Sensing its popularity, Obama’s former Supreme Court lawyer and a Louisiana Democrat are using an obscure corporate taxation case to try to make a federal wealth tax illegal before it even exists.
I don't honestly know. Both of the primary parties are going to fight it tooth and nail because it would weaken them drastically and the last thing they want is more competition for votes. I think the only thing we can realistically do is keep spreading the message until the majority of the population is behind the idea just like the ground swell that's working to get marijuana legalized. The problem of course, is that it's not really an exciting thing to get people behind, it's a pretty dry technical issue. So in the meantime, I guess just keep educating people, and keep putting pressure on elected officials to push for it.
Edit: Thinking about it more depending on how things go with the GOP there might be an opportunity there. If E.G. Trump or one of the other extremists manages to fracture the GOP into two competing conservative factions that neither have enough votes to win with we might be able to get conservative voters and politicians to actually back proportional voting as a pure survival tactic. At that point we'd only need to get a small subset of progressive politicians/voters to support it as well.
I would start by passing initiatives at the state level. There's no reason state legislatures gain anything from having two districting schemes for state elected offices. You could easily reform state representative districts into a single statewide district with party list voting or similar. This would tear a gaping hole in the two party system that could ripple up to higher levels of reforms.
Digital Direct Democracy. You need to win a constitutional ballot initiative in one of the states that has that mechanism and find a way for courts in that state to approve the ballot language. The hiccup is the discrepancy of representatives vs delegates. You need to find a way to make it linguistically work under the federal constitutional framework, while removing the ability for politicians to vote against the will of the people. It would nuke the party system from the inside and could potentially spread to a dozen or so states that have the same system of constitutional ballot initiatives. If you can do it in enough large states it will begin to undermine the power monopoly that's put us into gridlock. It's also likely the least corruptible system possible and has the potential to create a streamlined and nimble government that's adapted to react faster in an uncertain future. It heavily relies on technology though, so creating robust redundancies will be challenging.
ok, but materially, how do we get there?
Historically speaking, guillotine
I don't honestly know. Both of the primary parties are going to fight it tooth and nail because it would weaken them drastically and the last thing they want is more competition for votes. I think the only thing we can realistically do is keep spreading the message until the majority of the population is behind the idea just like the ground swell that's working to get marijuana legalized. The problem of course, is that it's not really an exciting thing to get people behind, it's a pretty dry technical issue. So in the meantime, I guess just keep educating people, and keep putting pressure on elected officials to push for it.
Edit: Thinking about it more depending on how things go with the GOP there might be an opportunity there. If E.G. Trump or one of the other extremists manages to fracture the GOP into two competing conservative factions that neither have enough votes to win with we might be able to get conservative voters and politicians to actually back proportional voting as a pure survival tactic. At that point we'd only need to get a small subset of progressive politicians/voters to support it as well.
I would start by passing initiatives at the state level. There's no reason state legislatures gain anything from having two districting schemes for state elected offices. You could easily reform state representative districts into a single statewide district with party list voting or similar. This would tear a gaping hole in the two party system that could ripple up to higher levels of reforms.
Digital Direct Democracy. You need to win a constitutional ballot initiative in one of the states that has that mechanism and find a way for courts in that state to approve the ballot language. The hiccup is the discrepancy of representatives vs delegates. You need to find a way to make it linguistically work under the federal constitutional framework, while removing the ability for politicians to vote against the will of the people. It would nuke the party system from the inside and could potentially spread to a dozen or so states that have the same system of constitutional ballot initiatives. If you can do it in enough large states it will begin to undermine the power monopoly that's put us into gridlock. It's also likely the least corruptible system possible and has the potential to create a streamlined and nimble government that's adapted to react faster in an uncertain future. It heavily relies on technology though, so creating robust redundancies will be challenging.