>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.
Socialism is economic democracy, but I believe political democracy is an essential step on the road to economic democracy. Political democracy is still a long way short of socialism of course, but it must be considered progress.
So the payoff for attaining real democracy is that people can comprehend its potential, if it were extended from the political, to the economic, basis of human affairs. But if you think what the US has is political democracy, then you don't even know what democracy is, so it would be a disaster to entrust you with democratic control of the means of production. Political democracy confers over hardly any power at all. Economic democracy would be power over the really important stuff.
>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.
Americans do seem to have a romantic attraction to feudalism, I've noticed that. Probably because you haven't actually experienced it as a nation and have romantic notions of it.
But I can appreciate that well-meaning advice by foreigners about how to restructure you political system is probably futile. Americans are probably just as pig-headed as Iraqis when it comes to meddling foreigners. (It goes with the insular locally-based mindset.) But we have a duty to try to educate you all the same. What used to be called the white man's burden, don't you know? ;-)
>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.
The danger is that Americans would try to adapt socialism to fit with their feudal notions of sovereign locally-based political fiefdoms. If, as you say, it is impossible for Americans to rise above that feudal mentality, then socialism would be quite impossible for you to get your head around.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas