Comments: Blogburst: What Texas Democrats Should Do Next?

How Democrats Can Become the Majority Party
James Caldwell PowerDemocracy.org

The Democratic Party will become a minority party permanently if it fails to correctly diagnose the reasons for its decline in power. It must then take effective remedial action. The reason the Democratic Party has lost power is that it has failed to appreciate the significance of changes in the political landscape that have occurred since the end of the Great Society. Specifically, the ever-growing influence of mass media have turned elections into competing marketing campaigns to sell a product to the mass market consisting of the voting public. This is not democracy. Democracy is rule of the government by the demos, the common people. The demos know that they do not have the power to launch political initiatives that express what they really want. This power could be referred to as “collective executive authority.” Instead they are reduced to the status of being “the consenting governed.” There is a vast difference in “governing” and “being governed.” When people perceive that they are “governing” they have a lively interest in politics, because politics directly governs many important aspects of life, including many that are overlooked when people think of the term “politics.” In America, the demos do not determine government policy to any great extent. Those decisions are made by the big contributors who provide access to mass media, and the interests of big contributors are diametrically opposed to those of the demos on many crucial issues. The result is voter apathy.
Now, if the Democratic Party wants to become the majority party, it can do so quite easily by overcoming voter apathy. If it were able to get the votes of only half of the non-voting citizenry, it would completely bury the Republicans at the polls. How would this be possible?
Here is where the correct diagnosis is essential. Democrats can never hope to match Republican fund raising, and will continue to lose power for as long as they continue to compete on a political playing field where the Democrats have a permanent disadvantage. The more Democrats try to appeal to big contributors, the more they alienate themselves from the demos. It is pointless to scold the demos for lack of civic-mindedness and lecture them about the importance of every single vote. Democrats may rouse the demos to support them temporarily in the case of particularly egregious abuses of power by the Republicans; but they will never obtain a loyal following that will vote them into power and keep them there until they prove to the demos that they represent their interests.
This line of argument is well known to anyone who has thought beyond the most superficial level of analysis and entered into discussions with thoughtful and knowledgeable advocates of true democracy. What is usually lacking in such discussions is a practical strategic plan for how to empower the demos. From the foregoing analysis, we must conclude that such a plan must begin by recognizing the necessity of changing the election system to one that is less plutocratic and more democratic.
Virtually the entire advanced industrialized world utilizes some form of proportional representation (PR) instead of the winner-take-all elections that typify the American political system. In the vast majority of PR elections, voter turnout is in the 85%+ range. Women and minorities tend to be better represented as well. Grassroots political power is more effective in proportional representation systems, and gerrymandering is more difficult. All of this is good for Democrats and bad for Republicans. Rather than the party-list forms of PR, I personally favor a form of proportional representation that would reduce the power of party organizations to enforce party discipline. This system allows people to rank order their preferences and cast a single transferable vote, similar to some IRV systems. The winning candidates receive the political voting power in office equal to the number of votes they receive. In this “Power Of Voice” PR system, every vote really does count. Here are the essential characteristics of a winning strategy for Democrats:
· The place for the Democratic Party to begin the political reform movement to PR is at the local government level.
· By launching pro-democracy ballot initiatives to revise city charters and institute PR elections, Democrats will gain support from across the political spectrum from all citizens who are frustrated with government by auction.
· Democrats would be able to seize control of the terms of the political debate by defining themselves as the champions of democracy and the opposition as the opponents of democracy – better than the conservative-liberal dichotomy that causes artificial divisions in the demos.
If the Democrats prove to the demos that they are the champions of real democracy and real governmental reform, they will become the dominant party in American politics. If, on the other hand, the Democratic Party continues to try to beat the Republicans in a contest that clearly favors access to wealth, the Democrats will continue to find themselves stranded on an iceberg heading straight for the tropics.

Posted by James F. Caldwell at December 14, 2003 10:08 PM
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