Partisan Politics versus Direct Democracy

The effect that the advent of partisan politics had on the legislative process is that it disconnected political power from the physical community of human beings and transferred it to an artificially created political interest group claiming to represent the “interests” of the people as a whole.  

This removal of power from the grassroots and the usurpation of this power by the political party have effectively torn the social fabric of society apart. Now politicians of all stripes make promise after promise to an electorate that increasingly feels estranged from the political process and convinced that the political parties claiming to represent their interests in fact continually fail to address the issues that matter most to them in the communities in which they live.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau would no doubt agree with me that politics disconnected from the community cannot succeed in expressing the general will of the population. In order for democracy to be strong, it must be directly exercised by the people at the local level who will then directly choose representatives from their own communities to represent them at a regional level and in turn each region will select a representative for the national level and so on. The political party and its agenda only serves to dilute and degrade the ability of the people to self-organize and actively participate in the political realm and real democracy can only be rooted in an actively participating public – the legislative process must be based solidly in the population.