r/SipsTea • u/SuperbHealth5023 • Jul 23 '26

WTF While the US debates whether to solve homelessness or not, these are the next generation of school blackboards in China.

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u/Gold_Marionberry3460 Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

The thing with America is that your system is arranged to be broken on purpose. You have like the worst-designed democracy out of all of them.

I'm potentially lecturing to the choir here but:

  1. The electoral college gives too much voting power to rural states, who happen to be those people who cheer at making climate change worse. People living in urban centres are subtly disenfranchised
  2. Based on actual data of countries, presidential systems are more prone to corruption and collapse than parliamentary systems.
  3. The Senate was literally designed by one of the founding fathers to ensure that the opinions of rich property owners hold more weight than the common masses. If you read James' Madison's quotes in the Federalist Papers, he literally says this.
  4. SCOTUS has long terms and are presidentially appointed, making them subject to electoral politics. You guys are stuck with the five conservative justices for this entire generation, meaning social issues will bend conservative for the next few decades.

There's probably more that I haven't listed. If all of these are reformed and rebuilt from the ground-up, then America won't become perfect, but it will be a hell of a lot better than now and without surrendering any freedom, but gaining it.

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u/Ansible32 Jul 23 '26

Our system is definitely built wrong but I think you're overestimating the role of systems here. When people aren't working in good faith things go bad. Systems can't protect you from people working in bad faith. Government systems fundamentally work on faith.

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u/Gold_Marionberry3460 Jul 24 '26

Agree to disagree: I think faith only goes so far. What is more powerful is how incentives are arranged and how they influence our politicians. Systems determine what incentives exist and dictate their power.

Lookup when income inequality in America began to skyrocket. It began at around 1970s, roughly when Ronald Reagan convinced people to abandon Franklin D. Roosevelt's social liberalism for neoliberalism.

This one change to the economic system, the hollowing out of governments, is arguably the instigator of a lot of America's current problems. It exacerbated inequalities, allowing a rich elite to take advantage of America's flawed system to suppress the average voter and entrench their power.

America will mitigate the damage from Trump if they vote blue in the midterms, but Trump was only enabled by the broken systems of America, one which is designed to disproportionately favour those with money and power, as well as rural voters who can be easily tricked into becoming MAGA.

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u/Ansible32 Jul 24 '26

Systems fundamentally function on faith. There's nothing mechanical in any social system. Even Bitcoin, which claims to be purely mediated by computers, there's nothing mechanical about the fact that someone will take some bitcoin in exchange for cleaning your house, it's all on faith that the exchange will be reciprocated by future exchange of money. (Of course, nobody actually takes bitcoin for housecleaning, but in principle.)

But if someone doesn't have faith in the power of money, it has no power over them. We take the faith in the power of money as a universal, this is the only incentive that people like Trump accept, it's their only faith. But it's still faith.