Ah, but America has freedom, so there are a lot more laws regulating what people can do.
The side most obvious to outsiders is where it seems to work badly - the bad sheriff who keeps being re-elected, quirks like dry counties. But it's admirable in a way, that people have some power to determine the local rules, together with the freedom to move away if they don't like it. If local democracy were extended further, there would be more variation, and more weirdness, but perhaps it would be a good thing overall.
(Note that a 'parish council' here is for a civil parish, that is the smallest type of administrative unit in the UK; it's not a church parish)
At that point, you will probably be relieved that those idiots aren't allowed do anything important.
I suppose in principle if local authorities were more important, you might get more competent people running for election onto them, but given the average quality of _national_ backbenchers, this seems optimistic.
I wish there was an empirical way of screening out moral puritan types with the aim of directly eliminating their influence, but I'm not sure that can be done without endangering democracy itself. A more difficult but much more ethical approach I think is to try and create new social norms that make aggressive conformity something to be ashamed rather than proud of, puritanism in any direction should be made into a sign of weakness rather than strength. We need a society that instinctively defends "witches" when the witch-hunters are in town.
That's impossible; political parties naturally emerge in democracies. Very few countries have the official recognition of parties that the US does (party registration, official primaries etc) but all democracies have political parties.
Non-partisan democracies do exist, some of them are even directly associated with the UK such as the Falkland Islands and the Isle of Man which are roughly the size of a British parish and a council respectively.
It’d be nice to see some CoL data on the international level too.
I'm skeptical on this point. I think that we're already around 10-20% remote work and might get to 25% remote work in the coming years [1]. I don't think this is a tiny fraction. I'm expecting technology to further reduce the dependence on physical presence over time.
I think remote work has had a significant change (e.g. less commute time, less pollution, more family time) and could cause changes in politics too. Imagine flipping a couple senate seats in a low population density area to further a remote work friendly lawmaking (i.e. land use rules, healthcare, etc...).
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/one-in-four-americans-will-b...
Peoples eyes have been opened and the genie is out of the bottle. I fully expect remote work to transform America to the extent that the post WWII suburbanization will look like a statistical anomaly by comparison.
I would love to work remotely, but I'm not seeing any realistic probability of that for me in the near future.
Indeed I would argue the more we defer to national politics the worse (dramatically worse!) things get. Senators were set up to be elected by the state legislatures on purpose to encourage people to pay attention to their state legislatures. The House of Representatives were selected by popular vote.
Separation of duties/check and balances. The 17th amendment "fixed" that - and I'd say every since it's been downhill from there. Pure democracy's CAN NOT work - it's why we are (for now) a representative republic. There is no perfect system as long as humans are involved, but we were blessed with a pretty good one. I wish people would stop trying to tear it down - we know from history the alternatives are pretty gawd awful.