| ▲ | bubblewand 4 hours ago |
| > Democracy has unfortunate failure scenarios, make a note for history books and system design lessons. Vote better next time. Major problems with the US system have been known for a long time. It's been regarded as basically obsolete for over a century now, by the kind of people who study this stuff. |
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| ▲ | legitster 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The US constitution has a really bad early adopter syndrome where it was so good at the time that it's hard to move away from. Nearly every country with a constitution modelled on ours has failed at some point. "We basically run a coalition government, without the efficiency of a parliamentary system" - Paul Ryan. To be more specific, our majority-based government locks us into a two-party system where one party just has to be slightly less bad than the other to win a majority. But our two parties are really just a rough assembly of smaller coalitions that are usually at odds with each other. The presidential democracies that function usually have some sort of "hybrid" model where the legislature has some sort of oversight on the executive office. But they are still much more prone to deadlock or power struggles. |
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| ▲ | sarchertech 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is no system that is immune to takeover from a demagogue. There's not even any hard evidence that any system is more resilient to it than the US is. It's all just tradeoffs. Germany had 7 major political parties in the run up to 1933. In fact if you look at the history of dictatorships that took over democracies, having 2 to 3 stable institutionalized parties is actually protective. The other thing that appears to be protective is a history of peaceful transitions of power, which the US has the longest or second longest. |
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| ▲ | BurningFrog 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Germany only became a democracy under duress in 1919, and it never really settled into a stable democracy. Under immense pressure from an impressive list of disasters during the 1920s, it reverted back to authoritarianism in 1933. I don't think this teaches us much about the US |
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| ▲ | Zigurd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How about we try keeping big money out of politics and using ranked preference voting before we declare democracy obsolete? People have been studying that stuff. |
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| ▲ | nostrademons 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | FWIW most experts now favor approval voting [1] over ranked choice. Approval voting has similar advantages as ranked choice in allowing 3rd-party candidates and favoring moderate candidates. It avoids the chaotic behavior that RCV can exhibit [2] where shifts in the order of voters' down-ballot preferences can very significantly alter the outcome of the election [3]. And it's also much easier to explain to voters ("It's like voting today, except you vote for everybody you'd find acceptable and the best candidate wins. Sorta like when you're picking a restaurant to go out to with friends - you go to the place that is acceptable to the greatest number of people, not the one that a minority really want to go to"), doesn't require that you reprint ballots (you can re-use normal FPTP ballots, but you just count all votes instead of disqualifying ballots with multiple candidates marked), and is easily adapted to proportional representation and multi-member elections (you just take the top-N best candidates instead of the top-1). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting [2] http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1o1byqi/... | |
| ▲ | triceratops 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think they're talking about the flaws in presidential democracies. Not democracy itself. Parliamentary democracies are supposed to be a better design. | |
| ▲ | Braxton1980 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If you ask most voters they'll say big money in politics is bad but if they know that why aren't they voting the issue? What is the money doing that the voter can't overcome? | | |
| ▲ | rootusrootus 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They all think it's big money on the other side. Everything they learn themselves isn't the result of a big money campaign, it's honest truthful information that they were smart enough to find on their own. | | |
| ▲ | JuniperMesos 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is precisely why I don't care very much about accusations that there's big money in politics. Of course there is - there's huge numbers of people and institutions with money, using that money to advocate for the political change they want to see, and an important strategy for doing this involves promulgating information that they think is favorable to their cause. Everyone is doing this all the time. Nonetheless, an individual citizen still has to support some political cause (even if you are completely politically disinterested, there are multiple factions claiming that your inaction is tantamount to support for their opponents). Whatever information about the world you think is true, or whatever political cause you think is in your interests, someone else can point to a monied interest who supports similar things. There's no way to use the absence of big money as a heuristic for what political causes are good or bad for you to support. |
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| ▲ | wang_li 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | How about, before we try to keep "big money" out of politics and adopt ranked preference voting, we ban ill educated people and ban voting yourself other people's stuff. Voting is not a survival skill, it's a civic obligation. | | |
| ▲ | JuniperMesos 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized to grant people the right to vote or not? What if some authorities within those educational institutions believe in universal suffrage and so make sure to give suffrage-granting degrees to literally everyone who sets foot in their institution, regardless of their academic performance? (During the Vietnam War in the US many college professors gave passing grades to all males in their classes, in order to allow them to keep their student draft deferments, to try to prevent them from being drafted into the US military to fight in Vietnam). There's a set of similar questions one could ask about exactly how you implement a ban on "voting yourself other people's stuff", in an adversarial political system where everyone has a different idea of what that means and is motivated to use whatever constitutional framework exists to ensure that their idea gets structurally advantaged. | | |
| ▲ | wang_li 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level. Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no one gets to live in the social safety net. No one who is receiving these kinds of benefits from the government should expect name brand anything, or to even be able to choose what food to eat, or to travel, or even pick who you socialize with. If you want to eat steak, you have to be a net producer. If you want name brand clothing, be a net producer. If you want to go to the beach, be a net producer. Everyone who should pay some amount of tax, and anytime there is an increase in government spending, that amount that they are taxed should go up. If there is a decrease in government spending, it can go down. But everyone pays something. People need to have skin in the game. The US's current situation where nearly half the country are not net tax payers is not sustainable. Anything that can't go on forever, won't. So the country should ease into better situation, where the country is a nation of producers and not a nation of consumers, instead of hitting a brick wall where suddenly your ration of beans just stop. | | |
| ▲ | mikestew an hour ago | parent [-] | | Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level. Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh? | | |
| ▲ | wang_li an hour ago | parent [-] | | Maybe you should learn to read at a level that you understand what I wrote? Smugness based on an intentional misreading just makes you look dumb. | | |
| ▲ | mikestew 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Plenty of illiterate people manage to stay out of jail, you’re implying that you weren’t suggesting literacy tests for voting, so I’ll just admit to being at a loss as to your point. But if you care to take another whack at how you would suggest “we ban ill educated people”, I’m all ears. | | |
| ▲ | wang_li 10 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I am not attempting to describe the world. I am trying to the expectations we have of the citizens of our polity. It has nothing to do with illiterate people manage not to commit crimes. I am saying that before we decide to get "big money" out of politics or we let people vote for the seven people who promise them the most shit, we should decided to put people who chose not to acquire basic skills that any human within standard deviation of average intelligence can acquire, when given 12 years of free education, into jail. It literally is not a literacy test for voting. It's an "are you a lazy piece of shit who is going to drag all of society down" policy. |
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| ▲ | 0cf8612b2e1e 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What is considered the best* system of government? Which country comes closest to the ideal model? *best is funny to define |
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| ▲ | ackfoobar 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I guess the answer has to depend on demographics. But if we are spitballing, it probably wouldn't be all bad for every country to have a Lee Kuan Yew. |
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