Keeping 'We' in 'We the People'

Until finals are over (1 more week) I'm planning on running re-runs of my papers this semester. At least there will be new posts...and some quite appropriate as we are about to enter hunting season--I mean, election year 2008.

My public policy midterm asked "Is the US public too ignorant to govern itself?"

Removing the American public from the governance of this country, even if as Hardin states they would get the same outcome if they did not vote, would fundamentally undermine the very concept of a country built on the principle of restrained government power and explicit rights of the individual from government protected in a constitution. If the people are taken out of “We the People,” it in effect cements into place every discrimination and social inequality that has to date not been resolved. The representatives of the American people are not representative of the people, and without public involvement in the process, however limited, there is no incentive for their interests to be considered.
Congress is overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged. The hundreds of thousands of constituents per representative of the House largely do not fit that profile, at least half of them after all being biologically female. As mentioned in class, only 16.3% of Congress is female, 3% of the Senate is Latino, and there is one lone African-American in the Senate. If this group of representatives were left to make decisions for constituents they share little to no common life experiences, with no input or threat of ouster by the people they represent, there is more than a fleeting chance that social services would be distributed even less equally than at present and laws preventing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace would not be made into law. Such issues of discrimination would simply not have been experienced by the vast majority of officials.
Historically, the view that "the people" could not govern themselves and needed the help of an aristocratic and benevolent elite to guide them was widely accepted. Some might say that with the emergence of professional politicians in the U.S. we are returning to this school of thought in some regard. As we discussed in the class, the more highly specialized a field becomes, the easier it is for political decisions to pose as technical ones. Removing the people from the process of governance removes yet one more barrier to keeping corruption in check.
Hardin has a dim view of how Americans make decisions on important political issues such as spending on foreign policy. However, one can argue that it is not the ignorance of the average American so much as it is the politicization of the (mis)information she has access to that lies underneath the problem of a misinformed citizenry. Increasingly polarized parties and media outlets shape the course of debate, skewing statistics as it suits the issue. The prevalence of interest groups in theory provides one recourse for citizens to speak truth to power. Groups with the largest numbers of members sharing their concerns are by and large the most effective groups in Washington. Their power comes from the number of engaged citizens they bring to the table with them when meeting about their issues. Yet even with this power, placing politicians above the reach of the public's vote would remove the bulk of their leverage in getting the ear of members of Congress.
It is a slippery slope to remove power from people to have a place at the table of governance. We routinely point fingers at other nations with less democratic participation—perhaps China one day or Russia the next—and decry the ways the will of the people living there is suppressed and ignored. We see the results in exposes on levels of pollution in Chinese rivers, injured miners, or patronage in Russian political circles. We do not say that the people in those nations are too ignorant to question their leaders or fight for change; instead, we applaud them. We should hold ourselves to a higher standard, but we do not do that by removing our power as citizens.