Your frustration is justified, but the core sources of our problems isn’t party corruption or gerrymandering, it’s acute political, economic, governmental, and scientific centralization that has stripped away meaningful democratic control. Part and parcel with that is that Congress, once a serious body that directed national priorities, has been hollowed out, with real authority shifting to an entrenched administrative state, corporate interests, and global financial structures. The solution isnt to remove representative selection altogether, but to restore the old decentralized, publicly accessible mass-member party system, which once allowed ordinary people, not just the wealthy or those tied to powerful special interest groups, to shape candidate selection. The old system, which used on on-going local and engagement, local and regional conventions, and broad grassroots participation, kept national politics from becoming only the careerist, insulated oligarchy that we now have. Your critique of parties is correct in that they no longer function as they once did, but random selection, which would just create a new form of bureaucratic control. To have positive results we have to once again make the mechanisms that allowed parties to be responsive to the public in the first place. Without this, removing Congress from power will only further our slide into a technocratic dictatorship. And we must decentralize generally for parties to work again
We've been trying to reform the parties for decades now, really almost a century, and just can't seem to make any headway. I'm in the mood to cut the Gordian knot, come what may. Though that's a great point about the bureaucrats trying to control the selection process - No doubt they'd be continually trying to twist the system to benefit themselves.
In leu of any change to the selection process, the best course of action is what you describe - Grassroots engagement. That doesn't seem possible in the Democratic party, but Republicans are still (mostly) selected via local reps. Some of these local party meetings are very small, just a few people, not because people are kept out, but because people just don't care.
Its not possible as long as the system is deeply politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically centralized, because as long as it is, local engagement almost never really means anything for most people. I’ve went to go verify what we’re taught about the past, it was no where near as bad as it is today, it was on a trend, but it wasnt until after the war that things started getting really bad, but as late as the 1950s they were still functioning ok. There are some non-centralizing things that made it happen with the parties that could just be undone without decentralization, such as how in the 50s/60s they began to implement very stringent anti corruption rules/laws at the local party level while simultaneously creating the massive legalized corruption methods of PACs at the national level which — I suspect intentionally — greatly weakened the local parties at the expense of the national party thus helping to enable the centralizing of them, but it will likely require decentralization. Although, beneath the surface, there are signs that thigs are trending that way, and should a major economic crises occur, one the center cant just “print” its way out of, well, that may just provide a catalysts
Your frustration is justified, but the core sources of our problems isn’t party corruption or gerrymandering, it’s acute political, economic, governmental, and scientific centralization that has stripped away meaningful democratic control. Part and parcel with that is that Congress, once a serious body that directed national priorities, has been hollowed out, with real authority shifting to an entrenched administrative state, corporate interests, and global financial structures. The solution isnt to remove representative selection altogether, but to restore the old decentralized, publicly accessible mass-member party system, which once allowed ordinary people, not just the wealthy or those tied to powerful special interest groups, to shape candidate selection. The old system, which used on on-going local and engagement, local and regional conventions, and broad grassroots participation, kept national politics from becoming only the careerist, insulated oligarchy that we now have. Your critique of parties is correct in that they no longer function as they once did, but random selection, which would just create a new form of bureaucratic control. To have positive results we have to once again make the mechanisms that allowed parties to be responsive to the public in the first place. Without this, removing Congress from power will only further our slide into a technocratic dictatorship. And we must decentralize generally for parties to work again
That's a good point, thank you.
We've been trying to reform the parties for decades now, really almost a century, and just can't seem to make any headway. I'm in the mood to cut the Gordian knot, come what may. Though that's a great point about the bureaucrats trying to control the selection process - No doubt they'd be continually trying to twist the system to benefit themselves.
In leu of any change to the selection process, the best course of action is what you describe - Grassroots engagement. That doesn't seem possible in the Democratic party, but Republicans are still (mostly) selected via local reps. Some of these local party meetings are very small, just a few people, not because people are kept out, but because people just don't care.
Its not possible as long as the system is deeply politically, economically, governmentally, and scientifically centralized, because as long as it is, local engagement almost never really means anything for most people. I’ve went to go verify what we’re taught about the past, it was no where near as bad as it is today, it was on a trend, but it wasnt until after the war that things started getting really bad, but as late as the 1950s they were still functioning ok. There are some non-centralizing things that made it happen with the parties that could just be undone without decentralization, such as how in the 50s/60s they began to implement very stringent anti corruption rules/laws at the local party level while simultaneously creating the massive legalized corruption methods of PACs at the national level which — I suspect intentionally — greatly weakened the local parties at the expense of the national party thus helping to enable the centralizing of them, but it will likely require decentralization. Although, beneath the surface, there are signs that thigs are trending that way, and should a major economic crises occur, one the center cant just “print” its way out of, well, that may just provide a catalysts