What do I want out of this?
Essentially Uncompromisable:
-At minimum, universal food and education; universal income well above subsistence level, as that becomes relevant and possible. We can't afford to put everyone through high level universities in the way that the RL!US could but doesn't, but that doesn't mean that the education stops being important or that that state of affairs need continue any further than necessary. I'd be including healthcare, but I genuinely don't know if we currently have that in any reasonable capacity; as that changes, so does my stance on this. Internet might reach this level but is even less doable than healthcare atm; some other method of ensuring the free flow of information would be acceptable there as long as it actually does that.
-Equal protection under law, enshrined in. LGBTQA+, women, men, all religions, all ethnic groups, rich, poor, etc. Probably other groups that have emerged in the last 50 years, or ones that I totally think should be included that! This should be examples, not a complete list, and it should be expandable; I'm aiming for sophont flourishing, not some subset thereof.
-Democracy, under a sane voting system. Ideally Something like Condorcet or instant runoff, but that particular detail belongs lower down. Universal suffrage is pretty much completely non negotiable.
Stuff I want badly, but am more willing to compromise on:
-Sophont rights. This would be uncompromising, but I'm more vague on the form. I would want something along the lines of
https://www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf , but I think there's a lot of room for a coherent system that largely hits the important points while still looking different. There are subpoints within this that belong in the above category.
-Business Regulation. The absolute minimum I would accept is the old US, plus loophole closures, but ideally I'd want significantly more and that would be a fairly bitter compromise. I'm not necessarily opposed to workplace democracy, but it's not a hard stance in my ideology and if it turns out to be a no sell in terms of drawing in foreign business to actually win this I'm willing to turn against it outright in argument.
-Regulation of hate speech. I'm not entirely decided on how much power on this score, and am open for being convinced in a wider variety of levels should there be a widespread sane consensus.
-Stronger federal power. Don't let the splintering happen again. Giving regional governments emergency power in case the central government is decapitated again sounds smart, though.
-Free flow of people within a country
-Laws against gerrymandering.
-Civilian control of the military
What I think should be kept from the old government for legitimacy and work:
-3 Houses of government. Presidency, congress, and supreme courts. I think that the president has too much power on that scale in the RL!US, but I think that internally and internationally the presidency is a fairly strong part of the image of America, and with a better voting system wouldn't have as many flaws in getting good candidates. I think we need a better congress, and potentially not two houses; this also gives a fairly easy way to integrate splinter states into a federation diplomatically, while helping with legitimacy; insofar as we change the appearance of things, it should be to taking stuff like a parliamentary system that can shore up the lack of continuity with their own legitimacy of international success.
--Local level government should also be democratic, but those are much less important for legitimacy and are correspondingly less of a sticking point. Direct democracy might not even work so badly for regions
-Same constitutional structure, but it definitely needs some aggressive remodeling. The second amendment should probably go, many of the other amendments should outright replace the text they modify, make it explicit that this isn't supposed to be a static document.
-Military structure, as possible; things like rank names or the like are non-negligibly helpful to establishing continuity and shouldn't be changed without reason.
-E: Not a fan of the electoral college but if we can make it genuinely symbolic, then 🤷
Stuff I want:
-Better public defenders; more per capita, probably more competitively paid but with a UBI and more availability of education that might not turn out to be necessary
-Better oversight for governmental employees. Something like ICE happening is completely unacceptable, as is the US military's unaccountability of budget, the current system's systemic local police brutality and racism, etc.
-A market with oversight. Money and markets are genuinely really really good at distributing scarce resources, but it's very clear that an unregulated market becomes anything but free and competition encouraging.
-Secular governance & freedom of religion
-Latitude to stamp down on seditious ideologies like fascism, but noninterference with ideologies that don't interfere with, well, liberty and democracy. I don't want the government to be able to enforce Soviet Russia all over again, but I have no objections to, say, syndicalists in power, or a social democratic government forming a coalition with libertarians, or conservative parties that aren't proto-fascists, as long as the government actually has popular mandate.
-Better recall system for elected representatives who defect from the will of their constituents
-Better protection against propaganda and falsehoods. My gut instinct is fines and retraction but I genuinely don't know how best to do this without getting too much censorship I
don't want.
-Prison reform, because holy fuck RL!America's is currently awful
My personal Ideology on other matters than the above:
-Somewhere around SocDem / somewhat left of there on some parts, so that would obviously be my preferred governing party, but I am very emphatically opposed to preventing that from changing or otherwise enshrining a political party in law.
There's probably some stuff missing because I'm not taking this anywhere near as seriously as I would actually redesigning the US constitution. If I missed something obvious that's probably why; I'm not wedded to this exact list, more that this is my attempt to express the underlying opinions.
