Hendrik Hertzberg makes some good points about how our democracy functions vs. how democracy functions in other free but more developed countries. Would "evolved" be a better word than "developed"?
Whichever. As long as we don't kid ourselves that we are the numero uno democracy, not when you look at the results. Hertzberg puts the knife to the ribs.
... In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.
The way we do it is, shall we say, more exciting. For us, an election is only the opening broadside in a series of protracted political battles of heavy artillery and hand-to-hand fighting. A President may fancy that he has a mandate (and, morally, he may well have one), but the two separately elected, differently constituted, independent legislatures whose acquiescence he needs are under no compulsion to agree. Within those legislatures, a system of overlapping committees dominated by powerful chairmen creates a plethora of veto points where well-organized special interests can smother or distort a bill meant to benefit a large but amorphous public. In the smaller of the two legislatures—which is even more heavily weighted toward conservative rural interests than is the larger one, and where one member may represent as little as one-seventieth as many people as the member in the next seat—an arcane and patently unconstitutional rule, the filibuster, allows a minority of members to block almost any action. The process that results is less like the Roman Senate than like the Roman Games: a sanguinary legislative Colosseum where at any moment some two-bit emperor is apt to signal the thumbs-down.
But we haven't gotten anywhere yet. That 60 years, friends!
Now look at the gap between freeing the slaves and, oh, the Henry Louis Gates incident, and you get a measure of just how "free" and "democratic" (not to mention "evolved") our nation is and how soon we can achieve a truly democratic system.
