Is Democracy As Good As It Gets?

One last post about Friedman and then I promise I won’t mention his name or his books for a long time. One of his chapters discusses how he would like to be “China for just one day.” This way we could bi-pass the party wrangling and entrenched lobbying that too often disrupts necessary change, and just mandate from the top down all of the needed reforms to our current political and economic structure that would allow for this new energy economy to develop. Then we could “switch back to being Americans in order to ensure that the changes were implemented.”

This got me thinking about democracy and if it’s really all that we have made it out to be? I’m not saying that any other system out there right now is necessarily better.  But, with a flaw as big as being deadlocked on the biggest issue our generation has faced, there has to be something better than democracy as its currently constituted.

What might this potential governmental system look like? Maybe this “China for a day” scenario can provide some insight. Or maybe we have not fully tapped the true potential of what a democratic government can provide. Something we could not do before the Internet and it’s ability to spread information, bring people together, and expose those trying to subvert the system.

You may have your own opinions about Obama and his policies, but he is the first President that has been able to take advantage of the power of the internet and we saw what it did for his campaign, and what he is now doing with change.gov since his election. People are being asked to contribute their opinions and proposed solutions to some of our most intractable problems like never before. Because there wasn’t a mechanism that could allow for this before. Obama’s success has not only been due to his charismatic nature, but also his insight that people were craving the opportunity to be engaged and asked to contribute. His continued success will depend upon how he handles all of these engaged citizens. Put to good use they can set our country back on the right track. Spurned for politics as usual they could mean the end of America as we know it.

So democracy may in fact be as good as it gets, it just hasn’t yet been implemented to it’s fullest capacity. Like anything else democracy is a constantly evolving and shifting system, yearning to get better and achieve more because the people that control it are striving to get better and achieve more.

And that is to me what it all comes down to. In a sense “government” is purely a figment of our imaginations, something we have mentally concocted. To expect more out of our government and the democratic institution we have to expect more out of ourselves.