And in say Mississippi of 1950 state laws did not say that a black couldn't vote. Just 99.99% couldn't get the minimum qualifications. How unfortunate. Why this scheme does not descend into this?
Earning the vote through National Service of some type.
- Thread starter Peg Leg Pom
- Start date
How about some kind of nascent democracy with a bad case of a siege mindset? Thinking something like Armenia or Israel; the latter already conscripts women IOTL, so at least you avoid the problems with denying women the vote. Or Eritrea, if Afewerki had died a hero rather than lived to see himself become the villain.
Every political system that's ever been tried has proved to be open to abuse.
And in this system the abuse is not who get's to take part or not as the laws would specifically prevent that. Rather as the individual would have little choice as to what role they have to fill, who gets the most dangerous jobs with the highest risks to life and limb and who gets to sit in a nice warm office organizing things or working in social programs in holiday resorts.
Group A gets to drain salt marshes in the middle of winter. Group B looks after the elderly in one of God's Waiting rooms by the sea. Group C gets to serve as assistants to members of the Government (Who by some strange quirk of fate happen to be good friends of their Grandparents)
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After Athens embraced Democracy, well created it, post Persian war, did not all citizens have to take turns participating in civil service? I think what you want is that everyone is randomly selected to fulfill a government civil or military roll. The selection process would have to allow for physical abilities, ie a blind person should not be a fighter pilot. This thought experiment has some interesting possibilities. Society could end up being stronger because everyone has to participate, no opting out. I guess one would have to determine what is a civil roll. Are teachers, doctors, fire fighters, police, paramedics, nurses included? Some will of course wish to remain in those rolls and I guess that is where the selection process would have to help determine. The above comment is cynical but realistic outcome of how things seem to work out.
The valid criticism would be that these are things that favour already successful families, and - more telling - disadvantage people from poor backgrounds - thus perpetuating a class system. There have been times when being from a working class family and area was not (much of) a barrier to getting a university education, and good health cate and education allowed a much more even playing field, but those days are long gone.
Incidentally, almost everybody I have ever come across who earned substantially more than average was there by some combination of blind luck, failure to realise their lack of talent combined with unjustified optimism, family connections or otherwise knowing the right people. Awards also generally tend to fall upwards rather than trickle downwards.
So, I can see what he's getting at but it's going to end up very unfair.
As for the OP, maybe a better way to do it is that everyone is entitled to a vote, but failing to do specific required civic duty (national or local service, whether military or civil) temporarily deprives you of the vote until you've done it. There would be some very specific exemptions and limitations - no blind pilots as suggested above, and some choice of timing to avoid harming practical or academic training but "I don't want to" and "but my father is rich" shouldn't cut it.
Implictly, that's the point. It gives the Right Kind Of Person greater voting power compared to the Wrong Kind Of Person, and conveniently defines what the two are.
The 'blind pilot' thing is covered, I think, by 'failing to do required duty'. Everyone gets the vote at 18 (or 16, or 21, or whatever). But if your call-up papers come through the letterbox, and you don't show up for duty as ordered, you're deprived of the vote until you meet the condition for its restoration. Completion of your service might be that condition. If you're deemed unsuitable for service, for whatever reason, you're not required to perform civic duty, therefore cannot fail to perform it, and don't lose your vote.
The same system could, of course, be applied to other forms of civic duty. Jury service, for instance. Or reservist training, if you're going for a 'garrison state' thing.
Going full Heinlein is probably not a good idea. Such a system is guaranteed to see the children of privileged families required to perform a fortnight's service taste-testing at the state vineyard, while children of disadvantaged families are required to work sixteen hour shifts in coal mines until physically incapable of doing so. It can't work unless you have a truly equitable way of assigning duties, which I don't think is possible.
I think the big issue here is that everyone is viewing the franchise as a carrot (or stick) the state wields to get stuff. That isn't how it works. The franchise is never given to any group unless those people agitate and fight for it (and often, not even then). There isn't going to be some grand meeting where a nation plays a Paradox game and messes with the election sliders to get a favorable outcome. Voting is a messy process with lots of moving parts.
There is "open to abuse."
And there is "chisel the locks off the doors, prop them open with giant lead weights, and send a gilded invitation by special courier to abuse's house saying "COME ON AND ABUSE THIS, YOU ABUSIVE ABUSER YOU, COME ON, DO IT, YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO!"
Systems with artificially limited franchise where you have to go through some kind of "federal service" to become a voting citizen are very much the latter.
That's just the start of it. There's also the question of who gets dishonorably drummed out of the service (and thus is made permanently ineligible to vote), and why.
Sexual or gender presentation that doesn't line up with what the service thinks you should be? Moral turpitude. Dishonorable discharge.
Signs of political radicalism or discontent, during or prior to term of service? Moral turpitude, insubordination, prejudicial to discipline. Dishonorable discharge.
Membership in a disliked minority group? Systematically given the stink-eye by all the senior officers, who will assuredly drum you out of the service unless you constantly struggle to prove you are one of "the good ones."
Quite bluntly, while I disagree with people who call Heinlein fascist, it is the plain and simple truth that a system like Heinlein's Terran Federation is one of the most efficient ways I can imagine to implement fascism while keeping up the pretense of being a republic.
That wasn't Athens' qualification for citizenship, though. Their qualification for citizenship was "be a male descended on both sides from other Athenian citizens with no foreign ancestors whatsoever, who is not a slave."
Now, certain things were expected of able-bodied adult citizens, such as that when Athens went to war, you'd pick up a javelin (or a suit of armor if you could afford it, in which case you had more privileges) and go join the army. Or maybe if you were poor (and therefore bad, this was a clear value judgment in a society that invented 'aristocracy' to mean 'rule by the best') you would accept a salary to be a rower in the Navy. But that wasn't something you did in order to be a citizen. It's just that your community tacitly expected you to come along for things like this, and the pressure was far too high for most people to turn down.
The thing is, modern societies do not actually require the semi-coerced labor of every able-bodied and motivated individual working "in the service of the state" for free or for subpar wages. It's not really necessary. Modern economies do not run on corvee labor, and there is no need to come up with some fancy workaround for corvee labor or conscription in which people are forced to submit to such labor or be second-class citizens for life.
Just have the government tax the citizenry and pay people to do government jobs, like a normal country. All this obsession with "we need the vote to only go to people who appreciate it properly" is either a sincere attempt to solve a fake problem that doesn't actually exist, or a real attempt to institute various forms of limited democracy, military rule, or caste system via the back door.
I think it's worthwhile here to try and be clear:
Are you asking "what would happen in a society that instituted System X" or are you trying to subtly say "System X is super-cool and I'm sure I can fix any minor problems with it and then clearly it will be superior to what we have now?"
Why is this a priority?
We know why Heinlein SAID it was a priority. But bluntly, he thought it was a priority because he thought that what America really needed in the late 1950s and early 1960s was to be more warlike and confrontational with the Soviets, more paranoid of possible communist infiltration on the home front, and more aggressive in disciplining Those Pesky Kids (that is, the late Silent Generation and early Baby Boomers) who were clearly a bunch of juvenile delinquents and needed a good (totally not fetishized) whipping to teach them some proper American values.
In short, Heinlein was very, very out of touch and was horribly wrong about what American society of the time needed at the time he wrote Starship Troopers. It seems reasonably likely that an America he was genuinely happy with would have fucked around and found out to the extent of getting into nuclear war with the USSR.
These are very different things to try to accomplish with a thread, and it makes a difference in how I or others might engage with you.
More precisely, this is the propaganda version spread by the world government after the "veterans' societies" in question became the world government.
I see no reason to imagine that the veterans' associations that became the Terran Federation in Starship Troopers were morally or politically all that different from the far-right militant Freikorps of Weimar Germany. Whether those groups were "forced" to do everything they did, and to adopt all the policies they did, and to shape politics as they did, would depend heavily on whether one is more inclined to agree with Hitler, or with the sort of people he liked to throw in prison camps for political dissidence.
I'm not sure that actually works, as opposed to being the kind of self-congratulatory "and this is why our system is best" stuff that any class focused on feeding 'correct' political and ideological propaganda to high school students would do a lot of.
The clear implication of the argument Heinlein gives us, and that you relay to us, is that there is a 1:1 correlation between "willingness to take risks," "moral virtue," "civic-mindedness," and "agreement with the clearly good, proper, and mathematically correct moral values of the Terran Federation." In actual practice, these things are not tightly correlated. Mahatma Ghandi would score very high on the first axis, debatably high on the second, very low on the fourth, and whether he would score high or low on the third depends entirely on whether you grade him as a person who's supposed to be a loyal British subject or an independent leader of the nation of India.
Both. If you are a first-class citizen (that is, if you are some combination of educated, a wealthy businessman, high-status in your community, and the over-45 parent of two) you will be very sure to vote.
If you are a second-class citizen, you will not see much point in voting; the system will by design make your opinion irrelevant. That is a feature, not a bug, from the point of view of the kind of person who implements this.
Also, expect a system like this to make whatever institutions gatekeep things that give access to more votes very careful about the qualifications they hand out, and under a lot of external scrutiny. If getting a university degree means you get to vote twice, expect a lot of people questioning whether any given university should be accredited or not, mostly on ideological grounds.
Goodhart's law applies here: "Any measure which becomes a target will then become a bad measure," because people start gaming the system. You'll see a huge business in multinational corporations who rotate citizens through overseas postings for two years just to be able to say they have done so, in universities that award whatever minimum degree grants you an extra vote via as many correspondence/virtual courses as possible, and so on.
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iddt3
Donor
You sir are dead wrong. The first film is a masterful satire of Fascism, holds up remarkably well to this day, and legitimately has better characterization then the book. Arguably, the movie does better world building than the books as well, in terms of how it would actually play out.
But yeah, as thought experiments go, Starship Troopers is interesting, but I can't imagine it being sustainable for more than a generation, either reverting to some form of flawed democracy, or descending into military dictatorship. Among other things, it's way too easy for the existing citizenship class to close the door behind them as it were.
I'm just speculating on what if. I personally think it's far too open to abuse to work.
The closest parallel I can think of is Rome. Citizenship was not universal, but confined to certain groups, and representing significant benefits (such as a lack of Taxes). Military service being a way to gain citizenship for you and your descendants.
This system wouldn’t work directly in a modern nation state. They can’t afford to exempt citizens from taxes and it’s unlikely they can get away with maintaining much of their population below citizen status. Additionally, the OP seems to be leaning to voting rights being tied to personal short service rather than long service granting status to both the server and their descendants.
I think that the OP is maybe possible, as long as military service is not the only method of gaining the vote. It could perhaps be the main one. If voting age is set so it generally falls at the end of mandatory service period anyway tying the two together might just be accepted as normal. But, as in many modern national service schemes, there would likely need to be exceptions for those who are going into critical industries or study certain topics. And probably for those who do not meet service requirements. And since most nations don’t actually require their entire population as military at any one time, it might make sense to roll many of them into a labour corps of sorts.
So yeah, my thought is it’s possible. It would have to probably happen after a significant amount of the population was either already enrolled in national service (and therefore only disadvantage those that are perceived to be shirkers) or the switch to this system would have to represent a broadening of the electorate from the current level without disadvantaging those that currently have political power. It’s a tricky thing to bring about, but probably not impossible.
This system wouldn’t work directly in a modern nation state. They can’t afford to exempt citizens from taxes and it’s unlikely they can get away with maintaining much of their population below citizen status. Additionally, the OP seems to be leaning to voting rights being tied to personal short service rather than long service granting status to both the server and their descendants.
I think that the OP is maybe possible, as long as military service is not the only method of gaining the vote. It could perhaps be the main one. If voting age is set so it generally falls at the end of mandatory service period anyway tying the two together might just be accepted as normal. But, as in many modern national service schemes, there would likely need to be exceptions for those who are going into critical industries or study certain topics. And probably for those who do not meet service requirements. And since most nations don’t actually require their entire population as military at any one time, it might make sense to roll many of them into a labour corps of sorts.
So yeah, my thought is it’s possible. It would have to probably happen after a significant amount of the population was either already enrolled in national service (and therefore only disadvantage those that are perceived to be shirkers) or the switch to this system would have to represent a broadening of the electorate from the current level without disadvantaging those that currently have political power. It’s a tricky thing to bring about, but probably not impossible.