College of Political Knowledge

Subject:  Political Theory/Political Process

Ever have an impacted wisdom tooth?  What is to be done with it?  You find a solution to the problem and most often that is to get rid of the irritating tooth, right?

Today’s class is on “impacted pluralism”…….let us begin with a short, simple definition….impacted means wedged together at the broken ends and pluralism– the view that politics and decision making are located mostly in the framework of government, but that many non-governmental groups use their resources to exert influence. The central question for classical pluralism is how power and influence is distributed in a political process. Groups of individuals try to maximize their interests. Lines of conflict are multiple and shifting as power is a continuous bargaining process between competing groups. There may be inequalities but they tend to be distributed and evened out by the various forms and distributions of resources throughout a population. Any change under this view will be slow and incremental, as groups have different interests and may act as “veto groups” to destroy legislation that they do not agree with.

Or more simply……bargaining between groups contributes as much to policy as does formal democracy.  And then the impacted part is that the extremes of either end of the political spectrum are fighting for control and disallowing any compromise that would facilitate the smooth operation of the government.

Now with that out of the way take a long look at the operation of the US Congress….I mean a long objective look…..what have you seen?  You have seen the issues that are championed by the extreme Right in direct conflict with the desires and issues of the extreme Left….and what has that given the US?  A simple question to answer….the US government is at a standstill…..they cannot pass any legislation that is anything but some lame little acts that do little to nothing in ways of helping the country deal with the problems, the massive problems, that it faces in this century.

How would pluralism work?   Policy takes place in a crowded arena, and no group or political party is powerful enough to dominate the others. Policy emerges as a compromise between the various interest groups. This brings along a specific rationale: each group adjusts its stance to take into consideration the others to promote stability, even if a group loses out from time to time.

So now…..”impacted pluralism” is politics characterized by the pursuit by groups of their various interests which used to give something to everyone and achieve negotiated compromises, but which has changed to a situation where competing interests are deadlocked, and neither the public interest nor that of groups is served.

As you can see something is wrong in our system……Thus we have an impacted pluralism….and the only way to change it is to get rid of it…just like that impacted wisdom tooth….we must find a way to make the government work again or we will lose the only thing that we should be proud of, our way of governance.