Weakening democracy lol

[Swammerdami]

• I organized the US into 8 regions, showing the various levels of regional identity in each county through lighter color variations of each region's base color. [1684x1086] : MapPorn
• ...

I clicked on a few of these. General silliness. The most revealing comment comes from the 'MapPorn' map listed above:

You don't need data to make this type of map. I literally just made this for fun.

 

[lpetrich]

1) the current US electoral system is the result of the civil war. Maybe don't fuck with until after the next civil war. Obviously things have changed since then. What was sensible and fair then, isn't now. But how are you going to change it now, without starting that civil war we're trying to avoid?

I'm baffled at what might be the source of this elementary mistake.

It's easy to correct with a little research.

The elected parts of the US Federal Government are the two houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Vice Presidency.

The House of Representatives has state delegations in proportion to the states' populations, and it has done so from its beginning:  United States congressional apportionment In the early days, some states used  General ticket - voting for all the delegates at once - but since the early 19th cy. nearly every state has used single-member districts. House members are elected for two-year terms on even years.

The Senate is has two members for each state, and they are elected in staggered fashion, one per election year. Senators are elected for six-year terms in staggered fashion: Class I is elected in years 6n+2, Class II in years 6n+4, and Class III in years 6n (6n+6). Each state has a Senator from two of these classes, and when states are admitted, their Senators' classes are assigned to try to keep the Classes' member numbers as close as possible. I once did a thread on that in Mathematics: US Senate Allocation | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

Senators were originally elected by state legislatures, but that was changed to popular vote in 1913:  Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The President and Vice President are elected by the  United States Electoral College but how that body is chosen has changed over time. Its members were originally elected by state legislatures, but with the rise of political parties, its members became chosen by parties, making it a rubber-stamp body. By the early 19th cy., which party gets the electors in each state was from which party got a majority of votes. So the EC system became what it has been ever since: a sort of aggregated and weighted popular vote.

The original system was for the electors to vote for President, with whoever gets the second most votes becoming the Vice President. This was changed to the current system in 1804 with the  Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution That is voting for the President and Vice President separately.

 

[DrZoidberg]

1) the current US electoral system is the result of the civil war. Maybe don't fuck with until after the next civil war. Obviously things have changed since then. What was sensible and fair then, isn't now. But how are you going to change it now, without starting that civil war we're trying to avoid?

I'm baffled at what might be the source of this elementary mistake.

It's easy to correct with a little research.

The elected parts of the US Federal Government are the two houses of Congress, the Presidency, and the Vice Presidency.

The House of Representatives has state delegations in proportion to the states' populations, and it has done so from its beginning:  United States congressional apportionment In the early days, some states used  General ticket - voting for all the delegates at once - but since the early 19th cy. nearly every state has used single-member districts. House members are elected for two-year terms on even years.

The Senate is has two members for each state, and they are elected in staggered fashion, one per election year. Senators are elected for six-year terms in staggered fashion: Class I is elected in years 6n+2, Class II in years 6n+4, and Class III in years 6n (6n+6). Each state has a Senator from two of these classes, and when states are admitted, their Senators' classes are assigned to try to keep the Classes' member numbers as close as possible. I once did a thread on that in Mathematics: US Senate Allocation | Internet Infidels Discussion Board

Senators were originally elected by state legislatures, but that was changed to popular vote in 1913:  Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

The President and Vice President are elected by the  United States Electoral College but how that body is chosen has changed over time. Its members were originally elected by state legislatures, but with the rise of political parties, its members became chosen by parties, making it a rubber-stamp body. By the early 19th cy., which party gets the electors in each state was from which party got a majority of votes. So the EC system became what it has been ever since: a sort of aggregated and weighted popular vote.

The original system was for the electors to vote for President, with whoever gets the second most votes becoming the Vice President. This was changed to the current system in 1804 with the  Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution That is voting for the President and Vice President separately.

Busted. I didn't look it up. Thanks for the lesson.

I still think it's ill advised to fuck with an electoral system that is working. The US economy is still very healthy. So the elected politicians could do a hell of a lot worse of a job

 

[lpetrich]

Something not in the US Constitution is political parties, and none of its creators seemed to want them. Several of them went on record as deploring parties as leading to strife from rival factions. The Founding Fathers on Party Strife (Quotes) | Satyagraha and What Our Founding Fathers Said About Political Parties - Bill King Blog and The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart - HISTORY

But their hope of a partyless political system was not to be. In the first term of the first President, George Washington, the politicians started dividing themselves into parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.

The Federalists wanted an industrialized nation with a strong government and a lot of international influence, while the D-R's wanted an isolationist, agrarian nation with a wimpy national government. Though many Americans continue to claim the D-R vision of the US as an ideal, the nation has become everything the Federalists wanted. The first D-R President, Thomas Jefferson, ended up acting Federalist-like with his Louisiana Purchase and his sending military expeditions to North Africa to punish raiders of American shipping.

 Party divisions of United States Congresses and  Political parties in the United States and  Political eras of the United States

Era	Years	Congresses	Party I	Party II
1st Party System	1789 - 1795	1 - 3	Anti-Admin	Pro-Admin
	1795 - 1825	4 - 18	Dem-Rep	Federalist
2nd Party System	1825 - 1837	19 - 24	Jacksonian	Anti-Jackson
	1837 - 1855	25 - 33	Democratic	Whig
	1855 - 1857	34	Democratic	Opposition
3rd Party System	1857 - 1897	35 - 54	Democratic	Republican
4th Party System	1897 - 1933	55 - 72	Democratic	Republican
5th Party System	1933 - 1981	73 - 96	Democratic	Republican
6th Party System	1981 - present	97 - present	Democratic	Republican

We are at the 117th Congress.

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin is a biologist turned historian who has been involved in researching cyclic theories of history, the "structural demographic theory". It was worked out for preindustrial societies, because they have a long enough written record to make patterns evident. According to the SDT, human societies go in cycles that look like this:

• Integrative phase - population increases, elites are relatively small at first, society relatively unified for a while. But elites increase, squeezing the common people, and they end up fighting among themselves for the top spots, thus ending this phase.
• Disintegrative phase - the elites fight each other and population declines. That continues until enough of the elites are killed, exiled, or demoted to commoner status, thus ending this phase.

Violence in disintegrative periods is not necessarily continuous, and it often has two-generation "father and son" spikes.

PT and his colleagues have found evidence of such cycles in ancient Rome, medieval and early modern Britain, France, and Russia, and Imperial China. Quantitative data on premodern societies can be hard to find, so they have to be creative, like counting coin hoards.

• Peter Turchin Secular Cycles - Peter Turchin
• Peter Turchin War and Peace and War - Peter Turchin
• Peter Turchin Ultrasociety - Peter Turchin

PT also concludes that such cycles continue in industrialized societies. He wrote a book about such cycles in the US, finding evidence for 1 1/2 complete cycles. It is Peter Turchin Ages of Discord - Peter Turchin and he has some supporting data in some related pages on his site. He described his work in an easier-reading form in History tells us where the wealth gap leads | Aeon Essays

He found evidence of this structural-demographic cycle in the US's history, though the cycles are faster and there are only 1 1/2 of them over the US's history. For ordinary-people well-being, he worked from a variety of sources of data, like how tall people grew (good), how late they married at (bad), how much their income was of the GDP per capita (good), and fraction of the population that is foreign-born (bad). For elite overproduction, as he calls it, he found the ratio of the highest fortune to the GDP per capita, elite-university tuition to the GDP per capita, and the amount of strife among elites, measured as political polarization. He also measured the among of social and political violence: terrorism, lynching, and riots.

Here is what he found:

Years	Era	People WB	Elite OP	Violence
1820's	Good Feelings	high	low	low
1890's	Gilded Age	low	high	high
1950's	Fifties	high	low	low
Present	Gilded Age II	low	high	high

WB = well-being, OP = overproduction

So the US is headed for trouble.

 

[lpetrich]

Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’ - NOEMA - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it’s here and what we can do to temper it." - Jack A. Goldstone and Peter Turchin

Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.

Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: The U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.

What happens?

First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elites seek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. ... Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.

This leads to revolutions, and revolutions can be *very* nasty. There are often conflicts between elites who want to preserve their privileges and elites who are willing to make the sacrifices necessary to improve ordinary people's well-being.

Writing a year ago, the authors speculated on likely outcomes of the then-upcoming Presidential election.

If Trump loses, he is likely to contest the outcome as a “rigged” election. But that action will again lead to massive popular protests, this time to insist that the election results be honored. If Trump again puts federal security forces in the streets, governors may ask their state troopers or even national guard to protect their citizens and defend the Constitution. Or Trump may call on his many armed civilian supporters to defend their “all time favorite president” (as he put it) against so-called “liberal tyranny.”

For two months since the election, it seemed as if Trump was going to be a much better loser than that, from his challenging the results from within the system. But on January 6 of this year, that last scenario happened.

 

[lpetrich]

As a result, American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.

A good description of Trumpism.

At the same time, many liberal elites neglected or failed to remedy such problems as opiate addiction, declining social mobility, homelessness, urban decay, the collapse of unions and declining real wages, instead promising that globalization, environmental regulations and advocacy for neglected minorities would bring sufficient benefits. They thus contributed to growing distrust of government and “experts,” who were increasingly seen as corrupt or useless, thus perpetuating a cycle of deepening government dysfunction.

A good description of Clintonism, something common among centrist Democrats.

How can Americans end our current Age of Discord? What we need is a new social contract that will enable us to get past extreme polarization to find consensus, tip the shares of economic growth back toward workers and improve government funding for public health, education and infrastructure.

This sounds like commonplace leftist discourse and a weak response to such extreme conditions.

The authors then discussed Britain in the 1820's and the US in the early 1930's. In both cases, reformers worked within the system to improve conditions for ordinary people, and they were pragmatic about their reforms, abandoning what did not work very well. I must add that in both cases, reformers threatened to do chamber-packing, as it might be called. Lord Grey's response to the House of Lords's obstructionism was to threaten to pack it. Likewise, FDR's response to the Supreme Court's obstructionism was ot threaten to pack it. What body might a reformer have to pack this time around?

 

[lpetrich]

 Cyclical theory (United States history)

From	To	Eras	Type	PS	CP	Rc	PT Cyc
1776	1788	Revolution	Lib		CP
1788	1800	Hamilton Era	Con	1
1800	1812	Jefferson Era	Lib	1
1812	1829	Era of Good Feelings	Con	1			+++
1829	1841	Jackson Era	Lib	2	CP
1841	1861	Slaveowner Domination	Con	2
1861	1869	Civil War	Lib	3		Rc
1869	1901	Gilded Age I	Con	3			---
1901	1919	Progressive Era	Lib	4	CP
1919	1931	Roaring 20s	Con	4
1931	1947	New Deal Era	Lib	5
1947	1962	50s	Con	5			+++
1962	1978	60s	Lib	6	CP	Rc
1978		Gilded Age II	Con	6

• PS = party system, a set of parties with characteristic platforms and constituencies.
• CP = Samuel Huntington's creedal passion: "In terms of American beliefs, government is supposed to be egalitarian, participatory, open, noncoercive, and responsive to the demands of individuals and groups. Yet no government can be all these things and still remain a government."
• Rc = race-relations upheaval
• PT = Peter Turchin's history-cycle peak (+++) or trough (---) at the end of a period

We're still in Gilded Age II, and we're still struggling for a way out of it.

 

[steve_bank]

IMO democracy in the USA has already failed. Here in Seattle city councul member who admitted wrongdoing and rants about tearing down the 'system' including elminating private property appears to have dfeated a recall election in her distict. Aparently around 50% support her.

I listened to a republican in Congress rant how when they win back the house they are going after democrats with a vengeance. He belives the DC riot was created by the FBI. Add to that sort f thing the fact that so many in the WH ans Congress appeared to have supported Trump's attempted takeover.

Democracy is not working on the dcale of the USA and its diversity and complexity.

Beyond ideologies I expect the Chinese leaders look at us and say 'no thanks'.

After V, Iraq, and Afghanistan Biden is yet again on the brink of engaging us militarily over Taiwan and Ukraine, both of which are essentially civil wars.

VP Pense made a statement that was probably based in part on racism. He said that we were more stable with the white majority. To a degree I have to agree. Today we have a constant clamor of minority grievances and no one wnats to give up any part of idenitity to a common identity.

Bang like whites is now a slur. 'Whiteness' is now offensive.

The Constitution was writen for a small agrarian population with little diversity of any kind.

 

[lpetrich]

Kshama Sawant? Kshama Sawant maintains lead as many challenged ballots are resolved | The Seattle Times

Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant was still narrowly staving off a ballot measure to recall her from office Monday, maintaining about 50.4% of the votes.

In updated results update from King County Elections, the recall effort to remove the three-term council member for a finance infraction and her involvement in 2020 racial justice protests trailed behind votes in support.

The two sides are working to resolve 436 contested ballots, but today, KS is ahead by 309 votes, her largest number so far. She was originally behind, but when more votes were counted, she came out ahead.

Ballots will be counted through 4:30 p.m. Thursday, and votes are set to be certified Friday. After that, both sides will have until Dec. 21 to request a recount, but they’ll have to foot the bill.

 

[DrZoidberg]

Something not in the US Constitution is political parties, and none of its creators seemed to want them. Several of them went on record as deploring parties as leading to strife from rival factions. The Founding Fathers on Party Strife (Quotes) | Satyagraha and What Our Founding Fathers Said About Political Parties - Bill King Blog and The Founding Fathers Feared Political Factions Would Tear the Nation Apart - HISTORY

But their hope of a partyless political system was not to be. In the first term of the first President, George Washington, the politicians started dividing themselves into parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans.

The Federalists wanted an industrialized nation with a strong government and a lot of international influence, while the D-R's wanted an isolationist, agrarian nation with a wimpy national government. Though many Americans continue to claim the D-R vision of the US as an ideal, the nation has become everything the Federalists wanted. The first D-R President, Thomas Jefferson, ended up acting Federalist-like with his Louisiana Purchase and his sending military expeditions to North Africa to punish raiders of American shipping.

 Party divisions of United States Congresses and  Political parties in the United States and  Political eras of the United States

Era	Years	Congresses	Party I	Party II
1st Party System	1789 - 1795	1 - 3	Anti-Admin	Pro-Admin
	1795 - 1825	4 - 18	Dem-Rep	Federalist
2nd Party System	1825 - 1837	19 - 24	Jacksonian	Anti-Jackson
	1837 - 1855	25 - 33	Democratic	Whig
	1855 - 1857	34	Democratic	Opposition
3rd Party System	1857 - 1897	35 - 54	Democratic	Republican
4th Party System	1897 - 1933	55 - 72	Democratic	Republican
5th Party System	1933 - 1981	73 - 96	Democratic	Republican
6th Party System	1981 - present	97 - present	Democratic	Republican

We are at the 117th Congress.

Political parties is unavoilable in a modern democracy. Its just too much shit to keep track of for one person. Ruling has to be a team effort.

I also don't give much weight to the pipe dreams of the founding fathers. In 1776 democracy was a wild and fanciful thought experiment. No, shit they got some details wrong.

 

[lpetrich]

Political parties is unavoilable in a modern democracy. Its just too much shit to keep track of for one person. Ruling has to be a team effort.

I also don't give much weight to the pipe dreams of the founding fathers. In 1776 democracy was a wild and fanciful thought experiment. No, shit they got some details wrong.

On a national scale, maybe, but the colonies had representative democracy in them, and the Continental Congress was that also, after a fashion. The US started out with Articles of Confederation, but that specified a very wimpy national government, and the US Constitution was created to specify a stronger one.

 

[lpetrich]

As I've noted elsewhere, there is some research which finds a correlation between strength of legislature and strength of democracy: Project MUSE - Stronger Legislatures, Stronger Democracies also at 1. Fish pp 5-20.pmd - Fish Steven - Stronger legislatures, stronger democracy - EN - Standards.pdf Also What Makes Legislatures Strong? | Journal of Democracy and some numbers: Microsoft Word - Parliamentary Powers Index, Scores by Country.doc - PPIScores.pdf Some later work: Measuring Legislative Power: An Expert Reweighting of the Fish‐Kroenig Parliamentary Powers Index - Chernykh - 2017 - Legislative Studies Quarterly - Wiley Online Library

It's worth noting that the US Founders started with Congress and not with the Presidency.

That also agrees with how the top-rated democracies are mostly parliamentary systems -- systems where the legislature is supreme and controls the executive.

 

[lpetrich]

The 2010 structural-demographic forecast for the 2010–2020 decade: A retrospective assessment -- Peter Turchin and Andrei Korotayev

This article revisits the prediction, made in 2010, that the 2010–2020 decade would likely be a period of growing instability in the United States and Western Europe Turchin P. 2018. This prediction was based on a computational model that quantified in the USA such structural-demographic forces for instability as popular immiseration, intraelite competition, and state weakness prior to 2010. Using these trends as inputs, the model calculated and projected forward in time the Political Stress Indicator, which in the past was strongly correlated with socio-political instability. Ortmans et al. Turchin P. 2010 conducted a similar structural-demographic study for the United Kingdom. Here we use the Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive for the US, UK, and several major Western European countries to assess these structural-demographic predictions. We find that such measures of socio-political instability as anti-government demonstrations and riots increased dramatically during the 2010–2020 decade in all of these countries.

As to what happens in a sociopolitical crisis, Peter Turchin The Ginkgo Model of Societal Crisis - Peter Turchin -- from how a ginkgo's leaf veins radiate outwards.

He rated 30 crises on how well they fit the following:

• Population decline / > 50%
• Lethal epidemic
• Elite: massive downward mobility / dispossession or extermination
• Ruler executed or assassinated
• Transformative revolution
• Civil war / Prolonged civil wars (>100 years)
• Territorial fragmentation / External conquest

His counts of how many crises had which numbers of them, from 0: 2, 1, 1, 4, 5, 7, 6, 3, 1.

Peter Turchin Population Immiseration in America - Peter Turchin

Peter Turchin A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord - Peter Turchin

 

[lpetrich]

Filling out: 0: 2, 1:1, 2:1, 3:4, 4:5, 5:7, 6:6, 7:3, 8:1.

A systems framework for remedying dysfunction in US democracy | PNAS - rather disappointing, but it does have some good recommendations, like instant runoff voting and nonpartisan primaries.

 

[steve_bank]

She is a self avowed Marxist who has publicly said wants to get rid of private property. She wants to tear the system down and relace it wth her vision of 'true democracy'. No police. She let rioters into city hall at night.

She has 50% support in her district. The fact of her sucess in a major city is an indication of how we are becoming susceptible to radical divions and divides.

 

[lpetrich]

Is that Kshama Sawant? She beat the recall effort, though by a narrow margin: Kshama Sawant recall, Seattle, Washington (2020-2021) - Ballotpedia - 0.8%.

 

[lpetrich]

•  Democracy Index - by the Economist Intelligence Unit
•  List of countries by Fragile States Index - by the Fund for Peace
• Countries and Territories | Freedom House
•  List of countries by system of government
•  List of electoral systems by country

Where the US is in the ratings:

Rater / Rating	US	All	Min	Worst	US	Best	Max
EIU Democracy Index	25	167	0	1.08	7.92	9.81	10
FFP Fragile States Index	37	179	120	111.7	44.6	16.2	0
Freedom House	61	210	0	1	83	100	100

1. What did the rating?
2. US rank (best = 1)
3. All that were rated
4. Worst possible rating
5. Worst that was listed
6. US rating
7. Best that was listed
8. Best possible rating

Note that the Fragile States Index is in the reverse direction: lower is better instead of higher is better.

The US, though good, is far from the best, and one can construct a composite profile of the best countries.

• Parliamentary system - the legislature picks the acting executive
• Proportional representation
• One legislative chamber or an upper one that does not do very much
• A ceremonial president or monarch

The US fails all four criteria.

 

[lpetrich]

3 reasons why New Zealand has the best-designed government in the world - Vox - Jan 16, 2015

Noting
The Perils of Presidentialism
Linz, Juan J. (Juan José), 1926-
Journal of Democracy, Volume 1, Number 1, Winter 1990, pp. 51-69 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/jod.1990.0011

Back to Vox.

We in the US tend to assume that — however awful we might think our politicians are — our political system is excellent. The Constitution is held in high esteem across the political spectrum, and Democrats and Republicans alike pay lip service to the "genius" of the Founders. But our system, combining two powerful legislative bodies with a strong executive, is pretty rare internationally. Indeed, it appears to be a weaker model than most; the US is the just about the only country to sustain a presidential system for a long period without descending into dictatorship.

We can learn a lot from other countries' models, which are often more streamlined and democratically representative than our own. The best of the bunch, in my judgment: New Zealand.

The article then discussed a downside of single-member districts: inadequate representation. A Democrat in rural Texas and a Republican in Manhattan are never likely to get well-represented. That is especially bad for when a candidate wins by a narrow margin - there is a big unrepresented population.

Author Dylan Matthews then discussed proportional representation, settling on mixed-member PR (MMP) as the best system. That is what's used in Germany, New Zealand, Lesotho, Bolivia, Scotland, and Wales.

Pure party list?

Party-list systems make it hard for a single party to get a majority, which means that if, say, a party has 45 seats out of 100, it still needs to win over a party with 6 seats to govern. The 6 seat party then has significant power to demand stuff, out of proportion to its actual level of support. So ironically, this form of proportional representation can have patently undemocratic consequences. Stuff like this has happened frequently in Israel, with fairly deleterious results.

DM says that nations with MMP avoid that kind of problem, but then again, there aren't many nations that use it.

Unlike party list representation, people still have representatives with at least some ties to their area, for whatever that's worth.

But more importantly, it means parties have to be organized enough to compete in a decent number of districts in order to have a shot. That discourages the kind of excessive party formation that happens under pure party-list representation, while still ensuring that smaller parties get some say.

 

[lpetrich]

DM then mentions another nice feature of New Zealand: unicameralism.

The US Senate weights voters of small states much more than voters of large states, something that is hard to defend as a democratic ideal.

But as he says, many nations seem to do well with only one legislative chamber: New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Portugal, Denmark, Israel, Iceland, Taiwan, ...

Australia has an active Senate like the US Senate, but Canada's is a rubber-stamp body and the UK's House of Lords does very little. New Zealand abolished its upper house in 1951.

But even weak upper houses can typically delay legislation if they want to, and force changes on occasion. Germany's Bundesrat, for example, has an absolute veto over constitutional changes; in other cases, if the Bundesrat rejects a bill passed by the Bundestag (the lower house) with a two-thirds majority, the Bundestag has to muster a two-thirds majority itself to overrule the veto. That puts New Zealand over the top; not only does it, like Germany, have mixed member proportional representation, but unlike Germany it doesn't have a meddlesome upper house. The sole legitimate democratic institution is the one elected to proportionately represent the population.