Good Afternoon, Peter
re: "In your list, you forgot to mention ... 'media coverage'."
Until I read your post, I hadn't considered it necessary or wise to
alter the role of the media in the electoral process. After you raised
the issue, I began to ponder the significance of this part of the
election process. You identified one of the things wrong with democracy as:
"3) Privately-owned media, which has the ability to tilt the
election results in any direction based the owners want"
This seems to sum up the objections to privately-owned media. The root
of the objection is that the media can manipulate the public and
influence the results of elections, but it does not make clear what
controls or alterations are needed.
There is no doubt the public can be manipulated. Yet, each of us knows
of instances where a media blitz did not affect us. It is not that
we're smarter than everyone else (even if we think so), it's just that
our store of knowledge and experience lets us see through this or that
manipulation attempt more quickly or more clearly than others. Therein
lies the key to solving the dilemma of public manipulation.
Plato, if not others before him, felt democracy could not work because
'ordinary people' are 'too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive
rhetoric of ambitious politicians'. He failed to note that some folks
are more easily swayed than others, and that some individuals are not
swayed at all. Our history is replete with geniuses who sprung up from
'ordinary people', yet Plato's faulty view of democracy has survived
through the ages and forms the cornerstone of political thought today.
The weakness in this concept is twofold. The first is the notion that
the only proper view of democracy is as a condition in which all the
people make all the decisions. The second is the failure to recognize
that 'the people' is made up of many individuals: some good, some bad;
some skilled, some unskilled; some with integrity, some deceitful; some
brilliant, some dull; some sociable, some unfriendly; some interested in
politics, some not. The task of a democratic electoral process is to
sift through these many types of individuals and elevate those best
suited to serve as advocates of the common good.
This is not a task that can be delegated. There is no machine that can
estimate a person's goodness or talent or integrity - only other humans
can do that. We cannot write a set of rules that will tell us, "This
person is better suited to lead us than that person." Such judgments
can only be made by one's peers, and then only when they have an
incentive to do so and enough time to examine the individual(s) carefully.
You and I agree the people, taken as a whole, can be influenced by the
media. Therefore, until it is shown that such influence can be
prevented, we would be ill-advised to consider political systems based
on the undifferentiated mass of people. Instead, we will be better
served to conceive an electoral method that lets each of us participate
in the political process to the full extent of our desire and ability
and lets us actively seek the individuals with the qualities we want in
our elected officials.
Fred
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