Undermining Democracy:

Party Politics and Pelosi's Priorities 

by Hank Edson

Political Pragmatism

Many well-meaning, pragmatic politicians espouse party loyalty because the party’s general vision of how to promote the public's general welfare is sufficiently in line with their own. Under such circumstances, the compromises a politician chooses to make out of loyalty to his or her party is off-set by the benefits that result when party strength is applied in service of the general welfare. The goal remains government of, by, and for the people. Such pragmatic loyalty, however, still diminishes the integrity of the political process and the value of the political debate on which wise policy depends for its formulation.

To appreciate that this is true it is helpful to compare the political process with the scientific process. Both processes involve an open critical discourse aimed at identifying the most accurate understanding of reality. In science, the goal is simply to understand the laws of the universe. In politics, the goal is to understand the laws that will most benefit society.

The Self-Interested Pursuit of Inequitable Advantage

Some take issue with this goal, arguing instead that the goal of politics is to allow individuals to pursue their own self-interest. This argument implies that there is no connection between the human equality in which we all profess to believe and the conditions upon which our individual self- interest depends. Our self-interested pursuit of happiness thus occurs in a perfect isolation that has nothing to do with anyone else. This argument also implies that there is no connection between our human equality and our individual support of the social contract. That is, we all believe in democracy only because we think we will all be able to use the system to our own advantage without concern for others.

Such individuals would argue I am dead wrong in my pursuit of the general welfare. They would say that, in fact, most of us do agree to the democratic social contract, not because we believe the goal of society is to serve the best interests of the whole, but because we believe the best interests of the whole can only be achieved through pursuit of self-interest. That is, the general welfare can only be achieved by disregarding it.

Not only is this argument worthless on its face, it contradicts our experience of reality. We know that pursuit of self-interest leads individuals with wealth and power to use the advantage they possess to tilt the playing field in their favor to further increase the advantages they possess. Then they use the new advantages they have acquired to tilt the playing field even further in their favor. Eventually, almost all wealth and power becomes concentrated among a very few individuals who claim their wealth proves their virtue.

When their lack of concern for the equal welfare of all members of society is attacked as un-virtuous, they respond by arguing that concern for others just makes the others “soft” and “lazy.” We know, however, that because the wealthy and powerful have accumulated so many advantages in their control of society that they do not have to work nearly as hard nor suffer nearly as much as do the poor and powerless they disdain as lazy and soft.

We know from experience that in reality the rich and powerful are the ones who are spoiled and pampered, not the average citizen fighting an uphill battle to achieve basic security in our corporate controlled economy. Thus, what the enormous wealth and power of the super-rich really proves is, not that they are virtuous, but that they must have done something to prevent the political power of the people from requiring a fairer distribution of wealth and power.

Democratic Prosperity and Human Equality

In a society in which the contribution of each member’s humanity is necessarily acknowledged and respected by virtue of each member’s inherent social contract power, all members of society demand a fair share of society’s security and prosperity. This demand is acknowledged by our social contract documents, The Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, as legitimate and in accord with the laws of reality governing the structure of human society.

The claim others make — that most of us believe serving self-interest maximizes the general welfare — is absolutely false. Most of us believe that the rich and powerful have an unfair advantage in any context where the general welfare is disregarded and the unrestricted pursuit of self-interest is condoned.

Most of us believe foremost in our human equality. In holding tightly to this belief in our equality, sooner or later, most of us come to believe that human equality can only be served when promoting the general welfare is acknowledged as the real goal of the democratic political process.

Scientific Independence and Political Process Integrity

When we compare the political process to the scientific process, we are therefore justified in stating that the goal of that process is to understand the laws that will most benefit the general welfare. Understanding this is our goal, we can move on to make our comparison.

The most important thing we must note is that the scientific process does not condone party loyalty or political compromise. Each member in the scientific community’s critical debate is duty bound to argue the truth about the laws of the universe as he or she understands it to be. Only when each member adds his honest “two cents” do the ideas under discussion benefit from the real wisdom and experience of the whole community.

The more times members of the scientific community challenge a given theory, the more refined and more accurate that theory becomes. Thus, each member adds to the integrity of the scientific process to the extent that he speaks from his unique point of view. If he merely parrots what others want him to say in exchange for their support on another issue, he adds no new challenge to the idea. Therefore, he adds nothing to the integrity of the process. Instead, he has distorted the scientific community’s understanding of its own real opinion about the theory. The community’s general appraisal of the value of the ideas under discussion now appears stronger or weaker than it actually is.

Were scientists to make agreements to exchange support for each other’s pet theories even though they didn’t believe in each other’s conclusions, the scientific process would become completely worthless, completely corrupt. The ideas presented would appear to hold a value in the eyes of the scientific community that they did not deserve or actually possess. Instead of arriving at a more accurate worldview, science would lead us into a false and distorted worldview.

All this is also true in the political arena whenever individual members cease to speak honestly their own beliefs about what laws best serve the general welfare. Whenever politicians start making political compromises in the name of party loyalty or otherwise, they pervert the political process.

If we want our political process to achieve the most accurate understanding of the laws that will best serve the general welfare, each of our politicians much speak honestly his or her own individual understanding of what those laws should be. Party agreements thus undeniably diminish the vigor and value of the political debate and undeniably corrupt the effectiveness of the laws that result.

A World without Political Parties

In defense of these political compromises, some will argue that they have to be made. Otherwise the opposing political party that does engage in such corrupt compromises will always win. They will argue that without party loyalty, there is no such thing as a political party.

Indeed, they are right, but they are also wrong. To attack the concept of party loyalty is ultimately to attack the concept of a political party, no doubt. But attacking the concept of a political party is actually democratic. There's nothing wrong with getting rid of political parties.

Our founding fathers did not intend for there to be political parties. This is evident if for no other reason than that, when they drafted the Constitution, they gave each elector two votes on a single ballot from which the presidency and vice presidency would be decided together. Under the Constitution the candidate who received the most Electoral College votes would become president and the candidate who received the next largest number of votes would become vice president. They saw no problem with there being any conflict of political philosophy between the president and the vice president and did not anticipate that candidates would pair up as partners.

To the extent that a conflict in political philosophy might exist between the president and the vice president, it merely reflected the democratic nature of the system. Our founding generation did not regard it as gentlemanly that a person would aggressively campaign for the presidency or proper that such a candidate should publicly choose a running mate who would be given the role of vice president. Indeed, it was not even good grace for a person to advance their own nomination for candidacy. For this reason Jefferson pretended ignorance of his own campaign while he let James Madison make all the necessary deals. Who knows what kind of protest the drafters of our Constitution would have raised to the idea of actually soliciting money from strangers to support one’s candidacy?

The idea our founding fathers meant to realize was that the offices of the president and vice president would be filled according to the degree to which the democratic process approved of the candidate’s individual merit. They did not seek to undermine the standard of individual merit by allowing partnerships to form that allowed other considerations undue influence in the selection process. Thus, our founding fathers were actually engaged in a scientific process of government that did not disparage idealism as “impractical,” but that sought to make manifest a principled purity in the democratic process they were engineering. The only problem was that they did not have the electors rank their two votes in order of preference. Had they allocated a full vote to the first preference and a half vote to the second ranked candidate, the system would not have come under attack as it did.

The Jefferson-Burr Corruption (aka The Twelfth Amendment)

It was only a few years later, when an ambitious Thomas Jefferson sought to obtain an anti-democratic advantage in his contest against John Adams, that political parties become accepted in the American political process. Jefferson formed a partnership with Aaron Burr who would secure New York’s large number of electoral votes for the team. Jefferson would get enough votes to win the presidency. Burr would get enough votes through his association with Jefferson to play a high role in the government not otherwise accessible to him.

Jefferson’s plan backfired, however, when the partnership was so successfully embraced by the electorate that both Burr and Jefferson received the same number of electoral votes. Under the terms of the Constitution, Burr was a candidate for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, just as was Jefferson. The tie vote gave Burr a shot at the presidency even though the electors clearly believed they were voting for Jefferson to become president and Burr to become vice president. The electors had not been paying close enough attention to the terms of the Constitution. Had the electors been allowed to rank their votes as suggested above, Adams would have come in second with 65 electoral college votes behind Jefferson’s 73. Burr would have come in far behind with only 36.5 votes, a much more accurate representation of the nation’s estimation of him. Under such math, the Jefferson-Burr partnership never would have formed for Burr would not have stood a chance of benefitting from it.  Additionally, recognizing the inutility of the partnership, the public would not have given support to a partnership campaign.

But no such ranking was available.  Jefferson and Burr were tied and Burr refused to concede the presidency. Pursuant to the terms of the Constitution, the House of Representatives was called upon to decide between the two candidates.  Thirty-five rounds of voting ensued without resolving the conflict. When Jefferson ultimately prevailed on the 36th round after seven days of voting, the unfortunate response of our government leadership was not to criticize the anti-democratic nature of the political partnership made between Jefferson and Burr. Instead, the government responded by changing the Constitution to allow such partnerships to become a permanent fixture of presidential politics.

The Twelfth Amendment created separate ballots for the president and vice president, thereby insuring that the political contest for the presidency would not be about individual merit, but about political partnership.

Hence forth, a candidate for president could safely team up with a lesser political light in order to secure some advantage his own individual merit did not possess. Likewise, the lesser political light would benefit from the partnership by being raised to a state of prominence from outside of the democratic political process.

In our current administration, neither Bush nor Cheney was a viable candidate without the other. Bush needed Cheney to offer security against his own incompetence and as a guarantee of fidelity to the corporate interests who sponsored him. To glaze over his harshly elitist authoritarianism, Cheney needed Bush’s vacuous professions of being “born again” as a true Christian.

The Twelfth Amendment effectively invested American politics in the false hope that two halves might make a whole. As we have seen in the Bush/Cheney administration, what such partnerships make is actually disaster.

This history proves that all those pragmatists who argue that political parties are an inevitable fact of life are wrong. There are unending new ways to improve the integrity of the democratic political process so that political parties do not exist and partnership is only expressed in terms of shared opinions on discrete policy issues. In fact, one of the best tools for improving this integrity is not new at all, but is the idea that was expressed over two hundred years ago in the original terms of the Constitution. We just need to improve it by adding the idea of candidate ranking.

We could greatly improve the integrity of our democracy by again establishing that the president and vice president are to be chosen through the same ballot with the person getting the most votes becoming president and the person with the next most votes becoming vice president. Just as we repealed the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol, we could repeal the 12th Amendment’s ill-advised degradation of the democratic nature of our political process and add an amendment to include candidate ranking in the selection of the president and vice-president.

Abandoning Party Politics and Pursuing Impeachment Instead

The bottom line is that where the quality of political debate is corrupted by political parties and party loyalty, Americans lose their edge in exercising their democracy. Our skills grow dull. We no longer expect of each other probing thoughts, concern for sound principles, and an appreciation for the wisdom that arises out of communal decision making.

A truly democratic decision making process, in which ideas compete for approval among a community of individuals who each maintain the independence of his or her perspective, produces an outcome that, unlike the Bush/Cheney partnership, is greater, not less, than the sum of its members contributions. This favorable result is not achieved through political partnership and compromise, but through political independence and integrity. Even when our intent is principled, party loyalty makes our political process unprincipled—and that will kill a democracy if the people let it.

All this is of particular relevance today when we have a corrupt political partnership between a president and vice president, both of whom clearly ought to be impeached. The Republicans’ loss of the control of congress in the last election cycle was a direct expression of widespread public disgust arising from the abuses of power these two men have committed.

Yet, now that the Democrats have regained the power to actually initiate impeachment proceedings against these men on multiple grounds for which there is substantial evidence, still nothing is being done.

The woman who holds the key to initiating impeachment proceeding, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, justifies her failure to initiate impeachment proceedings on the grounds that she is trying to hold together a coalition of democrats who can actually get things done for the American people. In order not to get distracted or divided in pursuit of this objective, she has imposed a lock-step mentality on her party in opposition to impeachment.

Imagine the honest views we might really hear on the floor of the House of Representatives if our representatives were really free to express their appraisal of the conduct of George Bush and Dick Cheney. Nancy Pelosi has got herself lost in the trees of pragmatic argument and political compromise; she cannot see the woods of political process integrity. Unfortunately, we are stuck for the moment following her misguided lead.

What Pelosi fails to understand is that impeachment for the abuses Bush and Cheney have committed is no more a question of political convenience or practicality in a democratic society than is the holding of elections. If we neglect to initiate impeachment proceedings when they are so urgently appropriate, we erode the accountability and therefore the responsiveness of the government to the American people. Pelosi is essentially arguing that she must erode the responsiveness of our political process because she has to be responsive to the people. Her desire to get something done for the American people is purchased at the expense of the American people’s democracy.

No thank you, Madam Speaker. We want a democratic political process that functions the way it was designed to function. We do not take lightly to the abuse of power in the United States of America. Put the house of our political process in order first, then see what you can get done using that process. Do not tell us that the Democrats must compromise to get things done. Do not tell us that impeachment will prove disruptive to party unity. Tell us you are going to restore to us our democracy where independent leaders contribute integrity and wisdom to the political debate.

Copyright © Hank Edson 2007