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Randomly drawing citizen. Sure politics require some training, but it can be done on the job
Also, countries with proportional votes tend to force politicians to talk with each other more than countries with single representative per district.
Limiting elected official mandates to one or two. If you couldn't do something in 10 years no reason to think you'll do it latter
Have you worked with people recently? A decent amount canβt learn anything and donβt take personal accountability. I guess that does sound like Congress.
No. This sort of arrogant rubbish needs to be shut down.
In my job - a doctor - I routinely discuss difficult and complex topics with people of all backgrounds and education levels. With very few exceptions people are able to understand difficult topics.
It is my experience that the most difficult people to work with are not ordinary people but those who hold the opinion that everyone else is stupid.
With very few exceptions sortition and participatory democracy have worked well whenever they've been tried.
I disagree about sortition, but I appreciate pushing back on elitist, misanthropic bullshit like you did. I think elections with a strong ability to quickly recall faithless representatives is a much better solution because it involves the decision-making of the whole community, rather than a community member chosen at random.
Iβm a branch manager in the trades and I see this daily. Weβve had to let go plenty because they wouldnβt take personal accountability for their actions and instead it was always someone elseβs/thingβs fault. Maybe itβs just the current field Iβm in. Who knows.
I've toyed with the idea of staffing the House by sortition. Maybe not entirely random, pooling from State and local offices might be more practical, political efficacy is a skill and a little experience is valuable.
Well my good-faith arguments would be direct democracy (i.e. everyone votes on every change) or ranked choice, but that has its own problems. However, you didn't say it has to be serious. So I suggest a system that locks a chimpanzee on LSD into a room with signs (options) and blinking lights. Chimp starts rolling and points to the blinky light he likes (or hates) either way, your government is operating far more efficiently than hairless apes doing something that is apparently too much work, and most are just as ill-informed as acid-chimp. I honestly think acid chimp accidentally gives you a better (albeit random) set of values than capitalism/democracy ever has.
You, I like you.
A bit is specific, but you can probably adapt them.
End FPTP. House of representatives actually representing the people instead of state or party. Senate still representing states but not parties.
Soviet Democracy. Workers elect delegates from among themselves, who can then be subject to instant recall elections at any time. Remove the "career politician" aspects from government.
Greatly expand congress (like at least 10x), and have it work like jury duty.
Random cost less to buy than congress people.
But you'd have to bribe a lot more to sway legislation, and nobody serves more than like a year or two so you can't "buy for life". Also, congress people are already shockingly cheap.
A bicameral legislature, one house elected by mixed member proportional system and the other selected at random from the voting age population. Legislation must pass both houses, if it passed one house but not the other it can go to referendum at the same time as the next general election.
You can also have things like citizen initiated referenda. Campaign finance laws similar to those in the UK are also desirable.
Hm, interesting take on the random group. The US has citizen initiated referendum. Just takes signatures. But the money spent on advertising for or against has a massive impact. I had to look up the uk campaign finance laws. They limit 3rd party spending, but I donβt see that as stopping someone from spinning off hundreds of organizations that each buy like one Comercial or something.
I can't say that I'm very familiar with the UK laws in depth other than that they have been in operation for many years and are generally considered effective.
For referenda there's no reason you can't have a publicly funded campaign for yes and no and limit private advertising, we have something like that here in Australia.
Sortition, random selection, when combined with an elected body has a lot of benefits. It has the advantage of having professional politicians with institutional knowledge and relationships while also having a body the that is actually representative of the larger population.
IMO anything with a direct vote of the people will end up as spending wars between special interests with the funds to advertise.
Seems like campaign finance reform is a more pertinent question then.
You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.
We all upvote or downvote a law
Lol, reddit making laws. I mean at least the names of the laws would be interesting. Lawy McLawFace
Everyone forms communes that reflect their personal values. I would prefer one with direct democracy, and no representatives.
However big a commune you want, but I'd recommend keeping it at 2000 people or less. Anymore and people start to see each other as strangers, not community members. Plus direct democracy works better with smaller population numbers.
So once you get to 2000 people, how do you determine who to expel? Maybe it would be fairest to expel the people who have the babies, putting them over 2000.
Hm, I do agree that if you have too many people, things go down hill. But what if one commune decides to use all the water heading to another... or decides their personal values are that other commutes should serve them.
What this person is proposing is functionally similar to forms of anarchism and anarchist theory has some answers to these kinds of questions.
For example the communes could have a federation where representatives are sent to settle disputes. Likewise instead of a fixed 2000 people with walls between you could have people in several smaller overlapping communities which act as bridges across a network of communities. Similar to how a person can be a family member and a company employee and a resident of an apartment building etc.
Though I don't completely buy in to everything it says, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works goes into how anarchist communities can and have worked
What's the opposite of congress?
Progress
I don't see the problem originating from Congress necessarily being polarized. I think the problem is that corporate and big money interests are too strong, and they fund politicians that will try to divide the people on social issues so that they can distract the people from badness happening on the economic front. In other words, I think we're seeing a problem with corruption that's expressing itself as polarization.
Even the term "polarization" can also be used as a trap, because it tends to be used in a way that frames politics as a linear spectrum, and your views are somewhere between these two end points. In reality everything is far more complicated. People have highly nuanced views on many different subjects with good reason, and there's no way you can easily capture it on one single sliding scale.
Well polarization can be used to measure how much the nuances affect things. Like the border bill that Biden tried to put up. The nuances were ignored in favor of what was good for the party. Bills that would be passable 20 years ago as bipartisan thanks to those nuances can't pass now because the parties have driven more people to ignore the nuances and just vote for one party or the other no matter the platform. And thus anyone who crosses the line fears they won't get reelected. And yes, money drives it as well. But not only directly. The media makes money portraying politicians as extremists to. So they help drive it as well. I don't think the money can really be controlled, so I think we need a different way to pass legislation that can somehow negate it's effect. I just don't know what that is.
There's a few ways in practice.
Court decisions are binding broadly. The conservative capture of the Supreme Court is political genius, honestly. They tend to have the final say regarding policy.
Federal agency rules are also broadly binding. EPA rules that limit greenhouse gas emissions, for example, apply everywhere in the country.
State legislatures are often less polarized, which facilitates a more productive legislature.
State agencies, like a state environmental department, mirrors its federal counterpart but is more localized.
Non-state organizations can get things done, though their interests are often limited and not necessarily in the interests of the broad public as state and federal institutions are.
International institutions can 'set the tone'. They may not have any power to actually do anything within a specific jurisdiction, but people within those jurisdictions can draw policy inspiration from international organizations and try for something locally binding.
This isn't an ideal solution, but a practical one. A simple hack for the U.S. would be to make congressional votes secret. Yes, this means congress people would be less accountable, but think about where their accountabilites lie. These people are far more worried about their parties' strongmen and sponsors than their gerrymandered constituents.
Impossible to implement in the present U.S. climate, but more idealistic is to divide the US into 50,000 person districts (greatly expanding an individuals access to their rep), then group those into evenly sized super districts. The reps choose from among themselves a super rep to attend congress, who they can recall at anytime. This should make gerrymandering more difficult, and dilute the effectiveness of corporate donors while increasing the influence of individual voters.
Oh, another thing about secret votes. It transfers blame from individuals to congess itself. If votes are public, and a popular bill fails, then the individuals and parties are blamed, if secret, then the whole of congress gets blamed and you could see incumbents lose reelection not because of how they individually voted but because of how the body as a whole did. That could force cooperation, but it could also introduce a new form of gamemanship.
Define a set of rules, and someone will figure out how to cheat it.
I honestly wonder if sortition is actually the answer.
Not much would stop special interests from influencing the random. IT would probably cost less even.
Isn't the strongest point of leverage that special interests currently have how expensive political campaigns are in terms of both money and time (and special interests' ability to provide both)? Sortition would eliminate this.