This American Presidential Election is a bit of a laugh, isn't it? In the
short-to-medium term it really wouldn't matter who became President. The
not-very-bright Bush would be guided by his White House advisors into not
saying or deciding anything silly, just as Reagan was, and the very bright,
but misguided Gore, would be disciplined by Congress if he had fancy ideas
of spreading hard-earned money around willy-nilly. In fact, the country
could easily run itself without any President at all -- just as the UK does
for weeks while a General election is going on or during the summer when
MPs are basking in the sunshine all over the world (often on Parliamentary
all-expenses-paid trips).
But, of course, such a civil-service government couldn't go on for very
long in any country because, before we knew where we were, we'd be trapped
into a secretive we-know-what's-best-for-you State -- in other words, some
sort of fascism/totalitarianism. The sort of thing which, sooner or later,
puts a blinker on any sort of economic enterprise and development. The sort
of thing, for example, which brought the economic development of China to a
grinding halt in the 15th century when, in fact, they were leagues ahead of
anywhere else in the world in trade and industrial development.
We need some new sort of democracy. The trouble is that what we have at
present is not really democracy. In any developed country, policies are so
many and so complex that most of them are above the understanding of the
electorate, so politicians have got to simplify and sloganise in order to
get elected. So everything is trivialised and there's no future thinking
beyond three or four years or so. It's become show business. Soon it will
become totally farcical. Because of this, politicians are steadily losing
any respect they used to have. Very few young people with any intelligence
at all bother to vote and certainly have no intention of becoming politicians.
The only partially successful form of objective truth-seeking (with its
influence on policy-making) that mankind has developed so far is the peer
review system in our universities and scientific disciplines. This has its
faults but something like this is what we now need in politics and
government. We need policy forums for the future, not party political
manifestos which are so long and tedious and, ultimately, platitudinous,
that they don;t really mean anything. Peer review would be democratic in
that anybody could join whatever policy forum that interested them, but if
they wanted their ideas to succeed they would have to argue their way
cogently against their peers in order to get their policies accepted at a
high level.
Quite how policy forums would intermesh with the civil service is still
problematical to me, but the mushrooming of single-issue groups in the last
few decades in all advanced countries convinces me that we're beginning to
see the evolution of this type of forum politics.
Keith Hudson
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Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus, www.calus.org
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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