<Snipped quote by The>
The problem is, voting democrat will also permanently damage our nation. You just can't win.
We really need to destroy the office of POTUS and kick as much power as possible back to state/local elected bodies. I have no fucking idea what a state comptroller's value is to my daily life -- let's give that some value, and then I'll care about that election enough to cast a vote, and it won't impact all you west coast hippies, AND I won't have to put up with all your weird policies either. Everybody wins. But it'll never happen because it breaks up the consolidated power of the establishments.
Personally, I don't think that solves the problem. It isn't the concept of federal government that is corrupt; it isn't even the idea of government itself that is corrupt, but the idea that one group of people are more powerful than another, And you can never get rid of that later thing. You'll still have corrupt officials in a confederated system, and those local governments will still act as the vessel of powerful people to take from powerless people (see the history of political bosses in the United States). But now, having weakened the federal government, we have the bonus of being an indefensible country of city states purposely undercutting each other for individual gain. The American Confederacy was broken out of the gate; the majority of founding fathers noticed that and banded together to create the federal government because they knew how broken the confederation was. Virtually every other government in history that has pretended to be a union of equal or near-equal parts, whether it was the early United States, the early Roman Republic, the Holy Roman Empire, the Greek Leagues, yatta yatta, either fell apart entirely after a short time, got embroiled into civil wars, or was absorbed into a central government. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that didn't fall apart was the Iroquois, but I know they did occasionally fight with each other in wars involving Europeans, so I don't think they can be counted as a functional confederacy either.
So really, harmonious local governments as the seats of national power is just as pie-in-the-sky dreamy as a communist utopia of workers collectives as that seat of power, or anarcho-capitalist idea of the market as being that seat of power. There always has to be even a small shadow of monarchy in a government for it to work.
Wilted Rose
