Conservatives wrongly seek 'government by tantrum'

Posted 8/10/2003 6:10 PM


Conservatives wrongly seek 'government by tantrum'
By Ross K. Baker

How ironic it is that American conservatives, who once argued so vigorously that the United States was not a democracy but a representative republic, should now be in the vanguard of those eager to bypass representative institutions and have voters write laws and remove officials in the voting booth.

More paradoxically, California Republicans, in their campaign to recall Gov. Gray Davis, find themselves in strange ideological company. By pushing direct democracy to its limits, they're in league with the counterculture leaders of the 1960s and '70s who argued for participatory democracy.

These troubling ideas are the same: Cut out the middleman. Let people rule without elected intermediaries. That it is happening in California, which often is a model for the rest of the country, is more unsettling. It would be ruinous for other states if they followed California's example. (snip)

(snip) Translated to as large and complex a place as California, direct democracy results in wild policy gyrations, hasty actions that courts must correct and damage to institutions. Term limits for California Assembly and Senate members have, for example, forced out lawmakers just as they're beginning to comprehend the complexity of the policies they must enact, and magnified the influence of lobbyists. (snip/...)

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Term limits magnified the influence of lobbyists - gee why did the media not mention this when the GOP pushed this in the 90's.???

I raised the idea of chaos theory in passing in a thread the other day that had begun with someone describing the Republican Party as a rogue elephant. It was just a throwaway notion -- but the more I think about it the more true it seems, and also the more disturbing.

One of the fundamental lessons of chaos theory is that most things in the universe are not naturally stable -- not even the orbits of the planets. It takes a lot of hard work to keep them on course and reliable.

Our political system is the same way. There are an enormous number of mechanisms built into it to keep things stable -- checks and balances, bipartisanship, feedback mechanisms such as the assumption that voters will naturally react against any party that holds power too firmly for too long. But now the Republicans are systematically destroying those mechanisms.

People on this board mainly worry about fascism -- the replacement of our democratic system of flexible adaptations with one of rigid stasis. And that may even be what some of the neocons want. But the actual result of their actions seems far more likely to be chaos than stasis.

Just as global warming is causing the wild extremes of weather we're presently witnessing, so the Republican destabilization of the political system is causing these "freak" political events. The California recall is the equivalent of a major flood or drought -- a warning sign that the normal stabilizing mechanisms are no longer working. If this continues, we can only expect to see the swings get wilder and wilder.

We in this country have always taken our democracy for granted, as though all it took was the right sort of constitution and laws. That's obvious from the neocon idea that you could transplant democracy wholesale to Iraq. But, in fact, democracy is very precious and fragile. It depends on a whole set of uncodified groundrules and unstated assumptions. Those rules are now under wholesale assault, and I fear that democracy itself will not survive the outcome.