Politics have become identity for a lot of people and for the people who have not chosen this road it’s very difficult to engage. You no longer have an abundance of open dialogue anymore. I can’t remember the last time i even tried to talk about social issues with people without hearing some bullshit talking point from Facebook/CNN/Fox or whatever that has ended the conversation before it’s really begun for them.

I’m getting saying to “move on” from that to say “I’m not proposing we scrap everything and start from fresh, I’m assuming the context we live in with our current government and political structure having some sense of legitimacy, now let’s explain why these parties behave the way they do within that context”. There are obviously wider discussions to be had, I was just trying to limit context.

Our method of voting has a lot to do with it, ranked choice, STAR, or other voting methods can solve a lot of problems with our governance and political system. Not all of them, but some. All the radical alternatives I’ve seen proposed to our current economic and political system are either untested or failed spectacularly in the past, often because they don’t have good ways to handle bad actors. Not that they can’t succeed in the future, just that I’m a little skeptical of trying them again without some major revisions. I’m all for experimentation though, our systems have to continue to grow and change, it is very unlikely that any system at any given point in time is the best system humanity could ever come up with. It’s easy to talk about “revolution” and critique the current system, but most proposals for how to do that involve a lot of blood and instability that could be avoided if we can intelligently use the levers of power available to us currently. Yes, there are incentives which prevent us from adequately using those levers of power (such as the way money influences elections), but they are not un-overcomeable. Most people don’t vote, if those non-voters voted, especially outside of a two party context but even within it, and particularly if they voted in the primaries, our political landscape would look a lot different. If people never participate in primaries, then yes, we will always get a choice between two candidates chosen by the party elite. But, if MAGA world can get their crazy sauce guy to be the nominee, certainly liberals and leftists can nominate somebody equally crazy. Right? They won’t though. Because the people who would nominate somebody who isn’t milquetoast mostly sit home during primaries and local elections. I’ve been one of those people, I get it, the whole game is rigged, why play right?

You are right to point out that the basic incentives of our political system produce bad outcomes, including the uselessness of the democrats. Changing the voting system is one way to fix that, that’s some that can be done within our current political structure. Another way to fix those kinds of base incentives is by adopting new economic systems that have rules which are not enforced by people or trusted parties. If we eliminate the need to trust people to implement rules, we can solve a lot of problems. This is, imo, one of the main failings of communism. It put the power of the government and the market in the hands of the state with few roadblocks for bad actors. We needed to trust somebody to manage the state and the market, which concentrated immense power in one place. At least capitalism splits the power between the two, kinda.

Regarding changing incentives, for example, there is a trend in capitalism for capital to aggregate into monopolies. We rely on government (a trusted party) to prevent that, but they are subject to regulatory capture and aren’t particularly effective. If the entire US economy used a blockchain instead of the government for this role, a rule could be enforced such as “once you have accumulated a billion dollars, congratulations, now you can’t accumulate any more” or things like universal income could be baked in at the protocol level. A 2% tax is levied on all transactions that goes into a pot, and once a year that tax is distributed evenly to all people who have the currency. No party needs to be trusted to do that, it just happens automatically. Just like every 10 minutes a new block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain and that’s gonna keep happening forever no matter what your national government has to say about it. Blockchain technology can be decentralized, trustless, and immune to nation-state level attacks. You may be a rich and powerful person who is used to getting their way in the legal or political system, but you are still bound by the same laws of physics and math as the rest of us. That’s a powerful thing.

The nice thing about using blockchain technology is that:

• We don’t have to do it one whole national economy at a time. You don’t have to overthrow a government and shed a bunch of blood just to try out a new economic system. Instead, these ideas can be proposed, people can use and try them, and if they work well they will grow organically and eventually displace whatever other current economic systems are in use, just as trade and capitalism inevitably did to all the other forms of economy that existed before it.
• Voting can happen within this same system, in a transparent way. This means, for example, people could vote on the % tax that goes to universal income or whatever. And when the vote is complete? The changes are made to the protocol immediately and automatically, without anybody having to be trusted to make those changes. These technologies have massive potential to increase people’s participation in democratic systems.
• We can create rules which are counter to the way that incentive structures organically work. Capitalism’s aggregation problem is not something that one person is enforcing, it comes out of natural power laws and things that aren’t related to “economy” or “money” at all, they’re related to resource scarcity and how power works and human psychology and a whole bunch of other things. But we can create rules, within a network, that are counter to those power laws, that don’t rely on trusting any party to “act correctly” either because incorrect acting is forbidden or because we have aligned their incentives so any self-interested party will act correctly, just as our current system aligns incentives to produce certain behavior.

Blockchain is mostly talked about in popular culture as it relates to finance, investing, scams, etc but really what Satoshi did (the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper and software) was solve a problem humanity has had for millennia: how do you administer a system where you can’t trust the parties who participate in it and where you can’t select a single party or party(s) to administer it properly? Having an answer to that question has implications way beyond the minting of currency. Ultimately, the more systems we can build that are based on code instead of trusting individuals or groups of people to ‘do the right thing’, the less we will even need government as a structure.

So, personally, that’s where I am focusing my efforts these days. I believe this kind of technology has the capacity to change human society in profound and important ways and undo many of the injustices of our current economic and political systems. Much of it needs time to mature, but the framework has been put out there and now people just need to build on top of it.