Designing a Political Party Platform

Wouldn't you just love to sit down with a clean piece of paper and design a political party platform from scratch? There would be no vested interests, no dedicated partisans, no history and no personalities. You could start at first principles and work from there. Fun, eh? This is just what I'm going to do.

A Political Party Platform
by Frank Hilliard

Before writing a political party platform you first have to decide how the world works. Specifically, are you trying to 'improve' society or do you accept that society is essentially immutable? Are you a Progressive or a Realist? Can you make the distinction between upgrading infrastructure and upgrading the people who use it?

This is the great divide between Marxism, communism, progressivism, fascism, statism and the left generally and liberal democracy and conservatism on the right. The first group wants to fix society by changing its environment, the second believes any successful social engineering program would destroy our liberties and freedoms. The former tends to be atheist, the latter tends to be religious.

The reason the split is along religious lines is that to the non believer human society is just as mailable as rock and dirt. If you can build bridges, you can create societies. And since there is no hereafter, one should start such a project immediately if not sooner. To a believer—and here I mean a believer in good and evil—improving society begins and ends with improving the self and if possible, the family. The world is seen as an intractable mix of good, bad, evil, pure, wonderful and disgusting and therefore not amenable to change, or at least, not amenable to change at a cost that is worth paying.

So, to boil all this down, we're talking about the value of human liberty. Is it to be tossed away for some greater good, or is it to be preserved against the forces that would enslave us all? And not just human liberty, but life itself. Hitler and the Nazis, in an attempt to 'purify' the Germanic people, tried to kill all the Roma and all the Jews. Tommy Douglas, in an attempt to 'purify' the Canadian people, suggested sterilizing the mentally challenged. Both, in their misguided way, treated people as dispensable. Both in their way, treated political power as the originator of morality. Both were wrong.

Christians, Jews and other religions, believe morality is above politics; that some things are so important and so true they exist as eternal verities, eternal rights. This is expressed in both the Canadian and American constitutions and in the fact, in Britain, that the government is under the Queen who, in turn, rules under God. No statist, from the French revolutionaries to Pol Pot, believes anyone or any thing is above his power and control.

So are we all clear now? Progressives vs Realists, atheists vs the religious, natural law vs God's law; where will we start and what will we say? What will be our guiding principles? Let me start with a few axioms and statements I believe are factually true:

1. Humanity and human society are essentially immutable and can't be changed though outside pressure. Any attempt to force change through laws and regulations will only work at the expense of the general liberty of all and will not, in any case, be permanent.
2. Since all human institutions are open to abuse, the political process must operate under the authority of divine law expressed as moral codes.
   
3. It is demonstrably true that a majority, actually a large majority, of any population will join a 'social contract' and agree to live under and by generally accepted rules because this expands individual freedoms (from chaos, death, poverty). However, a persisting minority will not.
   
4. Methods to arrive at what is 'generally accepted' are the reasons we have juries, elections, judicial panels and democratic government. All seek to find the majority opinion because the majority opinion is the one society will agree to live by without coercion.
   
5. This process is so complex and so fraught with difficulty, it has taken thousands of years to arrive at systems (customs, laws, government) which themselves have majority support.
   

So, given all this, what should my fresh, new political party have as its basic policies and beliefs? Here goes:

The Platform

The New political party believing in the supreme authority of God, the rights of the majority of the citizens of this country, the value of time-tested institutions and the goal of maximizing individual liberty, hearby proposes the following basic policies:

1. The coercive power of the state must at all times be controlled by majority opinion reached through time-tested democratic political processes in which each vote has equal weight.
   
2. The state, because of its potential for misuse, must be kept to the minimum necessary to protect the citizenry from outside attack and to enforce the laws decided by the majority upon a minority which rejects the majority opinion, otherwise known as the social contract.
3. The basic moral code, or supreme law, should be taught to children at an early age.
   
4. In order for the citizens to get a good understanding of what the majority opinion is in the society, a period of two years of public or military service will be required of all citizens between the ages of 17 and 19 years of age. During this period, they will live, work and play in various mixed groups selected at random and based on ability and interest.
   
5. To maintain itself as a viable entity, the state shall promote a policy of domestic replication, specifically a fertility rate of 2.1 children per female and an immigration rate equal to but not exceeding the emigration rate.
   
6. Taxation, necessary to run the state, maintain regional and local government, build infrastructure, staff the justice system and provide education and health services shall be a combination of consumption and income taxation arranged in such a way that entrepreneurship and innovation are rewarded rather than penalized.
7. Because the temptation of greed is so powerful in the human condition, strict controls must be put on financial transactions, banking and investment and all of these activities should be done in public, under agreed rules and regulations scrutinized by independent boards and agencies.
8. The judicial system should have as its primary goal the protection of society.
9. The head of state shall be hereditary because any other system invites abuse.

There, that's about it. I welcome your suggestions, additions and (hopefully not) corrections.

Update May 1, 2012
I have formed a political party. Not exactly as described, but close.