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"I've heard many times that although democracy is an imperfect system, we somehow always muddle through. The message I want to give you, after long and hard reflection, is that I'm very much afraid it is no longer possible to muddle through. The issues we deal with do not lend themselves to that kind of treatment. Therefore, I conclude that our democracy must grow up. I'm not going to give you a magic recipe on how that will happen—I wish I had one—but I offer some thoughts that I hope will stimulate your thinking.
What's principally lacking on the federal scene, it seems to me, is the existence of respected, nonpartisan, interdisciplinary teams that could at least tell us what is possible and something about the pluses and minuses of different solutions. Take energy, for instance. What I would love to see established, with the National Academies or any other mechanism to confer respectability, is a team that will ... say, 'Okay, there are lots of suggestions around, and most of them won't work. But here are six different plans, any one of which is possible. We'll tell you what each one costs, what's good about it, what's bad about it, how dangerous it is, and what its uncertainties are.' At least each option would be a well-integrated, clearly thought-out plan. I do not trust democracy to try to put together such a plan by having each committee of Congress choose one piece of it. Suppose Congress designed an airplane, with each committee designing one component and an eleventh-hour conference committee deciding how the pieces should be put together. Would you fly on that airplane? I am telling you we are flying on an energy plan, an inflation plan, and so on that are being put together in exactly that way.
Unfortunately the original 1980 article that this was excerpted from is paywalled.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @04:10PM
Democracy is working fine. The problem is that the majority of people cares about the truth. Many even argue that there is no such thing as an objective truth. If Americans paid attention to the truth of what politicians said (and held them accountable at the ballot box), then it would not have been a choice between Clinton and Trump, but rather a real choice between policies that might help the common people.
The only way to make this happen is to admit when you are wrong and give others the chance to see when they are wrong without making them a "loser".
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Entropy on Sunday January 01 2017, @10:10PM
Considering they all lie all the time and nothing ever happens to them, this seems a goal that's kind of hard to achieve. How many times are career politicians(Clintons, Bushes, etc.) ask a question to which they reply with a bunch of doubletalk that doesn't answer the question AT ALL IN ANY WAY....and that's somehow accepted as OK? It's corrupt all the way to it's core nowadays from the news to the oval office.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 01 2017, @11:08PM
She lost! Get over it, loser!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 02 2017, @12:35AM
Worse than that, she failed to receive 5 percent of the popular vote, hence her party won't qualify for public funding of its campaigns.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/27/why-5-for-the-green-party-is-a-win-for-america-jill-stein-commentary.html [cnbc.com]
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday January 06 2017, @10:34PM
Exactly why a small step to an instant-runoff preferential ballot would work. At least as a step in the right direction. And let the 5% threshold for public funding be determined by the numbers of *first* choices.