That is not possible with guys like Glenn Beck alive and ranting on TeeVee in the world…

So the first step in your revolution would have to begin with putting Fox News out of business, which is not likely to happen because it is funded by Corporate and Christian America … and after eight years of Bush, they have ALL the money!

If fighting among factions is inevitable, then something is amiss since it is possible to figure out the best things for government to do, and not do, in any given situation, given that (a) adherence to certain basic principles is desired and (b) the common good, and not just the good of particular interest groups, is the underlying principle.

A central problem with American democracy today is that we think the fighting between interest groups is a good thing because it shows we have a “healthy political process.” Actually, it shows we cannot come to agreement even on matters which actually do affect everyone. That’s an odd defintion for healthy process.

Our original mission as a nation, according to the Declaration of Independence, was to guarantee “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to all. While the specifics of that are open to interpretation, the generalities are fairly clear. The problem comes in when a partisan, as opposed to consensus-based, process is used to arrive at policy decisions.

When policy is partisan-driven, the common good goes out the window because, by definition, partisans present their own policy ideas as the best approximation of the common good. Rational analysis of most policies proposed by the left or right today would demonstrate they serve not the common or general good, as government is intended to do by the U.S. Constitution, but the private benefit of a specified subset of the population.

Can we have social safety net programs, such as something like universal health care, that abide by this principle of the common good and at very least hurt no one? I believe it is possible, but not possible if it is born through a “warfare” process of partisanship. In the latter event, it will bear the marks, and have the quality, of the process that gave it birth.

And that is the very problem at the root of most government activity today, the very process by which it creates and implements policy, is itself flawed. It can produce nothing other than continued “warfare” as it agitates and exacerbates special interest group interest differences continually.

In such a diverse country, fighting among factions is inevitable. The only way to end that i know of would be a totalitarian dictatorship, which is not acceptable and we should never tolerate it here, although we came close under Bush. The only institution that saved us, barely, during his eight long years in office was the U.S. Senate.

We used to be able to count on the federal courts for impartiality and to step into a breech when politicians were too afraid for their hides. Thanks to Bush, and the politicization of the DoJ and the courts, we can no longer count on the courts. It will take two Obama terms and more to reverse that and replace all the so-called “conservative” judges, who came onto the bench with the litmus test not to be “activist judges” or “legislate from the bench.”

Both of those Karl Rove terms re-framed the debate about the role of the courts in this country. Behind that re-framing was the mega-corporate interest in getting the courts and juries out of their affairs so run amok corporate capitalism could completely takeover and turn this county into an oligopoly, not the social democracy and egalitarian society envisioned at the time the Constitution was written.

We don’t necessarily need a massive re-thinking of how to re-structure our political system, although there is nothing wrong with thinking and writing about that. We just need to find a way to get back on track with the original mission.

Oddly, or perhaps not, many science fiction writers have a superb perspective on history and its trends. Maybe that’s because, in the case of far-flung epics set in the future, they have to invent hundreds or thousands of years of history and the cultures to go along with it. Hence, they become fastidious students of real history.

Where is politics leading us, in fact? My own view, borne both from studying real history and the fictional variety found in science fiction, is that we’re not headed to a good place. There are all kinds of parallels to the early days of the Roman Empire, and to other periods where relative freedom was abandoned in favor of an authoritarian regime.

I have often described Washington politics as “Byzantine,” referring to the latter centuries of the old Eastern Roman Empire, which ended when the Turks took Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1452. The later Eastern Empire featured many of the same problems we have now: a bloated bureaucracy, endless intrigue and wrangling at the top of the political class, lack of morals and ethics in the ruling class, and so forth.

In both cases – the authoritarian coups of the first two Caesars, Julius and Octavian – that ended the Roman Republic – and the last centuries of the Eastern Empire over a millenium later – original principles and ethics were sacrificed for what was perceived to be security and safety. As it turned out, the Romans, and later the Greeks and other peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, got neither. What they ended up with was despotism, antecedents to a long Dark Ages in Europe featuring nearly endless warfare that continued pretty much until the 20th century.

That’s somewhere between 15 and 20 centuries of mayhem and madness, with an occasional respite, and untold millions of innocent deaths, as well nearly continuous repression of human freedom.

Is there a better way? I believe so. The better way would be to restructure “politics” so that it ceases to be factional interest group warfare into something I call “concentrics” or governance by consensus along the lines envisioned in the constitution of the Iroquoian Confederacy of the mid-1700s. There are also other adjustments that would help, but that’s the main paradigm shift needed.

Otherwise, we could time travel to 100 years from now and the same interest group warfare will still be in progress, if we haven’t in fact had a new authoritarianism take over, a la the latter-day aristocrats of the Dune novels or the charismatic “Mule” of the Foundation trilogy.