A Different Political System - Do you think it could work?

formula is definitely winning this conversation.

As you probably read before, the essay requirement for the state voters was just a suggestion of a patch to prevent the dominant ideology in the state, if there is any, to infiltrate in the other one and nominate their "spies". Obviously, doing this is cheating. But maybe it is not even necessary, just make it harder for politicians themselves to join a party and compete. My first idea was way simpler, each party puts a list of candidates for the congress, and you vote for the candidate of the party you identify with. Two politicians with hopefully opposing views will be elected in each state. Any legal adult can vote.

I still stand for not allowing majorities to form in the congress. The president controlling the congress gives him the opportunity to grab power and do things unchecked. The president being the minority means lots of things won't be done, which might be a good thing when they are bad, but bad if they are actually necessary. I mean, sometimes politicians do this type of stuff just for personal revenge, or shady stuff, etc. 50/50 in congress seems the best compromise to me.

What do you (and Nut Nut) think about the idea that presidents always alternate after their terms end? I left it open how the presidents would be chosen, given there would be no elections. Maybe allowing the representatives of the side supposed to be in power at the moment? E.g. if it's left turn, left representatives choose the name? Or maybe presidents should not have a party at all, but be chosen by the equally represented congress? And yes, I know both ideas, especially the last one, sound a lot like a parliamentary system, in the latter one with a higher probability that the chosen leader will always be centrist.

Think about sports, in some parts of the world. Sometimes it gets to the point of actual hatred, I've seen that in soccer, in cities with more than one team, it may turn violent. Now imagine that someone, maybe the almighty state 😃 decides that, for sports to be allowed to exist, there must be no championships and no score tracking. It has to be friendly matches and no scores. Do you think fans would have any incentive to get crazy in a place like that, if they can't "own" their rivals, because there's nothing to win or lose?

This is more or less the broad philosophical idea behind my idea of this political system.

Politics shouldn't be about competing or winning, it should be about doing what's best for the people you're governing. It's not, and hasn't been for a long time, and I don't have the fix. You can't please everyone 100%, but I know the current systems are just designed to allow a minority to keep the majority exhausted, divided and producing for the minorities benefit.

Personally ........ I question the effectiveness of a system which doesn't allow a society to make and execute long term plans because leadership is changing so frequently.

For example .... the need to transition to low carbon energy sources is something that might take a half century of cohesive strategy.

If you look at how China is approaching such issues, they have consistent leadership under an effective dictatorship and they are methodically creating a low carbon infrastructure. They install more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. They have high speed electrical rail. They make EV's cheap and abundant.

The US system today in contrast is basically organized grift.

The US has successfully tackled major crises by giving enough power to popular leaders effectively make them dictators. Washington, Lincoln and FDR were close to being dictators .... such was their popularity. Trump is a dictator among the GOP voters. No in the GOP universe dares cross him and the Federalist Society has managed the SCOTUS appointment process well enough that he and the Court are marching to the same hymnal which is right out of the Heritage Foundation unitary executive playbook.

I think the version of governance that the US is reliant upon is currently failing. The problems are going to have get worse and somehow a candidate who is outside the box is going to come from the periphery and move to the forefront ..... just as people like Lincoln and Churchill emerged from relatively powerless places to be the individual who harnesses the zeitgeist of the people. I have no idea who that person will be ..... buy just imagine if someone like Mandami wins the general election and does a fantastic job as mayor of NYC. I don't think the US will elect a person of his heritage, but that level of success may open up the possibilities for other left leaning politicians.

I honestly don't know who could do it. Frankly, I'd like to see Jon Stewart run for the democratic nomination. He's a great communicator and he has a platform which is too big for the Democratic establishment and corporate media to hide. People trust him. He's not a bullshitter. If Trump can be POTUS, why not him ??

Let Stephen Colbert be the White House press secretary. I don't know if people have seen how Colbert roasted Bush Jr when he was POTUS at the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was a performance for the ages ..... dude has some serious cojones. Bush looked like he was going to have a stroke. Colbert could make mincemeat of the corporate media. There should be a role for John Oliver in there somewhere too. Too bad George Carlin is no longer with us.

If you're asking in good faith, I think your problem is this...

If each ideological side is "guaranteed" power every other term no matter what, then there is no incentive to earn trust from the voters - because the public no longer decides the outcomes.

With your idea, you’ve essentially removed any pressure for those in power to meet your standards or to serve your interests which is a pretty substantial leap towards mirroring a one party authoritarian rule that hasn't had much of a successful track record for very good reason.

I mean, the elections aren't about picking a winner, its literally about holding power accountable because once the power becomes guaranteed, the accountabilities dies.

This statement implies that there are only two ideological "sides".

Right now, the US has two major parties that are both economically right wing. Both militarist, oligarch friendly and supporters of economic colonialism. The differences are between liberal and conservative social values.

The other side on economic issues has no voice. They are not offered space to even talk to viewers on corporate cable networks. The discussion of left wing financial perspectives in verboten in oligarchic America.

The biggest suckers on the world are the people who fall for the Fox News BS that MSNBC is left wing. ROFLMAO. How gullible are these people who believe that a network chock full of former GOP functionaries is left wing ???

My gosh ... the stupidity levels in the USA are simply astonishing. A bunch of brainwashed zombies getting their imprint from the great sages Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow. Not understanding that their jobs are just part of a divide and conquer apparatus to get everyone else to fear and hate each so much that we'll never cooperate with each other.

I think if we want to imagine an ideal government, we might want to imagine the ideal for how we want to interact with each other as citizens.

I'm a citizen and I'm trying to reason with you all .... my fellow citizens.

When I suggest enforce limits on toxic pollutants ..... people try to throw dehumanize me by suggesting that I want to be a Stalin like leftist dictator. Yes .... rules are authoritarian.

We don't let private citizens build nuclear weapons and we are grateful for a govt with the authority to stop that kind of thing. So every second we are adding heat energy to the biosphere equivalent to the detonation of ten Hiroshima class weapon detonations as a result of increased greenhouse forcing. We let private citizens decide to do that and we shouldn't.

What I am is like the parent who insists that a growing child get adequate sleep so they are best prepared to make the most of the following day. A parent has the authority to set a bedtime for a child and has the foresight to imagine tomorrow that a child who wants to stay up late does not.

We are in the process of creating a really shitty tomorrow and we need a mature adult who respects the future consequence to be steering the ship.

Don't worry, I'm not a troll.

Hum, let's say we live in a state where there are only three non-politician adults: you, I, and Nut Nut. My ideological side is right, you both are left. I choose my representative, you choose yours (let's assume you both agree on the same name). They are supposed to defend our interests in congress, and be accountable to us. Since the congress is always 50/50, it is very hard for the president to ever grab more power than he should or do anything unchecked by congress.

I believe that under this system, there is accountability. It is indirect but it is still there. Also, no single individual, president or congressman, has much power alone, they are quite weak as individuals.

All of this assumes the choices are binary.

They also burn 30% more coal than the rest of the world combined, and have done for a long time. China's coal consumption is expected to level off due to renewables, but demand for coal in India and Vietnam is still rising. India is likely to become the worst climate-change offender quite shortly.

https://www.iea.org/energy-system/fossil...

Arguing for dictatorship, however, is always wrong.

Agreed. But assuming every single ideology in the country is represented and has a chance to get into power, how do we solve the legitimacy problem? Imagine we have A, B, C, D and E. A got 9% of the votes, B got 23%, C 17%, D 35% and E 16%. D should be elected, but he got elected by 35%. You still have 65% of people who didn't vote for him. Especially if his ideology is a very controversial one, I think this is gonna be a huge problem.

Ranked choice.

My ideology is survival. I don't characterize that as being left or right.

In order to survive, we need to prevent ourselves from collectively tipping the planet into a version which is incompatible with our survival.

So .... if the recognition that our survival outcome is related to our collective behavior is how you define someone as a "leftist", then I would agree that I meet your definition of a leftist.

But I would counter that by asking you if you disagree with me and cling to a belief that our collective survival outcomes are not intertwined with our collective behavior. What I'm trying to do here is dig deeper into the criteria by which you characterize and individual as "left" or "right".

I just gave an example of how the voting would have worked, if we three were the only voters of some random state, under the system I suggested 😀

In a system with 3 voters, 2 voters would always constitute a supermajority and the two that decided to team up together would basically be a 2 person dictatorship.

Bizarre and weird political systems can indeed work.

Generally what it takes for a political system to work is that you have enough people who believe in it and enough people who work for it. Exactly what those numbers / ratios have to be varies with the system.

Your system would work as long as the reigning norm was for the parties to uphold the intent of the system, which I am guessing would be for one to act as a leading party and for the other to represent its opposition. Representation without election so to speak, which isn't an uncommon political ideal (practice is more of a mixed bad). As long as the norms are in place, the rest could follow.

It would cease to work if and when that was no longer the norm, for example if the same movement came to dominate both parties and they simply traded candidates for show. In my opinion, this would be the most likely way for your system to fail.

As for your system being unorthodox, unorthodox does not mean impossible. Realistically, it isn't really stranger than a hereditary monarchy which relies on the far more uncertain aspect of biology, environment and genetics. One could argue that political freedom does not exist (in the democratic sense) in your hypothetical system, but democratic ideals of freedom is an exception when it comes to government anyway.

No, as I explained before, left wing party and right wing party are separate. Each one has to elect one person. You vote only for your party. The end result has to be 2 congressmen for each state, one left, one right. The purpose of voting is to choose the names that will be sent to congress. Ok, if you didn't understand the simplified example of us 3 voters, imagine a state with 5M people, with part of them being left and part of them being right.

So, basically, people will stop believing in this system and it will lose legitimacy as soon as both parties become clones of each other.

While this was not necessarily the end result I wanted in a perfect world, I must say that I was hoping for something where the equilibrium would be center-left and center-right, both parties being only slightly different. I think this is considerably better than both parties being complete opposites.

Let me give you an example of why I think the way I do. Country Dreamland has a left party which defends UBI, free healthcare, generous social security and every single welfare program you could possibly imagine, and will push to implement them all if in power. It also has a right party who thinks none of these programs should ever exist, and it will either bar any attempt to implement them, or will abolish everything as soon as they come into power.

A left wing president is elected in 2021, and a right wing president is elected in 2025. But, how can the left wing idea be the correct one in 2021, but now the correct idea is the right one? This is just complete absurd.

An alien from another planet who comes to Earth and witness this will probably say that the people from Dreamland don't know wtf they want for their own country 😃

Well, the alien would be correct. They don't know wtf they want for their own country.

I think the term you might be search for is stability. The idea being that the less dramatic differences are in government shifts, the more stable government will be. Now, in healthy democracies, even fairly different parties can maintain stability. This is done through bipartisan frameworks decided and agreed upon for the foreseeable future. Say in your "Country Dreamland", you do indeed have these two very different parties (or sides if we assume more than two parties). However, they agree on a compromise for healthcare, transport infrastructure, national security... and then over the next 3-4 decades these plans are largely respected even if government changes.

That said, I think the desire for stability like you describe is understandable. Especially in this day and age where extreme partisanship is lauded, which mostly results in politics being very loud and disruptive for little gain. This type of stability comes with its own issues though. It often leads to "let's not rock the boat" instead of reforms. With complacency you can also get apathy, which can be as corrosive as partisanship, it just erodes government more discreetly. It can also be frustrating to the populace if there is seemingly no meaningful difference between their choices.

And sometimes disruptive politics are necessary. A lot of the rights we enjoy in democracies today are the result of radicals being very loud and in some cases even destructive. And I can promise you that in the days when that happened a lot of people were rolling their eyes at these loud voices.

So basically, it's all just a mess and we rarely have a coherent plan for anything. But if there is one thing that I see as the glue that ties a functional democratic government together it is respect for norms and instutition. That is where it all starts. Without that you won't get functional laws or administration, you'll just get shiny words that mean nothing and corrupt institutions.

As for your more fundamental point. I'm not sure we will ever know wtf we are doing, but I think we could be clueless in healthier ways.