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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

What actions can Americans possibly take given the captured two party system and drawing back of voting rights? Not to mention the wildly unrepresentative government, wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless, or, republicans can fail for over two decades to win a popular vote and still elect three presidents in that time. Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate, and the House is similarly unrepresentative.

It seems that working within the system isn't an option for Americans that desire a better world anymore. Perhaps a billionaire has the means to change this within system-allowed parameters such as lobbying and ad buys?

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Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.”

Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.

Getting involved locally is a very non-specific guidance. Part of the problem with “local involvement” is that a lot of folks are in very very gerrymandered areas. Either you’re hopelessly outvoted or preaching to the choir when trying to affect local politics.

But also, I think we are well past affecting change through voting and so forth. Not that you shouldn’t vote. But if we want to see actual change in the United States, we need to start taking some cues from the French and other countries where they go on strike aggressively until they get what they want.

As long as we keep getting fucked and showing up for work anyway the powers that be are just going to keep fucking us.

Even if you do get involved, you're going to get tackled by the quarterback trying to enact the changes that you see are needed. What has been happening in politics over the last several years? Bickering about non-issues that don't really effect people.

What did the senate do this week? Interview the TikTok CEO. Meanwhile our economy is in shambles, inflation is out of control, housing and rent is unaffordable, the middle class is dying.

Why are they over there arguing about wokeness, screaming about communists and facists being on the precipice of taking over the country, and interviewing the tiktok CEO? Because that doesn't require any action. It distracts the public from real problems. The partisan inflammatory and meaningless screeching is enough to get them re-elected, so why do any hard work fixing problems?

And so people who do try to get involved in order to fix real issues like the economy or housing, end up getting blocked by pointless debates. It's system-wide filibustering.

Economic/systemic change has been off the table for quite a while. These poor politicians are just playing the only cards they have available - social tribal chanting - while filling their personal coffers as much as possible while the getting's good.

Odd to open asking what actions Americans can take, and then closing with a bizarre appeal to a noble wealth hoarder.

What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse

Something many have advocated for decades. But keep in mind that there are tens of thousands of elected offices in the US, most of them nonpartisan, local positions that cost little to contest: yet it's incredibly hard to find people willing to run. Voter apathy is a huge problem here, in part due to historic voter suppression efforts baked into the system, but the dearth of candidates willing to participate in elections is even more serious. There again, legal discouragements, especially in the most significant races (state and federal legislature, executive), are endemic. Still, too many offices at the local level (town and city council, special district boards) go uncontested: leaving one or the other major party -- or venal representatives of the FIRE sector -- in control to mismanage and misappropriate power in areas directly impacting public life.

Many of those local or state offices also pay little to nothing. A state rep in NH gets paid $200 for a two-year term based on an 1899 law.

That's something of an outlier but $25-50K is common.

The bizarre appeal was poorly communicated sarcasm.

As an non-USA inhabitant, one thing I see is that you have a lot more voting chances than most countries. I heard e.g. you can vote for officials like sheriffs and stuff.

So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.

I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round.

Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.

> Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.

That's not permitted in any state which I know.

I am a registered voter in "NO PARTY", which gives me the option to request a ballot from any party in a primary and vote within that party.

Any registered voter can vote any candidate or issue in general elections. I think what would improve our abysmal two-party system would be runner-up benefits, and coalitions, rather than winner-takes-all.

The likely best solution to the 2-party system is a change to balloting from single-choice to something like approval voting (check any number of candidates you could live with) or ranked-choice/instant run-off (number candidates by preference).

If I were king, I’d do away with party primaries completely. Run a jungle primary with all candidates on a single ballot. Ranked choice to pick the top 4-5 for the general. Then ranked choice in the general to select the winner. Something like that.

I’d also ditch the EC for direct election of the president. And legislate the size of a House district be derived from the smallest state population. This adds hundreds of members to the House, and brings voting parity back to CA and TX (who currently have districts substantially larger than Wyoming’s single seat.

The "jungle" primary you speak of is in use in Washington state.

Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.

This usually isn’t allowed. At least in my precinct (in an open primary state), both primaries are on the same day, in the same location, and you select which party’s ballot you want when you arrive. Anybody can vote, you don’t have to be a party member.

Some states have closed primaries, where only party members can vote. Usually you declare party membership in advance. Not sure how these states prevent people from joining both - I suspect there is a state register of party affiliation.

As the parent post alluded to, the US is at a bit of a crossroads. The protections built into the political system that were added to protect minority political groups from the tyranny of the majority has been turned on it’s ear over the last several decades and we’re now stuck with an ever-decreasing population of angry christo-fascists making decisions against the will of the vast majority of the nation.

I’d wager it’d be even more useless for me to vote for sheriff than president. The sheriff where I live is a populist figure who’s continuously re-elected in power for nearly 20 years at this point. He’s probably going to re-elected till he dies since he has that “celebrity” mentality Americans love.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…

Entirely open (at best) question, which no smug hacker news commenter is going to answer. What does one do?

(My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )

> Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor.

Politics is the set of activities associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals.

Throwing technology at these human affairs isn’t an answer.

Not the sole answer but it does enable different ideas that weren't possible at scale without technology.

Something like liquid democracy.

It also gives a fresh space to develop democratic systems that aren't dominated by previous parties to the extent that there is barely a functioning democracy. Existing systems are ridiculously compromised.

I agree with many that the most effective method will be some combination of empowering communities and destruction of property.

Way too much focus on the HOW and not the WHAT

> yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless

Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.

I'd guess you took what OP meant a bit too literally, I'd say that there's so many things to change, campaign for, convince that even if you say convince enough people to vote to change this law, there's already another rolling your 'win' back being prepared, backed by interest groups with much deeper pockets.

So in the end your individual vote does little, because real power is at the hands of much better resourced interests.

I bet in your county it would take the dedicated organization of maybe 10-25 people to tilt who is out on the ballot in your local government. (If your county is much larger, you may need 50 or so.) register for a minor party and then only nominate members of that minor party that fit your views. A friend of mine in his smaller town was able to, with his local family, put on only democratic candidates under Republican nominations because his family had minor party share.

A decade ago, activists made a difference protesting SOPA and PIPA.

Or Google did.

The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the price of short term inefficiency. Read the history of an imploding republic - France, Rome, Weimar - and you will see similar pushes to speed reform for the masses that ended in tyranny. Reading the federalist papers will give good perspective on the rationale for these things. One may disagree with the conclusions, but the concerns and rationales are reasonable

It’s hard for people to appreciate just how much better our lives are, and how much more just life is in western society now than all of the millions of years of human life before. 200 years ago some people were literal property, 150 years ago women couldn’t vote almost anywhere, less than 75 years ago Turing was chemically castrated for being a homosexual. Huge, meaningful strides have been made for equally and fairness very recently.

It may seem terrible and unjust that there are some now that are as rich as a Roman emperor and can buy a great deal of influence, but the world was once thousands of unaccountable tyrants, free to brutalize their peasants and slaves.

Millions of years? If I recall, our societies are quiet a bit younger than that, several hundred thousand sure, but millions?

Anthropologists have been arguing for quite some time that society wasn't "all that bad" here and there over the last twenty thousand years or so. Bad sometimes in some places certainly, but for many, there was general communal comfort and a large degree of sharing resources. As recently in the last 500 years, it was written with a note of surprise by European settlers in north America that the indigenous population never let someone go hungry or homeless.

Recommend reading some David graeber, his latest book is a phenomenal insight on new archaeological findings as well as bad assumptions anthropologists have made in the past.

Aside from the two party system, this is all working exactly as designed.

>wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless.

Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem.

> or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time

...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.

The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near.

>Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate,

This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion.

Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.

This kind of comment confuses me. There's always one rigid constitutionalist that shows up and just kind of... Pretends the usa was a determinist system kicked off the second the constitution was signed? Despite the immediate amendment when they needed to add some human rights to the thing?

Actually, America was designed to be a slave state, with laws explicitly laying out why African people are less entitled to rights than European descendants, and laws working around different states' positions on slavery. Working as designed, right?

> The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.

And yet, the people voted for the less charismatic candidate, and the electoral college elected the swindler. Working as designed, right? Now we have executives directly trying to influence the electoral college, and it seems to be working (supreme court stepping in during bush's election to force stop a recount that would have led to him losing the election, which we know as fact now).

Not only is it absurd to suggest the USA is a deterministic system like constitutionalists claim, there's a very easy retort: ok, it's a bad system then. Americans need a better design.

If America is working by design, then it's designed to be easily exploited by haliburton to send its soldiers to die in foreign countries so as to feed the military industrial complex. It's designed to have one of the largest prison populations on earth and a systemically racist police system. It's designed to have an outsized homeless problem, massive painkiller addiction crisis, and a population of people with no savings, no hope for retirement, and one paycheck from homelessness.

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