Alternatives to congress
What alternative ways can you think of to handle making legislation and passing laws that would negate the increasingly polarized political climate that is happening in more and more countries?
What alternative ways can you think of to handle making legislation and passing laws that would negate the increasingly polarized political climate that is happening in more and more countries?
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 can’t learn anything and don’t 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.
I’m a branch manager in the trades and I see this daily. We’ve had to let go plenty because they wouldn’t take personal accountability for their actions and instead it was always someone else’s/thing’s fault. Maybe it’s just the current field I’m in. Who knows.
Maybe tech school should require electives like philosophy, logic, ethics, sociology and psychology classes? This used to be required here, but isn't, anymore.
In their own words they are working a blue collar job because they learn by doing. It would also help if the common trade tech schools weren’t crap at teaching (at least where I am). Most learn more as an apprentice in 1 month than they did in school and they’re getting paid for it instead.
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.
Can you elaborate?
The US has an effectively two-party system. These parties make decisions based on the money they are given. In order to win votes, they find the most divisive issue to wedge a divide between their party and the other side. If they resolved these issues, they would have to create new ones so they are actually motivated to not compromise. There are many books and other writings about these problems.
As for the rest of the world, the US was dominant in the 20th century in power and influence. This meant that people who wanted power in other countries would look to the US way of doing politics for inspiration. I am not making all the connections for you, but I do want to mentioned how the parties in UK started hiring US campaign managers in the late 90s to help them gain power in their country. It clearly worked. Other countries have followed suit.
I totally agree. But also the media has the same interest in dividing the people. They get more viewers that way. But how does ending FPTP, which I assume is first past the post voting, going to solve that. I have heard some say it would help move caddies to the center some. But I am not convinced it would move them much in most states.
The media is often owned by the same people buying the partisan politicians. First past the poll consolidates power. It makes it easier to convince voters to vote for the lesser of two evils while party funding overloads media with their preferred candidates. Some states even get away with laws that only allow the two parties to be on their ballots. If you can vote based on candidate approval, you could choose your best candidate and your lesser of evils. When people see this make a difference after one or two cycles, parties will lose power in the polls.
I agree it will help. But all the advertising will still probably dominate who wins the most votes. The people paying will just not buy advertising for the politicians who don't tow the party line.
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.
Dunno, we’ve never seen anything go wrong with the Soviet system of representation before have we?
Definitely became overly-beaurocratized after WWII, but was generally far more democratic than Capitalist states
Could work if you remove the democratic centralism part, which is an effect of one of the main reasons the USSR was undemocratic most of the time
Almost every democratic structure practices Democratic Centralism, it just means the group is bound to the democratic results.
Just like many things in the USSR, It was perhaps that way in principle, but nefariously twisted in practice, where it means that everyone must vote whatever the elite thinks, majority requirements be damned. Like the ancient parable of Yu the Great choosing a successor, a dictating elite are bound to self-perpetuate and stray away from the proletariat, even if that's what they were once.
citation needed
Excerpts from a book from a reputed US academic institution, which I'm not sure whether you would favor over a book written by one of your comrades. Just give me the biggest example of when the Supreme Soviet voted against the Presidium starting with Stalin and before Gorbachev.
Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?
-Medvedev, Roy. Let History Judge. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. 144
This is from an explicitly anti-"Stalinism" book showing Stalin getting outvoted on a basic ideological issue by revisionists.
For the record, I do think that historical texts by "comrades," as you sneer, can be interesting and insightful, but I mostly concern myself with texts by liberals (or otherwise anti-communist ideologies) because I know those are the only ones that won't be rejected out of hand.
Thanks. The oblique narrative flow of this text is pretty confusing and I don't think I understood it. The expression in question is "dictatorship of the party", right? Was the vote inside the Presidium? From what I gather, the expression was in line with what the party elite wanted, meaning the soviet did not vote against the presidium?
My English level is only near-native, sorry. That's not what I meant. You answered my question directly with a source that I'd trust.
I apologize about the language bit. I rarely get a liberal arguing about this who wouldn't use such a term as "comrade" derisively.
Anyway, I explained the reason I shared it, which is that it is:
But that's not precisely what you asked for, I just don't have a good source on your real question.
Nah, it was democratic, moreso than Capitalist countries. You can read This Soviet World if you want a look at it.
Without a specific page or chapter number, I'm assuming you're pointing to the only paragraph that mentions "centralism". It just seems to repeat what I already replied to.
I'll explain further, then: At first, the lower body elects the upper body. The upper body decides everything. Then:
I'm referring to the book itself, you have a lot of confused ideas about the USSR itself. Blackshirts and Reds is another great "Myth Debunker."
Wrong. The lower bodies also decide things among themselves particular to issues specific to them, and elect delegates for the larger area. Imagine a soviet of a single factory, then a soviet of a city composed of delegates from all of the factories, then a regional soviet, etc. Each rung governs their respective areas with matters exclusive to them. These were workers with instant recall elections if needed.
Because the lower bodies vote on matters pertaining to themselves that don't affect others.
That's not really accurate. Diverse opinions were held and discussed, what was purged was liberalism and fascism, which were dangerous currents deliberately infiltrating the USSR, as well as wreckers like Trotsky who collaborated with fascists and liberals.
Secondly, Stalin fought against beaurocracy, it wasn't until WWII where the population was decimated and the USSR needed to be rebuilt that a beaurocratic class of "career politicians" began to take hold.
Again, I suggest reading more on the subject, you seem to be confused on the basic structure itself, causing other confusions to spring forth.
I appreciate that you're taking the time to politely respond.
Obviously, the lower bodies decide more minutiae and local stuff and can't go against the upper bodies' decisions, and that goes for pretty much every democracy, just like you said. I was talking about specifically the Supreme Soviet and its Presidium, which could also be abstracted into the presidiums of every soviet. I think that's the source of our confusion here. I'm looking at principles in making wide-ranging decisions, which are the things that can cause division. Not sure why I said üpper body".
Ah yes, known liberals and fascists such as the other two people who ruled with Stalin and whoever believed in genetics. If diverse opinions were allowed, what was the entire focus on eradicating factionalism?
Could you cite some sources or elaborate on fighting against bureaucracy? Why was bureaucracy established and why did it remain after the war? How wasn't Stalin before Lenin's death a career politician?
I have to sign off now until tomorrow.
The general line according to Stalin (e.g. in "Foundations of Leninism") was that there should be thorough and exhaustive debates among those with differing opinions within the Party but that, once a resolution was reached by a vote following the debate, further fighting on the topic as a Party official was essentially a form of wrecking, though of course matters were revisited periodically (for good and for ill). Even if you disagreed, you were then expected to go along with whatever the motion was in the interest of the integrity of the Party as an actor. This was "Diversity of opinion, unity of action" [edit: I got the motto slightly wrong, see cowbee]
I don't really have a developed opinion on it (I guess I should have left this to cowbee for that reason) but I definitely have sympathy for this approach when I look at it in the context of glory hounds like Trotsky being constantly contrarian for the sake of political brinkmanship instead of, you know, acting in good faith and believing in things besides that he should be top dog. There shouldn't be tolerance for people like that, and the long-term harm that Trotsky's opposition bloc did to the SU is hard to fathom.
You added good context to what I'm saying, good comment comrade.
Democratic Centralism can be hard to swallow if analyzed through an Anarchist lense, but ultimately the results and necessity of the matter speak for itself. Diversity in thought, unity in action.
Trotskyism is especially dangerous because it's essentially wrecker Marxism. Trotsky is often shown in a sympathetic light in western media and narratives, and prevents actual radicalization. New Leftists see a supposed Socialist with similar critiques of the USSR as the US State Department, and that's a far more comfortable pill to swallow in the west.
There's a difference between wrecking and having different opinions.
Losurdo's Stalin: Critique of a Black Legend is a good book going over this. Stalin agreed with Lenin about how the beauracracy could grow, so he actively tried to combat it. He even edited records of meetings to reduce his applause and increase it for others. Stalin was elected, yes, but the beauracracy wasn't solidified until Kruschev. The necessity of rebuilding infrastructure and a destroyed public led to a rise in opportunism that was completed under Gorbachev, introducing new fixtures of government that stood against the rest, harming the centralized system and resulting in dissolution.
I'd read the books I linked if I were you.
And Mendelian genetics wrecks the party with the unhinged liberalism of accurate science supported by half of Pavlov's students?
As for your books, you may realize that I am a bit short on time and do not have the energy to read 4 entire novel-length books instead of specific pages or chapters.
In the beginning of the USSR, there was legitimate struggle against bourgeois science, like race science. Genetics was unfortunately overly combatted in the crossfire. The USSR was still far more dedicated to scientific pursuit than Capitalist Countries, and managed to get a man to space before even the US.
Then just read Blackshirts and Reds. If your time is so short that you can't read even 1 short book on the topic of dispelling myths about the USSR, then your time is too short to argue with people online about it too, no offense. Blackshirts and Reds is recommended reading for new Marxists in general because it's short and to the point, and written in common American language without requiring having read books and books of Marxist theory to understand.
Okay, I'll try that book when I get home and get back later.
Let me start by saying that the general idea of this response is fair, but I checked and I think it's only 3 books, two of which are novella-length at best (I think the Losurdo one is a bit longer). I would furthermore like to encourage you to click on the link and glance at The Soviet World because it has a nice hyperlinked table of contents and most of the individual sections, clearly labeled by topic, are just a few pages each.
Showing nuance, nice.
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 don’t 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.
Not sure the US can limit private advertising unless the Supreme Court changes it's interpretation of the 1st ammendment (free speech). I am guessing that in the UK and Australia that free speech doesn't cover advertising. Maybe that is the lynchpin.
Legislators have been ignoring the vote, too.
Mixed member proportional is nice, but it suffers from overhang seats.
I have a different proposal, but that one is pretty extensive.
It goes as following:
1. Replace the presidential system with a parliamentary one. Separation of powers is still as strict as it is. But it goes further. Veto power of the president, judges, anyone, it's gone.
2. The head of government is chosen by both popular vote and consensus. The candidate with the most votes and approval from most members in parliament wins. They can be removed from position by parliament or by referendum at any time.
3. Change FPTP to proportional representation. Specifically, it should be party-agnostic, and have a 4% threshold, below which a seat holder still can vote and speak, but has less speaking time. Seat apportion will be according to the Hamilton method, and there will be an additional spare vote, so that main votes to parties falling below the threshold, will go to the voter's spare vote, which is one likely to gain a seat. Party members can recall parlementarians, and people can do so too through referenda.
4. Abolish electoral districts. Furthermore, no person earning more than 3* the median US income (stocks and other earnings overseas and tax evasions included) may contribute to or participate in the elections in any way.
5. Split up the Democratic and Republican Parties into their ideological caucuses. Caucuses may merge, but no caucus may be bigger than 16% of the total US House of Representatives amount of seats.
6. Abolish the Senate. It's a slog that slows down and only helps bureaucracy. The work it does can also be done by having a strong constitution (that actually does guarantee people's rights to civility, safety, and liberty), and parlementary comi
7. Increase the House's size to 700 seats. This way, the work pressure is smaller and the parliament can be more representative, and lobbying becomes harder. States' seats will be degressively proportional in a similae way to the EU's seats.
8. Faithless electors are forbidden, age limit. No officeholder shall serve a term beyond 5/6th of the median life expectancy in their residential region at their birth date - rounded down to the nearest year. In the US, median life expectancy is 76 years, so that'd mean 63 years.
9. More voting booths. One voting booth per area of 1000 voters, distributed such that as many people as possible have one within 1 km of their home. Remote areas with fewer people than this, will have a mail-in as default.
10. The US. Supreme Court of Justice is not appointed by any leader. This also goes for lower level courts. The court shall be appointed apolitically through multiple random ballots, out of a pool of all federal judges, whereas the latter shall be appointed by the same method, through a pool of all in their area, who have passed juridicial examination, whose passing requirements are determined by a commission of judges without any economical and/or political ties to non-judge figures.
The court's size is determined as C•0.075 3sqrt(US current populace + 2), where C is the court size in seats. This would mean that there'd be 54 judges in 2020.
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.
They will have lots of funds from all the savings on ads.
Anyway, I am starting to think random people secestered or something. Maybe it is only a couple of months at a time. They vote on some legislation, then work on new legislation for the next group to vote on.
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.
Nah, unless you suspend the 1st ammendment, you can't really fix that enough. People will always be free to pay for an ad supporting thier opinion.
You'll probably need to think beyond liberal dogma if you want to solve a problem with liberalism. "Paying for something is speech and therefore unimpeachable" is an insane thing to take as a fundamental element of how society is run when the end result is so obviously and demonstrably the rich using that ruling (which was always made for them) to buy elections.
People want to find some policy wonk solution to these fundamental problems ("Oh! Sortition fixes everything! Wait, maybe a parliamentary system. Ooh, ooh, how about . . .") but they are just red herrings, silly schemes that distract you from critical thought about the assumptions that brought you here.
I hear what you are saying, but that isn't campaign finance reform. Redefining what is protected speech seems like a prerequisite to campaign finance reform. And that does sound like a good idea. It certainly would help. But can it be leveraged to deal with the media which makes money polarizing the issues? If you don't fix that too I am not sure the problem will really be solved.
You still have spending wars. Politicians are bought and sold every day, and any large company probably donates to politicians of multiple parties.
Yeah, it's a hard nut to Crack. Maybe it is just impossible to get the money out of the process.
What's the opposite of congress?
Progress
Came here to make the same joke.
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
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.
I think spending on political campaigns is just one way to provide support to a politician. And I don't think it is the strongest. A promise of a well paying job after thier term is up would sway a lot of randos. Or even cheaper, parties and "speaking" engagements that are really fancy vacations would probably do the trick even while they are in office.
Direct democracy—except instead of directly voting on legislation, voters vote on the desired effects of legislation and a metric for measuring if those effects are being achieved. The actual legislation is then written by specialists trained on effective policy implementation, who can adjust the legislation on the fly if it isn’t having the desired effect. Their mandate is limited by the associated metric—if they can’t meet the goals, they lose their mandate and the case goes back to voters for review.
Hm.. I can't see voters being able to understand metrics enough to choose what is in their best interest. Also, anything where everyone votes will be dominated by special interests that have the money to advertise.
A parliament.
representative government is pretty good
let's talk dumping the executive branch. those bums are worthless.
The only alternative to an elected legislature (parliaments are different from congresses) is either direct democracy or one party rule.
Anarchy’s free association. We simply have them split and control their own part of land unless there’s agreements to use certain parts of common land. Would work for everything except global warming.