It's hard to reform when many Americans are in an abusive relationship with their own party. A Pew poll in 2017[1] showed that the majority of the most partisan supporters choose their own party because they hate the other one, rather than they like their own. You cannot make reform on destruction and hate. There is little positive energy to create really new proposals.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity-personal-politics-views-of-trump/8_04/" rel="nofollow">https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity...</a>
Governmental response to corona virus made me really depressed.<p>If we look at current response of the various governments, it looks like they effectively decided to increase the already high level of income inequality even further.<p>It seems system is unwilling to revise itself at all, which will keep making various socioeconomic issues worse in the long run.<p>I guess one good thing is that current system keeps getting less and less stable with each crisis, so sooner or later it will collapse for real, once that happens I hope humans will be able to come together and build something better.
I think any sufficiently complex system is hostile to reform just through its natural inertia, which in a huge system is a complex and fascinating topic itself.<p>But when you have truly enormous amounts of money and power at stake and a system that has settled into a certain posture that has concentrated those resources into certain hands...of course it would be very hostile to any change.<p>As the article states it takes shocks to bring about significant changes and hopefully we can move things forward some as a result of the current situation.
Any system that continues to exist is necessarily self-perpetuating. Otherwise it wouldn't continue to exist. This is why there's been so many states that either existed for a flicker (innumerable Southeast Asian nations, nomadic states, etc) or for hundreds of years (Rome, the Russian Empire, the United States). The former were unable to keep themselves stable while the latter's rigidity did so. Of course, that same rigidity can be quite the liability when stress is placed upon it...
The biggest problem with the U.S. political system is our first-past-the-post voting system. Are you fed up with your party and want to vote for a Green instead of a Democrat or a Libertarian instead of Republican? Go ahead, all it will accomplish is benefiting the candidate you like the LEAST because you would have otherwise voted for their opponent.<p>I'm of the opinion that high voter participation is critically important because if you're not voting, you're not being represented, and if you're not being represented, those who are will benefit (likely) at your expense. In the U.S. however, people are understandably unenthusiastic about voting, because it almost doesn't matter.<p>Imagine what would have happened in 2016 if we had ranked choice voting and Bernie ran as an independent. Many on the left would have been energized to actually vote because they could vote for the candidate they actually wanted (Bernie), but would have been able to say "well if Bernie doesn't win, I guess Hillary is better than Trump". Bernie wouldn't have won, but neither would Trump. More importantly, though, those that supported Bernie would have been <i>represented</i>. You could point to the actual election results and see that X% of voters supported Bernie's ideas above the other candidates'.<p>The problem with the U.S. is that we don't get to vote for the best candidate, we get to vote for the least worst.<p>And don't get me started on the over-representation of low population states in the senate and electoral college.
The United States is ungovernable in any coherent manner, except as an empire. It's far too large and culturally incompatible. There is no logical reason the people of appalachia should be governed by people on the west coast, or vice versa.<p>The real power centers, the banking, corporate and foreign-policy elites, are content to govern the empire indirectly, and keep us all fighting with one another over things like pronouns, so long as wages are ruthlessly suppressed.<p>It will keep going. Until it stops.