Is there anything more important than voting reform?

[Todeswind]

Ah forget what I said, I never realized she was contributing £184.8m to the treasury yearly.

Whoops.

A litte bit of knowledge without proper context is a dangerous thing, sorry if I came off as an ass.

[LaCroix]

And this is only the direct contribution. The Royals are one of the main attractions for tourism, as well, which is hard to put a number to...

[Todeswind]

True enough but I find the institution of monarchy, even one serving as a tourist attraction to be anachronistic. The UK is perhaps not the best example of this, the Kingdom of Jordan is perhaps closer to a functioning example of what I was referring to.

Perhaps a better example would be the Japanese parliamentary system that spent the better part of the past 50 years locked in single party control.

My overall point, that political systems tend to resist change at all costs, stands.

[Marcus Aurelius]

True enough but I find the institution of monarchy, even one serving as a tourist attraction to be anachronistic. The UK is perhaps not the best example of this, the Kingdom of Jordan is perhaps closer to a functioning example of what I was referring to.

Perhaps a better example would be the Japanese parliamentary system that spent the better part of the past 50 years locked in single party control.

My overall point, that political systems tend to resist change at all costs, stands.

Monarchy is anachronism, but like other have said the European monarchs have no say in actual politics. Many monarchs don't have any power even in principle because of constitutional changes enacted in the 20th century. The British monarch does have some theoretical power, but if she tried to use it even a little bit, there would be a political shitstorm.

Countries like Jordan and the KSA are of course different. They have no real tradition of democracy and therefore the monarch still rules in the way European monarchs used to rule before the democratization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most arab countries have either monarchs or otherwise authoritarian rulers, and I don't think the former are necessarily any worse than the effectively lifetime presidents or military juntas other arab countries have.

As for Japan; it's a very strange case, but the effective single party system has shown some cracks since the beginning of the long recession in the early 1990s. Japan is also a country with no democratic tradition before WW2 and the democracy was essentially imported by the American occupation troops, which probably has something to do with the questionable functioning of the system.

[Simon_Jester]

It is not literally impossible to change the Presidential nature of the system. All it would take is a constitutional amendment heavily amending Article II, passed by a super-majority of both houses and ratified by a super-majority of states. That's highly unlikely, even figuratively impossible, but it is not literally impossible.

The real problem would be redesigning the government to function without the presidency: to turn ourselves into a parliamentary democracy we'd have to restructure the top level of every government agency and radically reshape the habits and thinking of the upper-level government bureaucracy, who are used to dealing with a semi-autocratic president, not a prime minister.

Factoring that in, the challenge of actually implementing such a change in government approaches logistical impossibility: it is unthinkable that we'd accept the disruptions in government function except as part of some kind of massive, general upheaval on the scale of a revolution.

I mean come on, if it was the reverse and it was parliamentary democracy having the structural problems, don't try and tell me it would be easy to convince the Commonwealth nations to abandon it in favor of something else.

What are you talking about? Don't get tribal because your system is inferior. Here I was thinking democracy was about sovereignty deriving from the people, and not 'wah wah wah what if your system was broken'. If you idiots hadn't made presidents deities you wouldn't have these problems. Unless you think coming up with a workable definition of 'corruption' or 'bribery' that will be made law is remotely practical...

...And you're being an idiot, unless you're smart enough to know what you're saying is idiotic, which I suppose is possible. You're missing three very important points, all of which are utterly obvious.

Point one: There is an issue of human nature here.

It is very difficult to get a majority of the population in any system to agree to a formalized reform of the nation's constitution. This normally only happens after a revolution, after political upheavals so drastic that they get a large fraction of the population prepared to kill or die over political matters. Like the last time the US did such a thing. Or after the English Civil War and its aftermath. Or the 1848 revolutions in continental Europe that spooked a number of nations into giving relatively more power to their own parliaments.

This is not a unique American thing. It is a people thing. If you do not understand this, you are missing a very basic fact about the way human beings live in political systems. When you sit around and snicker about how naive it is of me to say that it's not practical to turn the basic political structure of my country inside-out all in one go, I don't know what you're using as a baseline for comparison. What kind of people, in what kind of country, on what kind of planet, are willing to do that? Who rewrites the foundation of their nation's constitution at the drop of a hat?

Now, mentioning your own nation's system as an example of how reluctance to change exists may have been a mistake, because now that I have insulted your tribe by implying that they could hypothetically be flawed, you must in turn retaliate by accusing me of tribalism for doing so. Even though it is rank nonsense to accuse me of tribalism for saying that people everywhere are reluctant to change their basic political structure.

Point Two: "If you idiots hadn't made presidents deities you wouldn't have these problems." is a lie, and a stupid one at that.

Political systems can and do have problems without any need for a president. Parties in a parliamentary system can and do become corrupt. If the office of the presidency were abandoned today in the US, would we get better government from the current Senate? From the House? Don't make me laugh; neither of those bodies would be at all likely to present us with better, more responsible leadership than we've already got.

Our Senate is functionally deadlocked to the point where I doubt they could even appoint a PM; our House is presently dominated by a political party that is pro-lunacy when it comes to questions of good government policy. In fact, our entire political process suffers from this.

That problem would not go away if the presidency went away. We would still have to deal with the Tea Party.

You can argue, with reason, that the presidency is somehow the ultimate cause of America's political mess. But the chain of cause and effect is long and subtle compared to the huge, obvious problem that causes direct day-to-day breakdowns in government: wealthy interest groups that can buy and sell any politician in the system, including the president, and who have enough media leverage to control the tone of public opinion, mobilizing it against any movement that threatens their influence.

If we don't fix the interest groups, rewriting Articles One and Two of the Constitution to include a prime minister won't do a damn thing.

Point Three: Your claim that it is impractical to prevent bribery from running a government is absurd.

It is absurd not so much because it would be easy to do this- it isn't. It would require a very significant effort of political will by the American people to enact public financing of elections- an act which, by itself, would break the back of most of the truly dangerous interest groups.

What is absurd about your claims, and which makes it obvious that you wrote without giving even a second's thought to the words appearing on your screen, is that you are comparing this task to rewriting the entire American constitution.

Seriously. Stop and engage your brain for a few seconds. Which of those projects is of greater scope? Which would require reeducating more people to understand the new system? Which requires only one or two modest spending bills to pass the existing legislature, and which requires a full-up constitutional convention?

I'm amazed that even you can pretend that what you're saying makes sense, in that context.

[Bakustra]

Simon, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems do have problems. But their problems are distinct from those of presidential systems. If you look at presidential republics worldwide, few of them are stable or have been. Mexico was under one-party rule for most of this century, South Korea similarly, even the US was single-party for brief periods. We even exported much of our government to the Philippines, and they've had severe problems with stability and maintaining democracy since. The most stable countries have been parliamentary or semi-presidential. Correlation does not imply causation, but we have one stable presidential republic, and many stable parliamentary republics, with significantly fewer semi-presidential republics than either.

The problems you cite are often inherent ones. We have perpetual gridlock not because of some insanity virus infecting the Republican party, but because our system is designed for it. Our system encourages minority governments because we have legislative elections between executive ones, resulting in mobilization of the opposition for that election. Partisanship is in part because of the Reagan Revolution and all it wrought, and in part because of the fallout from the failure of the Bush years for the Republicans, but it would not be a problem if we had a less fractious system. This is part incompetence (many of the Founding Fathers thought they could eliminate political parties) and part design (they deliberately sought to create a 'deliberate' form of government), but the effect is the same: gridlock.

The system encourages mega-parties that can maximize the chances of winning presidential elections, which is why the two parties are so broad and often have infighting. Responsibility is diminished as well- the Reagan deficits were produced by a compromise between Reagan and Tip O'Neill for tax cuts with no spending cuts to compromise, and both parties could publicly and reasonably blame the other.

While many of these are structural problems that could be eliminated one-by-one, in practice adopting a parliamentary government would solve most of them at once. Sure, campaign finance reform would be nice, but many weaknesses in the system are not there because of corporations and would not be removed by it.

The President, meanwhile, is a head of state that is also a head of government. This means he marries symbolic and executive power, and this means that patriotism is directed and expressed in terms of supporting the President, or rather the executive. Consider that in the Commonwealth, patriotism is directed at a royal figurehead of state, and in Germany, the President has similarly little power, and though the French President has more formal political power, he is still distinct from the actual head of government, the Premier. This dissociates pride in the mechanisms of state from pride in the ruling party in the Commonwealth and Germany at least, though not necessarily in France to the same extent.

Deification is not quite common for former Presidents yet, but the pride Americans associate with the office is immense, and that translates into pride associated with the ruling party. I believe that excessive partisanship can probably be associated with this lack of a distinction between head of state and head of government.

As for bribery, the problem is that the average American is highly corporatist, Simon. They get angry at the influence of "special interest groups", but the solutions are considered to be too restrictive of corporate rights and alternatives are shut down by the mainstream media, which is itself highly corporatist thanks to its dependence on advertising. NPR and PBS are not corporatist to the same extent, but they are minorities that come under regular attack. Creating a sea change in the USA would be needed either to significantly reduce corporate influence or to restructure the Constitution. While it can be debated as to whether they are quite identical, they are still similar problems.

[Knife]

Why? Your system is structurally broken. Bakustra is right in that it's nigh-impossible to fix (largely due to attitudes like yours and the very structural problems themselves) but the answer to 'democracy implemented badly' is not 'blame those damn corporations'.

I don't think it's structurally broken, I think it's over burdened with bullshit and corruption. The reason some people, not I, want a third party and continue to cry out for a third party as if they are the saving grace of the US, is because of the rampant corruption of the two parties we have. Eliminate the corruption, or cut the shit out of it, I'm not naive enough to think you can get rid of all corruption, and the need for third parties disappear.

Most of that corruption is due from campaigns and how we as a nation fund them. There is nothing structurally wrong with the system, anymore than any other system has faults anyways.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems do have problems. But their problems are distinct from those of presidential systems. If you look at presidential republics worldwide, few of them are stable or have been. Mexico was under one-party rule for most of this century, South Korea similarly, even the US was single-party for brief periods. We even exported much of our government to the Philippines, and they've had severe problems with stability and maintaining democracy since. The most stable countries have been parliamentary or semi-presidential. Correlation does not imply causation, but we have one stable presidential republic, and many stable parliamentary republics, with significantly fewer semi-presidential republics than either.

The problems of one-party rule in presidential democracies are separate from the deadlocked-two-party problem we have.

I am not a big fan of presidential democracy. It works adequately at best and fails horribly at worst, especially in countries where the idea of "the president is like a dictator only we elected him to be a dictator!" spreads- a common problem in Third World countries adopting the system, as you point out.

But America right now has problems that would not go away with the abolition of the presidency, even if the existence of the presidency helped make sure they'd become problems. If we just waved a magic wand, changed the Constitution, and replaced the president with a prime minister chosen by the House or the Senate, we wouldn't fix America. Not unless we also went back and retroactively altered just about all of American politics from the 1960s on. Lacking a time machine, we cannot fix the American system by reforming the Constitution alone; we'd just end up with a new flavor of stupidity, with no guarantee that the situation would ever improve.

If it did improve (which is, I admit, likely), it would still take decades for the toxins to flow out of the body politic. For the pro-lunacy political positions to fade. For the parties to reorganize into groups with clearly distinguishable positions. For a working multiparty system to emerge so that we could have open debates of a left/center/right format (with the "left" being somewhere to the left of the present Democratic position, and the "right" being at or to the right of the present Republican position).

Moreover, making all this happen would require a political upheaval of enormous scale: we'd need to get supermajorities of the population, and of the state governments, and possibly of Congress, to sign off on all this.

So this is not a practical solution to the current crisis. In theory if we could get enough approval somehow it would be a great way to avert future crises. But it isn't sufficient to solve our current problem on a useful timescale.

And I would argue that it's not only insufficient; it's unnecessary. It would be so much easier to enact campaign finance reform. If we had the power to shift to a parliamentary system, we could do campaign finance reform easily; if we lack the power to go to a parliamentary system we can still do campaign finance reform.

And that's what I'm getting at. While basic constitutional reforms are in some sense a more elegant solution to America's political problems, in that changing fewer things could cause bigger improvements, they are not a more practical solution. You're changing one big thing to get a big result, instead of changing a small thing to get a medium-sized result.

If we can't change the small things, changing the big things isn't likely to be possible- or rather, isn't likely to become possible until the resources to make smaller changes are in place.

As for bribery, the problem is that the average American is highly corporatist, Simon. They get angry at the influence of "special interest groups", but the solutions are considered to be too restrictive of corporate rights and alternatives are shut down by the mainstream media, which is itself highly corporatist thanks to its dependence on advertising. NPR and PBS are not corporatist to the same extent, but they are minorities that come under regular attack. Creating a sea change in the USA would be needed either to significantly reduce corporate influence or to restructure the Constitution. While it can be debated as to whether they are quite identical, they are still similar problems.

I think you'd find it easier to create anti-corporatist sentiment than to create sentiment in favor of abolishing the presidency.

The big problem you face in doing the latter is that American presidential democracy has worked in the past; we can read about it in the history books. Washington's leadership in the 1790s, Lincoln's leadership in the Civil War, FDR's leadership in the Great Depression, these things are major parts of the national mythos. There's a huge bank of historical memory about how successful presidents played a key role in making the system work... and it's worth remembering that much of this memory is accurate; it's not all stuff invented to justify deification of the presidents.

So while it's easy to mobilize opposition to specific presidents, that opposition does not translate into anger at the office of the presidency itself.

By contrast, there are very basic human drives that can be channeled towards anti-corporate sentiment. It is much easier to make concrete arguments that excessive corporate power is bad, that corporations are fighting for things that are bad, and that they need to be restrained. These arguments are rarely made in the American cultural mainstream, but at least they exist in a useful form that can be delivered to the average citizen.

To convince the average American that corporations are should have less power, all you have to do is convince him that they're hurting him more than they help him. To convince him that the presidency should be abolished, you need to make an abstract political-theory argument that flies in the face of the American historical narrative as generally accepted even by anti-corporate Americans.

I can't imagine the second being anything but hard compared to the first.