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The Logic of Elitism
h/t House of Eratosthenes...While the framers of the U.S. Constitution didn't give much forethought to the development of political parties, a political party need not be anathema to our Constitution so long as it abides by what one might call the representative model. A representative party is one in which elected officials carry out some close approximation of the desires of the people they claim to represent. The party serves to aggregate the most articulate individuals from a group of people who share some common interests. Those individuals may be innovative to some degree, but they should not drag their constituents in directions that they would not naturally go. Representative are just that -- representatives. They are not, in principle, the public's masters. While the framers did set up a system that allowed considerable scope for the talents of individual officeholders, such people were either directly elected by the people or appointed by legislators who were, in turn, subject to elections. Thus, in principle, all decisions made by government were made with the consent of the governed. Of course, the system never quite lived up to this ideal, but as long as the public understood and jealously guarded the broad outlines of the framers' intent, at least a majority of the people enjoyed some meaningful state of control over the nation's course. As long as the system itself was seen as sacred, there were limits to the amount of mischief any narrow elite could accomplish. The representative model is now defunct, destroyed in somewhat different ways by the two political parties. Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2015-07-27 |
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