Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

I am most interested in Joe Trippi's comments -- as noted by Jeff Jarvis at a NY conference this week -- that we will have a valid 3rd party by 2008. That has been my hope for many years. David, we keep talking about how technology is enabling the grassroots. This will be our chance to prove it. Here's our slogan: The status quo has to go.

That is my hope for our democracy.

Oh please. I see two candidates competing. What you don't like is that your favored candidate can't get his message straight, and is behind in the polls. I suspect that if the polls ran the other way, you wouldn't be fretting.

M and M... marketing and McLuhan. We can either continue to value salesmanship and media manipulation or we can return to explicit values such as truth and responsibility.

Please go to my blog.
Thanx.

"Pure Democracy" is defined as democracy in which the power is exercised directly by the people rather than through representatives.

Check out John McKnight's work: An easy to read summary here: http://www.ci.carlsbad.ca.us/ccps/03_community.html#02McKnight

He quotes DeToqueville (1881) who said, "we vote in Europe but voting is the power to give your power away. If you are in the minority you can't even give your power away. It is a necessary bedrock but in the US in local communities they have discovered and created something new to the world and it is their associations (small groups) that take power and make power with citizens. It is much more significant than giving power away."

"The center of every story about things becoming better was local residents using their skills, their gifts, and their capacities."

"Our cultural historian at our university said that what they will find about the US when digging up the past, is that this polyglot nation of people who came from other places, the US, will have only contributed two things to civilization: jazz, and the other is its associations. This is our glory. This is what we have done to create a new form of democracy in America."

Yea good question, what is happening to our democracy due to the course of the election?? I totally agree with you. . . what the heck is wrong with our country when they let someone like John Kerry run for office, much less PRESIDENT. Dear God for the hope of this world Bush had better get reelected. -Drew

James R... You can be more subtle in your point.

Occasionally, I will play a game of Pinochle with 4 strangers at games.yahoo.com. At least 1/4 of the games aren't competitive because Yahoo! deals some "interesting" hands. So you'll hear someone on the losing side say "Typical Yahoo! hand" and start complaining about how unfair the whole system is, and ferchristsakes, if this happens in 1/4 of the games, maybe you'd get used to it eventually, jeez. What I like to do when I'm ahead and someone gets into whine mode and we're up 400 to -50 is to offer to cancel the game. "No really, this is an unfair blowout, I feel bad about taking the rating points from you". Most people just shut up, but occasionally, someone says "OK, that is very honorable of you, I'd really appreciate that". And I say, "well, I was kidding."

So, maybe we could agree to postpone this election or let Kerry have dead or redundant voters in hotly contested stated. Would that make things better?

Spinoza had a unique way of reconciling freedom and determinism. To him, there is no free will, only Divine determinism, yet people should be left totally free, in society, to acheive that eureka. This is why, in the paragon democratic republic, Diogenes was able to flourish.

“When in danger, or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout” is one of the Democrat’s least attractive characteristics, as Josh Marshall has said, and one Republicans are always ready to encourage. Polls go up and polls go down, but I assume the question wasn’t about the latest bobble.

The state of our democracy seems to be roughly where it was around a hundred years ago. That was when Mark Hanna dominated the Republican party, (“The three most important things in politics are money, money, and I forget the third,” or words to that effect), Leopold of the Belgians kept meticulous records of the world media’s’ editorial positions he had bought and paid for, and colonial wars were in vogue.

The last time, it took the Reform movement a couple of decades to gather steam, the United States was not under realistic threat of attack (always handy in promoting war, as has been noted by Madison, Twain, Goering, and others), and if there’s a Teddy Roosevelt around, they’re still on the horizon. One keeps working, though.

Oh yes -- globalization was big a hundred years ago, also.

The problems with our democracy are these:

1. Every serious candidate, regardless of party, has already won a "rich people test"; otherwise he'd have no money with which to campaign and you'd never have heard of him. Thus every serious candidate has ideas that are -surprise, surprise - quite agreeable to the haves.

2. They need to pass the rich people test because advertising is so expensive and calls to tie free air time with FCC broadcasting licensure is met with cries of "socialism!"

3. They need the advertising because each candidate is in a race to out market the other. Rather than sell ideas, they sell lies, propaganda, fear and hate.

4. They sell those things because that's what we're mostly buying, we Americans.

5. Mainstream journalism seems to have forgotten it's role as watchdog over the powerful. They no longer know how to tell me that someone is lying to me. And that is supposed to be their job. At least part of it.

6. The lack of instant-runnoff voting and other similar systems prevent the rise of any viable third party, thus dooming us to a poverty of ideas and ensuring that a large number of us will end up voting against the candidate we fear the most rather than the one we like the best. Or we won't vote at all.

I wonder whether you engaged in such hand-wringing when Bill Clinton--a degenerate narcissist manifestly unfit to be dogcatcher--took office with barely 43% of the vote?

Every time I hear what the left wants to do to us if given the chance, I thank God we do not have a pure democracy but a system, however imperfect it may be, that at least acknowledges individual and minority rights.

Just because you don't like the outcome doesn't mean that there is anything that is flawed. You just don't like it that the American Public has become so conservative and jingoistic. We are that, outside our "liberal elite" colleges, universities, and cities, sorry to say, my dear depressed friend.