Democracy and how it could be improved

Before you all start reading this, can I just remind everybody that views I express are my own opinions, and that I don't give a toss about yours. Furthermore, I am human (or so it is alleged) and reserve the right to be wrong, stupid, opinionated, ill-informed, etc. I mention all this because the subject of this rant is political, and politics is not known as a subject which encourages people to agree with each other, or even to agree to disagree, or even to disagree in any civilised manner.

Mid term elections in the USA at the minute, and they are making an even bigger meal of it than usual. The 'new kid on the block' wild card which has attracted the media's attention is the 'Tea Party', a right-wing movement to 'restore' the original core values of immediate post-revolution America, or at least modern Americans' understanding of them. My own view is that the 'Tea Party' is a bit of a flash in the pan which has tapped into mainstream American dissatisfaction with the current economic crisis they are suffering. Its expressions are demagogueish and populist and it will be unable to make any constructive contribution to whatever debate and policy making will be needed to deal with the issues; but it makes excellent tv and great spectator sport.

At the core of its misinformed concept, though, are the noble ideals of the Founding Fathers, expressed in the magnificent rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most influential documents of Western Civilisations' History. These Founding Fathers were amongst the leading thinkers of the Enlightenmnet, and one of them, Benjamin Franklin, was a straight up, out and out, honest to god genius; men to take notice of even over 200 years later! The constitution they crafted was a clever and far-sighted device which included some very intelligent checks and balances to prevent any future dilution of thier intentions, and by and large these have worked (remember Nixon?), but even the Founding Fathers could not have forseen the racism, corporate power, crime, drug culture, and religious intolerance that plague modern US society. Well, arguably, they could and should have forseen the racism and religious fundamentalism, and perhaps should have realised that a federal state would be unable to deal effectively with organised crime, and that the federal organisations that would have to be created to attempt the task would inevitably descend into paranoia, secrecy, and a very undemocratic unaccountablility.

Stripped of the enlightend ideals, the American Revolution was actually based on something even more quintisentially American than even free enterprise democracy; a deal. The deal was between the leaders, Washington, Jefferson, Frankin etc, who proposed to the ordinary folk that, in return for their renouncing allegience to King George and fighting the War of Independence to a victorious conclusion, they would all get a vote. That was in itself a pretty astonishing idea at the time; possibly even more astonishing was the fact that the leaders honoured thier part of the bargain. One man, one vote was as good as it got in the 18th century, and modern comments that women and slaves were not included may not take this fully into account.

This blog is at last getting to some sort of point, honest. Our modern conception of what democracy should be like is still heavily influenced by those events. In the UK, most people if asked would state that they live in a Parliamentary Democracy with a Constitutional Monarch at its head, but our 'democracy' does not stand up for a second against the US one. Apart from the unelected Upper House, Britons have no constitutional right to own land except by permission of the Crown, to which thier elected representative have to swear allegience, all of us who think we own our homes pay ground rent, nor do we have any rights to any mineral wealth beneath them-I could go on. To most people throughout the world, the American system is the image had of the best possible Democracy. But is it in fact the best possible democracy?

Modern technology should be able to allow the voting procedure to do far more than the traditional cross against a name. It is my view that, in anything describing itself as a democratic system, voting would be compulsory, but that it would also be possible to have the choice to vote against candidates, or to register an abstention; in fact, if voting were compulsory, such choices would be essential! Now this would make politics much more fun as a spectator sport, as well as providing a much more accurate picture of the Will of the People. It would be possible for a party to attain power and form a government, without being to falsely claim, as most do now, that they have a 'mandate from the electorate' when maybe 20% or so have actually voted for them. In fact, you could even have a government that had attained power from the idea that they were simply the least objectionable to the electorate, the least of evils, which would possibly do something to quell the arrogance and self-assertion of modern politcians, and remind them who is supposed to really be in charge. It might even put the people who are supposed to be in charge-us-actually in charge! Now there's a really revolutionary idea....