Bhutan, after prioritizing happiness, now faces an existential crisis

That's just true, but people were wrong before when they thought we were good (and they may be wrong now about why we're a bad example).

There's a reason that when we (anyone, really, but even the US) let the policy nerds set up a democracy somewhere else, they usually don't model much or any of it on the US. The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century, as it became clear that not only does it have serious problems, but some of those are extremely resistant to repair.

I think the 3/5ths compromise is a good highlight of the poorness of the model of democracy the USA established from its formation. "A democracy of the people but only 3/5 of those people who only have a voice by proxy entrusted to their captives", falls quite short of an ideal model.

  > The system's not been regarded as especially good, as systems of democracy go, since not later than the early 20th century

what are some of the problems in your view?

The FPTP system of elections used for most federal elections in the country is certainly the worst part. Stabilizing at only two viable parties rather than several that must (most of the time) form coalitions to govern causes a bunch of problems, with few benefits. It is also why so much of the rest is hard to fix, including why this system of elections has been so hard to move away from. At the strictly federal level, the notorious electoral college system reinforces FPTP and has accomplished little of its positive intentions, leaving only "give lower-free-population slave states more power" (which has become simply "give lower population states more power" after the civil war) which effect is simply bad, as was the original primary reason for including it (and again, secondary reasons like "direct election of a position like president is kinda dumb [true!] so we should instead vote for trusted, wise representatives to go make the decision for us" never worked as intended, so aren't reasons to keep it)

The Supreme Court was recognized as super-dangerous at the founding and the solution some of our much-revered founders provided was "I guess we can just ignore them when they do really bad things?" which definitely seems not great.

Lack of a defense against gerrymandering is extremely bad, but file under things that jettisoning FPTP would largely fix without further specific action. The many ill effects of FPTP are why it's so bad.

There's some evidence that common law significantly increases the overall cost of government administration over continental systems of jurisprudence, though that's a more-recent and developing area of potential weakness.

That wouldn't explain why US democracy seems dysfunctional today, though.

The crazy thing is that in the recent 2024 US election, there were a number of ballot initiatives to replace FPTP, and FPTP won every time. Ranked choice was even repealed in Alaska. The majority spoke, and they said they prefer an "inferior" system.

Democracy has a fascinating "self-refuting" quality to it.

It kind of stands to reason when you consider the incentives in a hyper-partisan environment. FPTP generally benefits one major party over the other - which party it is varies depending on the location, but either way, it means that the same people who generally run the place and have the most long-term political power in it have the incentive to reject reform. And the vast majority of voters aren't going to delve into the details; if the people whom they generally already vote for tell them that ranked choice etc is a "power grab" by the other guys, they'll believe it. These days, such agitprop is often couched in terms that deliberately evoke various cultural issues - e.g. where Democrats are the ones opposing ranked choice, it is often presented as "diluting the power of minority voters".

Democracy is not exactly a single thing though, but current forms kind of do have that quality, yes. "Casting binary votes on specific questions and no take-backs" is actually a kind of terrible model of democracy. There's got to be other ways.

If we take "a healthy interpersonal relationship between people with mutual respect, self-knowledge, and strong communication skills" as a model, we can see how two or more people continually grow into the kinds of lives they want to lead by working together, and that's the kind of democracy I'd like to have.

Obviously, this doesn't scale. But that doesn't mean we just give up and take the lazy, clearly bad option. We ought to evaluate the situation we're actually in and adapt.

I mean, FPTP is obviously bad, but if we're being honest, we should expect a plurality if not majority of people to be unable to recognize a bad decision even when it's presented to them as such. We know that if you run enough emotionally-triggering ads and you will get supporters of virtually any idea - this is basically the concept of manufactured consent. And I think our society can't really evolve in a healthy way until we accept that more widely. (By accept, I mean "beware of", not "exploit".)

If you want a program to run efficiently and give you good results, you don't just keep taking lazier and lazier approaches and delete functions you don't understand. You carefully refactor. It's a continuous process. That's what we're supposed to do with our democratic institutions, but unfortunately, we're stuck focusing on specific outputs so much that we can't even understand the root problems.

Here in Colorado, it was interesting to see one of the few things the D and R parties could agree on is that FPTP was the best possible system. I'm pretty confident because without it, more parties would show up if people could actually vote for who they most align with instead of voting for (who they most align with who they believe will have a chance to win the election).

It admittedly gets game-theoretically a bit less than straightforwardly-good to unilaterally open up one's state's races to more parties when that probably means weakened political influence, in an environment where the vast majority of races are still FPTP and the two-party system will dominate.

Plus both of those two parties' leadership-class agree it's a bad idea, because it would weaken their parties and their personal power, so will tend to propagandize against such measures.

Actually the Alaska thing seems to be very close https://alaskapublic.org/2024/11/19/ranked-choice-repeal-bal...