Transcript
Hey everyone welcome to another DailyJim that's what I call the show. It is thursday july 14th and it is actually thursday july 14th 2022. And today I want to talk about voting in the US and how we seem to be voting for parties more than our other representations.
So it frustrates me a lot actually, because when I think about, say for example, the United States Senate, they have said historically that it is supposed to be the greatest deliberative body in the world. Now, do I believe that it's the greatest deliberative body in the world? I don't know do I believe it ever was? I'm not sure. But do I want to be one of the greatest deliberative bodies in the world? Yes. Now, when I think about US voting for parties, um I don't think our US constitution was built so much to balance the political party power. I believe it was more to balance the power between the branches, so executive, legislative and judicial, and balance the power between the national and the state level and to balance the power between geography. So the Senate is based on two seats per state and then also population and the House of Representatives is based on population density. So, and then you could argue that even voting is a way for the citizens to balance the power of the elected officials. So there are many ways that was, I think designed to balance power in one way, which I think it doesn't balance power very well is political parties, and maybe this goes back to the beginning and maybe in the Federalist papers, I think it was where they warned about factions rising and how that could split the country. And so I think about these elections that are upcoming. And I think about so many of the votes that happen and they seem to happen along party lines. And I see people who say that I'm a democrat for life, or I'm a Republican for life and they vote almost only exclusively for that party, which makes me wonder how much deliberation actually happens in a body like the Senate. So do we care who the individuals are? Do we care if they have the ability to deliberate to read the, bills that are being proposed to conduct the hearings, um to negotiate with other people within their party and across party lines? Two. Make hard decisions to interact with citizens to, poll people and try to figure out what are their worries and their struggles and their hopes and dreams, and basically to do a lot of these skills, do they have the skills or we really just voting for someone who has a political party stamp on them and will do whatever the party tells them to do? No, I'm not necessarily against parties or groups having sway over decision making power. I just can feel very frustrated because if I sum from michigan, elect somebody who is a of a certain political party, are they going to represent the political party more than they represent the state of michigan? Are they going to take the, the dreams and the goals of the political party into account more than the dreams of goals of me and the people who live here in michigan, are they also going to do what the political party wants more than the dreams and the needs of the country? Where does their allegiance ally? Does it lie in being a member of the legislative branch? Because again, if the balance is between executive, legislative and judicial shouldn't the people in the legislative feel proud to represent that particular identity compared to the other branches? Should they also not feel a certain level of pride or just a balance of identity between the national and the state level. So, these are questions I'm asking and it seems that the political party in so many of our. Conversations and our decisions in terms of who to elect takes strong, strong precedents over um, the other identities that these people are supposed to be representing. And so for me, it frustrates me because I think the system falls apart in some way when we start voting just on, If you're a Republican or Democrat, frankly, I look at some of these votes and I say, well, what's the point of even having human beings there making the decision? If we just know, okay, it's 51-49 in terms of the parties and it's going to almost always go in that one direction. What's the point? Why don't we just have robots or computers tallying up? Just vote for the party? Why do we even vote for individuals anymore? Because I believe the system is designed for us to vote for individuals to represent us to make decisions for us.
Not just for the political party that they represent, because if they just make the decision for the political party that they represent, or primarily if that's the primary identity for that one, like I said, it's not really balanced in the constitution. From what I understand in two.
It doesn't mean like if somebody has elected the senator senator of michigan, in my opinion, they're supposed to represent everyone in michigan, but if they care only about the political party, they may care about the people in their political party in michigan, we're sorry, the people in their political party in another state more than they care about the people in their state who are of a different political party. And I think this is a problem for how the system is designed now. I think it's okay if we if we agree on this and we say, well this is what we want to have, then I think we need to fundamentally change the way that our system works. Somebody today on CNN said that we have been shifting more to a parliamentarian mindset. Perhaps we need to change our form of governance to be more parliamentarian if we want to have this type of approach, I personally don't want to have that type of approach. I currently like the idea of having individuals representing multiple identities, in trying to represent the multitude of who they are in the balance of power across these identities. Now. Maybe parliaments do that as well, but it's kind of the whole thing of we get used to the I'm sure there's an idiom about it, but it's the idea of I'd rather have my problems in somebody else's problems, because at least I know how to deal with my problems. Um so I don't know, it frustrates me, I hope that we can get to the point where we start.
These people, we vote for people who will represent us in a collective term across multiple identities, not just their political party, that people who we believe have the intention to unite people across these identities, who have the intention or the skills to be able to deliberate with the people across different identities, especially across the political party identity.
So that we.
They can make decisions together instead of making decisions against each other. I would just love to see us make decisions together, working together to try to resolve problem instead of pulling back and blaming the other side for for the problems that we face in our life, asking them to help, helping when we can, asking if we can help them.
How would politics, how would society look like if we started doing that just a little bit more.
That's what I'm thinking about this thursday and I hope you had a wonderful day and if you heard this and you feel inspired, please start a conversation on twitter, start a conversation with me on twitter or on the forum, and let's you know, I'd love to continue this conversation because I think.
I think we don't talk about it enough. I think we talk there's a lot of blame and finger pointing in politics and I don't know if we talk about the deeper level in trying to bring us back together a little more. On that note, we'll talk to you soon.
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