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Randy Foote's avatar

Greetings Jim....I've been reading your blog for awhile and today I finally ponied up a few bucks to express appreciation. This post is much along the lines of what I've been thinking --- and despairing -- about our national political system. At my (our) age I see it as all in the hands of younger people, and I wish our generation would get the hell out of the way on the national stage. Though I don't see that coming voluntarily.

I've been thinking a lot about your excellent explorations of local governance, "Our Towns". Even though (or because) national governance has so failed, the real change is local. Living in Boston, the critical national issues such as abortion, guns, health care etc are kind of "not my problem" (to an obviously limited extent). It is all happening "out there", and I likely can have little real effect on the national level, whereas I can have a lot of effect locally.

I'm an historian, so that the worse things get in the present the further back in history I read in order to get perspective and hang on to sanity. Will my old Dunster friend Al Gore go down in history as a man of old school principle who showed the way, or as a dying breed of Roman Republican. The last President whom everyone agreed was legitimate was George HW Bush -- ever since then the opposing side (perhaps with good reason) has denied the legitimacy of the winning candidate, whether by contesting the election or by impeachment. Impeachment will now become a regular tactic whenever the Congressional and Presidential parties differ.

Your suggestion of increasing representation in the House makes perfect sense, just like changing the size and tenure of the Supreme Court. But the devil is how will anything substantive ever get through Congress, let alone the impossible Constitutional process. I look forward to your thoughts on this, but I cannot see a way out via any regular process.

Trump showed the path to subvert the Constitution in governance and elections. Our fortune was that he was not politically intelligent enough to carry it through. He could so easily have been re-elected had he followed the example of Bush II after 9/11 in his response to COVID. Fortunately he could not see that. The next guy will....

I'll have a lot more to say on this later. For now I am very appreciative to be a part of your conversation...

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Kevin Egan's avatar

The underrepresented states have great economic power: how could they join together to harness that power to force non-violent change on the resistant overrepresented ones? Boycotts are the most obvious idea—e.g. National Interstate Compact states favoring each other for business and shunning states that won’t join, which might lead to the end of the Electoral College— but how to organize such an action? Is there a Gandhian Salt March equivalent possible in our vastly more modern country whose press has lost its way so badly? The Rev. Barber is a worthy successor to Gandhi and MLK, but look at how much less coverage he and his movement get by comparison! I try not to despair…

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