michael sylvester wrote: > > > British parliamentary debates and proceedings must be the most > uncivilized affair on the planet. > Members of parliament disrupt,laugh,boo and throw all types of verbal > assaults at the Premier > and cabinet ministers.It continues outside of the building where > members of parliament can be pied and egged.
Good question. The answer is deeply historical. Prime ministers are not presidents. Traditionally they were just the leading members of governments and, more importantly, of cabinets. Each minister had primary responsibility for his portfolio (war, treasure, home, etc.) and, while they all worked together with the Prime Minister, they did not work "for" him in quite the way that an (unelected) "Secretary" in the US works "for"the President. (You may recall that Margaret Thatcher was thrown out *not* by a vote of the opposition, but by a vote of her own Tory caucus.) That old division-of-labor system among cabinet ministers has deteriorated over the years, and one of the primary complaints that is heard in countries using the Westminister (e.g., UK) model of Parliament is that they are becoming "too presidential." (Think of the way Blair acted, or Chretien in Canada, or Howard in Australia -- as though they alone ran the place, promoting and demoting ministers on the basis of personal loyalty rather than in an effort to maintain representation of various factions within the party.) Still, because of that history, Prime ministers are not conventionally accorded the same reverential treatment as presidents. Why is the US President accorded such reverence? One has to the remember that the US constitution was emphatically NOT written to advance popular democracy. It was written, by contrast, to leaven the perceived instabilities of democracy with the virtues of other forms of government. The US constitution was modeled on John Adams' Massachusetts constitution, which attempted to combine the three Classical forms of government -- monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy -- with the hope that they would each be able to prevent the other forms from falling into their (again Classical) degenerate forms: tyrany, oligarchy, and anarchy. The president was to be the analog of the (constitutional) monarch. Originally, you may recall, the president was not selected by popular vote of the nation (indeed, it still isn't) but rather by a vote of Electors representing each state (thus the origin of the current Electoral College). As a quasi-monarch, he was to be accorded the (some of the) respect due a monarch. The Senate was the analog to the classical governmental form of aristocracy -- rule by the nation's most superior citizens. Senators were not elected in the early US, but were appointed by the governors of the states, a tradition that carried on up into the 1920s, as I recall, and still continues in muted form in the right of governors (in many states) to appoint replacement senators when one resigns or dies, as was recently made infamous by the Blagojovich scandal. Only the House of Representatives was intended to be analogous to the democratic form of government (the "rabble"), and, you will notice, that the House remains more raucous than the Senate to this day, and that Senators still like to distinguish their chamber from the House by pointing to its superior "decorum," and to their own elevated "gentlemanliness." The US House of Reps is the direct descendant of the Westminister House of Commons (where shouting at the Prime Minister continues to this day). And who shouted "You Lie!" at the President? Was it a senator? No. It was a representative of the House. Just like you would expect historically. Do I think that Wilson explicitly knows all this history, and the very conventional role that he played in it? Of course not. I think that he (and most of the rest of us) absorbed it through cultural osmosis and it resides tacitly in his very bones. Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [email protected] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([email protected])
