Fantastic! There is a massive difference between Switzerland and the Anglo Saxon system: in Switzerland there is system for power sharing. Elections are not about win or lose, but about your weight in a common government.
Switzerland is the most advanced form of “democracy beyond majoritarianism”
I do not buy the Thiel technomonarchy at all, and I think the US could learn a lot from our sister republic, but there is one key difference: cultural homogeneity. I have a vague belief that it's extremely difficult to become a Swiss citizen, and as a result there is a rather long, continuous understanding of what it means to be Swiss though it evolves over time and creates its own factions. By contrast, the US is defined by heterogeneous culture, without many shared norms, especially post-1970s. The polarization is downstream of those trends, though the system exacerbates it and rewards ambitious politicians and polemicists for exploiting it. In so many ways, the US system is defined as building a system that can end zero-sum, blood-and-soil politics while still having a baseline identity of being an America with an overarching system that can accept multiple cultures.
Wonderful piece here from Kevin. So good, in fact, that I need to read it again.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the American FPTP system is enabling/creating a highly polarized environment that leads…well…not to a place that we want to go.
I do have a question though. How exactly does the Swiss system work? I understand there are still parties and proportional representation, but there is also direct democracy. Which decisions are “directly” decided, and which are decided by elected representatives?
Fantastic! There is a massive difference between Switzerland and the Anglo Saxon system: in Switzerland there is system for power sharing. Elections are not about win or lose, but about your weight in a common government.
Switzerland is the most advanced form of “democracy beyond majoritarianism”
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zzr8Pgf7pMf6tTpbM/democracy-beyond-majoritarianism
I do not buy the Thiel technomonarchy at all, and I think the US could learn a lot from our sister republic, but there is one key difference: cultural homogeneity. I have a vague belief that it's extremely difficult to become a Swiss citizen, and as a result there is a rather long, continuous understanding of what it means to be Swiss though it evolves over time and creates its own factions. By contrast, the US is defined by heterogeneous culture, without many shared norms, especially post-1970s. The polarization is downstream of those trends, though the system exacerbates it and rewards ambitious politicians and polemicists for exploiting it. In so many ways, the US system is defined as building a system that can end zero-sum, blood-and-soil politics while still having a baseline identity of being an America with an overarching system that can accept multiple cultures.
Wonderful piece here from Kevin. So good, in fact, that I need to read it again.
I don’t think there is any doubt that the American FPTP system is enabling/creating a highly polarized environment that leads…well…not to a place that we want to go.
I have long held that direct democracy is still workable, though I prefer using sortition: https://www.lianeon.org/p/imagining-our-martian-government
I do have a question though. How exactly does the Swiss system work? I understand there are still parties and proportional representation, but there is also direct democracy. Which decisions are “directly” decided, and which are decided by elected representatives?