Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

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64 politics and governance
defi ning issues and electing candidates, while many have little or
no say. It is time, long past time, to separate money and politics in
the same way the founders intended to separate church and state.
All federal elections ought to be publicly fi nanced. The corollary
is that no elected or appointed offi cial after leaving public offi ce
should ever be allowed to hold a paid position with any regulated
industry. If public offi cials face fi nancial destitution as a result of
their public service, let us pay them better. But the people’s business
should not be peddled like beer and SUVs.
Many who believe that we need a robust, democratic, and
rational politics propose to harness technology in order to create
an electronic version of a town meeting. After a thorough
and convincing examination of the causes of the decline in the
rationality in our politics, former vice president Al Gore, for one,
proposes to harness the power of the internet to join us electronically
as citizens across the divisions of age, geography, and ethnicity.
“The internet,” he argues, “is perhaps the greatest source of
hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in
which the conversation of democracy can fl ourish” (Gore, 2007,
p. 260). Susan Jacoby, to the contrary, argues that the “fi rst essential
step is negative: we must give up the delusion that technology can
supply the fi x for a condition that, however much it is abetted by
our new machines, is essentially nontechnological” (p. 309).
Another possibility is to create mechanisms in which citizens
would meet in small assemblies for several days to reason through
complex issues of public policy. James Fishkin and Bruce Ackerman
propose, for example, a national effort to increase civic intelligence
by engaging people across the political spectrum in public
dialogue. A national “deliberation day” would be held every four
years to coincide with presidential elections. Citizens randomly
selected and paid a daily stipend would meet to discuss and debate
the issues of the day, guided by rules to ensure fairness and full
participation. Fishkin’s early experiments indicate that the process
works, at least at a small scale under careful supervision. Other