The primary entities of our modern day politics, the national political party, was deemed anathema to good government. This view was the consensus view not only of those who gathered in Philadelphia during the hot and muggy summer of 1787 to draft the world's first written constitution - it was the view held in the canon of political theory from the Greeks of Ancient Athens, the birthplace of the concept of democracy, through the founding of America and into the 20th century. Only then did American Political Scientists, explicitly and overtly rejecting the primary premises in the Constitution's design (the Separation of Powers and the strong role of the people in an often indirect, yet vital, role in the governing process), begin the process of legitimizing the concept of parties and the idea of a two-party system.
They saw the parties as an extra-Constitutional means to "bridge" the powers (the three branches of government), because amending the Constitution to eliminate it was impractical. They sought to transform our politics to resemble what they came to view as the actual ideal form of government, arguing Madison and his fellow generation had gotten it wrong, in the notion of the "fusion" of powers that the Victorian writer, Walter Bagehot, in describing in a significantly idealized form, declared to be the "efficient secret" within the modern, unwritten, British constitution.
Only in the twentieth century did this become a normalized premise of government, rejecting the maxim of Montesquieu universally cited during the nation's founding era, that the fusion of powers into the same hands (now the hands of a single party as opposed to an individual person) was the very epitome if not definition of tyranny.
These Political Scientists also agreed with Bagehot's contempt for the notion that a true democracy, where the people had a formal, even if largely indirect, role in the actual process of governance. Instead the role assigned to the people in their theoretical models, but soon legitimized as the norms of actual practice, was to have an extremely limited role: the choice, one day every two or four years, of either approving of or removing and substituting the ruling party by being given a choice limited to one of two - the presently governing party or the party in opposition. Indeed they redefined democracy from the concept of popular self-government to the mere process of determining, via elections, a clear majority victor - in a choice, therefore, necessarily limited only to one of two major or elite parties, in order to produce an outcome in which one of the two had a clear majority, into a distorted and neutered form that only retained the superficial appearance and terminology, while rejecting the actual substance of democracy.
The Constitution ratified after a year long, and nearly unsuccessful, struggle in 1788 had one primary purpose - it aimed to establish a set of institutions and procedures that would NEGATE the effects of any and all political parties that might emerge - insulating the government from the deleterious effects of partisanship and in essence hoping to have inoculated the nation from this deadly disease. Unfortunately in this they did not succeed. Today we are seeing the culmination of the harmful effects of this infection of party spirit, now viewed as legitimate and even necessary, tearing apart the nation to a degree unseen since the Crisis of the 1850's. A crisis in large part due to the inability of the two major parties to address the nation's most serious problems, that ultimately tore the nation apart in costly and deadly Civil War.
If we are to prevent repeating the historical errors of the past we must not avert our eyes to the inner workings of today's normalized and legitimized processes of government. Indeed we must continually critically evaluate and challenge the notion that what has become normalized is therefore necessarily legitimate. We must look deep into the sausage-making process and rightfully feel disgust and revulsion knowing that in truth it is not a fact of necessity but one of choice. And thus recognizing that we, therefore, have the power - indeed the duty, to begin to make different choices.
Wikileaks has provided us with not only a valuable, but an indispensable, window into the process of government and politics as practiced by the political class established in the two major parties - in particular the current ruling party (at least in terms of control of the executive branch of government).
But understanding what is within the leaked emails is difficult given both the massive quantity and the partial releases (ongoing in small batches over time) of the data. The latter, however, is not necessarily a shortcoming or error in terms of how Wikileaks has chosen to reveal to all what they have learned. By releasing the material in small batches over time it is far easier for people to go through and find significant portions - whereas if they were all released at once not only would the story likely die, as the news cycle is perhaps as deleterious to the nation's health as the presidential election cycle, within a week or two; but it would likely thereby only focus on a small set of items within the whole as if they alone were the material of significance. There is a wealth of information within the Podesta emails. And it will take time, patience, and critical scrutiny to fully digest what they reveal about the current crisis of legitimacy we, as a nation, are mired within.
But it is not easy to do. Currently each new release brings a flurry of activity as people frantically search through looking for interesting individual tidbits to focus upon. The big picture is not likely to be grasped by such a hunt and peck approach. Yet even using the online search engine provided by Wikileaks does not always bring up all the content one is seeking. It leads to a frenetic and often necessarily random approach combing through the latest released batch of usually about a thousand seeking who can be the first to discover the significant needles in the seeming haystack of emails.
I thus offer this guide to navigating the Podesta emails in the interest of seeking to help make sense of the whole - providing a big picture of what they contain - as well as to provide a sense of what is yet to come - what remains at this time unreleased that Wikileaks will continue to reveal over the next weeks as we approach the November presidential election.
THE PODESTA EMAILS
We still don't know how much more evidence of the corrupted sausage-making politics of everyday governance in America that Wikileaks possesses. And every effort is being made to convince us to avert our eyes: from the baseless claim that even viewing them is unlawful, to the absurd argument that the process is dangerous, to the facially farcical notion that the documents are not real but are forgeries, and to the as yet foundationless argument that this is the work of Putin's Russia seeking to undermine American democracy.
If the argument were not already disturbing enough, that a citizenry informed with facts otherwise being denied them, could in any way undermine democracy (To the contrary - the withholding of such evidence is problematic to the realization of democracy in practice - which is why the real controversy over the Clinton emails is not the red-herring of whether she revealed classified information to our enemies, but the conscious and concerted effort she took to withhold from the public what the law, in the various public
records statutes, sought to guarantee in the interest of public accountability of agencies and officials which is necessary for an actual democracy to exist.); a close look to the only formal statement of the basis for the Russia claim that is uncritically reported, almost universally, as if it were fact " when not one single fact or evidentiary claim has been given to justify the reports.
Here is what James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, actually stated as reported in the New York Times, as the basis for the formal claim by the government (and now actual retaliatory measures being taken in a dangerous extension of national partisan politics into geopolitical posturing) and the sole basis upon which the entirety of mainstream journalism has, reminiscent of their coverage of claims of weapons of Mass of Mass Destruction in the lead up to an extremely costly war in Iraq, uncritically and improperly reported to the public as if it was a fact [click here]:
"We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities."
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