With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
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Notes -
I think we stress out too much about this shit because terms are too long. If we had Presidential and Congressional elections every six months people would be a lot more chill about it all. People would argue that such terms would be too short for the winners to develop any sort of continuity once in office but you know what, it's not the 18th century anymore, they have access to much more powerful tools than before. And in any case, that's their problem.
Shorter terms would also give us more opportunity to see how different politicians handle relatively similar issues. So much changes in four years that there's relatively little way to get a feel for how two politicians would handle the same issue.
I believe that most things that effectively reduce the impact of each particular politician have the net effect of transferring power to what we would call the "deep state", all of the unelected aides, assistants, bureaucrats, etc that actually stay in the same jobs for long times. This is usually in reference to tougher term limits, but I think it would apply to dramatically shorter terms too.
There is tremendous power in having long experience in a system, knowing what has and hasn't worked in the past, all the ins and outs of all the little rules, who knows how to do what, etc. The more we limit the amount of time actual elected politicians spend in office, the more we transfer that power to their unelected aides who actually know how to get things done, and can slow-walk anything they don't like while accelerating anything they do.
I don't think any "tools" can fix that problem, because it's about power. Tools that actually increase a politician's power effectively versus the system will never be built, because it's not in anyone's interest to make it easier for any newcomers to accumulate power. Power is only effectively increased at the expense of other people with power, who can't be expected to cooperate in the process.
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I think if anything that would be worse. As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices. The trouble we have now is due to short terms. The house barely gets settled in and knowing where the bathrooms are before it’s time to run for office. And this kind of short term means that they really don’t have to do anything concrete to fix problems. Worse, if you can make it looks like you’ve fixed something but the consequences of your bad fix don’t show up within two years, you’ll be gone before the negatives hit. Even four years for president is pretty short. By the time the economic impact of your policies hit the mainstream, you’ll be packing up to move out.
The second thing is that really, the short terms mean politics is taking up an extraordinary amount of the collective bandwidth of the public imagination. Every two years we’re choosing new leaders, and that means 6+ months every two years of constant speculation, political ads, push polling, and punditry aimed at convincing the public to vote in a given way. Worse, because fear and anger are the most effective means of inducing people to care about politics, we spend those six months learning to hate those who disagree with us politically. You hate abortion? You’re killing women, you sexist. Oh, you’re pro abortion? Baby killer! And so on, through every major issue. This tends to create tensions between people that shouldn’t exist. And the wounds caused by this short cycle never completely heal.
In my opinion, politics, ideally would be such a minor part of life that they really don’t matter. The general public is not served by a system so broken that it’s near top of mind what a political figure said or did today or any other day. It’s not supposed to be that important, and frankly, if the government worked properly, you wouldn’t have to constantly baby sit it and change its nappies.
One interesting thing is that IIRC the Federalist Papers contemplated that Cabinet Secretaries would need Senate advice and consent to be replaced, and generally serve across administrations. That might be a reasonable blend of longevity in office but with rapid accountability for particular screwups.
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Counter-argument: make all political appointments for life and multiply the salary many times over. This way politicians can spend their life going after whatever entity they think does the most damage (whether big tech / Amazon, school unions, pharma, etc) without worrying how it affects the party or the next election.
Maybe give them cool hats to wear as symbols of their office, while we're at it. But unironically I think it's a better plan than what we're doing now.
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that would be a logistics nightmare
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Would liquid democracy be stressful?
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