[thwest]

I want democracy to be about human to human negotiation. I don't want the basic unit of our society to be as abstract as one that would include corporations and unions (and computer programs? and other, smaller governments?). Corporations and unions exist to further human endeavors. To the extent that they aid individual humans, those humans will voice their support for higher-order structures. The higher-order structures should always be responsible to the entire field of individuals, and never granted moral status of their own.

[anigbrowl]

Unfortunately, other people want different things. Human to human negotiation gets tricky in larger populations; it's no accident that the American political landscape rapidly became dominated by parties despite the founders' ideals; if a group of people choose to delegate some of their moral authority to an entity like a party or a corporation, it's rather hard to articulate why they should not be able to do so. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.