Must "representative" democracy be the only valid type?

Those who've defended the Honduran coup have essentially presented themselves as defenders of "representative" democracy, powdered wigs and all. They hold to the notion that a traditional legislature is the only democratic form of governance.

But, since traditional legislatures are always biased towards the upper classes, should we really accept them as the only possible democratic form?

Why can't we look at other methods, like the community councils in Venezuela, like town-meeting governance here, like referenda with campaign-finance reform here, like economic democracy(democratic control of the economic decisions, which are, after all, the only ones that really affect most of us)?

Why not take this moment as a chance to take the power, humanely, democratically, and in a hopeful spirit, for ourselves?

Shouldn't we, the people, be the ones who have the say?

Why not just get rid of elite, self-interessted decision makers?

The worst that could happen would be freedom.

you haven't really suggested anything concrete to take the place of legislative bodies. And Venezuela does indeed have a legislature. We need to reform the election system. We need to do something about lobbying, but what we don't need to do is get rid of Congress. And your suggestion that we simply do it, is simply childish.

More that we need to establish more direct democratic models, more forms(and I don't want to present myself as the person to design these, the forms need to emerge collectively from what is best for the people as a whole)that break corporate control of politics.

One thing we need in Congress is to eliminate the seat limit on the U.S. House. It should keep expanding so that it truly represents the country by population. States shouldn't lose representation just because their population didn't grow as fast as other states, and that's what the seat limit causes.

We also need proportional representation, so that all the voices of the people can be heard in legislative debate, rather than just vague, amorphous blocs of "lesser evil" groupings.

and not the public. We need a public option for hiring politicians. By that I mean a clean election public funding of candidates option.

and I gotta say that here in Vermont where we have some of the most stringent laws about campaign funding, we grow good pols, both on the local and national level. That means a state legislature that's responsive to the people and politicians like Bernie, Pat and Peter. Not to mention Howard Dean and Jim Jeffords.

n/t.

the means of communication and/or the electorate is willfully uninformed, the end result will be the same.

All I'm saying is that none of us are protected or defended by the existing decision-making process.

If a politicians appear to be looking out for us, it's only because our interests happen to align with theirs at the moment.

The worse that can happen is either freedom or the Tyranny of the Majority

n/t.

Hell, you got almost an entire elite party of gays, though they are all closeted hypocrites (republicans).

n/t.

and the people took it away. Not true in Iowa either. Or MA. Or CT. Or VT. In fact, all the protections for the GLBT community have come from the elites- and of course by the tireless work of advocates from the community. Setbacks have come from the masses.

The Founders understood the dangers of Tyranny of the Majority.

People should be free to enter into any kind of consensual relationship they want, state power should never enter into it and should have never been allowed to get into the business of regulating marriage.

People are free to enter into any kind of consensual relationship they want--the state doesn't stop them. It just doesn't recognize them. On one hand, you cannot say that the state should not be involved in marriage, and on the other, claim that the state should extend recognition, benefits, and protections to everyone married.

I don't think marriage should give people any special benefits or protection. Since it does, it is only fair to extend those benefits and rights to all committed couples.

There are certain rights that everyone should have, no matter how much the majority disagrees. Any truly democratic system must protect a set of fundamental rights that no president, congress, or voting majority can take away.

look how well things worked out.

Oliver Cromwell got rid of a bunch of elites, too, and after a few years of him, Charles I didn't look so bad any more-- until Charles II reminded them why they got rid of the first one.

In our case, expanding Vermont town mweetings beyond Vermont towns would likely end up making more mischief than good government, Imagine if every decision in California was made by a ballot propostion...

And made it clear that his "Glorious Revolution" would not include the poor.

You can't really cite him as an anti-elitist.

China and Libya, for example, have these "community councils" that you speak of. They have absolutely no real power and are merely rubber stamps for the rulers.

So yes I agree that representative democracy isn't perfect of democracy but to paraphrase Churchill, I think it's the best that has been tried. However, I am open to the possibility that there is a better system out there.

It's not the councils that caused that.

Through the peoples' councils. But peoples' councils were inherently too weak to control the military and the police. Therefore Mao and Ghaddafi did and thus they controlled any real power.

I don't see any way in which community councils could possibly control the military and the police. Thus in the absence of a strong national legislative body, all of the power over those institutions will likely be vested in the executive.

Legislatures are only biased towards the upper classes as-so-far as how much their members rely on private donations for campaign fundraising. That's not a flaw of legislatures, that's a flaw of election financing.

New England type town meetings work only in small municipalities.

Referenda should be used only for amending constitutions, and then only with a 2/3 super-majority. Prop-13 and Prop-H8 are good examples of special interests provoking the mob into supporting crap legislation.

If by "economic democracy" you mean co-ops I'm all fine with that. If you mean some kind of economic planning that isn't gonna work because economic planning doesn't work.

That we need proportional representation for legislative and Congressional elections, with Instant Runoff Voting for Senate elections, then? That would go a long way towards removing the upper class bias.

And where do you stand on the "living constitution vs. original intent" debate? Myself, I see no reason why we should leave any vestige of the Compromise of 1787 in the Constitution. Nothing associated with slavery should be retained in our system.

IMO We need a whole new constitution. The age of the current one forces us do things like stretching parts like the Commerce Clause to extreme degrees just to get things to fit the realities of the modern world, and this is bad for constitutional government, as Bush's "Unitary Executive" BS shows.

pr would be more effective in the House, where there's rep by population(particularly if we got rid of the unjust 435 seat limit on the size of the House, a limit that deprives large states of representation.

BTW, I owe you an apology. I was unaware that there was no medicine for Asperger's when I made reference that in another thread. Sorry. I hope there is someday.

BTW, my Asperger's is not something I consider needs to be "cured" or "medicated", Jefferson, Einstein, and Newton, among others, are thought to have had Asperger's and it was the source of their brilliance. Our trouble with social stuff is just as much a gift as a curse because we can see through social conventions other people think are "just the way things are".

n/t.

:hi:

They tend to cling to it by hook or by crook.

The anarchists in the Spanish Civil War were on to something, but their plans were nixed by fascism.

The most important part of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is the "for", not the "by" - the "by" is necessary to ensure the "for".

Direct democracy would lead to massive erosion of minority rights; it would also place far more power in the hands of media barons.

...and all the referenda that have placed the government on the edge of bankrupcy.


Representative democracy has its flaws, but it is much better than direct democracy.

If we'd been able to have a national referendum on Vietnam in 1968, independent of the corrupt presidential nomination process of that year, the war would have ended that year.

I believe it is true that a large majority of Americans were unsatisfied with the way Johnson was conducting the Vietnam War. But I think they were in two camps. One were the peaceniks who wanted to pull out. The other were the hawks who believed that if we escalated the war beyond what Johnson was willing to do, we could easily win it within a short time. I think there were many who were hawks as a first choice and peaceniks as a second choice, in other words "Either finish the job or just get the hell out". Their votes combined with the peaceniks probably would've been enough to end the war in a referendum.

However, the hawks first peaniks second were still hawks first. If a referendum had been on the ballot that year, people still probably would've bought into Nixon's "peace with honor" aka "win by escalation" and voted against the referendum while simultaneously electing Nixon in order to escalate the war.

Just as people can be manipulated by the elites to vote for a certain candidate they can also be manipulated to vote a certain way on a referendum.

Who had been alienated by the triumph of our party's extreme right in Chicago. Those people, filled with the disgust they had every right to feel, stayed home in November of '68 because they felt there was nothing at stake. Probably they'd have voted for Humphrey, or at least voted for down-ticket Democrats(saving Wayne Morse's Senate seat in Oregon, for example, which was lost by less than one-half of one percent)and giving the '68 election a very different result.

Also, you can't assume all Nixon votes were "pro-war" votes. A significant number of people likely believed that Nixon would handle Vietnam like Ike handled Korea-wait a few months, make a visit, then call it a draw. If the public had known that Nixon intended all along to continue the war throughout his entire first term, he would never have won that first term.

A lot of that was due to McGovern's ineptness and some dirty tricks on Nixon's part. But it's hard to believe he would've lost in '72 even if his paranoia hadn't caused him to engage in foul play. It just would've been closer.

And the thing about Korea is that Ike didn't just call it a draw. He removed the Seventh Fleet from the Taiwan Strait in order to unleash Chiang Kai-Shek's forces onto mainland China. This put pressure on the Chinese from another front, making them less able to fight in Korea. In essence Ike escalated the war to another front in order to end it. And while it accomplished that, it damn near forced us into a war with China because of Chiang Kai-Shek's recklessness (the reason Truman put the Seventh Fleet there in the first place).

I agree with you that most of the public probably didn't think "peace with honor" meant "we'll still be there in four years", granted they didn't seem to mind a whole lot that we were (as I mentioned above). But I also don't think they thought it meant "call it a draw". I think they thought it meant "I will wage war Dresden style, which will produce a quick victory and get the troops home".

he ran as the "the war is basically over and I'm just tying up loose ends" candidate. He also ran(more importantly)as the "gee, isn't it wicked cool that I went to China?" candidate. Once that trip occurred, any Democrat, including Scoop Jackson, was doomed to lose 49 states(especially after the Eagleton slander).

Thanks for the info about Korea, though. How far DID the "unleashed" Taiwanese forces get on the mainland, btw?

And so Eisenhower's goal of forcing Mao to focus on the Taiwan Strait rather than Korea was achieved. However it created a crisis situation because Mao's forces were built up along the coast and Chiang's forces just miles away on Quemoy and Matsu. This ultimately would've led to the first and second taiwan strait crises.

If Dulles had been President he probably would've nuked China. Eisenhower had at least some restraint and didn't want to go to war with China and possibly the Soviet Union over some insignificant islands. With much posturing and luck (that Khrushchev didn't trust Mao) he was able to avoid war and still keep the US-Taiwan security guarantee credible.

This is some stuff I hadn't actually heard.

The Seventh Fleet pretty much put Chiang in a cage. Ike let him out of the cage but then subsequently realized that could have serious consequences and thus put a leash on him by making it clear that he didn't want him to invade mainland China and wasn't going to back him up with nuclear weapons. The leash was theoretically invisible, though, because Mao didn't know for certain that Ike didn't want an invasion of China. But once the situation died down the leash became more transparent. Kennedy and Johnson certainly didn't demonstrate much interest in invading the mainland and Nixon, as you mentioned above, actually went to China.

IMO, Nixon's campaign promises and criticisms regarding Vietnam were much like Ike's regarding Korea. The idea was that the Democrats were unwilling to do everything necessary to win the war and that the Republicans would which would both save American lives and produce a victory. That sort of promise isn't particularly appealing to anybody on the left who doesn't like the prospect of more Vietnamese or Korean civilians being slaughtered, but it is appealing to people who care first and foremost about getting their sons home.

of Chiang Kai-Shek ending up like the old servant in "In The Garden of Good And Evil" who(as the result of his deceased employer's will) is paid a full-time salary to walk an empty dog-leash once a day.

Anyone who thinks nukes should be used offensively needs a slap in the face. His whole Brinkmanship thing was lunacy!

Dulles made sure the German business class lost almost nothing for having supported Hitler.

And that's one of the reasons I'm not a huge fan of Ike. He was a strong enough and popular enough figure that nobody could've seriously accused him of being soft on communism. Yet he caved to the hard right anti-communist crowd in his party on both foreign policy to the Dulles brothers and domestically to McCarthy.

Humphrey's political career was on the whole very progressive. He, just like many fellow liberals of his generation, were simply hawkish on foreign policy out of sheer post-war policy inertia long past the time that it made sense.

And Humphrey delegates voted against the peace plank and against almost all party reform measures proposed by the McCarthy and McGovern delegates(the ones that actually represented the majority of the popular vote from the primaries, which was left-of-center and antiwar.)

He wasn't allowed to be nominated as a liberal, but simply as LBJ's surrogate. Humphrey wasn't nominated as himself.

The modern association of Hawkishness and Conservatism didn't exist until 1972. It was the completion of a role reversal that started during WW2 when Pearl Harbor shut up the isolationist conservatives. Before WW2 it was the Dems that were more hawkish, the legacy of Woodrow Wilson.

(who really shouldn't have even had a say, since it was clear they were all going to go home and campaign for Wallace)and Mayor Daley and the last of the machine Dem types. The people who forced Humphrey through, and who did so against the overwhelming will of the primaries, were the ones who formed "Democrats for Nixon" four years later. Their political descendants went on to form the DLC(or, as Jesse Jackson so aptly called it, "Democrats for the Leisure Class").

The single most difficult puzzle of constitutional theory is this: Does every new constitutional order have to be approved and adopted according to the procedures created by the prior constitutional order?

The people criticizing Chavez and the Honduran president seem to take it as a fixed postulate that yes, every constitutional revision must conform to the procedures set out by the previous constitutional order.

This conflicts, however, with the theory of popular sovereignty -- the notion that in a republic, the people are sovereign and always able to create a new constitutional order.

The historical reality is that constitutions are amended or scrapped without conforming to the prior constitution.

We've done that here in this country. The adoption of our constitution did not conform to the procedures set out in the Articles of Confederation. The founders just called a constitutional convention and scrapped the old order.

Then after the civil war, the 13th, 14th and 15 Amendments -- arguably the most important in the Constitution -- were adopted without conforming to the procedure set out in the Constitution itself. (That's because Congress had a pretty sketchy theory about whether the southern states were or were not part of the Union. The non-Confederate states adopted them despite having the theory that the southern states never successfully left the Union, and then required adoption of the amendments as a precondition to the southern states for re-admission.)

So the idea that either Chavez or the Honduran president engaged in unconstitutional acts rings somewhat hollow for me.

It's the wealthy and powerful who get their bidding done in this government. We, the people, cannot even get decent public health insurance option passed.

Who needs bourgeois liberal democracy? We need the freedom to send the Black Marias around at 4 am to arrest the Enemies of the People! Long live the glorious NKVD!

:eyes:

Stalin did what he did outside of legalities.

It was the party, not the Soviets, that was to blame for that. It's not like not having Soviets would've prevented it.

If the Soviets had had the power they were meant to have, there would've been no Stalin.

That's why they called it "scientific socialism".

The key problem with their model was the "vanguard party" structure. That was an unaccountable power model, and it was that, not the notion or "utopianism" or "radicalism" that allowed that monster Stalin to do what he did.

It's not that difficult to create another model of radical change that avoids that.

There do need to be checks and balances. What there does NOT need to be is a "checks and balances" model that lets the reactionary forces bring everything to a standstill and force the progressive forces to water their plans down to nothing.

This thread, in part, is about trying to find new models.

Marxism itself is inherently totalitarian. You can polish a turd all you want but it's still a turd. Marxism is about as "scientific" as astrology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemies

It's the Leninists that were the problem.

There was nothing totalitarian in the idea of giving workers control of the means of production. That's still a valid idea.

And broader democratization and transparency, with as little government secrecy as possible, is also crucial.

What we need to get away from, under whatever system comes next, is a small group in a small room making secret decisions solely for their own benefit.

-Churchill.

There's something to what he says.