Well...It's fairly easy for democracy to function in a small community of a few hundred or a few thousand people, where everyone sort of knows the people they are voting for, and where there are no political parties. I've seen this in town councils, and in a North American Indian traditionally-based community. If you actually know the people you're voting for, then you have a fairly good idea of what you can expect from them. If there are no political parties involved, so much the better...people can run on their own merits and vote according to their own conscience, without pressure to vote "party line" after they're elected.
When you get above 20,000 or so people it gets a lot more cumbersome, and then the propaganda starts. Since people don't necessarily know much about whom they are voting for, they have to trust what the media tells them. If the media is mostly owned by a few rich people, and the politicians are chosen largely by those same rich people (from their own ranks, usually) then you can expect a ton of misleading propaganda. How do you sort through it? Not easy. How many people have the time to truly sort through it?
Add political parties to the picture, and you have a form of entrenched, self-serving corruption that can only get worse with every passing decade...and it does.
The best watchdog on this is an alert press, but as I noted before the press is generally owned by the rich and powerful...although there are always independent columnists with something useful to say. TV news is hopeless, since it goes into nothing in much depth (generally) but just tosses pithy "sound bites" around. TV news is really entertainment (like the National Enquirer), not news.
Now when you've got a country with many millions of people in it...and dominated by two or more very corrupt and selfish political parties who are only in it to WIN, not to serve the public...then you've got a fairly hopeless situation. When banks and big business own the political parties, it's absolutely hopeless from the point of view of the ordinary public, who are in truth shut out of the process. Their vote is nothing more than a rubber stamp.
That's what is happening at the present.
What's the solution? I'd say, completely abolish ALL political parties, vote for individuals on a LOCAL basis, have those individuals form regional councils, have those councils form a national parliament representing all regions in a fair manner, and decide policy on a group basis rather than creating king-like presidents and prime ministers, who are simply a focus for a lot of fantastic image-building and propaganda on the part of the existing power structure.
Imagine a government that is not divided into 2 or 3 or 4 competing power blocs that hate each other most of the time...but one that is formed of a large number of totally independent individuals who represent their parts of the country in the best way they can. Imagine no more Redemocrapublicants, no more Liberal/Conservative/BocQuebecois/CanadianAlliance/NewDemocratic nonsense (those are the Canadian parties).
Furthermore, provide an equal amount of funding to ALL candidates who run and BINGO...the business lobby is eliminated! Said money to come from a public fund, and to allow a short and not very expensive election campaign, long on content and devoid of partisan propaganda.
It could be done. Will it? Ha! I doubt that I will live that long.
In the meantime, what we've got is better than an outright dictatorship...but it's no more honest and only slightly more moral...and that is mostly because of our customs and legal traditions, which tend to carry on regardless of unscrupulous politicians.
The reason it's very hard to have a healthy functioning "democracy" (in the western sense) in a country like Russia, for example, is that they've had so little of it at any time in the past. They do not have that base of custom and legal tradition that one does in the USA, Canada, France or England.
Our democracies have a good social tradition as a foundation, but they have been corrupted by the political parties which were all bought out long ago by the big financial players. From Tammany Hall to Exxon and the World Bank.
And so it goes...
It isn't that politicians are necessarily bad people...it's that Big Money has killed real democracy.
- LH