>>Why lay our deficiency in those regards at the door of
>>the Constitution? At the time it was written, how
>>many countries were doing it better?
>
>It was written over 200 years ago. Isn't that a rather odd standard to use
>in 1999?
Not necessarily. The Allthing is still the Parliament in Iceland, and it's on the order of 1000 years old. Similarly the Magna Carta, 800 years old, is still the touchstone for UK democracy, classist tho it was. It's not at all clear to me why age should be an issue. Much more to the point is whether the principles are being upheld in the best way or the worst. In the US, today, it's the worst.
>
>>The Document doesn't forbid our having a better
>>political system. It would support all the things
>>you name, if only we demanded them.
>
>You are really underestimating the institutional obstacles to popular
>democracy in the U.S., starting with those deliberately obstructionist
>constitutional institutions, the Senate and the Supreme Court, and going on
>down to the whole idiotic federal structure of the U.S., with its 85,000
>governmental entities. For a country that professes to hate government we
>sure create lots of them. How can you create a sensible regional or
>national policy on anything from education to welfare to the environment
>with every Podunk school authority and water district claiming sovereignty
>over its precious half-acre of soil? And how about our state governments?
>What nests of incompetence and corruption they are - they make Washington
>look like models of flexibility and openness.
Surely you don't mean to argue that if every voter in the US spoke with one voice it would be ignored, do you? Do you really believe, as my older daughter cynically claims to, that 'if voting could make a difference, it would be illegal'?
I don't. I'm convinced that the folk in power want nothing more than to convince us that 'resistance is futile'. The very fact that they put so much energy into convincing us, managing us, and deflecting us suggests, as Chomsky has pointed out, that they are extremely vulnerable and they know it.
As to central v decentralised control -- tho I'm unclear on what that has to do with the issue -- we're only now coming to the point technologically where central planning is even a realistic possibility. There's nothing inherently wrong with decentralisation -- in fact, it is the only way to get human-sized problems, right now.
If even the Religious Reich could be successful on the local level despite such a dystonic message that they had to lie about it...surely the left could define an appealing, workable platform and capture first local, then regional, and finally national offices. Why aren't we working on that?
Or is it that we 'inteligentsiya' truly are intellectually arrogant, stagnant, bankrupt, and have nothing to offer working folk except a dystopic reprise of Soviet-style 'paradise'? Should we admit that we have nothing to offer but obfuscatory, hypertheoretical criticism? Pack up and go home, sort of thing?