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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24719 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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Our rationalist-adjacent 'friend' and (perhaps?) sometimes lurker mister Curtis Yarvin has another new substack article out, titled The Situation and the Solution..

It's a long article, and follows his typical style of being quite doomer about the political situation, lamenting how weak modern men are, and generally telling us that for REAL regime change we need HARDCORE monarchy, with no letting up.

However, he does make an interesting point, which dovetails nicely with something @coffee_enjoyer said downthread, as I'll quote here:

he joy that men get from fulfilling these natural instincts is intended to be set against defectors and foreign invaders; that is why humans have this instinct. But American education has made them phobic about this truth at a young age, and modern Christian theology erroneously leads them believe that it is evil. But the Somali, with his rich history of piracy and tribalism, and his religion which celebrates war against the Kafir, is not confused by any of these illusions. The scamming is fun in itself. It is one of life’s greatest joys. They would do it even if they only make out with a single dollar, just as American men do it for free in virtual pretend worlds.

Moldbug agrees that fun is one of the missing elements in modern white culture and politics. He recommends replacing a modern 'soft party' with what he calls a 'hard party,' partially by making things fun:

Voting is fun and exciting. So is war. Voting is symbolic war. Also fun and exciting: raiding an enemy tribe, catching them asleep, slaughtering their fighters, and leading their women and children home in ropes to their new lives as slaves—carrying the remains of their husbands and fathers, already in steaks for the party. Since this is the way Homo sapiens lived for millions of years, it must be possible to activate the motivational instincts behind this behavior, even just on your iPhone.

What I find most interesting is Yarvin's vision of a 'hard party app', where people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.

Yarvin sees this gamification as a way to essentially recreate the old, militaristic political parties of the past, for modern men's sensibilities. He understands that modern men are much softer and weaker, so instead of continuing to try and make people angry and pissed off, which hasn't worked, he wants the right to play towards the fun that it can be to band together to fight your enemies.

While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?

I'm sure there are some reasons, but especially now that Yarvin has posted about it, I wonder how long it will take for political parties to adopt this app-style, gamified setup. And, I wonder how that will change the political game as we know it?

As I was reading it, it seemed to me that the problem is he seems to believe an app can somehow assign will be fanatically loyal without any way to actually assure any of that.

I think this is the way to go. Armies historically bestowed titles, fashion accessories, accolades, and other conspicuous signals of status in order to direct human behavior toward an intended aim. The Boy Scouts used to do this to much success. The most popular RPG games do this, and it works because people can immediately see your status, and this feels satisfying even when it occurs in a totally virtual world with no influence on real life. Reddit does this, the world of finance does this. Literally the most addicting activities incorporate this feature. Paul, when motivating Christians, tells them to seek the heavenly crowns and prizes, and Jesus promises that the one who overcomes will sit on a throne, working with this same instinct.

(It looks like I stole Yarvin’s substack post in the OP quote, but I promise I did not; maybe we both read something that inspired a similar thought)

(It looks like I just stole Yarvin’s idea there, but I promise I did not; maybe we both read something that inspired a similar thought)

I didn't think you did. Your line of thinking matches up well with the app idea regardless. I do think that specifically engineering status symbols in group hierarchies is crucially important, and something almost no major groups do now! Quite strange.

It has a cult like smell to it for new people.

My mother recently joined the DAR and they have a whole badge system for in group rewards.

Scouts organizations get away with it, cuz it's cute when kids do culty things and the adults quietly role their eyes a little.

While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible!

It already exists. Greg Abbott has one that's off the ground and the RNC has a beta-testing version. Presumably the DNC is trying to decolonize one.

Do I get to collect and battle politicians? Maybe a Pokemon Go type game for canvassing.

I don't think that "gamifying" politics will revolutionize it for the same reason that various attempts to gamify productivity haven't resulted in a massive productivity boom. This doesn't mean that such an app is necessarily a bad idea inasmuch as it might be a net positive, but I tend to doubt it's going to "make things fun" or at least fun enough to dramatically change political life.

When I was an undergraduate student, I was offered a free tablet and told it would be "fun" (I knew some of the people involved and yes did enjoy hanging out with them) if I minded a bunch of high schoolers as part of a GOTV effort. It didn't sound fun to me, regardless of the inducements, and I declined. Now, obviously, the model employed by that organization wasn't flawed: that was enough inducement for enough people to make their effort work! But if those weightier inducements didn't work on me I doubt "gamifying" it will induce most people, even regular voters, to do things like activism or volunteering.

Weird inconsistency for him. Usually his spiel is about how making things more restrictive and exclusive them better. Like the urbit project.

He's doing Formalism again really: politics is already an MLM cult, therefore let's make it take the trappings of one so that we may clearly identify the dynamics and therefore benefit Lions rather than Foxes.

I was just listening to the man rail against populist non-solutions yesterday! He did or is doing interviews in the UK for whatever reason. It was this Liz Truss podcast because why wouldn't Liz Truss have a podcast?

He starts out talking about the full sovereignty enjoyed by British parliament, but then goes down a rabbit hole with some pie-in-the-sky, untested, cyber-punk app idea. Why not go with what you know works (and has worked for 700+ years). Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system. I bet you could get support from a lot of unexpected corners. You can call the prime minister the president if you want, for the sake of the hard core traditionalists. But otherwise, it would be a clean sweep.

For the record, I prefer stability over all of this. But if you are going to do something, copy an existing model and implement it well. That's how China is eating our lunch. We might as well eat someone else's.

Call a constitutional convention with the express stated purpose of switching the US over to a parliamentary system. Everyone hates the current system.

Because the one thing that doesn't work in the current system is the legislative branch. We're good at electing national avatars, "good" at constructing deep-state bureaucracies, and good at having hypertrophic judiciaries/legal oversight.

What we're NOT good at is actually doing representative legislation. Congress is increasingly a useless puppet show. Outright eliminating the independent executive and shoving everything at congress (or a new "American Parliament") is liable just lock in civil service rule as it has in much of the rest of the anglosphere.

A lot of that is a function of how the representatives are chosen though. We have A) an extremely polarizing primary process, and B) a system that allows the executive and agencies to function in a weird sort of limbo while the legislature does nothing. Those are both problems caused by perverse incentives, that could easily be fixed by a better structure.

You'd need to install a super-powerful non-delegation doctrine preventing Congress from passing broad enabling acts and then leaving all the actual regulating to executive agencies. And probably ban cameras/TV from the House/Senate floor. Otherwise they'll just keep doing that and resuming their job as Jr Varsity TV pundits.

Also fun and exciting: raiding an enemy tribe, catching them asleep, slaughtering their fighters, and leading their women and children home in ropes to their new lives as slaves—carrying the remains of their husbands and fathers, already in steaks for the party.

I see Yarvin is once again back to LARPing as a psycho.

Voting is symbolic war.

Political campaigning, much like military campaigning, is 99% tedious and unglamorous shit, and even the exciting bits are quite often exciting in the wrong way. Militaries resolve this by not allowing soldiers to quit (and, often, by not allowing them to refuse to participate). Political parties don't have such tool kits available, so they have to resort to cheap carrots. Which is to say, we already do what Yarvin proposes, just not through an app. Politics, especially local politics, operates heavily on a prestige economy, where you can climb the ladder just by being willing to show up and do boring organizational work.

The problem is that Yarvin is wrong. Most people don't crave this level of political engagement. Trump's big success is with low-propensity voters who are like 50/50 on whether they can be fucked to fill out their entire ballot in presidential election years. Votr^tm badges are not going to persuade them to commit massive amounts of time and effort in political ground game. They want to watch the game, they don't want to be out on the field getting demolished.

An app as an organizing tool would have limited utility, anyway. You could rally the grunts, perhaps, but an open registration tool would be hilariously vulnerable to sabotage and subversion.

instead of continuing to try and make people angry and pissed off, which hasn't worked

It has worked. The problem confronting Trumpism isn't that its supporters aren't motivated. It's

a) they have a ceiling of 51% of the vote, meanwhile about 40% of the country wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire and the marginal Trump voter will desert or stay home once it becomes clear he won't/can't deliver on his fanciful promises.

b) the gaps between their promises, their ideas, and their competence are insurmountable (but that's populism for you).

While I don't always agree with Yarvin's extremely pessimistic take on right wing politics, I have to admit that the app idea is incredible! This is one of those ideas I read and thought... huh, why don't we already do this in politics?

Because the two party FPTP system has produced incumbents who do not benefit from a more engaged voting base. Democracy is fundamentally evolutionary rather than intelligently designed, those currently in power have been produced by the current system, and changing it means undermining their own success. Using an app-style gamified setup would alter the makeup of the electorate, and that would change who gets elected.

Every member of congress won a party primary voted in by people who currently vote in party primaries, then won a general election won by people who currently vote in general elections. Altering the makeup of the electorate will result in fewer incumbent members of congress being reelected.

The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on. The primary had settled in the past into a mix of formal rules and customs where a lineup of evangelical conservatives and a lineup of moderates would run a series of primaries until settling on two champions to duke it out. Trump stepped into this structure, which was not created and negotiated for the purpose of the MAGA faction seizing power, and hacked it by inventing the MAGA faction which transcended these boundaries. It was both radically more socially conservative than the evangelicals on immigration and anti-feminism, and radically less socially conservative on gays and the sexual revolution more generally; he combined an aggressive nationalism which appealed to NatSec neocon moderates, with feigning a libertarian anti-interventionist condemnation of nation building adventures abroad.

Such a solution to political party engagement will exist where and when it benefits the existing power bases, and not otherwise. What allowed the MAGA faction to hijack the existing Republican party and skinsuit it was that it hacked the system in an accidental ambush not by elaborate plan.

Further:

people sign up to an app for their preferred political party, and then the political party gamifies political action. If you sign up, download the app, and pay your dues, you get basic party affiliation. If you go vote in an election or two, you get a badge. If you go and engage in some activism or political volunteering, you get an even doper badge, level up, or whatever.

Is already really close to how things work now if you show up at the local level. You do small things, which gain status, pretty soon you can do bigger things. It just happens in real life, and less legibly to those used to sitting behind screens and getting XP for completing quests.

Where I disagree with Yarvin's essay is that I don't think MAGA has failed, I think that the hard MAGA faction within the Trump administration has specifically come to the realization that they will not have time to build anything before they lose and run out of steam. What they do have time to do is destroy. They can't build a new international order, but they can so undermine the reliability of the United States as a partner that no future neocon administration will be able to find willing patsies and partners. They can't actually build an American manufacturing base, but they can destroy the decades old system of international cooperation such that it cannot easily be rebuilt. They can't rebuild the federal government, but they can make it an unreliable and annoying place to work. I think that DOGE and MAGA have achieved a great deal of destruction in the federal government through weaponized incompetence and chaos, and that it will not be rebuilt in our lifetime.

PS: I don't know if he's lost his fastball or I just lost interest, but I find Yarvin increasingly unreadable lately.

The makeup of the electorate can be changed only when one or another existing faction within the party seeks to change the rules to benefit themselves, or when an outside force appears that hacks the evolutionary created rules. Trump(ism) was such a force: Trump did not have majority support within the existing Republican electorate when he announced, but he was able to hack the system and stack enough wins to become inevitable before a single competitor could be settled on.

One of these days I will have to write my oral history of the Republican civil war, but today is not that day.

In any case that is not how I remember things going down.

What Trump did was accurately identify key fault lines that cut across large swaths of both the conservative and corporate sides of the Republican electorate as well as former Democrats who'd been alienated by the national party's embrace of things like open borders, decarceration, drag queens in pre-schools, and men in women's sports. IE "it's the economy stupid", bread and butter issues are what win elections. This should not have been such a novel insight but this is where the whole "skin in the game" element comes into play.

By the spring of 2016 it was already clear that the upcoming election would be a fight between the beltway establishment and some variant of the Tea-Party with Hillary Clinton representing the establishment. A vote for Hillary was a vote for more of the same, and for a large swath of the population who viewed the foreign, financial, and domestic policies of the last decade as just one massive fuck-up after another "more of the same" was not a compelling sales pitch. @faceh's rant about rewarding failure reflects much of the sentiment I heard from voters at the time. As such it seemed clear to me that despite being the favorites of the national party neither Jeb Bush nor Chris Christie ever really stood a chance. If a voter wanted business as usual, what did either of those two have to offer over Hillary? Accordingly the 2016 Republican primary looked like it was Ted Cruz's to lose. However, Cruz's campaign was hampered by the fact that he was a career politician with no real accomplishments to his name aside of being able to climb the party ladder. As such there was a lot of discussion at the state committee level about whether Cruz had the balls to fight the beast or would he become just another beltway stooge if elected.

something I don't think that a lot of our more liberal posters here really grasp is that despite their surface level similarities the internal organization and power structures of the Republican and Democratic parties are radically different. Republican state and municipal committees are more like independent chapters than wholly-owned subsidiaries. State and municipal reps wield real power and a national party endorsement doesn't carry the same weight in funding or in raw primary votes that it would in the Democratic Party. The Florida RNC backed Trump over Jeb Bush despite Bush being the governor of Florida at the time, and there wasn't anything the national committee could do about it because Florida was a net contributor to the national fund.

Enter Trump, Trump doesn't have Cruz's problem, he's not a career politician, he has a portfolio of accomplishments he can point to, and for all the sneering from establishment liberals about him not being a proper gentlemen, there is no question in anyone's mind about whether he has the balls or stomach for a fight. By adopting the most popular planks of the Tea-Party platform he immediately made himself the front runner. Cruz and Trump would fight it out to the end, but the choice was only ever going to be between Tea-Party original recipe (Cruz and Rubio), and Tea-Party extra crispy (MAGA). When Rubio threw his lot in with Trump, that put an end to the debate.

Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window. You and others keep throwing around words like "destruction", "chaos" and "weaponized incompetence" like this wasn't the plan from the start. It's only "incompetence" if you define "competence" as supporting a top-down liberal order.

One of these days I will have to write my oral history of the Republican civil war, but today is not that day.

I'd be interested to read this!

Trump isn't "wearing the Republican party like skinsuit" so much as he is the brick that the electorate has chosen to throw through the establishment's window.

YoushouldhavelistenedRonPaul.gif!

One of the things that worries me more than a little is who might follow Trump through the window if he fails.

The real trick is figuring out how to do it without effectively doxing myself or getting bogged down in current events because a lot of the players are still in the game. And yes they should have listened, a major theme of the story would be how establishment attempts to "tamp things down" instead contributed to the eventual crash.

As for what comes next, that is a legitimate concern, but for my part that concern is tempered by the fact that Trump is the kind of guy cares about "legacy". Characterize it as narcissism and self-aggrandizement if you like. He does seem to be genuinely concerned with how future generations will remember him, and the sort of world he is leaving to his kids.

To clarify, my concern here is more that the electorate might throw a larger brick, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail, through the establishment's window.

To clarify, my concern here is more that the electorate might throw a larger brick, or perhaps a Molotov cocktail, through the establishment's window.

Yes, that is a bit more concerning. But I also see that as something that is largely outside Trump and the MAGA Movement's control.

I think it depends on whether our resident technocrats and anti-populists choose to adapt or double-down.

In the sense that doubling down will continue to fuel anti-establishment fires?

Yes, and not just fuel them but justify them.

This misapprehension of the message being sent by electing Trump is why the keep stepping on rakes. "Oh my Lord he's breaking norms and doing things without checking for permission, this is chaos!"

Honey if the politicians are upset that's valued added.

More cynically, the main thing Trump actually offers is breeches of decorum, which angry voters interpret as the best thing available. Not through any bad faith on his part, but his short attention span and lack of actual follow through. The US will be in approximately the same cultural and political position in 2028 as it is today, just as it was in the same position in 2020 as 2016.

The establishment is happy to use him as a useful patsy, and the hysterical shrieking about him being neo-Hitler confuses people into thinking he is a more substantial threat to the establishment than he is. So he's a vessel to channel discontent and anger into dissolution.

The unfortunate fact is that Trump is mainly an expert at making everything about himself.

The fact that he brokers peace deals and implements popular, long-past-due policies in order to garner attention is a happy side effect.

The important thing is not to elect "the right people". The important thing is to make it profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

He also kills political dynasties, which always good for bringing in new blood.

The app idea runs counter to the concept if "skin in the game." What would actually work is an organized paramilitary counterpart to Antifa, with actual ranks and unforms and hierarchical privilege, responsibility, and accountability. However the SA are still such a potent memetic vaccination it probably couldn't happen until some time after the last Boomers are gone.

Antifa functions by being anonymous, and also by being a motte-and-bailey. You cannot build an above-ground paramilitary, particularly not a right-wing one, in the United States without it being it becoming infested from top to bottom with feds and other saboteurs, and every member ejected from polite society.

Just what our society needs, more screen time!

If anything, I would support the direct opposite: make politics boring and difficult again.

I had the exact opposite reaction. I think everything in the article is excellent up until the app idea. It's totally unnecessary. Trump could have marched over government. People vote for the president and expect them to lead. If "the law" is in the way then get it out of the way.

You don't need it to staff government. If you set out a competent agenda you will get talent from everywhere.

People just need/want to vote once and have it fixed. For 99% of people that is the appropriate level of engagement. You need an American Bukele, perhaps with a stiffer temperament, but instead they got Trump.

It is not specifically in the form of an app but these kinds of symbolic incentives for voting already exist? Stuff like I Voted stickers and campaign buttons have been popular in the United States for decades. My own state (which has primarily mail-in elections) even offers downloadable stickers to put on your social media. I'm fairly sure, though I haven't done it myself, political campaigns hand out similar things for volunteering and so on. Is it supposed to be the app-based part specifically that's innovative? Or some different verbiage that's more motivating? Maybe tying it all together as a unified progression? I wonder if at some point you run into state laws restricting the giving of a thing of value in exchange for some of these activities.

Unrelatedly, a bunch of his ideas about how to operate a hard party to take power are just straight up illegal in the US today. Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States describes many of them. If your plan requires you to first takeover a substantial fraction of state governments to change their election laws so you can have the political party to take over the state, I don't think your plan is very good! People have thought before about making the kind of party Moldbug envisions. It turns out we used to have them and they kind of sucked so we largely made them illegal.

I would like to second the linked post about political parties (as understood in the rest of the democratic world) being illegal in the United States. This is something where Americans don't realise how weird their political system is - in most of the world, parties make their own rules for how they select candidates.

One of my not-widely-held views is that Duverger's law is not the main explanation for the US two-party system - other FPTP countries have fewer serious parties than PR countries, but they don't normally have exactly two (Canada, the UK, and India all have systems with two dominant parties but the smaller parties consistently get seats in Parliament and aren't going anywhere).* The big difference between the US and other FPTP countries is that in the US the easiest way for an outsider to run for President is to capture one of the existing party lines with an outsider primary campaign, whereas in other FPTP countries the easiest way is to set up a new party. Ballot access laws in the US are a relatively small part of the difference - the main one is that the primary system makes it easier for an outsider to skinsuit an existing political party.

If the US had a Commonwealth-style political system, the Republican party would have kicked Trump out - in the same way Kinnock kicked Militant out of Labour in the 1980's or the Tories kicked out their remaining pro-EU MPs between 2016 and 2019. He would have had to do what Farage did, and set up his own populist political party.

FWIW, I think that political parties which can police their own political boundaries are a good thing and skinsuit candidates are a bad thing. The American system appears to produce worse candidates than allowing party organisations to select candidates, and there is an obvious reason for this - if you are a professional politician or a serious activist, you are a lot more motivated to take electability and competence into account when voting in an internal party election (being in power is a lot more fun than being in opposition) than you would be as an armchair supporter. American primaries are either successfully managed by party insiders so they don't actually function as open primaries (the The Party Decides thesis), elect the candidate with the most cash and/or name recognition, or elect an ideologically pure candidate who is going to turn off the median voter.

* Any discussion of two-party systems gets confused by the period c. 1945-1980 where almost every democracy including Germany (PR) and Australia (AV) had something close to a two-party system because of the dominance of class-based politics.

Honestly, I think we should replace Congress with this app.

I think this is where I'm going to take a moment to shill my personal vision: let's amend the apportionment act of 1929.

I don't know if the house of representatives having 1,000 members would be an improvement, but I'd like to see what would happen.

A while ago I kicked around a concept of political representation that hinged on dunbar's number

Basically: You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

Every group, let's call it a "century" after the Roman military unit, is a member of a higher level group of 100 centuries (call that a "meta-century" for now), and each one elects a representative into the meta-century. Just like individuals, the representative can choose to make their century a member of a different meta-century, if that meta-century is willing to accept it. The meta-century chooses one representative into the meta-meta-century, and so on until you have one president.

Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.

I have no idea how well it would work but it would ensure that every single person is contained within a political unit below dunbar's number, which I think is a good property.

Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.

This doesn't make sense - the whole point of sovereignty is to solve the problems that can't be solved by freely-formed associations (like . In practice those problems tend to exist in physical space, so practical sovereignty is territorial. A century of people who don't live together can't provide policing, defense, roads, environmental regulations etc. and a century that net contributors can leave at any time can't provide social insurance unless there is some kind of shared bond that means that the other 99 members won't just leave if one gets expensively sick.

A similar system that functioned purely for allocating voting power (so there is still a single sovereign, but it is controlled by a vote of the nine meta-meta-meta-century representatives) is part of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sort-of-utopia dath ilan, and the general approach (which is a good idea and should probably be tried) is called liquid democracy

You choose to join a group of 100 people. These 100 people can live anywhere, it's just the group you're a member of. You can leave your group if another is willing to accept you.

It might be slightly more practical to say:

  • A normal-size group comprises 71–140 people.

  • An undersize group comprises 51–70 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either merging with another group or taking on new members individually.

  • An oversize group comprises 141–200 people. Within one month it must become a normal-size group, by either splitting into multiple groups or bleeding off members individually.

I'm glad this was the biggest problem you could find with this proposal lol

house of representatives having 1,000 members

Weak. Return to the original apportionment ratio of 1-30,000. Bring on the Small City of Representatives.

(It would make gerrymandering harder and less impactful, though the dynamics of an 11k member house would be very weird)

Small City

Ackchually, according to the United Nations you don't hit "city" status until 50,000 people, so this would just be a mid-sized town.

Trying to imagine the sheer logistics of this. A roll call vote like the vote for Speaker would (assuming each vote takes 5s) take ~16 hrs to conduct.

I don't see why roll call votes are necessary. Just use an electronic tabulator like they used to poll the audience on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

I am sure we would end up with some kind of electronic solution, but it's still something that would have to be built. Congress currently has electronic voting for bills but that currently has a rather limited number of options (Yes/No/Abstain). Currently any Representative-elect can say basically any name as their choice for Speaker of the House. I don't think it needs to be anyone nominated in advance nor even any Representative-elect. Do you just give everyone a text box and hope ~5k people all type the correct name together? Do you constrain options in the voting system? Interesting to think how those discussions might play out.

I imagine you'd end up with a house-within-the-house that dealt with the vast majority of business.

I am under the impression this is already largely how the House functions, with committees. And particular committees (Rules comes to mind) being much more influential on general business than others.

Most business is conducted in committees, but virtually every rep has committee assignments. With 11k representatives, I could easily envision a situation where the vast majority of reps do very little except vote to organize the House and handle constituent issues.

I wonder if maybe you'd end up with highly specialized committees. How much of the bureaucratic/topical expertise currently embedded in executive rule making agencies could make it back into Congress if the House had 11k members? Although that expertise would probably not be optimally distributed, since it still relies on actually winning elections.

More comments

Recursive sub-parliaments?

Wait a minute, that's just Syndicalism.

Imagine the committee appointment drama.

I've done the math, and if we kept up with the original intent, we'd be close to 1776 congressmen right now.

I will admit, I've wondered before about the feasibility of making the people into the "fourth house" of government. I feel like introducing an app where the people get a veto on all bills, budgets, etc. and make the margin for blocking a flat 50% of those who vote on the bill. I guess the major problem is that it introduces a bias to inaction, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

I think if there's one thing the US constitution doesn't need, it's another veto point. Congress has basically abandoned legislating, leaving actual lawmaking to the Supreme Court and the Presidency. It doesn't need another thing stopping it from doing its job.

So the reasoning behind it in my eyes is that the government keeps doing things that (almost) no one wants. Like, I don't doubt it's popular with the actual people in office, but most people would be very happy to cut off a large amount of foreign aid (especially to Israel).

Up here in Canada, we had a recent bill (C-12 I believe, but it may be C-2) which was basically "close down the borders, but also give warrantless search powers to cops." Our most recent budget included lines that basically said "our government can arbitrarily exempt any business it wants from following the laws." I think a bit of stalemate when the government tries to spend money is a good thing.

I'd say most of the law making gets done in the bureaucracy. And technically that bureaucracy is under the presidents authority, but reality is a much different picture. The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds. But they rarely make much of an impact. The only ruling I can think of recently that impacted me was their handling of homelessness.

The supreme Court handles a tiny minority of disputes that are interesting to legal nerds.

Didn't they abolish segregation, mandate the legalisation of gay marriage, mandate the legalisation of abortion (before later returning that power to the states), abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns? Those seem pretty political and sigificant to me. Certainly they seem like things that should have been decided by elected representatives or by referendum.

abolish affirmative action in colleges and mandate that states allow individuals to carry guns

Neither of these have worked. Everyone who might be affected just refuses to obey the ruling and nothing happens to them. The others are left-wing causes so they didn't face this problem.

They DID in fact face this problem. But the executive and the Supreme Court were willing to do something about it. The Feds sent in the National Guard to do desegregation, and the courts backed them up. And the courts have often done follow-up rulings to landmark cases to indicate that yes, they really meant that. For guns and abolishing affirmative action, they did not. That's because while they consider the rulings they made to be correct in an academic/constitutional scholarship sense, they want the opposite policies.

I said they rarely make an impact, not never. Those rulings you listed are spaced out by decades sometimes.

It's also often questionable how much impact they really have. We have a resident gun law expert that will tell you the supreme Court rulings aren't worth shit and the states regularly flaunt them.

They abolished obvious and explicit affirmative action, but it was very much still happening under "holistic" evaluations.

Compare their impact to something like the IRS which has a daily impact on our budgets, and their yearly rule changes can make thousands of dollars of difference.

Or your state DMV which isn't federal but impacts almost everyone.

The bureaucracies of the federal and state governments impact me way more than any of the official branches of government. But of those branches the supreme Court is often most removed from daily impact on my life.

flaunt

flout

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