LEL.
United States of World.
I’m quite sure I would find myself unamicable to your long list of “improvements.”
Texas is itself a partitioned jurisdiction of the United States, and has within it further subdivisions. Yet the issues remain.
Yeah, I think I’ll pass on joining the Super-EU
True, but it illustrates the point that voting is basically irrelevant. People who couldn’t vote nevertheless got the government to change its policies because they were politically active and they changed hearts and minds. And people who just sit around and complain until election year often are disappointed in the results, despite their vote.
Even absolute monarchies were often forced to change in response to the people’s will, despite the concept of “voting” not even existing in those governments. It’s direct action, and compelling ideas (and yes, sometimes violence), that changes society, not a token poll once every few years.
Or some loose federation along the lines of the EU, which is less of a union than the U.S. but more of one than the UN. Why not, eventually?
I’m for a world government as long as it basically prevents war to the best of its abilities, but doesn’t try to micromanage things. And I’m not so sure we don’t already have that. Maybe the UN could do better at preventing civil wars and sectarian violence, but I believe the UN+nukes is why we haven’t had any major world wars or “total warfare” in the last 70 years.
Do you really believe elections don’t matter, and that there is not some degree of difference between a George W. Bush administration and what a Gore administration would have done? Between Barack Obama and the McCain/Palin ticket? LBJ and Barry Goldwater? Abraham Lincoln and George McLellan?
I mean, admitting there are other factors at play is one thing, but the notion elections do not matter at all is simply crazy. If anything these are mild examples; at a state level, the difference between a Republican administration de-funding public education and a Democratic one that won’t has a hell of an impact on people.
Everyone do what I say, and you’ll all be fine!
First, send me all your socks and bonds …
No, I don’t believe elections don’t matter. But the election is the result of the actions and words of people who did more than vote occasionally. An election doesn’t cause changes in society as much as it reflects them. And yes, they’re important, but if you think voting every few years is all you need to do, you’re going to be disappointed.
My solution is to wait and vote Democratic. I think things are getting better overall. The problem we’re having will eventually fix itself with demographic change. In fact I think this is why we’re seeing the current tactics being used by the Republican Party. They realize that the country is changing and they are doing everything in their power to stop it. Even if they succeed in the short term there is no way they can prevent long term change. Give things 12 years, maybe 16 at the most, and we should be past this small hiccup. And that’s what it is. I don’t know how anyone can claim with a straight face that the USA is being ruined or is “worse than ever” the way that some Republican politicians claim. Worse then the Civil War? The Great Depression? World War II? The war of 1812? Even the troubles of the late 70s and the 2008-2009 recession were worse than our current time period. To sum it up, this is my solution.
- Vote Democratic.
- Wait a decade or two.
- No need for drastic actions.
[puts fabric-footwear, handcuffs and ball-gags in mail to Boyo Jim]
OK, what next?
I’m actually pretty happy with things. Oh, I don’t like the way the abortion laws are going, and I would like some degree of gun control, and I would love not to go to war again, but none of these things change the fact that I live in a country where:
- I have legal recourse to my stuff and my body and it’s not sheer chaos, with anarchy and warlords trying to take my stuff
- I can, and do make a decent salary and can feed myself and my family and save some money and even have some fun
- Even though racism is still around, there really isn’t anything that’s truly barred from me as a non-white chick. There are more hurdles for me to jump and it may be harder, but I can do it, if I really put my mind to it
People are always screaming about how bad times are, but really, if you look back in history, times were always bad. And the new generation always sucked. And old people never wanted to budge. It’s not the end of the world, it’s the beginning of a new one. Crime rates are low, teen pregnancies are low, gays can marry, transgender people are finally being able to come out of the closet a little bit, by all metrics we are doing better than a generation ago.
I don’t think a huge violent revolution will happen. It’ll be more like a slow simmer and its already started with informal secession.
This is where huge groups, cities, or various states simply start ignoring federal laws. This what is going in with sanctuary cities and marijuana laws. Not a whole lot the fedgov can do unless it want to conduct a military invasion. The legal system can only handle relatively small numbers, not a several hundred thousand. If state and local police absolutely will not help or or even hostile to the feds, they won’t be able to impose their laws.
I know nothing about American politics, What would happen if some states voted to leave the Union
Yes, and one side of the population is demanding that their representatives not compromise. Enough of those Congresscritters are obliging them that it has created an unhealthy level of gridlock. So much for the “compromise of democracies”.
And it isn’t just the population. I don’t think the people were consulted when GOP leaders vowed to block Obama at every turn just to make him look bad. Instead, they’ve made democracy look bad, and that is leading people like the OP to question its effectiveness.
But the Ted Cruz stunt wasn’t aberrant. It fits the pattern of GOP obstructionism during Obama’s time in office that has damaged American democracy to the point where Donald Trump looks like a good option. Just how much damage has been inflicted remains to be seen.
If you think non-democratic governments don’t have gridlock, you’re delusional. Yeah, it’s very easy to imagine that under a dictatorship, the dictator decides what will happen and the people obey. None of that messy compromise needed.
Except how does it happen that people obey the dictator? Because he’ll shoot them if the don’t. But how does he shoot them? He orders the army or the secret police to shoot them. So why does the army or the police obey him? Because they’re scared of what would happen to them. The secret of totalitarianism is that everyone is cooperating to oppress everyone else, and they have to do it because if they don’t everyone else will squash them. And the dictator is in just as tough a position. You think he just issues orders and lounges around? How does he keep one of his bodyguards from just shooting him? How does he keep the army generals from staging a coup? How does he keep his wife or concubines from strangling him in his sleep? How does he prevent the oppressed masses from revolting?
It takes constant work, and it takes lots of people who agree to obey the dictator because they believe playing along is better than the alternative. The dictator still has to buy off cronies, he has to favor certain factions, he has to make the country run well enough that it can’t simply be invaded and conquered by the neighbors.
Authoritarian government has a horrible track record. Like, really really horrible. Have you read any history books? OK, you occasionally get your Lee Kwan Yew or your Marcus Aurelius. For every one of those guys you have a couple dozen Caligulas, Pol Pots, Saddam Husseins, Idi Amins, and on and on. How many dictators took power in a struggling but decent country, and left it a literal smoking ruin?
Democracy, simple voting, is obviously not a solution to the problems of a country. Without a functioning civil society the votes are meaningless. And in a functioning country votes just ratify or make obvious the decisions that have already been made. Voting is just a feedback mechanism for the citizenry to communicate with the various powers that be. In a functioning country that communication is listened to, just like a business listens to customer complaints. You can only ignore and cheat your citizens for so long before bad things start to happen.
What’s the alternative? Tell people to shut up and shoot them if they don’t? How does that solve the problems of society that you’re supposedly trying to solve? Again, votes for a particular policy or leader aren’t a decision for action, rather they communicate the decisions that have already been made.
Lemur866, if that was directed to me, I get all that. I’m not looking for an option to democracy. I’m saying that Republicans are destroying the democratic brand to the point where a significant number of people are seeing it as a failure and totalitarianism is looking good to them.
If it wasn’t directed at me, well, carry on.
They tried that before. It was the bloodiest war our country ever fought. And the states that seceded lost.
Historically, even in light of such a short period as the last 20 years, it’s totally abberant.
And even at that, Cruz’s budgetary shenanigans were a publicity stunt more than anything; I think he engendered more ill will *within his own party *than he did damage to the democratic process or the Democratic Party. They fucking hate the guy- the only reason we’re hearing anything other than “CRUCIFY HIM!” is because Donald Trump frightens them more than they hate Cruz.
And beyond that, a lot of the Republican intransigence is a consequence of the 24-hour news cycle and the Internet, rather than some kind of fundamental shift in what people actually believe. As a result of those two things, it seems like both parties are pulling away from the center to some degree, with the Republicans having a better handle on how to use the media to energize their own base than the Democrats do.
Nobody wants totalitarianism, but I do think that what we’re seeing here is a sea-change in how American democracy is conducted, and it started in about 1996-ish with Bill Clinton’s election and the beginnings of the Internet as an effective mass communication tool with the content not managed by a company or government agency. Donald Trump’s candidacy is another manifestation of that sea-change; he’s popular not because of his political abilities, ideas or platform, but rather because of his public persona and the media circus that surrounds him.
It’ll be a while until this settles down I think, but I have little doubt that it’ll reach some kind of equilibrium eventually.