this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Unlike prior revolutions in which the new regime was established after the old, we should write a new constitution in advance.
Start with a framework. Maybe take the Constitution of the United States and make some no-brainer changes (getting rid of the EC, say. Or election by ranked choice)
And then, we develop it. Run clauses by legal scholars, hold town halls. Get it on the web. Debate about the benefits of competing clause versions.
So that when there is a movement, a resistance (and there will be) an organized rebellion, the people will not just have an enemy to fight against but something to fight for.
Or take one that already works well for centuries. Scandinavian countries, Austria, Swiss, are generally good at this.
Sure!
So my original fantasy (during the Obama era) was to create what would start as an wiki of all^†^ the constitutions of all nations of the world, translated to all^†^ languages.
Then there'd be a workshop section where amateur legal experts could take known clauses and tweak them so that they'd be better (say, revising all the US federal elections so that they're ranked choice, and fixing all the instances of two-party procedure so that they accommodate any number of parties. Or, for another example, fixing UK Parliament so that it is appointed by sortition from all qualifying citizens.)
The point of all this when the world isn't on the precipice of despair is twofold:
1) It provides a resource for new societies to look at what other constitutions look like, so they can pull from what works, which means that coups d'etat are more likely to result in something other than a provisional dictatorship that accidentally becomes permanent. Because we have new states rising from the ashes of the old frequently. And...
2) It provides a place to crowdsource amendments to constitutions already in place (or to change current non-foundational ordinances). Right now, here in the US, we depend on our legislators to write laws, and they rely on their staffers who often have corporate allegiances, when they don't receive bill text directly from corporate or special interest lobbyists directly. So it would create a place for the public to talk about it and have its own input.
Such a website was a no-brainer to me, so much so that I had assumed that it existed somewhere online. But no, no-one has made it.
I don't have the skill it takes to start what might eventually become a sizeable project with lots of political enemies, like Wikipedia or Wikileaks. But maybe here on Lemmy creating an interested team would be easier.
For now it's a pie-in-the-sky idea, as I wouldn't have any idea how to begin it.
† This is the internet definition of all, id est as many as we could crowdsource.