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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

That is good, as we are a model of good Federalist Republic.

The continued attempts to make the U.S. a national democracy is an ongoing problem, we need and should revert many of the "democratic" elements that have been put into our system, such as repealing the 17th amendment, we should more limit the power and scope of the federal government reversing bad Supreme Court Rulings such as Wickard v filburn which expended the power of the federal government far beyond what is should be, we should also expand the size of the House (using the Wyoming Rule) there by limiting the power of any one representative person. We should also make the House a 4 year term Elected with a 2 year offset of the president.

And Ofcourse we should be using Instant Runoff / Ranked Choice voting not First past the post.

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You're completely missing the point here and the federalist republic argument has always been a terrible one to defend this complete deafness when people criticize the US' democracy. It's like a dictatorship saying they're simply a one party system.

No I am not, your simply reading that one line and making assumptions about my position ignoring everything else I stated

This is hilarious. You literally only read the word democracy and started with the "federalist republic" nonsense without reading any further, which is exactly why you completely missed the point with your post.

The problem is: we're not a 'model' of a republic. We've set aside many of those values in favor of a different and incompatible set, some democratic and many authoritarian.

We have professional police, slavery dressed up as prisons, fiat currency, income taxes, a standing army, no meaningful access to trial by jury for most people in most situations, closed borders, rampant eminent domain to build freeways... it's hard to recognize this state as any serious resemblance to a properly functioning republic.

But I think your overall point, and suggestions, are basically sound and, hopefully, the kind of direction we'll take increasingly seriously as our current state falters.

I have no idea what this means, but I'm also completely illiterate in US political theory. Is your point that republic implies strong federalism and democratic does not?

I'm not who you're replying to but strictly speaking "republic" simply means a government based on rules, technically every democracy is a type of republic. But the US system is a republic very different from a democracy, with democratic institutions but also rules and institutions that cannot be changed democratically and many non democratic processes.

To understand how the US government works it is very similar to the UK under Oliver Cromwell prior to the attempted creation of the third house, it was basically modeled after that period of UK government.

I think the OP is trying to get at the relationship between the constituent States the make up the United States and the Federal government.

Personally I like the idea of devolving authority away from the Federal side and towards the States but honestly it's a giant rat hole that mixes power politics (something Americans do well enough with) and history (something that Americans do not do so well with).

In any case more centralized or less centralized is the work of decades not years so I would hope no one is holding their breath in any direction.

> republic implies strong federalism and democratic does not

This is, in essence, a substantial portion of what is asserted in The Federalist Papers, an 85-part series of letters and treatises written and distributed in 1788 by three proponents of adoption of the US Constitution.

I see, thanks a lot. As far as I could read in the few minutes, the Federalists were opposed to identity theory, Rousseau's idea of direct democracy without political parties, whereas the Federalists were pluralists, like Kant and Aristoteles. IOW, this is not about the current meaning of democracy (as almost all current democracies are both pluralist and federalist, though of course to varying degrees).

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