I tend to disagree. I feel that empire building is driven at least as much by human nature as by economic reasons.
Thanks for the correction, Mr. Schumacher!
It may be driven by the nature of leaders pursuing their own narrow ends, and we certainly hear much about them. But I suspect most people throughout history would rather have been left alone to look after themselves and their communities. Instead, they were forced, fooled, and manipulated into war and empire, if they weren’t driven by economic scarcity. And if you and I agree it’s at least as much economic scarcity as human nature, with scarcity solved, we eliminate half the empires.
My grasp on popular culture, always shaky at the best of times, appears to be slipping into the crevasse.
First, I had to have tater tots explained to me in the VP culinary thread.
Now, I find myself asking: Mr Schumaker ?
E.F. Schumacher, the British economist who wrote “Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered,” 1973 or so, if memory serves. Not to be confused with Willie Shoemaker, the jockey, though now that I think of it, he was unlikely to be of Andre the Giant proportions.
Thank you. I googled « Schumacher » and wandered into an F1 news article about Villeneuve slagging some junior Schumacher. At least I’d heard of Villeneuve.
And Schumacher (the economist) was a student of Leopold Kohr (and Keynes) who wrote an interesting book, The Breakdown of Nations in 1957, arguing for smaller political units, to return to the theme of this thread. So if I were redesigning the US and Canada and everything, I would indeed think small.
I assume there’d be some kind of cap on the number of people who could vote in each virtual district?
I’m still not sure what the point of the districts is if they’re not geographically tied to a state or area though.
I don’t feel there would need to be an imposed ceiling because self-interest would cap the “population” of any district. Remember that regardless of how many people are in a district, it’s still only electing one member to Congress. If two million voters have flocked to a single district, they’re going to realize they’d be better off having some of them move to other districts, where they could form majorities and elect more people into Congress.
Many people feel they are not politically aligned with the people in their geographical region. If you’re a liberal in Utah or a conservative in Massachusetts, you might feel that your interests are being ignored and your vote doesn’t matter. The same is true is you support a third party and every around you is a Democrat or a Republican. If you were free to choose your own virtual district, you could select one that you feel is more aligned with your views and one where you’d have a voice in choosing who gets elected to represent you.
A couple of thoughts.
First, this is an aspect of collective executive drawn from the legislature. The First Minister (PM federally, premier provincially) is the dominant power in Cabinet, but the Cabinet is still a collective body. That’s who makes a lot of appointments. Because it’s collective, and because it’s drawn from the legislature, the members of cabinet have political power in their own right. That means that opposing views are hashed out in Cabinet, and the first minister has to pay some attention to them, in a way that is not the case in the US federal cabinet. Collective decisions, in my opinion, tend to be more moderate because of the give and take needed to make a decision.
That pattern repeats in other appointment processes. Senior Police leadership, for example, aren’t appointed directly by the politicians. By statute, there are police commissions in each municipality, composed in part of municipal politicians, but also other members, representative of community groups. That’s the body that appoints, and also the body that dismissed, and only if a statutory process is followed. That kind of collective appointment / dismissal process insulates the police leadership from partisan politics.
There’s similar review processes in the appointment or dismissal of judges, with the courts involved at both stages. That insulates judges from political influence, and is backed up by codes of conduct that bar judges from being involved in politics. For example, a judge in Ontario was recently disciplined for making a donation to the federal Liberal party after she was appointed to the bench, totalling about $700.
The Attorney General, although a politician, is constitutionally barred from taking partisan political implications into account, under the Shawcross principles. One federal AG recently resigned very publicly, over what she saw as an attempt by Trudeau to influence her prosecutorial independence. That triggered a parliamentary inquiry, and a finding by the federal integrity commissioner that Trudeau had breached ethical standards. That didn’t have a direct consequence for Trudeau, but I think it certainly affected voters’ impressions of him.
Those are just some examples that come to mind, of checks and balances that are built into the system, by the constitution and by statute.
Yes, in the UK too, and I don’t doubt many other countries too. A combination of collective diffusion of influence and the "good chaps’ principle - that it just isn’t done.
Which is not to say that it wasn’t done in the past (pretty much the rule until the mid 19th century), or that recent governments haven’t tried - but there is plenty of scrutiny of their appointees and plenty of knowledgeable people to cry foul if they start playing unfair. Indeed, one of the complaints of the most swivel-eyed of A Certain Political Party has been that even their appointees to various bodies such as the BBC “go native” under the influence of ‘the blob’ of the permanent staff and holders of institutional memory and culture.
Ok.
Nice.
Ooh, yes.
Great. Those are more concrete examples of how to make those entities less political. I’m in favor.
If you really want to go into details, here’s how the Judicial Appointments Commission for England and Wales does it:
And how our Electoral Commission works:
https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/about-us/our-commissioners-and-teams
As the Trump experience has showed, much of what makes our government work correctly is character and honesty. The president can be downright dangerous if he is a criminal without scruples. So, the solution would be to make corrections in our governmental structure that make assumed honesty and character unnecessary. The structure itself would protect us. Having said that, I must also honestly add that I really don’t think it’s possible.
No matter how many constitutional and statutory protections you put in, any government of any stripe is potentially vulnerable to anti-democratic forces taking over. Weimar Germany had a parliamentary system, for example, but fell to anti-democratic forces that had strong popular support, strong enough to overcome those who had a commitment to democracy and constitutionalism.
The ultimate protection for a democratic, constitutional government is the people themselves.
Ben Franklin got it right, two centuries ago:
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
It’s up to the citizens of every democracy to keep it.
My starting comment would be that the system of government from the 1790’s through to the 1970’s worked rather well. Consider the Presidents (who have great power in the U.S. system) from the late 1920’s through to the late 1970’s. Great Presidents every one!
Hoover made mistakes but he was an intelligent and honest man; his mistakes had nothing to do with the governmental system. JFK may have been a womanizer and over-confident narcissist but the huge libido which gave him these traits also made him dare to achieve great things, like the Man on the Moon. Even Nixon was an intelligent patriot, and probably better than almost all the Presidents who came after him. And so on.
The American political system worked quite well for almost two centuries!
But now political dysfunction is the rule. The old-fashioned truth-telling by icons like Walter Cronkite has been replaced by barrages of lies. There’s a good chance that if the voters choose Harris-Walz in November, criminal corruption will lead to certification of Trump-Vance as the victors.
It’s a pipe-dream to imagine that the Republicans will agree to any change that erodes their power. Since the answers to thread’s question will all just be fantasies anyway, I think focus should be on the problems of too much money infecting politics, and too many lies infecting social media, rather than cosmetic changes to the details of government structure.
I think a big one is the Two Party system. It is not in the Constitution, there is no official rules to limit our government to only two parties that have any we find ourselves stuck there anyway. It’s almost as of the Parliamentary system having two camps of a coalition government and an opposition government has been enshrined, except our two camps are solidified into official parties instead of fluctuating groups of parties.
Sort of like the parliamentary system is playing on a 2D field, but the US is stuck with a line. Think about how we nominally have Libertarians and Green Party and the “Tea Party”, and any number of small interest groups that define their politics beyond merely liberal or conservative. But we’re still stuck arguing where in the line they fall instead of merits of the broader goals of each.
Gerrymandering. The political party that happens to be in power after the decadal census gets to redraw the lines, and they draw them to dilute their opposition. People don’t get access to representation because their district is reshaped to ensure their views are the minority.
Example: my own Denton, Texas. Probably as liberal an area as Austin, but in the last redivision was split in half and the halves combined with a half a dozen other rural counties to make a Republican majority. I’m not in the same Rep district with people in the other side of my town, but am with people in Amarillo. Sensibly, Denton County should be in one district together, and might have been merged with other Dallas area cities. But that would have risked a Democrat district and seat in the House.
That’s 2 I can think of. Those 2 combine to cause a lot of the issues that plague us.
“Democracy” and “republic” are at odds, though. Our current government was designed as a republic, at the country level, and everyone fails to see that and tries to foist “democracy” onto us. We’re a democracy locally, and somewhat at the state level, but in line with my suggested re-design above, we’re not and never should be a democracy as a country, because we’re not a single nation, only a single country. The “tyrannie de la majorité” isn’t just a hypothetical, it’s real.
If one has to stretch things, one might say “representative democracy,” but that’s as confusing as thinking that “lifeline” equals “socialism” when it’s nothing of the kind.
Democracy is government by the people. Direct democracy is where every citizen votes on every issue, but that only occurs in tribal situations. I can’t think of a community that functions that way except maybe some small communes. Even townships in modern society have a city council that makes decisions.
A Republic is a representative government. Representative governments can be chosen by the people, or hereditary, or selected by some power group.
A Democratic Republic is a government where the people elect representatives. Decisions are made by the representatives, but power lies with the poeple, who can replace them.
The US is a Democratic Republic.
I will also point out that most self-described Democratic Republics are communist.
Communism is also one of those political philosophies where execution is at complete odds with the stated aims and goals. In theory, communism is supposed to wrest power away from the aristocrats and hereditary power mongers and distribute the power to the people as a whole. It sounds utopian in fairness and freedom to the individual.
In practice, it was quickly corrupted to serve the power hungry and oppress the people. Whether this is an inherent outcome because of the structure of the system or because of human nature is debatable. But that’s a different thread.