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Notes -
Wild suggestion - every 50 years or so we switch to dictatorship for a while to clean up the mess.
To this and @2rafa's comment below;
Please don't slip into blackpill "debugging authoritarianism."
The solution is simply less legislation and regulation over. Less bureaucracy, less gover-nance.
One of the reasons I like to describe myself as a Willmoore Kendall conservative is because he specifically talks about the dirty trick of citizens of all political persuasions now (which is to say, in the 1960s!) taking as axiomatic a level of daily government interference in their lives that leaders from the founding fathers through to Lincoln and all the way up to (just before) FDR would have found pants-shittingly insane and illiberal.
The eager temptation nowadays is to use those evil powers for good (which is an inherent and intractable contradiction) - I.e. having an "authoritarian white boy summer" to drain the swamp or whatever. If you accomplish even those admirable ends by illiberal means, you've just set conditions for a counter-movement to swing back the other way in even greater force. "They did this, so we gotta do that!" is always a good rallying cry.
I'll admit that I don't have a great solution or even strategy for how to yield these ends with non-evil means. I think SCOTUS will help very slowly and over a very long term. I think the Federal bureaucracy may eventually collapse under its own weight and be re-organized. I can already see that the PMC factories we call universities are burning themselves down. But, "victory" (however you may define it) is still far from guaranteed. To get somehow even more handwavy, I think a byproduct of an actual kinetic conflict with China could be a revitalization in patriotic citizenship that may contribute to a larger suspicion of hyper-individualism. Then again, without a large scale draft of military recruitment effort, the war will be "a Washington thing" that is actually a fucking everybody thing. I'm starting to go in circles here, so I'll cut it off.
Liberalism and democracy are tools not goals.
I think you mistake what me and 2rafa are talking about is that a state have 2 modes - slow burn and fast. Democracy is by design made to be ineffective - especially the modern, especially the US one. And whenever you look at history - the big fast efficient strides are made usually under some form of authoritarian government. Democracy is quite good in maintaining a nash equilibrium, authoritarian government - into moving from one to another. Both have uses. A deep state problem can't be solved democratically - as is big all encompassing bureaucracy.
But right now - the authoritarian streak of the US is manifested trough courts which perverts the justice system.
Hmm, okay. There's something here.
Totally agree with your latest comment (especially like the Nash equilibrium usage) ... And also agree that the big changes do happen under an authoritarian model (especially if a crisis is involved; Civil War, WW2, 2008 Financial Crisis).
But my value assertion remains the same - we shouldn't ever really be ok with an authoritarian system.
So, I guess the question / problem becomes - I am being naive and wishful in thought that it will never happen again (probably?) If it's unavoidable, should we seek to steer towards "conservative authoritarianism", however that odd term is defined? I take it that that's roughly your/@2rafa's position?
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A good move would be to appoint a president with absolute power under the constitution (ie to make any law except that which SCOTUS rules unconstitutional) for a single 8-year term, with Congress’ sole function being to approve a new debt ceiling every 5 years and - but only with a supermajority in both houses - to dismiss the president if necessary. A secondary mechanism could involve a supermajority of state governments doing the same. That’s enough safeguards to avoid an insane dictator while allowing for high capacity governance.
Problem is that there's not enough counterweight then to keep that president from messing with the legislation or even just enforcement around voting. Eight years you're out is legible enough to create a Schelling point to unite the country around enforcement. Look at the drama in the last election around single-digit percentages of votes. That is a healthy thing, I like seeing that. I think it'd be too easy to suppress that with near-absolute power.
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