Longer elected terms would lead to better government?
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He showed us what a democracy gets you - it's government by the least common denominator. It devolves to sensualism, that is, the highest aim of the people is to satisfy their desires, and they capture the government for that purpose.
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My unsolicited opinion: a government reflects its people. If the people are corrupt, so too the government. I think the framers of the US Constitution understood it, and knowing their peers corruptible, set up precedent and procedure to ensure stable government.
We've had some rocky patches, and we're encountering another bumpy stretch of trail, but with history as our guide, we'll pull together when the moment's need arises.
That wasn't the only restriction. He also recognized that the longer someone is power, the more likely they are to be corrupted. Plato does not believe that democracy is the best form of government. According to him, equality brings power-seeking individuals who are motivated by personal gain.
In the US, there is a mix but there is a telling wrinkle. The Supreme Court is a lifelong post, but the decisions are carefully documented and deconstructed. The President (and most legislators) have a much lower level of scrutiny because of intentional obfuscation (like National Security reasoning) and closed sessions without formal reasoning for their actions. Transparency is not valued highly at the most immediate levels, which is why corruption is inevitable under the current practices.
Even if I am able to verify one side or the other of the Court is being hypocritical with their argument for lifting Roe v Wade (abortion legality) soon via the careful examining of the results, will this mean anything more than catching any politician BSing?
I think you mean political appointment.
The discussion is centered around the philosophy of political positions and their utility over time. Regardless, the SCOTUS is also a political position that has a specific process and set of requirements (explicit and implicit).
> will this mean anything more than catching any politician BSing?
I think you're missing the point. The fact that the SCOTUS decisions are considered so important (despite being equally impactful to an individual as any local political decision) is a cognitive dissonance that is baked into modern US politics. One term is the longest that can be assessed and all others are relatively short term.
That's worth trying to explain, rather than arguing over the merits of short-vs-long cycle political postings, as if there exists one-true-way.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...
Unless the need are manifesting slow enough (e.g. climate change).
I think religions are valuable because they give their adherents a common foundation on which to base their decisions. So if they live in a community with a fellow believer, they can be reasonably sure how they will behave over time - which has advantages to them.
It's noteworthy that the thinking around climate change has some similarities with religion.
And the reproducibility crisis is not an example of decline. It's not like social science used to be reproducible then stopped. It's that for the first time in history, we've realised that things are bad, and now we're (slowly) starting to do good science. The reproducibility crisis is an example of improvement!
I think it would also be fair to say, that there were other organizing factors in addition to religion, certainly civic, and economic.
Regulatory capture/policy capture by for-profit industrial complexes seems never ending, each major industry taking its turn at extracting wealth - which wouldn't be so much of a problem if individuals weren't left behind or extracted enough to suffocate them towards death.
A democracy tends to reflect its people a dictatorship tends to reflect the dictator.
Let's not believe the USA was founded as a utopian project.
If Plato's hypothesis is that all democracies will elect 100 mega-Bernies to their senates, I think we can safely say it has been falsified.
>This is a problem as old as thought itself. One of the worlds first philosophers, Plato, wrote a book about it. He agreed, the best form of government is one where the terms are longer.
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Hayek said "If I have to chose between a democratic society and a liberal society, then I must choose a liberal society." That idea has been at the heart of Western political theory since Plato, who also suggested that it was better to live in a liberal society than a democratic society, but Plato was reacting, specifically, to the democratic murder of Socrates. Socrates had advocated for a style of probing philosophy that would wake people up by forcing them to "Question everything" and this made the people of Athens uncomfortable, so they accused him of "corrupting the youth of Athens" and they sentenced him to death. And Plato's analysis of the democratic murder of Socrates set up the conflict between democracy and liberalism that the West has spent the last 2,500 years discussing. The criticism of the "tyranny of the majority" usually starts with a discussion of the democratic murder of Socrates.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/is-it-true-that-entrepreneu...
This can fit in well with democracy (e.g. Bill of Rights), but can also be absent in democracies (e.g. the majority being able to vote to kill you). Similarly, liberalism can influence governments of all types, codifying individual rights and laws which can limit the power (or at least the rights) of the government.
Then by simple reasoning, the best government possible would be to elect them for life - they'd never have to pander again. Yeah, there's a /s missing, but I think you'd get better government by attracting better people than those interested in being in government. Perhaps term limits, certainly limits on lobbying or donations, anything to make corruption harder and (somehow) make results attainable.
yeah, but more complex reasoning might suppose that for some things there might be a sweet spot, that is to say the efficiency might rise for a number of years, but then decline.
Then it's left to each stakeholder to weigh the importance of each factor to them. To find the global optimum you then need to weight the relative importance of each stakeholder and each opinion held by each.
Impossible, of course!
Edit: that's not even including how all of these assessments vary over time, and also the peoples' expectations and predictions of the future variation, even if all of the above is known at one point in time.
So maybe there shouldn't be a signle government? But e.g. elect a "government for economy", "government for internal affairs", "government for education" etc?
"Finally, I’ll add a different kind of example, an example we mentioned in an earlier essay: it is worth noting that during the debate over the Brexit treaty, from 2016-2020, the Tories in the House Of Lords were far more reasonable and rational than the Tories in the House Of Commons. This example is especially interesting since we are comparing people who belonged to the same political party. The only difference between them is that one group was free to think about the long-term consequences of the treaty, while the other group was under pressure to pander."
I agree that's the difference, I don't think it comes from the term length though. The lords are toothless so it doesen't make sense to apply your presure/lobying there. Also some percentage of them weren't politicians before being named in the lords.
It probably has a formal name that I won't look up right now.
It ignores the nuance of what happens as the quantity grows.
If I stay awake for two extra hours, I can get more done in a day. Conclusion: I’ll stay up 24 hours/day for maximum efficiency.
For elected officials, I would like longer terms for members of the house of representatives to have longer terms but with an option to get kicked out, if they severely underperform or go against their mandate --but kicking them out should take 60% rather than simple majority to avoid the threat of agitators who constantly would threaten recall elections. Just like calls to the 25 amendment should have to go through a non-partisan committee made up of independents to decide if an official should be removed --not just because the opposition does not like the official.
That is in the federal constitution for Senators. Or it was until the lobbyists took over by pretending things would be better if Senators are beholden to lobbyists instead of being recalled by States.
https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/inte...
Good read, for those interested in going back to what worked better. "George Mason argued that state legislative selection gave states the power of self-defense against the federal government."
"We previously listed some of the most admired leaders of both the left and the right and we noted that all of them came from safe seats. In the case of someone like Margaret Thatcher, it was a deliberate choice to give her a Tory safe seat. And safe seats help create great leaders, since it allows those leaders to focus on leadership, rather than having to think about elections. In other words, over the last 300 years, to the extent that the democracies have had good leadership, this has been achieved through a bit of engineering, where the system grants certain leaders lifetime posts, while pretending to do something different."
"In the case of someone like Margaret Thatcher, it was a deliberate choice to give her a Tory safe seat."
I don't think that design ever expected a class of professional politicians who spend their lives in office. I think the expectation was that people would serve a few terms as a service to the Country then return to their private lives, not dictate policy for entire generations.
I think that best government is least government; if we need a "governing class" hanging around all the time, then making sure they're webbed up and tied down with process, procedures, and other bullshit to the point of almost total sclerosis is the best way for society to survive their presence.
The problem with this view is that government is the way that we - as a society - make collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live, as well as the way we build programs to serve the public good and achieve things that we want to achieve together.
If you make that process - the process of deciding rules and norms - so painstaking slow, and the process of enforcing the rules nearly impossible, then what you end up with is a society with out rules or norms. Which isn't a society. Or with rules and norms locked down and frozen, unable to adjust to the changing needs of the society.
What we need is a government that is as responsive to the needs and wants of the governed as possible.
Usually the way you achieve that is through various forms of democracies, but those are prone to tyrannies of the majority - in which a majority intentionally choose to oppress various minorities. So the trick is to have a super-responsive Democracy that also has safeguards in place to protect the minority from the majority.
And there in lies the rub, what those safeguards should be is the never ending debate.
But "best government is least government" is a truly toxic and self-destructive meme that has badly infected US culture. If you want to understand what you're actually saying with that sentence, s/government/civilization/g. Government is simply the mechanism through which we collectively build our civilization.
There's nothing in what you wrote there that can't be and isn't done in the private spheres. Making "collective decisions about the rules and norms under which we want to live"? That's part of any culture, and often happens by social processes in which government is irrelevant. And charitable organizations — or "programs to serve the public good" — have a long and successful history of outdoing government at actually helping people in need. Finally, business and social organizations "achieve things that we want to achieve together" in a way that doesn't involve government coercion.
You suggest we can "s/government/civilization/g", but I'd say you have it backwards, if you value people working together willingly to accomplish great things for each other.
There are many things which the private sphere cannot do, and other things which it could do in theory but has utterly failed at in practice. The obvious things it cannot do in theory or practice are set laws - the rules we all must live by whether we want to or not. Things like you don't get to murder other people on a whim. That is no something the private sector can enforce, and if you argue that society could simply enforce that through the majority exiling people who commit those sort of crimes - what you are describing is government, in its most primitive form. The private sector cannot handle this - not even in theory.
As for things the private sector could handle in theory, but has utterly failed at in practice, health care is an obvious one. If you compare the places where the government handles health care as a private good well to places where health care is handled by the private sector, the private sector has not outperformed the government - anywhere.
It really boils down to this: not everything can be voluntary in a society. Some rules have to be set, and enforced by everyone with no opt out. We can debate endlessly about exactly which set of rules should be included in that, but there's a minimal set (don't kill, don't steal, etc) that almost everyone can agree on. The process of agreeing upon those rules and enforcing them is, by definition, government. And having those rules exist and enforced is, by definition, civilization.
This is because it is impossible to provide private health care in an undistorted market. A patient can often cannot "shop around" for health care. It can never be a truly voluntary exchange when one party's health is on the line. There will always be an significant element of coercion and urgency for the party needing care. This is especially true of emergency and urgent care, but is true to varying degrees for most forms of health care.
Now that our civilization is built, we don't need armies of elected politicians or long-term, unelected functionaries controlling the society or ourselves.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...
Your terms are acceptable.
and thus if need a project management class in the company then making sure they're webbed up and tied down with process, procedures, and other bullshit to the point of almost total sclerosis is the best way to get our projects delivered on time and under budget!
The actual work gets done by everyone else. When a project comes up, the project team applies for a manager or two for just their one project. “Government” helps determine the appropriate management system for the project outcomes and rents/gives the project a (team of) managers trained in Scrum/PRINCE/Consensus/holocracy/etc. At the end of the project the team disbands and the managers return to the pool.
Well, sure. I am glad to have domain experts who understand the trade offs of highway construction or whatnot on the execution side while other people operate at a higher level of abstraction (how do we allocate funds at a macro level, and trade off the various interests?).
It’s far from perfect but far more effective than having elected officials decide how thick the roadbeds should be or the maximum spacing for electrical plugs in houses.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...
Ok. That is literally an extremist view. It is too easy a mantra. Exactly how little government would be too small? I personally think the IRS should be funded, so to the FBI, EPA and military. Other people think otherwise and would be happy to do away with all those agencies. But to say that less is always better is to wash one's hands of the conversation, to abandon the hard task of working out exactly which services society wants and needs from government. Less always seems better until you actually need something.
"best government is no government" would be extremist. I submit that "least government" is a reasonable view that admits there are positive functions of government in society, even if they are "all the other options suck worse" judgements where "positive" is "least negative".
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1842174835/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
About this:
"There is no reason why it among all possible forms of organization"
Whatever form of organization you want to invent for a society, that will be a form of government.
What is the name for this ideology? It feels like it's the political version of Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, but I've never seen it given a name before. I am of course interpreting this through a Bergerian/Luckmannian lens[1].
1. Specifically by way of "reification is the apprehension of the products of human activity as if they were something other than human products - such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will." p 106 TSCoR http://perflensburg.se/Berger%20social-construction-of-reali...
On what time scale, geologic?
Baked into that statement is the assumption shorter electoral terms means shorter periods in power. It doesn't.
Governments tend to stay in power for about 8 years where I live, which has 3 year terms. That doesn't seem to be much different to the UK, were terms are twice as long, or the US for that matter. But individual politicians are often there for decades. The fate of the election tends to depend on 10 or 20 swinging seats, out of about 80. Typically a bureaucrat is going to be dealing with politicians with decades of experience at handling bureaucrats.
It's not always true of course. Occasionally, the electorate does get riled up when the government does a particularly poor job. And then it isn't just a matter of 10 or 20 seats, most of them change, and it's after a minimal term in office. But that's only happened literally once in 60 years to me. Yes, that's inefficient, but I don't see any choice. Occasionally, the political class needs to be reminded who is actually in charge. 3 year reminders seems to work well enough.
Does it though? It's much more than just the heads of agencies that are political appointees [1] that change with administrations.
It may appear that the government can be slowed by paperwork but there really is no penalty for the executive branch (or any branch) to just ignore the other branches (ex. [2]).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_appointments_in_the_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears#Legal_backgroun...
I call bs.
I think most people are bad at leading and an easy way to get rid of bad leaders results in better governance than a bad leader that has life long power.
Also, California implemented term limits which have made the government worse: rather than having a politician learn the ropes and build a specific practice over time, they get into office, spend a term learning and doing a little useful stuff; by the second term they can start to be really useful, but have to think about their next job as well. This has increased the power of lobbyists who do have longer tenure.
* The specific problem was electing an unpopular and corrupt president because his alternative was worse.
Since they don't, term limits are mostly sour grapes on the part of the losing faction.
So they literally become "you can vote for whomever you want, except the person you actually want".
That’s basically a problem of every governmental system, including autocratic ones (why should that person be king? Well at this point trying to change it would lead to a power struggle that would be even worse, so I’ll just put up with it).
Democracies are all about trade offs and mostly about least worst decisions. Still superior to anything else tried so far.
But agree the short term led the impossibility to define and implement a Vision.
How many times am I going to read about someone who voted for Brexit then suffer the consequences of exactly what they were warned about - farmers, fishermen, expats living abroad who voted for Brexit, and then when they suffer consequences of leaving the EU their response is "This is not what I voted for!"
Uh, yes, actually you did. This is exactly what you voted for.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
It's term limits without the limit and provides the elected official with enough time to get something meaningful done.
If you elect the wrong one, though, you're stuck with 'em for a while.
Get it so that a member of the house represents a reasonable number of people (and the body as a whole can return to actually being somewhat popularly elected - right now you almost have two senates really) and the court’s ideological balance can’t be completely u-turned by 2 people dying in as many years and then you can maybe fix some other stuff.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
Name an activist that got any sort of political power? just one.
Politicians talk, they say nice things the populous likes to hear they don't fight for unpopular ideas that would reduce their change of getting reelected.
The truth is that in a democracy long term projects like building infrastructure is done by long term agencies and politicians just take credit.
I think op hears politicians take credit and say if only I am reelected leader for life I will build more bigger and better and op believe them.
There are so many obvious, non-controversial good government reforms. Applicable to all levels of govt: federal, state, county, city, districts, boards, etc.
living wages
full staff
public financing of campaigns
proportional representation (assemblies) & approval voting (executive positions)
lengthen the legislative calendar, maybe even open ended
default to public disclosure, eg data.gov for all
In a democracy, pandering to the citizenry is kind of the point.
Long term plans that work and are popular are often continued even by governments with diametrically opposed agendas.
What would lead to better democracy is a populace that isnt informed by network TV and tabloids with owners who have diametrically opposed interests to their readers/viewers, not longer term limits.
Blairite governments werent neoliberal because of short term limits. They were neoliberal coz thats what the blairites/brownites were.
The theory that voters dont punish bad behavior is fairly well disproved just by looking at the last presidential election.
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By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels
Page 110-111
Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts’s analysis identifies the circumstances under which an incumbent may be tempted to “pander” - implementing the policy preferred by the voters even though her private information suggests that it will not serve their interests. In their basic model, pandering occurs when the probability is not too high that the inferiority of the voters’ preferred policy will be revealed before the next election (and if the expected quality of a prospective challenger is strong enough that the incumbent has to worry about her public standing at election time).
It also assumes that politicians essentially only want one term and would be perfectly content to be destroyed electorally in their third term if they can win their second term.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
Addressed in a previous essay:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empowe...
I'm personally interested in participatory democracy strategies like citizen juries.
Not to be confused with direct democracy strategies like initiatives. Which have proven to be poor choices.
Emphasis on the deliberation, discourse, participation. Versus just voting.
Learning how the Iroquois governed is on my "to do" list.
I share your concern about grain (scope). Both bundling unrelated stuff as well as the need to preserve (protect) mutually dependent facets. A "just so" example of the later is comprehensive progressive tax reform is easily sabotaged by breaking up the effort.
I'm so glad you're thinking about these issues.
Is actually having an effectively democratic system, starting with an electoral system which produces proportional representation.
Or intuitively as t tends to infinity the system would be tending to some form of dictatorship.
But, if you run for Congress and are prohibited from any legislative position once your 9-year term is up, you might actually be incentivized to try and be productive.
"A final thought: the top judges in Britain are appointed for 18 years, which apparently is the length of time that Britain thinks offers the best balance of accountability and independence. So maybe our politicians should be elected for a single term of 18 years, with no chance of running for a second term? In such a case, they could spend 100% of their time focused on their legacy, without having to spend one minute thinking about re-election. If we outlaw a second term, but give them the equivalent of 4 terms, then they have the incentive and pressure to do some good in the limited time they have been granted."
Then, for the house of representatives, we could leverage Zoom and fill it with a few thousand representatives, make the terms very short, and then pick them through sortition.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-have-politics-in-the-us...
You'd have to add something else to sortition, like the legislature themselves have to come up with the laws without the staffers, or sortition them too.
Has anyone ever investigated this?
Really good book. Not sure if this would be the "perfect" system, but I think we should at least incorporate some aspects of it.
One of my main issue with modern politics is that politicians and political parties are out of touch with people. The general populace does not have the financial means or organizational structure[1] to compete with professional lobbyists. Political parties have become an end unto themselves and they reward people within them that serve the interest of the party, over good leaders, which is evident by the sometimes ridiculous virtue signaling.
[1] Parties were supposed and used to be that organizational structure
I’m far more inclined to listen to the second most influential economic policy group in the US (after Brookings) than a random blogger who makes it sound like giving a monopoly on power is a good idea.
The incentive for shorter terms, is you can get rid of the bad ones faster, whether we do or not is another story.
>And yet, the evidence is overwhelming that, in real life, the majority of voters do not keep track of what politicians are doing.
Of course, a constant barrage of the latest transgression of the culture war, and endless discussion of unsolvable wedge issues adds a whole lot of noise to this tracking mechanism. There is also a whole lot of spin, "he really didn't do that the way you say because ... the other party," etc. There's also not a lot of reporting on what bills are actually passed either.
IMO, we've gotta start voting out the incumbents until we start to have a government we feel comfortable ruling over us. It's the only power we really have.
No amount of screwing around with term limits will somehow suddenly reduce corruption and make the U.S. a functioning democracy. No amount of voting out the incumbents will change much -- the parties significantly predetermine who you get to vote for in the first place, of course.
The theory I have is it will, over time, destabilize all the back room deals and self preservation mechanisms currently in place built over decades of incumbency. I can't really think of another option.
>the parties significantly predetermine who you get to vote for in the first place, of course.
I agree. Having said that, there is nothing in the constitution that even mentions political parties, they were an invention to gain power during the Washington administration, and they are highly effective. Would it be any worse to elect some third party representatives just as a protest vote?
"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."
- Boss Tweed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington%27s_Farewell...
This would increase the influence of the two major parties even more (candidacies would be more rare, after all, so even more is at stake for each election). Why would extending a term suddenly make a politician less concerned about their own power and wealth and suddenly start actually doing things for their _constituents_?
I think the root of the problem is that somehow we ended up with a congress full of people whose last thought is for their actual constituents. There are a lot of insightful observations on how this came to be, but none of them point to term limits or length of terms as being the cause.
I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying we should vote out the incumbents until we have a government we are happy ruling us.
FWIW, I basically agree with voting out these present incumbents, except that I think the major parties are irredeemable, so what's the point? I'd love for an election to show everyone voting 3rd party and no one voting for the duopoly.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...
It’s a train wreck. Their plans enacted insulate them from real work and threaten the public with repercussions for not doing the work they won’t.
It was tried. This is the result; another nostalgia obsessed group of elites an gerontocrats bleating story and words of power that are nonsense.
We should ban old people from roles that impact the next generations they won’t be around for.
It’s tacit ageism against the youth but no one will call it that.
It’s shocking how kowtowed we are by people we’ve just seen have no ability to support themselves without abusing workers. So much for American memes of self sufficiency. Their self sufficiency is still based upon dumping on lower castes.
Ok sure an economist can wrap it in math with correct order of operations as it looks like this geometric object on paper. But that’s unnecessary obfuscation intended to empower them and traditional talking points.
It’s 1984 levels of double speak going on; without economists counting there would still be trade. Their work does not give rise to human agency.
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part...
"""Again, the benefits of democracy have been well-documented. Amartya Sen (whose work we will review this coming February) won a Nobel Prize for showing that people in democracies do not suffer from famine. People in democracies are better protected against disease, are more likely to be vaccinated against common childhood illnesses, and tend to have better educations provided by their governments. In the long run, democracies tend to experience more economic growth than non-democracies, though at any given time there might be a non-democracy that is growing very fast. One study has shown that men are taller in democracies.
And yet, there is substantial evidence that most voters do not care much about politics, do not understand the issues, do not want to engage in study of the issues, and often sabotage their own interests. (See previous essays.)
So the benefits of democracy probably don’t come from the voters. The benefits must come from structural factors, such as the voting itself, the transfer of power among different political parties, the ability of the political parties to funnel the frustrations of the people into productive channels (rather than resorting to civil war), the ability of newspapers and media to mediate the conflicts among the most powerful interests, making the tensions transparent so that they can be better managed, or possibly the free and unfettered activity of the most important professions, such as lawyers and health professionals and religious leaders and the accountants, plus other sources of accountability for money. As we noted in a previous essay, those democracies that have frequent changes in power among parties tend to have less corruption than those democracies where one party has held power for several decades in a row, so the mere transfer of power among parties seems to limit corruption (and this is true even when the leaders of all parties are known to be corrupt!)"""
Economic opportunity comes from the masses clearly not wanting to kill each other but collaborate. If the opposite was true we’d have done it already.
The politics of it are a synthetic inner monologue implanted by power structures. Circle English constructs all they want, the scientific truth is people collaborate without the high minded bullshit of Anglo-gibberish. We did it before formal language, why believe sermonizing in historical script means anything?
Bridges and machines need a formal language for safety. I am unconvinced formal language defining social truths can be anything more than mind viruses intent on thought policing.
Am I freer by ogling images of Pelosi with her magic scepter and nodding along with McConnell’s obvious equivocations? No. I’m surrendering agency to standing there nodding along, memorizing their platform and sermons.
Coddling such things in our inner monologue is antithetical to free speech and agency.