From Troop Strength to Instant Runoff Voting (Don’t Ask)
By Montag | Related entries in Elections, General Politics, Ideas, WarDemocrats who want to look “tough” want to increase troops:
Centrists who contend Democrats cannot retake the White House until voters trust the party to protect them said Sunday the Army should expand by 100,000 soldiers and that colleges should open their campuses to military recruiters.
Associated Press: Centrist Dems urge military enlargement
This issue always brings good ole Federalist #46 to mind:
Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms.
–James Madison, Federalist No. 46
Perhaps the above is only meant to apply in peace time, but it doesn’t even matter in this case. I did some checking. Current troop strength is at 2.7 million, (1.4 million active & 1.3 million reserve,)* and the current US population is around 2.97 million. So, we could increase troops by 270,000 without violating Madison’s ‘one hundredth’ figure. [*Found these numbers on a poll question regarding the current size of the military. Are they accurate?]
So the proposal would seem quite within reason. What is the purpose of Democrats making this proposal?
This is the talk they talked at the annual meeting of the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council):
There were few who quibbled with the argument that the party needs to move toward the middle.
“I think this country is becoming more and more moderate and more and more conservative,” said Leroy Comrie, a councilman in the New York City borough of Queens.
From said the simple math of elections means Democrats must do better among moderates.
“We have to win about 60 percent of the moderates to break even,” he said. “There has never been a time when there were more liberals than conservatives in the electorate.”
Associated Press: Centrist Dems urge military enlargement
Is it true that “[t]here has never been a time when there were more liberals than conservatives in the electorate” ? Doesn’t it depend on what definitions are used for “liberal” and “conservative”?
Surely politicians on both sides have reams of data and polling they can point to to “proove” their side is more relevant. I think the reality must be that most people are all over the map, “liberal” on this issue, “conservative” on that one. In a sense, everyone is to some extent a “centerist.”
Why are partisanship and party politics allowed to rule in this country? Why is it ok for the parties to ask people to compromise on their beliefs because it is more important for the party to gain power and control congress?
Our discussions here are a start, but is there a solution to fix congress? Perhaps a ‘power sharing’ arrangement where committee leaderships are divided proportionally between the parties? Would instant-runoff voting empower voters to vote their conscience rather than defaulting to party loyalty?
This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 and is filed under Elections, General Politics, Ideas, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 25th, 2005 at 10:55 am
I think it’s a result of the two party system. In theory at least the parties would try to form some sort of consensus and campaign on that, as opposed to forming a government with whoever gets elected after the fact. The problem is neither party really makes much of an effort at the consensus part since all they really have to do is get one more vote than the other guy. As long as it stays a two party(I know there are other parties but they are so small as to not really be relevant) system I don’t see either party having an incentive to change that.
July 25th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
The two-party system is an almost inevitable result of electing one president for such a vast and diverse nation.
“Instant-runoff” voting has gotten some attention lately because people think it would have preventede the election of Bush in 2000 (Nader voters could have written “Nader and then Gore”).
But it has such a potential to be gamed (reminds me of my friend Murph who made a living for a few years betting on which dogs would finish second in the races in Tucson) that I think it probably only would further disillusion an American voting public that already has a hard time keeping up with the issues and the processes.
A while ago I proposed, in jest, but as a way to maybe get people thinking about alternatives, a model from classical antiquity.
The political values systems of the core “blue” areas of the American map seem to be disconnected from the “red” ones. The people gather into the modern political equivalent of tribes, insulated in self-constructed media cocoons, and national politics become increasingly acerbic, emotional, and vulnerable to demagogues.
Ancient Athens had a similar problem, once upon a time. The Peisistratidai tyrant dynasty entrenched itself by exploiting regional conflict between the tribes, with their individual religious customs, and between the mutual hostility and different values of people in the coast, the interior, and the mountains.
The late 6th century B.C.E. statesman Kleisthenes forced a solution to this problem, and for this he is called the founder of Athenian democracy. His main achievement in government was redrawing the tribal map, which was something like the ancient equivalent of a congressional redistricting. But he did it in a way that amounted to a complete social reorganization of the Athenian state.
He set the number of tribes at 10, and he gave each a name and identity based on a god-hero. Then he divided the entire Athenian territory into electoral districts, and assigned all the citizens of each district to one or another of the tribes. But he set this up so that the chunks of turf of any tribe did not adjoin, and so that each of the tribes had a section in each of the three regions — coast, inland, mountains.
This defused any chance of tribal barons building up a power base, and it forced the people to work together across geographical lines and local identifications.
A man’s tribe and deme were hereditary, and he kept them even if he moved. The tribes were artificial ones at first, but they gelled because of the custom of having holidays and observances in common, and because men of one tribe now fought together in the same regiment (as Americans generally did, up through the Civil War), and because the Boule, the Athenian council or parliament, was to consist of 50 from each tribe — elected by all the citizens of that tribe.
The system succeeded so well that it outlasted Athenian democracy itself, persisting into Roman times. It succeeded so well that modern historians have a difficult time reconstructing what came before it.
The American Founders had an abhorence of Athens, as an unbalanced state and a case of democracy run amok. But we are more Athenian now than they would have liked, so Athenian models perhaps are proper ones for us.
So, imagine this: dissolve the current Congressional districts, and apportion them by population, but dispersed in at least three divisions, spread over varying regions of the country. Make one district out of, say, North Philadelphia, Key West, and the eastern third of Wyoming. The people in those places have to nominate and elect one Representative. To do that, they have to get to know and understand one another, to compromise and communicate.
And before you dismiss it as entire trifling, savor the image of Ted Kennedy campaigning in Kansas, or Tom DeLay trying to woo voters in Maine.
July 25th, 2005 at 5:17 pm
Reposting a comment I made on another site:
Sometimes I wonder whether our American culture should encourage more travel of its citizens within its borders, to lessen the fracturing. Isolationism of American communities has bred a plethora of strange philosophies reminiscent of so many butterfly species in an Amazonian rainforest.
July 25th, 2005 at 5:43 pm
Great comment Callimachus.
And Paul, agreed. And it looks like Callimachus’ idea would do just that.
However, I think this comes down to a matter of economics in the end. Travelling costs money and only those with disposable income (and time) could travel to the places and get the type of diverse experience you’re talking about. And proposing a socialized means of travel that was cheap and affordable wouldn’t sit well with a lot of Americans, especially when you get down to the matter of actually paying for it.
July 26th, 2005 at 12:37 pm
The best I could see it sold, would be as an exchange program. Say for instance, a SoCal school with a sister school in Cincinnati, etc. Send kids around for a month or three.
July 27th, 2005 at 5:08 am
And actually, read in context, what Madison is talking about likely is the practical limitation of a national standing army with late 18th century military technology and national revenue. The 46th is about the tension between state and federal powers, and he’s working to allay the fears that the federal government will be able to ride roughshod over the states. And one reason, he says, that can’t happen is that the states could call up the militias, which would swamp a federal army if it tried to cow them. Interesting document, from an American Civil War perspective.