Our Graying Democracy

I was at a dinner the other night and was sitting next to a man much older than me. We were having a very interesting discussion about a number of topics including art, children, politics, and government. This man made a very interesting comment to me that I've been thinking about ever since.

He said that our democracy is too old and if we don't modernize it soon, we are in big trouble.

I've always felt that our founding fathers built the perfect democracy and as a result America has prospered beyond any other country.

Not so, according to this man. They built the perfect democracy for life at the end of the 18th century. But it doesn't work at the beginning of the 21st century.

His assertion is that the foundation of our democracy is built around relationships like rural vs urban and educated vs illiterate that don't exist in our society anymore. He thinks the two party system, the electoral college, and the presidency itself are outdated instutions that our holding our country back instead of moving us forward.

His solution? The modern democracies that have been established in the past half century. He thinks Israel and Japan's democracies are the best examples of what we need to create. He thinks a parliamentary system that allows for multiple parties is a much better representative government. He thinks that parliamentary governments get created and abolished more quickly and can respond much better to the dynamic nature of our globalizing world.

It's an interesting thought. At first blush, I liked it. I helps me understand what frustrates me so much about our current political environment where the religious right and the "head in the sand" left seem to control so much of our political dialog.

Will it happen? Not anytime soon. It will take a crisis of epic proportions to change our political system and I am not eager to go through that.

Comments

[Dan]

Unfortunately parlamentary gov'ts are not much better (having lived in Italy and Israel I have experience). First, they are very unstable. No continuity. Secondly, if you think the extremists have a say now, wait. In Israel no gov't is formed (left or right) without involving the 10-15% seats of the religious parties. They are the powerbrokers who control the coalition gov't.

[Pete Caputa]

although his ideas don't seem to be ideal, i think that the mechanisms in which we practice democracy should be questioned and open to innovation.

[Stephen Bronstein]

Check out Jonathan Rauch's great book "Government's End" to see another perspective on why our government has 'stopped working'.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1891620495/wwwbronsteior-20

I agree with Dan that parlimentary governments are not the answer - look at Japan's economic stagnation, for example, where the frog continues to slowly boil. Parlimentary democracy makes it even harder for them to break out of this sclerosis.

[Bill Burnham]

Hi Fred,

Interesting post, but god forbid we adopt a political system similar to Italy (which has the post-war record for most collapsed governments) or Israel where small, extreme parties wield wildly disproportionate influence. Majority rule representative democracies are far more stable and efficient than parliamentary democracies because they force political parties to build electoral coalitions which ultimately marginalize the influence of the fringe elements in each party. Since you appear to like books on the founding fathers, let me give you a summer reading suggestion that might be appropriate during your exodus from NYC during the RNC. The book (which won the Pulitzer and Bancrof prizes) is called "The Ideological Origins of the American Constitution" by Bernard Bailyn and it lays out all of the competing democratic structures that the founding fathers considered for the United States. It's almost impossible to read that book and not come to the conclusion that the founders A) did their homework B) ultimately made the best possible choice.

[Glenn Cameron]

Fred,

Your dinner companion's point of view reminded me of Alvin Toffler's book, Powershift; even though it was published in November of 1990, his stance & expectation that democratic' agrarian governing principles where fast getting out of synch with e-business & technological change. Well worth (re)-reading if you haven't, as his ideas around 21st century wealth creation from information are quite profound, and highly applicable today.

Keep up the great posts!

Best regards,

Glenn

[Upe]

What the founding fathers designed was amazing - but it was designed for a small, relatively homogenous society. All the voters were white, male, landowners, with common issues and goals, who viewed themselves as philosophers and devoted much time pondering society's issues. It's not unreasonable to think that what they designed can't scale to what we have today - an immense, diverse society, where voters can afford to pay little attention to the complexities of the country. That it's scaled as well as it has is a testament to the robustness of the system, and how much the basic principles have managed to adapt (or be adapted) through every generation.

[maymay]

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[April]

Great post, i found it very interesting