http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZfMolxRXMDo not ask from Direct Democracy outcomes it cannot produce and, especially it cannot maintain.
There is no steady state in human history or OF human history.
We can perceive the divine, we have all kinds of different names for it, but we are not divine, we can be only fallible beings, with or without direct democracy, with or without representative government, with or without autocracy, with or without oligarchy, with or without totalitarianism, with or without rude force, with or without religion, with or without ideology, with or without philosophers, with or without market capitalism, with or without socialism.
With this argument, as some of
you know, the Founding Fathers pushed the ratification of the Federal Constitution in the the state ratification conventions. They wanted to convince those who had the right to vote at that time that they needed "energic government". They knew about Switzerland and its particular form of republicanism already then. The subterranean war of self-appointed "federalists" of all kinds, started then.
The American radicals, who fought the revolution out, followed the same fate of the American royalists, they had to leave the country or shut up. One example for all: Thomas Paine, who is the true Founding Father of America. He was not allowed to sit at the Constitutional Convention, even though he was the one who designed it in the last pages of Common Sense and even if old doctor Benjamin Franklin would have liked to have him there.
What won was not the revolution, but the counterrevolution - and it won in more steps between 1777 and 1867.
Thomas Paine wrote about his disappointment of the way how the American revolution ended to Washington in 1796 (
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/paine_letter_to_washington_01.html). In the meantime he had been elected in the French constitutional convention and, together with Condorcet, he wrote the first direct democratic constitution in modern history, the constitution that was taken as a model by the Swiss radicals in the 1820s and 1830s (
http://mjp.univ-perp.fr/france/co1793pr.htm). But also the French revolution ended no better for the radicals, it ended with Napoleon after three constitutional conventions and five not implemented constitutional projects ... Paine escaped from murder in the Luxembourg prison by pure chance, Condorcet had to kill
himself ...
Direct democratic procedures and standards do not not exist in many countries because it is a chance of history, but because wealth and wealthy oligarchies are against them, they are fighting a war with all legal and illegal means against direct democracy.
This was not the case in Switzerland: The aristocracies governing the cantons during the Tagsatzung centuries discovered that they could use direct democracy and the invention of federalism to survive also in the modern era of "democratic constitutionalism", introduced to Switzerland by the French revolution. Switzerland was a poor nation at that time, with few exceptions, made up of peasants and of mercenaries.
Humanity lived without democratic constitutionalism for no less than
15,000 years. In most European countries it is barely as old as in
Switzerland. In some, like in Italy, it exists only apparently, still even these days. Democratic constitutionalism is just a second of time in the geological time of human history - and it is inherently unstable, it can be brought to its knees in many ways.
The war against Switzerland and direct democracy still lasts in our days, it has just different names than in the past. It is sometimes called "abolition of Swiss bank secret", but it is a war for abolishing the "anomaly" of the Swiss political and constitutional system, fought together by the US government and by the EU and its member states.
Until you do not understand that there is this war against direct democracy going on since no less than 233 years, you will not understand many things - and you risk of demanding from direct democracy to bring about political outcomes it cannot bring about.
The paradise is not in Switzerland, even though the happyness index there is highest among "postmodern" Western nations. The Swiss know it and continue to experiment with their political and constitutional system - and their industrial and banking corporations continue to ask for its abolition.
The perception of the divine in men and
women, besides the mere fact of their fallibility, is what is driving political history, political change, political thought and political evolution since the Greeks. We tried many political systems, but no one was capable of satisfying fully the expectations of those called to bear with them. We have tried many times to escape from hell designing paradise in our minds, but we always failed, sometimes so miserably that even serious historians can give us only made-up accounts of what really happened.
It would be good to avoid to give the impression to others, especially the less knowledgeable, those faible beings among us more prone to illusion, to self-illusion, to cheating and to self-cheating, that direct democracy will not fail them, because it will fail them, it will fail them many times.
Humanity is driven by the constant search of visionaries and of protesters for some form of government corresponding to the human dimension, to the
real needs and ideals of real women and of real men. This search is not over, it is just at its beginning, we haven´t seen anything yet in the last 233 years.
The only form of government capable of delivering this fully probably is anarchy, which is self-government by pure consent. It might work in some ideal conditions, maybe it worked in the prehistorical past, maybe not. It is THINKABLE, hence it must come from somewhere, even though only as a political fantasy.
Government cannot MAKE human beings happy. Corporations either. The rise of suicides at France Telecom about which French newspapers are commentating these days is just an extreme episode of a social organization form that is reaching the limits of its sustainability. I can see much dissatifaction in the messages running through this exchange. That our social organization might be ill is something that psychoanalysts have tried to explain in the past for many years.
Neoinstitutional economists and historians explain to us that when institutions cost more than they produce, they are likely to collapse.
You want "direct democracy" to follow on. Some want something else, the "new world order", starting with a world central bank or a network of central banks (of course "independent"). You want a decentralized world (I hope at least); they want an ultra-centralized world, where political and economic responsibility are only indirect for the "rulers", who rule basically by the long stick of corporations.
Well, I would like to have "direct democracy" and a decentralized political system too, but I am very distant from the ideas moving your discussions.
The dissatisfactory performance of Western style constitutional government in my opinion depends on the fact that they are conceptually "incomplete", i.e. they solved well only the problems connected to delegation, the problems related to political
control are completely neglected.
I would wish to my children a political system they can control effectively. This means direct democracy to me. This is the reason why I am skeptical about the utility of thinking of direct democratic procedures and institutions in a purely "electoral" framerwork, as election necessarily means delegation of some sort or the other. I think that they should be discussed in the framework of political control. Of course there must be collective decision rules operating in any political system, but it should be clear to anybody who has a little bit of understanding of this science, which is political science, that any collective decision system is a "statistical filter", it cannot really aggregate individual preferences. The Arrow theorem says this - and much more ... that happyness that the Founders did not find in monarchical and aristocratic rule today is still the goal, but we need to look for it also in
other places where it can be and how we can make it come about. The quest for human government is still open, we learned only a little bit, not much, in the last 233 years.
Then, of course, being the concepts of democracy and of constitutional government multi-dimensional it is not appropriate to think that one instruments can solve many problems at the same time, it will not happen.
I recommend the study of Bruno Frey´s FOCJ model of democratic federal government to try to point your discussions out of electoral problems. If you are direct democrats serious about political equality, then you should look deep into the Swiss financial referendum instruments, not too much into the electoral system ... "leadership" is not an issue at all, cooperation, sharing of information and control of outcomes, revelation and correction of mistakes are the issues ... those of you who already know the FOCJ model will have understood that it cannot operate
without financial referendums both on the entry and the exit side of the budget.
Those of you who are serious about the idea of political control - which constitutes one of the oldest blocks in the tradition of democratic constitutionalism -, will easily realize that it is only through the direct and the indirect control of money by the Citizen at all levels (local, national, international) that the transparency, the accountability and the responsibility expected by "postmodern" Citizens can be brought about. This is the real cause for much of the dissatisfaction of postmodern man (and woman) with the postmodern representative government.Now government and the banking system use those powers to control the people directly and indirectly, while the contrary should be the case. This is what the current "crisis" is revealing - and the crisis will not be over until one of these two sides will prevail.
Direct democracy requires a completely
different fiscal system than the one we have today, even in Switzerland, one based on the principle of fiscal equivalence, not on ability to pay. Direct democracy requires also a proper "monetary constitution", which is not based on central banking, but on general public ownership of the production and the the distribution of money and that is effectively separated not only from the the politicians, but also from the private banking system. It requires also a completely different budgetary process than the one practiced now, which is based on executive power. What is needed is one where collective decisions about the production and the distribution of collective goods is based upon individual preferences or individual needs for public goods.
The goal cannot be to produce the steady state in this world, but a "convergent" political process under a"machine that would go of itself", under the ultimate control of the supremacy of constitutional law.
This is why I believe that we should hold firm the evolutionary gains produced by the invention of the constitutional conventions and by the "property rights" solution to the problem of political control envisioned in the modern sovereignity theory. If you look deep into the EU "constitutional treaty" (so-called), you will realize easily that this is exactly what the current abusive "owners" of representative government would like to cancel from the minds of university professors and of voters, especially the ideal of directly elected constitutional conventions. It is the same thing that the architects of the new "financial order" envision, which is one in which the debts are piled up by international organzations whose "directors" are appointed by political parties on recommendation of corporate interests and where there is no place for the Citizen.
No constitutional convention ever would approve the foundation of a "world central bank"
with 750 trillion of dollars of derivatives spread all over the planet, most of them on public debt obligations of Western "advanced" nations, a nominal amount which is about 15 times current world GDP. No constitutional convention (if properly constituted) would also continue to approve current levels of military and "defence" expenditures by Western "advanced" nations. No constitutional convention would approve of any carbon taxes whatsoever.
The financial bankruptcy of Western "advanced" nations is becoming more and more evident day by day, at the same time as the number of "nonbelievers" in the "system" speaking out their minds is rising. Western governments are preparing to use force against possible uprisings. The first place for usage of the newly founded EU army might be against the EU Citizens themselves.
The new, self-appointed kings and princes are naked, also this time.
This time it is up to the intelligence and the
craft of direct democrats to win a battle against hypocritocracy, that can help to spread over the world a more humane system of government, not the form of "democracy" propagated by central intelligence directors and their progeny.
Of course it must be a system that in the end does not only allow any Citizen to control directly and indirectly any act of political power, both ex ante and ex post, but also economic and market power. The two things are two faces of the same medal.
It will not produce paradise, just a more humane system of government than this one we have. The one we have is suiciding itself again, like in the 1930es and, sooner or later, it will be replaced with something else.
Luca Zampetti