It’s increasingly clear that it's too little, too late. Even if the current political nightmare ends, foreign governments aren’t going to rush back into Washington’s embrace when the underlying system that produced the crisis is still broken and extraordinarily difficult to reform. The proposed institutional fixes are sensible in theory, but the odds of them passing in the current environment are super small. Real stability would require deep structural changes to both American society and its political architecture, changes that, if they ever begin at all, will take years to implement. Add to that the reality that roughly 30% of the U.S. electorate sits at or below OECD literacy benchmarks, making widespread critical‑thinking‑driven political judgment even harder to expect.
And then there’s the havoc that Trump has unleashed, along with the complicity, incompetence and amorality of those backing him. International reactions to the Epstein files, and the near‑total lack of movement inside the U.S. in response, are enormous red flags for any nation considering “cozying back up” to America. From the outside, it looks like a country unwilling or unable to police its own elites, constrain its own extremists, or repair its own institutions. Trust doesn’t return in that environment; it evaporates.
I do agree with everything you are saying, as things are in the moment. But the current crisis will come to a climax that will force substantial reform. Germany is a good example, once the aggressor, now a stable, credible democracy that the world can consistently trust.
While Way Yuhl proposes a software update (Parliamentary/Technocratic reforms), you correctly point out that the hardware is incompatible:
The Cognitive Limit: You cannot run a high-complexity democracy on a population where 30% struggle with basic literacy. That is a mismatch between the System and the Processor.
The Impunity Loop: Your point on the "Epstein Files" highlights a fatal structural flaw: The Rule of Law has decoupled from the Rule of Power.
Foreign nations do not trust intentions; they trust mechanisms. When they see a mechanism that refuses to educate its voters or prosecute its own elites, "evaporation" of trust is the only logical outcome. We are not just facing a "bad cycle"; we are facing structural insolvency.
Peter, well stated: "You cannot run a high-complexity democracy on a population where 30% struggle with basic literacy." Which is why competency standards for elected officials are needed. Ideally, the country has an educated electorate, but that is no longer (maybe never was) the case in the U.S. The second best case is an educated pool of candidates.
I agree with you to a point. But what you gonna do? Just bitch? Or do something? I know you are not saying that nothing can be done. The first thing to do about any situation is figure out what to do and then do what can be done to make the scene more ideal. Even if it takes 40 years to bring about a good government, best get started. Working on it despite barriers is what mankind has been doing for centuries and there ARE fewer wars nowadays than there were 200 years ago. There IS less slavery nowadays than there was 200 years ago. It is just taking a long time. Perhaps with a wider access to knowledge, speed toward an ideal will pick up. Sorry to sound all Pollyanna here. I would have never learned a lot of things I know today if the internet had not come along including all its warts. No worries.
Steven, you are not a Pollanna. History is clear: 'things' get better over time (as you articulated). There are collapses that set humanity back. In the West, it was the collapse of the Bronze Age and the Roman Empire. We are not facing anything near those rare events. I'm quite optimistic about the future. The USA will sort itself out, and in the meantime, the EU, China, BRICS,+ and others will grow stronger and more cooperative with each other. Yes, it will not be pleasant to be in the US during this time, but it's a small part of the world.
Thanks for your feedback. You are of course correct. And no, I am not advocating doing nothing. But let’s be realistic and have the honesty to admit to ourselves that as things stand today, we have a long roe to hoe. Or… we could take our collective finger out and do something… now… to limit the considerable damage that has been and is continuing to be done. What that could be? I confess that I do not know. I fail the “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” test. Some are proposing prolonged consumer boycotts. Why not? But I am under the distinct impression that the traitors currently in power… Do.Not.Care. Open to suggestions.
You bet. I am from the something is almost always better than nothing school of thought. I personally am for a national strike. Minneapolis did at least a regional strike as well as protests and got some concessions. Not sure how much. We were doing a delivery there last weekend and didn't see a single ICE patrol or hear any whistles. That means almost nothing since we were only in South Minneapolis for about 10 minutes and didn't come that close to where the activity had been in the past. BUT, protesting and at least a regional strike by a bunch of businesses in the area DID bring about something. I get the idea that ICE Out signs in the windows of fast food restaurants also makes a difference. These people (ICE backers) really do think they are doing God's work. A LOT of people where I live (Northern Wisconsin) are very certain that only real worst of the worst criminals are being detained and arrested. They don't hear the part of the story that the protesters are protesting about, I think because the algorithm protects them from any viewpoints other than their own. In their view, the protesters are just trying to tear down the fabric of society. Which is true to a degree, the protesters ARE trying to tear down the fabric of a society that doesn't pay any attention to due process and thinks that illegal search and seizure is totally fine as long as those being seized are different from them. Personally I think a big phone campaign would be a good thing. Something that would break the algorithm's hold on people's communication with each other.
American failure is Architectural. We are trying to run a hyper-complex 21st-century society on an 18th-century operating system designed to maximize friction (Checks and Balances). The result is a system that generates heat (rage) instead of motion (governance).
However, the proposal suffers from a thermodynamic fallacy: The Activation Energy Problem.
To switch from a Presidential to a Parliamentary system requires a level of consensus that the current system is structurally incapable of generating. You cannot rewrite the source code (Constitution) while the machine is running at 100% CPU on a culture war.
These reforms are the "Correct Engineering Solution," but politics is not engineering; it is psychology at scale. Without a mechanism to lower the emotional temperature first, these structural rationalities are dead on arrival. We know what to build; we have simply lost the ability to agree on the blueprints.
Interesting analogy. I agree with your assessment. My assumption, which I do not have in the articles, is that changes will come after the crisis climaxes and it’s becomes clear that drastic changes must be made for survival. This is when democracy operates most effectively. The entire world order changed after the crisis of WWII. On a smaller scale, ask the local council to fix the road and it can take years, but they are on the spot after a “crisis” like a major storm.
It is sobering to view Catastrophe as the only remaining Administrator.
Your "WWII" and "Storm" analogies confirm the thermodynamic reality: When a system loses the capacity for proactive maintenance, it defaults to reactive reconstruction.
It is a valid historical mechanism, but it changes the strategy from "Reform" to "Survival." We are no longer trying to patch the roof; we are implicitly agreeing to wait for the hurricane to level the house so we are forced to build a better one.
Less snarkly, I'm really struggling to imagine, given the difficulty of constitutional change and and the very real dangers that the attempt would produce a worse constitution than we allready have, how any of these proposals translate into pratical prescriptions for political actions producing short or mid-term results. Ranked choice congressional elections? Most of the reforms possible without constitutional amendment are tinkering at the margins.
The necessary changes will require constitutional amendments, and it's in emergency situations or after significant devastation that democracy works quickly and effectively.
The opinion that China is governed by individuals vetted on the basis of "professional competency standards" is supportable... if 1) you assume that somewhere there is some other planet with a place called "China", governed by professionals whose competence is evaluated one the basis of reality-based standards, or 2) you believe that being a governing participant in a semi-hereditary partial kleptocracy operating on the basis of rapidly shifting personalized ideological dictate is a "profession" in which "competence" is assessed on the basis of performance based "standards".
I eagerly await the author's further development of this argument, but meanwhile I'd like to meet his dealer - I'll cheerfully pay $20 for $10 worth of whatever he's smoking.
It’s increasingly clear that it's too little, too late. Even if the current political nightmare ends, foreign governments aren’t going to rush back into Washington’s embrace when the underlying system that produced the crisis is still broken and extraordinarily difficult to reform. The proposed institutional fixes are sensible in theory, but the odds of them passing in the current environment are super small. Real stability would require deep structural changes to both American society and its political architecture, changes that, if they ever begin at all, will take years to implement. Add to that the reality that roughly 30% of the U.S. electorate sits at or below OECD literacy benchmarks, making widespread critical‑thinking‑driven political judgment even harder to expect.
And then there’s the havoc that Trump has unleashed, along with the complicity, incompetence and amorality of those backing him. International reactions to the Epstein files, and the near‑total lack of movement inside the U.S. in response, are enormous red flags for any nation considering “cozying back up” to America. From the outside, it looks like a country unwilling or unable to police its own elites, constrain its own extremists, or repair its own institutions. Trust doesn’t return in that environment; it evaporates.
I do agree with everything you are saying, as things are in the moment. But the current crisis will come to a climax that will force substantial reform. Germany is a good example, once the aggressor, now a stable, credible democracy that the world can consistently trust.
While Way Yuhl proposes a software update (Parliamentary/Technocratic reforms), you correctly point out that the hardware is incompatible:
The Cognitive Limit: You cannot run a high-complexity democracy on a population where 30% struggle with basic literacy. That is a mismatch between the System and the Processor.
The Impunity Loop: Your point on the "Epstein Files" highlights a fatal structural flaw: The Rule of Law has decoupled from the Rule of Power.
Foreign nations do not trust intentions; they trust mechanisms. When they see a mechanism that refuses to educate its voters or prosecute its own elites, "evaporation" of trust is the only logical outcome. We are not just facing a "bad cycle"; we are facing structural insolvency.
Peter, well stated: "You cannot run a high-complexity democracy on a population where 30% struggle with basic literacy." Which is why competency standards for elected officials are needed. Ideally, the country has an educated electorate, but that is no longer (maybe never was) the case in the U.S. The second best case is an educated pool of candidates.
I agree with you to a point. But what you gonna do? Just bitch? Or do something? I know you are not saying that nothing can be done. The first thing to do about any situation is figure out what to do and then do what can be done to make the scene more ideal. Even if it takes 40 years to bring about a good government, best get started. Working on it despite barriers is what mankind has been doing for centuries and there ARE fewer wars nowadays than there were 200 years ago. There IS less slavery nowadays than there was 200 years ago. It is just taking a long time. Perhaps with a wider access to knowledge, speed toward an ideal will pick up. Sorry to sound all Pollyanna here. I would have never learned a lot of things I know today if the internet had not come along including all its warts. No worries.
Steven, you are not a Pollanna. History is clear: 'things' get better over time (as you articulated). There are collapses that set humanity back. In the West, it was the collapse of the Bronze Age and the Roman Empire. We are not facing anything near those rare events. I'm quite optimistic about the future. The USA will sort itself out, and in the meantime, the EU, China, BRICS,+ and others will grow stronger and more cooperative with each other. Yes, it will not be pleasant to be in the US during this time, but it's a small part of the world.
Thanks for your feedback. You are of course correct. And no, I am not advocating doing nothing. But let’s be realistic and have the honesty to admit to ourselves that as things stand today, we have a long roe to hoe. Or… we could take our collective finger out and do something… now… to limit the considerable damage that has been and is continuing to be done. What that could be? I confess that I do not know. I fail the “Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” test. Some are proposing prolonged consumer boycotts. Why not? But I am under the distinct impression that the traitors currently in power… Do.Not.Care. Open to suggestions.
You bet. I am from the something is almost always better than nothing school of thought. I personally am for a national strike. Minneapolis did at least a regional strike as well as protests and got some concessions. Not sure how much. We were doing a delivery there last weekend and didn't see a single ICE patrol or hear any whistles. That means almost nothing since we were only in South Minneapolis for about 10 minutes and didn't come that close to where the activity had been in the past. BUT, protesting and at least a regional strike by a bunch of businesses in the area DID bring about something. I get the idea that ICE Out signs in the windows of fast food restaurants also makes a difference. These people (ICE backers) really do think they are doing God's work. A LOT of people where I live (Northern Wisconsin) are very certain that only real worst of the worst criminals are being detained and arrested. They don't hear the part of the story that the protesters are protesting about, I think because the algorithm protects them from any viewpoints other than their own. In their view, the protesters are just trying to tear down the fabric of society. Which is true to a degree, the protesters ARE trying to tear down the fabric of a society that doesn't pay any attention to due process and thinks that illegal search and seizure is totally fine as long as those being seized are different from them. Personally I think a big phone campaign would be a good thing. Something that would break the algorithm's hold on people's communication with each other.
American failure is Architectural. We are trying to run a hyper-complex 21st-century society on an 18th-century operating system designed to maximize friction (Checks and Balances). The result is a system that generates heat (rage) instead of motion (governance).
However, the proposal suffers from a thermodynamic fallacy: The Activation Energy Problem.
To switch from a Presidential to a Parliamentary system requires a level of consensus that the current system is structurally incapable of generating. You cannot rewrite the source code (Constitution) while the machine is running at 100% CPU on a culture war.
These reforms are the "Correct Engineering Solution," but politics is not engineering; it is psychology at scale. Without a mechanism to lower the emotional temperature first, these structural rationalities are dead on arrival. We know what to build; we have simply lost the ability to agree on the blueprints.
Interesting analogy. I agree with your assessment. My assumption, which I do not have in the articles, is that changes will come after the crisis climaxes and it’s becomes clear that drastic changes must be made for survival. This is when democracy operates most effectively. The entire world order changed after the crisis of WWII. On a smaller scale, ask the local council to fix the road and it can take years, but they are on the spot after a “crisis” like a major storm.
It is sobering to view Catastrophe as the only remaining Administrator.
Your "WWII" and "Storm" analogies confirm the thermodynamic reality: When a system loses the capacity for proactive maintenance, it defaults to reactive reconstruction.
It is a valid historical mechanism, but it changes the strategy from "Reform" to "Survival." We are no longer trying to patch the roof; we are implicitly agreeing to wait for the hurricane to level the house so we are forced to build a better one.
Less snarkly, I'm really struggling to imagine, given the difficulty of constitutional change and and the very real dangers that the attempt would produce a worse constitution than we allready have, how any of these proposals translate into pratical prescriptions for political actions producing short or mid-term results. Ranked choice congressional elections? Most of the reforms possible without constitutional amendment are tinkering at the margins.
The necessary changes will require constitutional amendments, and it's in emergency situations or after significant devastation that democracy works quickly and effectively.
The opinion that China is governed by individuals vetted on the basis of "professional competency standards" is supportable... if 1) you assume that somewhere there is some other planet with a place called "China", governed by professionals whose competence is evaluated one the basis of reality-based standards, or 2) you believe that being a governing participant in a semi-hereditary partial kleptocracy operating on the basis of rapidly shifting personalized ideological dictate is a "profession" in which "competence" is assessed on the basis of performance based "standards".
I eagerly await the author's further development of this argument, but meanwhile I'd like to meet his dealer - I'll cheerfully pay $20 for $10 worth of whatever he's smoking.