[EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process

[Fred Gohlke]

Good Afternoon, Peter

re: "In your list, you forgot to mention ... 'media coverage'."

Until I read your post, I hadn't considered it necessary or wise to 
alter the role of the media in the electoral process.  After you raised 
the issue, I began to ponder the significance of this part of the 
election process.  You identified one of the things wrong with democracy as:

   "3) Privately-owned media, which has the ability to tilt the
       election results in any direction based the owners want"

This seems to sum up the objections to privately-owned media. The root 
of the objection is that the media can manipulate the public and 
influence the results of elections, but it does not make clear what 
controls or alterations are needed.

There is no doubt the public can be manipulated.  Yet, each of us knows 
of instances where a media blitz did not affect us.  It is not that 
we're smarter than everyone else (even if we think so), it's just that 
our store of knowledge and experience lets us see through this or that 
manipulation attempt more quickly or more clearly than others.  Therein 
lies the key to solving the dilemma of public manipulation.

Plato, if not others before him, felt democracy could not work because 
'ordinary people' are 'too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive 
rhetoric of ambitious politicians'.  He failed to note that some folks 
are more easily swayed than others, and that some individuals are not 
swayed at all.  Our history is replete with geniuses who sprung up from 
'ordinary people', yet Plato's faulty view of democracy has survived 
through the ages and forms the cornerstone of political thought today.

The weakness in this concept is twofold.  The first is the notion that 
the only proper view of democracy is as a condition in which all the 
people make all the decisions.  The second is the failure to recognize 
that 'the people' is made up of many individuals: some good, some bad; 
some skilled, some unskilled; some with integrity, some deceitful; some 
brilliant, some dull; some sociable, some unfriendly; some interested in 
politics, some not.  The task of a democratic electoral process is to 
sift through these many types of individuals and elevate those best 
suited to serve as advocates of the common good.

This is not a task that can be delegated.  There is no machine that can 
estimate a person's goodness or talent or integrity - only other humans 
can do that.  We cannot write a set of rules that will tell us, "This 
person is better suited to lead us than that person."  Such judgments 
can only be made by one's peers, and then only when they have an 
incentive to do so and enough time to examine the individual(s) carefully.

You and I agree the people, taken as a whole, can be influenced by the 
media.  Therefore, until it is shown that such influence can be 
prevented, we would be ill-advised to consider political systems based 
on the undifferentiated mass of people.  Instead, we will be better 
served to conceive an electoral method that lets each of us participate 
in the political process to the full extent of our desire and ability 
and lets us actively seek the individuals with the qualities we want in 
our elected officials.

Fred