What is your personal opinion on the US political system?

[seanmpa]

Hey, I'm new here. This is my official first post on the forums. I want to let everyone know my opinions first of all. I personally support reduced taxes (not no taxes at all though), I am pro-choice and accepting of same-sex marriage, I oppose ACA and I oppose things like food and helmet laws. Thank you.

[pbrower2a]

Used to be great, but on the brink of a very nasty single-party system. Outsiders will be helpless against the ravages of the entrenched minority. The only 'reforms' likely in a GOP-dominated America will be those that gut human rights. The legal system could become brutal.

The GOP stands for the most superstitious part of America, a part that wants its beliefs (like creationism) foisted upon as many people as possible and used as tests for  getting jobs.

We are going fascist.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Beyond horrible.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

HS

[Marokai Backbeat]

S**t's f**ked.

[traininthedistance]

The primary feature of the US political system is an entrenched and horrific bias against urban areas and the people that live there.  The primary beneficiary of this bias is now the heavily-subsidized exurbs, which are able to appeal to rural areas (which used to be primary beneficiaries, but no longer, as they have less relative population and wealth) to maintain a systematic legislative majority (especially in state legislatures and the House) on grounds that are sometimes understandable but more often disingenuous and just as exploitative as the urban/rural dynamic is normally imagined to be. (Older, inner-suburban areas are in relative equilibrium here, and when they side with the cities there is some faint hope of balance.)

Most people will point to race, income, and religion as the important cleavages instead– and yes they are important, and complicate my ten-second analysis considerably– but dammit I have an ax to grind here, and I apparently feel like grinding it super sharp right now.

[Mehmentum]

Pretty low.

A.) Gerrymandering makes it so most representatives are in safe districts.  These congressmen have no incentive to compromise and every incentive to play to their party's base. 

Not to mention, gerrymandering is unfair to the party in the minority when redistricting occurs.  The Party in power just draws the minority party into a few super concentrated districts.  Democrats won the popular vote for the House in 2012, they didn't even come close to picking up the House.

B.) Because of the filibuster, its basically impossible to get anything passed without significant bipartisan support, which is very hard to do in such a polarized environment.

C). The amount of corporate spending in politics is obscene.  Most congressmen are beholden to corporate interest to some extent.

[Illuminati Blood Drinker]

Literal dictatorship could work better.

[Lambsbread]

Absolute garbage, Tuesday was just a reinforcement of that feeling.

[angus]

Hey, I'm new here. This is my official first post on the forums. I want to let everyone know my opinions first of all. I personally support reduced taxes (not no taxes at all though), I am pro-choice and accepting of same-sex marriage, I oppose ACA and I oppose things like food and helmet laws. Thank you.

Your views are alright.  I agree with them in the aspects you have posted.  Your method of introducing them, however, make you look like a naive tool.  Nevertheless, you begin with a question, which always deserves an answer.  To wit:

Overall, not bad.  It's probably better than the system that existed in France in the 18th Century, and better than that which existed in Russia in the 19th Century--or at any other time in Russia, really--but it has some unpleasantness.  For one thing, our offices are for sale.  This is neither bad nor good in the abstract, but simply the result of evolution in a system wherein people have never suffered the indignities of foreign occupation, starvation, rule by Divine Right, or prolonged strife.  Still, rationing offices to the highest bidder makes the office holders less beholden to the people governed than to those who ensure their victories with largesse.  Such a system will likely devolve further into feudalistic corruption to the point that the rights that the lowest classes enjoy will in time be diminished by the system of retail politics as it exists in the United States.  Our system is also cumbersome.  This is also neither bad nor good, but simply the result of a large population with wallets fat enough to make it so. 

Much of the problem derives from the conceit of democracy.  Democratic processes really only work well with a well-educated, well-informed, motivated, and interested populace.  During the early days of the republic, the franchise was limited precisely to those who were well educated, well informed, motivated, and interested.  Over time, the franchise was extended, little by little, to those less fortunately placed.  Given our current sensibilities, this seems not only warranted but noble.  Fair enough, but the privileges of education, information, motivation, and interest was not also extended to the marginal groups upon whom the burden of democracy was placed.  This expansion of suffrage made it easy for the controlling class to exploit the populace--especially in the absence of universal information--into setting into place a system of continual oscillatory brinksmanship/power cycles in which small groups of well-placed individuals control the masses under the apparent aegis of presumed democracy while simultaneously extolling the virtues of their brand of democracy so effectively that those controlled purchase it with their very existences.  More astounding still, they do it by affecting a façade of competition between two political factions whose goals are essentially the same, but who cleverly spin it in such a way as to seem diametrically opposed to the great unwashed masses, so that when one sweeps the other from the halls of power, the public is seduced into being placated by its apparent autonomy.  This is also neither bad nor good, but it can be amusing if you don't allow yourself to take any of it too seriously.  (Assuming, of course, that you have the funds to insulate yourself from the temporary economic disequilibria that always accompany such reversals of fortune.)

[Boston Bread]

The political system, along with the surrounding culture, ensures the most vulnerable have the least influence and gives those least vulnerable the most power, with predictable results. Only a dictatorship could accomplish this more effectively. If gerrymandering was repealed and there was more voter engagement it could be salvaged.

[Citizen Hats]

The main problem I see with the US political system (and I did live there for decades and grew up in it's environment) is that the founders went too far in distributing power.  This has only carried forward as time has passed, with states adopting even greater distributed power systems than the Federal Government. 

The problem with this is that the distribution of power also considerably distributes responsibility and thus accountability.  The buck can always be passed to some abstract combination or another that has sabotaged the public interest. Thus, so many officials can make a plausible case that they are not really responsible for the result of their actions, that electoral accountability becomes not simply a question of 'was there a screw-up' but 'who in particular was the real screw-up'. 

As a result of this diffusion of accountability, there results a sort of 'anything-goes' political culture, where the only real rules are in the form enacted legislation, if that, and political actors do not form unwritten codes of behavior because politicians know the voters can't really punish them for breaking them. So we end up with highly partisan judicial appointments, political motivated constituency boundaries, attacks on the electoral process, and all sorts of smaller corruptions that can only live in the distributed-responsibility system that we have -- things that in countries of a similar level of development are at the very least unseemly, if not things you just don't do.  Lost in this mess of civil servants, committee chairs, floor leaders, party bosses, presidents, congressmen, senators, filibusters, secret holds, confirmation hearings, and independent agencies, is the voter tasked with making sense of it all. 

In a parliamentary system, by contrast, there is a direct line of accountability. The bureaucracy is responsible to the Cabinet who are responsible to the Prime Minister who is responsible to parliament who are responsible to the people. Regardless of actual fault, there is one direction of responsibility for the success or failure of national policy, and elected officials act accordingly.  Now, it is true that this tends to concentrate truly vast amounts of power in the hands of the Prime Minister, but that power is continuously validated by the continuous approval, or absence of active disapproval, of a body of individuals responsible to the people. This is in contrast to the practice of assigning power to an individual for a fixed and immovable period of time as found in the United States. 

In the early history of the Republic, these tendencies were mitigated by an electoral system that depended on vast feats of coordination to achieve something resembling a governing coalition, and tended to create an environment where all members of a party stood or fell on their collective accomplishments, rather than individual roles. This is because, until the 1880s, elections were conducted by citizens lining up and informing tellers which people they wished to vote for what offices.  In those days, "ballots" were privately printed by the parties, and were consisted of lists of approved candidates and ballot measures which could be handed to the teller. In order to split a ticket, one had to go through the process of manipulating several ballots or memorizing who was running for office.  The effects of this system were that party candidates could not run as individuals, but had to run as a common organization and resulted in more disciplined political parties.  Combined with a presidency which was dependent on the support of party barons for nomination and prevented from wielding real command authority by the administrative burden of filling tens of public service positions, meant that the political structure of the 19th Century United States featured considerably more defined paths of accountability than today. 

If I were re-working the structure of the United States Federal Government, I would necessarily want to maintain many features of the existing system, simply for the reason that Americans are deeply attached to it, but I would alter several key things.  Firstly, I would abolish the Senate.  The Senate's imbalanced distribution is deeply unfair, and their few numbers create a club of powerful barons who distribute power too widely. I would lengthen the term of the House of Representatives to four years, to match the term of the president so that they are elected by a common electorate and to give the body enough time to live through the effects of it's enactments. If I were to retain the legislative approval of executive officials, it would be on a continuing basis so that the legislature could vote to remove as well as approve. Such a system would have a considerably simplified power structure, but it would also be considerably more simple for citizens to hold their servants to account.   

[AggregateDemand]

House of Representatives is too large, and the debate between direct representation and virtual representation has become moot because the people are not getting any effective representation.

Reduce the size of the US House of Representatives to 250 members, and bait Congress with a 50% pay-raise to vote it through. Reducing the size of the House will increase the voting strength of small states, and reduce the effectiveness of gerrymandering by increasing the size of the voting districts.

If restricting the size of the US House of Representatives fails to make it functional, consider raising the term to 3 years (1/2 Senate term).

[Gass3268]

Get rid of the Senate and add 100-200 seats in the House elected by Proportional Representation. 

[© tweed]

you are overstating the degree to which the USA functions as a small-d democracy, even in a narrow sense.  elections are carefully-scripted, mulibilliondollar affairs run by the public relations/advertising industry.  the candidates hardly, if ever, speak about policy beyond the barest platitudes, and even the position papers you can dig up in some corner of their website are a) ambiguous and sparse on details and b) poorly correlated to what the candidate will actually do with power one elected.

the ballot propositions show this gulf between politics and policy.  multiple states, even the 'red states', voted resoundingly to raise the minimum wage (while voting for candidates that probably support the repeal of the min. wage).  voters routinely support rolling back the prison-industrial complex by legalizing weed and limiting the ability of DAs to charge nonviolent offenders with felonies with petty crimes.

this is not a new development.  Chomsky noted all the way back in 1984 that voters re-elected Reagan in a landslide while exit polls showed that they hoped his domestic agenda would be defeated.  the relationship between electoral politics and policy has been dwindling for a long times, and is now approaching zero.


now, if your argument is that the American soul is corrupt beyond the possibility of redemption, no argument there -- it always has been.

[anvi]

I agree with most of what angus wrote.

Jesus. 

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Overall, not bad.  It's probably better than the system that existed in France in the 18th Century, and better than that which existed in Russia in the 19th Century--or at any other time in Russia, really--but it has some unpleasantness.  For one thing, our offices are for sale.  This is neither bad nor good in the abstract, but simply the result of evolution in a system wherein people have never suffered the indignities of foreign occupation, starvation, rule by Divine Right, or prolonged strife.  Still, rationing offices to the highest bidder makes the office holders less beholden to the people governed than to those who ensure their victories with largesse.  Such a system will likely devolve further into feudalistic corruption to the point that the rights that the lowest classes enjoy will in time be diminished by the system of retail politics as it exists in the United States.  Our system is also cumbersome.  This is also neither bad nor good, but simply the result of a large population with wallets fat enough to make it so. 

Somewhat better than Tsarist Russia and Revolutionary France isn't bad? LOL.

[angus]

I agree with most of what angus wrote.

Jesus.  

haha.  I'm bouncing back and forth between extreme cynicism (in this thread) and extreme optimism in others.  It has been one hell of a week.  I've come full circle trying to track down several thousand dollars that seem to have disappeared.  To add to my pleasure, we're in between secretaries just now.  Hard to reconcile statements in a vacuum.  One office says to provide certain information to the budget office.  Where can I get that information?  From procurement.  Procurement, when asked, says "We don't have that information; you'll have to get it from the budget office."

What a glorious and beautiful thing is bureaucracy.
 

[anvi]

What a glorious and beautiful thing is bureaucracy.

Yeah.  Reminds me of a story a friend told me about a guy who lived in Tunis who urgently needed a government stamp on some document, but when he arrived at the right office, he was told: "Sorry, but the person with the key to the drawer where we keep the stamp is on vacation."  Hope you find the $$$.

In the meantime, my default mode about politics has become cynicism.  If someone in office can surprise me out of that cynicism, I'll welcome it.  But I won't expect it.

[justfollowingtheelections]

Outdated

[justfollowingtheelections]

Get rid of the Senate and add 100-200 seats in the House elected by Proportional Representation. 

I agree

[Vega]

Get rid of the Senate and add 100-200 seats in the House elected by Proportional Representation. 

If not abolish the Senate, definitely get some IRV for that body.

[KCDem]

JUNK SYSTEM!

[AggregateDemand]

Get rid of the Senate and add 100-200 seats in the House elected by Proportional Representation. 

What do we gain by eliminating the competent legislative body, and replacing them with a 600-person mob in the House? If we were trying to completely undermine the notion of representative government and minority voting rights, perhaps eliminating the senate and adding Congressmen would fly.

[Slander and/or Libel]

Get rid of the Senate and add 100-200 seats in the House elected by Proportional Representation. 

What do we gain by eliminating the competent legislative body, and replacing them with a 600-person mob in the House? If we were trying to completely undermine the notion of representative government and minority voting rights, perhaps eliminating the senate and adding Congressmen would fly.

Lolwut?