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...Its people. Every form of government that has ever succeeded seemed like a good idea at the time, which is why enough people were willing to cooperate with it to make it function. But no form of government has ever worked as well in practice as its founders thought it would. Every form of government in history has always been based on an incomplete understanding of human behavior. A functional universal understanding of human behavior exists now, but it's been discovered by-- who else-- evolutionary theorists, of which I am one.
In our case, our government is (supposedly) controlled by votes cast by its citizens. Supposedly we have a secular government. But voters cast their votes based on what they believe to be true about the world, regardless of why they believe those things to be true. If the secular goverment is controlled by votes cast by people who hold their personal beliefs for religious reasons, you don't have a secular government.
Enter the Christian Coalition and other Christian fundamentalist groups. They build their political ideology in a secular fashion on beliefs a majority of Americans hold about the world for religious reasons. You can read all about it at www.theocracywatch.org.
The Christian Theocrofascists have seized control of our government by outmaneuvering our political system. In effect, they have made themselves a third party in our two party system. But instead of running candidates, they control such a large number of votes that no politician can get elected without offering the Theocrofascists what they want. So no matter which candidate gets elected, the Theocrofascists always win, because whoever doesn't offer them what they want doesn't win elections. Obviously that's more true in some states than it is in others, but that's the basic idea.
Luckily, a lot of progressive Christian leaders and other religious leaders have been figuring this out, and are trying to mobilize a political force to counteract the Theocrofascists. You can find a couple groups at www.tikkun.org and www.crosswalkamerica.org.
I'm contributing to that in my own way by masterminding a fourth party that can replace the Theocrofascists as the dominant alternate party in America. The Theocrofascists have woefully underestimated the uses of evolutionary science, because at this point there is not one single characteristic of humanity that can't be traced down to the evolutionary origins of our species. That means that (strange as it may sound), it's possible to use evolutionary science to write a book that does everything the Bible does, only better, because instead of being founded on an understanding of the world held by a certain group of people who lived 2,000 years ago on the other side of the world, it's founded on characteristics that everyone in the world is guaranteed to have in common by virtue of their membership in the Homo sapies species. Poets, philosophers, progressive activists, and progressive religious leaders have been trying to write a new story of the world for decades, but the one critical component that was missing up until a couple of years ago was a working understanding of how all the components of human behavior fit together. So once that working understanding of human behaviro was complete, all that left to do was to fit together all the things that progressively-minded people were trying to say. You can download my free audio book from www.newbookforanewworld.com.
There's one other political movement I can think of that's winning a lot of support right now. If you were to poll everyone under 30 and ask whether they were Democrats, Republicans, belonged to some other political party, or had given up believing that voting for anyone would ever solve anything and had started looking for ways to solve problems in the world independantly of government, I'm will to bet that more people under 30 would identify with Anarchism than with any other political party. I know a lot of Anarchists who agree that President Bush has done more to attract people to Anarchism than anyone else in history. First our two party system effectively shut any other political party out of being able to participate effectively in our political system, and then the Theocrofascists lured so many people into voting for their political goals that they turned our two party system into a one party system. So currently, Anarchism is the only other politcal movement anyone has to choose from. A good place to find out more about this is www.infoshop.org.
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