Oh, Democracy...

  I'm well aware that the United States is a representative democracy, not the pure democracy of Athens or whatever, that it's really a republic and all of that. But I came across the website for a progressive magazine called Democracy: A Journal of Ideas while trying to find some sort of substantial information about, really, anything. I found an article by Joe Klein, the venerable TIME columnist, entitled "DMV Liberalism," about pendulum changes between conservatism and liberalism. It looked at first to be an article about abstract theories and ideas, but it wasn't; Klein usually writes with substance and facts, which is why I don't mind reading what he writes. In this article, he calls for liberalism to produce a tide change similar to the Reagan-era conservatism beginning in the early 1980s, recognizing the difficulty to change the mind of nation so assured that government interference in their lives is bad, not paying higher taxes is good, and anything worth saying or doing can be done so succinctly and with immediate effect. Klein cites such acts as tax cuts and the uncomfortably quick move to invade Baghdad; actions like these are brash and noticeable and easy to digest for the general public as, well, actions -- but they're short-sighted and ill-fated. Liberalism's curse, Klein argues, is that creating a universal health care system or reacting effectively to  environmental issues or acting with diplomacy (as apposed jingoism or militant paternalism) abroad are all actions which will take much time, much work, and much patience on behalf of the public. Our culture, at least in the post-modern world, does not appreciate complicated processes or long-term planning, which makes conservative sound bites, vague mottos, and brash actions so appealing.
   In regards to the idea that perhaps the American public is not capable of understanding broad, complicated issues, that it's unreasonable to ask the masses to try to learn about issues instead of just listening to bastardizations of the definitions of "freedom" and "constitutionality" from self-serving fringe groups, I'm citing another Klein piece, this time his most recent column in TIME. In his article "How Can a Democracy Solve Tough Problems?," Klein discusses the act of kleroterion, an Athenian system used to pick a random group of citizens (free white men) to make an educated decision on an issue. James Fishkin, a professor at Stanford, has attempted to use this system in communities in several different countries; the results are actually very good. The groups are selected scientifically to represent the local population, and then all are educated on the issue by experts with opposing viewpoints. The citizens can ask questions to understand the issue, but are then forced to make their own decisions based on what they have learned. Apparently this led to Texas' surge in wind power and some public works decisions in a small community in coastal China. Fishkin reports that, in general, people aren't as into extremes as it seems; when given a chance to make an individual decision that will actually be heard, they tend to care more about what they are voting about. I'm not sure that I agree with this; they are plenty of stupid people who honestly don't care about being educated on anything once they've set themselves on an opinion of identified so completely with a larger group, so I doubt this kleroterion system could work in every community or on any platform larger than strictly local. But it is interesting, and far more substantial and forward-moving than Obama's blue-ribbon commission developed to study the federal deficit (as opposed to actually revising or expanding the frustratingly vague Keynesian economic policy), which is what the rest of the article is about. So I'm not sure what I think of the public as decision-makers, since I basically called us all a herd of impatient sheep in the first paragraph.