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by Thom Hartmann
The frauds and deceptions of the Bush administration are legion and, sadly, to be expected, based on the Bush family's past (from sweetheart business deals going back to WWII, to smearing John McCain in South Carolina in 2000, to lying to the American people just before the election of 2002 about the threats Iraq posed).
But few people expected Ralph Nader - one of America's finest defenders of the public interest and the commons - to employ deception in an election.
Specifically, Nader has gone to great lengths to exploit the lack of knowledge most Americans have about how other democracies around the world work, and thus deceive people about both the history and present reality of our electoral system and the role of third parties in it.
When the Founders and the Framers of the Constitution put together American democracy in 1787, it had never been tried before in the way they visualized. In ancient Athens, it took 6001 citizens to turn out and agree to pass a law; Rome was a republic, but not of, by, or for "the people"; and the Iroquois Confederacy had no "executive branch" to elect, a remnant from the days of kings that the Framers were unwilling to give up. Thus, the Framers of the Constitution had no "truly democratic" model to work from.
So they created a flawed constitution.
The major flaw was that national elections are held on a first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all basis. Which means that if three or more candidates compete in a race, it's virtually guaranteed that somebody with less than a majority of the vote will end up winning political power. The result of this flaw is non-democratic minority rule, instead of the democratic ideal of majority rule.
A good example of this happened in the 2002 election in my state of Vermont, where the Republican candidates became Governor and Lieutenant Governor with 45 percent and 41 percent of the vote respectively because each had more votes than his Democratic or Progressive opponents alone. (Example: Republican Brian Dubie - 41%; Democrat Peter Shumlin - 32%; Progressive Anthony Pollina - 25%. The Republican "won.") The majority of Vermont voters selected liberal or progressive candidates, but conservatives are in charge of the state - the exact anti-democratic result that gave some of the Framers nightmares.
James Madison was the most outspokenly worried about this. In the 1787 Federalist #10, he goes into a lengthy discussion of the danger of "factions" - one aspect of what we today call political parties - emerging. First he puts a good face on the problem, suggesting that the new Constitution will solve the "violence" done to democracy by factions. But in the next sentence, he admits his fear that he and the other Framers had not truly solved the problem of what would happen if "factions" were to emerge.
"Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed Union [based on the Constitution], none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction," wrote Madison. "The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice. ... The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished..."
The problem was that if factions were to emerge as political parties, it would mean there could only be two of them, for if more than two parties emerged then the majority of people would almost always remain unrepresented, while the most well-organized minority would end up ruling.
Madison concluded by saying he felt the Constitution he and Hamilton were promoting with the Federalist Papers was the best solution they could come up with to solve the problem of factions.
But, as he noted, the constitution wasn't perfect: "The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger [of factions] on this side, as was wished and expected." His only solution was to beg Americans not to form factions.
Although George Washington was soon thereafter elected unanimously and by acclimation, America's second presidential election (won by John Adams) almost immediately led to the creation of Madison's feared "factions" in the form of Vice-President Thomas Jefferson's "Democratic-Republican" party (today called the "Democratic Party"). Ever since then, we've largely been a two-party nation - because our Constitution is written in a way that causes anything else to result in the least democratic outcome to an election.
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