I'd suppose realistically, what will be the best for the country in the long-term would be is to make it the most democratic system as possible.

That will be achieved by:

1. Democracy is first and foremost, about power. Power that can be easily replaced by another power.

2. Therefore, criticism of the government should be absolutely guaranteed, and should become one of the highest rights.

3. Make it easy to identify and replace power and governments.

4. Promote alternative governments and oppositions.

5. Promote such a culture of generating both criticisms and new ideas.

6. If there is no alternative, then it will become dictatorship. And hence, systems should always be kept in mind as if yet-to-be-known hypothetical alternatives exist. There is no such thing as There Is No Alternative.

7. Everything will be done in the service of defending this democratic ideal, until a better alternative is proposed.

Quote Originally Posted by squark View Post
Ban lobbyists.

Throw out the entire congress. Make elections for both house and senate written statements of issues, and the people would vote on each issue, not for a person or a party, but on the issues themselves, and the state representatives would then not be party representatives but would be required to try to enact the wishes of the people of their state. And salaries would be equal to the mean of the population. So instead of being a way to become rich and well-known, serving in the congress would actually be an act of service.
Interesting idea, but that seems to create new problems on their own. Like, what is the definition of an "issue", and what constitutes a "success" or a "failure" of the implementation of such "issues"?

You could say that the congress could become like an "auction", where the people that are effective of implementing "issues" are kept, and those that are ineffective are kicked out.

But then those that are successful at implementing those "issues" will inevitably need teams, cooperation, alliances, strength by the number, and hence the creation of coalitions and parties will become inevitable, anyway.

I think that voting for people will be unavoidable, because you need power (of the people) to enact those implementations. Democracy is just about people telling representatives what to do. And those representatives tell bureaucracies what to do. Ideally, anyway. Often times the bureaucrats end up holding more power than the representatives. And it's the bureaucrats who think that they're genuinely selfless and doing genuine good for the society, without having greed for neither power nor money, unlike politicians or business persons.