This morning I heard a clip of a Senator questioning John Bolton as to why he has not done more to build “consensus” in the U.N.  He seemed to think that Ambassador Bolton had not been doing a good job of representing the interest of the United States at the United Nations because he has frequently been in opposition to many of the other nations represented.  The Senator seemed to think that the most important grade on a report card is next to “Works and play well with others.”  I suspect it is the Senator who is doing a bad job of representing the interests of the United States.

Mathematics has a term that is a direct equivalent for “consensus” – Lowest Common Denominator.  The only way to get all of the countries in the U.N. to agree with what you propose is to eliminate everything important from your proposal – to appeal to the lowest common denominator.   This is not in the best interests of the United States.  Our Ambassador needs to persuade, not “build consensus”.  It is more important to make right than to make nice.  John Bolton understands this.  Apparently some Senators do not.

Debra Saunders draws the conclusion from the rougher treatment Joe Lieberman has received from the left wing of the Democratic party compared to the treatment John McCain has received from the right wing of the Republican party that the liberals are less tolerant of “ideological impurity” than conservatives are.  The intolerance of the toleration worshiping left is indeed seen in this, but in many other places as well.  This is compounded by a factor she did not mention.

Not all ideologies are created equal.  Even if conservatives were more demanding of ideological purity it would make sense because they are right a much greater percentage of the time than the liberals are.  Straying from the conservative party line is much more likely to result in error than straying from the liberal party line, which is precisely why the left can’t tolerate it.  When you believe in something that isn’t true you have to defend it very zealously because even the tiniest crack could expose it for the fraud it is and bring the whole thing tumbling down.  This is why the tolerance worshippers can’t afford to be tolerant of people like Joe Lieberman, but the “intolerant” right can get along quite well with John McCain, or Rudy Giuliani, or George W. Bush.

A most entertaining article compares nation states to high school kids.  The United States and Old Europe are the cool kids, with Eastern Europe as the up and coming kids from the wrong side of the tracks.  North Korea, Iran and other rogue states are the social misfit kids who act out to get attention and sometimes end up going postal.

The article is quite entertaining and yet the analogy does work at many points.  What is left out is the identification of the smelly kid.  Every class in every school has a smelly kid.  If you think yours didn't, then you were probably the smelly kid.  Even the social misfits felt superior to the smelly kid, yet the smelly kid isn't usually the one who goes postal.  What country or countries would you nominate to be the smelly kid?

Let me confess up front that I intend to raise some questions, but offer no recommendations.  While the nature of the questions raised raises some troubling issues, I will not offer any solutions.  The value I intend to offer is to make an attempt at clarifying the questions and issues, and in that there is value.

Making good decisions requires that the person making the decision have two things, the relevant information and the wisdom to know what to do based on the relevant information.  This applies equally to decisions made for yourself as an individual and decisions made for you as part of a group.  The reason some governmental systems work better than others is that they are better at getting people who have the two requirements for making a good decision into decision making positions.

The ability of a system of government to get the right people into decision making positions is not necessarily inherent to the system.  Some systems, such as direct democracy or true communism, work well only with small groups with small issues.  This is because everyone has input into every decision, so the groups and issues have to small enough for everyone to have the relevant information.  Once a certain size or complexity of issue is reached it is no longer possible to assure that the relevant information is possessed and understood by everyone in the group.  This is what led to the development of the representative democracy, particularly a noteworthy experiment started in 1776.

The strength of the representative democracy is that only the elected representatives have to possess the relevant information and the wisdom to act on it.  All the voter needs is the information and wisdom to select good representatives.  This enables representative democracy to work on a much larger scale both in the number of governed and the complexity of issues addressed.  Yet there have been changes since 1776 that may affect how well representative democracy works. 

Marshall McLuhan, a media theorist, posited that, “The medium is the message.”  The essence of his premise is that the medium carrying information in some ways shapes the information.  A simple and logical observation, but one with many consequences.  Some of these consequences affect representative democracy.  Examples of this is how the electorate gains information about the candidate and the candidate about the electorate.  In 1776 this information flowed mainly though the conduits of people and print.  Now a large percentage of the information voters have about candidates comes through “sound b ites” and web communities.  Elected officials now receive information about the voters through polls and “netroots” campaigns.  There has been an exponential increase in the amount of information available, but the character of the information has changed.  A significant trend is that the information is in many ways less personal.  Voters get a professionally managed image rather than candidate.  Candidates and elected officials get elected or reelected by appealing to statistical aggregations of voters rather than actual people they know.  This has changed the character of the governmental process.
 

“Character” is a felicitous term here.  It also points out that the voter did not choose just a set of ideas or principles, but a person of a certain character who would act on the voter’s behalf.  This is the strength of representative democracy.  The voter learns enough about the candidates to choose wisely and the elected candidates learn and act wisely on the voter’s behalf after that.

This leads to the key question: Have the changes in the character of the information exchanged between the voter and the candidate changed in a way that reduces or eliminates the voter’s ability to assess the character of the candidates?  Is there no alternative to the voter being left with a choice between professionally created images rather than between candidates of known character?

The recent resurgence of partisanship and the “divide” that has worried so many of late may be a reaction to the depersonalization of the electoral process.  Partisanship is, in some ways, a method of personalizing politics and politicians.  When the information available to me does not allow me to draw a conclusion about the character of the individual candidate, I may re-personalize the process by making a decision about the character of a party and imputing that character to the candidates of that party.

If the effectiveness of representative democracy depends on voters being able to know which candidate truly represents them best, what effects have the technologies of the Information Age had on this process?  Is increased partisanship a healthy response to technological changes that affect the electoral process, or is it an unhealthy compensation that will weaken representative democracy?  These are questions to which I would welcome your answers.

A Texas judge has ruled that Tom Delay’s name must remain on the ballot since he won the primary, even though he has dropped out of the race and changed his residency to his home in Washington.  Republicans say that Texas election law allows them to put another name in his place, but Democrats say there is insufficient proof that he will not be a resident of Texas on election day. 

This sounds eerily similar to the last election cycle, but then it was a New Jersey Democrats who wanted a fellow named Torricelli off the ballot.  There were plenty of very clear reasons to not allow this, not the least of which is that applicable New Jersey law states that the "vacancy shall occur not later than the 51st day before the general election.", and this was only 35 days before the election.  The judge allowed the switch and we now have Senator Frank Lautenberg as a result.  There was one difference we should note.  Torricelli wasn’t just accused of wrong doing.

So maybe Tom DeLay should change his name to Tom Torricelli and his legal residence to New Jersey.  It has to be the name and state of residence since no judge would allow which party would benefit from the switch to make a difference.