Today begins a series of posts on how to make our democracy
work better based on an article in The Intelligent Optimist magazine (formerly
Ode) by Tom Atlee. Atlee begins by
discussing some of the difficulties we currently face.
“Ordinary people don’t have time to get informed on all the
issues. So they delegate their decision-making power to politicians. Most
politicians, by the nature of their jobs, tend to have big egos, big ambitions
and big bank accounts (or at least the ability to please rich and powerful
supporters). These qualities lend themselves to conflicts of interest and corruption
as our politicians travel their path to power, and especially when they have
finally achieved that power and want to use it and hold on to it.
“Rare is the politician who doesn’t want to be reelected—and
reelection usually requires a significant amount of money and some compromise
of integrity. From early on, politicians are surrounded by powerful special
interests that gravitate to centers of concentrated power, bringing a lot of
money, persuasion and demands with them. It is hard to ignore them when your
political career is at stake.
“Even when a politician’s integrity remains mostly intact,
he or she may soon become habituated to the privileges, obeisance, assumptions
and fellowship that go along with power and the elite culture in which he or
she has become embedded. Furthermore,
the intensely competitive atmosphere of business-as-usual politics—with its
ongoing strategic pressures and often ruthless attack by opponents, the press
and adversarial interests—cannot help but have an impact.”
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