Which I cannot give! However, it is clearly time that somebody with an egg-shaped head and a lot of time explained why the US political system is such a pile of total garbage, from electioneering, to legislating, and everything in between.
What was the original idea, and who on earth would think that these systems would ever realise anything even remotely constructive?
We get the government we ask for.
First, it’s only terrible compared to systems which have the distinct advantage of not existing. It’s imperfect, but so’s every real system, and systems which claim to be perfect only do so at gunpoint, such as Iran and North Korea.
Yes, it’s messy. It’s people trying to solve complex problems; if it were simple, we’d have serious problems, because a simple solution to a complex problem looks like a gulag.
Yes, it’s imperfect. Everything is imperfect. Some of the imperfections are magnified, some are serious problems, and none are easy to solve. Governments without our problems have other, worse problems: It’s pointless to lobby if all laws are handed down by an unelected oligarchy, for example.
The original idea was hashed out over a long political process in 1787, when a lot of our Founding Fathers attempted to modify the Articles of Confederation and ended up throwing it out and replacing it with the Constitution. Then, in order to get states to pass it, they had to add ten amendments we now know as the Bill of Rights but they knew as a further messy compromise they had to debate over for an even longer period of time.
The original plan included much less direct participation in the process, including Senators being elected by the states as opposed to the people themselves, and included fewer protections for individual rights, especially given that the Constitution didn’t say a damned thing about what laws states could pass. It took the Civil War and decades of social change after that to get to the point where people actually have the rights enumerated in the Constitution.
It’s always been a mess. The original plan was utterly unworkable, hence the current Constitution, and the Constitution itself has been modified over the centuries, both through amendments and through interpretation. Trying to build a non-messy system is utterly impossible, unless you’re not only willing but eager to kill everyone who doesn’t fit into your idea of “non-messy”.
The original idea was that the best men in each small community would be recognized as such and would give up many years of their lives to serve in government.
That worked exactly once. George Washington was elected president.
We’ve been scrambling ever since.
I recently read America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 by Bernard Weinberger, an excellent summary of how and why parties entered the ideal and ridiculously unrealistic world of the Founders. (There are many other books on that election, of course.) It’s incredible how that election prefigured yet mirrored our modern world.
Title edited for clarity.
The original idea was also that the best men were necessarily the property owners, who were the established elite.* Ensuring universal white male suffrage was one thing, but it was too much to expect that poor whites would be able to govern, and therefore their direct voice must be filtered through a few layers of representation before it made it to the Federal level.
That was a big reason why state governments are the way they are. The Civil War and the Jim Crow Era proved that idea unworkable, and demonstrated that the Federal Government must take a direct role in some things to ensure that fundamental rights are respected.
*(This helps explain why the American Revolution was so uneventful afterwords, with no purges, no attempts at reestablishing the monarchy, no radical or reactionary movements: It was a revolution by and for the local rulers, who were accustomed to running things without any oversight from the distant central government, and who could therefore sever the final legal ties to it without changing much about how the people close to them already lived and were governed. The bureaucracy largely remained the same, and the bureaucracy is the autonomic system which keeps the country alive. Revolutionary slogans and inspired leadership are all well and good, but running a postal service is hard, and if you don’t have one, your country is going to be difficult to do business in. Revolutionary zeal can’t make up for technical competence.)
So, you claim that New Zealand and Belgium are fictitious in fact.
Isn’t Belgium is just a polite word for burping?
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, etc.
Was it a perfect system? No, but we seem to be doing better than a lot of countries. Maybe you should give them some credit? Lets see you come up with a government that lasts 240 years and ends up with the world’s strongest economy and military.
Even if we ignore the Belgian Congo and the history of the Maori, they’re still not paradises on Earth.
I’m not sure Belgium is the country you want to use as the exemplar of a functional political system.
Also, if Belgium is the comparison you want to make, then the proper comparator is Connecticut or Vermont or Hawaii. If the US has to count Mississippi, then Europe has to count Greece (or, arguably, places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Not that Madison, Hamilton & Jefferson always agreed. Madison & Hamilton worked well together until Jefferson got back from France–then the Virginians stuck together. Well, TJ opposed his fellow Virginian Washington as VP. (Is this the plot of Hamilton?)
The country’s had some rough patches. One very bloody one, in fact. But the right to participate in government spread to all men–then even to women. The struggles aren’t over. One big problem is that too many people do not bother to use those hard-won rights. Or live in a haze interrupted every 4 years by one big election.
We are taught history & political science in school. Even if we slept through the classes, the knowledge is still there. For those who care to learn.
Eh? There is no Europe-wide political system. There is a complicated series of international treaties governing those things that the EU and eurozone states do in common (which is less than you might think, and subject to the final decisions of member state governments acting together). There is a (broader) European Convention on Human Rights, with a common tribunal. And that’s about i
This kind of relativism isn’t super helpful since of course no system is perfect but America’s falls on the far side of below average.
IMHO, there’s two main causes which help explain not just the political system, but a lot of other things in American life. Firstly, America suffers a lot from first mover disadvantage. Americans are generally one of the first to adopt something which means we are making a lot of it up as we go along. Later countries can learn from existing examples and use the lessons to avoid the bad ideas but the first mover doesn’t have that luxury. In a way, you can think of America as running Democracy Alpha which has been heavily patched over the years while most other countries are running Democracy 2.0 or Democracy 3.0.
Secondly, America is a relatively conservative country, not in the political sense, but in the sense that it resists change. The American system favors a consultative process where it’s far easier to make something stay the same than it is to change it. Along the process, there’s many points along the way in which a proposed change can be derailed.
You see this in things like America still not getting rid of the penny and only finally implementing chip & pin cards or being the only developed country without universal healthcare.
Hell, even Jefferson and Hamilton, despite having contrary views, still seemed to have a respect for one another. There was the famous Comprise of 1790 (with James Madison also there) and the fact that Hamilton’s vote is what secured Jefferson entering the White House instead of Aaron Burr. That last act arguably cost him his life (along with his pride) since it all went downhill with Burr after.
I think the major issue is that the Founding Fathers didn’t expect political parties to form. In Federalist #10, Madison seemed to think the predominant issue would be “factions.” Part of his argument was that a bigger republic allowed increased diversity and diluted the power of factions. Apparently, he just didn’t realize that a large amount of those factions would assimilate rather than operate independently. While over-simplifying, I’ve always thought of it as Madison believing there would be an ever changing number of factions, who would eventually dissipate once they got what they wanted or simply tired of the political process. Instead, he got a permanent two-party system that thrives on adversity and unrealistic hardline positions.
I completely agree that the apathy displayed by certain portions of the general population needs to be rectified. There needs to be more political awareness, starting by being really thought it in school. When I was an undergrad, I had to spend a day surveying people through random numbers. One of the questions I had to ask was how many branches of government there are. I was shocked how many didn’t know. That type of ignorance shouldn’t exist. Another problem is that I think many citizens have gravitated toward presidential elections with local regions being left behind. They think they only need to vote once every 4 years. And part of that is because so many people seem to view the president as some type of dictator that has complete control over their lives. Yes, Executive power has grown tremendously in the last 100 years or so, but the President still has to face Congress and the courts. He doesn’t possess absolute power; nowhere near it. That’s was a really long-winded way of saying that I think teaching kids about the political process at a young age. And not just on the federal level. One of the things de-Tocqueville marvelled at about America was the political/civic associations. The fact that towns would be crowded with civilians actively participating in the political process. We’ve lost that to a large degree. Or, at the very least, it doesn’t happen very often. I think educating kids at a younger age about the political process will better equp them for when they’re older.
Exactly. They cannot even manage a federal government! It’s similar to the Articles of Confederation, which America tossed after a decade of failure.
I don’t think they’d give “The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word ‘Belgium’ In a Serious Screenplay” award if that’s what it meant.
And here we disagree again.
I find it interesting that this criticism runs directly counter to your next one. America apparently can’t do it right when it moves first, and can’t do it right when it waits for others to blaze the trail. Do you see why I get a bit tired of this kind of debate? There’s literally no right answer for America, because every single thing we do or refrain from doing is wrong.
This is a feature, not a bug, and it’s a feature of literally every stable political system. Changes must be deliberated and everyone must feel they have a voice, because if enough people feel disenfranchised, you get a revolution.
Chip and PIN is one thing, but, well, which UHC plan should we adopt? I agree that some plan is needed, but when you look at any real, existing system, they all have serious criticisms lodged against them by the people who live under them.