In my view, the gerontocracy is a side effect of deeper, systemic issues: too much power in incumbency, too much power placed in the hands of the hands of too few, too much power given to money. I would prioritize these three changes to fix our democracy:
Publicly funded elections
Uncap the House
Term limits on the Supreme Court
That’s it. Everything else flows downhill from there.
I still would love to see a new political party which represents the people’s interests - call it the direct democracy party. Use blockchain technology to create a general ledger of polling for every vote inside the party - everyone would have a copy of the polling data so it couldn’t be hacked/changed. Every party member would have one single vote in every poll, and their elected politicians would be bound to follow the polling data in how they vote, or they are immediately replaced under the party rules.
Of course that’ll never happen - too expensive to implement and the campaign laws are setup to ensure a two-party system while preventing a third party from challenging them.
But damn it would be nice to have a party which represents the voice of the people, directly.
Paywall removed: https://archive.is/UozLV
In my view, the gerontocracy is a side effect of deeper, systemic issues: too much power in incumbency, too much power placed in the hands of the hands of too few, too much power given to money. I would prioritize these three changes to fix our democracy:
That’s it. Everything else flows downhill from there.
Thanks for the paywall free link. I didn’t realize it had a paywall as it worked fine for me, it must have a certain number of “free” views.
Happy to! Thanks for posting it originally. FT does good reporting, their paywall is obnoxious.
We need a constitutional amendment to place term limits on the Supreme Court.
We do not need an amendment to increase the number of justices or to impeach them.
Can you expand on 2 (uncap the house)? I’m not familiar enough to know what that refers to.
Fully agree with 1 and 3 though.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-the-house-got-stuck-at-435-seats/
I still would love to see a new political party which represents the people’s interests - call it the direct democracy party. Use blockchain technology to create a general ledger of polling for every vote inside the party - everyone would have a copy of the polling data so it couldn’t be hacked/changed. Every party member would have one single vote in every poll, and their elected politicians would be bound to follow the polling data in how they vote, or they are immediately replaced under the party rules.
Of course that’ll never happen - too expensive to implement and the campaign laws are setup to ensure a two-party system while preventing a third party from challenging them.
But damn it would be nice to have a party which represents the voice of the people, directly.
We’ve had parties like this in Australia, but they’ve never won a seat unfortunately.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux_(political_party)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy