
Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform - viburnum
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/our-political-system-is-hostile-to-real-reform
======
umilegenio
It's hard to reform when many Americans are in an abusive relationship with
their own party. A Pew poll in 2017[1] showed that the majority of the most
partisan supporters choose their own party because they hate the other one,
rather than they like their own. You cannot make reform on destruction and
hate. There is little positive energy to create really new proposals.

[1] [https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-
animosity...](https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity-
personal-politics-views-of-trump/8_04/)

~~~
einpoklum
And this is doubly sad considering how both parties are/end up in significant
agreement about the US' huge military presence abroad, tax cuts for the
wealthy, deregulated campaign finance etc. Which are subjects where most US
citizens hold the opposite view to the bi-partisan near-consensus.

~~~
threatofrain
On the issue of campaign finance, there is the matter of the McCain-Feingold
Act, as it was informally known. Senator John McCain tried for years to
advocate for something of its like but was energetically blocked by his own
party, such as in the 105th Congress when McCain gathered the support of <all>
45 Democratic senators and a few GOP allies, but still not enough to break a
GOP filibuster on the bill, thus killing it.

It was around 2002 that there was sufficient political atmosphere for McCain
to gather the support of nearly all Democrats and 11 GOP allies for the bare
minimum of 60 votes to beat a GOP filibuster.

The bill had restrictions on: (1) soft money, or money meant to promote issues
or parties, (2) hard money, or money meant for specific campaigns or
candidates, (3) advertising in proximity to an election, and (4) foreign
contributions.

President George Bush declined to take a stance and signed the bill into law
without comment.

It was challenged by Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, challenging
whether they could be restricted from airing political ads near the election
date, and it was overturned 5-4 by the US Supreme Court conservative majority
along known party lines.

All parties have their failings, but it would be a mistake to think that a
vote for either party is equally meaningless with regards to campaign finance.
In the GOP, it's only McCain and a scant few allies who paid for this issue.
The Democrats as a whole spent severe political energy and opportunity on
campaign reform, while McCain spent his own political currency against the
energetic opposition of his own party.

~~~
einpoklum
I'm talking about a constitutional amendment to severely limit spending on
elections, public funding for elections, non-exclusionary public debates, and
perhaps Instant-runoff (ranked-choice) or other voting resolution mechanisms.

PS - Buckley v. Valeo made it clear that a regular weak-sauce bill wouldn't
do.

~~~
threatofrain
I’m talking about which party has burned serious political opportunity for
this issue at all. Alternatively we could say Obamacare is weak sauce and
cannot do the trick for American health, but it’s also a reflection of a
history of which party burned political opportunity in exchange for an issue.

That McCain’s legacy withered so soon after suggests the inadequacy of his
reach, not that a vote for the GOP, which worked so tirelessly to filibuster
McCain, is the same as a vote cast for Democrats. It was only until Enron and
after his presidential run that McCain had the window to gain the bare minimum
60 votes to stop his own party from filibustering his bills to death.

And now we hear that the GOP are the same as the Democrats on campaign finance
reform. Okay.

------
DethNinja
Governmental response to corona virus made me really depressed.

If we look at current response of the various governments, it looks like they
effectively decided to increase the already high level of income inequality
even further.

It seems system is unwilling to revise itself at all, which will keep making
various socioeconomic issues worse in the long run.

I guess one good thing is that current system keeps getting less and less
stable with each crisis, so sooner or later it will collapse for real, once
that happens I hope humans will be able to come together and build something
better.

~~~
erentz
Yes. The $425b that will be leveraged into $4 trillion of basically free loans
to large corporations is going to make things considerably worse for every
ordinary American. Increase massively the consolidation of the economy and
reduce competition. It’ll be used by the large corporations that can access it
to buy up competitors.

Here is just one topical example of how this kind of consolidation over the
past decade has hurt us. And this program is more than five times the size of
the 2008 program: Ventilator company Covidien acquired Newport to prevent it
from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from
its existing ventilator business. [1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-
us-v...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-
ventilator-shortage.html)

This is very bad for America and - (I know politics is frowned on hut this is
the real world and this is a political problem we are discussing) - and if
anyone thinks the Democrats are not equally to blame you need to look again,
they could have stripped this program from the House bill and passed it
without and forced the Republicans in the Senate to either show their hand
that they’re holding Americans hostage for this or force them to blink first.
But they refused to do that, IMO because they're clearly aligned on giving $4T
to large business. If you disagree with that please explain what prevented
them doing that. I would like to know.

------
codysc
I think any sufficiently complex system is hostile to reform just through its
natural inertia, which in a huge system is a complex and fascinating topic
itself.

But when you have truly enormous amounts of money and power at stake and a
system that has settled into a certain posture that has concentrated those
resources into certain hands...of course it would be very hostile to any
change.

As the article states it takes shocks to bring about significant changes and
hopefully we can move things forward some as a result of the current
situation.

------
sb057
Any system that continues to exist is necessarily self-perpetuating. Otherwise
it wouldn't continue to exist. This is why there's been so many states that
either existed for a flicker (innumerable Southeast Asian nations, nomadic
states, etc) or for hundreds of years (Rome, the Russian Empire, the United
States). The former were unable to keep themselves stable while the latter's
rigidity did so. Of course, that same rigidity can be quite the liability when
stress is placed upon it...

~~~
einpoklum
That's a bit of trivialization into a tautology.

Systems continue to exist, but most of them also change in various aspects -
some superficial, some fundamental. Republican Rome was quite different from
what Imperial Rome ended up being; the US of the 1800s is very different from
the US of today.

------
ktalm
The biggest problem with the U.S. political system is our first-past-the-post
voting system. Are you fed up with your party and want to vote for a Green
instead of a Democrat or a Libertarian instead of Republican? Go ahead, all it
will accomplish is benefiting the candidate you like the LEAST because you
would have otherwise voted for their opponent.

I'm of the opinion that high voter participation is critically important
because if you're not voting, you're not being represented, and if you're not
being represented, those who are will benefit (likely) at your expense. In the
U.S. however, people are understandably unenthusiastic about voting, because
it almost doesn't matter.

Imagine what would have happened in 2016 if we had ranked choice voting and
Bernie ran as an independent. Many on the left would have been energized to
actually vote because they could vote for the candidate they actually wanted
(Bernie), but would have been able to say "well if Bernie doesn't win, I guess
Hillary is better than Trump". Bernie wouldn't have won, but neither would
Trump. More importantly, though, those that supported Bernie would have been
_represented_. You could point to the actual election results and see that X%
of voters supported Bernie's ideas above the other candidates'.

The problem with the U.S. is that we don't get to vote for the best candidate,
we get to vote for the least worst.

And don't get me started on the over-representation of low population states
in the senate and electoral college.

~~~
mnm1
Or even simpler, we could have a one person, one vote system. It would have
worked in 2016 and 2000. When you have a system where the less popular
candidate wins regularly, is it any wonder people are disillusioned by it?

Let's not even talk about the Senate where 500k people get the same amount of
votes as 50 million. Yes, the founding fathers goal to not let rural areas be
unrepresented was achieved at the expense of making the most populous areas
underrepresented. So now instead of majority rule dominating minorities,
minority rule dominates the majority. Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong?
/s

~~~
RickJWagner
No way. I'm a resident of a rural state.

The things you probably find crazy: Gun ownership, owning trucks, large
houses, etc. we find essential.

It's a big country, with different needs for different people. The day we
trash the electoral college is the day we destroy America.

~~~
krapp
>The things you probably find crazy: Gun ownership, owning trucks, large
houses, etc. we find essential.

Of these, only gun ownership even has remote relevance to Federal politics,
and none of them are actually essential, or even exclusive to rural residents
to begin with.

~~~
RickJWagner
Sorry, I should clarify. Those things are essential to our way of life. Our
way of commuting, recreating, and living is different than what a large city
dweller may be accustomed to.

This is why the electoral college is so very important. Without it,
politicians would quickly shift even more focus to populous areas, to the
detriment of the rest of the country.

~~~
krapp
You do realize that when presidential nominees come to your rural area, eat at
truck stops, pose with hunters, and give speeches about how the "real"
Americans are the God-fearing people in the heartland doing honest work in the
mines and steel mills and factories, that they're just pandering, right? They
don't care about preserving your way of life, only the cold calculus of
turning whatever states happen to be the swing states that election year.

I mean, the two party process gave you a choice between a millionaire from New
York with at least a tenuous cultural connection to rural America, and a
billionaire from New York with none, and judging from your former comments,
you seem to have voted for the billionaire, and then the electoral college
decided whether or not your vote mattered, and chose Kang over Kodos on your
behalf. Luckily for you, your state agreed with your vote. But if you happen
to be of the wrong party in some states, thanks to the electoral college, your
vote simply ceases to matter.

I don't think the electoral college is giving you the leverage against urban
cultural power you seem to think it does.

------
vearwhershuh
The United States is ungovernable in any coherent manner, except as an empire.
It's far too large and culturally incompatible. There is no logical reason the
people of appalachia should be governed by people on the west coast, or vice
versa.

The real power centers, the banking, corporate and foreign-policy elites, are
content to govern the empire indirectly, and keep us all fighting with one
another over things like pronouns, so long as wages are ruthlessly suppressed.

It will keep going. Until it stops.

