[toyg]

Part of the problem is just scale.

National governments were formed to solve nation-sized issues (trains, taxation rates not changing every 50km, consistent languages and education systems, etc). Modern problems are bigger than that: globalized production chains, tax havens, climate change, migration flows, and superpower conflicts, simply cannot be fixed at the national level.

I can guarantee that all the boats in the Mediterranean and the North Sea will be shot on sight by my navy, but people will still get into Europe from somewhere else. I can ensure all the manufacturers in the country respect stringent pollution laws, but people will still buy cheaper and more polluting Chinese goods. And so on and so forth.

So we move to a super-national, continent-sized model, and we have a better chance to address these problems - but then we're adding more layers of indirection between citizenry and representatives, and we get an issue of legitimacy. It's a thorny subject.

[jerojero]

Personally I think we can make good use of sortition to inject legitimacy into the system. Kind of like what has been done in ireland, france, belgium...

Sortition is very scalable and private citizens are actually much "cheaper" a resource than career politicians while imo being more legitimate and more interested in actually solving problems rather than furthering their careers.

It's an underrated social technology. It's why I recommended Landemore's book previously.