I will dare to admit aloud that I think maybe the founders were making a rational choice when they decided that only certain citizens would have the right to vote. As awful as that sounds, there are halfway decent arguments in favor. Maybe not just restricting to white wealthy landowners, but sometimes I do wonder if we would benefit from a filter that adequately screens for people 1) with real skin in the game and 2) a plausible claim to being well informed.

That is just a thought experiment, though, I do not believe it would play out beneficially if we tried to implement it in real life.

I like this idea in theory. In practice, the problem is that someone gets to decide who is allowed to vote and on what grounds. If that institution is corrupted, it leads to worse outcome than allowing everyone to vote. And the bad actors would have all the incentives in the world to corrupt that institution.

The answer isn’t less voters, it’s more. Australia’s compulsory voting system has successfully taken the edge off extremist ideology.

Not quite sure this works out as nicely as that. Argentina has both compulsory voting and a legal voting age of 16 and it managed to produce Javier Milei (who makes Trump look like Kissinger).

What's the best way to have a sane system? I'm not sure. I personally lost all faith in democracy.

> What's the best way to have a sane system?

A start that would not require big changes to our existing system would be open primaries. That would incentivize moderate candidates. Or perhaps eliminate primaries altogether and go with a two-stage general election like some places have for their local elections. Everybody runs, then the top two run against each other (unless one got an outright majority in the first run). Skip the more elaborate instant-runoff styles of voting because that is too advanced for average people.

Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military. Not even compulsory voting can fix those. There are dark private forces currently waging war on democracy it will be a catastrophic disaster if they win.

> Argentina is notoriously corrupt and suffers from an overly politically powerful military.

Huh? If there's one thing that Argentina did correctly that no other Latin American country under military regimes in the past century did, it was breaking the political power of the military. Most members of the National Reorganization Process died in jail, the army was greatly downsized and culturally reprogrammed and it strengthened civilian institutions. It worked well until it didn't (and the breaking point happened before Milei, to be entirely clear).

But the point is that the issue lies elsewhere. Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?

I know how it will happen. Nearly every single veto power group will give them a free pass. Naïve humanist liberals will pontificate about the ideals of democracy and freedom to do whatever you want. Boring fence-sitters will legitimate their discourse and ideas under the veil of neutrality and objectivity. Those who worship Ba'al will seek to build a symbiotic relationship. And before you realize it, White Australia has risen up once again.

> Do you think Australia won't lurch to the anti-liberal and anti-democratic side as soon as someone with the right combo of charisma and psychopathy arises?

Indeed, all of our friendly western liberal democracies should not get too comfortable thinking this insanity won't come to them. Some of them already experience increasing amounts of it, and the rest could easily be in that position.

Kissinger was a war criminal with a huge amount of blood on his hands.

That's half of the point of the comparison (otherwise I'd have picked Einstein or some other cliche smart guy).

The other half is that Kissinger was a smart and cunning piece of shit, and Trump is an absolute imbecile.

> Trump is an absolute imbecile

And thank god for that, at least. He is too stupid to make his petty policies more durable, instead relying on methods that are just as trivial to undo as they were to implement in the first place. We would be in a much worse place if he had the cunning of Kissinger.

You have to couple that with their use of STV voting and lack of a presidential system.

The problem is what to do with those people who can't vote. At worst, they'll rise up in arms and create an ever bigger mess.

If you're not into social and demographic engineering, then you're going to face a real problem.

My solution would be to get it over with and shoot everyone who disagrees with the system I'm trying to build. It sounds childish but it does actually genuinely work. It has been put in practice in so many places it's easy to lose count.

That only works in the immediate term. It isn't even a stable short term solution, let alone medium to long term. Consider what the incentives of such an approach are when iterated.

Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea.

It really depends on what stage of a regime's lifecycle you apply it at.

Obviously it's not going to be as extreme and as simple as 'go shoot people house-to-house until you're powerful :D', but repression is much more often than not effective. Think of the Arab Spring, the 2018 color coup attempt in Nicaragua, etc.

Hell, even if the incentives are completely misaligned, you can get away with it as long as you're strong and ruthless enough. The whole world thought Myanmar's military junta would implode and break under the weight of all the freedom fighters… and it's still hanging around, not the worse for wear. If you're willing to burn everything to the ground before you lose power, you can often raise the stakes to a level the other party simply can't afford.

> Unless you aspire to the way of life in places like North Korea

Here's the thing: the right-wingers already aspire to that way of life. They will implement it. At this point, it's not about whether I aspire to live like that, but about who's going to take the reins of power of that type of political structure.

Better us than them.

Right but all those examples you're listing are what I was vaguely referencing when I referred to the incentives of such an approach when iterated. The resulting government won't inevitably implode (although it often will eventually) but it doesn't result in a particularly functional society either.

> They will implement it.

> Better us than them.

Well sure, if you've already accepted defeat then I suppose that's the logical course of action. But that doesn't seem like a reasonable position to me given the available evidence.

There are far more pressing changes needed, like reducing the impact of vote buying (reasonable spending limits for political campaigns, and the lobbying problem) and a voting system that doesn't inevitably reduce down to two sides.

If people still elevate the worst candidate to POTUS after that, then blaming the voter might be in order.

Everybody should be allowed to vote, except for people who don't want everyone to vote.

Even people who openly aim to violently overthrow the government and abolish elections?

If they're an electoral majority then you already have a problem.

But the point is they're less likely to get there if they're part of the power structure.

A presumed but frequently not mentioned component of democracy is the peaceful transition of power once a decision is made.

Transition of power (peaceful or not) is not a necessary component of democracy. Nor are leaders (elected or not), representation, or power structures such as centralization of power. Pure democracy is also incredibly inefficient at scale.

Yes, why not? If they are a minority, then there's no issue. If they are a majority (or close to it), then perhaps they have a point.

This makes me think the other comment in this thread about mandatory voting may be on point. Part of our problem is that not only can we elect petty dictators with less than 50% of the vote, we can do it with way less than 50% of the adult citizenry when people cannot be bothered to vote.

Make voting mandatory, and require vote-by-mail. Or if that is too 'risky' then mandate a sufficient number of voting locations with a maximum travel distance from their voters (and maybe allow voters to go to any location convenient for them) and make it a paid federal holiday.

Pipe dream, of course. One party is too strongly incentivized to suppress the vote. They could just moderate their positions somewhat to attract more centrists, but for some reason that has not occurred to them.

In a sane world, we could compromise. I would hate to give up vote-by-mail, but as part of a grand compromise I would accept it. Empower the FEC to issue ID for voting (and only voting), give them the budget and mandate to go roving around the country periodically like the census and track down every last citizen and give them an ID. Then require that ID for in-person voting. Ostensibly this should also satisfy the GOP, but of course it won't, because it isn't actually about the ID.

People with those characteristics are often wealthy: can't have "real skin in the game" if you're just a pleb with a mortgage, 2 kids and 2 cars in a middle-class neighborhood, right? At which point, once again, those with $$ are more equal than others.

Sure, they might be better informed - which lets them figure out how best to corrupt the system.

Edit: in fact, I could see a strong reason to DISALLOW anyone in the top 1% to vote or spend any $$ towards the election.

1% of the vote isn't all that significant. It's the money that creates the problem.

Yes, part of the solution could be strongly curtailing how we apply the first amendment to political spending. Maybe elections should all be taxpayer funded, access to media guaranteed, etc. And if we do allow donations, it has to be something fairly trivial. Maximum $50 or something per person regardless of net worth.

The unregulated, unlimited money situation we have now is a big part of the problem.

The founders mistake was creating a presidential system.

I don’t think the founders made a mistake. They understood the weaknesses in their system and were very open about the fact that it wouldn’t always be smooth sailing. Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.

Liberty isn’t a constant state, but a dynamic cycle. Even 250 years ago, they knew that a guy like Donald Trump would come along.

People are admitting that now. It's happening. There's some hope that something can be done about him.