Originally Posted by
homonculus
The BBC 10 o'clock news had an excellent item (for a change) on the US situation, pointing out the history of racial tensions in the US - totally different from any other country - but also the issue of 18,000 separate police departments where some police have as little as 12 weeks training. Many are so small that oversight must be imperfect.
Yeah, our idea of democracy is based on it working from the bottom up, not from the top down.
That is on purpose.
The overall intent is that we, as a matter of systems design, want to avoid too much power being in too few hands, unlike Europe and the autocratic habits they developed over about 20 centuries.
Our founders didn't arrive at their ideas by accident. They took a lot of ideas that arose from the Enlightenment and tried to put a few of them into practice. It's called the Great American Experiment in Self Government for a good reason. And yes, we are still in a petri dish. Seen from the Chinese or European perspective, a couple of centuries or so isn't a pie that is for sure fully baked. Might take a bit longer in the oven, as it were. Still baking, maybe waiting for the crust to turn that lovely golden brown.
With that design principle come a variety of inefficiencies.
That also is on purpose.
This means, as you observe form that article, it's a bit of a mess in detail but the overall framework remains intact. We survived a bloody civil war. And some progress was made. We lived through the upheaval of the 60's and 70's, learned, made a bit of progress.
Here we are again, doing something similar but different. And it may be painful, but in the longer term I am optimistic that a bit more progress can be made.
Again, that is on purpose.
Our Constitution is the political version of the model of continuous improvement that Deming claims to have uncovered in the 1950's. (I like his work, but he was a few centuries late to be original).
Being political, which means that the messy human element is involved, it's somewhat less than a perfect lab experiment.
That is by design.
The reasoning behind that design is an attempt - and for that matter an experiment - in creating a system that prevents too much power being in too few hands. The underlying reason for that viewpoint is about 2000 years of European history before our nation's founding, from which our founders learned.
The experiment remains an ongoing process. That too is by designer intent.
So far so good, but it can for sure get messy at times.
I have hopes for the experiment to proceed into the future for a while. If it ever ends, and when it ever ends, the rest of you will wish it hadn't.