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I suspect Australia and Europe are under different pressures though, are they not?
I am inclined both ways on this question. The US' institutions have arguably survived longer than the ones in most of Europe! If you think institutions have a natural lifespan it's logically possible that they are both stronger than most European ones and that they are just now reaching a point of decay after most of Europe's crashed and burned. But I digress: the Constitution as originally written envisioned a very strong Congress. (BurdensomeCount fingers the strong US Supreme Court but that's actually much more debatable an institution, at least when it comes to original intent.)
I'll just incorporate by reference an older comment I made with my thesis that a lot of Trump's supposed puncturing of norms is due to wielding the accumulated powers of the executive (often delegated by Congress) in the one hand and the inherent, original, sometimes neglected powers of the executive on the other. But what I don't really discuss in that comment is why Congress seems so dysfunctional.
There is a simple (although I think incomplete) theory as to why this might be the case: Congress has not grown with the nation. The House has been capped at 435 members for more than 100 years. This has not kept pace with either population growth or the growth of the government. Put it simply, in this theory, Congress is overworked and isolated - they aren't capable of conducting proper oversight of the massive, sprawling bureaucracy, and they are a smaller, more elite portion of the population. The one thing George Washington cared about was that the ratio of representatives to citizens not exceed 1:30,000, and we blew past 1:300,000 around 1940. Today we're at a worse than 1:760,000 ratio.
This seems like an odd thing to finger as a major problem, but network effects are very real. Of course, increasing the size of the House to, say, FOUR THOUSAND would also have implications for network effects: FOUR THOUSAND or FORTY THOUSAND representatives are, perhaps, too unwieldy to come to consensus on anything. So, to add some extra ammo to your argument: however well designed America's institutions were or weren't originally, we should not expect them to function the same, distorted as they are.
Unfortunately, for all of that, it does not seem that a leaner ratio (In Australia that ratio is about 1:125,000, on a quick Google, and something like a blessed 1:75,000 in the UK) is actually effective at getting the cultural or legal outcomes that I prize. A pity!
Hypothesis: in a modern society, law and regulation is simply too complex for an MP or congressman to learn in the time they have, much less meaningfully edit. That would be if democratic politics selected for autistic systems people to begin with, which it doesn’t.
These people *have * to delegate their power to professionals one way or the other. All that’s stopped is they no longer have the fig leaf of ‘approving’ the one page summary that the person with real power gives them.
I think this is correct. But I am not sure it is entirely a feature of modern society alone, I am given to understand that older civilizations also managed to generate sprawling legal codes. It seems like an inherent risk of "writing" + "non-expiring laws."
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This is increasingly an idea that I am cooking. It used to be that politicians were often well-learned, with a strong elite knowledge, which provided a strong foundation for understanding the world and engaging in governments. But the modern world is just too complicated, politicians are now people-persons, coalition builders, cult of personality enjoyers, peacocks. There was a post a couple months back about how the James Bond archetype of a hyper-competent man is increasingly unrealistic, that I think touches on the same idea.
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