This article and the responses stir up a lot that’s worthy of consideration and comment. I’ll take more time and offer some more organized thinking and examples to Medium later.
For now, a few thoughts. Considering the U.S. alone, there’s so much that’s broken it’s hard to know where to start. Besides that, the existing mechanisms for fixing all that’s broken are woefully inadequate. This is a huge part of the challenge involved in fixing anything in this country.
As a child many of the simple questions I had then I still have now. None of the ‘answers’ make any real sense.
For example, what’s the deal with having states at all. Why should the law in Delaware be different from the law in Montana or Alabama? Yes, federalism and all that, but does that actually work? Is there any benefit to people? Are the needs and desires of a citizen of Texas really all that different from a citizen of New York?
What makes more sense is the view that in actual day to day reality that people live, the U.S. is 11 regions. Organizing ourselves in that way would offer tremendous advantages. This way the organizational structure would better reflect the dynamic reality.
But HOW would you ever make that happen? Any objective, factual analysis would reveal that this would make more sense than the current structure. Still no apparent method exists to achieve this better way.
The same could be said of the electoral college and the Senate — where good policy goes to die. Current events highlight the extreme dysfunction of both and the suffering this dysfunction has caused and continues to inflict.
The much hallowed Founding Fathers would be appalled by things today. They would do now what they did then. They’d look around the world and in history to identify best practises and then incorporate them into this new country and the Constitution.
Almost nothing designed in the 1700s works well today. Things are different. What makes anyone think a government designed in the 18th century should be best practice in the 21st?
An ancestor of mine, George Mason, was one of these men. He’s worth a little research. He wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution and formed the Virginia militia. He refused to sign the Constitution, even though he was one of the most frequent speakers at the Convention. Why? Primarily because it didn’t address the problem of slavery and had no Bill of Rights originally among other things. His objections are easily found online.
There were a set of values, a view of humanity, and a view of what we ought to seek in results in the way we decide to govern ourselves. Those are worth preserving and deepening. But there is NOTHING sacrosanct or necessarily optimal in the METHODS these guys came up with 200+ years ago.
They firmly believed that the methods, structures, and processes of government should be up for constant review, revision, or even a complete re-start from first principles if required.
And, by God, such a complete re-start is the only thing I see that will really beigin to fix all that is broken. Call it revolution if you like.
If there a method in our current law that would allow this it would be a new Constitutional Convention. Tweaking things here and there won’t do the job.
We must re-affirm and re-define our shared values and social objectives first, and then, from those, devise best methods by taking the examples of those doing it better than we are.
For example, if the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, and Costa Rica have better results for their people, what makes us so special or different that we can’t learn from and apply their examples?
Does American Exceptionalism mean we’re too dense to learn from others? That our answers are the only ones?
What I propose is a huge and difficult task that may well take decades to accomplish. Yet, our objective should be the same as those convening in Philadelphia way back then: a better way of life for generations and generations to come.