> Being in government, or having your foot on the throat of the
> government, amounts to more than being merely a pressure group.
I've said before, and will repeat, that these European/Australian systems do give third parties more of a voice in the government, but what is the ultimate payoff? If we're interested in replacing the capitalist system by a more democratic (in traditional terminology, "socialist") economic system, which is where the real advance in democracy would come from, these non-U.S. systems aren't any further along than the U.S. I hear the same complaints about how the capitalists are screwing workers in those countries as I hear here.
I understand that a lot of U.S. Leftists would fondly love to make this country into more of a carbon copy of their favorite overseas countries, and people in those countries are constantly giving us well-meant advice to make ourselves into such copies. But I'm afraid it ain't gonna happen. Americans are not going to change their local-based, winner-take-all political system for any other country's. We just have to work with the system we've got.
And we have a lot of work ahead of us, rewriting the traditional socialist ideas to make them relevant to 21st-century conditions and putting them into a language our fellow Americans can understand, and building organizations which will provide tangible benefits to them today, not pie in the sky in some indefinite future (which intellectual theoreticians love to dream about, but ordinary people find useless). Once we do that, we will have just as much success, or more, as our European and Australian sisters/brothers.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________________________ It isn’t that we believe in God, or don’t believe in God, or have suspended judgment about God, or consider that the God of theism is an inadequate symbol of our ultimate concern; it is just that we wish we didn’t have to have a view about God. It isn’t that we know that “God” is a cognitively meaningless expression, or that it has its role in a language-game other than fact-stating, or whatever. We just regret the fact that the word is used so much.
— Richard Rorty