Even if/when Trump Loses, It's Our Failed System/Institutions that Make Him Possible

This article says it pretty well, an excerpt:

https://slate.com/business/2020/11/the-election-was-insane.html

But even if this election does bring an orderly end to the Trump era, do not for a second forget that absolutely everything about it, and the year that has led us to this point, has been utterly, incalculably insane, a 50-car pileup of reminders that we are a broken society with a broken political system that seems ever-more untenable, whether or not we are doomed to spend four more years with our addled president.

It is insane, for starters, that he even has a shot of pulling this race out. Nobody, least of all Trump, believes that he will win the popular vote. It is not even a discussion at this point. But we’re all trapped in a mad house erected upon the Electoral College, an anti-majoritarian barbarism that, according to conventional wisdom, now requires Democrats to win by at least 3 percent to have a shot at the White House and drives otherwise sensible Americans to spend sleepless nights and precious emotional energy freaking out over early voting patterns in Miami-Dade.

Other countries—the ones we like to think of as our peers, even if they see us more like a tragic, strung-out uncle these days—don’t do this to themselves. In normal, advanced presidential democracies, the candidate who gets the most votes actually wins. We’re the only one where the person who comes in second can still somehow end up in charge. There is no good argument for it, in this year of our collective misery 2020. It is nuts.

It is also pure lunacy that after four years of family separations, tax cuts for the rich, transparent corruption, and deadly ineptitude, more than 4 in 10 Americans are apparently ready for another round of Trump. We are literally living through one of the worst-case scenarios experts anticipated when he was first elected: A pandemic that has killed 231,000 Americans, thanks in no small part to the White House’s botched response, and is set to ravage the country for months more, since Republican leaders seem to have mostly decided to let COVID rip and hope for the best. This a man who caught a deadly pathogen because he wanted to look tough and felt silly wearing a mask, turned a White House Rose Garden party into a superspreader event, and ended up dragging the country through a week of steroid-fueled psychodrama as doctors blasted him with experimental treatments to save his life, then somehow concluded that, hey, the disease wasn’t so bad after all. Since then, he’s moved on to talking openly about firing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted disease expert in America, after the election as payback for criticizing the administration’s response.

And yet a substantial portion of the country looks upon Trump, and his record, and sees not only a successful leader, but one they love, a figure they are willing to pack into a cold airplane hanger to cheer on while unmasked, because they apparently want to own the libs and the germ theory of disease. As a polity, we are not well.

I mean, look: If the only thing you care about is stacking the federal judiciary with conservatives, Trump has been a stellar chief executive. I get it. He just scored a hat trick on the Supreme Court. But the fact that a sizable chunk of voters, not to mention Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, sees this as the single most important goal in politics is, itself, a symptom of our country’s institutional sickness; in a functioning political framework, picking judges just would not be that high stakes of an endeavor. It would be more like nominating members of the Federal Reserve—important, but not something to wage a cold civil war over. Here in the U.S.A., however, we appoint clerics for life who have final say on what laws are permitted by our two-century-old founding scripture. Much of our governance has been warped around that process of bestowing absurd, anti-democratic power.

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Soem prescriptions for a more healthy system:

Executive
Stronger anti-corruption Executive laws (duh)
Fewer political appointees at agencies, more career appointees
Stronger revolving-door measures

Congress
Eliminate the Buster
Add States
That's just the beginning - the Senate as currently constituted is irredeemable. Eventually it needs to be dissolved, I believe this is actually possible
Less rich people in congress (raise salaries, make it harder to buy a seat)
Get rid of gerrymandering (need the courts to expand to have this, currently).

Voting Rights
Stronger protections, national voting holiday, limit federal court interference with voting rights by curtailing their jurisdiction.
Ranked choice voting (state level)
Electoral Vote Compact

Judiciary
EXPAND THE **** OUT OF THE COURTS AT ALL LEVELS - THIS IS A COMMON SENSE POLICY
Limit lower courts ability to invalidate entire federal statutes
Require a supermajority to find federal legislation unconstitutional

This is just the beginning of what we need for a functional system

 

Seems fine but the risk here is that we have a total and complete systemic failure, where presidency judicial legislative corruption and stare governments all colluded to take us to the verge of autocracy.

Can't just pass a few conflict of interest laws aimed at the presidency and then head to PF chang's for the rest of the off-season

 

I follow sean carroll too, I love his podcast.

 

I'm not young anymore, and our system seems pretty ****ing broken as compared to even 5 years ago.

 

To your point:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/theres-no-escaping-who-we-have-become/616992/

1. The American system of government is ineffective and crisis-prone.

The point of elections is to produce effective governments generally regarded as legitimate by most citizens.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. system of government has failed that test again and again. Elections now systematically disfavor voting majorities. From 1892 through 1996, the person who won the most votes became president, every time. In 2000, the U.S. got its first minority-rule president since the aftermath of the Civil War. That outcome was seen as a freak at the time. Four elections later, it happened again. Today, Trump is looking to the courts to overrule the voting majority for a third time.

It should not take the largest voter turnout in U.S. history to guarantee that a president rejected by the majority of the American people actually stops being president.

Even given that turnout, assuming Trump steps down, the electoral system will produce a gridlocked government—not because “the voters” or “the American people” wanted it that way, but because strategically positioned voters in small states did. The unrepresentativeness of state governments is even more extreme because of gerrymandering. And Republicans seem to have done well enough at the state level in 2020 to thwart any systemwide move to fairer representation in 2021.

Adam Serwer: The Supreme Court is helping Republicans rig elections

These unrepresentative state and federal governments seem less and less capable of coping with the problems of the modern world. In the span of 12 years, the U.S. has had the two worst economic collapses since the Great Depression. It has started and lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It cannot collect taxes it is owed—including from the current president. It cannot balance its books even in prosperity; in fact, it long ago ceased even to write annual budgets. It cannot police its borders against unauthorized immigration. It cannot act against existential environmental threats. It cannot protect its people from a disease that can be controlled by wearing a $5 mask.

The U.S. system depends on compromise and cooperation. The administration cannot administer without the budgets and laws passed by Congress; Congress cannot legislate without dealmaking between the parties and (except in the most extreme cases) a signature from the president. Yet the spirit necessary to make the U.S. system work is draining away.

A Biden presidency will have no choice but to do business with a Republican Party gripped by paranoid delusions and enablers of authoritarianism. That party seems unlikely to feel the shame and remorse called for by the Trump presidency. Instead, it will pour its energy into all-out war against non-Republican power holders, convinced that such conflict is the surest route back to the total control it enjoyed from 2017 to 2018. A decisive Trump defeat might have induced some renewal and redemption in the Republican Party. As is, Republican incentives favor a recommitment to corrupt and authoritarian Trumpism, reformed only by a stronger work ethic and more focused messaging.​