What alternative ways can you think of to handle making legislation and passing laws that would negate the increasingly polarized political climate that is happening in more and more countries?
Randomly drawing citizen. Sure politics require some training, but it can be done on the job
Also, countries with proportional votes tend to force politicians to talk with each other more than countries with single representative per district.
Limiting elected official mandates to one or two. If you couldn’t do something in 10 years no reason to think you’ll do it latter
Have you worked with people recently? A decent amount can’t learn anything and don’t take personal accountability. I guess that does sound like Congress.
No. This sort of arrogant rubbish needs to be shut down.
In my job - a doctor - I routinely discuss difficult and complex topics with people of all backgrounds and education levels. With very few exceptions people are able to understand difficult topics.
It is my experience that the most difficult people to work with are not ordinary people but those who hold the opinion that everyone else is stupid.
With very few exceptions sortition and participatory democracy have worked well whenever they’ve been tried.
I disagree about sortition, but I appreciate pushing back on elitist, misanthropic bullshit like you did. I think elections with a strong ability to quickly recall faithless representatives is a much better solution because it involves the decision-making of the whole community, rather than a community member chosen at random.
I’m a branch manager in the trades and I see this daily. We’ve had to let go plenty because they wouldn’t take personal accountability for their actions and instead it was always someone else’s/thing’s fault. Maybe it’s just the current field I’m in. Who knows.
We all upvote or downvote a law
A bit is specific, but you can probably adapt them.
- Bring back pork spending, it’s over all cheaper to spend 100 million on some garbage than beating people into submission to pass something.
- Increase number of representatives significantly, makes some things less efficient, but also massively reduces the power of lobbying, and increases the power of localized activism.
- Limit length of allowed legislation per vote. Smaller more focused bills are ultimately better than sweeping legislation that attempts to address everything. More votes also makes working together easier with lower stakes and more opportunities to collaborate.
Well my good-faith arguments would be direct democracy (i.e. everyone votes on every change) or ranked choice, but that has its own problems. However, you didn’t say it has to be serious. So I suggest a system that locks a chimpanzee on LSD into a room with signs (options) and blinking lights. Chimp starts rolling and points to the blinky light he likes (or hates) either way, your government is operating far more efficiently than hairless apes doing something that is apparently too much work, and most are just as ill-informed as acid-chimp. I honestly think acid chimp accidentally gives you a better (albeit random) set of values than capitalism/democracy ever has.
Define a set of rules, and someone will figure out how to cheat it.
