The People’s Ruling Class

The Founders expected that their more perfect union would be ruled from a set of equalized local districts set up by State Governments.  State Governments seem not to have the foresight to abandon their archaic districting systems in favor of the same system by which the national government is ruled.  One set of representatives should be ruling the entire federation from bottom to top.

The ruling class by which we are now being ruled is a mysterious lot of mostly self-appointed persons in powerful positions, some of which can be identified and some not.  In order for the people to participate in this ad hoc mysterious system, each must register as a member of one of its political parties.  This is precisely the system that the Founders saw as divisive and to be avoided if at all possible.

Thirteen state governments which set up the system are the culpable ones.  Now fifty state governments share that culpability and should be getting us out of the messed-up system.  It would be embarrassingly easy to do, once they visualize what needs to be done.  It would create an entirely new ruling class operated from every local district in the nation.  Each of those districts would create its own political flavor, and that flavor would undergo possible modification at each 2-year rep election cycle.

States need to drop every aspect of their old districting that runs their state governments.  They need to reach a common agreement on what the population of a proper local district should be.  (Why not, until studies show otherwise, adopt the 40,000 of the original Congressional District?)  In a nation of 320,000,000 persons, that would create a grid of exactly 8,000 “elite rulers” who would form the foundation of all governing---from the smallest chartered entities of each state to the top governing officials anywhere in the nation.  Those districts would thumb their noses at partisan ideologies as they choose their favorite local leader. That leader may be a dyed-in-the-wool partisan, but will “dance with the ones who brought him.”

Phase two focuses on the vanities of we-the-people, ourselves.  After we have elected that elite body of representatives, we need to step out of their way and let them do the governing, for good or ill.  It is their responsibility and we will deal with them at the next election.  The Founders created a 3-tier electorate: those qualified to elect persons to 2-year terms, those qualified to elect the 4-year term executives, and those qualified to elect the 6-year term senators.  The longer the term, the more sophisticated the voter. We have thoughtlessly trashed that system, both as it applies to electoral colleges and as it applies to election of senators.  Both are fundamentally sound ideas that have become propagandized beyond belief.

No matter what the system of government in any nation, the elite class of people always manages to find its way to the top of it.  We have been given the opportunity to elect our elite class in an orderly manner. Our system is in peril because its grassroots has been manipulated by skilled, deceptive partisan charlatans.  The charlatans are soon weeded out in their small districts.  The truly elites are not charlatans.  If we do not elect them, they will be imposed upon us by other tactics.

Why not resurrect the Founders’ idea which would create 8,000 reps? We have never tried it.  It would synchronize all governing into one interconnected system. The propaganda driven national frenzy the partisans put on every four years is a disgrace that a proper ruling class renders obsolete.