Great post, Frank. I find the idea of a dispassionate scientific study of a science of government to be very appealing. But it's a sensitive thing to propose. Many people hear it as "let's hold another Constitutional Convention! Yee-haw!" and "Constitutional Fundamentalists" take it as an attack on the holy of holies. That's not a useful attitude. I'd rather play with it, and start by defining what's what.

People tend to collapse self-government and representative government into the all-encompassing term "democracy", but that confuses things. Democracy is a group decision-making tool while representative government is an organizational tool. And those things aren't set in stone and we can apply a "science of government" to come up with better tools. That part isn't sacred.

The third thing is the principle of the thing: "Self-government", however we implement it, is the only known moral form of government. It's the form that protects the weak from the strong through the weight of numbers of the weak. It's biased towards peace and law and order.

Maybe, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's democracy that's the worst form of self-government?

I look at American politics today and it sure looks like we've lost the knack for self-government. Or the will for it. Democracy doesn't seem to be working as a decision-making tool, because simply put, it's producing no decisions.

I don't know a solution to it, but I think it's important to define the problem first: The machinery of government has seized up--how do we fix it while preserving the principle of self-government? Everything but self-government is on the table as far as I'm concerned.