Parliamentary America

The Least Radical Means of Radically Repairing Our Broken Democracy

De: Maxwell L. Stearns

Narrado por: Maxwell L. Stearns

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 blueprint of how to move toward a more perfect union

While others were working on Project 2025, law Professor Maxwell Stearns was working on Parliamentary America. Where our legislative system has been captured by the industries it was meant to regulate, our democracy has been captured by the Impact of the freewheeling and utter guilelessness of the modern social media landscape.
We have become so siloed that we no longer believe our options in each and every election speak to our finely curated preferences in political representation. Some want to be represented by a Green Party President. Others, America First. Still others, desire a Progressive Party President. Desperate to use their solitary vote to strike a blow against a stalled system, every cycle we risk enough voters casting that vote for a third party, holding their nose and voting for the candidate closest to their values, or not voting at all.
Imagine a reconfigured system that allows them to have the best of all of those options. Better than what we have now. Better than Ranked Choice Voting. A system that assures more representative government and that invites the majority, comprised of a broader mix of voices to cooperate to form a governing coalition. In this scheme, the people will see their Green Party representatives fighting for the Earth, alongside their more tradition Democrats, perhaps aligning on some issues and diverging on others. The same would be true across the aisle; America First Representatives might align with traditional Republicans on some issues, but certainly not all. And sometimes traditional Democrats and traditional Republicans might join together to ensure a system not captured by extremes.
Professor Stearns articulates that more than half of our population feels politically homeless. Progressives often feel homeless in the Democratic Party. MAGA felt homeless in the more traditional Republican Party. Democrats feel homeless in the pull of the more socially progressive bend of AOC and her squad. More traditional Republicans feel homeless in the new MAGA era of the Republican Party. The answer is more parties (but not too many) and a doubled House of Representatives. Two ballots, one by district representation, most commonly Democrat and Republican as we have now, and the second ballot by party preference, with results allotted by the percentage of overall party votes in each state.
No longer would voters be stymied by the choice of the lesser than two evils. There is so much more packed into this book. How we pick our President, for one. But that shouldn’t be the headline. Because we have allowed our system of governance to govern less and less competently over time. This fix requires fundamental change. Our founding fathers believed we were capable of building a more perfect Union. They gave us the means to amend. Professor Stearns has given us a blueprint.
Maybe we start obsessively focusing on what is working, allowing us to finally fix what is broken?

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.