California is entering into a financial abyss, an abyss of its own creation.  The budgetary disaster that is eliminating health care and summer school for thousands of children, closing state parks, and leading to state workers and small businesses being paid with IOUs is the result of poor to stupid decisions by state voters and the governing elite.  It can be fixed, but probably will take an initiative to do so.

It would be a simple initiative, one that returns budgetary decisions to a majority vote rather than a 2/3 requirement as it exists today.  It should be followed by another initiative that eliminates the ability of anyone with enough money to put an initiative on the ballot, but that’s another matter.

People on the right in particular are disproportiontly responsible for the crisis.  They have forgotten our Founders reasons for wanting a democracy, if they ever knew.  James Madison was quite explicit.

He argued that majority vote for normal business was necessary even though occasionally the majority would err.  He explained that whenever more than a majority was required for normal business, a minority could blackmail a majority on a regular basis, as has the Republican Party for years here in California.  Republicans can not pass laws on their own, but with the 2/3 rule, they can demand Democrats do their bidding to get a budget passed.  

The California crisis is 100% the result of Republican blackmail in obstructing a democratically chosen budget, and the Democrats’ refusal to give in to their extortion, and adopt measures opposed by a majority of Californians in order to get a disciplined political minority to approve the budget.

Madison also made another point relevant to what is happening today. He argued factions had been the destruction of all previous republics, and the only way to reduce the danger was to have a large democratic republic that encompassed many factions.  That way a sharp us vs. them gulf would not emerge because no single faction would be large enough.  He explicitly compared this diversity with the success of religious toleration, which worked where it was tried in Europe because the variety of sects kept any one of them from dominating.  From a Madisonian perspective it is significant that despite the constitution, religious freedom is weakest in this country where a single kind of Christianity, Southern Baptism, dominates.)

Our form of government was devised before organized political parties had developed.  No body anticipated them.  Parties turned out to be politically necessary, but from a Madisonian perspective had the possibility of uniting factions and undermining the major check in America for successful democracy.  Fortunately, for various reasons, after they developed American style parties did not undermine Madison’s argument because they were what political scientists call “weak” organizations.  People were elected based on local issues, and did not need to agree with centralized leaders to hold and keep office.  Parties were not strongly disciplined.

In this way American Parties were different from ‘strong’ European parliamentary parties, and while European democracies have developed ways to keep strong parties from destroying democracy (as they had in the Weimar Republic), our system has not developed such safeguards because we have not needed to until recently.

The modern Republican Party is in many ways more like a European disciplined party than a traditional American weak one.  It votes as a strong bloc and does not care what damage it does to the other side, or the state or even to country as a whole, so long as it keeps its opponents from accomplishing anything.  This behavior is disturbuingly similar to the actions of the Communist and Nazi parties in the old Weimar Republic, who often cooperated together to make it impossible for more moderate parties to get anything done.  Things had to get worse before they would get better, they claimed.  They were right, but not in the way they thought.  It took World War II to undo the damage they caused.

There is no democratic way to force the Republicans back into the traditional American mold.  And the Democrats could conceivably evolve in a similar way, in which case democracy will ultimately break down in California and the US.  But there is a way to weaken the damage this kind of thing can cause.

California should be the first state to adopt another initiative requiring a majority rather than a plurality of votes to win political office. Our plurality rules were initially adopted because parties did not exist, and the framers believed no one could get a majority on a regular basis.   ‘Plurality election’ means whoever gets the most votes wins.

Once parties arose that was no longer a problem, but so long as they remained weak a rough balance existed between having enough cohesiveness to govern and enough diversity not to act tyrannically.  But plurality rules also make it almost impossible for a third parties that actually matter to form.  With weak parties the plurality rule did not do much damage, but with strong ones it is suicidal.  

A majority rule for winning office would mean that we could vote for third parties without actually helping the major party we most oppose.  In case no majority emerged, run-off provision, would guarantee that lunatics would find it almost impossible to win, obstruct normal politics. or hold the majority up for blackmail.  It would end the possibility of minorities extorting from majorities on a regular basis.

As the most ethical means by which people who sometimes disagree can live together in peace, the cure for democracy’s shortcomings is more democracy, intelligently applied.

Gary Kimaya over at Salon has another good analysis for those readers interested in this issue.