r/politics • u/zsreport Texas • 19h ago
We need a new theory of democracy — because this version has failed
https://www.salon.com/2025/08/24/we-need-a-new-theory-of-democracy-because-this-version-has-failed/2.1k
u/Pristine-Degree-2254 19h ago
Might have been decent if we actually tried to punish those who flaunted our democracy in our history, but we never have.
We slapped the wrists of the south, and waggled our finger at a fucking failed coup. Democracy is fine when you actually do it, which means defending it.
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u/pilgermann 17h ago
The reason they attacked the Capitol is the same reason they got away with it. Nobody holds democracy as sacred anymore, or even takes it seriously. Most of the population barely understands how our democracy even works.
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u/TwinSwords 16h ago
Let’s try that with a little less abstraction: the reason they attacked the capitol is because Donald Trump directed them to.
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u/ProfessionalField508 15h ago
While I think that has some merit, I think politicians caring way more about billionaire donors than voters and citizens is the real "how". It always comes back to money in the end.
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u/Vaperius America 18h ago edited 18h ago
waggled our finger at a fucking failed coup.
Twice. Once with the Business Plot and then with Trump. We did it... twice. We let wealthy interests get away with trying to overturn American democracy, twice; the first time it happened, there should been a crackdown on the amount of influence corporations can have on politics; but instead, we let them expand it, until they were able to succeed the second time.
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u/RefractedCell Tennessee 18h ago
And the Brooks Brothers Riot which was just a minor, localized version of 1/6.
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u/Vaperius America 18h ago
Brooks Brothers Riot
One that was even worse, specifically engineered, literally, actually paid actors, specifically, a ton of Republican staffers who had a personal interest in making it seem like there was public outrage over the issue.
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u/even_less_resistance Arkansas 17h ago
And ended up rewarded by getting some of the operatives involved in making sure that went to Bush onto our Supreme Court: Amy Coney Barrett and Kavenaugh
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u/gatsby712 17h ago
A lot of those republicans were a part of 1/6 and used the Brooks Brothers Riot as a blueprint.
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u/A_Rogue_GAI 18h ago
We let Nixon get away with it, which emboldened Reagan, and when Obama failed to punish or even investigate Bush, the reactionaries won.
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u/FrogsOnALog 18h ago
I’m sure if Obama went after Bush that would have made it even harder for the Tea Party to take the house and sweep every state legislature across the nation /s
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u/AverageLiberalJoe 18h ago
We did it with Florida Brooks Brothers riot as well.
Brooks Brothers riot - Wikipedia https://share.google/7gb69z8ELXINky5uA
We let Bush go for War Crimes.
Our democracy has failed because Democrats don't hold Republicans to the standard of justice that everybody else lives by. Simple as that.
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u/T1Pimp 18h ago edited 17h ago
Ok conservatives, you just don't do slavery any more.
Ok conservatives we'll let it go with Nixon.
Ok conservatives we'll let it go with Bush.
Ok conservatives we'll let it go with Trump.
There's a pattern.
And... Reagan. Forgot him initially.
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u/SnooPaintings7581 18h ago
I constantly hear from supposed centrists that being a Democracy actually means you're supposed to let fascists and racists do whatever they want, and if you try to bar them in any way you're not a "real" Democracy. I got downvoted on Worldnews for suggesting that a good Democracy shouldn't let the government eradicate minorities, even if its "popular" to do so.
I don't know, I think I'm fine with barring fascists and racists from control of the government.
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u/From_Deep_Space Oregon 18h ago
It was all "we're a republic not a democracy!" when Biden was president. But as soon as Trump was in they switched overnight to "he has a mandate, and doing anything against his wishes is undemocratic!"
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u/__Geg__ 18h ago
Worldnews is a right wing cesspool.
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u/Ki-Wi-Hi 17h ago
The Zionist shit on it is brutal
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u/even_less_resistance Arkansas 17h ago
There’s threads and threads of people getting banned for posting Wikipedia links or asking questions that are inconvenient for their narrative. I compiled a really interesting slide show on the weird manipulation going on there and in other subs- like with Palantir getting caught astroturfing and such
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u/AliMcGraw 14h ago
People treat tolerance as a virtue, but it's not, it's a treaty. If you are intolerant, you have broken the treaty, and are no longer entitled to its protections.
Kick the racist fuckers out.
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u/The-Future-Question 12h ago
Part of the Good Friday agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland was to force the government to be a coalition between the protestant and catholic parties. They did this because the protestant democratic majority kept trying to build an apartheid state. By letting the minority hold cabinet positions we were able to keep them in check.
I think it is a good workaround for when democracy can empower the worst people.
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u/pockpicketG 13h ago
Democracy= mob rule, but it requires the mob to be decent people or it falls apart.
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u/Shadowholme 10h ago
I'll go on record saying that I wpu;d never punish someone for their beliefs - even if those beliefs are abhorrent.
But as soon as they cross the line between belief and action, they should face the consequences of those actions. No excuses - you do the crime, you do the time.
That is as far as my 'tolerance' will extend.
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u/Ghune 18h ago
That's the problem of democracies. They don't know how to be firm and strong in order to maintain their existence.
Like a nice friendly teacher who is great but too kind and can't discipline the disruptive kids. It ruins the experience and makes the whole year worse.
Democracies need to learn that sometimes, you have to ensure your survival by using all the power you have.
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u/Lycanious 18h ago
The people with all the money to rig the system and agitate against it through mass media don't actually have a vested interest in democracy.
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u/Ghune 18h ago
I actually think that being a millionaire isn't a threat, being a billionaire is.
What do you do when you can buy 10 houses, 20 cars and have all your family protected?
You want power and influence to ensure that things will go your way. You find campaigns, but newspapers, medias, you tweak the system in your favor.
This is the real threat
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u/Candid-Fisherman-274 11h ago
I actually think that being a millionaire isn't a threat, being a billionaire is.
As a point, not all millionaires are equal as you can be a millionaire with $1 million, and still be a millionaire with anything up from there till $999 million.
That person with $1 million in wealth is basically middle to upper middle class.. the person with north of $100 million is already a threat to the stability of the systems in play.
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u/Ghune 10h ago
I agree.
I'm a radical. I don't see a point of having more than 10 millions.
With 10 millions, you can do anything (reasonable) you want.
You want to have a nice house? Sure, you have it. Two nice cars? Done. An RV and a boat? Easy. Send your kids to the best schools, you can do that. You can even travel a few times a year to nice places. Anything you want.
Ok, I think the society shouldn't care of you can't have your private jet, bit that's me. Go to business class,. it's not bad...
I think that more money than would be better used in hiring more social workers, nurses, doctors, teachers, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.
But that just me.
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u/Candid-Fisherman-274 9h ago
Yah, though as a point of how insane some of the numbers are and with regard to even some tens of millions of wealth;
You can even travel a few times a year to nice places.
Honestly, less really weirdly leveraged finances wise can probably travel all year long. Even work wise very few jobs come to mind that pay you sufficiently enough to get to that level of wealth that you cant do remotely anyways.
I think that more money than would be better used in hiring more social workers, nurses, doctors, teachers, healthcare, infrastructure, etc.
It would be better for society, and the economy, and consequently for rich people too, but as things stand with the ultra wealthy it is no longer about the money.. its about power, and their ability to use it to abuse others.
Which brings up another point that there is no such thing as a "good billionaire" they are all evil exploitative shits, and one does not get to that level of wealth without being an awful human being, and more broadly sick in the head in some way, shape, or form.
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u/Segundo-Sol 16h ago
Correction: the USA doesn’t know to be firm and strong when defending their democracy.
Bolsonaro attempted a coup in Brazil and is currently in house arrest awaiting trial, because there are actual laws against attempted coups.
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u/leeuwerik 18h ago
You also need a smart and working set of rules. For instance letting congress decide who's on the highest court is not a smart rule.
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u/mmmmm_pancakes Connecticut 16h ago
Grade schools should teach the Paradox of Tolerance and its solution.
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u/bleat_bleat_bleat 18h ago
American democracy drops the hammer on the poor and suffering, but gives the hammer to the wealthy and powerful.
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u/Snarfsicle 18h ago
America for far longer than I was born has had a weak hand when it comes to holding the powerful accountable. That's the root issue that has led to where we are. Democracy doesn't work if there's a set of rules for the rich and for the poor.
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u/barryvm Europe 17h ago edited 17h ago
The problem with punishing anti-democratic actions is that most right wing politics consists of those actions and many of their supporters aren't really in favour of democracy. They want what they call democracy (actually, just power) for them and people like them but not for those other people. Everything else, every ideological or religious construct, exists merely to justify the selfishness and exceptionalism that sits at the core of this, which is why they can so easily shed their principles (including the USA's famed love for democracy) without any push back. They were always facades and understood to be facades whenever that was convenient for them, and deeply held principles whenever it was convenient for them to believe that about themselves.
Their entire political project has been the destruction of any institution that attempts to promote or preserve equality. The only thing that has really changed is the scope. Rather than harping on how human rights, socialism, certain ethnicities, ..., are destroying the country, they've now expanded that treatment to anyone who isn't them and the only reason they were reticent before might just be that they didn't think they could get away with it.
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u/Wave_File 16h ago
This exactly.
Donald Trump should have been rounded up and sent to gitmo and everyone else who was even near him should have been so buried in cases that their grand kids will be sorting out their legal problems.
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u/Late-Edge9039 14h ago
There is a hypocrisy to our current ideal of democracy though and it’s something we don’t like to talk about. We say it’s about freedom and equality, but unfiltered freedom of speech will always end up disrupting its cycle. It will always be exploited. Every time democracy stabilizes, there are people who use that same system to undermine it. sometimes openly and sometimes subtly but yea. Our system almost never punishes them in the name of unity because if we arent careful it’s “authoritarian”.
But that’s the paradox: the very values that make democracy worth defending are the same ones that can make it rot from the inside
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u/Van-garde 17h ago
The collective “we” indicates a proportionate distribution of responsibility. That is not the case. The national legislative body has been utterly dominated by certain demographic slices.
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u/The_Lost_Jedi Washington 15h ago
And let's be clear, this is on the voting public as a whole, not just the leadership, because they're taking their cues from the voters. Too many Americans balked at the notion of holding people thoroughly accountable for all that shit, which has only served to embolden the people doing it to do more next time. You can draw a direct line from Nixon through Reagan through the Bushes to Trump on this, because it's many of the same people. You can also see echoes from earlier instances as well, where those lingering issues were still laying buried and seemingly dormant, but seeping poison into the ground.
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u/tegrtyfrm 19h ago
The trees keep voting for the axe.
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u/Global_Crew3968 17h ago
The axe should never have been allowed to run then
I am all for democracy but the current system is stupid as fuck. Why should we have uneducated and unqualified people writing laws and policies just because the uneducated dirt eaters of Fucking Nowhere, North Dakota elected them? Imagine if airlines didn't have pilots fly the plane, they just put it to a vote of the passengers each flight? That would be a dumb fucking way to run an airline and its a dumb fucking way to run a world power. I am not smart enough to know what the answer is but we need climate scientists writing climate policy, not climate deniers. We need economists writing economic policy, not high school dropouts. I can't get an accounting job without an associates degree at least but there are zero qualifications to be a congresmman literally steering the direction of a nuclear superpower? It makes no fucking sense!
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u/NewConsideration2867 15h ago
The axe never was allowed to hold office again. The problem is that the lumberjacks all noticed the loophole that the axe could still technically run anyway, and by the time all the votes were ‘counted,’ it was too late to ‘DeNy tHe WiLl Of tHe TrEeS’
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u/egretstew1901 19h ago
Rush fan?
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u/Goatesq 18h ago
Probably a reference to the original proverb, since the way we are discussing addressing the problem of the ultra wealthy corrupting the democratic process....is not exactly alligned with the ideals of Lee Lifeson and Peart.
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u/yesrushgenesis2112 18h ago
Horrid take rooted in a decades old stereotype. Dudes weren’t conservative at all, least of all Peart.
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u/Goatesq 17h ago
Are libertarians in favor of wealth redistribution? Because judging by the lyrics to that song, no. At least, not the sort of libertarians they were when they wrote it.
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u/yesrushgenesis2112 17h ago
That’s not what that song is about, my guy. Never was. It only gets paraded around as if it were by the same people who made up the rumor that they were conservatives in the first place.
The Trees is about not taking away the things that make people unique just because it makes them “better” than you. It’s closer to “don’t wish ill on athletic people if you’re not athletic” than it is any socioeconomic/political commentary.
And even if it were that song was written in 1977/78, when Peart was 25. By 1980 he was writing songs about responsible use of technology and conservation of nature. By 81, about the damage that right wing ignorant fear mongering brings. By 85, about corporate money’s ability to manipulate politics and society and people. In 87, an all out plea for responsible action on climate change. If you’re going to speak on a band’s political philosophy, especially one that was as intentional about their writing as Rush was, it would behoove you to do the work before you speak.
Peart himself, by Bush II, said he wished we lived in a world where people could be free to do what they wanted as long as it didn’t hurt anyone, but acknowledged that that simply wasn’t possible because of selfishness and greed. He abhorred Fox News. He mocked the backwards politics of Florida. Above all, the guy was a humanist who seemed to believe in the strength of the human spirit and the qualities found in every individual. But the dude did not support unfettered libertarian capitalism, he did not even support Ayn Rand by the 80s.
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u/ottieisbluenow 12h ago
The trees would rather vote for the Axe than the alternative. And this place is incapable of doing any introspection as to why.
This article is a great example. It asks "maybe people are ignorant?". Then posits "well maybe people are brainwashed?". Then arrives at "I guess this is just who people are".
Not one question about "what are we doing that maybe causes this?"
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u/Van-garde 19h ago edited 18h ago
I’ll boil it down:
Cooperation > competition.
This is the next frontier of humanity. It will drastically shift resource distribution, which is why so much money and effort goes into opposing the transition.
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u/WideParamedic6152 18h ago
Since Citizens United, it has been Corporations > People, Compassion, Generosity, Fairness, and so forth.
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u/Van-garde 18h ago
That’s what I’m saying. Keep your eyes peeled for someone talking about ‘competition stimulating innovation.’ It’s capitalist dogma.
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u/IJustLoggedInToSay- Illinois 16h ago
The tricky part is how to enable and enforce cooperation at large scales without centralizing into authoritarianism.
Anarchists have the right idea with local collective action, but it's not a national system, by its very nature.
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u/the-new-left 14h ago
This is the next frontier of humanity
Agreed, but how do we get there? Seems kind of impossible with the chokehold that mainstream media has on the general populace, manipulating emotion and forging groupthink at scale
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u/Van-garde 14h ago edited 14h ago
My guess is one community at a time. And with what I’ve been calling ‘targeted migration.’
It’s already in use, but not to a critical mass. It’s also in use by white suprematists.
In my home state of Oregon, down in the southwest corner, Coos County has a shitty, ineffective attempt in action right now:
Across hours of conversations, the group debated the optics of Nazi salutes, accused each other of being federal agents or gay, and praised Whit’s plans to recruit more white nationalists to Coos Bay to work for him and potentially run for office.
If the US is pushed toward dissolution, I’m guessing decentralization will be more effective. Right now, the authoritarian at the helm is holding things together with violence, and shaping the country in a non-inclusive way.
And any attempt will meet with resistance. The asymmetry in resources will be a major disadvantage. Most who want collective reform are among the bottom 65% in the spectrum of wealth.
Regarding wealth, I think companies need to declare their support for social reform, so we know where we’re sending our dollars isn’t a multinational conglomerate.
At the individual level, I’ve been wishing for a superficial identifier, like an arm band, so we know who is who.
I think segregation of society along the lines of economic ideology would be a great initiation. Keep the workers’ money in the hands of workers.
Tangible steps are needed. Theorizing on the Internet, as I’m doing, offers emotional or cognitive release, at the expense of using that energy on action. Would assume superficial indicators (like the armband) would be a step toward physical congregation. Ideas are more easily shared—and less easily monitored—by mouth. Or pen and paper.
There has been little progress in the practice of revolution. Avoiding sensationalism in favor of conscious action is the engine which turns those wheels. But smartphones are appealing, among everything else, and local networking is fractured.
This is part of why I love community college courses in philosophy, education, economics, sociology, conflict resolution, politics, etc, etc… We have a chance to exchange ideas with people from our community. And they’re deep ideas, rooted in history, and the process is guided by a person who wants us to understand what we’re discussing.
God-damn do I love school. Would go forever, were it not prohibitively expensive.
”The unrealistic sound of these ideas is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces working against them.”
https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/marcuse/one-dimensional-man.pdf
”The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption.”
https://www.hccc.edu/abouthccc/resources/documents/freire-pedagogy-of-the-oppressed.pdf
Kinda just let the coffee take hold, there. Hopefully there’s something to engage with.
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u/SceneRoyal4846 16h ago
I think most places where democracy works has a more than 2 parties running, no? But I’m not caught up on every countries systems.
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u/AmericanDoughboy 15h ago
Yes. Capitalism is the problem.
Money being free speech is ridiculous. That’s not democracy.
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u/Darth_Chili_Dog 19h ago
The system doesn't matter if the population is uneducated, apathetic, or prizes culture war over their own needs.
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u/Van-garde 19h ago
That’s why the systems matter. You can’t educate a majority without changing the systems.
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u/QuidYossarian 15h ago
The point is there's no such system that can survive bad actors.
You're right that education is absolutely key to preventing this. Which bad actors have spent the better part of a century sabotaging while people around them kept insisting "they won't really go that far."
At this point I think things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. And if they ever do get better it'll only be when those bad actors are acknowledged for what they are.
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u/5510 15h ago
Attempting to survive bad actors is literally the reason systems exist. If we weren't worried about bad actors, we could just vote for a king every few years and let them do whatever without many rules or much oversight. The whole point of trying to make a good system is trying to make it such that even if shitty people are in power, that the system will drive their own self interest towards a direction that is at least somewhat popular for society.
The problem is the US has a broken system which does not do this very well at all.
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u/QuidYossarian 14h ago
There is literally no system, not now or ever, that can survive being controlled by bad actors. Which we handed ours over to.
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u/5510 14h ago
I think it depends. Yes, too many bad faith actors will likely outstrip the ability of even a good system to keep functioning. But at the same time, it is a significant goal in designing governmental systems to try and make them as resistant as possible to some amount of bad faith actors.
If a system is too vulnerable to bad faith actors, then it's not a very good system. Sadly, the US is not a very good system. It was forward looking at the time, but now it's mostly archaic out of date nonsense.
Because of how American elections work and the guaranteed creation of a polarized two party system, the major issue right now is there are too many bad faith actors that are all on the same "team." So the entire concept of checks and balances are destroyed.
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u/-ghostinthemachine- 14h ago edited 14h ago
I would go one step further and say that this article is pointing out the very real threat that 'bad actors' are everywhere, and the system may simply be working as intended if a hundred million people feel this way about existence. The single thought which has kept me awake since 2020 is, how do we build a society with people like this? The situation is deeper than mere politics. This is like the duality of man, and our ability to be both saintly and depraved, collectively or even individually. The very idea of a dictator as a member of a psychopathic minority goes out the window when you get to millions or billions of people willingly cheering for suffering and decay.
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u/FairDinkumMate 15h ago
Look around at other democracies. Americans are so convinced that they are the "strongest" or "best" democracy in the world, that they fail to see the shortcomings of their own system and look to see how other democracies have overcome or avoided them.
eg's:
- Gerrymandering - The "strongest" democracies have independent bodies drawing voting districts, so much so that in most of them the drawing & re-drawing of boundaries as required is never a political issue at all. It happens as needed and the parties & politicians simply have to deal with it.
- Voter suppression - From compulsory voting(which is great at ensuring more centrist governments & avoids suppression altogether) to making voting as easy for everyone as possible, countries have different approaches to ensuring that the "will of the people" is heard as clearly as possible. What they don't have generally? Elections on a Tuesday when most people are at work. Clearly partisan efforts to reduce access to the polls. Hours long lines to vote. Reduced or removed mail-in voting.
- Electoral College - Most democracies have a Senate designed to balance out the voting power of States with large populations. The US electoral college allows this 'balance' to be applied twice & winner takes all electoral college votes multiplies the effect yet again.
- First past the post - Awarding the win to someone with a plurality rather than a majority of votes, locks the US into a two party system. Many countries have instant runoff voting which gives 3rd parties a realistic chance of pulling some votes and potentially winning seats. Having a 'balance of power' held by true independents is a great way to avoid bipartisan gridlock and temper the extremes of both sides.
- Unlimited corporate spending - The idea that corporations have the same rights as citizens would freak out the citizens of most democracies.
The system DOES matter. It baffles me that US citizens continue to have issues that are hugely popular among them yet allow their politicians to act in the interests of their donors rather than their constituents!
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u/Minute-Individual-74 19h ago
We haven't had a democracy in decades.
You can't have the same handful of billionaires own 80% of all media and have the same billionaires fund politicians' elections.
It's a miracle that even one person breaks through that without taking money from them while being either blackballed or trashed non stop in monopolistic media landscape.
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u/Carl-99999 America 19h ago
The last chance was Gore.
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u/Protoss-Zealot 18h ago
We were screwed long before that. Raegan villainized the LGBT community via AIDS while greatly expanding the war on drugs as a means for arresting minorities and pushing to privatize as many public services as possible.
Nixon had the obvious watergate in addition to the now infamous quote from one of his aides about criminalizing drugs heavily to provide the original excuses to arrest his political opposition and minorities.
Should point out that the DNC during that time acted similarly to how it does now and pushed back heavily against the anti war protests at the 1968 DNC.
Prior to that we had Jim Crow + the McCarthyism of the second red scare.
Prior to that we had Japanese concentration camps and open fascists running our nations largest banks and manufacturing plants.
Prior to that we had Union crackdowns and the 1st red scare.
I could go on, point is we have always been doing this stuff.
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u/TheQuadropheniac 18h ago
Its almost like the country was founded by slave owning rich dudes who set the system up to favor themselves. They thought it was dumb you needed the right last name to be King. So they made the system where all you needed was the most money to be King
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u/gatsby712 17h ago
The last chance was Jimmy Carter… the was a hope for change under Obama but ultimately like Biden he was only able to talk about saving the system but ended up just reinforcing it. I can only imagine how much better our health care system would be right now if single payer was able to pass back when ACA ended up getting passed. Life is still much better with ACA than without it.
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u/Minute-Individual-74 13h ago edited 13h ago
I will never understand how when Biden told us during his 2020 campaign that he would veto a Medicare for All bill if it ever to make it to his desk, that we still stuck with him. The fucking DEMOCRAT nominee said that while running in the primary! And somehow Democrat voters were like, that sounds good, I'll vote for him.
So if somehow there was a bipartisan bill, bc at that time it would have had to been, to make everyone's lives better with affordable and better healthcare that covered everyone for anything that happened to them primarily paid for by billionaires, that sack of shit Biden was going to veto it. What a horrendous fucking policy point to run on.
As fucking dumb as Republicans are, I'm starting to think democrat voters aren't that much smarter.
If that's the best we as democrats can muster, America is super fucked.
If we can't have an FDR style transformative administration next, I truly believe we have secured America's future as the next fallen roman empire. And even if we do, I have doubts we aren't too late already.
I have come to the conclusion that the huge majority of Americans have zero interest in fixing anything its gigantic disaster like the recession. However this time, there are other countries ready, willing, and capable of dominating the global economic and political system if we slip up. And it looks like Republicans are hell bent on making sure that happens.
Republican politicians are obviously stacking cash and consolidating power for when America falls, they can be oligarchs among the ashes while the rest of us are extremely poor and destitute. They want us to be live like north Koreans and Russians.
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u/aliquotoculos America 6h ago
Yup.
And yeah. All across the political spectrum, we have more uninformed, under-informed, and misinformed people by the thousands, than we do people who pay attention and actually know what they are talking about.
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u/ATotallyNormalUID 18h ago
Nah, Clinton had already set the dials at that point. We were going to be cooked no matter what. The hollowing out of any form of actual society that began under Reagan achieved it's final form under Clinton, as he ended welfare as we know it, created mass incarceration, brought in "Free Trade" agreements, and balanced the budget on the backs of the poor.
America never recovered. The downward slide that made Trump inevitable started with Bill Clinton, and won't even slow down until and unless every person who has any association with the Third Way Foundation is driven from the Democratic Party.
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u/Loves_His_Bong 18h ago
We never had a democracy. Our entire country was designed to empower slave owners.
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u/braddillman Canada 18h ago
I've long wondered why people just don't switch the channel away from Fox News and other conservative media. Indeed, many people will switch away from other media to prefer conservative media. Does some of the blame lie with the people who make their own media choices? Few people are forced to consume conservative media, they do it by their own choice.
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u/Minute-Individual-74 18h ago
I've wondered why we all don't look to see where primary campaigns are funded from and if it's from billionaires and corporate pacs, not voting for that person.
It's just that easy, but people don't want to do that.
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u/RespectTheAmish 18h ago
Democracy died when we consolidated exclusively into a two party system.
Citizens united and partisan gerrymandering are just raping its corpse at this point.
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u/mrdevil413 Ohio 18h ago
Citizens United cemented the ability for the corporatacrcy to not have any more barriers to buying the politics of late stage capitalism. Don’t see a way to put that djinni back in the bottle but a new look at democracy is a good start.
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u/ctmurfy 19h ago
Democracy is mostly fine. Capitalism just ate it.
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u/chemicaxero 18h ago
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that these two things are just not compatible in the way we've always thought they were. Any system of government where billionaires and the wealthy can find ways to influence and corrupt government to their favor cannot be a democracy definitionally.
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u/MaievSekashi 15h ago
"Democracy" is a skinned corpse from Athens that the state wears when it doesn't feel threatened. If you try to do any fundamental change to the way the state works as a war and profit generation machine, it drops that skin and you feel the violence that was always beneath it.
It's just a way to manage dissent in ordinary conditions by telling people they have a say, when those who count the votes choose the system.
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u/cheeesypiizza 17h ago edited 14h ago
They’re compatible with a floor and a ceiling. For example, a floor that includes a basic income for housing, food, education, and healthcare with the opportunity to earn beyond that (including a percent scaling tax until a high threshold that has a tax cap at 99%) would be a fair capitalistic system in America. Businesses would also be required to raise wages with inflation, and monopolistic practices would be heavily punished.
This system operates on a rising tide raises all boats philosophy. A system like this, optimistically, would have less crime, better roads, less debt, etc. However, the rich would have to understand that they would sacrifice ridiculous individual wealth for a society that’s better for everyone. Businesses of course, would be banned from political activity due to the conflict of interest with all potential contracts (this would include all businesses), so a separation of Corporations and State (outside of contracted work requirements).
In reality, the problem with capitalism on an American scale is we made corporations people and they can steer the government to benefit their company and owner/trader interests. We’ve also allowed monopolies to grow in our digital frontier, making it nearly impossible to shrink them because our daily life is reliant on their technology.
Now, the problem on a global scale is that global capitalism allows people to seek financial refuge for tax evasion, and businesses operate large functions of their company for cheap from another land. The global supply chain is necessary in a global society, so there needs to be a global effort to fix this system and only a few nations and individuals can screw this up for the rest. Since the current global system has allowed individuals to be wealthier than some nations, we would have a near impossible task of cleaning this up.
TLDR: Capitalism with a floor and a ceiling would work in a democratic society but it’s nearly impossible to put in place with the current global economy.
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u/spicy-chilly 16h ago
They're not compatible. People will complain about corruption or legalized bribery, but the root cause is the power that comes from the capitalist class continuing to exist and extract surplus value.
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u/gatsby712 17h ago edited 17h ago
Corporatism with our system of wealth accrual and private ownership is the issue. When the government gives legal ownership to the majority of worker’s wealth to the owner of massive companies instead of to the workers then you’ve got this shit show. CEOs and owners should be gaining marginally and barely more stocks and ownership of their company than individual workers with a stake in the company as well. In fact the larger the company, the more equality there should be in wealth ownership, except the exact opposite ends up happening. Elon Musk and Tesla may be the clearest example of how fucked our system is through basically having a company be incredibly overvalued because of a feedback loop of overvaluing Elon and the company, and then undervaluing worker contribution. We, as a collective, have created gods out of these owners rather than taking ownership for ourselves and the people that create.
One of the things when America has worked well that greatly contributes to that is how private ownership of land and assets is protected and how the government system compared to most throughout human existence was able to provide some sense of security for the most people possible. There was good utility in the form of our constitution and government for a long time, with some affronts to that system like massively rich people or slavery. Yet at the time it was formed and for a long time in its history America generally did private ownership and opportunity so well it formed the basis of an American dream and was envied by others.
Now that the system is crumbling and inequality and wealth ownership is only being defended by a government redistributing that wealth to a few rich people, we’re starting to see a new constitution and new form of democratic government is needed for what appears to be outdated with the changes in technology and life in the past century. The parliamentary and multiple party system in newer constitutions and democracies has worked better than what we are seeing here now.
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u/EBBBBBBBBBBBB 16h ago
"Corporatism" is just capitalism at its logical conclusion. Call me a tankie or whatever, but we need an entirely different system, one that actively suppresses the capitalist element that seeks to undermine human equality
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u/CoryOpostrophe 16h ago
Citizens United + a cowardly lobbiest-teatdrunk congress afraid to fuck w monopolies
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u/5510 14h ago
I mean, the US version of "democracy" is pretty flawed to begin with.
If you took a class on modern government design, and turned in something like "single seat plurality winner voting" (US voting), you would get an F.
Almost literally EVERYBODY well educated on voting systems agrees the US voting system is awful.
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u/TintedApostle 19h ago
It failed because half the country decided they didn't want to compromise.
"How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape."
- Christopher Hitchens
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u/5510 14h ago
I mean, the voting method guarantees a hyper polarized two party system. And one where the system itself incentives politicans to increase polarization.
The game theory of it just doesn't lead to compromise.
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u/DonManuel Europe 19h ago
The public vote in America is way smarter than the electoral system allows. It's a lack of democracy since ever, not a failure of it.
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u/SlapNuts007 North Carolina 18h ago
2024 popular vote would like a word.
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u/Answer70 18h ago edited 17h ago
Google "bullet ballots." The results are questionable AF.
Elon wasn't running a lottery to get a bunch of names to do nothing with them.
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u/UltraMegaFauna Texas 19h ago
How about, and I'm just spit-balling here: Democracy, but for everyone? Even workers? In their work places? And no billionaires?
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u/Pale-Moonlight2374 19h ago
It's hard to do a democracy when half the country rubs their nipples for white nationalist christofacism, while old white establishment liberals are inept or financially complicit.
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u/westtownie 15h ago
We handed control of our democracy over to corporations and the elite in the 1980s under Reagan and this is the logical end to neoliberalism.
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u/OccidoViper 16h ago
Man I am not really religious but Trump is like the biblical description of the Antichrist
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u/Slackluster America 18h ago
First past the post voting is fundamentally broken. Switching to ranked choice or proportional representation is a necessary step towards fixing things.
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u/Colddigger 17h ago
This is the comment I was looking for,
Voting for the lesser evil regardless of what party you're in is a stupid approach, being able to rank your choices and transfer your vote is so much better.
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u/TD12-MK1 18h ago
We do not have a direct democracy, we have a representative democracy. This is the crux of our problem. The Founding Fathers never envisioned a time of massive cities and dense population clusters. When NYC and LA have populations larger than 40 states, you do not have true representation.
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u/RipErRiley Minnesota 18h ago
Our electorate is full of too many entitled, tribal, and dumb religious people…excuse me…voters.
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u/Iola_Morton 18h ago
Killed off by Citizens United and general Republikan assholery
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u/iamuseless Canada 19h ago
The called it the great American experiment. Now, the experiment has concluded in failure. RIP.
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u/Neat_Operation_6505 17h ago
The arrogance of even calling it an experiment. Democracy is fine. It’s American capitalism, greed and tribalism that is threatening to upend it in america.
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u/Lordnoallah 16h ago
Religion, racism, and republicans. The 3 R's that are destroying democracy and our nation.
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u/astrozombie2012 Nevada 18h ago
It didn’t fail. It was undermined into oblivion by the Republican Party.
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u/EWool 18h ago
Failure is the result of too much undermining... And ultimately we have to look in the mirror when considering who to blame.
We've allowed ourselves to be divided and conquered. It's not about left vs right but rather the owning vs working class.... we need a collective identity because the one we used to have has been shattered beyond recognition!
Love your neighbors and do what you can to stand up for them
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u/McCoovy 15h ago
American democracy is one of the worst ever designed. The electoral college, first past the post, the Senate. It's hard to think of ways to make it worse without being malicious.
American voters have completely lost faith in their system. Nothing gets done. Everyone hates each other. Tensions keep rising and rising. American democracy is completely broken. It doesn't serve the people.
And how to fix it? What would it take to get the political capital to make any changes? The American voter has no reason to believe things will ever improve.
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u/coreychch New Zealand 8h ago
You could have the best theory of Democracy ever - but it’s pointless without mechanisms to defend it. Even just having a federal law to stop a convicted criminal from running for the Presidency may have stopped the mess you have right now.
Trump tried pulling a lot of the stunts he’s getting away with now in his first term, but was largely blocked by competent people in his administration stopping his worst impulses. He still did a lot of awful things, but then the efforts of the DOJ to go after him after he left office for actual criminal acts fell short as they didn’t want to seem partisan in chasing down a former President. In other words, they came at him too late, he stalled everything long enough to regain the Presidency - and this time there’s no adults in the room to stop him.
What’s the point in it all if you’re not prepared to go hard after these people when you know full well there is a tonne of irrefutable evidence of illegal acts?
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u/The_Human_Event 6h ago
How about we try the version where corporations aren’t people and elections are not dictated by money.
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u/hermitzen 19h ago
It has failed because we have consistently defunded and deemphasized education, which should include the arts for optimal brain development and critical thinking skills. Democracy depends on an educated populace that can determine the difference between shite and shinola. Unfortunately we have lost that ability.
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u/INTJ_Dreamer 18h ago
We need a parliamentary system of government. No, it's not perfect, even countries that already have this system have significant problems; that's just reality. However, it's much better compared to what we have now. People can vote their conscience without being voter shamed into just checking out and staying home, and it won't throw us into fascism.
Every 4 years we just kicked the fascism can down the road until we couldn't anymore. We're incredibly lucky that it took over 200 years to end up here, because our system made that possible all along.
If we have a multi member proportional representation system, gerrymandering would do nothing. If a state is 35% party A and 65% party B, then representation would reflect that no matter how you draw the lines. Party A wouldn't be able to gerrymander party B into political disenfranchisement or vice versa as we see happening in Texas.
We could ditch the 2 party system and have multiple parties that represent the entire political spectrum, and will prevent one party from having a chokehold on the entire government. Everyone gets a seat at the table, but nobody can take it over.
Yes, problems would still persist but we could handle them in a more democratic way in which everyone has a voice.
The American experiment as it is has failed, we can start fresh with a new system and usher in a brighter future.
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u/LocalBodybuilder7036 16h ago
Also parliamentary system much easier to have vote of no confidence, and get rid of terrible leaders. The president is basically an emperor, and is based on the Roman system. President has way too much power (including being the head of the military, makes zero sense as can always use military to rule unlawfully).
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u/DangerousBill Arizona 17h ago
Its failed here. Other countries are doing fine. The US is not the world.
Democracy is an inherently unstable state. It requires constant care and struggle to maintain it. We forgot that.
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u/JDGumby Canada 19h ago
Not so much "failed" as "deliberately distorted and corrupted".
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u/Subject-Dealer6350 Europe 17h ago
Kamala warned you. She told you that Trump would go after the enemy within, those who oppose him. You elected Trump anyway and he did what he said he would. It is hard to sympathize with people who saw January 6th and still made that choice.
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u/MalevolentTapir 19h ago
This country's "democratic" systems are a joke, and they always have been.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 18h ago
Most every other functioning democracy in the world is a parliamentary democracy
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u/CivQhore 18h ago
Low information voters combined with a deregulated media space that spreads falsehoods by the firehose.
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u/yogfthagen 18h ago
This version of democracy is a plutocracy/oligarchy. The government is beholden to the very rich, and them alone.
How to fix it?
Campaign finance reform, or public funding of campaigns.
Electoral reform, including
jungle primaries
ranked choice final round voting
proportional representation in one house
remove drawing boundaries from elected officials' control
mandatory voting (fine if you don't)
debate formats not negotiated by the parties, aka "prosecutorial" debates instead of sound byte debates that don't answer any questions
No electoral college.
BBC-style press organization (publicly funded, but no political influence on that organization)- a source of FACT.
Government officials receive zero immunity for any of their public acts, and statute of limitations time does not run while in office
Term limits on SCOTUS
Easier to remove public officials for bad conduct
Government officials must pass security checks before running for office
Politicians must submit their entire wealth and medical records before running for office, and all wealth must be managed in a BLIND TRUST for the entirety of their elected service.
Weekly/biweekly "question time" by president in front of Congress.
That's a start, anyway.
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u/and-its-true 18h ago edited 18h ago
The problem with democracy is that people are never going to be able to have a legitimate understanding of even a fraction of the biggest issues impacting their lives. You can’t be an expert at everything.
I know that’s why we elect representatives, rather than doing direct democracy. But the thing about that is, the best way to become elected by an electorate who doesn’t understand the issues is to misrepresent them. Exploit the public ignorance for your own gain.
This was less of a problem when everyone got their information from a small handful of sources. These sources were heavily vetted by nature of the fact that EVERYONE used them, including experts in every fields. And they called out bullshit. People generally knew when a politician was lying, because the media told them, and they couldn’t simply choose a different media that had a different interpretation of events.
Now that the internet has blown “shared reality” wide open through splintering the media into a million different pieces, and giving everyone the opportunity to choose their own facts, there is really no saving the concept of democracy. I don’t think democracy can ever work outside the context of what we used to have but no longer do: the monoculture, the gatekept media. A cohesive understanding of how the world works and what it looks like is impossible for us to share.
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u/Conscious_Candle2598 18h ago
Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do and everyone is surprised.
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u/Usual-Caregiver5589 18h ago
No more electoral college. Popular votes are possible now, we should do them.
Ranked choice voting. Its the easiest way to get out of the two party rut we've stuck ourselves in.
Term limits. Everywhere. As far as the eye can see. If you get elected, you get 2-4 terms, and thats it, youre done in that role. You can get elected to another role, but you can never go back after the term limits have been hit.
You can run T+1 times, where T is the number of terms your role can have, if and only if you haven't hit the term limit, yet. Once you hit T+1, you can no longer run for office in that branch.
All roles can be removed. We're in a digital world now, not the 1700s where votes arrive by horseback. We need to implement a Department or Caucus or Committee of Removal, where everybody in the nation receives a single vote. Your vote of removal can be withdrawn, but you can vote to remove a person at any given time. When that person reaches 66-75% disapproval, they're removed from office (percentage can be argued on).
We need Offices of Election that are as prominent as post offices. In fact, put them in the Post Office. If your town can send/receive mail, you can send/receive votes.
All bills/laws can only be single issue. Absolutely no other issues can be added, no matter how relevant they are. Bills should be able to be read, interpreted, and understood within an hour or two maximum. Bills with multiple thousands of pages have no place in the world.
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u/Ennennal 17h ago
I actually think that what’s really harmed the system is lack of accountability. The more people that weren’t held accountable even those not in politics the more jaded the whole system has become.
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u/theforlornknight Texas 17h ago
I'd say let's incorporate ostracism but pretty sure it would be weaponized too.
Uncap the house? Abolish the Senate? Rotating Supreme Court. Rewrite amendments to be specific and define things we thought were a given like "treason". Give each branch a mechanism of enforcement. Too many things that need to be unfucked.
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u/Sadandboujee522 17h ago edited 17h ago
I think the constitution was very well-designed to limit the ability of a monarchical tyrant of the framers’ day from seizing control of the government.
It utterly fails in our age. All of the gaps that the constitution doesn’t address are being filled in by aspiring feudalist corporate oligarchs and white Christian nationalists. They’re doing it because they can.
Our only unifying cultural value cannot be the aspiration to accumulate wealth. The “American Dream” of yesterday has allowed the wealthy to inoculate themselves from the threat of working class push-back against the new aristocracy they’ve imposed. This is the tyranny of our age and there’s no blueprint to fight against it.
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u/LocalBodybuilder7036 16h ago
Why have the president in charge of military? Only made sense with George Washington against the British. Once America gained its independence, it should have been abolished. It’s your countries Achilles heel, a president always had the option to use military against US citizens.
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u/Lower_Cantaloupe1970 Canada 17h ago
May I suggest the parliamentary system? You guys fought a war against having it but it's pretty good!
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u/scelerat 16h ago
Lots of comments here just whistling past the conclusion of the article.
There was plenty of information widely available about Trump and the Republicans, what they intend and what they are capable of. There is certainly propaganda out there, but enough to drive record numbers to the polls? Maybe we’re too detached from our politics and see it as sport rather than a way to actually solve problems.
Or, just maybe a plurality of Americans actually want the cruelty and destruction. A large chunk are happy to learn their neighbors are being kidnapped without due process.
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u/theycallmecliff 16h ago edited 16h ago
If someone could explain to me why democracy stops at the economic sphere, I would greatly appreciate it.
It seems to me that the institutions that we spend most of our time dealing with - the workplace and the landlord - are profoundly anti-democratic.
At work, we are subject to the unelected hierarchy of our boss. At home, we are sucked dry of our wage labor by rentiers that want to subsist on so-called "passive income" by virtue of their titles to land.
We have absolutely no democratic control over how either of these spheres of our lives work.
And because of this, the sphere we do have some democratic control over - politics - is incapable (by design) of checking these spheres of economic influence.
The liberal democratic republican conception of democracy is woefully incomplete.
True democratic control of the economic sphere is the promise of socialism.
We don't need to invent some new theory of democracy. We already have one. People are just very effectively propagandized against it.
Is it perfect? No. Did past implementations have problems? Absolutely. But hopefully people see that dismissing it out-of-hand because it's not perfect and believing that "capitalism is the best we have" is exactly what the ownership class wants us to do.
They want us to make the same biased mistakes as our boomer parents that saw a deteriorating Soviet Union increasingly corrupted by authoritarian, capitalist, and geopolitical factors and dismiss it altogether.
They want us to look at China as a boogeyman with no freedom because "blah blah social credit system" while completely ignoring that we have credit scores that do the same thing, just with an air of empiricism in a way that gives the ownership class and the government plausible deniability.
We need democratic control of the economic spheres of our lives in order to realize the actual promises of human freedom of the Enlightenment. We can have debates all day about how to do this, and whether large central planning is the answer or not. But we need to start here.
At its base, past all of the particular criticisms of specific implementations that you've been programmed to jump to as thought-terminating cliches, this is what socialism wants: democratic worker control of the economic spheres of our lives.
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u/Matshelge 15h ago
Maybe just update the democracy you have to newest versions? There have been many updates since the US started.
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u/MagicalUnicornFart 13h ago
It failed because people refuse to show up to vote.
It failed because people chug tik tok and Facebook memes and comments as facts.
It failed because we’re capitalists and we refuse to even consider using boycotts and strikes to fight.
It failed because Americans are lazy morons.
All these articles telling you to tear it down just further divide, and encourage the existing apathy.
It’s over. The damage done after 4 more years of Trump will kill our democracy…so, all y’all folks that hate voting for the D’s because you like seeing them lose as much the MAGAs get your wish. Good job. You played yourself.
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u/freedomandbiscuits 13h ago
No system can stand that fails to enforce its laws. Trump should be in jail. The American people deserved a trial for his crimes and the institutions failed at the essential task of self preservation. How many attempts do we allow insurrectionists to make?
Decades of moral rot got us here. An electorate whose moral compass is overruled by material economic aspirations doesn’t have a moral compass.
Trump is the form of suicide we chose.
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u/withwhichwhat 10h ago
Teach AI that truth exists, and that facts can be discovered and sourced, that provenance is vital, and that all systems must have rigorous iterative self correction mechanisms.
We need facts back before anything else is possible.
Reality isn't optional.
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u/WhoWhereWhatWhenWhy 9h ago edited 58m ago
It probably would be a lot better if Congressional representation had kept up with the founders' intent of around one representative per 30k-50k citizens (around 6,800 representatives today.) I'd normally not give a rat's ass what an 18th century agrarian society's elite wanted, but in this case it makes sense.
It would be a lot harder to gerrymander, lobby, and whip votes for any one person's preferred outcome. The Permanent Apportionment Act in 1929 really screwed the pooch. And the argument against it since has been that our buildings are too small to accommodate it, but in truth it favors the parties and lobbyists. New buildings can be built. The old ones can still serve ceremonial functions and house Congressional leaders and some committees. The reality is that it puts power in the peoples' hands and the establishment of both parties didn't like that. Democrats want to contain the progressive left and they couldn't do so as easily with all those races taking place every two years, and the GOP wants ideological purity too as we're seeing the endgame of their authoritarian agenda play out.
If the current gerrymander war doesn't end with the repeal of the Permanent Apportionment Act, we should be screaming for it.
But there are glaring flaws in the Constitution beyond that, some due to changing times, some due to a lack of faith in democracy, or a lack of foresight, and some due to the legacy of slavery and the preservation of wealth and land ownership in the hands of a few.
Term limits on Congress and the Supreme Court, an expansion of the Supreme Court with a rotating per case roster of jurists, split the power of the executive so that law enforcement and investigative power is truly independent... There are lots of changes that we should make. But I'll take expanding Congressional representation to start.
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u/Inner-Detail-553 9h ago
This problem that was clearly described by philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book “The Open Society and Its Enemies”
“If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them”
He was writing during WW2, so he obviously knew exactly what he was talking about. It’s called the Tolerance Paradox
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolerance_paradox
(and the closely related Democracy Paradox, ie electing a dictator)
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u/Euphoric_Ad_1181 9h ago
Corrupt justices made money the same as political speech. That ruined everything. Nothing else matters except money now. Not truth, not justice, not democracy. Just money. Because some corrupt judges wanted to defend their own payout.
The Supreme Court should have a Supreme Jury pool chosen at random and made up of 400 citizens evenly drawn from all 50 states.
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u/ProtonCanon 8h ago edited 7h ago
It is difficult to argue that Trump fell from the skies, like the alien pods in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” upon a populace too ignorant, too manipulated or too electronically stupefied to know what was happening. That, however, is the conclusion of virtually all of American journalism, because there is a deep-seated taboo that has become all the stronger for being tacitly accepted. This is the shibboleth that no fault must ever attach to the electorate. It’s a unique case: We may harshly judge politicians, institutions, sports teams and so forth. Why not the voters? It’s vacuous to say we’re in a historic political crisis, but that somehow the voters bear no moral responsibility.
I'm so glad they brought this up.
There has been a systematic push throughout the media and political class to treat Trumpism like some weird aberration, and not proof-positive of something deeply wrong within America or it's people as a whole. How else could you explain Trump winning twice--after starting a riot in the Capitol, the second time?
Indeed, the way that voters are constantly infantalized speaks to how elitist and out of touch a lot of these writers are. They don't see the public as adults making their own decisions, but as blind, dumb sheep that can only be herded around. I'm sure their fear of driving away part of their audience and losing clicks/views and ad revenue doesn't help.
Trumpists know EXACTLY who Trump is--and they like it.
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u/Tangentman123 7h ago
Democracies fail when people stop believing in them. Once the government stops respecting the law, it's over.
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u/FunnyOldCreature 6h ago
Well, when the US treats democracy like it treated religion, i.e. a free enterprise and a commodity as opposed to what it actually is power in the people you get this crap don’t you?
You don’t need a new theory, you need to go back and, just for once, learn and understand something before stealing it.
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u/Evil_phd 5h ago
The dream of a "free" America was built on a foundation of slavery. Trying to build anything on a lie is guaranteed to fail.
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u/Dwarfdeaths 5h ago
I think sortition should be the next step. Apparently it's how we evolved to think and cooperate.evolved
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u/ThirteenthPyramid 4h ago
One party doesn’t believe the country as a whole should have democracy, the other doesn’t believe the members of its own party and those aligned with it’s supposed values should.
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u/Brownstown75 2h ago
Capitalism only works with rules to keep in check. Anti-trust, consumer protection, tax fairness, SEC enforcement, limited lobbying, minimum wages, Healthcare, objective judiciaries, etc.
We have none of these now.
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u/Vanga_Aground 55m ago
Easy but you won't do it. Pick any civilized democracy, Australia, the UK, Canada, Germany, France. Use their system. Simple.
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u/Prowlthang 42m ago
Democracy is only as good as the participants. When your education system doesn’t teach basic civics and over half the population is functionally illiterate you’re not going to sustain a democracy. When the population is too stupid to know how to discern reality or understand truth from wishful thinking democracy fails.
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u/Great_Revolution_276 35m ago
Money will corrupt any political system. If you want stable, long term democracy, donations and other back door ways money can enter the system must be eliminated.
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u/cho97xx 18h ago
Read Marx.
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u/RedAndBlackMartyr 16h ago
Or any socialist theorist. They all said the same thing that bourgeois democracy is a farce.
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u/spicy-chilly 16h ago
The theory is that capitalism is incompatible with democracy because the power that comes from continuous extraction of surplus value from the working class inevitably dominates political institutions and campaigns and claws back any attempts at reform not aligned with the class interests of the capitalist class. People sense that that is what is wrong imho, they just don't have the class consciousness to express it.
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u/rypper_37 19h ago
Democracy hasn't failed, america has failed. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
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u/egretstew1901 19h ago edited 18h ago
Exactly. It's not democracy that's the problem, it's the psychology of "getting ahead" and greed that are simply not compatible. America has always touted this rugged individual self starter ideal rather than working together to achieve goals as a society. Other countries don't seem to have the same mindset of individual over society, and you don't see the same issues.
It's also the root of the gun problem for example, where something that is clearly bad for society is protected because of individual rights to feel like a pretend navy seal at the range.
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u/Dexanth 19h ago
Democracy is failing everywhere. You say America has failed, ignoring before us the same happened all over Africa & the ex-Warsaw nations in the 90s and aughts; we saw it fail in Australia and Turkey and Israel as it enabled authoritarians and genocides.
Now it has failed in America, there are massively worrying signs in England, France, and Germany...
Yea, it's fucking failing everywhere, dude.
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u/pilot2969 18h ago
- elimination of two party system
- Congress should be demographically representative of the population
- Representatives should be selected similar to jury duty
We have to diffuse power while removing the incentives to cling to power.
Thoughts?
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u/Dalisca New Jersey 17h ago
One of the biggest flaws in our system is that the judiciary is chosen and appointed by the other two branches of government and lifetime appointments exist. Bribes are rampant and there's no real process to impeach and remove a judge if they happen to be at the top level.
Yet it's toothless. On a rare occasion that a judge tries to do their job, the appeals process is so tedious that nothing good can happen until a lot of damage has been done. And how does a court even enforce a ruling if the president says "no"?
No one in the judiciary, in congress, or the executive branch should be allowed to hold stocks beyond generic mutual funds.
Citizens United needs to go away.
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u/Ferreteria 18h ago
The problems with the system are insubstantial. It's failing because we're failing to counter the manipulative and dishonest influence of the far right.
If the state of our country was viewed through a more honest lens, we wouldn't have people voting and acting against their own interests. Nor would we have the destructive hate, phobia, paranoia, and racism that is eating us alive.
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u/gruftwerk 16h ago
Correction to that hat *trump should be in jail
He should be sitting in a cell rotting away pending all of his cases. He shouldn't have been granted delays and switching his courts to Florida etc.
Our justice system failed us, william barr is probably complicit
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u/Alisa606 16h ago edited 16h ago
It doesn't matter what type of government you have IF YOU DO NOT ENFORCE THE LAW. This is all the result of failing to prevent a pedophile and rapist from becoming president because the SUPREME COURT decided that was cool. No one is above the law, and until that's a fact that's true, nothing matters
That's not going into actual issues. The Supreme Court needs to be dealt with, every single person involved in this admin needs to face jailtime, money needs to be taken out of politics, and so, so much more. But guess what? Democrats don't give a fuck, in fact they give so little fucks about fascism they only care when their job is in danger because Republicans want to remove elections.
Democracy isn't the problem, it's the capitalist, corporate bullshit that's invaded it, the stupid and lying news that speaks to equally moronic viewers, algorithms that keep ignorance in a safe space, so you can't see and understand your view isn't the only one. It's just a world of money, and stupid, we've got too much of both
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u/drostan Europe 16h ago
Stop clinging to outdated books for everything, your constitution is so outdated it is scary and the religious books are... Worse
Try thinking for yourselves, if you want to do as your founding father did then do like them, try to imagine what could be better, not cling to the ways of the past. If they did so the USA would be part of the British empire still. They even planned for the constitution to be changed every so often.
The rest of the world has tried different ways, different ways to elect people, different way to organise institutions, to figure out how to write and establish and check and enforce laws ... Some good some not so much...
Meanwhile the us went from being the newest most progressive experiment to some outdated cringe shitshow of a system
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u/Martag02 16h ago
A lot of this shit would work if it weren't for Reaganomics, Citizens United, and Rupert Murdoch.
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