THE AMERICAN PEOPLE HAVE just completed a 10 month, multimillion-dollar process of electing a new president of the United States in which 25 percent of the citizens chose between two mediocre personalities, neither of whom addressed in any truthful way the vital issues facing the country and the world in the last 12 years of the 20th century. In this time the world is endangered by global pollution, mass starvation, and the threat of annihilation by nuclear war.
The presidential campaign revealed the terminal stage of a takeover of the political process by image manipulators, directed at television media. This creates distortion and demagoguery and leads to confusion, apathy, and low voter participation. The way our political system selects political candidates is in serious need of reform, if we are to preserve a vital democracy. We need to consider alternative processes that can generate better candidates and greater citizen education and participation.
Most Americans believe that we are the leading democracy in the world. Our government claims the right to intervene in socialist countries such as Cuba and Nicaragua because they are "undemocratic." Yet one of the things that I learned on a visit to Cuba a few years ago is that, at least in some areas, they had developed better grassroots participation in the political process than we have. This was shown in the way in which the Cuban political system creates what are called "basic laws," or policy guides for social development.
Cuban society is organized around several grassroots organizations--workplace, women's, and neighborhood organizations. Everyone belongs to at least one of these groups. The party proposes an outline of a basic law, for example, in family policy. The party proposals are then discussed at the grassroots level in each of the base organizations; revisions are proposed and delegates selected for the regional level and, from there, for the national level. At each level the basic law is revised from suggestions from the meetings of the people. The final law then reflects this grassroots process.
BY CONTRAST, OUR PEOPLE do not even know, much less have an opportunity to discuss in detail, the policies that our politicians plan to implement. Our political process is increasingly designed to conceal rather than make public what the candidates "stand for." Parties create a platform at the convention, but it is not publicly discussed. It is not a part of the public debate. Copies are not made available to the electorate.
As a starter for political reform, what if the party platform were made much more a subject of public knowledge and debate, and the candidates really had to discuss it, to run on it, and to be accountable for it? One might imagine a process in which the parties would draft a platform well before the national convention. Copies would be made available and meetings organized at the neighborhood level to discuss it. Delegates might be selected to county and, then, to state-level party meetings where grassroots suggestions could be integrated into the platform.
At the national convention, the final revision would be made, and the candidates would then run on the basis of the policies to which the platform commits them. The public television debates would be conducted not by journalists, but by representatives of social sectors such as educators, labor and business leaders, and public interest groups such as environmentalists.
The debate would focus on the policies of the party platforms, not misleading trivia. This would at least raise the level of the debate and create a process of voter education.
Greater discussion of issues would also increase voter participation. Low voter turnout favors the conservative and wealthy, leaving the poorest people disenfranchised. We might also consider making the voter registration card the basic identity card for public transactions rather than credit cards and driver's licenses.
These are some beginning suggestions on what must become a public debate. American society is increasingly being controlled by a secret government that uses disinformation and demagoguery to get and remain in power. It is vital that we check these trends and find ways to conduct our elections that generate better citizen education and participation.
Rosemary Radford Ruether was a Sojourners contributing editor and Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, when this article appeared.
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