Parliamentary America

The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy

De: Maxwell L. Stearns

Narrado por: Maxwell L. Stearns

Duración: 11 h y 24 m

Resumen del Editor

Americans face increasingly stark choices each presidential election and a growing sense that our government can't solve the nation's most urgent challenges. Our eighteenth-century system is ill-suited to our twenty-first-century world. Information-age technology has undermined our capacity to face common problems together and turned our democracy upside down, with gerrymanders letting representatives choose voters rather than voters choosing them. In Parliamentary America, Maxwell L. Stearns argues that the solution to these complex problems is a parliamentary democracy.

Stearns considers such leading alternatives as ranked choice voting, the national popular vote, and congressional term limits, showing why these can't solve our constitutional crisis. Instead, three amendments-expanding the House of Representatives, having House party coalitions choose the president, and letting the House end a failing presidency based on no confidence-will produce a robust multiparty democracy.

Stearns takes listeners on a world tour-England, France, Germany, Israel, Taiwan, Brazil, and Venezuela-showing what works in government, what doesn't, and how to make the best features our own. Genuine party competition and governing coalitions, commonplace across the globe, may seem like a fantasy in the United States. But we can make them a reality.

©2024 Maxwell L. Stearns (P)2024 Kalorama

A solution to the preserve our democracy

This book is extremely well written and I enjoyed listening to the audio version. It was smooth and easy to listen to. He fully explains each idea and proposal in a way that easily relates to the world issues we face today. The author shared his knowledge of the subject matter in great detail to allow listeners to grasp and would easily understand. He uses metaphors and comparisons to pop cultural and historic facts in an entertaining yet detailed way to get the key points across.

The author fully details the structure of our present government structure and its evolution since its founding principals. He points out the positive aspects and flaws of each fundamental pivot along the American Democratic journey.

Readers will have an opportunity to compare and understand how other democracies have evolved on a world tour section of the book. The thesis of the book is to look at what works and what doesn’t work and how we can change our system to better serve the evolved needs of its constituents.