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18th July 2022, 08:14 AM | #1 |
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The results of a new political revolution in America
A major and fundamental political reform in the US could easily lead to calls and demands for a new Constitution as an essential element of ground-up infrastructure necessary to address the convoluted legislative bloat that is the anachronistic modern American Legislative and Judicial system. As a lead in to these considerations, I'd like to offer the National Constitution Center's efforts looking at several aspects of democracy and a variety of Constitutional documents they have generated from a variety of modern mainstream US political perspectives.
While I am most intrigued by the Center's Progressive Constitution ideas, it really should probably be looked at in comparison to their ideas regarding Libertarian and Conservative constitutional ideas1. To be honest, there is much to like, and hate, in all of these perspectives but though I've always considered myself to be a primary proponent of democracy in the abstract, one of the more troubling issues of reading through these considerations is the questions they've raised in myself regarding how to balance the freedoms of as much democracy as we can tolerate with the personal and societal responsibilities that must be tied to such freedoms in a mature and sustainable society A few teasers -from the Libertarian Constitution
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*1. CONSTITUTION DRAFTING PROJECT https://constitutioncenter.org/debat...afting-project |
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18th July 2022, 11:49 AM | #2 |
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While I understand the reason for moving this thread, I had similar concerns when initiating it, but, as the re-structuring of the US government would have impacts and considerations that go far beyond merely the US and its citizens, and I, personally, am as interested (if not moreso) in the opinions and considerations of those who are not American citizens regarding such potential changes in how American governance can be improved. It is difficult to learn new things when you are only open to those who are already embedded within the current system. Hopefully, despite this transition, a significant non-American participation and involvement can help to enlighten this discussion.
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18th July 2022, 01:43 PM | #3 |
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I'm amused by this bit from the Conservatives: "The good of the people is all too easily hijacked by self-interested and ideological factions that promote their own objectives at the expense of the long-term interest of the whole. "
They should know plenty about that! Not a debate in general that I want to get involved with, though, as I don't think any new Constitution is in the offing, and if it were, it would make a streetfight look dignified. But since this is about the US Constitution, I think it belongs in USA Politics, no matter who comments. Plenty of non-USA correspondents weigh in on USA Politics, as is appropriate, but that's still the subject under discussion. |
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18th July 2022, 07:59 PM | #4 |
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19th July 2022, 05:05 AM | #5 |
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As someone living next to the Sleeping Elephant (qv), I decided to try an understand this subject of this thread and read a few chunks of each of the proposed(?) constitutions and then a bit of the real thing. What immediately struck me was a parallel to Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon which amusingly seemed to be written in the English of the King James Bible.
Would they all read better if they were written in modern English and not a mock 18th century version? |
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19th July 2022, 08:59 AM | #6 |
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Yes, but then it might not leave sufficient ambiguity to get away with doing whatever you want anyway and saying it's constitutional. Which is the whole point of this exercise; to get their foot in the door should something like this come up and present conservatives as the constitutional middle ground between the fringe extremes of everyone to the left and right of them.
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20th July 2022, 02:29 AM | #7 |
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Frankly, and from an outside-of-the-US perspective, I think that this effort totally misses its target. And I also see no "political revolution" at all there; rather, it is a "more of the same" feeling I got.
First, it seems to me that a constitution, being the base document on which the political structure of a state is defined, should be as neutral as possible regarding the left-right spectrum. Such a neutrality is necessary to ensure that regardless of what citizens may chose as a tendency (left, center, right), the institutions defined by the constitution would allow those tendencies to be expressed without constraints. Second - and I think this point is even more important - the projects presented there are not really new constitutions; they are mere variants of the current one. Significant parts of the texts are copypasta from the current US Constitution. Third, from both the texts and the explanations they give on each proposal, it doesn't seem that they looked outside the United States to find ideas to solve the various issues. A lot of work has been done in various democracies around the world during the last two centuries, and various political issues the US encounters have also been encountered in other countries; why not have a look at what works and what doesn't? Maybe the authors actually did, but that doesn't seem obvious in their comments. And finally, none of the texts really tackle the issue of the "binary party system". A lot of the issues seen today are the result of the opposition between two strongly polarized sides, which mostly comes from how the various political bodies are populated. So, it seems to me that even if one of those texts became the new US Constitution, it wouldn't significantly improve the current situation. But in any case, that's a highly fictional scenario - at this point, the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers got such a quasi-infaillible status that denouncing any as "wrong" is not acceptable by the majority. In this context, I think changing the constitution is plain impossible. |
21st July 2022, 10:44 PM | #8 |
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I don't disagree, though there is an issue of whether one is more interested in the view from those within the aquarium, or from those outside of the bubble. To be certain, though, either way the focus is the aquarium.
A supposed positive I've heard, for using "dead" languages in the composition of such a treatise is that their terms are fossilized, so that any translation changes in the compact are attributable to colloquial interpretations. Indeed! ...I'm a bit rusty at regular responses, it's been a while. |
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22nd July 2022, 03:04 AM | #9 |
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Political revolution? Intellectual devolution!
America is swirling about the drain. |
22nd July 2022, 03:16 AM | #10 |
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Why not just adopt a parliamentary system?
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23rd July 2022, 11:18 AM | #11 |
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While I would think that such would be a major alternative especially given the American penchant for not being able to imagine a system without political parties, ...and to my understanding such would only enhance and encourage individual parties within the system of governance. My personal preference is to outlaw political parties and all private money in the governance systems, but I'd be open to seeing what type of parliamentary system Americans would be actually interested in, if any.
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23rd July 2022, 11:21 AM | #12 |
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23rd July 2022, 01:48 PM | #13 |
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23rd July 2022, 02:20 PM | #14 |
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The examples you give suggest that the connection to the canvassing is explicit and relatively unmediated. But how does that play out in extension? How immediate should this be? Does everything you do for the benefit of a speaker count as speech? To what extent does that separation give you immunity without responsibility? What if the speaker's utterances are treasonous or libelous? Does it matter whether it was ten minutes or ten years before?
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Moličre) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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23rd July 2022, 05:41 PM | #15 |
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24th July 2022, 12:55 AM | #16 |
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If the nation requires the population to be "a bit less indulgent in their own arrogant ignorance", then it means its institutions are not adapted to its population. It is the system that needs to adapt to people, and not the opposite.
A good political system should take as an axiom that the population is, in majority, greedy, sellfish and lazy, and that the main reason why citizens participate to the political life is to push their own self-centered agenda, and not for some vague idea of a "greater common good". |
24th July 2022, 06:51 AM | #17 |
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Like many humorless and indignant people, he is hard on everybody but himself, and does not perceive it when he fails his own ideal (Moličre) A pedant is a man who studies a vacuum through instruments that allow him to draw cross-sections of the details (John Ciardi) |
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24th July 2022, 07:54 AM | #18 |
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24th July 2022, 08:21 AM | #19 |
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It would be silly to use outdated concepts such as conservatism, progressivism and libertarianism to update an only slightly older foundational document.
Instead of following certain ideological lines, a constitution fit for a hundred years needs to be above all guided by tolerance and flexibility. |
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24th July 2022, 08:36 AM | #20 |
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political speech is never equal. It is more valuable to support the position of a canvasser that can convince 100 houses than a canvasser that can only do 10.
ETA: I see it like a school president campaign. Because candidate X can get more friends and put more time into making more posters to commit acts of speech is not justification to restrict the number of school posters permitted by a candidate. Let's not use the Harrison Bergeron process to construct speech laws |
24th July 2022, 09:15 AM | #21 |
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A century is a pretty low bar, and all this tolerance and flexibility talk from a self-described maledictorian seems misplaced!
That said, Constitutions are generally more inspirational and aspirational types of foundational documents rather than the cumbersome and convoluted criminal codes that are eventually derived and evolved from them. The problem with a lot of legislation, is that once laws are established they generally stay on the books until they are repealed, or negated by court decisions. This makes flexibility and evolution very difficult, and all too often near impossible. One way to address this might be to require all legislation to carry sunset termination/revision standards. |
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24th July 2022, 09:19 AM | #22 |
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24th July 2022, 09:53 AM | #23 |
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24th July 2022, 10:06 AM | #24 |
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Even the minorly tinkered constitutions put up by the OP represent pure dreaming so I guess you might as well go all the way.
I personally prefer parties. Independents have a reputation of being a wild card and often do nothing about the issue on which they campaigned. The two basic models are the Irish system where the president is a pure figurehead or something like the French system where the president has some powers but can't ultimately thwart the will of the parliament. I suspect that having a US prime minister might sound too British for the average American. |
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24th July 2022, 06:43 PM | #25 |
Дэлво Δελϝο דֶלְבֹֿ देल्वो
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My preferred solution comes in two steps.
1: Break the country up into several large chunks. At this point, it wouldn't matter which side introduced the bill in Congress; plenty would vote for it on both sides. This has the advantage of being a far more realistic and achievable goal than the kind of massive overhaul our government needs otherwise. 2: Each of the new resulting countries, being a new country that never existed before, no longer needs to treat our old Constitution as a starting point, or even pretend to. Talibama might want to anyway, but that's Talibama's business and not my problem. But what about the northeast, my home and native land? We wouldn't even need to bother coming up with our own new version of a government. Other countries have already done it better before and their systems are public knowledge, so all we'd need to do is pick another country's system to adopt... like maybe the one we'd already have a border with. It would only need the tiniest technical tweeks, like changing "ridings" to "counties", getting rid of any references to kings/queens, and not including that hokey excuse for an anthem. We could even ask to simply join, although I'm not betting which way the answer would go. It's not that I'm swearing theirs is better than, for example, Norway's, but it's just the simplest, quickest, easiest route, saving us the trouble of choosing between Bokmĺl and Nynorsk. |
24th July 2022, 07:12 PM | #26 |
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Yeah, this would be a really, really bad idea, which may be why the Constitution makes it pretty hard. A new constitutional convention can arguably be called for via Article V:
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Not ready for a reroll on the constitution myself. |
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25th July 2022, 12:29 AM | #27 |
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Fortunately, the US Constitution has a build-in 250 year sunset provision.
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25th July 2022, 06:48 AM | #28 |
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25th July 2022, 07:03 AM | #29 |
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25th July 2022, 07:07 AM | #30 |
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“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos.” |
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25th July 2022, 07:15 AM | #31 |
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What are you talking about? Equalizers are not evenly distributed. If I say this gun is the great equalizer, it doesn't mean everyone has that that gun, or that people with more guns do not have an advantage, or that everyone should have a gun.
All it means is that my weaker self can use the gun to blow the brains out of someone stronger and smarter than me, but without the gun. |
25th July 2022, 07:40 AM | #32 |
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“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos.” |
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25th July 2022, 07:44 AM | #33 |
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25th July 2022, 08:15 AM | #34 |
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As has been said many, many times: if privately held guns could change anything, they would be banned.
Same with personal wealth. |
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25th July 2022, 08:18 AM | #35 |
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25th July 2022, 08:24 AM | #36 |
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Quadratic voting would be an equalizer.
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25th July 2022, 09:19 AM | #37 |
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25th July 2022, 01:20 PM | #38 |
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To me that's asking the question "why have a democracy?"
So that the wealthy few are not dictating laws to the many less wealthy. Democracy is an effort (however imperfect) to give the population a voice beyond their proportionate share of wealth. |
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25th July 2022, 02:31 PM | #39 |
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25th July 2022, 02:34 PM | #40 |
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