Radical politics

Seeing the field of the GOP's presidential candidates evolve—or rather disintegrate, as it were—with several of the remaining ones proposing wild and seemingly simple plans of reducing the deficit or balancing the budget or reducing the federal government and its effect on people's lives, whatever the daily fad turns out to be, one cannot help but thinking about likewise desperate measures to demonstrate convincingly that those plans not only will not work but will ruin the country, set back the US in the sciences, advanced technologies, the economy, in personal health, and as a society, to name just the most visible aspects.

So what could be done? What is the problem with these proposals?  It is, of course, that all these ideas and measures touted as remedy for perceived ills in our nation are based on theoretical models of usually narrowly defined parts of society, or commerce, or economy, or finances, etc.  That is, of course, a general problem with theory:  It is hard predict what the outcome would exactly be, and difficult to make an estimate of the "unintended consequences" in other areas affected by the model.

There is, however, a general solution for deciding whether a theoretical model of reality is correct or wrong, a solution which has long been established in the sciences, in particular in physics. That solution is to do an experiment.  But how could this method be practically transferred from the sciences to politics, in this particular case, in this situation in which we currently find ourselves in the USA?  Well, it is actually quite obvious: Let's elect Santorum or Gingrich or Paul president and also make sure that the GOP has the majority in both houses of Congress. Then let's all support the motions for laws and acts and other political tools that the Republican Party puts on the table by not raising any rational objections, by resisting the urge to point out fallacies in their thinking or to extrapolate the effect of certain measures beyond a year or two.

The more support the whole nation gives the GOP the faster and more deeply the implemented measures will take effect. It can be hoped that before the second term of the new president comes to an end, so many people in our nation will be in so dire straits, demonstrably caused by the new policies that were implemented, that there will be either a revolution by the deprived masses that overthrows the GOP's government or at least a populist consensus on the reasons nothing in the society works anymore and a new political paradigm would have to be installed under which one could have a real democracy here as originally intended.

That means politicians will be completely independent from any interest groups, would have a proven capability to collaborate, would be well educated in the specific area of expertise they represent in the gremiums that propose laws (so that such gaffes as happened with accepting the fact of global warming and consequent climate changes would not take so long that affordable countermeasures would be coming too late).  Another desirable feature of the new politics would be a third party that could balance the political spectrum and represent the interests of the people rather than that of the establishment or of the backward religious right and that would not be afraid to look around in the world to find out how other countries with a much higher level of education, science, health, and societal structure are running their affairs.