Before you go all Marx on me, yes yes I know about utopian socialism vs scientific socialism, but its ok to have fun once in a while.
This is what my ideal leftist government looks like.
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Unicameral legislature. No separate elections for executive. Ranked-choice voting.
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Executive is formed from the directly elected legislators through voting among legislators.
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1:10,000 elector-electee ratio at the state level and 1:100,000 at the federal level.
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All state and federal reps can be recalled by an 80% no-confidence vote. This vote doesn’t need to be initiated by the majority, you just go to your local govt office and submit a form of no-confidence, and once the threshold is reached, the elected rep is sacked.
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No head of state, either at state level or federal level. This means no President, no Governors, no Speakers etc.
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Anything in the constitution can be repealed, amended or added with simple 60% majority.
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No more national-level courts. State-level judges are appointed only for 5 year terms. Judges have zero power to nullify laws.
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The standing army is abolished and military duties are assigned to all adults.
The secondary assembly will be made up of academics elected by random lottery for relatively short terms, assigned to consult and overrule on their area of expertise. They only get to vote on bills classified to their field. To some extent the different fields should be ranked in importance so some overrule others. They can also introduce their own bills and would require more than a simple majority to veto.
Basically: Any laws about energy have to go before a board of climate scientists, and that board of climate scientists needs to have the power to go “Fuck you we’re doing this or we’re all gonna die.” When you’re deciding how to deal with a pandemic, the public health scientists have to sign off on it and can tell you to shut up and sit down. Short terms because they are supposed to be active academics currently working in their fields, not politicians. It should feel like jury duty that’s distracting them from their research.
Also, mixed member proportional elections for the legislature. You vote for a local MP but also vote for a party, and after all the local MPs win their seats, extra seats are assigned to the parties based on how much they actually won. I understand why people want local representation but in the US the closest elected representative that I share even a couple of views with is over 1000 miles away. Getting to vote between two people completely opposed to everything you believe in is not democracy.
Yeah the areas of expertise thing is the thing I’m the least sure of myself. My question was how to set up this system so that climate scientists can say “No, we can’t build new coal plants” but some less relevant group can’t veto something that would hurt their pet project. Although honestly in trying to come up with an example of that situation for this comment I couldn’t think one up.
Basically my main thought was to prevent economists from fucking shit up but then I realized economics isn’t a real science and simply shouldn’t be included in the same way astrology shouldn’t be included.
And yeah active position at a public university was my thinking, and assuming that if we’re creating this whole new governmental system we’re also handling the problems and incentives of the university system
