More than two weeks into the US-Israel war on Iran, and the conflict appears at risk of spiraling out of control.
Back home, Donald Trump’s behavior also appears chaotic. A foreign conflict typically brings somber reflection from leaders: in Trump’s case, it has brought a stream of behavior that has defied norms and raised eyebrows over his state of mind.
Take last Sunday, for example: the Pentagon solemnly announced that a seventh US service member had been killed in the Iran conflict. Trump spent the day playing golf in Florida, where he appeared to be wearing the same baseball cap he wore during a dignified transfer ritual of dead military members on Saturday.
That same day, Trump spoke at a “Shield of the Americas” summit, alongside a group of Latin American leaders. He told heads of countries, including El Salvador and Honduras, that Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, has “a language advantage over me”, because Rubio speaks Spanish.
It’s not just our political representation, everything is being comodified into some app or other. I can sit at home and do all my shopping without ever talking to anyone. This is bad for mental health.
The fact that all of the lawmakers are crammed into one place makes it easy for lobbyists to set up shop. If we live next door to our representative we can at least attend afternoon tea with them and on the way out throw a brick throw the window of our local PAC.
The whole idea of a representative for millions of people is an anachronism from feudal days. How can they possibly serve all their constituent’s interests from atop a giant hierarchical pyramid? On the other hand, we desperately need unified action to tackle the looming climate crisis or we’re all fucked.
In 1793 each Rep represented 35k people…
In 2023 it was 761k per each House Rep…
Representative democracy is fine, the problem is we need like 20x more representatives at least.
That makes lobbying/bribing that much harder and dilutes political power. As well as giving us a much wider pool for higher office.
The excuse for freezing the number is number of chairs that will fit in a room, literally, that’s why we lost representation. Telework solves that.