Hello Fred,
if I understand well you promote concurrency between political parties
because we would benefit
from it as much we benefit from concurrency between companies. A copy from
the capitalist dynamics from the marketplace toward the ideological ring?
The more choice we have, the more power the customer or the voter has. Nice
analogy.
But I was already a fan of proportional representation. You should try to
sell your stuff to mecreants. ;-)
Steph
From: Fred Gohlke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [EM] language/framing quibble
Date: Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:21:49 -0400
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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