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by atoav
25 days ago
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The one truly astonishing aspect in US politics for my european mind is the degree to which many US voters appear to have given up their agency in favour of party loyalty. Some may think supporting their own party no matter what is a smart move that will let them win, but the only thing it achieves is that the party can now stop representing your interest. One of the few levers you have as a voter is the threat of not voting for a party or even voting against them. By swearing blind loyalty no matter what, you're giving up that single lever you had. The power of a voter isn't to vote people into office, it is to vote them out of it. Trump has seen time and time again that he can promise X and then get away with doing the polar opposite of X, just because Republican representatives and voters think towing the line is more important than everything else. In an actual democracy the politicians are afraid of the voters, not the other way around. |
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It was very definitely better than the centuries of militaristic monarchic feudalism Europe waded through from medieval times until the mid-1900s. It is very definitely worse than modern pluralistic coalition-based democracies with proportional representation, which offer a wider range of choices to voters, and make it possible to launch competing parties / movements to counter institutional stagnation.
Until recently, the one counterargument I would hear to this second assertion is "but coalition governments have a hard time getting anything done". Now that we see a prime example of a government that alternates between a) not getting anything done and b) getting things done that belong somewhere in a timeframe from the 1890s to the 1940s, I no longer hear people making that counterargument.
Re: constitutional structure, one Irish friend I have made an interesting point: in his lifetime, there have been many changes and amendments to the Irish constitution. This is next to impossible in the US system, both because of the party loyalty dynamic mentioned above _and_ because of the incredibly high procedural bar to doing so. (And not least because of the current predominance of originalist thinking in the judicial branch, as though the constitution were an infallible document handed down from gods among men, eternally to be interpreted as the Founding Fathers intended back over 200 years ago in a completely different social, political, and technological context.)