It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.
The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.
When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.
Their actions are recorded. You have full view if they are failing to do their job, and when they fail to do their job it is on you as their employer to bring the consequences. What did the people who hired John Fetterman do to stop his unacceptable behaviour? Nothing, right? That's the problem. Employees are not magical beings. They are simple, imperfect humans that need constant management. But there is this strange idea that voting is sufficient to act as the management layer. That is not how it works. Voting is only for selecting the employee you want to hire. You still have the be the employer after they are hired.
It is not fundamentally broken. The model proves to work perfectly fine in other contexts regularly. The trouble is that you, along with a lot of other people, are looking for magic so that you don't have to get your hands dirty. The harsh reality is that magic doesn't exist, I'm afraid.
It's corrupted by money, bribery, gerrymandering, an electoral system that is anti-democratic, and a two party system that has as a joint monolopy on power via division.
It is broken. As we already discussed, the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer. They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory. That doesn't happen in the real world. Employees need management. Always have, always will.
It is not fundamentally broken. It is fixable by the people stepping up and doing what an employer needs to do. The reluctance to want to roll up sleeves is understandable, but magic doesn't exist. It is either let the employees run wild or stand up and manage them. Your choice.
> the employers are not fulfilling their duty as the employer
Ok I'm an employer, and voting is my superpower. So I guess I just need to vote for the ones that aren't corrupt and that'll fix it? Too easy. Help me out though because I don't want to screw this up...who exactly do I need to vote for to fix our broken systems?
> They think they can spend all day, every day, on the golf corse, metaphorically speaking, and everything will function hunky dory.
Wait a minute...voting isn't enough? I also need to dedicate my life to this? Ok what should I do? Run for office? Volunteer at a campaign? Whose campaign? Go to DC and protest? Lie down on the freeway? Post my thoughts on r/politics? Wait does this HN post count? Am I fixing our corrupt country right now? This is easy!
The problem as I see it is more about a real habit of blaming the other side and keeping problems alive as wedge issues than actually solving anything. This was a problem before, and always has been to some extent, but seems to have gotten much worse since social media and twitter became ways for memes to spread virally. So much easier to get outraged about something the other guy is or is not doing, than to do the work to come up with any solutions. And the country is pretty evenly divided on which side they like, so we're just treading water in sewage mostly.
Exploiting wedge issues is how the game of politics is played, isn't it? This has been the playbook forever. Find (or create) an enemy (real or imaginary) and rally supporters against them and keep the wedges/enemies in place, so it can be exploited forever. This is true nearly in all democracies. It would be nice if it wasn't but somehow politics generally seems to attract/promote the worst people in society.
Agree. There's a direct line from Robert A Heinlein:
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you’re using force. And force, my friends, is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
to the anonymous scholar who first said, probably as a joke:
"If violence didn't work you didn't use enough".
Whatever you think of voting and democracy, the alternatives are far more unpleasant. Vote every time, without fail.
How does more voting resolve anything? Split up fans are still split opinions and bad politicians are still bad politicians. A 51 49 election still has the same outcome if 10 million or 100 million people voted. It seems to me that people will need to not only vote but change their voting criteria
I'm specifically thinking of the primaries here, where you often have more than two candidates and it's not a 51/49 split. I think it's very likely that the people who currently sit out the primaries would vote differently from the people who show up. It's a pretty small minority who vote in primaries, and those who do will tend to be a lot more politically active than average.
Far too many people complain about the bad candidates in the general, and don't do the most basic thing to influence that.
The ancient Athenians knew that elections favored the rich. That’s why they incorporated selection by lot into their system. Our modern understanding of democracy has fetishized elections to the point that some voters might see hundreds of them in a year, including for positions that shouldn’t ever be elected (e.g. judges), while still having little to no actual civic power.
> How will you get selection by lot into the current system without violence? Voting
Oh totally agree. But also civic involvement. The returns to even small amounts of civic engagement in America are so ridiculously high because most of the population doesn’t do it. If like 5% more of the electorate called their electeds at least twice a year, that would represent a 25% increase in civic engagement, enough to break constituencies.
I think the Athenians named our current system an oligarchy. Selection by lot would take a lot of the corrupting influence of money out of the system too. There would need to be safeguards though, similar to how juries are protected during a trial.
I read somewhere recently about how congress should be much bigger than it is currently due to population growth, and how that would make all the redistricting that currently happens irrelevant.
I've thought a lot about this, because my state is heavily gerrymandered, and the legislature keeps voting to undermine several recently passed amendments (abortion rights, marijuana) to our state constitution. They also tried to change the threshold for passing a referendum from 50% + 1 vote to 60%, when it was clear that there was enough support to pass the abortion rights amendment.
You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Fuck what the professional politicians think of sortition; do an end run around them, because professional politicians are the problem.
Get this accomplished in enough states, and then you have a level chance of doing an amendment to the US Constitution.
> You do it via constitutional amendment, which is a popular referendum.
Aka...voting.
If you truly believe "voting doesn't work", as you first said (EDIT: that was someone else whose username starts with a "b" sorry), then this referendum won't go anywhere either.
But I would say that the voting that matters most is voting in primaries. Get rid of the ideologues and zealots on both sides; get some people who can think rather than just yell.
> There's a lot of thoughtful responses to your histrionics
Sorry, can you please point to one of these thoughtful responses? I've seen one idea suggested: "sortition". But no ideas for how to get it peacefully without voting it in. I engaged with all these comments and asked this question.
"Voting doesn't work" is a cynical, doomerist, thought terminating cliche. I don't want this mind virus to propagate. You may call my comments "histrionics". But instead I suggest you take a breath and think about where calling voting and elections "useless" leads.
It works fine to accomplish what it is intended to do: Pick a worker to hire.
The problem is that many assume it ends there and the employee will magically go off and do great things. That is not how it works. If you've ever worked with employees before, you'll know full well that you have to regularly communicate with them to keep them on track. Even if the most stellar employee in the world trying to do everything right will never be a mind reader.
When was the last time you spoke to the person you hired for the job of representative? I expect for most reading this, the answer will be never. That is what doesn't work.