Is "majority rule" an acceptable way to govern? As some of the more avid readers of the MTB blogs may have noticed, this is a prevailing question. It's a topic that's been often debated whenever talking about the IRP, even internally among us who are working on it.
To begin with it's a difficult concept to define, because in human history, we have never really seen a true "majority rule" scenario. Even the most democratic of countries usually hand power back and forth between a privileged minority, and even if the occasional social-progressive/revolutionary rises up from the ranks of the common citizens to win a benchmark election, they are usually quickly invited to join the privileged minority, or join the martyr club. I'm sure you get the metaphor.
So based on the lack of real data to examine, the question of whether to follow majority rule or not is a purely hypothetical question: If we could ever manage to figure out a way to have verifiable knowledge of what majority opinion is, would things be better or worse?
Let's assume for the sake of this particular discussion that the IRP is the tool that allows us to finally have a factual majority opinion. We wake up one morning, and suddenly we all know if we're in the majority or minority on any given issue that we care about. Majority rule is suddenly not just a loose concept but a tangible reality.
Does that mean that we all don white Snuggies and live in Utopian harmony for all time?
Not a chance. The majority will make many mistakes, simply because people make mistakes. So if that's the case, why bother with something like the IRP? Don't our representatives speak for the majority? In my eyes, no.
When we legalized bribery in congress (that's what lobbying is folks, a legal way of bribing legislators), we planted the seeds of a puppet government, one where representatives are in place to play on the passions of constituents, all the while furthering the agenda of the wealthy few that keep them in the money. The recent Citizens United ruling only made this worse.
It's a broad generalization, but most of our representatives are in fact corrupt, and I'd be willing to bet a public flogging that if someone were to hook up all of congress to polygraphs, the vast majority would splatter the page on most, if not all, questions regarding misuse of power.
So given this sad truth, is our representative system a real democracy? And here we get to the essence of what democracy is. Democracy IS majority rule. By definition, democracy is: “a political system in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who can elect people to represent them”. But if those that the body of citizens elects are, or become, corrupt, then are we really being represented? Or is it just the illusion of being represented, while in reality they work for their financial benefactors?
When a privileged few are in control, change and reform come at the pace they feel is necessary (if at all). Public well-being is secondary to wealth and power, leading to government of the wealthy, by the wealthy. What "trickles down" (thanks Ronnie) to the common citizen is essentially what those privileged few feel they can spare, which is in most cases much less than what the rest of us need to prosper. How do we improve things like health care and education for the general population, when it's up to the approval from those who only stand to lose from reform? In this country it roughly breaks down to 10% of the population defining what's good enough for the other 90%. Is this really a democracy? Or should we just call our government for what it is, a subtly disguised oligarchy?
If there's a tangible, relevant way to gauge public opinion (such as the IRP) putting the majority truly in control, this problem is resolved. It's not that education and health care immediately improve for the sake of following majority rule, that would be a foolish assertion. It's simply that we can improve these things as most of us see fit, when we see fit. It forces reform to be built for the common man and woman, centered around what the majority needs in order to prosper. No one person's agenda is above the others, no revenue stream is above the public good. The privileged few still have a voice, just not louder than anyone else's. And our representatives are forced to represent us, for we can finally know when they are working for us, and when they've been bought off.
Can the majority make mistakes? Absolutely. Even in this hypothetical world, there will still be bad laws, bad programs, and bad ideas that become public policy. But it's in these bad ideas that the brilliance of true democracy would shine brightest, because when most of us realized something wasn't working, we can simply vote to change it, without having money laden lobbyists and self serving Supreme Court justices derailing what the majority decides.
For me, it's simply the choice of oligarchy vs. democracy. I believe in majority rule because I believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
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