In the Obsession with Secrecy thread, CCM wrote (@ 7:33PM, March 1st, 2006): “there is an inherent power struggle between the citizenry (the vast, invisible branch of a nation) and the government. Both struggle to avoid serving the other, both struggle to reduce the control over the other.�

I responded: We ignorant Americans don’t seem to know or to care, but in state-of-the-art 20th (and 21st) century parliamentary democracies, the executive can’t play such effective secrecy games with the voters because the executive is drawn from the parliament – and representatives in those systems – which sport vastly fewer lawyers than our legislature (see book recommendation below) – aren’t nearly so willing to delude their constituents for the good of the party. The recent blowups and flaps in Blair’s government – which are not genuinely parallel to the seemingly similar ‘mini’ scandals of the Bushies – bear this out.

So, regarding this: “Should the government serve the citizenry, or should the citizenry serve the government? Many issues of transparency and how they should be managed boil down to this tension … a struck balance is difficult to achieve…�

In parliamentary democracies, the government is viewed as the implementer of the will of the citizenry – not as an elected but sovereign (and coercive) quasi-adversary.

If you don’t believe me (and my assertions based on extensive time discussing this sort of thing with the highly civically-involved citizens of Sweden and Greece), please check out Daniel Lazare’s The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution is Paralyzing Democracy Harcourt, Brace, & Co.; 1996) http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-0156004941-0.

I know I’m surely developing a reputation as an obsessive for so frequently suggesting this book, but it’s for a damn good reason. These problems of our government, from the seemingly simple problem of voter interest and turnout, to these vexing questions of congressional integrity and executive imperiousness, are all a by product of an experimental blend of democratic impulse and the founders’ simultaneous fear of democracy (which they dubbed something like ‘mobacracy’, if memory serves).

So, they gave us a republic only one step removed from monarchy (we elect our ‘king’ to four year terms, while skipping altogether the British ‘prime minister’ model), that was rigged to favor the propertied over the ‘ignorant masses’.

And we seem so smug with our constitution that we’re not willing to question whether or not two centuries worth of untrammeled development of corporate power and international commerce hasn’t perhaps nudged it into obsolescence.

To one who has read the Lazare book, it’s blatantly obvious that this is exactly what’s happened. (And I feel more strongly than ever that this is worthy of an hour of ROS.)

Sooo…

I would start my own opinion on the 50/50 split by noting that in our usually apathetic country, a 60% turnout for a national election is considered remarkable.

I, for one, consider it pitiful.

Not enough voters feel enfranchised. This is a condemnation of the two parties, yet it also compares unfavorably to the typical turnouts in multi-party parliamentary elections abroad. Any body politic able to shop through a full spectrum of political philosophies will generate more interest than this one-party-with-two-heads hybrid republican system we’re stuck with now. Here’s why:

It’s true that many people would know that their smaller party could not win a majority of seats in the national legislature. But in a multi party sate, this isn’t the game anyway. Winning as many seats as possible is the goal, and then – after the election — the various parties parley to form a governing coalition. This ensures that the issues most important to the smaller parties will garner the attentions of the policies of the governing coalition. Often this entails the smaller party leaders assuming ministerial roles in the government agencies most responsible for the issues or policies.

How does this differ from the current system?

As it stands now, Americans convene in quadrennial political conventions where the diverse affiliated interest groups who, in a parliamentary system would have their own parties, must hammer together titanic platforms. Yet because none of these policies can be implemented until after the election, the voters, with justified skepticism, view the platforms as mere ‘campaign promises’. Worse, this often turns out to be true in the practical reality of Washington shenanigans since the opposition party – especially in the Senate with its filibuster threat – can stymie whatever policies it most decries.

This legacy of ‘broken promises’ leads directly to the feeling among the stay-at-home 40+% of eligible voters that neither the Elephant nor Donkey can be trusted to represent their interests. Disillusion = disenfranchisement.

Now, it’s only natural that the 60% who feel enfranchised will spilt the center. As the political debate lures people from the stay-at-home sidelines to the voting booths, those lured to the fray will likely be even split. This held true even the last time but with one minor statistical glitch: Republicans won the last Presidential mud-fight because Rove rightly calculated that 4,000,000 more evangelical Christians would turn out to support the ‘God-fearing’ (that means ‘fundamentalist-respecting’) Dubya than the Donkeys could summon from their disillusioned stay-at-home sympathizers.

And the SOB was correct.

To me, this implies that if a multi-party system invigorated all those stay-at-homes, the political center would swing back to the left. The Republicans know this as well as I do (no matter what they say publicly), which is why slimeball folks like Newt Gingrich freely admit that Elephant hegemony depends on depressed voter turnouts.

And, therefore, the Elephant would fight with all their might any effort to amend the national legislature into a multi-party parliament.

Screw them.

Let’s do it anyway.

It’s only Moonbatting in the beginning. Talk it up, talk it all the damned time, and make it into a movement.

It will happen eventually – or, Sandra Day O’Connor’s warning of incipient dictatorship will prove more prescient than we care to contemplate.

Our tottering old republic will morph into a dictatorship or a real democracy, one or the other, and within 20 to 30 years, if the history of other quasi-democracies is any guide.

If this isn’t convincing, forgive me: I’ve been cogitationally hampered lately. Fire back a critique and I’ll try again. And thanks.

Actually, I think that question would be a good topic for a show.

I’ve cut, pasted, and modified this post from 3 or 4 others I made in several other threads over the past 5 months. To older Rosbats, this post will be redundant since they might have read it when I first drafted the originals, but at least it’s a way to experiment with the ‘de facto’ nesting thread idea – to see if anyone will link to here from Guttersnipe Alley and engage in conversation. If you do, please say so in the Alley – and while here you can click onto your post’s date, which will give a identifier in your web-browsers ‘history’ drop-down box that you can copy and paste into the alert you write in the Guttersnipe thread.

(Does that make any sense?)

On the Insta-Bloggers show, one of the guests said:

‘The blogs are broadening politics’

Quite right!

S’why I’m here.

This format is effectively the ‘Federalist Papers’ of the 21st century – or, at least, the forum from where the 21st century’s new American constitution’s “Federalist Papers� will be drawn and debated prior to the ‘IRL’ constitutional convention.

Or so I hope.

Despite my decidedly mixed feelings for the slave-owner Thomas Jefferson (& Madison too, right?) I don’t despise the constitution’s drafters. I consider them wealthy men who created a republic that served not merely their interests but the interests of a democracy they hoped to found. That’s certainly laudable and noble, but hardly worthy of secular sainthood. They did, after all, legitimize slavery in their new republic. They weren’t the end all be all livin’ end, but just bright guys doin’ their best in the racist and classist society of that era. I neither venerate nor deplore them.

None of this is especially vital to the question of whether the republic has evolved anti-democratically – which I contend has happened. The country’s economic and social conditions today are unrecognizably different to conditions at the time of the constitution’s drafting. The founders’ job was to unite 13 state governments under a single federal government that gained its legitimacy from 13 states’ citizens – and said citizens were only white males ‘of property’.

Contemporary veneration of the ‘Founding Fathers’ is of no practical value, and a constitutionally-conservative equivalent to Hillary Clinton’s jingoistic anti-flag-burning-amendment. Politicians commonly invoke the ‘Founding Fathers’ to convey an implication that their constitutional creation is above reproach and impossible to improve upon.

Yet their creation is outdated — an 18th century republic in a 21st century world. It may have been a model democracy in its day, but no longer, especially when compared to modern parliamentary systems. Unfortunately, the founders simultaneously made any sort of meaningful constitutional overhaul a near impossibility. And their secular sainthood makes any such criticism into a secular sin.

Let’s talk about it anyway. If there is a hell, secular or religious, I’m doomed to it no matter what.

I was lucky in my youth to spend time in Europe. And I can tell you that to your average European in your average European multi-party parliamentary democracy, the American two-party system doesn’t look democratic in the least. Why?

Well, to people who live with multi-party palate of legitimate electoral choices, our system looks like a one-party state offering the illusion of choice. A corporate-oligarchic Soviet Union masquerading as a democracy, and much more effectively that the USSR ever could because the fights between the two parties seem so vicious and therefore so real.

But are they? Or is the viciousness really only a byproduct of hotly contested one-on-one elections? (Keep in mind that in many multiparty states you vote for the party, not for individual representatives.)

Or, is that the Elephantine Right really have an ideological axe to grind, while the Donkeys are only interested in surviving the next Rove-ordered strafing run by the Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the rightwing attack machine?

I’ve got no confident answers to those questions.

But I am sure of this: We The People haven’t any real champions right now. And we won’t without fundamental constitutional change: creating a genuine multi-party palate wherein the left, right, and center all have distinct parties articulating their particular segment of the political spectrum.

Imagine, please, what a Christian Democratic Party would do for the center of American political thinking—a party wherein the planks and platform were drafted, instead of by the fundamentalist lunatic fringe, by PROGRESSIVE Christians! (Even I, an agnostic, would be a sympathizer to such a party, although I’d strongly prefer the ‘Democratic Socialist’ option.)

Imagine, please, a Green Party that could actually win seats in an American national legislature. And could then partake in a coalition government! Do you think we’d have to endure any more farces like the ‘Clean Skies Initiative’ if the Greens were in charge of the new EPA?

And imagine, please, the Republican coalition broken into its real constituencies: The Moral Majority (sic) Party, The National Rifle And Machine Gun Party, The Bring Back The Confederacy And Get These Coloreds Out Of Our Neighborhoods Party, and The Corporate Oligarchy Party (whose slogan would surely be “Just let us make all the decisions and we’ll you promise Really Good Video Games for Christmas!�).

I’ve probably left out some segments of the spectrum, but surely you get my drift.

And please remember that some of the notable drafters of our current 18th century constitution expected it to evolve as the nation needed it to. I don’t think those guys — who BANNED CORPORATIONS, btw! — would rest easy if they thought the system they’d crafted would never, ever evolve, and would only and ever serve the interests of one percent of the population!

It’s time to push for change: a new system wherein the legislators answer to the People instead of to the heirs to the 18th Century’s mercantile barons.

Doncha’ think?

“…in this scenario the liberal-leaning parties get 51% of the vote. But it could be the other way around.”

Don’t worry: when Americans are polled on policy positions without reference to party, the progressives win a majority every time!

I still want to post a few questions about the Senate, but I’m currently working out my Afghanistan-horrors on another thread.

Regardless, thanks for the response.

See you round the site.

This thread is run out probabaly except for you and me.

I liked your scenario for the party-only/parlimentary version of a new government forming apparatus in the constitution. Especially since in this scenario the liberal-leaning parties get 51% of the vote. But it could be the other way around.

And no doubt the G.O.P. has more to lose because their tent is more unwiedly.

Anyhow we need some improvement with the choice between the visionless donkeys and the ruthless republicans one way or another.

Take care.

Although, and admittedly, I don’t expect him or anyone else living who ever took an oath to ‘support the constitution’ to agree with my seemingly radical call for an overhaul.

But I WOULD expect just such agreement from Misters Jefferson and Madison, if only they could see the titanic tumor that grew within the government their republican experiment created.