Of course yeeting bad code into production with a poor review process is already a thing. But this will scale that bad code as now you have developers who will have grown up on it.

Creativity emerges through a messy exploration and human experience -- but it seems no one has time for that these days. Managers have found a shiny new tool to do more with less. Also, AI companies are deliberately targeting executives with promises of cost-cutting and efficiency. Someone has to pay for all the R&D.

Notably, a good number the examples were just straight-up bad management, irrespective of the tools being used. I also think some of these reactions are people realizing that they work for managers or in businesses that ultimately don't really care about the quality of their work, just that it delivers monetary value at the end.

By investing in open source projects, governments can create more efficient, transparent, and innovative digital services. If anything I’m sure it’ll save tax payers money on expensive licenses paid to a company in another country.

This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.

We should desire that the legislative side actually legislates and each branch of the government holds the other two in check, regardless of partisan control.

Further having our judicial branch become openly partisan while remaining lifetime appointments despite younger appointees with longer lifetimes, is really the finishing touch on this slow rolling disaster.

“And now at last it comes. You will give me the Ring freely! In place of the Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All shall love me and despair!”

Oppression when Galadriel is on the throne may be better than that for Sauron; it's still oppression.

Presidents are elected based on promises made to various parts of the electorate, and if/when Congress won't act (often even when Congress is controlled by the president's party, nearly always when controlled by the opposition), no one generally makes a fuss if the president pushes through a popular-ish thing by executive authority. Republicans may be happy now but they won't be when a Democratic president ups the ante in a few years, just like Democrats were perfectly happy with Obama and Biden's overreaches but are furious at Trump's.

All for reps expansion. Remember that we haven't expanded in nearly 100 years because "we were out of room in the building". Meanwhile we have 435 people representing 330 million people (average of 760k people per rep), when the population representation was roughly 250k/rep the last time it expanded.

We should have at least 1000 reps by these numbers.

And reason has prevailed again.

But sarcasm aside, its a difficult question who controls parlaments, when democratic participation is not enough. Maybe oversight or veto rights by randomly picked citizen councils are a better way then blindly trusting anything that happens in-house.

Yes, we have tons of bad legislators: some just not good at their jobs, some actively harmful (leaving that vague on purpose—I think all partisans can agree that they exist, even if we disagree on who they are). In theory, they can be excised via the ballot box. However, we don't want to kick out the good ones just as they're getting to be their most effective—not only do we lose their direct skills, but we lose their ability to mentor the promising up-and-comers.

I place more blame on the way we do primaries and general elections: in most districts, the only thing that matters is the primary, and that produces some truly rotten results.

As long as things are staggered, senior legislators will mentor junior legislators, and that institutional knowledge will be passed on.

And I don't think we're talking about limiting representatives and senators in the same way we do for the president. I would say it would be fair to allow them to serve for something on the order of 15-20 years.

But sure, I think there are many other problems that matter more: winner-takes-all elections that essentially require you have only a two-party system, the electoral college, and (as you mention) the primary system.

While we're at it, let's put terms on the Supreme Court, too: rather than for life, make an appointment last 18 years, staggered every two years.

Who cares? They don't get to cast the votes.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dian...

Related gripe: How both houses of congress prioritize "seniority", so that changing a representative indirectly harms the interests of the people being represented. (Though possibly not as much as keeping the wrong representative in office.)

In other words, State X benefits more when their seats are _not_ competitive and subject to turnover, the quality of candidates being equal.

Are you sure this is going to be a fact, in the future? How likely is it, that the next elections will still be (somewhat) fair?

In Virginia, I get to participate an incredibly professional and structured process that makes it easy for everyone who can vote to vote and makes sure there are many checks that the process is being followed correctly.

Women who changed thier last name to their husband's.

Naturalized citizens who come from places where the language requires non ascii characters.

Anyone without a passport.

Anyone from a place where the courthouse burned down taking thier original birth certificates with it... Copies don't count.

To name tens of millions. Maybe trump will interpret the law in a way that lets people vote, or maybe he'll decide that correct interpretation is to limit voting to people more likely to vote for his third term.

Trump doesn't execute those laws, though. The states do, as they are in charge of running elections. Certainly Trump's DoJ could bring lawsuits against states that don't comply in the way Trump wants them to, but it's far from certain that the courts (even Trump's stacked SCOTUS) will agree with Trump's interpretations.

> The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators

For president it just says states will send electors chosen by the state legislature. This has been the source of immense fuckery for decades... state legislatures often want to ignore the popular vote and just send their party's electors and it's unclear how the current court would sway if that actually happens (particularly if the state's constitution doesn't bind their legislature to send electors based on the popular vote). Further, federal laws like the voting rights act have often been held to apply to presidential election as well as congress.

The conditions for this are being set as we watch. Dictators always prize loyalty above competence, which is exactly what our current leader is doing.

I don't doubt that nearly everyone involved in managing our recent elections are conscientious and professional, but what are they going to do if a bunch of troops with guns show up to change the results?

There is no one waiting in the wings to take over popularly if this happens. Previous people who have at various times looked like they might, have fallen mightily from grace in the eyes of the party, such as DeSantis.

It all falls apart without Trump. And Trump is an old man, doing a stressful job.

The current problem is that Trump is happy to implement the policies that all these hard-right lunatics have come up with. It's not like Trump writes those executive orders. He just agrees with them and signs them.

Certainly Trump is a problem. He's the one that has united the party around this horrifying agenda, and who is amenable to letting others like Musk dismantle the federal government. The question, after Trump is gone, is if there is anyone else that can motivate the party to vote for someone who will continue to do things The Trump Way (that is, let other, smarter people do things).

I don't know. Like you say, people like DeSantis seemed to have a shot for a bit, but they've fallen out of favor. But it's unclear if these people need another Trump, or if someone with even half of his weird... charisma... will do.

(All of this is of course the standard hypocrisy: Trump and his cronies run on the whole "drain the swamp", "eliminate the deep state" nonsense. But of course Trump just immediately installs a different unelected deep state to run things.)

And I think the answer is no.

You're correct, that none of the policy being pushed through comes from Trump. It comes from various other people who are using Trump as a vehicle for their legislation.

But that doesn't really matter, because Trump didn't run on policy. He ran on force of personality.

I don't think anyone else will be able to strike quite the same balance Trump does, once he's gone. They'll either lean too hard into the policy stuff, which will backfire, or they'll lean too hard into the personality stuff, which leads to broadly unpopular people like Marjorie Taylor Green.

I think the only reason that Trump was/is as successful as he is, is that he has spent literal decades being in the news for something-or-other. By having headlines about him pop up every so often since the 1980s, he managed to engrain himself into the public consciousness in a way that let him then win the 2016 election, and everything since then.

Without that history, the immediate name recognition by everyone, I don't think the 2016 primary would have looked remotely like it did. And I don't think there's anyone else with that institutional name recognition waiting in the wings.

There were a bunch of people who are easily tricked who latched onto the election fraud claims by habitual liars. That doesn't make the claims true.

I really don't understand what you are trying to do other than distract.

Would you be open to a $10,000 bet that the 2028 election is, as decided by unbiased international publications (BBC, Reuters, etc.), fair?

Yes, if there was some sort of prediction market around that, I would absolutely make that bet. My rationale:

Elections are run by each individual state, not by the federal government. The federal government certainly has the ability to set standards for those elections (and something like the SAVE Act, if passed, will disproportionately disenfranchise likely-Democrat voters), but election integrity is managed by the states. The states don't really have an incentive to mess with their elections. Deep blue and deep red states will get the outcome that likely-of-the-same-party election officials expect/want without the need for any meddling. Swing states generally have enough people in power from both parties that those elections are going to be watched very closely by people who will call out irregularities and provide actual evidence of such, if it truly exists.

The only thing I'm worried about is legal disenfranchisement, but it's unclear if anything new there that happens in the next 3.5 years could meaningfully swing an election.

Regardless, I am less worried about 2028 than I am about the mid-terms in 2026. Not worried election-integrity wise... just worried about the Democrats getting their shit together and retaking at least one of the houses of Congress (and if they can only take one, preferably the Senate, even though that will likely be the more difficult one, as usual).

Obviously I would prefer if these morons on the right wouldn't fall for Trump's conspiracy bullshit, as democracy functions much better when everyone has faith in the integrity of elections. But as long as the elections are fair, that's still something in the "plus" column.

If anything the democrats were the party to get rid of some of their democratic process. They didn't even vote on their parties candidate, and no, that doesn't scare me either.

Not to mention the democrats had far more private money spent all three times fighting Trump and yet he still won democratically twice and lost once democratically.

The system isn't great or even good, but it's still functioning.

If it was, we wouldn't have unelected kids breaking and entering in some of the most sensitive government organizations, getting access to private data and dismantling institutions without congressional oversight.

How many more alarms before you start taking the situation seriously? Complacency like what you suggest will be the order of the day right until things break, and then everyone will forget they thought this way and talk about how obvious it all was. Granted I don't have any solutions at hand, but better to start thinking about them now than later.

1. Trump and his cronies didn't seem like they actually expected to win in 2016. They weren't prepared. Now we have Project 2025 and DOGE.

2. Trump's first-term cabinet picks and other political appointees (hell, even his VP) were not chosen all that well, in that they weren't fully bootlicking Trump loyalists. Many of them pushed back on some of the crazy things Trump wanted to do. This time, everyone has been hand-picked for their loyalty and agreement with advancing the agenda in Project 2025.

3. Members of the civil service also pushed back during his first term in ways of their own, slowing things down, and making the more destructive things hard to do. Now the civil service is being gutted.

4. In 2017, Trump hadn't yet packed federal courts and SCOTUS with hard-right loyalists. That's done now, and more will come.

5. There were Republicans in Congress during his first term -- even if not many -- who disagreed with Trump, and were willing to do so publicly. They voted against the more destructive things that Trump wanted. Some even voted to impeach/convict him! But today, Congress is stepping back and letting Trump do what he wants. Certainly what he wants in the executive branch will only get him so far; eventually he will need Congress to pass things to advance his agenda. But many of those uncomfortable Republicans who were present during his first term have retired or been replaced with card-carrying MAGA members.

If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028 (which I think is certainly possible; one thing that I'm not that concerned about is the integrity of our state-run elections), I'm worried that there won't be much of an executive branch left for that president to be in charge of, and will spend nearly all of that 4-year term rebuilding what was destroyed, if they're even able to do so, both logistically and legally.

Being ignored would be a blessing here.

- As a way of not having to know anything while appearing intellectual or somehow "above it all";

- Genuine and fundamental misunderstanding of the political forces in the US. Example: thinking there's such a thing as "socialism" or "the far left" in America;

- To knowingly deflect from the excesses of the conservative movement.

Here are the two political forces in American politics:

1. The fascist party who has had a 50+ year project to take over and subvert every aspect of government to destroy any aspect of democracy and create a neofuedal dystopia masquerading as a Christian theocracy; and

2. The controlled opposition party who loves nothing more than to be out of power and, when in power, to do nothing. It's why Democrats not in office are suddenly for progressive policies like medicare-for-all (as Kamala Harris was in 2019) but when on the cusp of taking power, they have a policy of no longer opposing the death penalty, capitulating to right-wing immigratino policy, arming a genocidal apartheid state and the only tax breaks proposed are for startups.

Look at how successful progressive voter initatives were in the last election compared to the performance of the Democratic Party. Florida overwhelmingly passed recreational marijuana and abortion access (~57% for, unfortunately you need 60%+ to pass in Florida) while Trump carried the state by 14. Minimum wage increases passed in deep red Missouri. In fact, abortion access has never failed to garner a mjaority of votes whenever it's allowed to be put in front of voters, no matter how deep red the state.

So why if progressive policies are so popular, are the Democrats so opposed to them as a platform? Really think about that. The Democratic Party doesn't exist to abuse power. It exists to destroy progressive momentum at every level of government above all else.

A lot of the decisions that have been flagged as "openly partisan" are just the Supreme Court saying exactly what you're saying: the executive branch and judicial branch don't have the authority to write laws and both branches should really stop writing laws and force Congress to do that.

We will see this year and in coming years whether this Supreme Court is partisan or just activist in tearing down executive authority. If they uphold this administration's opinions about executive power, then yes, they're blatantly partisan and have no integrity. If they stand in the way, then maybe they just finally had the numbers to rein in the executive branch like conservatives have been arguing for for generations.

I don't think we have enough information at this point to judge which is more likely (though I know most here will disagree with me on that point).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States_(2024...

(A nit: the word you're looking for is "rein", as in the thing you hold when riding a horse, not "reign", the ruling period of a monarch.)

I would hope that, in this hypothetical reality, a judge and jury would still find that laughable.

Even if such a ruling would have kept Nixon safe from prosecution, Congress still could have impeached him, and at least that would have kicked him out of office.

Of course, Nixon was preemptively pardoned, so we didn't even get to see how that would have played out in the reality of the time.

Something like the REINS Act, forcing regulations to be voted on by congress, would be something that hurts both sides & prevents executive overreach.

Something tells me presidential vote totals around Fort Bragg or Oak Ridge—both home to notable numbers of career federal employees—might give a different impression.

E.g. https://news.clearancejobs.com/2025/01/18/the-data-shows-whe...

Most federal civil servants live in Maryland or Virginia, not in DC.

Yet GOP senators were more than happy to claim credit for infrastructure funding that they opposed.

[1] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

The Democrats are complicit by trying too hard to play by the rules and take the high road, but it's not a fair comparison of culpability in the slightest.

A good example is immigration policy. Setting immigration policy is an enumerated power of Congress. The executive branch has no say at all. Congress failed to revise immigration policy when it got out of sync with facts on the ground. That led to the current mess.

The last attempt to overhaul immigration policy was in 2006.[1] Arguably, this was more workable than what we have now. It combined tough enforcement with a path to citizenship. It had supporters from both parties. The House and Senate did not agree on terms and no bill was passed.

So, instead of reform, we had weak enforcement, now followed by strong enforcement. What we have isn't working.

We need something like that bill now. Has anyone introduced a comprehensive reform bill in Congress? No, as far as I can see from reading through the immigration bills in the hopper. The current bills are either minor tweaks or PR exercises.[2]

Beat on your congressional representatives. We need an immigration law that works. It's Congress' job to argue over how it should work, and to come up with something that, when enforced, still works. We don't have that now. Immigrants are screaming about being deported, legal residents are screaming about being caught up in raids, and farmers are screaming about losing their labor force.[3] This is the moment to do something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...

[2] https://www.newsweek.com/immigration-bills-republicans-congr...

[3] https://www.axios.com/local/chicago/2025/01/27/business-lead...

How so? I don't really have any confidence that the current Congress (regardless of which party we're talking about) could agree on anything but what you pointed out -- minor tweaks.

Until a couple years later on average, a state protection organism gets put in place to check those organisations are working as expected.

Eventually, the state protection organism gets a bit carried away on what they are supposed to be checking on.

"Nearly half of dictatorships start as a military coup, though others have been started by foreign intervention, elected officials ending competitive elections, insurgent takeovers, popular uprisings by citizens, or legal maneuvering by autocratic elites to take power within their government. Between 1946 and 2010, 42% of dictatorships began by overthrowing a different dictatorship, and 26% began after achieving independence from a foreign government. Many others developed following a period of warlordism." [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictatorship (see "Formation")

do you see jan 16 as a military coup? Coz i do. Just because the people involved are poorly equipped, and badly organized, doesn't mean it isn't.

We, as a nation, did not punish them hard enough. We as a nation, did not cut the hydra at their head, and allowed it to fester. It is done, perhaps, as a form of peace keeping and appeasement.

But history has taught us that appeasement does not work. So once again, those who failed to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Sure, some people were private militia members, but that is not the same thing.

They governed well enough until January 20.

> This is opened up an opportunity for a well funded strongman, and the checks and balances that were intended to protect our democracy are now mere suggestions.

Creating gridlock and dysfunction is an intentional (and well-known) strategy to create a strongman. Most of the gridlock and dysfunction are on one side. You can call that partisan but even they oppose even the most simple, inescable issues such as paying debt. Back under Obama, the GOP in Congress openly said that their goal was to make government a failure under Obama.

Even when Republicans are in power, Democrats don't resort to blatantly obstructionist measures to mess with a Republican administration.

Democrats don't refuse to consider judicial nominations because "it's a presidential election year", and then hypocritically rush through a SCOTUS appointment right at the end of a presidential term.

Sure, they do things like vote down a debt ceiling increase when it's paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they don't agree with. But when the power balance is reversed, Republicans will vote down a debt ceiling increase if it's not paired with some completely unrelated legislation that they want.

(I wish there was something in the constitution that required that each bit of legislation be single-topic. Certainly that would still be open to interpretation. But I think at the very least it would eliminate the more obvious examples of abusive brinkmanship.)

Isn't this a direct result of "no compromise" policies on one side of the aisle?

If you doubt me, simply go read votes from the past 20 years, and compare it with say 1960-1980. Republicans do not cross the aisle anymore.

The interesting part is that at some point republicans had so propagandized their voters against the very concept of governance that "Elect me to office for the next 6 years and I promise nothing will get done" was a decades long strategy that worked! The more republicans obstructed, including preventing republican voters from getting things they claim to want, the more republicans got voted in. For decades now, republicans that compromise with democrats have been primaried by less collaborative republicans.

Imagine a judge getting elected for insisting they will never hear another case!

None of this should be controversial, republican politicians have literally stated this as their goal and promise.

For some reason the people who keep saying government doesn't work are working very hard to make government not work.

Fairly obvious what that reason is.

It's the same reason Putin supports Trump -- if you yourself are threatened by something (democracy) then you need to go make that thing a joke.

Some key examples: Reagan saying "the government is the problem", Newt Gingrich starting the modern obstructionist movement in congress with the Contact with America (also backed by the Heritage Foundation, which is behind project 2025), and Mitch McConnel breaking norms to practically shut down congress under his leadership, openly stating his intent several times.

Republicans don't want to lead in any practical sense. They want to break the government and privatize the pieces so they can buy in and profit off of them. Anyone who can't buy in gets screwed, because services will cost more to pay for the investment and profits that the investors demand.

Trump's biggest achievement last term was a massive tax cut for the rich. So to balance to budget, they now want to destroy as many government services as they can, using "efficiency" as an excuse.

Breaking things is great when you run a social media company. Worst case scenario, your website goes offline for a few hours. When you start breaking the government, people die. Of course, if you're richer than God, you don't have to worry about the fallout. It doesnt matter if the FDA falls apart and leads to massive food contamination when you only eat Wagyu beef from your private ranch. People will die, you pay less taxes, and you only see it as a success.

There are many other critiques to be made, but this is just the surface.

I have no idea which side "started it", but where we've landed isn't useful.

The founding fathers envisioned the legislature be slow and deliberate, so it was never intended to move quickly.

One major party doesn’t think government solves any problems, so it’s not incentivized to use it to solve any problems. In fact, a generation of Republicans have tried to stifle fixing any of the large problems.

The other party is frequently torn between a wide spectrum of “do everything for citizens in a wide swath of policy areas” and “neoliberal free market capitalism”, so they can’t even agree when they are in majority how to weird their political capital.

The rest is usually downstream of sound-byte media (stripping out nuance and polarization of media outlets), paid advertising scaremongering voters (money in politics), and electoral engineering like gerrymandering (legislators picking voters instead of the inverse).

I'd also put out that the lessons of the Tea Party (Gingrich style) have not been lost on modern people with political goals -- a fairly small group has used the heavy party whipping that the Republicans use to become an important swing vote / caucus -- and the republican party was more amenable/vulnerable to this sort of tactic, precisely for cultural reasons embedded in the Republican party's history, governance and setup.

"Weird" is a presumably a typo there, but I think it actually works as-is. As long as we allow for the verbing of adjectives, anyway.

The only change needed is repealing the Apportionment Act of 1929.

My impression is that there are many reasons for the dysfunction of congress; the media feedback control system (in a literal and metaphorical sense) plays an important role, as does the filibuster, lobbyists, and other corruption.

(Aside: in aging, an organisms feedback and homeostatic systems tend to degrade / become simpler with time, which leads to decreased function / cancer etc. While some degree of refactoring & dead-code cruft-removal is necessary - and hopefully is happening now, as I think most Americans desire - the explicit decline in operational structure is bad. (Not that you'd want a systems biologist to run the country.))

Originally there were about 35k constituents/rep. Today it's an average of ~750k constituents/rep, with some districts at over a million.

This is because of the Apportionment Act of 1929 capped the number of reps. If we had the same constituent/rep ratio, we'd have ~10k reps total.

If instead we went back to the constituent/rep ratio that existed originally, a lot of our structural problems go away, via a mechanism that's accessible via US code rather than a change to the constitution.

For instance, the electoral college is based on federal representation. If you expand the house by ~50x, that dominates the electoral college by nearly two orders of magnitude, and creates a very close to popular election.

It's also much much harder to gerrymander on that scale.

That scale would also have a return to a more personal form of politics, where people actually have a real chance to meet with their reps (and the candidates) face to face.

It also feels that by having a much larger, more diffuse legislative body, we'd better approximate truly democratic processes in a representative democratic model.

Wow, that's a lot! I recall reading a piece, I believe in the Washington Post, sometime within the past few years, on this topic. They didn't run the numbers for such a dramatic increase, but I think talked about a House size of around 1000 representatives. And I was surprised to find out that this didn't shift the balance of power as much as I expected it would.

But regardless, as much as I would like for it to be easier for Democrats to win elections (in what would be an entirely fair way for them to do so!), that just puts one party in power more frequently. It doesn't fix the underlying dysfunction.

Almost all change in biology happens to populations, not individuals. In order for that to apply to governments, we would need to have massive churn and rapid experimentation of government policies and structures. These are not conducive to voter feedback (eg. Democracy) and would be so disruptive to business and life as to make governments useless until they reached some steady state.

I remember hearing that Italy had 52 governments in 50 years. It’s suffering from all of the same problems as the rest of western countries, perhaps somewhat worse than average.

It is bonkers to me that legislative districts are drawn by whatever party is in power once every ten years. Not only should the census be more frequent (real-time/ongoing, really, and more lightweight than the system we have now), but districts should be redrawn yearly, and it should be done by a non-partisan committee.

And we really need an objective, quantitative measure of gerrymandering, and comprehensive law against it.

But really I don't think all of that is it. Making representation more proportionate might make Democrats win the House (and possibly presidency, since electoral college votes are apportioned the same way) more often, but the Senate will still be broken, and political polarization will still rule the day.

We need more than two viable political parties (which would require a major overhaul of each and every state's election process, at the least), and they need to govern through coalition-building, more like how parliamentary systems operate.

And ultimately it's just the tone of the whole thing. Legislators need to stop with this all-or-nothing approach, where the biggest hot-button issues don't see any measure of compromise. But that's a culture thing, and you can't fix that with laws or process.

Some articles which were written a few years ago, but were re-upped recently:

> In a presidential system, by contrast, the president and the congress are elected separately and yet must govern concurrently. If they disagree, they simply disagree. They can point fingers and wave poll results and stomp their feet and talk about “mandates,” but the fact remains that both parties to the dispute won office fair and square. As Linz wrote in his 1990 paper “The Perils of Presidentialism,”[1] when conflict breaks out in such a system, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved, and the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.” That’s when the military comes out of the barracks, to resolve the conflict on the basis of something—nationalism, security, pure force—other than democracy.

* https://slate.com/business/2013/10/juan-linz-dies-yale-polit...

> Still, Linz offered several reasons why presidential systems are so prone to crisis. One particularly important one is the nature of the checks and balances system. Since both the president and the Congress are directly elected by the people, they can both claim to speak for the people. When they have a serious disagreement, according to Linz, “there is no democratic principle on the basis of which it can be resolved.” The constitution offers no help in these cases, he wrote: “the mechanisms the constitution might provide are likely to prove too complicated and aridly legalistic to be of much force in the eyes of the electorate.”

* https://archive.is/https://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/amer...

When it has come to presidential systems, the US has been the exception as most others with something the same have not worked out over the long term.

Thats what happened. Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Well... most of them are.

I wonder which of these two commonly happened in the past.

The real problems with the DNC campaigns are complex. They have a poor model for how to run national campaigns, clearly. All this equities wealth was made under Democrats, including Elon’s wealth, so it’s not so simple as to say, chasing money. There is some consensus that Democrats need to run media personalities instead of experienced politicians. But not enough consensus to move away from demographics-based election modeling. Suffice it to say this thread could be an interesting conversation about anything but has become a magnet for fringe theories.

The DNC didn't even have a primary last election. They just propped up Kamala and said "here's our candidate" and expected the sheeple to vote for her. Meanwhile one of their best candidates was kicked out of the party a while back and is now Trumps DNI. And if you want to say "they didn't have time" well that's because they figured it was OK to leave a declining old guy in office beyond his sell-by date - yet another poor choice by the DNC.

You know who was? Senator Mark Kelly.

Maybe most electable (though I'm not sure I buy that either), but certainly not best. The simple fact that she's now Trump's DNI makes it clear that she'd been playing for the other team even before her official party switch.

Yeah, and the fact she's working for Trump now is proof that was the right call.

Congress is sitting on its hands and seems to be enjoying the view so far, for the most part. Republicans in Congress seem to think it's fine that Trump is usurping power vested in the legislative branch. Or at the very least they're afraid to speak up; every time they do, Trump threatens to primary them during the next election cycle. (I'm honestly not sure which is worse.) Democrats are "waiting for the right pitch to swing at" (paraphrasing Jeffries), as if doing nothing is some sort of strategy. And it's not like they can do anything anyway; certainly they have the power to get proposed legislation passed/not passed if Johnson loses a few GOP votes, but they can't get new legislation on the floor (y'know, like something that says "get DOGE out of the government's computer systems, right now") without the permission of GOP-controlled committees and Mike Johnson.

The courts are doing some things so far, but by their very nature, they're slower to act. But even if they tell Trump he can't do something, Trump doesn't actually have to listen. The executive branch is responsible for the enforcement of laws... and court orders. Let's say a court orders Musk to stop doing something, and he ignores it. Let's then say the court finds Musk in contempt, and orders him jailed. Who is going to arrest him? Not Trump's US Marshals Service, not Trump's FBI, etc.

As proof, this isn't an American problem, it is nothing to do with the US constitution or "gridlock". In most English-speaking countries you have seen: massive increase in power by unelected officials, the vast majority of these officials have identical political views and operate with a political agenda (to be clear, at no point did anyone ask whether this was legal, whether these were "strongmen"), and this effect has paralysed government function in every country.

Even worse, this appears irrespective of clear limits. For example, the US system of political appointments of judges is clearly a bad idea, the incentives are awful, the results are predictable. But the same issue with judges overriding elected officials is occurring in countries where selection is (in theory) non-political.

The reason why is simple: there has never been a greater difference between the lives of the rulers and the ruled. The reason we have democracy is to resolve this problem.

But the US is a particularly extreme case of this: if you look at how government operates in the US, what is the actual connection with people's lives? The filth and decay in US cities is incredible given the amount of government spending...the answer why is simple: the spending is for government, the people don't matter.

Also, US-specific: it is extremely strange to characterise the US as a system of checks and balances if you look at actual real world political history rather than some theoretical imaginings of someone in the late 18th century. Checks and balances have always been dynamic. The reason why the outrage is so vitriolic (and the comparisons to Hitler so frequent...imagine if Hitler fired civil servants or changed regulatory policy, definitely the worst thing he did) is because the people being hit are the people who believed they would always be safe from oversight.

He did. It's called "Gleichschaltung", we learned about it in school. https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zgtyvcw/revision/4

Every government has fired civil servants. The worst thing that Hitler did was not fire civil servants...he got up to some other stuff later that was worse.

Also, quoting a resource for children does not do you much credit. Quote an actual source if you are going to do it.

There was bipartisan (Republican-ish) immigration legislation with enough votes pass until Trump told people to vote against it, because he knew that he could blame the problem on his opponents and many people would believe him.

Note that none of this would be possible with Citizens United and dramatic media consolidation in the hands of a few oligarchs. ;-(

FIRST Interesting how, if true, the GOP Political class is now beholden to Musk:

http://youtube.com/post/UgkxTKZoZe_AzdNF8w7X0HO19w6xxH5rGinI...

> Congress is supine because Republicans are in charge, and Musk has also become Trump’s hatchet man — threatening Republican members of Congress if they deviate from Trump.

> Iowa’s Republican Senator Joni Ernst was firmly set against Pete Hegseth for secretary of defense until Musk hinted that he’d finance a primary challenger to Ernst, who’s up for reelection next year. Presto: Ernst supported Hegseth.

> Indiana’s Republican Senator Todd Young expressed concern about the nomination of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence until Musk tweeted against him. A besieged Young spoke with JD Vance, who arranged a call with Musk. Presto: Young announced he would back Gabbard.

> Musk warned Republican lawmakers in December that he was compiling a “naughty list” of members who buck Trump’s agenda. He also pledged shortly after Election Day that his political action committee would “play a significant role in primaries” next year.

> A Republican senator told The Hill that Musk’s wealth makes primary threats “a bigger deal.”

SECOND And Interesting how some Media, Wa Po in this case, coincidentally blocked Paid Advertisement advocating an Anti-MUSK Political takt.

> Musk’s financial and political power have been enough to intimidate even the mainstream media. An advertisement set to run in The Washington Post yesterday calling for Musk to be fired from his role in government was abruptly canceled, according to Common Cause, one of the groups that had ordered the ad. When asked why the Post had pulled the ad, the Post said it was not at liberty to give a reason.

it seems the same play is being made in 2025 at the advent of AI and Tech supremacy as it comes to a headroads with the death of traditional US neoliberalism. Tech is more interested in the monarchy, as was the feudal lords of old, and seeks a neofeudalism while the parliament of our time, the house and senate, prattle on like the Diets and assembly promulgating edicts and regulations that are either wholesale ignored, or gridlocked bike-shedding; fiddling whilst Rome burns.

No one wants (and I don’t think anyone should want) bipartisanship, not really. Bipartisanship means the rich get everything they want—efficiently. It means the meetings of the club we aren’t in happen on time and no one ends up with a black eye. That’s also an unacceptable outcome. Of course, it can be argued that the outcome we are getting is basically the same thing, but with cheap depressing entertainment and widespread governmental dysfunction.

Of course, anyone who thinks voting for any of these right-wing figures will end oligarchy is delusional. Their charisma comes from the fact that, because they hate basically everyone, they also incidentally hate many of the other oligarchs. But nothing good happens when people vote for hate, and none of these pricks will ever end oligarchy since they are all part of it. The Nazis truly did present themselves as somewhat socialist (it was in the name) in the early 1920s to gain their first followers, but as soon as they were in power, they realized they had more to gain by siding with the industrialists and against labor, which is of course what they did.

It’s this loss that plagues Congress.

Bipartisanship is what was jettisoned by the republicans to ensure that they would always be able to blame democrats for the failure of the government.

Even during Obamacare, when they adopted a Republican plan, Romney had to distance himself from it. Despite all the efforts for Bipartisan outreach - for all the concessions, the republicans couldn’t stand with the dems.

The Dems must always be wrong.

Bipartisanship means you have to spend more effort to get more people on your team.

Partisanship means you just have to get on board with one party.

So how is bipartisanship the problem?

I'm so glad we have a consensus democracy. We're a small country but I don't see any reason why a more moderate, consensus based system couldn't be adopted by larger ones. In fact I think this centralization of power around one person doesn't scale.

I'm also glad that we have the direct vote in order to reign in our government whenever they overreach or turn too far away from our interests. That seems much harder to implement in larger countries, but it's an excellent tool to course correct a government.

> political systems with single-member districts and the plurality voting system, as in, for example, the United States, two main parties tend to emerge. In this case, votes for minor parties can potentially be regarded as splitting votes away from the most similar major party

If a third party grows it will either shrink again as voters realize they are splitting their vote against their biggest common opponent, or the third party replaces one of the two existing parties. Either way, you get two main parties.

The most effective single thing to promote a multiparty system is to switch to ranked-choice or approval voting (if staying with single-member districts) or to switch to multi-member districts with some kind of proportional representation. That would be where, say, everyone in Texas votes for their preferred party, and the 34 seats get allocated proportionally to party results.

Honestly, implementing Ranked Choice is the best compromise.

  * Meaningfully improves the ability of minor parties to succeed
  * Removes the concept of "wasted vote" so that citizens can vote their conscience
  * Electoral results are more informative of the positions of the electorate
  * Candidates have to compete more on ideas and policies than attacking opponents
  * Conceptually easier to understand than other systems
  * Maintains single-member districts (I don't like this, but I think trying to change the House to multi-member districts is too radical for us)

So we're stuck with this joke we call democratic elections. Also seen in the UK with its abysmal first-past-the-post system.

FPTP isn't sufficient to get a two party system. The US has such a system because it combines FPTP with open primaries. In the UK the right is trying to rebuild a new party from scratch, because the Conservative party has no working mechanisms that would allow it to have its direction changed by its members. Whereas in the US open primaries give members a great deal of control, and that kills the incentive to create new parties. The current Republican administration is run by a group of former Democrats who came into the GOP from the outside - this isn't possible in the UK system.

The single best is to switch to multimember proportional for the legislature (which can remain candidate centric using, say, 5 member districts and STV), and that gets even better (though procedurally more difficult to adopt in the US) if you were to switch the Presidential election from a single winner two-seat President and Vice President to ranked choice two-sequential winner system (e.g., IRV or Bucklin, but after you pick a winner, eliminate that candidate, and tally again without them for a second winner as VP) where each party is structurally incentivized to compete for both spots. These not only make more parties viable they also each offer more election-day choice among candidates of the same party, denying incumbents of favored parties an uncontested sinecure.

It hasn't happened anywhere in the US as far as I know, despite being adopted by various local governments.

Ranked choice's major benefit is that it reduces the effect of spoilers. Third parties are the spoilers.

Because I can't find an example in any country, yet it is appears to be taken as an article of faith that it will happen by proponents of ranked choice voting.

The evidence for switching from single member to multi-member elections is far more clear. Of course, you obviously can't have multi-member elections for President, the Senate because the Constitution staggered elections and courts have ruled against multi-member districts for the House in the past for violating the VRA.

Approval voting is the better compromise IMO. It has most of the same benefits, except that it's even easier to understand, and attacking opponents is even less valuable. You don't get as much information about opinions from the result, but you do still get more than the current system (assuming statistics are made available). You don't have to worry about people wasting their vote because they don't understand the new system, voting for only one candidate is a valid approval voting vote, it simply implies a higher threshold.

this is because:

1. the IRV tabulation algorithm discards a lot of useful information. (there are better ways to tabulate ranked ballots.)

2. strategic exaggeration of rankings is more distortionary than with approval voting.

https://medium.com/@clayshentrup/expressiveness-6ef8c034bc65

This kind of rhetoric really just feeds the beast.