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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

liberty and free speech tends to overly concern Americans when they have more pressing and bigger problems. The big mistake with the title is "way back to cultural health", stop looking backwards. If you do want to look back to the idea that founded your republic, look back and see a whole bunch of people trying to look forward. Do that. Fix your system of government, a two party system is bad for you, you've become religious about your politics and it has divided you along lines that don't make sense. You need much more varied representation so that free speech can manifest in political force, to represent the vast differences between the millions and millions of you. Just makes no sense that a 2 party system can represent that diversity.

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Without their First Amendment rights, it is unlikely that Americans would even figure out if many parties might be a good idea. They'd also be unable to bring those into existence without it: freedom of expression, assembly, and the right to petition are the primary mechanism towards presenting a better future to others.

Americans should be super concerned about attempts at eroding dialog between its citizens. The government, corporations and activists have done everything they can to create a forced discourse.

why have parties at all? think about who the party serves and to what ends. is it for the people? no. it's for the politically ambitious to more easily coalesce power. parties are an indirection the populace doesn't need. it's something that makes campaigning easier and more centralized. centralization of power, whether in companies or in governments, is never for the betterment of the population, despite all the contrary rhetoric.

I’ve long wished the same, banning political parties. As you’ve said here, it makes not thinking about who you’re voting for easy, which is a negative.

Most have had the joy of building or organizing a thing and seeing their effort unfold. Some have enjoyed the same joy creating things with others. If there are nation wide efforts to accomplish something and people get to work at it themselves and marvel at the fruits of their labor the natural question is: What shall we build next? If a nation is overly focused on the self over the collective those efforts will decline and the question what to build next is drowned in the noise.

The new man, who talks in text over the internet, is rendered without the context a face to face conversation offers. Take how one can ask people to do something for you. 30 years ago I would frequently ask people to do things that took hours. I would buy something to drink, cook a meal, take them out for drinks or dinner or do something for them later. When I got online it took me quite some time to realize you cant ask random strangers for more than a few sentences worth of assistance or worse, they would get furious if I send them a pm.

Marveling at our collective accomplishments is now even further away. I'm not even going to ask anymore what we can do together to turn the tide or progress in some other way. I'm no longer going to offend anyone with the idea that if they are the one who can do something they are also responsible for the outcome.

This clip from coneheads was brilliant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6ANOBnwpSA

This is who we are now.

When the constitution was written, less than 25% of the US population had the right to vote. Basically only White male property owners could vote.

That was a very different political culture to how it is today.

It’s also interesting to see how the reading scores of presidential speeches have changed over time.

Everyone always harps on the whole white male property owners thing but it misses the entire point.

It's probably more productive to think about it in terms of "the usual people who were given a voice back then, but only the subset of them who couldn't f-off without leaving behind a ton of their wealth if things went bad."

In effect they limited voting to people who had settled down and had substantial skin in the game.

Why did they do this?

I've been listening to the revolutions podcast (very good) and was really struck by the idea that having "skin in the game" was almost universally considered superior to universal suffrage for a long time. I think there is something to the idea, although the implementation is what matters.

This is amazing to me, because I am also listening to the Revolutions podcast (just finished part 1 of the Russian Revolution, i'm sure this Stolypin guy will make some good reforms and Tsar Nicholas II will live happily ever after). However, I come away from these episodes with a completely different lesson: that the people opposed to universal suffrage were almost always the people in power who did not want to risk losing power, and so drew convenient lines to disenfranchise anybody who threatened their regime.

I very much do not think there is any merit to the idea that only those who claim to have "skin in the game" should get to vote. The grands blancs in pre-revolution Haiti - who owned lots of land, wealth, and people - often didn't even live on the island! In what way did they have more "skin in the game" than the slaves whose skin was being literally ripped to shreds in order to generate more profits? Not to mention the Black freedmen who owned property but still couldn't vote!

I think the mere act of being a citizen of a country - and thus being subject to the laws and policies of that country - gives you the right to a share in the governance of that country, no matter what your net worth, sex, race, etc.

Nah, Madison is very explicit in The Federalist Papers that the masses are a bunch of idiots. They were merely expressing the outlook of bourgeois British culture with its strong ideas of class, which doesn’t disappear in America until the 20th century.

Packing your things and fucking off was expensive and dangerous for the common man

What makes you think that people who don't own (maybe can't own) property don't have substantial skin in the game?

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