People being what they are you might already be thinking ”You don’t live in America, you don’t know enough to go making suggestions” well I disagree due to the fact that I use the internet a lot and on the internet you’ll run into American politics constantly whether you were looking for them or not, they get shovelled into even things that are only tangenitally related to them. Back in 2006 when I first started to use the internet in earnest it was full of furious, Richard Dawkins level canister shot polemics because of America’s culture war so in fact it is my business. On the English speaking internet the world seems to be divided into America and Other so in fact I think I do know enough to make suggestions and there’s also the fact that the Americans seem incapable of fixing their political system themselves so perhaps someone with a more zoomed out view will get the full picture.
Instant Runoff Voting
In the American elections whether for President, the House of Representatives or Senate whichever candidate gets the highest number of votes gets the seat/electoral votes; whether or not that candidate got a majority of the votes. The problems with this are that it can and does often end up that someone the majority did not vote for will win that election; the majority won’t get what they voted for in spite of it being a democracy. There is also the problem of vote splitting; for example a leftwing person might prefer to vote for the Green Party but if leftwing votes are split between the Democrats and Greens the Republican candidate could win that state/seat as happened in Florida in 2000. This allows the bigger parties to blame smaller ones for their defeats in close races as opposed to blaming themselves for not doing a better job or changing the voting system. In instant runoff voting the candidate who comes last is eliminated until at the end there are only 2 and whoever gets the majority of the votes is the winner. If a candidate needs a majority and not simply a plurality of the votes to win then this would make candidates do a better job and not be as extreme since they need to reach more people.
End Gerrymandering
Here in Ireland we have an independent boundary commission and so even if a party is dominant in a certain county they can’t divide up a constituency in their favour. In America however there is widespread gerrymandering and many congressional districts are heavily in favour of one party due to both packing and stacking. With candidates more worried about being defeated in a primary election by somebody in their own party than by a candidate from another party this contributes to polarisation; which is only getting worse over time. If congressional districts both make geographical sense and not merely political sense and can only be won by someone with a majority of the vote then this surely will help to reduce polarisation.
Reduce the number of Senate seats by 1 per state and increase the number of House seats by 1 per state
A Senate seat is statewide whereas House seats are in areas of a seat. I see no use in there being 2 senators per state and with America being a 2 party system this only makes things worse and not only that but at present (30th June 2023) in 44 states both senators are from the same party (46 if one counts Krysten Sinema and Bernie Sanders as Democrats); only one party is represented at Senate level in 88% of the states. If the number of Senate seats each state gets isn’t determined by population anyway and are statewide then it might as well be 1 seat while an extra House seat in each state will mean smaller and more local areas can be better represented (and with all of the federal dysfunction perhaps more localism is need anyway) but also there’s the fact that an extra seat in each state means borders will have to be redrawn; hopefully that would be an opportunity to draw them up more fairly, to end gerrymandering.
Scrap the Electoral College and elect the President directly by national popular vote
It was argued that the American people wouldn’t be informed enough to decide for themselves who should be President but the problem today is that too many of them are misinformed.
One of the arguments made by its defenders is that scrapping the electoral college would mean that the small states would be ignored but with the electoral college they’re ignored anyway and so are even the biggest states! The candidates spend their time and money on the closest states since almost every state whoever gets a plurality of the popular vote in that state wins the entirety of its electoral votes.
Another problem, yet again, is that the losing party gets nothing. Yet another instance of 2 parties but a winner-take-all system meaning one party gets nothing which leads to polarisation.
The Democrats may say that the electoral college favours the Republicans but in reality it’s like a subsidy that keeps a failing industry going when really it would be better off dieing. The Republicans can go as far to the right as they like and still be competitive since they’re the biggest rightwing party. A lot of even rightwingers might not like them but no other rightwing party (or candidate, not even a Mormon running in Utah) can win even one state and thus not even one electoral vote (barring the odd faithless elector, a rare occurence) without having the official Republican nomination. I say on balance it’s bad for both parties as the Democrats are more likely to win less of the electoral votes than popular vote is what goes wrong for them. It’s true that the Democrats are kept artificially competitive for the same reasons as the Republicans but the Democrats have gotten more of the popular vote at every election (bar 2004) since 1992 and so it’s not they who need to reform (in terms of getting votes, obviously on policy I would prefer more left wing economics and the party to be more socially conservative).
Abolish the Supreme Court
It used to be that nominations to the Supreme Court were uncontroversial but from Bork onwards it has become highly partisan and talk of justices being liberal or conservative with the unfortunate result that Supreme Court decisions are often postmodernism; there’s no objective truth about the thing itself, just opinion and whoever has the power enforces their opinion. In the Roe v Wade decision it was argued that the constitution guarantees a right to privacy (it doesn’t mention one) and within this right to privacy a right to abortion was read in. If something can be read into the constitution and something else read into that then pretty much anything goes just as long as it’s before the Court. It was said that there are a penumbra of rights in the constitution; a penumbra is small bit of light on the moon. Something closer to Earth and bigger in size would surely be better and of course then the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Perhaps a longer constitution more relevant to today would be better than the current one but (people’s own partisan interpretation of) the constitution is some kind of sacred cow which the Americans seemingly will never slay.
Cop On
The American people themselves although often misled by internet commentators or ranty talking heads on the cable news also need to do better themselves.
One thing to do is to stop saying the same things over and over again. Apparently the advice is that people should say things over and over but both sides do this so I see no reason to prefer one over the other except when it comes to the substance of the policies. Whether it’s politics, religion, atheism or anything people spend too much time on the advertising and too little on the quality of the product which is a twofold recipe for annoyance.
Another is to stop with the solipsism. Both sides say try to convince the other using their criteria but this is silly; if the other side accepted your sides’ criteria they’d be on your side. There’s also the notion that if we’re for policy x for reason y then the other side must hate policy x for reason y. This happens a lot with American libertarians where they’ll oppose something in the name of freedom and then brand anyone supporting it a communist or fascist (as opposed to they’re pro something like safety or equality as opposed to anti-freedom) and with the social liberals if they support something in the name of equality or secularism then anyone opposing it is an evil ignorant, bigoted, theocratic homophobe/transphobe (as opposed to someone not being convinced by the arguments for gay marriage or transgenderism and seeing plenty reason to think making changes to a conservative status quo on these would be dangerous). Treating the other side as some mirror image of oneself is not only ignorant but will put them off of your side and further erode what little chance there was of them going over to yours there was to begin with.
Some on the right say America is a Christian nation well then let there be a repentance; a turning away from sin. From polemics, ridicule, dogpiling, nutpicking, gaslighting, always playing the victim like some manipulator and assuming the worst of people, turn away America.
European Qoheleth's Thoughts 