Democracy; watch this space.

Unless there is a rapid and profound reversal in the fortunes of one of the American Democratic candidates, Hillary and Barrack are racing to see who can lose to McCain. I am not a keen observer of the American political scene, so if I’m coming to this conclusion it’s either too obvious to miss or I’m just pulling stuff out of my ass again.

I am of course not above such things here, but as always you get what you pay for, and you get fair warning of my lack of academic rigor when it comes to anonymous ranty stuff. With that out of the way, in the absence of anything that particularly outrages me today, this will be the beginning of a free-form noodling about what we have for government and what else there may be down the road, or at least options.

What I would really like to do is encourage a discussion about Democracy, and what we understand that to be. From there, what we actually have vs. our expectations, and possibly what could be done to bring the two closer together.

This is more an issue for the Americans (to the best of my knowledge I have no American readers) as the Canadian system has not strayed far, warts and all, from our founding. So if it seems I look south of the border a lot, it’s both because their system and political origins are more interesting than ours and because of the state and fate of America is of no small concern to the rest of us Democracies.

Main Entry: [from Miriam-Webster Online Dictionary]
de•moc•ra•cy
Pronunciation:
\di-ˈmä-krə-sē\
Function:
noun
Inflected Form(s):
plural de•moc•ra•cies
Etymology:
Middle French democratie, from Late Latin democratia, from Greek dēmokratia, from dēmos + -kratia -cracy
Date: 1576

1 a: government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
2: a political unit that has a democratic government
3capitalized : the principles and policies of the Democratic party in the United States
4: the common people especially when constituting the source of political authority
5: the absence of hereditary or arbitrary class distinctions or privileges

There’s a pretty non-partisan definition to start from. Even more simply; a form of government that involves the direct, non-violent intervention of the people in the governing process. (Source: me)

More to follow as I come up with it, likely to show up as edits to this post, hence the subtitle.