Political Issues
In our earliest human history, groups of people banded together in groups to protect themselves from predators and other humans. We learned early on that we had a better chance to survive as part of a group rather than on our own.
Given the limitations on available food within the area where the group lived and could control, the size of the group had to remain relatively small. A group may have included just a few individuals of an extended family up to about 100 individuals.
In order to protect and to guild their group, the people would have needed one or more of their group to lead them. They may have called upon the wisest and most experienced of their elders, or someone strong enough may have just taken charge. In some cases, other members of the group may have had some say, or the group may simply have followed the leader they had chosen or who had taken control.
These earliest governments were generally quite simple, since their role was mainly limited to such things as protecting the group, keeping the group together, and coordinating the gathering, making and distribution of necessities within the group. Given the limitations of transportation and communication, these early governments were greatly limited to controlling their group and the small area of land that they could effectively control.
As time went by, advances in agriculture and technology altered human society in many different ways, which included making it more complex. With groups growing larger and engaging in more businesses and trade, governments had to take on more responsibilities, which meant they also had to become larger and more complex.
As transportation and communication got better, governments were able to manage larger groups of people and more land. Although to do this, they needed to create multiple and overlapping layers of government, where the higher levels of government exerted ultimate control over the lower levels of government. As a result, most people became more and more isolated from the decision makers in their government and had less, if any, real say in how they were governed.
As governments continued to grow larger, people found that the older political systems did not always work as well as they did when the governments were smaller. As time went by, people experimented with a wide range of ways to govern and to be governed. As a result, many different political systems have come and gone, or evolved into new forms.
With everything else being equal, it seems that some political systems can offer a better chance to create a good government for its citizens than others. In general, some form of democracy seems to offer most people the best chance of having a good government. On the other hand, it seems that all political systems have had their successes and failures. For instance, there have been good kings and bad kings, and good dictators and bad dictators, just as there have been good democracies and bad democracies.
In 1787, our ancestors here in the United States of America, created a constitution that put our fledgling republic on a democratic path. At that time in history, this was a bold new direction for a nation to take. In the years that followed, more and more nations experimented with various forms of democracies. Although some of these democracies have been fairly successful, none of them, including our own, have truly lived up to our goals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
When our democracy got started, the world was a very different place than it is today. Then, life centered on family and community. The national and state governments were often far away and played limited roles in people’s lives. It was the local government that mattered, and most people could have some say in the affairs of their local government. (Although initially, that often meant just the men who were land owners.)
Over time, our understanding of the merits and limitations of our democracy has grown. As our nation has grown, more people have gained the right to vote, our communication and transportation systems have gotten faster, and our state and national governments have grown and taken on a bigger role in managing our lives. Our political system has also become more and more dominated by special interests and big money, and less and less responsive to our individual needs. As a result of all of this, the voice and power of the average individual today is quite small and is often ignored by our representatives in government.
In theory, we live in a free and democratic country, which means that we should be able to decide how we are to be governed and who represents us. Although this may be the goal, I contend that we have not yet achieved it and that we have even moved farther away from it.
Given what we know today about the good and bad points of our democratic system and what new technologies are at our disposal, we should be able to come up with a better political system. What we must do is to think about the purpose of our government and how we are represented in our modern age. This is what I have done and I have come up with some ideas that I believe can make a big improvement in the way our democracy and our governments work.
In the following sections, I will try to expand on what I believe has gone wrong and how we can fix things.
Constitution -
How to change our Constitutions to allow us to make a better democracy.
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