|
|
| date | 2000-12-12:21:17 |
| Speculation |
The purpose of this topic is to catch thoughts that are too wild even for me to take seriously, although they are still serious thoughts, in their way. I rarely write about current affairs because I rarely have anything interesting to say about them that hasn't been said better by someone else. But they can be a fun starting point for one's wilder fancies. Here is one of mine. The current U.S. electoral mess illustrates how badly modern democracies are broken. In Canada, we have just had an entire election campaign in less time that it's take our American freinds to count, and recount, and recount, the votes. Of course, we don't use polling machines, and we have a national electoral commission that governs the process at arms length from most of the partisanship, and in any case, who would be willing to play the kind of stupid games Gore and Bush have been playing for the prize of becoming Prime Minister of Canada? Even given our vastly, demonstrably, superior electoral system, our democracy is busted too. It isn't as busted as America's is: we have in the past ten years done the equivalent of deleting the Republican party, replacing it with a party that unfortunately is even more radically social conservative and led by a person whose beliefs fly so far in the face of fact that if they had not the rubber stamp of religious dogam they would be considered grounds for psychiatric commital. But that party did grow up from the grass roots, which has to be some kind of measure of the health of those roots, however encrusted by conservative moss the livelier bits may be. In contrast to the social conservatives, the other mainstream party has no philosophy except "we run things" and is also led by an aging shadow of yesterday's man, albeit one with the very best advisors. The closeness of the Gore-Bush race in Florida illustrates the absurdity of "first-past-the-post" elections. With the populace evenly divided, what is the justification for choosing one candidate over the other? In fact, even if the populace is unevenly divided, what is the justification for choosing one candidate over the other? I know it's the way we do things, and have done them in one form or another for quite a few centuries now, with a good deal of success. But just because something worked in the past doesn't mean it will continue to work in the future, nor that it will be the best way of doing things ever discovered. The last round of major constitutional reform in England, Canada and the U.S. (and presumeably Australia and New Zealand, as well) came in the late 1800's or early 1900's with the women's sufferage movement. The Statute of Westminster may have made a difference to Australia, which was in 1932 or thereabouts and gave them control of their own constitution, although Canadians rightly judged that our lot would make a mess of it and so left the constitution mouldering in Britain for another fifty years until it was finally repatriated in the early 1980's. Although there were some changes to it that were important, none touched on the fundamental structure of government, and I don't think anything since women getting the vote has changed very fundamentally in the U.S. either. There was some fiddling with the constitution of the U.S. Senate at around the same time, and of course the income tax, which in Canada didn't require a constitutional amendment, which fact should give proponents of written constitutions pause. Canada, with no paper protecting us--the British North American Act basically defined juristicional boundaries between the various levels of government and the like--behaved roughly as badly as the United States when given the same opportunity. Not better, generally, but neither worse. So it is worth wondering what the good of those peices of paper (we have one too, now) are, apart from sorting out lines of juristiction. So the last time any of us did any serious constitutional tinkering, apart from disasters like prohibition, was getting on for a century ago. The automobile shared the roads, which were mostly unpaved, especially over long distances, with horses. Trans-Atlantic telephony (or telegraphy) was a modern convenience. Television was a gestating dream and radio was a medium where people were still trying to figure out how to make money. "Talkies" existed, but were still rare enough that they were called "talkies". And our governments had pretty much the form they do now. Today, you're reading this not only using technology that didn't exist when we last tinkered with our governments, that technology is based on physics that didn't exist then either! The theoretical apparatus of quantum theory didn't get put together to the point of being useful for understanding solid state devices until just before the war, and didn't get applied in any big way until somewhat after it. It's understandable that there wasn't much constitutional fiddling in the last century--in my view, there was a single war that lasted in various forms from 1914 until the fall of the Berlin Wall or shortly thereafter, but I'll say 1987. States under seige don't generally engage in washing their dirty laundry in public, which is what constitutional debates often come down to. It's late now, and I've gone on long enough about background, and I don't really have time to write at the length I want to about the topic I want to, so I'm going to stop here, and return to this topic tomorrow. |