Time for some real democracy

The term 'democracy' is loosely used to describe any government that authentically represents the will of the people. Intrinsic to this notion is the realization that no group of people can achieve unanimity on any significant topic. People disagree and in a democracy those disagreements must be resolved in a fashion representing the will of the majority (or, in some cases, a supermajority).

The problem is that certain problems do not readily produce clear majorities for specific solutions. Two of the most serious examples of this problem arise with abortion and gun rights. These two controversies have been raging for decades now and we have failed to achieve any kind of definitive resolution on either.

Instead, we rely on our courts to provide resolution of what are not legal problems but political ones. The courts are thus forced to find legal resolutions that simply don't exist. A good example of the problem is provided by this article explaining the semantic interpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005229.html#more

This is going too damn far. Here we have a detailed analysis of a major political problem, and the whole thing boils down to the correct interpretation of the grammatical role played by a comma. This makes the first clause of the sentence an "absolutive clausal adjunct". On and on the analysis goes, attempting to find meaning in a comma.

We see the same thing over and over in our political discourse: endless wrangling over the precise intentions of the Founding Fathers, microscopic parsing of their writings, all to decide 21st Century political controversies. If there's anything that's clear in the deliberations of the Constitution in 1789, it's that everybody then knew that it was an experiment, that it would likely require multiple amendments, and that we'd probably need a new Constitutional convention every few decades. And yet we treat this document as if it were sacred scripture handed down from God himself, containing all the political wisdom necessary to guide us into the furthest future.

Our problem here is political cowardice. We need politicians capable of tackling controversial issues forthrightly. But our democracy has decayed to the point where pressure groups can override the public interest. Poll after poll has shown that the American people are in general satisfied with the current abortion regime, but a minority of adamant opponents have paralyzed the debate, making it impossible for us to solve it once and for all.

The same thing applies to the endless debates on gun control. What we need is an amendment to the Constitution defining exactly what is and is not acceptable in modern America. Relying on the Second Amendment -- written when "arms" meant muskets and swords -- to make decisions about machine guns and hand grenades is just silly. But again, politicians are too frightened of the NRA to sit down and work out a reasonable compromise. So the problem festers and we end up squeezing ancient documents for wisdom that isn't there.