I’m not even talking about the cool, major transformative stuff, like expropriating industry or creating free public housing for everyone.
I’m just talking about things like ending gerrymandering and moving from a two-party system to a multi-party system. That doesn’t sound like much, but it would basically require a revolution, or something close. The things that would be necessary to make a multi-party system possible (getting rid of the electoral college, implementing proportional representation for legislative bodies, and implementing ranked-choice voting for executive positions, and probably a couple other things) are not possible through the processes and institutions that make up American politics currently. No sitting politician is going to do any of that, because they benefit from the two-party system, and it would go against their own political interests.
So, yeah. Never mind socialism. Even if all we wanted was to get rid of these stupid two-party spoiler effects and make third parties electorally feasible, that would still require taking up arms.
[minor improvements] like ending gerrymandering and moving from a two-party system to a multi-party system
These aren’t really that minor of improvements.
A government has both formal and informal power structures. Formal structures are the systems in place like voting laws, the party primaries, districting, judge jurisdictions, and reforms like these. They’re the stuff liberals insist are the full story about how governance works. The informal power structures are groups of people with shared material or ideological interests who are capable of organizing a joint show of power. In the US that includes competing capital interests, religious groups like Qanon, the white supremacist nepotism network interwoven in the criminal justice system, and labor unions.
The actions of the government have to be an adequate compromise between the desires of the informal power structures. Failure to adequately acknowledge the underlying power base means that group will use its power to get what it wants directly - through ignoring the law, capital flight, revolution, strike, stochastic terrorism, or whatever else that group is capable of (a group incapable of such a response has no power).
That means that the formal structure of the government has to be one that produces adequate compromises between these structures. Otherwise it’ll invite one of these responses, and enter crisis.
Making the US democracy more accurate to the will of the people (which is what those reforms would do) would not make the US democracy more accurate at coming up with these compromises. It would over-value mass opinion, when the unorganized masses don’t have any power. Somehow forcing the change anyway would invite organized responses from other groups.
Going in the other direction, increasing the power of the people - generally by organizing - would make the current system less accurate to the underlying power structures. Either it would correct itself (possibly by introducing those very same reforms), or it would invite a revolution.
(I meant to have a concluding paragraph here but I made the mistake of starting to write this right after taking my sleep meds, so that’s not happening. Hopefully it made you think.)
