I can’t help but feel democracy needs a huge amount of separation between the legal and political systems to remain functional.
As in attorney generals, judges etc. should be appointed by a non political process. I think any rebuttals of the form ‘the other side did it too’ just add weight to this viewpoint.
I think I probably agree on general principle, but everything's a tradeoff. Do this and you end up with what gets perceived (and potentially actually is) a "deep state" of entrenched bureaucrats that are not accountable to voters, even though they pursue real policy goals that are separate from partisan campaign considerations.
The entire government was intended to have 3 competing branches keeping each other's desire for power balanced against one another.
Unfortunately, Duverger's Law (splitting votes results in your least favorite candidate winning) made it so that there were only two competing parties, each able to most effectively campaign by sabotaging the other. This kept going until one secured control over every branch, and their masters strong-armed enough support from the other party to finish the job against the protests of a few holdouts.
The founding fathers didn't have the math to understand game theory, nash equilibria, and the tragedy of the commons. They didn't know that plurality voting applied to the prisoner's dilemma would result in the worst suffering outcome for both/all participants.
If instead of voting for one candidate ({+1, 0, 0, ...}) we had used partial votes ({+1, +0.5, -0.5, 0, 0, ...} without repeating candidates or scores) with limited expressiveness (to preserve partisanship rather than creating a purity test like China's approval system creates) we could vote for the output of the decision matrix rather than just the blind, selfish inputs. This would prevent the states from being carved up into two parties, instead having 3-4 local parties available to represent each state more accurately and intelligently.
The benefits to representation, cooperation, constructiveness, and intelligence (creating win-win outcomes) would have been enormous. It would've meant far more proactive handling of long-term issues rather than short-term gains. Yet here we are.
What made America great was open, honest, constructive competition made possible by opportunity. What we face now is the destruction of competition itself, driving what remains underground, set to emerge in catastrophically destructive form.
> The founding fathers didn't have the math to understand game theory, nash equilibria, and the tragedy of the commons.
I mean they had something even better. They added a process to amend the constitution so that as issue arose it could be fixed.
However there's no amount of game theory that will get around the fact politicians won't fix a system they see as working; they got correctly elected after all!
As in attorney generals, judges etc. should be appointed by a non political process. I think any rebuttals of the form ‘the other side did it too’ just add weight to this viewpoint.