Everyday people have been clamoring for some sort of change for a long time. 00s at least. It reached a boiling point in the late 2010s and you had a nearly parallel rise of Trump and Bernie. The difference is that the republicans couldn't keep a lid on Trump and his backers like the democrats did to Bernie. So Trump got in and then politicians "built in his image" started getting elected all over the place. So now the republicans have a party that more accurately reflects what people want. And they'll use that to mop the floor with the democrats until the democrats turn their own party over to reflect what voters want.

I don't think most Republicans want the destruction of our country so no I don't think he's an accurate reflection

And yet he dominates the party. How could that be without popular support from the party base?

It’s easy to dominate the party as long as you have 51% of the primary voters, which in 2024 was about 20% of registered Republicans.

Essentially if you have the very strong support of 10-15% of the party voters, you’re untouchable.

If people cared they would vote in the primaries. If they don’t, then they must be happy with how those who do are voting.

But then they also vote for him in the general election, since he won, so I conclude he has the support of the Republican base.

Ahh democracy

Of course that also relies on those “I don’t want Trump” republicans actually voting for him.

But let’s assume that all happens and it’s not the fault of republicans because they are apethetic. How do you explain the congress and senate members who back him?

Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.

If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.

Because Fox, and Newsmax work overtime to convince people that Trump wouldn't do the things he said, and he'll actually do the good things people want. And that if anything bad happens, it's the aftershock of previous administrations (of which, Trump's is exempt, of course).

You don't have to be tapped in to see that whatever is said on Fox becomes Republican dogma very quickly. That's why half the country is more concerned that Zelenskyy is, somehow, a dictator, and less concerned that we ushered Russian state media into our white house.

It's an embarrassing state we're in, but many voters have been fostered with complete incuriosity with what Republican politicians stand for.

50 years of attacks on our education systems have yielded exactly what was intended: a nation so poorly educated that they cannot discern truth from fiction anymore.

They wanted destruction of minorities (racial, sexual, gender, religious), but not of the country. They still hold out hope that Trump will hurt them more in the long run. It’s an extremely mean-spirited party at this point.

  > reflect what voters want.

and what do they want?

To be listened to, rather than to be told what to care about, and to have those concerns make it to competent people with the power to do something about them.

But it's not really compatible with a system where one person represents millions. You'd need something recursive such that no person represents more than a hundred or so, that way there's time to circle back and explain why certain complaints aren't being addressed this cycle and such. You know, responsibility of leadership to the people.

It's also not really compatible with a system where your representative for foo-type issues must also be your representative for bar-type issues, because "competent people" is too broad of a category to be useful.

How to get there from here? I'm not sure but it seems like it'll require a more significant discontinuity than we've seen so far.

Repeal the act capping house representatives to 435. The house then expands massively and you get more representative government.

I think the fix is a more drastic refactor than that. We need more depth in this tree. Much more depth.

I imagine a sort of cultural "open enrollment" period during which anyone can mark anyone else as their representative. Perhaps we create four or five categories that we need representation in (foreign policy, infrastructure, education, monetary policy... something like that), so you gotta then find four or five representatives which you personally know and trust.

Then we follow the directed representation graph to its terminal nodes (or cycles) and those are the representatives that we ask to get together and get things done. Those are our leaders. They meet only sometimes, the rest of the year they spend working with their constituents.

So you have 6,000 representatives, which is about the same ratio as the population back in 1790.

What does each one do? What agency does each have?

They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.

What would happen is that representatives are more locally focused on their districts and would vote in larger 'sub'-parties.

In a single seat district system, increase in seats its also proven to improve representation for minorities.

I don't think the expansion by itself is a fix-all solution.

One of the issues is that you have many single issue districts and those that get elected can vote whatever they want on everything else. That is both good and bad in some situations.

> They get 20 minutes a year to speak assuming a 2000 hour working year.

Congress isn't about making public speeches, its about legislating in congress. Turning congress into a TV show is part of the issue in the first place.

Where congress just follows the party line. Or does back room deals

I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic. A software engineer in Austin and one in San Jose have far more in common than a software engineer in Austin and a Tractor dealer in Austin.

The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.

Back room deals aren't necessary a negative. That how the sausage is made. I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise, rather then having media spectral where congress sessions are reality TV. Mostly used to get clips that can then be used in adds.

> I think the larger problem with democracy in general is that constituencies are no longer geographic.

I think that is a good point. Specifically on federal level. On local level geographic still matters.

Its basically the old socialist argument about class system. Just with a much more complex class system.

I guess you could have some sort of cluster analysis putting into X different interest clusters and you could vote for a representative in each. And then somehow calculate an optimal congress.

"Vote for me, I'm representing technically inclined fantasy nerds that like cat girls"

Not sure that is the solution. But you are right that the 'pyramid' style system used in most countries could be improved on. A simple version of this is basically to do all federal votes for congress and use some kind of representation algorithm.

The issue with this is that doing a political campaign on a federal level is insanely expensive. And I can't even imagine if each congress person had to try to get elected on federal level. The amount of political adds would be crazy.

I really don't have the solution and its hard to run experiments on things like this.

> The representative for Austin has to represent the conflicting views of both the Tractor dealer and the software engineer.

Smaller countries does help her, as geographic area gets smaller more interested are represented.

You define a bunch of "constituencies"

Farming, Tech, Fossil Fuels, Civil Rights, etc. Maybe as many as 50.

Each one puts up candidates, perhaps on a list basis,

You give everyone 10 votes to distribute to those candidates. If you're really into supporting Farming, you might put 10 votes to Farmers and screw the rest. If you are more widely concerned you might put a couple in tech, a couple in civil rights, one in space, etc.

Those votes are then distributed and the number of representatives are chosen in proportion. If Farming gets twice the votes as Tech, they have twice the congressmen, and Farming gets twice the representation at a national level.

If you don't have this, you end up with widely supported low level things (say a 15% support evenly across the country - truckers for example) with no representation, but areas where there are high levels of concentrated support (Tech for example) with a lot of representation.

I don't know, if you just have a fixed '50' many people will be very unhappy with the list. That's why I suggested that this somehow had to be algorithmic.

Its an interesting concept, I don't know of anybody that has fully defined how this would work.

>I rather have backroom deals when people can make rational compromise,

Along these lines, policy kind of went to shit when they got rid of earmarks.

It used to be some congressman from rural Ohio being able to vote in favor of union stuff his people want but the party doesn't because he knows the bill has some pork for his district to make his people happy so he'll be secure next election.

Now that guy's security next election is all dependent on party funding so he's gotta vote the party line every time and any deviations from the party line are a complex game of favor trading and backroom dealing and whatnot.

The parties in the US are pretty damn weak. And their ability and interest in overthrowing their own members is limited. They need to focus resources on the battleground states. So in the US, parties are much less less powerful.

In Britain, you basically get removed from the party very quickly and as an independent its incredibly hard.

Trump is only the latest example of how parties are weak in the US.

The point is to make it easier for people to hassle their representative, and to make it feasible for them to actually understand what the people they represent actually want.

Change.

Nation-wide Chesterton's Fence happening right now, with people learning a hard lesson soon enough. Let's just hope it won't be too late to repair their broken systems.

The only real issue is these assholes are taking me down with them.

Maybe that's what the people want?

Maybe they don't like the fact that there's people out there making 500 grand a year? At least not while they're struggling to make ends meet on 50 grand a year.

Now your leaders are supposed to be wise enough to not take down the 500 grand a year guys. But what if they aren't?

And someone with a mere 10m in the bank makes more than 500 grand just from their wealth appreciating.

Yet people seem to have far less concern about people with such relatively low wealth.

I'm WAY closer to the 50k group than the 500k group. I just want a leader who has some empathy.

> It's never too late to fix. The problem is the time frame.

We're never out of time but the problem is time? There is absolutely a point of no return.

Sorry, I should have said:

The problem is the time frame of the fix

If the US ends up a smoking ruin it can still be fixed, it'll just take longer.

I mean, eventually we also hope some other places develop something like a functioning democracy, or whatever is better in the future, and we hope it will be a matter of time until they at some point do.

The problem with the US is though, that they have the most powerful military on the planet, and the US ending up in smoking ruins probably means lots of other places going down with it, when the US looks outside for reasons of its failure. It is quite dangerous.

Change what though? I'm convinced a lot of this has been right wing media portraying government as corrupt and broken for decades while demonizing the Democratic party as being responsible. True, some of this is likely the result of globalism and neoliberalism, but instead of an educated debate on the tradeoffs involved and how the world has changed, there is a culture war.

For life to be worse for the people they don't like. They just didn't expect it to be worse for them too

A rational theory of spite suggests that even if they know that it will be worse for them too, if the level of their spite is great enough, they are still better off because the joy of the suffering of others is greater than their own induced suffering.

By my reckoning, Trump is just the reactionary talk radio monster of Limbaugh, Gingrich, and others finally escaping its cage. They'd get people all riled up with low-information rage against the gubmint, and then dial it back just enough to herd them to the booth to vote for establishment republicans. The main way the party has morphed is that the inmates have finally taken over the asylum.