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Recently, while trying to stay awake through the consultant-crafted chirpings of one or another of the privately-financed
national politicians we wistfully refer to as "public servants," I heard a simple question pose itself to me: What
would it be like if we had a democracy?
It is a question not often asked by our anointed national leaders and our media stenographers, the former of whom pretend
that we already have plenty of democracy and the latter of whom actually believe it.
But it is a stubborn question, the kind that keeps prodding at your ribs until it gets a response. So I shook off the
soundbite cobwebs and got to thinking: What would American representative democracy actually look like? What would our rules
be? What new laws would we need to pass, and what old ones would we need to wipe off the books?
Here in the Bush age of newcular politics and scripted realities, asking such questions feels a little bit like science
fiction. You know, like the character in the Kurt Vonnegut story who, because he thinks too much, is required by the government
to wear an earpiece that interrupts his thoughts with blasts of noise. Still, I think asking the obvious questions is a good
idea, if only because the act of imagining a democracy is the best antidote I know to the blaring false claim that we already
have one.
So I have started keeping a sort of Democracy Laundry List, which I am posting here a couple of items at a time. Take
a look and see how it compares with your own wish list for civilized government. If you have items you think should be added,
email me at aliasbruce@earthlink.net. And tell others to do the same. I will post all thoughtful additions. Maybe we can make
a project of this.
Okay, here goes. In a functioning American democracy:
1. NO PRIVATE MONEY WILL BE ALLOWED IN PUBLIC ELECTIONS.
I think the only remaining Americans who do not see how private money savages public elections are the mainstream journalists
who breathlessly cover the corporate-underwritten electoral horse races between the wealthy and the wealthier. The rest of
us have long since gotten the dope slap. It's not exactly a brain teaser: When private money is the gateway to public office,
public office serves private interests. This is why we have such surreal contradictions between the desires of citizens (as
shown overwhelmingly in polls) and government policies that do exactly the opposite. Universal health care is one glaring
example: Americans want it and the private sector doesn't, so guess what we get. (Please don't try to rebut this by citing
the Clintons' failed health plan; it was innumerable concessions to the health care industry that made their plan such an
unwieldy beast.) Public education, which neocons and some moneyed interests would like to drown in the bathtub, is another
area in which national policy ignores the public will. (Forget the speeches about better public schools and the unfunded mandates
of No Child Left Behind; look at the real federal budget numbers.) Not to mention energy and climate change. And we don't
even need to talk about the Washington/Average Citizen disconnect on the industry-enriching war in Iraq and the pork-laden
War On Terror.
Take away the dictatorship of private money in electoral politics, and suddenly you have a system within which a person
can become a credible candidate on the basis of the outright public appeal of his or her ideas. Replace private war chests
and manipulative barrages of TV ads with publicly-funded forums where candidates actually say what they believe, and suddenly
you have a more level playing field in which no message can overwhelm the others through the power of wealth.
What our country needs is a system of fully-publicly-funded elections in which private money is outlawed. Period. Elections
are public entities, and private money has no more place in the process than it would in, say, wealthy citizens handing cash
to local police departments for better personal protection. Money is not speech. Speech is speech. In a democracy, we would
know the difference.
Where would the money come from to publicly fund all elections? Well, we could start with the avalanche of greenbacks
now squandered on privately-generated government policy. Let's see: there's the Iraq war (hundreds of billions of dollars),
tax cuts for the rich (trillions more), and the towering cost of our chaotic private health care non-system (more trillions).
And that's just the beginning. Public-spirited policy drafted by fairly-elected representatives would free up huge portions
of our misdirected national expenditures and make them available for actual public use. Ain't democracy grand?
2. PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION WILL END THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY.
It's crazy, this American religion about democracy being the fair and just rule of the majority. Lani Guinier had it right
when she wrote her 1994 treatise "The Tyranny of the Majority." When 51 percent of the electorate wins it all, it
means that 49 percent gets nothing. When George W. Bush was reelected (I use the verb loosely) with just over half the vote
and then used the presidency to ram through radically aggressive and rightist policies, it meant that just under half the
voters gained no representation whatsoever. This is not democracy, folks, no matter how faithfully we repeat the mantra in
civics classes. Ours is, at best, a dictatorship of the plurality.
That is why we need proportional representation, an irrefutably common-sense concept accepted long ago in nations as widely
varied as Britain and Israel. It is a system that puts politicians in power in proportion to the votes they actually receive.
So the party that ekes out a plurality wins, but must then share leadership power with other parties in proportion to their
respective vote counts. The power-sharing can happen at the very top, with key leadership positions allotted to candidates
from dissenting parties, and also at the rank-and-file level in the composition of the legislative assembly. But the basic
idea is that a political platform and the people who support it still gain representation even if they did not get the most
votes in an election. In comparison with such an elegantly sensible system, what we Americans call "democracy" is
an authoritarian mess.
A corollary that is just as sensible is the system of instant runoff voting, which eliminates the "spoiler"
problem by allowing voters to specify, in the voting booth, who they want their vote to go to in the event that their preferred
candidate loses. So you can vote for, say, Ralph Nader, but also stipulate that your vote will go to Al Gore if Nader isn't
among the top two vote-getters. It's a perfectly practical way of allowing citizens to vote their true preferences -- and
who can argue with that? Further, it frees voters from the clutches of a two-party system that effectively disallows dissent.
With instant runoff voting, you need no longer fear that supporting a third (or fourth) party will rule you out of the game.
For anyone who embraces the purported core principle of democracy -- that a nation's leadership should reflect the wishes
of its voters -- there can be no coherent opposition to the ideas of proportional representation and instant runoff voting.
They are inherently democratic, they do no harm, and they enhance the most egalitarian aspects of the one-person-one-vote
system.
Proposals that America adopt such a system are greeted with silence, by and large, by mainstream reporters who reflexively
accept the current fundamentals of American politics as unchangeable. But the major opposition comes from two sources: incumbent
politicians who would be more accountable to more voters if the system were democratized, and zealots who believe their causes
have an unconditional right to prevail.
What does that say to you about who is a friend of democracy and who isn't?
(MORE ENTRIES TO COME. UP NEXT: HEALTH CARE.)
© 2006 Bruce A. Jacobs (Posted 9/9/06)
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