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I am a Belgian trying to live together with my USAmerican girlfiend despite our cultural differences. I realize that I do not understand the USA at all so I am doing this little personal research project. In your article "What are we fighting for?", you mention that you think "the US system is flawed". Could you expand on this a little? I am interested to know what Americans living in the USA think are the flaws of their system. I started to respond via email on this but once I finished writing it, it seemed as if it would make a good log entry. The system in the US where the President, the Senate and House are all elected separately leads to the possibility that one party may control two of them while the other party controls the third. That has been the norm in the 20th century. It's been extremely rare for one party to control all three for an extended period. (That happened during most of the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example.) So when control is mixed, it has lead to deadlock and political posturing, with each party trying to set the other up to take the fall for bad news. As a result, the parties spend more of their time maneuvering to try to gain more control than they do actually governing. Sometimes governments have to do things that they know will anger the voters. If one party controls the government then it has to grit its teeth and do it. But when you have the situation in the US, then there will be maneuvering where each party tries to set the other up to take the blame. The Parliamentary system is better in that regard. There's only one (important) legislative chamber instead of two, and the executive is selected by the Parliament. While you do sometimes get coalitions to form a government, once it happens you have a single group with control who can unambiguously act on their own policies. There are disadvantages to that, too. One advantage of the US system is that elections are scheduled. Necessarily, in the Parliamentary system the government can fall at any time, and it's possible to have Italian-style government churn, where the nation spends much too high a proportion of the time mucking around with campaigns and elections, during which time the government is paralyzed. Equally, you can have Israeli-style party fragmentation where you have a scad of parties and many times the government is a coalition of several. This means that often the coalition is forced to give disproportionate influence to some extremist fringe group, which means that the policies of the resulting government will not be representative of the electorate. ALL democratic systems are flawed; that has actually been proven mathematically. It's not possible to create an ideal democratic system. (A guy named Arrow won a Nobel Prize in Economics for proving it.) So it's not so much a question of the US system being flawed and systems used in Europe being better, it's rather that each has different flaws. And Arrow's proof is eternal, so it's not possible to fix the flaws without introducing others. (discuss) |
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