Setting aside Capitalism vs. Communism (or maybe I just think I am), this structure vs. that. Why is it that there aren’t really huge lists of alternatives? Where are the people who are imagining new government structures?
Like electing citizens to office at random, like we do with jury duty (forget the word for it). Or totally different arrangements of legislatures. Or even a pure democracy in a modern sense. That one is especially probably a terrible idea, and they’re not even that unique, but who is brainstorming this stuff? Is it mostly just sci-fi authors? Where is it talked about that isn’t already bending toward a team in the already-existing scheme of things? Even the most radical sorts are referencing back to books/ideas that are a century old. There are ultimately like four ideas and we just kind of gave up? That’s all of them?
Why have we seen so few different approaches tried? Or seemingly even imagined? I feel like even in fiction, it’ll be 2,000 years in the future and the whole thing is structured like a glorified city council ruling entire star systems. I feel like it’s difficult even for our minds to imagine anything truly inventive, in that sense. Is that baked into the concept? Is it because we’re just dumb monkeys that only understand “big strong monkey better?” HAS this stuff been written about extensively and I’m just unaware (probably, yes)?
If you have any specific examples, that’s just the kind of thing I’m after. Stuff that makes me go, “whoa, I didn’t know that was even a thing!”
Have a read of Wengrow and Graeber’s The Dawn Of Everything. It’s a re-examination of the political implications of archeology, and it’s pretty inspiring. Definitely dispelled me of any notion that capitalism or communism or totalitarianism were the only plausible systems.
If Wengrow and Graeber were required reading every civics/government/social studies curriculum for high school age students, the world would be a much better place.
That sounds spot-on, thank you!
Ideally, you would find a “philosopher king”, but that’s unlikely to happen. The next best option would be liquid democracy or some sort of direct democracy. If that’s not an option, you could switch to preferential voting that leads to a coalition parliament fairly often. Proportional representation works too. Basically anything other than FPTP.
Think of a more direct democracy. I will oversimplify enough to annoy those from Switzerland:
Differing levels of law require differing thresholds. Country votes on a law, the majority above the required threshold vote it in. It becomes a national law. That is easy. What about when it fails? Then look to the state level. Did it pass the threshold for your state? Yes? Then it is a state law. Failed state level? Let’s look at your county/city/local level. Passed threshold? Local law.
Again, over simplified, but general idea.
The Constitution of the Italian Republic and The Constitution Of The Republic of Poland have been interesting to read. Reading about the ways the Knesset and Parliament of the United Kingdom and the Riksdag work has also been interesting. I’m sure the constitution of Germany is interesting too, but it uses a structure that is less similar to the others I’ve researched recently (elected representatives of the states are involved in choosing federal representatives, whereas in other places local representatives have much less influence on country-wide elections).
It’s also interesting to see who is the commander in chief of the armed forces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander-in-chief
In general, I find it hard to design fundamental social institutions (constitutions), but I expect that someone will find a way to improve those that we already have.
In particular, I would not have come up with the Constitution of the Italian Republic if I was working in isolation, but I haven’t noticed any major flaws with it (at least for periods of peace: the election of the president requires participation from every region, so if one was occupied by a foreign power such that it could not participate in an election it might be impossible to elect a president). One thought I had is that it might be good to limit the president’s ability to dissolve parliament, like limiting that power to cases where the parliament has had a significant amount of time to produce a budget but hasn’t actually done so (as is the situation for Poland), to avoid situations where the president says they dissolved the parliament but the parliament says they impeached the president before being dissolved.
Some similarities I’ve found
Of the states I referred to, there are some interesting similarities I’ve noticed.