Yes, the proper focus of behavior would be directly on the issues. Or, second-best (sometimes a poor second-best) at least on allegedly issue-focused political parties. Yes, it’s too bad that behavior to influence public decisions is instead focused on individual candidates and money for them.

But the trend toward this actual behavior was and is not accidental. The behavior was and is enabled and favored by the USA political systems’ established constitutional and legal rules. Not only the USA rules which favor individual office-holders, each in their satrapies, versus political parties. But more fundamentally the world-wide conventional rules whereby all public decisions get made by a relative few long-term expensively-elected or appointed officeholders, and the ordinary citizen’s role is reduced to that of an occasional mass-voter cipher.

A sustainable improvement can be expected only after change of these system rules, so that the forces and currents which arise from the rules will favor good rather than bad behavior.

Unfortunately, the article’s well-intentioned proposed solutions overlook this. They amount to relying on voluntary charity (in this case from organized labor) to solve a systemic problem rather than directly attacking the ongoing source of the problem. (It’s as if we were told to rely on voluntary charity to feed the destitute, without recourse to systematic economic stimulus and public welfare.)

Rather than asking for voluntary action to swim upstream against the currents and forces that are generated by the system rules, what is needed is to change the rules, so as to alter the course of the ensuing natural currents and forces, so that good behavior equates just to swimming downstream.

As the article suggests, all might be a lot better if only we the citizens were always ‘organized’. However, in truth most of us do not have the combination of time and inclination to be forever ‘organized’ on all our favorite issues. Nor – given a reasonable system of public decision-making – would we need to be.

We would do better, with far less prolonged pain, to focus on organizing once to do but one thing: once and for all to change the decision-making system. Today’s handing over of decision-making to the same few, for long periods and over many issues, is a recipe for over-concentration and abuse of power and thus also (per Lord Acton’s famed warning) for corruption. It’s a recipe for alienating and wasting the knowledge, zeal and contributions of all the non-elite citizenry. Rather, we need a system where public-decision-making power is decentralized to the great mass of citizens – which in our day is reasonably well educated and qualified to help make close-to-home (and yet other) decisions. Well-deliberated decisions could be made by each of many short-term randomly constituted citizens’ decision juries.

Rather than having to agonize day-in day-out how to influence and in many cases super-perk and corrupt the oligarchic poohbahs that make all the big and little public decisions, we ordinary citizens would need but to take our turns in manageable short-term jury stints.