Service guarantees citizenship. Would you like to know more?
Look, guys, I realize there are ways a system like this can be abused. The system we have now is arguably being abused in some ways. If you will point me out any kind of system that human beings can’t abuse in some way, I would desperately love to see it. Now, would this lead to MORE abuse, necessarily? What makes you think so? My wish would be that by making voting and being a citizen more desirable. In fact, if it turned out that a lot of people were disinfranchised and ROSE UP in fury to regain those rights, I’d be bloody delighted. Better revolution than apathy.
And I don’t mean to imply that paying taxes and working in the private sector is not admirable and worthy. I was just wondering if a system set up to encourage a large number of people to participate in ‘the service’ might give us, Americans, more of a sense of solidarity. A common experience on which to build more ties to each other. Wouldn’t it instill, at least somewhat, a sense of teamwork? Community? Civic and national pride? Aren’t those worthwhile qualities to try to develop?
As for the high school civics and social science courses, those were a joke; they were hands-down the easiest classes. As were the community service credits, they were pretty easy to cover, or even fake, from what I remember.
Yeah, but what you’re missing (as I see it) is that America has NEVER been about teamwork and getting together and such. Even when first founded the states could agree on any damn thing and several made plans to go it alone. Each of them had to be bartered and bullied into joining the union.
The strength in the American system isn’t the teamwork and sense of the whole but rather the competition that leads to temporary alliances for policy goals.
And, frankly, I stand by my argument that more franchises is better than any limited franchise.
First off, you’d have to define “abuse”. What does it mean for a citizen to abuse their rights? What responsibilities are people currently dodging? Do you mean voting and paying taxes? For the former, I personally feel that while more voters would be nice, there’s no need to force people to vote if they don’t want to. For the latter, we have a system in place already to go after tax-evaders. I don’t see how mandatory public service or a citizen exam will keep people from not paying their taxes.
Secondly, what’s the downside to being a non-citizen? What rights and priviledges will not be granted to non-citizens? If all that’s withheld from them is the right to vote, then that doesn’t seem like a big enough disincentive. But if you’re going to deprive them of the basic freedoms laid out in the constitution (no guns for you, slacker!), that seems too extreme. Will non-citizens have to get green cards and work visas? For your plan to work, you’re going to have a system of incentives and disincentives…otherwise what’s the friggin’ point? And that means you’re going to have folks abusing the system. A whole lot of them.
I don’t see how this will promote solidarity. In fact, I can see it being divisive. Right now, people are granted citizenship for just being born here. Imagine a society where you have 1) full citizens, those God-fearin’ patriots who bleed red, white, and blue, 2)native-born non-citizens, those dummies who couldn’t pass the citizenship exam or drag their ass to their mandatory community service (Lord knows why, since picking up garbage on the side of the interstate is so much fun), and 3)immigrants. Currently we are divided along the first and third axis. You really think we’ll become One Big Happy Family when you throw in the second? Especially when one of the group has more rights than the others?
We already have common experiences. Most of us attend schools as children, where we are appropriately socialized in American cultural values. Most of us attend church or temple or mosque, where we fellowship communally. We go to work everyday, where we practice teamwork. And most of us give back to our communities through paying taxes and volunteering. We are emersed in the same mass media, one that you can’t easily escape from. I’d say we are as unified as we can possibly hope to get without turning into the Borg.
Actually, I don’t think Americans have a problem with our patriotism. In fact, I think most of us go overboard in that department.
So…you want an exam harder than what you would find in high school?
Question-what about those unable to “earn” their citizenship-the mentally ill, the mentally handicapped, etc? Are they automatically second-class, with no rights?
This sort of pithy statement is something people always find easy to say when they live in a peaceful country and haven’t seen what genuine civil unrest is like.
Apathy is a sign something’s working.
All right, it is probably a little over the top. I don’t agree with you about apathy meaning something is working, however. Maybe you could explain that a little more? :dubious:
If you will read my OP again, I did say that I wasn’t for taking away the rights and protections that most people count on. I mentioned the right to vote and the right to run for office. And I believe somewhere later I made mention of medical exceptions to service. If someone is so mentally disabled that they can’t pass the test, provided the test could be made fair and accessible, even to the blind, the illiterate, the dislexic, or whatever else you can come up with, then why do they necessarily deserve a right to vote? If you are mentally incompent to do other things, can you still vote?
When people imigrate and apply for citizenship, they do have to pass such a test. Is that unfair?
Frankly, I don’t even know if I would support this idea, if it were being considered for implementation. Possibly it is one of those ideas that wouldn’t work in the real world. I just get frustrated with how many people don’t vote, and aren’t interested in politics, and how many people are blitheringly ignorant of the whole process. And on the whole, I was thinking that people are less likely to take a thing for granted if they have earned it, as opposed to having it given to them. I’d hazzard a bet that the African Americans who marched and fought for their right to vote still cherish it, and that women who fought for the vote turned out at every election.
Sounds like Classical democracy to me. 
I do believe citizenship should be earned - by never commiting a felony crime. All other citizenship tests are bunk designed to reinforce the position of one sort of elite or another. Of course, my method is buggy. It runs the risk of having felony crimes being redefined such that they match someone else’s citizenship criteria, so I’m willing to live with citizenship for felons too, as the lesser of two weevils.
Heh. Sometimes I miss that old crank.
FRDE writes:
Mark Twain had proposed the same thing earlier in his short essay “The Curious Republic of Gondour”, which is available on-line. I hadn’t heard of it untril I read about it in one of Heinlein’s books.
As noted, Heinlein had proposed a system very much like the one in the OP in his book “Starship Troopers”. Alternate forms of democracy – with different requirements for voting and the like – seem to have been a sort of hobby of his, and you can find discussions of weird and different forms of government in several of his works, especially The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Tunnel in the Sky, Expanded Universe, and most notably starship Troopers. I doubt if any of them have seriously been tried*, but you have to wonder what the results would have been – restricting the franchise to women, or women who have had at least one child, or to people who can solve a quafratic equation, or to the very wealthy, or putting the losers of the election in office. His proposals wouldn’t fly in the U.S. asd things are, of course – they’d definitely violate civil rights by restricting the franchise to some special group.
I suspect the one in ST is closest to his heart, though. He seems to lavish special care in describing it and its origins, and cae back to defend it in Expanded Universe – the only weird form of government to be talked about in two of his books. There is something to recommend it – why shouldn’t the right to vote be earned? and wouldn’t people appreciate it more in that case? But I also think it wouldn’t end up the pristine thing it appears to be, and the temptation to turn the army and the non-military centyers where one serves one’s alternate service into indictrination and recruiting centers for one party would, I think, be pretty hard for at least some folks to resist. For better or worse, I think the existing system better.
- The voting system at the MIT Science Fiction Society used to be (and possibly still is) to allow each member one vote, but one which could be split into as many parts as one wished, so you could give 0.5 to one candidate, 0.4 to another, and 0.1 to a third.
That so many people can be apathetic about the political system indicates the country is running reasonably well. People aren’t apathetic when everything is going straight to hell; they’re apathetic when things are pretty good. Nobody was apathetic in Rwanda in 1994.
Furthermore, why is apathy, in this context, necessarily a bad thing? I’m a voting citizen. My personal priorities in life are supporting my family and spending a lot of time with them. I vote, but politics are not my highest priority until things start to go badly awry. Unless there’s some life-altering issue on the ballot I will usually vote for whichever party I think will be the most fiscally responsible and will, otherwise, do the LEAST tinkering. I want the government to have a degree of apathy. I want it to stay the hell out of my life, tax me less, do only those things government can do, and let people run their personal lives as they see fit. People who have a really, really keen interest in politics seem to often be people who want to tell me what to do, and they seem to vote for government initiatives that interfere with my life. And the evidence would suggest that the more a government wants to tell you what to do, the worse off the citizenry is.
I’m not saying apathy is a positive thing - in fact, I’d agree people should be more informed, at least. But its existence is indicative of positive things; namely, that the country is peaceful and running reasonably well.
My problem with conditional suffrage (which is a better term for what you’re proposing) is that there is no system you can devise that will result in anything better than what we have now. It sounds fine to propose giving people a vote because of public service, but… what exactly will you achieve through such a plan? I see many, many, many potential negatives, but I don’t understand what the positives are supposed to be. In fact, in your OP, you don’t even suggest any positives except that “people would value it more,” which is a pretty fuzzy thing to hang this particular hat on.
Do you really think people who’ve engaged in public service will vote better? I sure don’t; I know a lot of people who served with me in the army who were idiots, and I know a lot of people who’ve never done any public service who are very smart. In any event, voting isn’t just a function of brains.
Do you think it will draw more people into public service? Very probably it will, but the unintended consequences will be enormous. It would bloat the labour force available for jobs that carry the get-the-vote requirement while depleting the labour available for private sector jobs, not to mention the fiscal implications. You would likely be handing out the franchise to a subset of the population that is demographically skewed in one direction or another.
And like I said before, I don’t see why having more people working at the DMV is necessarily a good thing. If you need more people in a certain job, raise the salaries and benefits and let the market decide. That’s what works best for allocating labour resources.
Sadly, I must agree with RickJay, that apathy, as bad as it really is, is indicative of our nation running well. As bad as it is that some people can’t be bothered to vote, or that others vote for candidates for stupid reasons (eg, “he/she’s cute”), having any condition on voting changes it from a right to a privilege. AFAIK, rights can (or, at least should) only be forfeited through commiting a felony or simply not taking advantage of it; they can’t be forfeited through failing to qualify. Sure, it sounds good here because no one wants stupid/apathetic people voting, but what of other rights? “I’m sorry, you can’t have property/free speech/freedom of religion until you pass your citizenship test. You have to live in public housing/say only government approved messages/worship the almighty dollar until you do.”
How do we decide which rights are conditional on this test and which aren’t? What makes a right to a fair trial or protection from discrimination not require being earned? Shouldn’t they be “appreciated” on the same level as voting? If anything, I think voting is one of the most fundamental rights because it is a large part of what protects those rights.
Further, what exactly qualifies as public service, and who draws these distinctions? If military is a public service, how do you justify essentially conscripting those who have physical handicaps, religious objections, or just plain don’t want to serve? I don’t want to be defended by a military full of people who don’t want to do that job. What other forms of public service would qualify? As others have mentioned, what makes working in the military or for a charity somehow more virtuous than working for a private organization that is providing a valuable serice? Further, wouldn’t forcing people to hold these jobs necessarily skew voting in a way that will potentially negatively affect representation?
You just read starship troopers didn’t you? =)
Its a great sentiment, its impracticable though.
This country was built up by people avoiding the draft in the old country and, by thunder, I’m not going to support anything my great-grandfathers came here to dodge!
It doesn’t have to be an either-or choice. We could have a system where we’re both citizens and we each have a vote; but you have two extra votes because you’re a veteran with a college degree. See Mark Twain’s “The Curious Republic of Gondour.”
Multiple votes was mooted in Mrs Thatcher’s reign. I don’t remember much about it except that virtually every single newspaper came out against it and they portrayed it as one of her loonier ideas. Maybe casdave can remember more?
Yes, you could have a system like that. Or, you could havea system where you get three votes if your first name starts with an X, because names that start with X are so cool!
Extra vote if you can do wicked air off your board, dude!
You can already buy your way into America. If you have a million dollars to spend on a small business and you employ 10 people for a few years, you get your greencard and you are on your way to citizenship.
Except we already have that - everyone has one vote, but the richer you are, the more money you can spend to support a candidate getting their message out, which effectively gives you more votes.
And that’s pretty much a representative of American culture- the idea that, if you’re a worthwhile person, you’ll make money, and the better a person you are, the more wealth you’ll get. The only thing this debate is about is whether we should push for different criteria. But would that be at all fairer? Is having a college degree in any respect a better determination of intelligence, wisdom, and a desire to work for the common good than money is?