[dduckwessel]

Qfwfq, on 29 January 2012 - 11:52 AM, said:

In the end it's got to come down to either the people or to the regime.

I personally think it's a twofold problem; both the politicians and the general public are not upholding their end. As I said earlier, the politicians are not keeping their promises and the general public are not holding them accountable for those promises.

However, just as soon as the politician commits a personal indiscretion, suddenly the general public finds their voices. I'm not saying that government officials shouldn't be held to high standards of moral behaviour but that the 'raking over the coals' could have been avoided with a timely 'rap on the knuckles'.

In this respect I blame the failure of government on the public for a lack of due diligence.

[CraigD]

What this thread strikes me as poking a problem well known to government founding bodies, such as the several congresses and conventions in late 18th century America that gave rise to the government of the United States: how to assure that capable people conduced the affairs of the nation, yet not in the process reduce the status of the majority of the people to a status akin to un-consenting slave of the state / serf.

IMHO, the approach of the founders of the US was an excellent one, consisting primarily of stating a very small collection – two, by my count – of principles according to which a government could be designed to achieve this balance:

• That there should be no legally codified differences between individual people – that is, no explicit classes, such as nobles, commoners, and slaves.
  
• That government requires the consent of those subject to it (for historical reasons, we Americans don’t refer to such people as “subjects”)

These principles are clearly and explicitly stated in 2nd paragraph of the US Declaration of Independence of July 4 1776. The rest of the document is essential a list of grievances against the government of England, personified by its King, justifying the US’s rejection of that government, and effectively declaring a state of war to already exist between the two states, pointedly one started by the English government.

Many possible governments can satisfy the above 2 conditions. The US’s, codified just over 11 years later in the US Constitution, a document defining in many words how the US government must be structured and function, and, in the first 16 words of Article 4 section 4, known as the Guarantee Clause, that every state must be essentially similar, in that they must have “a Republican Form of Government”.

Next to the importance of the 2 conditions, the structure of the US government – its 3 branches, its 2-house legislature, etc – are mere details. The US government would remain legitimate had it a single rather than a bicameral legislature, or with any one or both of its branches folded into the others, so long as it met the 2 conditions.

Looking at these 2 conditions, which the Declaration and the Constitution implicitly yet clearly make requirements of “a republican form of government”, it’s clear the 2nd set an impossibly high standard. It doesn’t state “government require the consent of a majority of the governed”, but that it requires the consent of, absent other qualification, all of the governed. Being impossibly high, a practical interpretation is needed, and has many times been made by the US government: that all reasonably identifiable subpopulations, even fairly small minorities, must consent.

For this to be possible, the US and all the state governments must, essentially, give every identifiable subpopulation at least some of what it wants from government. This is less difficult that it at first sounds, because practically all the subpopulations have in common a want to be left alone by their government.

Assuring the consent of the governed precludes direct democracy – that is, passing laws by some majority vote of the People – because, at various times, a majority of the American people passionately believe that some minority should be prohibited from engaging in some behavior they would rescind their consent of their government if denied. Racial and religious minorities, non-primary English speakers, non-heterosexuals, physical or mental defectives – these and more groups have, at various times, been deemed worthy of forced conversion, expulsion, or even sterilization or execution, by a majority of Americans.

The way the specific government guaranteed to the People by the US Constitution achieves this (when it does – like all human enterprises, the US is imperfect, having actually permitted at various times the enslavement, imprisonment and execution of various minorities)

[Qfwfq]

dduckwessel, on 29 January 2012 - 01:13 PM, said:

In this respect I blame the failure of government on the public for a lack of due diligence.

Indeed this is exactly the problem and the reason it tends to emerge in so many democratic nations is the tendency for most people to be more concerned with drawing water to their own mill than with making sure things are fair. Election campaign is marketing.

Another thing that doesn't help is bipolarism.