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The Facade of U.S. Democracy and Election 2006
Only more democracy can save democracy
As the elections of 2006 in the U.S. were heading toward the finish line, the
mainstream press was aglow speculating about whether the Democrats or
Republicans would win control of the House of Representatives or the Senate.
The Wall Street weekly Barron's predicted a Republican victory in the House and
Senate based on the fact that Republican candidates often had almost double the
war chests for their campaigns than the funds raised by the Democratic
candidates. We ... based our predictions, Barron's wrote, on which candidate
had the largest campaign war chest... (Survivor!: The GOP Victory, by Jim
McTague, Monday, Oct. 23, 2006.)
Other newspapers predicted a Democratic landslide. Republicans prepare for the
worst as disaster looms in midterm elections, wrote Andrew Buncombe in the
Independent, a British newspaper. (Nov. 2, 2006) Predicting a Democratic Party
victory in the House elections and possibly in the Senate, Buncombe quoted
political analyst Charlie Cook's assessment that in the battle for the House,
the only question remaining was the size of the Democratic victory.
Other newspapers reported early problems with voting machines, especially newly
installed electronic voting machines. Jason Leopold in an article in Truthout,
an online news Web site summarized a report documenting machine failures,
database delays and foul-ups, inconsistent procedures, new rules and new
equipment which could lead to snafus or even possibly chaos on election
day.
The more significant issues, however, were hidden away, often requiring that
one be able to read between the lines in the mainstream media articles, Why Do
So Few People Vote in the U.S.?, whose author Calvin Woodward asks why only
about 40 percent of U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote, do.
Otherwise it is necessary to find the rare alternative publication, like
Counterpunch which could resist speculating on who would make it first to the
finish line in Tuesday.s vote count, and instead consider the broader political
issues. (See for example The GOP Should Lose, the Democrats Don.t Deserve to
Win.)
The bigger question, the question that rarely surfaces in any of the media, is
the question raised in a program on E-government as a Tool for Participation
and Inclusion at the United Nations on Nov. 3.
The opening speaker in the program, Dr. Ann Macintosh explained the need to
consider participatory models of democracy that make it possible to do more
than just vote every few years. Though other speakers on the panel limited
their presentations to the description of e-government forms for delivering
government services to citizens, the Finnish representative in the audience
asked whether citizens had any means of participating in the decisions
regarding what government was providing to them.
This question, whether citizens have any means of participating in the
decisions of government officials, is critical when it comes to determining
whether or not there are any democratic processes available for citizens.
The two party structure in the U.S. is such that one must choose between two
candidates who often have very similar positions on the issues and are more
like each other than would be someone who has been put forward by the majority
of the electorate. How can elections be considered a fundamental exercise in
democracy as one TV announcer proclaimed, when the people voting have little
or no way to influence the choice of who is on the ballot. The primaries,
similarly, only allow for voters to choose among candidates chosen by for them
by the parties.
The current representative system in the U.S. is one in which the leadership of
two political parties which are detached from the majority of the people in the
country, make the decisions instead of providing a means for the public to be
part of the decision making processes. This is not only true during the
election process, but even more so once the election is over. Once the
politicians are in office, their allegiance is more likely to be to the
lobbyists who wine and dine them and who provide some of the war chests for
their future campaigns
What then would be a democratic governing model? There would need to be a means
for the public to participate at each step of the governing procedures. The
Internet makes it possible to have such participation.
A democratic government would have to find a way to disenfranchise the
lobbyists and replace their spheres of influence with a means for citizens to
determine what kind of laws are needed, and to have a means to debate and
discuss the pros and cons of proposed laws and then a means to participate in
helping to put those laws into practice. Utilizing the Internet it would be
possible to have discussion groups for citizens
