I would go one step further and say that executive power should be dramatically reigned in, and that laws should take an 80% consensus to pass. And laws also have to be renewed every 'x' years with a similarly large consensus, perhaps with a method similar to constitutional amendment to allow for permanent laws. Under such a system you'd absolutely have to collaborate to ever do anything. And I think this would be a very good thing.
Such a system would also completely do away with divide and conquer as a political strategy, which again is also a very good thing - as that's likely one of the biggest causes of instability in the Western world today.
You could also refuse to collaborate to do everything. This would result in an anarchist system where power/money has the ability to do whatever they want without regulatory oversight and the public are unable to vote to give themselves any rights they can't take by force.
But in modern times a typical social experiment (of which there are a zillion on YouTube) is to describe some policy passed by a President/party but swap the names to 'the other side.' People's response to the policy will invariably sharply shift. People aren't even thinking about what they think is a good idea anymore, but seeing everything through a hyper-partisan lens. That's obviously not conducive to bipartisan acts, pretty much ever.
I think this is trying to solve the wrong problem. If our concern was that the second the new party gets that 51% margin they suddenly start passing a ton of laws, that would help reign it in. But that's not really what is happening. Congress has become profoundly unproductive in the last few decades. As an example, the last time Congress passed a budget on time, which is the bare minimum of functioning, was in the 1990s. By basically any metric, Congress is becoming less and less capable of passing laws. Requiring 80% consensus would make that even harder. And requiring laws to be reviewed every X years would greatly increase the responsibilities of Congress to keep the government functioning.
What you mention about budgets is a good example of this. Neither side wants to cooperate on anything at all. So in the House you get things like one side votes 100% yes, the other side 100% no. And then it gets passed to the Senate. The reason budgets freeze up in the Senate is the filibuster where you need a 60% majority to pass. So suddenly there's actually some cooperation required which is when both sides tend to start working together, a little, to add this or remove that.
But with an 80% consensus required, you need to start the cooperation immediately in the House because you can't just roughshod your fantasy budget through on a 1% margin. And none of this is going to change in 4 years, or 40. If you want to get things done, you need to start viewing 'the other side' as just other people working towards what they see as a desirable direction for the country, instead of an opposing team to be conquered and strawmanned into the worst evil since Hitler.
Two party systems end up governing from their extreme positions while trying to pull 1% over.
Why must it be so? If one party was non-extreme, would it not be better at pulling the 1% over? (In fact, there are a lot more than 1% who don't bother to vote because neither party speaks to them.)
It seems to me that the thing that pushes parties in the US to the extremes is the primary system.
But that is true in all two party states.
The people who take part and organise the party will not be in the centre undecideds they will be those who are off centre. To become the leader you need to get the votes from the party workers, these will tend away from the centre so you get more extreme leaders.
With the two party system the coalitions are made behind closed doors in the party.
That can't be the whole story because Trump never bothered to win over party workers when he won in 2016.
In the US it is just the registered voters that need to be won over.
Primary elections are the problem. The moderates who would win bigly in the real election are rapidly washed out during the primary season.
It's 2025, we should be able to have more granular control over the direction our governments take, and not have to rely on some nebulous "party" or politicians grouping that forces us to deal with compromises. And not only compromises, but all the deal-making and trading that the groups make with eachother.
Sucks that they keep electing lunatics. But do you really think the party who ran almost entirely on hurting others wouldn't independently vote for hurting others? Or that the 100,000,000 people who didn't vote to stop it would suddenly vote? Or that people wouldn't look toward leaders and form parties so they can quickly get a feel of the room based on like minds?
Politicians being corrupt is, at the end of the day, mostly the fault of the people. They refuse to hold them accountable. I mean, they elected a convicted felon - a convicted rapist - an impeached president - a known con man and womanizer - who works with dictators and mafias and tried to overthrow America. And they're still cheering on every insane idea.
This sounds nice but if people can't even vote for favorable outcomes now, how can we expect them to make informed decisions on dozens of matters of public policy?
The problem still remains that we can't expect individuals (let alone millions of them) to be able to appropriately weigh in on things that require more than 5 minute reading on an online platform. One cannot gain an expert understanding, nor an appreciation of the nuances that come with that, in that situation.
But democracy shouldn't be about giving them that choice only if they are educated and informed on the topic, that is antithetical to democracy. Their choice matters whether they are informed on it or not, that's their choice - period. Of course, it would be good to give them all the info we can on the topic and we should strive to do our best to help them be informed. And if that's the case, and we agree democracy is about the will of the people, not their "expertise" and "knowledge" on a topic, then there is absolutely no reason why we should deny the possibility of more direct-democracy type decision making.
> Education and understanding of a topic for the most part does not sway peoples' opinion. And democracy shouldn't be about that, because then it becomes a game of "who can convince the most people" and "who can indoctrinate the most", rather than simply being the will of the people that they naturally form as part of existing as individuals and interacting with the world around them.
It sounds like you're saying understanding of a topic should come second to how citizens "feel" about it. There's no denying that's how it is much of the time, but should it be?
People, as part of existing as part of the world, naturally form hatred or distrust of various groups of people based on their personal interactions. How is it healthier for society to act on those feelings, vs electing people and building institutions that act based on reason and good faith?
Look, if that's the case, and that's how we want government to be run, then let's just come out with it. Let's not pretend that people have a choice. But until that day comes, democracy means will of the people and in this modern technological age that translates to people being enabled to choose what they want.
We've lost the "excuse" to use coordination, tallying and "time to count votes" as a means to push representative-type democracy, and the sooner we get there the better the world will be. Because right now we have this schism, and it's tearing societies apart.
I think we'll see more of this, now that the parties are so ideologically separate from each other. With such a narrow majority, any tiny intraparty fracture has the potential to break a coalition.
We got Trump in part because people felt unable to fully express their opinion - they felt it was either the status quo person or the anti status quo person, with no nuance in between.
And there are still divisions - the freedom caucus, the progressive "squad", the swing politicians. Those politicians should be in parties that reflect them rather than Frankenstein's monsters of parties.
Coalitions are made to enable things like voting on government budgets before funding runs out .... But that problem does not seem solved in the US