So I've said before that we need constitutional societies to teach this as a wide spread cultural practice; we should have lectures on new constitutions and whole univerisity departments but they should also be as common as historical reenactments. The province of reform and better government are something that belong to all of us and you can't have a grass roots democracy if there isnt civic training and civic participation. But classes are not a proper measure of how to do this. One of the most educational experiences I ever had was a program in high school called Youth in Government where we went to the Colorado State Legislature to actually make mock bills and have a shadow governor, shadow senators, shadow press agents and shadow representatives. Government is a practical active skill and all members of a democracy should understand actively how it works. When you know what a legislative committee is or what your legislators are doing it makes it less arcane which increases transparency and accountability. You know, for example, how terrible Republicans are in doing any kind of governance whatsoever, and how inept democrats are at treating fascism like the threat that it is.
One of the most interesting LARPs I've ever taken part in is the NSDM or National Security Decision Making Game, where two cells are typically made with roles and political positions representing the interests and structures of two competing governments and a baroque but functional system to resolve mirrors of the real world for things like the US vs North Korea or Iran vs Saudia Arabia etc. The games dont mimic the real world exactly, nor would they pretend that, but they are great ways to highlight one system vs another and how they actually work when the sausage of decision making actually takes place. My perfect example of how to do an exercize that could happen in every school in America would be a three day session, where you spend the first day teaching people the basics of what a constitution is, what governments around the world have done and what will be happening the other two days. The second day would be a larp and also a constitutional design session where you actually make a functional government (or disfunctional government) and the third would be a larp showing the government that people just made actually working in a crisis. This serves many purposes; including demystifying the process of making one, and also ensuring that people see the consequences for design decisions; like how baroque the Electoral College is and how it is a miracle that it took until 2020 before it was a serious threat to our democracy.
I really intend to run this eventually; though stability has thus far not allowed. In another blog I'm doing a bucket list and will be adding this to a bucket list. I think that the value of this exercize is you can explore about a lot of different systems of government and see what works, and once you do you can also see how easy it is to find something that works a hell of a lot better than the current crap 1789 constitution. I've said it before and I'll say it again; the 1789 constitution at the TIME IT WAS MADE, was brilliant and well ahead of its time; visionary even. But we've had close to 250 years to learn lessons from it and we've learned a lot, many of which I am applying as able to this political blog, but the short version of it is, the current systme is clearly not working by any defintion of the word and needs to be reformed. The problem is, we've ossified as a culture and trust our 'political leaders' to have our interests or that some other magical leader will come along and initiate this process.
Balderdash.
I've made a poem about it, but I'll retell the story here. Once I sat in a movie theater with my wife and the projector stopped working. It was a crowded tehater, andw e all sat there waiting for someone to fix it. Five minutes went by, and I looked around, and it was apparent that everyone else was thinking the same thing. I stood and went and got the people to fix the damn thing. I have always known and understood that there is no "Someone Else." I dont agree with the politics of the documentary "Waiting for Superman" but I do like the point of the title and the point the documetary that people knew education wasnt working but that they were all sitting around waiting for some magical messiah to fix things. To fix our political process we all need to roll up our sleeves and come up with a strategy and then take over the democratic party (since the Republican party is broken and pointless beyond repair) and initiate a constitutional fix.
It sounds like pie in the sky, but what's the alternative? It's not like the Democrats are actually going to fix things on their own. Why should they? They have a good thing going where they force progressives to vote for them by threatening them with the nazi republicans, and thanks to Duviger's Law and a lack of Ranked Choice Voting make third parties effectively non existant and useless in the United States. Even if the Republican Party implodes; what's waiting in the wings? The Lying Liberatians or the Russian Anti Vaxer Greens? Its the Democrats or nothing, and we need a whole hell of a lot more at this point to fix things than just a couple of laws. The Democrats always promise to make us live in Shangrila if they get the Holy Trifecta, but those are at best incremental reforms and dont address the fact that the 1789 Constitution allowed one of the two parties to become full on insurrectionist Nazis and has totally failed to address climate change. Look, I'm not saying the democrats havent done good things; Biden's Infrastructure Reduction Act and the Election Security Act were good things, but neither of them nor a damn thing that Biden has done or that Harris promises to do if she gets the Magical Holy Trifecta (blue no matta who!!!) will fix the underlying problem of Nazis.
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