[EM] language/framing quibble

[Fred Gohlke]

Good Evening,

re: "The construction of organizations and their interplay in the domain 
of politics is, I think, more than anything else a process."

I agree, and understanding the process is critical.

Parties take on a life of their own ... and their life-blood is money. 
Their primary and continuing concern is to attract the support they need 
to insure their existence.  Ultimately, support is and must be 
financial.  Thus, parties are standing targets for the vested interests 
that benefit from the laws they enact.

In the United States, this process has been running for over 200 years. 
  During that time, we've seen the birth and cancerous growth of 
behemoths that owe their existence to the laws they've purchased from 
the people we elected, at the behest of the parties, to represent us in 
our government.

As you say, it is a process, a process that includes gutting the laws 
passed after The Great Depression to limit the excesses of huge 
financial interests.  As a result, this very weekend, we are pondering 
how we can prevent severe losses to foreign governments that trusted the 
integrity of our financial institutions.

The aspect of this circumstance that is commonly overlooked is that the 
legislative acts that allowed the current contretemps were not seen to 
be ideological in nature.  They were proposed and enacted as 'routine 
housekeeping' tasks ... just 'cleaning up some old legislation'.  Since 
they were not branded as liberal or conservative in nature, both parties 
were able to support the changes without violating their ideological 
franchise, hence their actions were unchallenged.

By far, the greatest proportion of bad legislation is purchased and 
passed in this way.  Imagining that ideological differences have a 
significant impact on our legislative process is the height of folly.

(In this connection, it is important to recognize that lobbying is a 
vital part of the democratic process.  The evil is not lobbying, the 
evil is our failure to build an infrastructure that can forestall the 
potential for corruption inherent in the legislative process; the evil 
is our failure to devise an electoral process that makes integrity a 
valuable trait in our public officials.)


re: "The process is influenced by both external and internal 
constraints: what weakens and what strengthens."

That's true.  It is a process that, by the natural operation of 
self-interest, strengthens partisan control of our government and 
weakens the people's influence.  That is NOT a good thing.


re: "... multiple parties would keep any one party from gaining such 
dominance that it could trump through policy unopposed, even more so 
since the opposition of multiple parties would be stronger than the 
opposition of a single party."

That is correct.  The more we atomize the perspectives that combine to 
form policies, the less opportunity there is for single-party dominance. 
  On the other hand, to be effective, opposition parties must achieve 
significant size and the larger they grow, the greater their 
susceptibility to targeting and subversion on matters purported to be 
non-ideological.  That portion of the process is Darwinian, and, right 
now, the 'fittest' are not the humans among us.

I must interject here that changes that weaken the stranglehold the two 
major parties exert over the political infrastructure in the United 
States are valuable.  My opposition is to the lack of understanding of 
the process, the dynamics that produced the monster we currently endure. 
  As you said, we need "... something with which to replace the old 
party dynamics ..." but we can not find that 'something' until we 
understand how and why our present system evolved as it did and learn to 
harness the forces that guided its development.


Fred