A government in gridlock cannot trample The People’s freedoms
It would take an amendment to the US Constitution, but we could limit campaign donations so that a person or corporation could only donate to a candidate that would actually represent them. This would have no effect on Presidential campaigns, but it would stop big money interests in New York State from buying both Vermont’s Senate seats, for example.
Unfortunately, those who benefit the most from the way things are now are the very ones who must initiate such a constitutional change
Here’s the thing about representative democracy: people have jobs and kids. They don’t have time to figure this stuff out, so they hire other people to do it for them. Just like you hire a doctor to figure out what that weird bump on your arm is, or hire a plumber to fix your sink. You probably could, theoretically, just look it up online and go to the hardware store and pick up the right parts but ain’t nobody got time for that.
Which raises the question, how do we decide who to elect? And the answer seems to be we just trust our social betters to give us some candidates that won’t wreck everything, probably. Mostly rich lawyers on strings, but eh, close enough. It’s hotdogs every year, but we get to choose ketchup or mustard.
I see nothing here for me to feel ashamed about: “Diane Finestiene stood in front of the Senate during the Bush One administration and boasted about banks getting big tax payer bail out money by saying ‘70,000 out of the 80,000 of my constituents implored me with emails to vote against the bail out. But I did it anyway because they just don’t understand what’s best’!!”
Save for the Bush One thing I’d say I’m pretty spot-on with my much scrutinized comment. And I could have just as well said during the George Washington administration, as it wouldn’t have taken one iota away from the point I was making, i.e. that the system is riddled with corruption as indicated by Finstyne’s brazen actions.
I also note … that if I’m to be criticized for my lack of accuracy it should be on account that I understated the margin of emails urging her to not go along with the bailout.
As far as her getting reelected goes? Clearly reasonable people didn’t bother heading out to the polling booths, as they no doubt figured there was no point as crooked politicians and their powerful banking pals no doubt made darn sure to have their agents set to do the tallying.
I’m not sure how you could abolish political parties. At its heart, a political party is just “a bunch of people who agree on ideas and decide to work together.”
I suspect that Ms. Feinstein voted appropriately and that OP has unwittingly provided an excellent example of how counterproductive his proposal is. It sounds like many voters, including perhaps OP, didn’t grasp the risk that the financial system would freeze up.
(I say that I “suspect” Ms. Feinstein voted appropriately because I’m not sure what the real alternative was. I’d have preferred a bail-out that worked to curb Wall St. excesses but still kept institutions clearly solvent, but was that on the table? Is that what the 70,000 e-mails asked for?)
Not really a sound objection. The idea is a better democracy, not simply getting results more to suit your own opinions. That said, I beileve the polls indicate a computer-based democracy would vote ovewhelmingly in favor of it, in America.
You have plenty of company (in this place) in your position on the matter, but I continue to say it’s the strongest of the fittest that matters and that the chips should in these situations be allowed to fall where they may … so healthier and more vibrant businesses can spring up in their place, rather than resorting to a quick artificial prop job.
Having said that, the most important point of my ramblings on the issue continues to be that the whole political system is irreparably broken and antiquated, and my pointing out the evil that ms. finsteen did was just one example of an innumerable number illustrating just how far the wheel has fallen off the wagon.
P.S. Watch the YT vid I put a link to (in a couple of posts above) and see if that doesn’t help you to “grasp the risk” of just how cancer-ridden the body politic has become.
This touches the deepest and most profound issue in the history of our system.
The Constitution doesn’t mention parties because the belief system of the Founders didn’t call for any. They had an ideal that the best and brightest men would be elected as representatives, as they had, and would discuss each issue as it came up on its merits, forming majorities by rational persuasion. Applying “thought” as generously as possible, this is apparently also what the OP thought his suggestion would result in.
Yet political parties formed about one nanosecond after Washington took his oath of office.
How could they not have known? How could Washington go to his grave detesting them? Reading the day-to-day history of the Constitutional Convention - there are many good books on the subject and I’d highly suggest finding one because they shed strong light on everything that happened since - shows that issues are not capable of being resolved by rational discussion based on platonic ideals of governance.
They went in with conflicting interests - North/South; small states/large states; patrician/plebeian; individual/collective - that had no resolution, along with mindsets (today loosely titled liberal and conservative) that saw the world fundamentally differently. After furious battles and endless votes, they compromised, compromised, compromised, kicking resolution down the road in the hope that somebody else could figure it out. What emerged during the compromises was the power of alliances. An obstinate minority could wear everyone down. One person’s top priority was lower for another and vice versa, and so they blunted ideals to get results. After all those weeks of compromises what emerged was merely a framework, and a rickety one at that, so timid and mealy-mouthed and deliberately vague that a strong judiciary had to form to parse the thousands of laws that have accreted, leading to more alliances and more compromises and more bickering and a living constitution that can’t ever be resolved.
All of which should have made it obvious that parties would form as soon as laws needed to be made. (The battle of the Federalist and the anti-Federalist papers should have made that crystal clear.) Congress disagreed vehemently on everything, tried stuff, tried other stuff, abandoned some things when the times changed but left in others even when obsolete. It’s always been messy.
So how should a representative respond to mess and compromise and change? That battle has also been fought since the beginning mostly between two schools of thought. One was the the representative represented, i.e. tried to ascertain the will of constituents. The other was that the representative, with better knowledge and background, made best individual judgments which the people could quickly react to by the short two-year term of office. In reality, most real people shifted as adroitly as possible between the two poles, an ongoing compromise.
Politics is compromise. Any attempt to reduce it to yes/no responses will fail. Change is coming, true, because that’s always been true. Every decade of American existence has seen a new wrinkle in the old game. There have never been a time in which things were good, the best ever. Everybody always thinks their time is the worst, because it doesn’t live up to their ideal. Everybody always thinks that money plays too large a role, because money always has. Everybody always thinks their representatives are not giving them what they want, because they never can.
The Constitution is an example of sausage-making. No person could support all of it at the time. It emerged out of sheet necessity - it was that or the abyss. Putting that process into everyone’s hands is the Constitutional Convention times a million, with no ending. The alternative is not the abyss, so it can’t be a good solution. It’s idle wish fulfillment, magical thinking as estranged to reality as the sovereign citizen movement. Why indulge it?
I think a computer-based direct democracy would have some serious flaws but might be better than the present system in many respects.
For example, as shown by Gillen and Page’s study, the middle and lower class (and a significant portion of the upper class) have absolutely no influence on government on economic issues. None. Zip. Nada. So all of you who favor the present system who are not also One Percenters are in favor of having no voice in government on economic issues. None. Because that is the system we have now.
On war I think we’d do better with direct democracy. Sure, we’d be damned easy to get stampeded into a stupid war like Iraq II, but so what? We’re pretty damn easy to stampede now. And we’d be out of those stupid wars a LOT sooner because we’d stampede out as soon as the body bags started coming home en masse instead of lingering for years for vague policy reasons.
On social issues I think we’d do the worst. We’d enact all sorts of hateful, bigoted laws against minorities, and then slowly have to be weaned away from them as their ill effects became more obvious. God knows what we would have come up with during the 80s when AIDS happened. It would not have been pretty, or smart. But we’d probably continue our painfully slow, awkward, lurching progress toward something resembling enlightenment, overall.
Short term however, switching to computer voting would be a wonderful thing, because it would cut the heart out of the Republican Party. The elderly Baby Boomers who are the Republican Party’s mainstay are allergic to computers, and hence, in a computer voting age, would be allergic to voting. Getting rid of that bloc of pure ignorance, malevolence and stupidity would be a very good thing for America. Of course, they will all die soon anyway, but the sooner the better for America.
At the risk of repeating the obvious (and sorry, no, I didn’t watch your video) do you really think a collapse of Wall St. would have been benign? If so, you’ve again proved my point.
We can agree that American politics is defective. But only a quack prescribes a cure worse than the disease.
You can’t imagine how hard I’m giggling at the thought that you and Dibbs would be on the same side.
I just need to say that the Boomers are not the issue. You’re talking about the Greatest Generation, who leans overwhelmingly Republican. Boomers are more evenly split. And far, far more likely to be comfortable with computers.
Stop blaming everything on Boomers! (And, yes, I are one.)
There are some assumptions baked into the Constitution that held at the time but not now. The economy was different, industrialization didn’t exist to the same degree. One can argue about the wisdom of centralized versus decentralized government, but centralization is now possible on a much larger scale than the Framers could have imagined; similarly, nation- and world-spanning buisnesses were rarer, and weren’t able to be as top-down as they are today.
On centralization, I like certain aspects of the Electoral College system, but the reasons it was necessary no longer hold now that we have computers (though I guess they could have done a national vote as long ago as the 1892 election).
That said, the trouble with direct democracy is I actually want to delegate political decision-making to people with the time and resources to become experts on the issues – to professional politicians, in other words. Moreover, I don’t like the idea of running the country online because a lot of people have no internet access, and they shouldn’t be disenfranchised more than they already are. I’d like to see more inclusion.
That isn’t possible. We can make them less important, and reduce their influence on the political process (and I think we should), but we’re not going to keep people with similar or common goals from working together, which, at bottom, is what political parties are.
Why is this a problem?
You seem to think that the only possible reason someone might be opposed to your idea is that they like the way things are now.
I agree with this, and so does Edmund Burke.
This. Whatever the SovCits think, the abstruseness of legalese and legislationese isn’t there to keep people out, at least not mostly; it’s (in principle) to make sure the law does what it is intended to do and not anything else.
So you have a brilliant idea, the details of which you will leave to others to work out.
I have a brilliant idea: people should make everything better. Which people? Better how? I don’t know, but I’m sure someone can come up with something.
Yeah, except people have been pointing out actual problems in a way that’s hard for someone who’s actually reading to dismiss as “it’s new so I don’t like it.”
That’s a false dicotomy, though. It’s possible to say the current system is bad without saying that Dibbs’s solution, or direct democracy, is better.
I’m not convinced the people who don’t have computers access are the heart of the Republican party, or that it would be beneficial to disenfranchise them.
