Professor’s Classroom

Subject:  Political Theory

Paper #2

A good question…..some will say nothing and yet others will say everything…..after many years of watching and participating in the political process of this country I have come to believe the latter….I have been a radical that believes that the people are the political power and have been an advocate of participatory democracy for all those years….but yet there will be those that say the our present form of democracy is the best…that representative democracy is the best way for the country to behave…..I will disagree.

Is there a good reason that I feel this way?  Yep and a big one……the present system eliminates the people from the process with the exception of elections every so often…all other decisions are made for us…whether we think they are a good idea or not….it is all about what the ruling elites want, not what the people want…..

People are starting to question the validity of the representative democracy for many reason, but the most common are:

1–too much is expected of the process

2–it completely fails to rev the people up or to generate much interest in the process

3–the people gravitate to individuals not issues

4–fails to find solutions to complex problems and issues

Since the days of our Civics classes, which are a thing of the past, we have been taught that the answers to ALL of life’s problems can be fixed by our representatives, whether it be in Washington or at the local level……but there is a bigger truth that is somehow lost in the shuffle and that is that the representative body is too weak to solve the massive problems facing the people…..if an example is needed then just look at the whole recent debate of health reform (at least at the time of this writing)……why would I say this?……the players in the representative game are pre-occupied with the longevity in Washington and everything else is just a bothersome task that has to be attempted……the masses are nothing but a pack that needs to be manipulated….

The representatives seem to be trying less and less to involve the people in the decisions that concern them…..the people are nothing more than a consumer of the political rhetoric that is uttered daily….there is NO more face to face discussion between the pols and the people, instead there is the one way media….that means that the media reports on one aspect and all else matters not……the media has gained so much influence that it leads to a massive manipulation by the elites and because of that the original idea of the Founders is only a vague memory in a historian’s head…..

The Founding Fathers, back in the day, did not want the masses involved in the national discourse….but they thought that a face to face with the reps back home would make the running of the country much easier and more streamline…..originally it probably was, because in the communities everyone knew everyone else…..but today that is NO longer possible….the idea of a face to face debate with the rep is just a pipe dream from the past….

For many many years the representative form of democracy has been failing the people……yet those same people allow it to continue…..why?

The answer is very simple…..Americans allow the rep form of government to continue because they are too passive and badly misinformed…just an example of what I just said…..in a recent survey of self-described Repubs, 63% said that Obama is a socialist….that right there illustrates the completeness of American ignorance…..Americans have a very weak commitment to educate themselves on political matters, they prefer to rely on slogans, sound bites and lies to make the political decsisions….

The champions of Rep dem point to the need for an “educated elite” as the tools of governance…….Rep government is “by the people” but it rests on the wide shoulders of the elite to make it so…..

Is there another way of governance?  For me there is….I prefer what is known as participatory democracy, where the decision are made by the people…..but sadly it will NEVER come to fruit for the very reasons I outlined above……why?   Well as I see it…the masses, for lack of a better word, are at times too intolerant, nationalistic, anti- intellectual, alienated, hateful and violent….issues that would make good governance a nightmare….

So for now we are saddled with the representative form of democracy…the people trust their reps to govern as they intend, which is naive at best….just look at health reform…the majority wants reform but a few ruling elites have decided that it is not to be….and in turn the people get in line and accept the lies as truth……a pathetic ignorance……

There is so many facets to this debate that it would be virtually impossible to summarize it in a 1000 words or less…..I hope that a little more understanding has been had by my readers……..

Next watch for Part 3 of this series entitled Bureaucracy:  Management by paperwork.