Thomas Paine talked about the necessity of government, that without it society is dependent on the moral virtue of all citizens to all other citizens. That is difficult in even a small tribe, much less a large country with millions of citizens. Considering that the colonies were a small fraction of what the US is today and they recognized the challenge only underscores the growing pains we are experiencing today. We are after all quite young as a nation compared to others and I think this point in our development was a long time coming.
Paine also said “… that the elected might never form to themselves an interest separate from the electors.” He mentions the key to a successful nation is “strength of government, and the happiness of the governed”. I think these ideas go hand in hand, as long the interests of the governed are represented by their representatives, the system will work out just fine.
It truly would be inefficient and ineffective for everyone to participate in some pure democracy where everyone has an equal say in matter, nothing would get done.
Paine also talks about how the more simple a government is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier it is to repair if it does become disordered. Our government is anything but simple. The original design with the three branches of government and the checks and balances was a masterful construction of the time. I don’t think the founding fathers expected it to remain in its original form for 250 years. They expressed as much at the time. Is the representation in Congress still divided into a fair districts, even though the population of one county in one state is more than the state population of half of the states. Are those citizens fairly represented?
For me the concern in our government is representation in general. Only a small percentage of our citizens know how their government even works. We are presented with a few choices every few years that we have to pick from, without knowing how those became our only choices and in general not really optimistic about any of them. So politics and government had become a game they play, with our lives and liberty hanging in the balance. Politics has been distorted from public service and representation into the pursuit of power, for their own agenda and for those who helped them attain that power.
The electoral college was created as a compromise between having congress elect the president and a popular vote by the people. At the time, and I agree, a popular vote would have been difficult to conduct. We didn’t have the technology and means that we have today. And, rightly so, the founding fathers didn’t want the Congress to elect the president to preserve the separation of powers and prevent Congress from electing a president to represent their majority interest instead of the will of the people. Over the last 40 years the electoral college has become a chess piece in the gamification of government, secretly distorting it to one party or another with gerrymandering. I think it has outlived its purpose and is instead a detriment to the nation and should be deprecated.
The biggest failure of the founding fathers was not including term limits on Congress. They considered, but ultimately rejected, term limits, instead relying on the citizens vote to remove unwanted elements from Congress. I think they underestimated the damage that would do, and overestimated the average citizens grasp of the architecture of our government. I have watched through the course of my 50 years 12 presidential elections. Every 4 years I see my fellow Americans attach everything, good or bad, to who was president at the time. Most of what affects our lives is the responsibility of the legislative and judicial branches. The legislative branch (House and Senate) make the laws, control the money and has the power to declare war. The executive branch (President) is responsible for enforcing those laws, and the judicial branch (Supreme Court) is responsible for evaluating the laws set forth by Congress to and determine there constitutionality. So most true power is the Congress which is why there are so many more individuals in the legislative branch. But I think for the average person, it is hard to blame 535 people for things not going right and instead feel better focusing on 1 person, the president. This bad because that means that we generally have a good turnout and vote for presidential elections, but do not do the same for elections in between when House representatives and Senators get elected. Even worse is that we don’t really understand or participate in the process the chooses which candidates we will have to choose from on the ballot.
Which brings me to the real problem with our present day political structure and government, political parties. Political parties are not unique to us and have the same terrible effect on other governments as well. They have been around from the beginning, but they have changed over years either being replaced by a new party or with the changing agenda of an existing party. I think it would be naive to suggest that we do away with political parties, it would be quite like a gun standoff… “You first”. But I do think we need some new parties. The longer a political party is in existence the more extreme it seems to get, one-upping on it’s fundamental principles as it migrates further from the center where most citizens are and toward some extreme. Left vs Right, Blue vs Red, Liberal vs Conservative… Democrat vs Republican. It has many names but ultimately the same thing, US vs THEM. I think if most people reflect honestly, neither truly represents them. People are unique and most are somewhere in the middle and will fluctuate on different issues. Maybe you want fiscal responsibility but still want to make sure that nobody goes hungry. People like that don’t have a political party, so we choose between the two and pick the one we think (we hope) best represents our values. It would be bad if it was just a label, but those political parties hold a lot of power over us. They are the ones responsible for who we get to choose from come election time. Those candidates they choose tend to have more loyalty to the party than they do to the people they are to represent. Much of the agenda of the political parties (both of them) is to attaining and preserving power than to be the organized voice of their constituents which was their original purpose.
Politics and government have made this a game of choosing a side, and each blaming the other side… US vs THEM. The true US is all of us citizens and THEM being our elected officials. They work and represent us. They are supposed to work together, compromise, to find the best solutions that represent the will of the people, not to plant a stake in the ground on their extreme perspective, be unbending and accomplish nothing.
The last note I will make is on the separation of powers. It was the secret sauce of our democratic republic, and crucial to keeping it a government By The People. It is the fault of We The People that it has been eroded because we believe that our way of life was incorruptible and could not be taken away. We have seen the damage to those checks and balances over the last few decades. Orchestrating SCOTUS appointments when a majority of congress is in alignment with POTUS. Filibusters, holds, and other tactics to prevent legislation from getting passed. Killing a bill to support the stance of an incoming presidential candidate. Packing a bill with hidden agendas to either make it undesirable to pass at all or to sneak in legislation that could never pass on its own. None of this is in service of The People.
In my next post I will reflect on the second part of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Monarchy and Succession. At first I thought it would not have much to do with modern day America but I found that it actually does.
Common Sense 