This is like assuming that your birth status makes the person. Think minarchy, castes, ...
You can be a naturalized citizen in live with your country, or a born citizen plain stupid and with worst interests in mind.
I'm one that questions the whole pledge of allegiance forced to be recited by children that have no wherewithal to understand what allegiance even means or the ramifications of that pledge. Yet, I'm okay with born in country and of a minimum age.
When you look at people who were "almost born" (came to the country as toddlers) or naturalized because of the love of their new country, purple claiming that they are second category citizens are hard to listen to.
If you are a supporter of, say, Trump you therefore say that Biden or Harris are much better than any other, naturalized citizen, as presidents?
It's hard to see the logic here, probably because I am an idiot, but if where you were birn defines the man for you then fine - everyone has their opinion.
it's not a good better best situation like you seem to think. at this point, i really think the unwilling to see how attempting to limit the new nation from being led by a foreign operative would be so important to the survival of the new nation. only, new is now 200+ years old (yet still a babe in the woods to other national histories) so the "threat" seems lessened by people like you.
i also started the entire thread by stating we have a foreign operative in place now, so if you can't read between those lines in who i didn't vote for then you're really just being deliberately obtuse about the situation is the only logical explanation i can see.
Apparently, as of last year, the constitution also says that the president is actually above the law. Given that they've written it after having just gotten rid of a king, I'm assuming they also put that part in deliberately. Truly, their wisdom and foresight was boundless.
It's an interesting document, but as time passes, its practical uses seem to become more and more limited. We're now at the 'people are getting disappeared into a gulag in El Salvador because the president decided they are criminals' stage, by the way. No judge, no jury, just an executive order that makes a person go away, and no mechanism to stop it from happening.
(I don't actually have strong opinions about that provision. It's certainly saving us from, heaven forbid, a Musk presidency, but only by an utterly uninteresting accident of his birth. People like him aren't foreign adversaries, trying to subvert the country, they are domestic adversaries, who bear no allegiance but to themselves.)
And I say, if the American people want Putin to be president (and Putin is willing to take the job), they deserve him.
At least, if you believe in democracy.
If you don't believe in Democracy, I suggest putting some obscure German house of nobles on the throne.
Not in the modern world it doesn't.
Voters can take these things into consideration when casting their ballots. No need to make these choices for them.
In that case, I suggest finding some obscure German house of nobles and putting them on the throne. Works reasonably ok for the UK.
Elect a dynasty to rule forever
Limit voting rights of group X,Y and Z to get "better" votes
Remain with the rule of the majority system
Elect ChatGPT to rule forever with a "be nice pls" prompt
Or you could try sortition, which you haven't even considered at all.
So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled? Do you then set a minimum amount of time to keep the polling below that threshold. 0s? 24hrs? 1 week? You've now also limited the number of eligible voters to those with cards that work in ATMs, so people with some form of wealth which is probably in line with how the framers intended
The solution to the mood based polling is the "should the vote not be corrected over Y time". Y can be determined depending on what gov can handle but is it really mood voting if you get voted in, a year later you've not been in the lead position for over Y time (say 3 months) and you get replaced by the new favorite?
Calling them ATM cards was probably just a short cut in describing how the system would work. Not a suggestion to connect with the banking system.
In any case, it might actually be an interesting idea to perhaps give everyone a base vote for free and then let them have some bonus votes in proportion to actual net taxes paid. Gotta give those billionaires an incentive to not dodge their taxes so hard after all.
> So if a person's poll numbers drop below some threshold, they are automatically recalled?
That's a relatively simple flaw to fix, if you'd actually want to fix it. You already made some suggestions, and there are other ways.
In general, I would suggest trying these kinds of innovations out more locally before you go for the federal government.
That could either be in states or counties, or even for running local clubs and cooperatives and companies.
There's some standard ways for shareholders to vote on the board of directors etc. But it's relatively easy for willing companies (especially new startups) to experiment with alternative forms of governance.
Have a look at Bryan Caplan's "The Myth of the Rational Voter" for more background.
To fix that you need either unequal votes or to remove the voting rights of those with incorrect opinions and understandings. Maybe education but then you'd have to make reeducation camps for those of incorrect opinions and understandings since educating the entire populace will mostly just move the average bar higher.
I'm not talking about doing referendums on every single issue direct democracy style and I am aware that to correctly implement something like this you'd need to do it gradually so that the populace has time to adjust to their increased political power which will hopefully increase their interest in politics in general.
Not necessarily. You could also punish liars several after the fact, ie after their term, and hope that incentives will do the trick.
Though my favourite idea is to make voting with your feet easier. If you have more issues decided at more local levels, then it's easier to up sticks and move to the next town over, if you disagree with a policy.
I call that the "McDonald's flavour of democracy": McDonald's doesn't let you vote on their menu, but if you don't like it, you can always just head over to Pizza Hut.
You can either (A) do that inside an existing system by aggressively pushing responsibility down. That's what subsidiarity is meant to capture. And also how the US was supposedly meant to be structured; but over time centralisation won out.
Or (B) you can ensure that by having smaller independent countries. Ideally city states.
That's one of the reasons why Singapore is my adopted home.
Moving with your feet is about the most direct democracy you can get, but you also don't have to worry about the usual downsides of direct democracy.
I like local governance but you have the same issue on a different scale. Whether the president or the governor runs the show I'd want them to be replaceable in a timely manner and to have a little fire under their ass.
Moving your feet is something I also do but I'm not sure is sustainable. What you get is people going to more social places in the beginning of their adult life to get as much support as possible and then move to the most capitalistic places possible once they start earning big money to pay less taxes/have more buying power. How many people do that, I don't know. In my circles it's a lot and I'm one of them.
It's one of those perfect is the opposite of good things though since centralised politics isn't really better either..
my alternative proposal to simple sortition is election by jury. https://www.electionbyjury.org/
Though I would just directly fill up parliament with a few hundred MPs picked at random from among volunteers.
Parliament can then make laws and pick leaders for the executive (like in Germany or the UK).
As a slight complication, I would allow people to pre-declare proxies that would sit in parliament for them. Proxy declaration season would be akin to traditional election season.
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In the UK or Germany, this way you could keep most of the existing political architecture intact. You'd just change how MPs get selected. Compared to your proposal, you also get the benefit of the law of large numbers, and you don't have to have a judge etc.
I would argue against picking a singular leader at random, just because the variation is too high. But in the US, you could re-use much of the existing system: fill up the electoral college at random.
You could take inspiration from the 'National Popular Vote Interstate Compact' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta... for how to accomplish that gradually.
The US house of representatives and senate probably have enough members that you could bank on the law of large numbers.
fight for election by jury tomorrow. https://www.electionbyjury.org/
Now the king, that guy can't even be catholic! And until recently, couldn't even be female with living brothers.
I hope it stays that way.
The US had pretty strong traditions in politics, too, but they are increasingly being eroded.
To give an example that's hopefully far enough in the past to be non-controversial: when they banned alcohol in the early 1920s, they felt that their constitution did not already explicitly give their federal government the power to do so. So they passed the 18th amendment to give the feds that power to specifically ban alcohol.
Decades later, in the context of the war on drugs, everybody seems to take it for granted that the federal government can obviously ban arbitrary substances.
This may have held true sometime in the 17th century, but it really doesn't in the 21st.