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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Gohlke who wrote (10806)	2/3/2006 6:05:45 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541515

I also include the corruption of spirit which flows from selling one's loyalty. In that sense, the corruption of our political process is pervasive. People will work together to meet common goals. If you don't have parties you will have other types of groups and organizations. If you try to stamp them out then you only make it more secretive. People work out a compromise agenda with those who have similar ideas. If you don't support the agenda the group won't support you. That idea doesn't depend on parties, it pre-dates political parties, and probably pre-dates recorded history. I wouldn't usually use the word corruption to describe this process. Compromise maybe. I suppose it could be considered "corruption of spirit" if you support ideas that you consider evil in order to get ideas you like passed or in order to retain the seat, but short of that I would not call it corruption. If we devise an election method where candidates are advanced on their merit rather than their partisanship, each representative would have to be bribed separately. That may not be impossible, but it is certainly more difficult than working a deal with a party fund-raiser and controlling all the party's politicians. In our current system, the party acts as an intermediary. If you eliminate the party, all that's left is direct bribery ... and bribery is illegal. While some people will participate in immoral acts, illegal acts are less popular. Groups of people will still collaborate to advance their candidate whether they are called parties or not. You will have political issue groups, political education groups, political caucuses ect. If you try to stamp them out than you are putting the boot to an extent on both democracy and freedom. People will still have to get their message out (perhaps even more than they do currently when they can count on some partisan support) and will need a lot of money to do so. If campaign contributions to parties are corrupting (a debatable proposition) then contributions to individuals would also be corrupting. We are devising a new method of selecting those who represent us in our government. We are at the stage of listing the goals we seek to attain. I suggest one of the goals of the new method is that it be open to, as you mentioned, all citizens who have attained maturity. Any who disagree that this is a proper goal for our efforts should present their arguments so they may be considered. I don't think it would be a proper goal because I don't think the end justifies the required means and in fact I don't think the end would be achieved by implementing the means. If you have an open election to determine the candidates than you will still have people who have the support of large political organizations (whether or not they are called parties) and these people will have an advantage, probably a big one. Everyone could try to toss their hat in the ring, but everyone (at least everyone who meets the criteria and that is pretty much all eligible voters) can do that now. What does your method even hope to gain? The net effect is almost the same. We must all be allowed to participate, regardless of our beliefs or our support for or opposition to this or that ideal. We are all allowed to participate. We might have a 0.000000001% chance of actually winning but we already have the ability to run or to support somone else. Whether or not any of us advance must depend on our individual qualities (one of which will be our ability to convince others that we should be advanced). How could you cause that to happen? Our communications and data processing capabilities and our high-speed transportation offer us great flexibility in creating the method. If we replace the one-way communications that characterize our present electoral process with multi-way communication, candidates can not dissemble and obfuscate as they currently do to delude and mislead the electorate. We should not approach the problem with the notion that "campaigning", as we know it, is a good or desirable way of selecting our representatives. There are better ways. We need to define one. Campaigning gets your message out to millions. You can't have a multi-way political conversation with millions of people all participating. Many won't care to participate and those that do would swamp the system. If the don't swamp the communications system used (and its likely that they would) they would swamp our brains ability to take it all in. The most prolific posters on SI have probably only posted to hundreds or thousands of people (tens of thousands of posts but many to the same people) and that is over years. Now try to get millions in a multi-way process in an election cycle? Impossible. We want to believe that those we elect to public office will act honorably on our behalf. We continue to believe that in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary ... or, we cynically decide that the whole human race is corrupt. However, if we think about it, it's not so hard to see that, if it costs ten million dollars to win a Senate seat, those who want to be senators will happily compromise their integrity to secure the financial backing. Under any system politicians will have incentives to act other than "honorably on our behalf. Under any system it will be expensive to get your message out to scores of millions of voters. If the government provides the communication buy paying for it than that is just someone else picking up the tab. If the government requires TV stations and radio stations and such to accept free political adds than the media is picking up the tab. TANSTAAFL When I suggest our method must be in harmony with human nature, I mean we must carefully consider how humans will really act in the system we design. Sure I can agree with that. But remember humans are complex creatures esp. in terms of social, political and financial interactions among millions of them. Its very hard to predict how people will react to anything very different than the current situation, no matter how carefully you consider the changes. Tim