this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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A somewhat less pessimistic take: the system is set up to be self-stable.
And it was also designed so that States would have most of the power, not the Federal government.
At various points in history the common people did get benefits. New Deal. Universal suffrage. Civil rights. Abolition.
But it always requires a critical mass of the population to support change.
Like in the 2016 election? Or in 2000? The system is set up to prevent the will of the people from being enacted and it takes a massive crisis for everyone to be pissed off enough to do something. Add to that the control of nearly all media by the oligarchy and you get to where we are today.
The US government system was set up to be better than the monarchies its designers had grown up under. In this sense it has been wildly successful. But... it wasn't really designed to scale to the size it has, nor to account for the massive changes in technology that have occurred since it was written.
The leaders of the time decided to replace the first attempt only 6 years after it was ratified, and I believe they fully expected any future government to do the same if they found the current system wasn't working. They did try to make the new system more adaptable by adding the Amendment process, which was frankly genius and unprecedented in government systems prior to that.
I think it's very important to remember where and when the system we have came from, and to try to think like the people who wrote it, and to remember that at the time they had no other models for successful government beyond the writings of Enlightenment-period historians. It's very easy to criticize the current system. It's far more difficult (and substantially more important) to draft a better system.
I've often thought that America suffers from being the first successful iteration of our style of government. It was great and a huge improvement over all the other examples at the time. So much so that much of the world eventually followed in its footsteps.
But where other countries looked at our first successful attempt and further improved and refined the idea, we're still stuck on that very first version. What was once a radically new idea that worked so much better than everyone else, is now an old, outdated and barely functional relic. We're the early prototype iPhone 3g, while several other countries have iPhone 6/10/etc
Can you give any specific examples
I'm not sure if anyone could conclusively declare a certain country's democracy is totally better than ours, but several more recently created democracies have avoided many of the pitfalls that have been discovered with American implementation. Things like mandatory voting, ranked choice voting, better and stronger rules around money and political campaigns, more comprehensive list of citizen rights, etc. Most of those countries have their own missteps as well, but a lot of our issues have been solved, we just haven't adopted the methods and improvements already shown to work. Typically because they'd require pretty extensive reform, which is incredibly hard to achieve with our government especially in the current political climate.
A while ago I read the book Swarmwise by Rick Falkvinge about the process of starting a political movement in Sweden, and some aspects of how their democracy works seemed comparatively impressive to me, and better capable of genuine representation because the barriers to getting started are not so insurmountable. Still, I'm not convinced overall of the narrative of changes to the structure of government being generally positive. You used a technology metaphor, but it's been a clear trend for tech platforms to actually become worse over time in terms of user agency, privacy and exploitation, something that to me seems mirrored in government. A lot of what people see as solutions to problems take the form of an increase in centralized control and a weakening of barriers to that control, and I see those barriers as the ideological core of how the US was originally designed to work. A specific law might be shown to have positive results in itself, but be achieved by an unsafe concentrating of power. In particular, I think the way the executive branch has been expanding over the last century is very concerning especially with stuff like the Patriot Act and everything associated with it.
Basically, especially right now it's clear that a lot of the people in power are malevolently insane, incompetent and demented, and it's really important that we maintain and improve protections to keep them from doing too much damage, so I am skeptical about ideas for major reform especially when the idea is to take the shortest path to policy goals.