Good Evening,
re: "The construction of organizations and their interplay in the domain
of politics is, I think, more than anything else a process."
I agree, and understanding the process is critical.
Parties take on a life of their own ... and their life-blood is money.
Their primary and continuing concern is to attract the support they need
to insure their existence. Ultimately, support is and must be
financial. Thus, parties are standing targets for the vested interests
that benefit from the laws they enact.
In the United States, this process has been running for over 200 years.
During that time, we've seen the birth and cancerous growth of
behemoths that owe their existence to the laws they've purchased from
the people we elected, at the behest of the parties, to represent us in
our government.
As you say, it is a process, a process that includes gutting the laws
passed after The Great Depression to limit the excesses of huge
financial interests. As a result, this very weekend, we are pondering
how we can prevent severe losses to foreign governments that trusted the
integrity of our financial institutions.
The aspect of this circumstance that is commonly overlooked is that the
legislative acts that allowed the current contretemps were not seen to
be ideological in nature. They were proposed and enacted as 'routine
housekeeping' tasks ... just 'cleaning up some old legislation'. Since
they were not branded as liberal or conservative in nature, both parties
were able to support the changes without violating their ideological
franchise, hence their actions were unchallenged.
By far, the greatest proportion of bad legislation is purchased and
passed in this way. Imagining that ideological differences have a
significant impact on our legislative process is the height of folly.
(In this connection, it is important to recognize that lobbying is a
vital part of the democratic process. The evil is not lobbying, the
evil is our failure to build an infrastructure that can forestall the
potential for corruption inherent in the legislative process; the evil
is our failure to devise an electoral process that makes integrity a
valuable trait in our public officials.)
re: "The process is influenced by both external and internal
constraints: what weakens and what strengthens."
That's true. It is a process that, by the natural operation of
self-interest, strengthens partisan control of our government and
weakens the people's influence. That is NOT a good thing.
re: "... multiple parties would keep any one party from gaining such
dominance that it could trump through policy unopposed, even more so
since the opposition of multiple parties would be stronger than the
opposition of a single party."
That is correct. The more we atomize the perspectives that combine to
form policies, the less opportunity there is for single-party dominance.
On the other hand, to be effective, opposition parties must achieve
significant size and the larger they grow, the greater their
susceptibility to targeting and subversion on matters purported to be
non-ideological. That portion of the process is Darwinian, and, right
now, the 'fittest' are not the humans among us.
I must interject here that changes that weaken the stranglehold the two
major parties exert over the political infrastructure in the United
States are valuable. My opposition is to the lack of understanding of
the process, the dynamics that produced the monster we currently endure.
As you said, we need "... something with which to replace the old
party dynamics ..." but we can not find that 'something' until we
understand how and why our present system evolved as it did and learn to
harness the forces that guided its development.
Fred
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