TIME OUT OF JOINT

Little good can be gained by cursing polarized political institutions and amorphous societal, religious, and economic conditions which get all mixed together in the melting pot that is  contemporary American culture.  We are what we are, and unless something happens that changes the collective us at a basic level of awareness of what we are and what we should be and could be, nothing much will change after November 6th... no matter who gets elected in local, state, and national elections.  We will get what we deserve, but not what our nation's founding fathers had in mind.  I am trying to develop a proposal that will challenge every person who is seeking election in November to demonstrate that he/she will, if elected, act in the interest of the people, not just of the party or of the individuals that funded his/her campaign.  Check the BLOG in the next few days to see what develops.

The framers of our Constitution favored representative democracy over direct democracy for reasons which they understood clearly.  Representative democracy is founded on the principle of elected people representing a group of people.  Representatives elected by the people are charged with the responsibility of acting in the interest of the people, even when the people’s interest does not coincide with the interest of the individual representative or with the interests of the people with the most money who can afford to pay for the representative’s election campaign. 

At times when decisive action is needed to avoid catastrophe, direct democracy is slow and laborious and often inefficient. It doesn’t provide for swift initiation in the face of changing circumstances. It places responsibility on the people for voting on policy initiatives directly, as opposed to representative democracy in which people vote for representatives who then vote on policy initiatives.  A most important feature of representative democracy is that it gives elected representatives enough authority to exercise swift and resolute initiative in the face of changing circumstances. To the naive citizen, direct democracy seems to be a gift, a blessing, a fair reward for living in a “free” society.  To the more thoughtful citizen, the best form of democracy involves giving all citizens the right and the responsibility to vote for competent representatives who will study all issues and will work in cooperation with other representatives, whatever their declared political party affiliations.

  

In America, what started out as representative democracy is gradually morphing into direct democracy.  Despite our national government’s representative beginnings and it’s constitutional basis at a federal level, eighteen states allow people to initiate directly a change in a state constitution and to establish laws directly, overriding the power of elected representatives. The initiative system obviously favors the people with the most money because they can pay the high cost of getting their projects onto the ballot.  Those same people with the money can promote the initiative through highly specialized, sophisticated and often misleading advertising aimed at persuading poorly educated individual voters to cast votes against their own interests.  James Madison and the people who worked with him to frame the original constitution of the United States were well aware that a representative democracy is designed to look after the interests of all the people, even the interests of the weakest party.  It was the tyranny of the masses that led a now repentant Germany into the holocaust.  It was the tyranny of a majority of people in mobs that accounts for America’s own holocaust.  In 1914 Tuskegee Institute reported fifty-two lynchings for that year.  The Chicago Tribune reported fifty-four, and by some accounts the number was seventy-four.  According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States.  3,437 Negro and 1,293 White.  The largest number of lynchings occurred in 1892.  Of the 230 persons lynched that year, 161 were Negroes and 69 were Whites.