works.
  • bwb 8mo ago
    Sometimes they do, but yes, I am worried about the flip side as well.