An Article by:

Russell Cole

Bad for Democracy is scheduled for publication in September of 2008

In order to ascertain the significance of the thesis propounded by Dana D. Nelson in her manuscript, Bad for Democracy, it is useful to first characterize the way in which American democracy is perceived according to the collective representations, instructing the political understandings possessed by the preponderance of Americans.

American mythology instructs us that the composition and ratification of the Constitution serve as historical markers for the solidification of American democracy. According to this narrative, prior to the Revolution, there was a growing democratic fervor. Ultimately, this ground swelling of radical democratic sentiment resulted in a rebellion against Monarchy and colonialism. Following the independence of the American Colonies, the devotion to democratic ideals continued; albeit, in a form that was reckless and unsustainable due to its unmanageability. As a consequence, the Founders of the Nation saw fit to innovate a political structure that both manifested democratic principles as well as a state with a workable governability. From there on, as this orthodox history suggests, the Nation was set along a course leading to the continual improvement of its democratic fixtures.

In contradiction to this grand mythology, Nelson provides us with a concise – although thorough – counter-narrative that expresses aspects to American historicity that run in opposition to the premises underlying the standard master-narrative. Central to her thesis is the recognition that the historical trends in American politics have not conformed to a trajectory headed toward an increasingly enhanced democratic embodiment. As Nelson quite correctly indicates, the practice of radical democracy and the cultural attributes with which it is associated – those behavioral habits that dispose the citizenry so that they take an active role in the ongoing affairs of government – had a more complete expression during the Colonial epoch than in subsequent periods of American history.

With the ratification of the Constitution and the establishment of a centralized office wielding executive powers, a trend was set in motion that is comparable to the political transformation undergone by the Roman Republic during the Roman Revolution. That is, similarly to the Roman Emperor, whose ascendancy to power was associated with popular land reform, the Presidency in American governance has been interpreted as a political mechanism offering representation to the populous. Presidentialism, as Nelson terms it – which is defined as the stature that has been infused into the semiology attached to the conception of the High Office – has been, from its inception, increasingly interpreted as a vehicle for the realization of the popular will in the body of public policy.

Even more, the concept of Presidency has acquired a semantic value, adding to the concept a latent notion of paternalism. We, as citizens, are all too willing to submit to this parental authority; not only during times of uncertainly, peril, and calamity, but during times unmarked by social drama, because we see him as the personification of the democracy that we collectively form as Americans. When the President appears powerful and impacting, we relish his strong paternal presence because we conflate it with our collective contributions, as citizens, to American polity.

However, it is precisely this quality that is assigned to the Presidency – an attribution that causes the Presidential incumbent to be perceived not simply as the outcome of democratic process, but as the carrier of the vitality belonging to the body politic – that contributes to the cultivation of behavioral dispositions, rendering the citizenry democratically disinclined. We confuse our ability to engage in a ritualized affair – where we cast a single vote that infinitesimally affects the outcome of a Presidential Election – with the operations of a functioning democracy. This illusion is propagated by the growing authoritarianism of the Presidency – which reinforces the prejudice that voting in Presidential Elections somehow epitomizes democratic civic engagement.

As Nelson adeptly points out, democracy is more than mere electoral politics. For a political order to be democratic, public policy must be determined through the direct deliberative participation of the citizenry. The Republican Romans, for instance, indeed had elected officials. Furthermore, the aristocrats in the Republic formed the Senate. Nevertheless, only through passage in the House of Plebes could legislation be enacted. Although the Republican Romans possessed intermediaries between the state and the public, such as the Senate who could advise and consent, the commoners, whose votes were organized according to tribes, remained politically empowered through their ability to directly legislate.

Democracy, in order for it to exist in America, must take on similar attributes to those instantiated by the Roman Republic. Americans must learn to acknowledge that the unilateralism of the Presidency is antithetical to democratic organization. Democracy is a messy affair; one that involves an ongoing public dialog conducted in an effort to arrive at new compromises among shifting factions. Democracy is not a political condition whereby a “Decider,” as Nelson mocks, is endowed with solitary authority over pertinent matters of state.

The Populist Party of America has already adopted a platform that calls for political decentralization, with the intention to effect a condition conducive to what we have coined, localized democracy. We realized that through the political empowerment of local communities – a state of affairs that can be hypothetically achieved through the decentralization of government – the political influence of individuals can be amplified; thus, accentuating the motivations of ordinary people to participate in the dealings of their municipal polities.

People will become more politically conscious and politically engaged because, within the context of municipal affairs, their participations can have demonstrable consequences upon the public policies that bare the closest immediacy to the Lifeworlds that they inhabit. In other words, the impact that can be had through participation of people in localized democracy will seem more concrete and more relevant and, therefore, more worthy of their sustained interests and their persisting efforts.

In the prescriptions she lays out for a democratic revival, Nelson appears to have unknowingly joined Populist America’s activist chorus. She recommends political decentralization. Even more, Nelson introduces the verbiage, leaderless democracy, in order to designate an organizational state that is comparable to the networked politics that I had summarized in earlier writings that examined a developing theory of democracy, which has been labeled by members of open source software communities as Extreme Democracy:

http://www.midwest-populistamerica.com/articles/theories-of-extreme-democracy/; http://www.extremedemocracy.com/.

Despite the lack of originality marking the recommendations included under the breadth of the normative section belonging to Nelson’s work, she does provide a valuable survey of the various trends in Computer Mediated Communications that are not only leading to a new paradigm of democratic organization, but to a larger intellectual phenomenon that should be considered a new episteme.

The emergence of social knowledge – facilitated through the device of web based communications – is generally characterized as decentralized modalities of content authoring and editing. Wiki platforms, such as the Wikipedia, are demonstrative of this understanding of knowledge and the processes through which knowledge is most effectively constructed. In the spaces generated by the Wikipedia, anybody can contribute to the creation of content by either authoring original materials or editing the materials already published on the platform.

Although there lacks a sufficient amount of studies to draw generalizations with certainty, preliminary studies, such as the one conducted by Nature, have compared the Wikipedia with traditional reference publications, such as Britannica, and have found the rates of errata between the two respective reference materials closer than one would probably suspect. Additionally, the Wikipedia, in comparison to Britannica, possesses a far greater amount of materials devoted to a broader range of topics. Further, due to its decentralized editing process, it takes less time for the Wikipedia to correct its errata than it does for publications, such as Britannica, that follow a traditional workflow process.

All of these developing social formations fall under the extension of the concept, Web 2.0: web platforms that are devoted to collaborative knowledge building conducted by a community of interlocutors. This new form of sociability suggests that radical democracy – a state that is, oftentimes, embodied by Web 2.0 communities – is not only a deontological ideal – a social condition that we should strive to foster, because it is inherently desirable – but a form of social organization that is pragmatically endowed.

In order to understand why social knowledge produces knowledge constructs on a scale that supersedes in volume and quality the knowledge built from traditional social institutions, such as the Academe, it is illuminative to first explore the precepts that support the epistemic prejudices associated with High Modernity and the Academe:

Political centralization, according to its interpretation under the lens of the new social knowledge understanding of knowledge, is a relic belonging to the social condition marked by industrial capitalism: a myriad of interdependent industrial productions that require homogeneity in order for there to be the predictability that is necessary for the various manufacturing outputs to be interoperable with one another. What is more, industrial capitalism calls for cultural uniformity, in order to effect a state wherein the activities of labor can be integrated into the system of interdependent industrial functions that collectively comprise the modes of production; a social organization that requires social agents, serving a labor, to react in predictable ways when operating as cogs in the machineries constituting the modes of production. Following this logic, organizations must possess an executive authority, under which all other offices and capacities are integrated, in order to ensure their synchrony. In short, they must all fall under a unified command structure.

The paradigm of centralized organization continues to reign dominant in contemporaneity. Nonetheless, this centralized model of social organization is not necessarily the most efficient or effective. Whether we are to compare a starfish to a spider; Native American Apaches to the Aztec or the Incas - decentralized structures are proving to be more resilient and adaptable.

Nelson refers to the popular work, The Starfish and the Spider, authored by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, who point out that leaderless organizations – similarly to the starfish and the Apaches – cannot be destroyed by annihilating a single component of their structures. Contrarily, in a case of spiders and in the case of the Native American empires, the organisms can be killed by simply targeting their central nervous systems – or, specifically in these cases, the head of the spider and the metropolises, belonging respectively to the Aztec and to the Inca.

The challenge for the reader is to understand how these properties, attributable to leaderless organizations, relate to potential democratic reforms enacted upon the American sociopolitical establishment. I would suggest that leaderless organizations – or, in the context of this essay’s ensuing sociopolitical considerations, what I shall call networked politics – possess a dual function:

Initially, networked politics can be used as an instrument of insurrection. The recent success of the popular uprising among the Filipino is evidentiary of the efficacy of networked forms of resistance. The insurgents relied upon a moblog – a server upon which contents derived from wireless gadgets can be published by a decentralized public – in order to coordinate their activities. Therefore, the Filipino revolution was not centralized, falling under a single command structure; rather, it was decentralized and voluntarily associational. Although networked politics have just now emerged as a topic of social scientific research, historical incidents, such as the historically recent Filipino revolution, suggest that they might be the optimal form of political resistance in a world where social actors are increasingly connected via the availability of Internet based forms of communication.

Secondly, and perhaps more significantly, networked politics are more resistant to the consolidation of sociopolitical power under any particular hegemony. If we look to traditional forms of popular insurrection – those that were guided and controlled, to a large measure, by van guards – we see a tendency for the elites, who orchestrated the successful revolution, to simply consolidate power themselves, forming another hegemonic faction in control of the society’s sociopolitical power.

As Orwell so brilliantly depicted in his Animal Farm, the revolutionary elites – which, in the case of Orwell’s short story, were comprised of the van guard pigs on the Farm – following the revolution, simply transform into the role that was assumed by the previous governing class. Consequently, the pigs, after staging the revolution, eventually morphed into an embodiment indistinguishable from the human farmer who had been expelled during the uprising.

However, in the case of network politics, there is no centralization, so there will not necessarily be any faction in a position to install an elitist governing structure, or hegemony, in the post-revolutionary social order. To translate the argument I am making into Nelson’s terms – the expressions she used when constructing an alternative American historicity – the emergent social condition will not possess a unified executive branch, and, therefore, it will be absent of Presidentialism: The cultural condition whereby Americans are disposed to conflate democratic processes with the presence of a strong, paternalistic Executive Authority.

Russell Cole

Tags: activism, constitution, decentralization, democracy, executive powers, government, populist party america, Russell Coles Blog, self governance, Social Change, sociology, sociology web 2.0
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, constitution, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, self-governance, Social Change, Sociology, activism, executive powers
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As the Populist Party of America grows in size, we are faced with some challenging obstacles and difficult decisions to make regarding the future of the Party: i.e., What type of structure should be given to the Populist Party of America? Should we strive for a strong national organization? Or, contrarily, should we stress decentralization, choosing to focus on the development of state and local parties without any overbearing emphasis placed upon the integration of the various pockets of Populist America into a monolithic formation? Thus far, I have been exposed to two contrasting visions for the future organization of the Party, as it continues to grow in size.

There is an argument that maintains the necessity of an organization to possess some kind of integrated structure, which would include members who would participate in planning and problem solving. This managerial core would contribute to the development of different actionable plans that could later be introduced to the membership at large, providing some options that have already been delineated, from which the membership might select to adopt and implement as a Party platform. This proposal calling for the Party to possess a kernel, consisting of more active members, who would be inclined to offer centralized planning for the Party as a whole, stands in stark opposition to the other conception for the appropriate structuring of the Party, as it continues to expand.

This proposed design for the Party - which stands in opposition to proposals for centralization - would not provide for an organization with a centralized nervous system. Alternatively, the Party would be allowed to proliferated along lateral dimensions while failing to create an integrated hierarchy of offices.

To relate this ideology of decentralized politic to contemporary sociological literature, the jargon that has come into fashion, as a result of the studies upon the Informational Economy, which were initiated by Manuel Castells, uses the reference, Networked Politics, to designate instances of decentralized patterns of political praxis.

This new form of political mobilization often transcends the geographical boundaries imposed by states and governments. Furthermore, Networked Politics are understood as a by-product of what has been termed by Castells as Informationalism, which simply designates the technological paradigm underlying the expansion of Internet communicative infrastructures. However, the type of sociopolitical opposition that is formed through the networking of diverse agents and groups via the communication channels provided for by the Web - despite the transnational character of these network configurations - fails to negate the embodiment of geographical locality and the coalescence of interests among advocates who reside in physical proximity to one another; thus, allowing for embodied interaction.

This condition, where localized concerns are situated and understood in the context of larger geo-economic and geopolitical social forces, has been referenced under the neologism, glocalization. This concept fits in well with the social theoretical framework that has been introduced by Castells, who discards with the global democracy thesis propounded by Habermas and Rorty - which was founded upon the notion of a cosmopolitan culture - in favor of an understanding of the globalizing trends, facilitated by Informationalism, where multiculturalism will be preserved; only such cultural differences will become circumspect within a global forum of manifold cultural identities, who will participate in a world representational space in order to express their uniqueness as well as discover the peculiar attributes of others.

It is here, in the conception of glocalization, that I propose as a guiding post serving as an indication for the appropriate trajectory in which Populist America should transverse, as the Party enters into its future stages of development, as it continues to grow larger.

[Future installment: the concretization of glocalization in the praxes of Populist America]

Russell Cole

Tags: centralization, communications, community, decentralization, Global, government, National, politics, populist party, populist party america, Populist Party organizational structure, Social Change, society, third parties
Categories: Commentary, National, Global, Society, Populist Party, government, Decentralization, Politics, Third Parties, Social Change
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Despite the best efforts of the Luddite, Jim Crow bigots residing in the backwater town of Jena, Louisiana, the cap is about to burst on these white supremacists, who are in the process of committing what amounts to a lynching of several, young African-American males. This clinical lynching is being conducted under the veneer of a juridical canard. The African-American high school students presently face decades in prison for charges related to an assault that was committed upon a white student in the Jena, LA school district. The African-American students, who have been charged with attempted murder, allegedly assaulted a white student. However, if one is to learn about the circumstances under which these charges have been leveled against the African-American male high school students, a picture emerges that screams of injustice, resulting from a racism that is so severe that I was shocked when I became fully familiar with these insidious events.

Apparently, this whole incident began after African-American students, during their launch break, sat under a tree that had been the providence of white students. In reaction to this apparent affront by the African-Americans, the next day white students had tied lynching ropes from the trees under which the African-Americans had sat. Despite the fact that this symbolic gesture on the part of the young aspiring Klan members constituted nothing less that a direct threat of murder directed against the African-American high school students - where a bystander would be left only to assume that the lives of the black students were in immediate peril - the white students responsible for this unforgivable threat were given a three day suspension. On the days that followed, the assault, for which the Black teenage boys are accused, took place. The African-American adolescent males were arrested and charged, not with simple battery, but attempted murder and the reduced crime of aggravated assault. These hyperbolic charges are only applicable in instances where a deadly weapon is used, according to Louisiana statutes. The first of the Black males to stand trial was convicted for the lesser charge of aggravated assault. According to the jury, the African-American boy’s tennis shoes qualified as a deadly weapon.

To make this whole affair even more sickening, the jury was all white. Additionally, during the case, the judge preceding over the trial had issued a gag order on all witnesses. Consequentially, the parents of the African-Americans, who were to take the stand in defense of their children, were prevented under threat of contempt from making public issue out of this miscarriage of justice; consequentially, the parents were precluded from pursuing recourse through an appeal to the innumerable law professors who would have accepted this case pro bono!

To read more of this revolting affair, you can begin by visiting an article that someone has put up on Wikipedia. It has been marked as potentially biased, but from what I have gathered from other sources, including interviews that were taken by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the account on Wikipedia appears to be, for the most part, spot on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jena_High_School

With the events that have taken place in Jena, LA, I am going to return to the issue of the Tenth Amendment and its properly conceived relation to the Fourteenth Amendment.

I had written three controversial essays focusing on the candidacy of Ron Paul. I had criticized Paul for opposing legislation and certain reforms, which could be implemented by Presidential Decree, that would effectively contribute to the alleviation of the discrimination faced by gays, lesbians, and cross-gender. Paul, of course, explained away his refusal to adopt platform positions in support of the establishment of measures contributing to the equal rights and opportunities by all members of society, via appeal to a Libertarian ideological tenet that embraces the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution over and beyond other Amendments that might lead to divergent conclusions with respect to the appropriate role of the Federal Government and its interventions into social affairs that might alternatively be left to the states in order to regulate. Using the Tenth Amendment and its implications as premises, Paul essentially concluded that the inclusion of gays in the military as well as the extension of Federal Hate Crime Statutes to include crimes motivated out of hate for gays, lesbians, and cross-gender were decisions better left to, in the case of the former, the Military - and its own independent deliberations regarding its Uniform Code of Conduct - and, in the latter, the States and municipalities, who, in the absence of Federal intervention, would assume full responsible for the prosecution of crimes against these sexual minorities.

In opposition to Paul’s stance, I had countered by contending that Federal intervention has been historically demonstrated as a necessary device to extend civil liberties and citizenship rights to marginalized minorities who suffer from persecution and exclusionary practices within the provincial affairs of certain states. In short, my conclusions came down to unavoidable inferences drawn from the brute raw fact that without Federal interdiction these vulnerable minorities might not have their rights protected. I further argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was at stake - which in my opinion is far more significant than any appeal made to the nebulously defined Tenth Amendment

The Tenth Amendment - if one analyzes it with care - does not make specific references to the instances in which it should be prioritized over and beyond other possibly germane and applicable Amendments. In other words, rather than an Amendment intended to delineate specific rights, such as a clear and certain range of defined circumstances, where states should be deferred the sole authority when it comes to issues of civil liberties - the Tenth Amendment, according to my readings, appears to be intended only to limit Federal intrusions when the National Government is in the process of curtailing rights. However, in instances, such as hate crimes, the Federal Government is not inhibiting individuals from practicing types of social actions that fall under the extension of their own negative rights. Contrarily, the Federal Government is merely extending civil liberties by protecting the rights of vulnerable segments of society, who all too often are the deliberate and persistent targets of crimes, which impede the minorities from enjoying their own personal liberties, motivated out hate for the social minorities and the characteristics, which they embody, that make them socially different and identifiable as social outsiders.

This is not to say that the Tenth Amendment should not take on any significance and it should not be appealed to in instances where the Federal Government is in the process of extending its authority in a modality that is an affront to civil liberties. However, conversely, the Tenth Amendment should not be used as a juridical-politico artifice for what amounts to curtailing civil liberties by deferring the responsibility for protecting individual rights to the judgments of states and their provincial practices, in which the manifestation of racism and hate related crimes might be afoot, leading to the legalization of practices that only serve to curtail the rights of minorities. I think that most would agree that the Golden Rule - although not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution - nevertheless, serves as a guiding post for the formation of our best conclusions regarding what social conduct is permissible versus actions on the part of individuals and groups that should be interdicted. Those who act upon others in a manner that prevents the enjoyment of liberties by those upon whom the actions are committed should expect no better by other agencies who might act upon them. I cannot put it any more succinctly.
Returning to the case in Jena, I cannot think of a more compelling example of why the Federal Government must sometimes be permitted to intervene in order to prevent the most egregious instances of the persecuting of disliked minorities. To reiterate, Ron Paul needs to go back to the drawing board, and thoroughly recalculate his position on Federal hate crimes as well as the rights of sexual minorities.
Russell Cole

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, decentralization, democracy, education, government, National, politics, power, Russell Coles Blog, social responsibility, society, sociology
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This letter, which was originally a Green Party correspondence, is of interest because I would contend that the depiction of the qualities missing in the Green Party are, in fact, embodied by Populist America:
Thanks Again for an Insightful Response,

I agree with you that there is a lot of consensus among the Greens, and I am wrong to necessarily interpret that as a negative indication of things to come. I just fear that the Greens, who still symbolize a beacon of hope to college kids, for instance, do not transform into a replication of typical American Leftist organizations, which entail hierarchical structures and unegalitarian methods of decision-making. These are the kind of attributes that repel the kinds of people the Greens should be trying to court.

I had envisioned the Greens as more of a gathering ground for people to meet and discuss things with one another and discover their similarities and differences; both are equally as important. I say this because it is the proliferation of social difference that provides the multiplication of possibilities for stylizing one’s own distinct existence and political persona, because without diversity with which to juxtapose one’s self with various other social elements, there is no possibility to provide definition to one’s own persona.

For example, the identity of male is inextricably tied to the identity of female; the negation of male; because without the term female the term male would void of meaning. The lexicon, male, would be identical in sense to the lexicon, humanity, for example. In turn, without the term, animal, then the referring expression, male, would be depleted of any symbolic significance. Consequently, it is the proliferation of difference that allows for unique identities to form.

On the other hand, I agree that there needs to be a large degree of solidarity or the various elements of the social groups would simply disperse, and the result would be anomie. Further, I do think that there is an association between trust and social solidarity. Therefore, the position you advocate is certainly valid, but only valid under the parameters of a limited scope, since without difference, which involves a degree of enigma, according to the somewhat alien interpretations of an alternative identity, there would be no cultural space for individuality in society.

The trick, therefore, is finding some sort of balance between these two dynamics that we have identified: difference versus solidarity and trust. I think that the incorporation of another guiding-principle is in order, so to provide some insight into the process involved in assessing the most advantageous ledger between difference and trust. I propose that we have to consider the dynamic of power, as well as, the other two elements previously delineated.

Power is associated with control. Both power and control are opposed to the maximization of agential possibilities on the part of the object of power and control. So, we already know that the identity of male is connected to the identity of female; without one, you cannot have the other. Unfortunately these binaries seem to always possess an asymmetrical power dynamic in that the positive attributes of male, to use an exemplar, are defined by the negative attributes of female: Males are rational. females are emotional. The identity of female is not determined by the voluntary decision-making of the female; rather, it is imposed upon the female by the oppressive social identity of male. This is why it is important to maintain a degree of enigma or something that conflates to a lack of trust in society. On the other hand, there needs to remain a degree of the conflicting dynamic of solidarity or trust.

The only resolution that I can see for this problematic is creation of a social space where identities are maintained, but only under the auspices of friendship; a relation which seems to evade the power dynamic included in relationships between other identities in society. This is getting far too complex, but if the differences and similarities possessed by the male-female binary are subsumed under the institution of friendship, then, perchance, there is the possibility of an egalitarian society. I do not even want to attempt to sort out the network of relations among the elements comprised by the hypothetical mergers of friendship along with all the other binaries in society, so I will simply suggest the possibility, and go no further.

That is about as good of a response that I can reasonably come up with. However, I thank you for this exchange, because you have certainly stimulated a great deal of considerations on my part, and if you care to, we can attempt to tie all the loose strings together; or, even, ponder the possible connections between or among any more strings that you suggest for contemplation. Either way, you have directed down what I think will prove to be a fruitful path.

Regards,
Russell Cole

Tags: decentralization, direct democracy, green party lack of democracy, politics, populist party, Populist Party organizational structure, Russell Coles Blog, Social Change, third parties
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Extreme Democracy (ED) is a set of technology- and sociology-bound political concepts being developed in hopes of changing the nature of representation. ED advocates want citizen activists to have a greater role in governance, mostly through digital technologies that can bring together dynamic, ever-changing, issue-driven majorities (as opposed to traditional, rigid, party-line, ideology-driven majorities). They want the representative govt — the repocracy, rule by representatives, new word to take away their false claims to democracy — to become more responsive to citizen consensus.

Unfortunately, the ED advocates don’t want this to be direct democracy (DD), which is rule by the people through constitutionally-defined governance components decided by binding referendums. In various US states, there are eight constitutionally-defined DD governance components. (See this blog’s sidebar essay, “Executive Summary of Direct Democracy”.)

The eight DD governance components are the greatest corruption-fighting package ever devised by ordinary people in the history of humankind. It was secured into the many state constitutions by the greatest democracy movement that has ever occurred: the Reform Era, circa 1898-1918. Many tens of millions of politically sophisticated Americans were directly involved. Their collective level of political sophistication so far exceeded that of today’s national civil society as to be a face-flushing embarrassment for any ethically normal person with sufficient historical information.

The predators’ Reform Era corruption machines promptly ran in unconstitutional controls of citizen-proposed law, taking away much of the corruption-fighting power that the citizens had won. We’ll come back to that.

The eight DD governance components include the election of representatives. There’s nothing mystical about elections that set them apart from referendums. Elections are nothing more than binding referendums, voted by all eligible citizens in a given jurisdiction, as all referendums are. This lack of distinction between elections and referendums becomes very important in breaking down the wall of sophistries and vacuous arguments that predator elitism uses so deftly to help them keep down the sovereign people’s DD.

In fact, in the genesis of DD, in the early 1900s, there was one primary purpose that came through in the DD literature. DD, most often referred to then as Direct Legislation. It was to achieve the genuine representative govt that the sovereign people had been promised in the Constitution — and that political corruption had robbed away.

Strangely enough, that is exactly the intent of the Extreme Democracy political philosophy.

Contrary to predator elitism’s propaganda, sophistries, and vacuous arguments, the purpose of DD was not to set up a “pure democracy” to weaken representative govt, but rather to set up citizen checks and balances on govt to strengthen it against the treasonous corruptors within and without. (See especially, The National Economic League, The Initiative And Referendum: Arguments Pro And Con By A Special Committee Of The National Economic League. � 1912, J.W. Beatson. Published at Cambridge, MA: Caustic-Claflin Co., Printers.)

One of the ED movement’s leaders, Lebkowsky, misstates DD — in distinguishing it from ED — to require that “all people must be involved in every decision in order for the process to be just and democratic.” He then turns this specious falsehood into a straw man, which he handily knocks down to show that the ED political philosophy is vastly superior.

Lebowsky has not done his homework on the legal realities of either American DD or Swiss DD. (He seems not to know that DD is a legal reality in the US, or that it exists as an intrinsic part of the Constitution’s guaranteed “republican form of govt” in 23 active I&R states.) In both nations, DD’s citizen lawmaking — formulation of new law with the initiative, or veto of legislature-made law with the referendum — is not involved with every “decision”.

In the US, thousands of unchallenged, legislature-made laws go quietly into the books every year in the 23 states in which the citizens possess DD’s veto-referendum. In Switzerland, there is a informal 90-day rule. If the sovereign people have not brought a veto-referendum within 90 days of a measure becoming law, it’s understood that they have given tacit approval to the law.

Of course, the sovereign Swiss possess the constitutional amendment initiative (CAI — the most powerful governance component in the nation), which has the power to write law directly into the constitution, indirectly wiping out any law that has become harmful by making a correcting law. There are 17 active CAI states in the US, and here as there, the CAI is the most powerful governance component in the nation..

Most DD advocates, excluding the “half-DD” elitism-fascism shills, but including especially myself, would love to see the Extreme Democracy concepts active in the civil societies of the I&R states. The ED concepts amplify participation in the democratic processes, which would include the DD processes. They also would help activate each I&R state’s civil society to organize the national citizen action groups (CAGs) that we desperately need now to combat the Bush-Cheney Usurpation with our sovereign people’s power. Additionally, the ED concepts would be invaluable aids to future Online Citizen Institutions (OCIs), much more below.

Unfortunately, ED is not a good fit for DD civil societies. It could be beneficial, if its advocates could temporarily limit its leadership analysis, but it’s not clear that the ED political philosophy can function without its full-blown leadership principles.

ED’s leadership analysis is attractive and commonsensical. It accounts for the rise of individual leaders in any horizontal, nonhierarchical organization (NHO), which, of course, ED sees itself generating. ED’s leadership analysis says that individuals who are naturally talented, effectively active, lucid, and cogent will be identified as issue-related leaders in the NHO, and will be followed by others. It says that such leaders will acquire more power than others to affect decision-making in the NHO.

Such NHO, of course, were also the products of any local or state-level DD campaign before the advent of — arrggg — money as free speech. The DD NHOs grew out of the processing needs of individual I&R and recall petitions. People who supported the issue got together and campaigned the petition into the next election/referendum.

Naturally, advocates of a future national DD system want to see DD NHOs become permanent fixtures in and around the needed OCIs, which will protect citizen business against govt intrusions, vote in agendas for their state or regional jurisdictions, develop and process I&R and recall petitions in wikis and other modules, create a deliberative and amendment “floor” for discussion of the petitions, vote amendments up or down, vote finished petitions into the formal state or national govt’s lawmaking process, coordinate most of the petition campaign’s activities, and ensure that state or national govt actively complies with any law passed by the people.

Strangely enough, all of that is on a par with, but a step up from, ED political philosophy. It’s a step up because it carries with it the sovereign people’s power that precludes govt from using its arbitrary rulings and corruption machines to block legal citizen action.

However, the deep-pockets corporate funding now possible in I&R petition campaigns — since the 1988 SCOTUS decision deemed money as free speech — has made DD organizations very different from what they were previously. The presence of big money, to buy petition signatures and to run expensive PR campaigns, automatically requires and brings managers, giving the organization an hierarchical structure.

Obviously, the ED leadership analysis cannot apply to individuals within hierarchical political organizations (HPOs). The hierarchy provides the leaders, not the grassroots group. So DD loses the ED leadership analysis that was once its reality. It loses that reality to elitist-fascist encroachment — for now. It’s about when grassroots are not grassroots. ED would also suffer in such supposedly grassroots HPOs. ED’s natural leaders could easily become disheartened. In the end, ED leaders will probably eliminate HPOs from any ED operations.

Many of us who advocate an optimum, fully independent, DD system melded to the national repocracy believe that money is not legal free speech. (Bribery is done with money, and bribery is illegal. If money were actually free speech, then bribery would have to be legal.) We insist that the misuse of money as free speech in political affairs is nothing more than the legalization of bribery for the benefit of the elites. We generally agree that the 1988 SCOTUS ruling should be reversed with a Constitutional amendment and that the political uses of money should be heavily regulated, along with all other corporate and political party intrusions into politics.

If we can make those things happen, the Extreme Democracy leadership analysis for NHOs will be applicable. Well — as long as the NHOs are truly and fully independent of govt controls.

And here we both, DD and ED, run into the teeth of repocracy’s corruption machines.

Clearly, a DD system that is underhandedly controlled by govt cannot be a nonhierarchical organization. Govt, in its intrusive controls, makes itself a hierarchy for the DD system. Citizen leaders may think that they are leaders, and they may be seen as leaders by their followers initially, but govt control denies them independent leader status and diminishes any related powers considerably.

You cannot effect decision-making within the NHO if the decision-making is severely limited or taken away from you by govt. If the Secretary of State says that your initiative petition’s ballot language is unacceptable and that he has (unconstitutionally) re-written it in accord with some (unconstitutional) statute, you, as the leader who carefully crafted the original ballot language, have been cut off at the knees. The Secretary of State’s (unconstitutional) action may have adverse effects on your continuing leadership among the NHO’s individuals, and your status reduction might disorient and adversely effect the entire NHO and its objectives.

Fact is, such unconstitutional actions are open to every I&R state govt. The rabble are kept down and the profits and power of the elites remain unlimited. So it has always been. So it must always be, according to the predator elites. Constitutions and statutes have always been, and will always be, subordinate to the natural law of wealth and power. Well — as long as the sovereign people let them have it their way.

Beginning immediately after the passage of constitutional DD provisions, most of which happened in the early 1900s, the constitutional criminals in the legislatures began writing and passing statutes directing many different types of unconstitutional and arbitrary controls for citizen-proposed law. Constitutional criminals in the executive branch, especially Secretaries of State and Attornies General, have unconstitutionally acted in accord with those unconstitutional statutes. Constitutional criminals in the judicial branch have joined in with their own, uniquely judicial unconstitutionalities, in accord with the state’s unconstitutional statutes.

It’s a gauntlet of unconstitutional and arbitrary contols that applies to every citizen-proposed law in every I&R state. However it is only selectively applied so that civil society doesn’t connect the dots.

Citizen-proposed law that is offensive to money-power is stopped — or worse, passed and turned into a nightmare of anti-DD, anti-people, and anti-public-education machinations, as was the case with California’s Prop 13, limiting property taxes, in 1978.

Citizen-proposed law that is NOT offensive to money-power sails right on through, demonstrating that the system works.

It’s been a successful strategy, helping to keep the people from noticing the unconstitutionalities, for over a hundred years.

There are many variations on the theme, but the two most common groups of unconstitutional acts against citizen-proposed law are separation of powers violations and binding judicial review of proposed law.

The separation of powers violations occur when executive branch officials perform legislative or judicial branch functions that are NOT specified in the state constitution. The Secretary of State may be directed to write or re-write the ballot language provided for the proposal by the citizens submitting the petition. Writing the ballot language is a legislative function, not an executive function. What the ballot language says is important legislatively. It may very well be a factor in any subsequent court action that must interpret the citizen-proposed law’s meaning — and subtle, misleading language written by an executive branch official could easily result in an unfavorable court ruling.

Another popular trick in the separation of powers variation is to empower the Attorney General to deem that a particular citizen-proposed law is not clearly written or conflicts with the standing laws of the state, and must therefore be rejected. The rejection action is unconstitutional on two counts. First, no executive branch official is permitted to reject a bill of law proposed in accord with constitutional provisions, regardless of whether that proposed law comes from the legislature or from civil society. Second, such an executive branch official’s binding judicial review of a proposed law would be unconstitutional even if done by a judge. No constitution, state or federal, defines the judicial power to include binding judicial review of proposed law. Binding judicial review can only be applied after the measure has been signed into finished law.

The only way for such cross-branch acts to be constitutional is for them to be specifically ordered in the state constitution, as exceptions to the separation of powers provisions. The Nebraska constitution’s separation of powers provision is typical –

The powers of the government of this state are divided into three distinct departments, the legislative, executive and judicial, and no person or collection of persons being one of these departments, shall exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others, except as hereinafter expressly directed or permitted.

With regard to citizen-proposed law, there are no cross-branch acts specifically permitted in any of the I&R state constitutions — with the sole exception of Massachusetts. I&R constitutional provisions there so heavily contradict other constitutional provisions — in their creation of arbitrary elite controls of citizen proposed law — that all Massachusetts I&R, since its inception in 1918, has been, and will continue to be, unconstitutional. Only a statewide constitutional convention will have the comprehensive power needed to sort it all out and eliminate the contradictions.

The most common unconstitutional stunt outside of the separation of powers violations is the binding judicial review of proposed law — done by judges who absolutely, positively know exactly how unconstitutional their binding review is. Nonetheless, this unconstitutional stunt accounts for most of the delays and rejections of citizen-proposed law.

If state officials or judges pulled either of those stunts — separation of powers violations or binding judicial review — on legislature-proposed law, they would be impeached and removed before dinner. But the unconstitutional stunts are SOP for citizen-proposed law. It’s how the people are kept down and the corruption machines kept well-lubricated.

And, please, no more specious arguments, claiming that there is some sort of viable distinction between legislature-proposed law and the citizen I&R petition. Both are proposed law, pure and simple.

The I&R petition proposes that a law be passed, not that an executive agency policy or judicial ruling be passed. The I&R petition, once approved by the sovereign people, becomes law, not anything else. The law that the approved I&R petition becomes is open to binding judicial review as law, just as is any law passed by the legislature. The I&R petition is a legislative function within the legislative power of govt and, purely, proposed law.

When the constitutional criminals reach outside the state’s constitution to delay, alter, and/or reject citizen-proposed law, the dollar and human costs are incalculable. The harm that the constitutional criminals do is far beyond the delays, alterations, and/or rejections of a potential better governance for their sovereign civil society. They also further the people-abusive and costly corruptions that the citizen-proposed law would have ended. They give those corruptions more time to run before the corruptions can possibly be ended. They cripple I&R rights by deterring citizens who have good ideas from coming forward in the future. They betray, defile, and violate the rule of law, which is probably the single most important founding principle of our nation.

Additionally in violating the state and national constitutions to do their political evil, they both violate citizen rights and their oaths to protect the rights of citizens. The two together are an act of treason, as defined for the secessionist state legislators in the 1860s.

As things stand now, the unconstitutional and arbitrary controls of DD in the I&R states are the predator elites’ first line of defense against any state or national limiting of their corruption machines or their illicitly-gained profits and power.

Predator blocking of state-level good governance policies that are offensive to money-power turns out to be an excellent way to prevent those same policies from gaining national traction. Citizens in many I&R states have tried to pass initiatives ending regressive personal income taxes, and replacing them with progressive sales taxes. Of course, sales taxes to support state services would cost the luxury-item-buying elites a lot more money. State govts have unconstitutionally and arbitrarily thrown out all such attempts, one way or another, over decades of time.

It is very important for this simple fact to register in your brain. Compute this. The hundred years of lawlessness in violation of their sovereign’s fundamental-law constitutions by officials and judges in roughly half of our state repocracies have been knowingly participated in by the leadership of both major political parties. Both majors have been increasingly involved in creating the new unconstitutional statutes that provide variation on the theme of controlling citizen-proposed law, keeping the unsuspecting people down and the predators’ profits and power unlimited.

No rebuilding of either political party will save us from the predators. Both political parties are front-rank predators.

To make things worse, to grab we the sovereign people with another come-along that drags us past dealing with the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous state govt interference, we now have Extreme Democracy advocates painting this pretty picture of how leadership develops in a nonhierarchical civil society. All we have to do is to put that leadership notion to work at the grassroots, they say, and we’ll have civil society’s best and brightest showing us how to overcome the bad guys.

Intentional or not, ED is a string-’em-along, jerk-’em-around. It glosses over, covers up, and looks past the unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous actions by state govts in their control of citizen-proposed law.

We need to see the truth and reality of the current unconstitutional, felonious, and treasonous state govt system first. We need to understand the progression of constitutional amendments that will be required to clean up I&R law in each state. (For an in-depth discussion of this topic, see the SOTR, Chapter 4, “Violating Constitutions” — all of it. It’s on the DDL site at http://ddleague-usa.net/SOTR4.html ) We need to find ways to criminally prosecute and bring civil lawsuits against any public official or judge who uses the old unconstitutional statutes to block our clean-up.

The national Constitution guarantees a republican form of govt in the states. In the I&R states, the republican form of govt is constitutionally defined as the combination of DD’s citizen lawmaking and representative govt. That definition is completely legal and constitutional, per a 1912 SCOTUS ruling.

When state officials or judges unconstitutionally interfere with citizen-proposed law, they violate their citizens’ rights to the federally-guaranteed republican form of govt. Such acts violate the federal statute, 18 USC 241 — felony conspiracy against rights. Felony forfeits all immunities. Co-conspirators can be criminally prosecuted in federal court, regardless of being incumbents or sitting judges.

The unconstitutional acts that control citizen-lawmaking also violate the federal statute, 42 USC 1983 — civil deprivation of federal rights by state officials or judges. Co-conspirators can be sued in federal court.

Each constitutional violation by I&R state officials and judges to control citizen-proposed law also violates various state laws.

In the upramp to every general election, state officials and judges somewhere use the gauntlet of unconstitutionalites to keep down the civil society’s attempts at good governance. Election 2006 is no exception. This has been going on since the early 1900s. We the sovereign people are still collectively ignorant of what has been done to our constitutionally defined lawmaking. We need to collectively understand. We need to correct the situation.

However, if the 1-party, 3-branch, fascist despotism in Washington DC has its way, we are already too late. Their tentative locks on our privatized and easily hacked electoral system, the US District Attorneys and many of the US District Courts, and the Department of Justice and its central role in the obstruction of justice for all of the despotism’s players may mean that the state govt constitutional criminals in all three branches are as untouchable as are the national govt’s constitutional criminals in all three branches. It’s all tentative now, but it will become permanent if we allow it to continue much longer.

This is the repocratic system that ED wants its toothless political philosophy to alter into a governance of cooperation between representatives and civil society.

“The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.” Frederick Douglass said that about his people regaining their freedom in the 1860s.

Citizens in the 23 active I&R states won their political equality and freedom with the passage of their constitutional DD provisions in the early 1900s. They promptly lost that equality and freedom as quickly as their state legislatures could pass statutes that instructed officials and judges to unconstitutionally and arbitrarily control citizen-proposed law.

It’s way past time to regain our equality and freedom. The DD toolkit of eight governance components can be used in many ways to force the issue. It can’t be done in the present climate of political unsophistication, but if small groups get started working with the toolkit, the civics lessons will flow like water. (See especially, “Open Letter To Susan–Making Bush-Cheney Null & Void”, 12 September 2006, on DD Revival — The Blog. )

When we’ve got the DD systems fully independent of reprocratic interference, then the Extreme Democracy political philosophy and analysis of NHO leadership will be useful.

© by Stephen Neitzke, 2006

Stephen Neitzke [send him email] is the founder of the Direct Democracy League. He is the author of “The State of the Republic, 1776-2004″ as well as a number of other works, which can be found at www.ddleague-usa.net and on his blog, DD Revival, at http://ddrevival.blogspot.com/

Tags: citizen legislation, constitution, decentralization, democracy, direct democracy, extreme democracy, government, legislation, liberty, politics, populist party, referendum, repocracy, representation, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Populist Party, Democracy, liberty, constitution, government, Decentralization, self-governance, Politics, Legislation, Direct Democracy, Extreme Democracy, Referendum
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Thomas Jefferson envisioned a state of humanity that was absent of a state impose upon humanity.  He possessed the conviction that humankind instantiated the necessary dispositions for self-governance. We currently live in a society that provides greater grants of funding to the quasi-academic pursuit of criminal justice while providing little or no funding to fields such as political theory, or political philosophy, or even critical theory.  One can draw multiple inferences from this allocation of resources to academia.

The Constitution of the United States has the redeeming quality of explicitly enunciating a Bill of Rights.  However, the rest of the document is designed to mitigate the power of the Demos, so to preserve the extant social structure.  The Document has been improved and expanded - although currently being retracted - regardless, it is insufficient for the purposes of creating a democracy.  The Constitution needs to be drastically reformed.  The watered down version of republicanism needs to be extracted and replace with a system that allows for the direct, deliberative involvement of the populace during the decision-making processes that produce public policy.

Tags: bill of rights, constitution, decentralization, democracy, government, jefferson, liberty, self governance
Categories: Commentary, Democracy, liberty, constitution, bill of rights, government, Decentralization, self-governance
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…while Centralization expands the Hegemony of a Provincial Interest’s impact upon the Whole

This brief essay is a response to the Populist Party’s recent publication of a compelling argument calling for the decentralization of political power found at the following URI:

http://www.populistamerica.com/populist__32

The reason I feel compelled to annotate in a modest form the contents of the polemic is the opposition within social theory to conceptualizations of power in Modern society that conceives of this dynamic in a manner opposed to the established Foucauldian paradigm.  Foucault, of course, argued through the observations rendered through his historical research that power was very much a dynamic that had become decentralized in nature assuming a form that is often analogized to a capillary distribution of its expansion.  As Foucault argues, the monarch has already been decapitated, and we need to reformulate our conceptualization of power in Modern society, accordingly, to reflect a networking of relations through which power is administered in local contexts through the disciplinary practices of institutions that lack an integrated reflexivity of itself, in its entirety; akin to conceptions of a centralized nervous system.  Foucault further contends that this decentralized modality of power has greater consequences with respect - not so much to its prohibitive measures upon agency - but in its productive capacities as it serves as mechanisms - administered through the practices of disciplinarians - in the active implantation of behavioral dispositions into the bodies of both the objects of its praxis as well as the subjects of its praxis.  By this, Foucault is indicating that subjectivity is formed from industrialization of the individual body into a positive modality of agency where the subject has been trained to seek cultivate itself into the form that has been prescribed to it through its intense exposure to the pedagogy, correction, disciplining, and regimentation, implemented through the expansion of the disciplinarian institutions that have come in Modern society to increasingly dominate all aspects of our existences.  In order to conceive of what Foucault is contending simply recalculate the extent of conformity demanded upon the Modern individual in developed societies as opposed to the lack of regulation upon the decisions of a savage.  Quite clearly, through the positive production of our identities in the incredibly complex matrix of modalities of existence constituted by the proliferation of the distribution of labor in all spheres of society - i.e., the economy, the polity, and, most significantly, the spaces falling within civil society - we have become saturated within the operations of power - which extend their reach through grammar school teachers; through psychiatrists and psychologists; through the corrective mechanisms of the Juvenile Justice System; through the psychobabble of Dr. Phil and Opera; all of which qualify as the appendages of power, circulating not simply in the domain of what we typically consider to be polity, but in the crevasses of all aspects of Modern life. 

I do not wish to construct a polemic in opposition to Foucault’s revolutionary reconceptualization of power; however, I do want to suggest that this description also involves the inculcation of a contrasting thematic quality, operating as an antinomy to the interpretation of the decentralized nature of power in Modern society.  It is through this expansion and rationalization of disciplinary control over the population that homogeneity is fostered, which is indexical as a subsidiary to centralization, that, in this case, does not involve a monarch, but the proliferation and imposition of a form of life upon the populace; tantamount to the descent of an “Iron Cage” upon humanity - the hyperbolically organized and regimented form of life associated with Modernity.  In fact, I would assert that this form of centralization is more insidious than suffering under the authority of the whimsicality of a despot, because it remains hidden, difficult to conceptualize.  Furthermore, this is not at all at odds with a Foucauldian theory of power in Modernity.  It is, rather, a specification of Foucault’s work, which he arguably makes himself, that attributes to power in Modern society the effect of producing sameness from what is originally composted with diversity and difference.  In order for the institutions in the Modern society to function, there must be adherence to protocol in order for there to be the predictability resulting in expectations of the behaviors of counterparts with whom we make transactions when operating under the auspices of the various organizations in which we assume capacities.  It is for this reason that the Populist Party’s adamantly advocated stance on the decentralization of governmentality is not only in order to protect and expand our freedoms, it is additionally compatible with the trends in contemporary social theory.  We call for decentralization in order for their to be space for social difference, which is a requisite for individual sovereignty and stylization.

Russell Cole

Tags: centralization, decentralization, foucault, modern society, populist party, power, Russell Coles Blog, society
Categories: Commentary, Society, Populist Party, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization, foucault
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Like all dimensions of the identity politics associated with the New-left, the Green Party’s philosophical underpinnings consist of a bullet list of values. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that such an approach to politics consists of merely creating paradoxical tangles of propositions that result in a philosophy that is practically void of any pragmatic qualities. The lack of any usefulness results from the inability of one to actually infer any deductions from the core principles contained in the philosophy, which might provide some direction as to the posture one should assume when facing issues of political and social significance. The Green Philosophy can be considered nothing more than pure sophism in the sense that it is rhetoric void of any substantive insights.

We do not want to bore the reader so we shall just proffer a single instance of the type of confusion to which we are referring. The following are both principles contained in the “Key-values” of the Green Party: One should possess personal responsibility to his or her social and ecological environment; as well as, one should, contemporaneously, have a respect for cultural diversity. We shall first provide a broader context in order for the reader to better understand the implications of these two positions.

Communitarianism, which we consider to be the general ideological framework from which the former of the two Key-values is derived, is a philosophy that stresses the positive obligations one has to his or her community along with the positive expectations that he or she is obliged to expect from his or her community. This value - derived from communitarianism - is at odds with the predominate American ideology, which stresses Liberalism in its classical form, which we consider to be the ideological perspective from which the latter of the two Values emanates.

This Anglo philosophy, classical Liberalism, emphasizes the negative rights and negative obligations of individuals within a community. We emphatically believe that classical Liberalism, or what we shall call libertarianism, is a crucial component of the Key-values of the Green Party, in the sense that it is the bedrock for Values such as the tolerance for diversity, which consists, mostly of negative obligations; namely, not to interfere with the practices of others.

For instance, for one to possess the value of tolerance for diversity, he or she must be prepared to abstain from condemning an individual who transgresses the conventions and norms of the community in question, and understand that this particular individual has a different understanding of what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Value of Personal Responsibility, however, seems to run in contradistinction to the Value of Tolerance, because a member of a community should be expected to act in a manner that falls within the moral boundaries as they are defined by the community, due to the Value of Personal Responsibility. One, so to speak, is to be a good citizen, which curtails an individual’s negative rights not to be persecuted for practicing his or her own unique form of life.

So, the problem has been identified and this conflict between the Key-values of the Greens, if not corrected, debases