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Are We A Majoritarian Politic? A Question For The Modern Center-Left To Address (2 Viewers)

If judges are going to look at one but not the other, that's the opposite of being equivalent. 😉
Not sure I follow. If an originalist judge is trying to interpret something from the text of the Constitution, they're going to look at what the people who drafted that section of the Constitution were thinking when they drafted it, whether that happened in 1787, 1865 or 2022.

 
While keeping the general thread topic in mind, if the US ever entered into a Czechoslovakia - type divorce and the tentative leaders of your new nation asked you to write a constitution for it, what kind of election system would you build? 

This is in response to MT's comment on how many things we realistically can't change. So use whatever hypothetical new borders you want and start from scratch. How much would your system look like our current one?

 
While keeping the general thread topic in mind, if the US ever entered into a Czechoslovakia - type divorce and the tentative leaders of your new nation asked you to write a constitution for it, what kind of election system would you build? 

This is in response to MT's comment on how many things we realistically can't change. So use whatever hypothetical new borders you want and start from scratch. How much would your system look like our current one?
If I was starting from scratch, I would probably have a somewhat more fenced-in government than what we currently have.  Something very similar to the bill of rights, along with other restrictions on the central government's ability to meddle in state, local, or individual affairs.

With that done, I'd be pretty open to a parliamentary system.  The last two presidents seem like textbook examples of leaders for whom "no confidence" was invented, and we don't have a good way to deal with that.  When we elect a lousy president, we're stuck with them for at least four years with no recourse, and that seems bad.  I also like the idea of indirect presidential elections, with the president being accountable to the legislature.  That would be a helpful corrective to our overly-strong executive branch.  

(Also, it is unhealthy for presidential elections to drag on for nearly two years -- parliamentary systems seem to not suffer from that problem quite so much, but we should fix this one even if we stick with the current system.)

As recently as just a few years ago, I would have opposed proportional representation because I didn't want white nationalists, socialists, and other opponents of small-l liberalism to have a voice in government.  Unfortunately, that ship has now sailed, so maybe that's worth looking into now.  

I'd still have a supreme court with judicial review.  

 
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I don't know if I'd even have an executive branch, a second legislative branch based on state representation, or states at all in my new nation of Atlantica (roughly Virginia northward, population about 75 million). 

No fixed election dates, multi-member districts of five reps for every million citizens. A strong Bill of Rights to protect minority rights from being trampled. Maybe some kind of supermajority popular vote to approve constitutional amendments. 

I may be the world's worst federalist.

 
I'd never really thought too hard or speculated too much about the possible adoption of competing democratic governing bodies and structures. I guess because for so long in America, ours seemed to work. A legislative body, an executor of the legislative decrees or laws, and the courts determining what is and is not constitutional should a case or controversy arise. Parliamentary systems seemed so foreign, and always wound up with tricky governing coalitions not necessarily representative of the people's will, that I thought American governance seemed superior. It moved when it needed to. It didn't encroach on the people when or where it shouldn't have. It seemed very fine, this system we had. 

That all began to change in the 20th Century with the rise of the administrative state, the use of Continental philosophy and civil law inquiry methods into jurisprudence, and an explosion in anti-majoritarianism in the name of radical individualism, or as I would prefer to call it, our movement towards isolated atomization.  I think that the Bill of Rights plays an outsized role in our society and that a little more majoritarianism at the state and local level would be a good thing. In any hypothetical state I can envision, I still would keep judicial review of legislation, but I would temper the judiciary somehow, possibly with a 7/8ths provision of some sort. That would provide a check on the high courts so that they didn't deviate so far from their purpose like I believe they have. 

Because it comes down to this: Democracy can't exist with two competing and diametrically opposed versions of the economic good and the religious impulse. We were once able to blunt disagreements through compromise, but as the logical excursions get further left and right, we have no middle ground upon which to stand because we have a conflict of first principles. It is here that I personally think that we're paying for diversity -- not diversity of race nor ethnicity nor gender -- but diversity of central tenets and the conception of what is the good and the just. We have lost the spirit of liberal toleration for others (not to mention the virtue of moderation) and given license to libertinism and extremism in all forms. We're not Europe yet, but we're close. 

And so maybe it would behoove us to look to our European counterparts to see how they dealt with the death of God and radically diverse thought that spans the political spectrum. Because it's coming home to roost here, and our structures are possibly antiquated and no longer quite equipped to deal with bad faith and bad actors. 

 
A few of us systemic reform folks believe that we are now suffering from the effects of "first adapter." The work done in the 18th century was remarkable for its time but in the interim two centuries better systems have been devised. And now our original decisions have made it virtually impossible to make improvements.

Heck, we can't even make the House larger and that's a simple legislative matter.

 
The work done in the 18th century was remarkable for its time but in the interim two centuries better systems have been devised.
I often wonder this exact same thing. If the scientific method is testable hypotheses and observation, and Enlightenment theory takes into account the acquisition of knowledge about human behavior through this observation, what do we do with the knowledge we have gathered that seems to point to inefficiencies in the process of obtaining the good life here in this country?  

 

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