Let's take as a basic precept of this essay that when we attempt to formulate a workable government that we'd all want to live under, our ultimate goal, whether we've ever thought of it this way or not, is wise government.

This is generally the desire of those who are going to be governed, when they attempt to formulate an idea form of government.  We want to be governed wisely and well.  We want our government to make good decisions, pass sound laws, spend the money it collects from us on useful things that will improve our lives.  All that, basically, adds up to 'wisdom'. 

The problem with this is two fold.  First, wisdom is a tough get.  Second, wise governance is rarely the aim of those who are going to do the governing.  They generally have substantially different objectives, like, amassing as much personal power to themselves for purposes of their own self-aggrandizement as possible. 

Let's deal with the first, first.  Wisdom is always a rare commodity.  You can find a wise person, and then, maybe, you can elevate that wise person into a position of authority where they will hopefully make wise decisions that will better the lives of those they govern.  But that's only a temporary solution, because, well, first, often times wisdom does not survive the accumulation of personal power (power being an intrinsically corruptive influence), and second, even if your wise ruler stays wise when given great power over others, there's no guarantee that said wise ruler will have a wise successor. 

This is the problem with monarchies and other tyrannies.  You find an enlightened, intelligent, and wise person to boss you around, and that works out for a while, but eventually that enlightened, intelligent and  wise person either turns into a sonofabitch or dies on you.  And then you're right back at square one.

Wisdom is a tough get.

Then we have the second thing, where the people who are going to do the governing are rarely interested in governing wisely, or in an enlightened fashion.  In fact, as a reliable rule, those who are interested in having power over other human beings are neither wise nor enlightened, although often, they are unpleasantly intelligent.  (Not always, as recent Presidencies will attest to.  But often.)

So then we turn to democracies, a form of government as old as the ancient Greeks.  This is where either the people vote, en masse, to decide every single matter that concerns them as a people, or, the people vote for a representative ruler or rulers to make these decisions for them.

This is even more of a problem.  When you allow the governed to vote on their government, you are basically making the governed part of the government.  And if wisdom is a tough get, if it is indeed a rare attribute (and it is) then the more you expand your government, the less wisdom you are going to have in it.  Democracies, by their very nature, are rarely very wise.

Yet we, the governed, yearn for wise government, and we have since we lived in caves and rude huts on fertile flood plains.  We yearn for it, yet it seems impossible to achieve... or, at least, when we do achieve it, it doesn't last long. 

This is where our American Founding Fathers did something truly radical.  Instead of creating what they thought would be a wise and enlightened form of government, they decided to abandon that natural but unrealistic yearning, and, instead, create a largely inept and inefficient government instead.

This is where We The People often go wrong, when we look back through our exceptionalist fog at the founding of the United States.  We think the patriots that created the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were idealists attempting to enact as close to a perfect kind of government as humans could conceive of.  We believe they wished to engineer a utopia.  Yet the actuality was, they were all pretty pragmatic.  They were younger sons of wealthy families who came to America because they were sick of the Church and the Crown confiscating all their crap.  When it turned out they hadn't come far enough to escape that nonsense, they fought a war to toss the Church and the Crown right the hell off their chosen continent of residence, and then they wrote documents to found a replacement government  that specifically delineated all the things that government would never, under any circumstances, be allowed to do.

They weren't angels, or slumming deities, or even  upright paragons of civic duty.  They were rough and they were tough and they owned the damn land they built on and farmed and they worked hard and they took no shit from anyone and, in point of fact, they were pretty goddam surly.  They wanted the minimum government necessary to get shit done, and they wanted to make damn sure that government didn't tax their incomes, steal their land, tell them what church to go to, or how to raise their families or treat their slaves. 

So instead of making any kind of attempt to create a wise government, which they knew was doomed from the beginning, they created a government that, for the most part, wouldn't know its ass from a hole in the ground.  They figured, sure, inevitably any kind of authority is going to corrupt those we allow to have it, so when that does happen, we'll make sure that there isn't a whole lot of power for those corrupted government officials to abuse.  They put in checks and balances.   They deliberately created a system that could, and would, tie itself into knots at every opportunity. 

And then they retired to their tobacco plantations to futter their slaves in relative impunity.

Enlightened, wise leaders and visionaries these laddies were not.  Sullen reprobates who didn't want anyone to screw around with them and theirs, they certainly were.  And that's the kind of government they set up, and it's the kind of government we have.

Yet here we are, 233 years later, and we're sick right up to our gorges with government bungling, government corruption, and, lately, outright government malevolence.  We want a wiser government for sure... and presuming we can somehow manufacture one out of the empty ether, then we want a more efficient and functional one, as well.

But honestly, we're expecting way too much of ourselves and our rulers.  If wisdom is hard to find on an individual basis (and it is) it is virtually impossible to find in a group.  Winnow the global population for the wisest individuals you can ferret out, then put those wise people into a room together and ask them to do anything as a group... come up with a plan for directing traffic at a rock concert, say.  Whatever wisdom each of them has will evaporate instantly the minute they sit down at that conference table; let them bicker and yell and scream at each other for four solid hours, and the only thing they will have settled is that the person who has to refill the coffee pot is whoever was out of the room going to the bathroom when the vote was finally taken. 

So we want wise government...especially in times of crisis... but we can't have it.  It's simply not realistic to expect it out of any group of human beings.

Probably the best thing to do, if we want wise government for a while, is to find a wise person and give them emergency powers until this mess gets straightened out.  Yet I look back at the eight years we all just went through and shudder at that thought, because that, essentially, is exactly the argument that Bush and the Republican Party were making the entire time Bush was in office.  And it resulted in a spectacular global debacle. 

Personally, I think Barack Obama is a one of a kind visionary and a genuinely wise person, and we could do far, far worse than make him Dictator for the next six years.  But I don't recommend that as a permanent form of government by any means. 

For one thing, I ain't no genius.  I could be wrong about Mr. Obama.

For another, I'm just not a big believer in Dictatorships or Tyrannies.  I'm of the opinion that if we, as a people, cannot make our democracy function wisely and well, then, well, we get what we deserve, pretty much.