Looking for Real Democracy? - Look Around

By Kirkpatrick Sale

It is usually claimed that the United States is a democracy, but you only have to think about it for a minute to realize that a term that means “rule by the people” has to be mightily and torturously stretched to apply to a system in which the people make none of the consequential decisions of the nation.

We are allowed to vote every so often among an array of candidates we seldom know to select one that will make thousands of decisions in our name for the next two or six years. They do not know, and do not pretend to know, what we think before they make those decisions—and, after all, the members of the House of Representatives actually “represent” an average of 643,000 people in their individual home districts and could not possibly find out even if they wanted to.

And even when they make their decisions for us, they have almost no way of knowing how those will turn out after being handed to an Executive of a whole bunch of other people, many of whom have political agendas of their own and most of whom are hirelings in the civil service with still other interests and priorities.

Far from being “rule by the people,” this system provides rule by 535 people who theoretically make the laws and 2,800,000 people who carry them out, or not. Except that “rule” doesn't actually make any sense in such a context, since such a crowd of people is capable of attending to only a tiny part of the actions that ultimately effect the way things are run.

But that's not the way it has been through history—or prehistory. For most of the time since we became Homo sapiens, decisions were made by tribal systems, where, as near as we can tell, most of the individuals actually had a say in what went on because that was, evolutionarily, the most efficient way to survive. Even when empires and suchlike arose in the Neolithic, the great majority of people continued to arrange affairs on a local level with considerable democracy at work—again, not because they knew anything about political science but because that was the efficient way to build the roads, collect the harvest, allocate the spoils.

You have only to look closely at how towns actually took the principal decisions of their lives most places on earth to see that, for many centuries, some form or other of the town meeting generally operated—and more than once a year, to be sure—regardless of whether or what kind of higher political body existed. The ancient Greek city-states all had some kind of democratic rule—that's where the word comes from, after all—when they were left alone and people like Alexander didn't mess with their power. In Barbary during the 17th and 18th centuries there were various beys and whatnots nominally in power, but the decisions of life were made by local djemmas, (in effect, town meetings). In 19th century Russia, where matters of foreign policy and military operations were decided by the Tsars and their corrupt and cruel courtiers, the matters of daily life, government on the local level, was in the hands of the mirs, not exactly democratic bodies to be sure, but with widespread input and consensual decisions. And so on: democracy operated at a local level because decisions had to be made, and it worked.

The story of the modern nation state is the story of the effective destruction of town-level democracy—democracy in the sense that all of the people (or in some cases all of the men) of a place made the central decisions—almost everywhere in the world. Of course, towns and cities are allowed to make a variety of local decisions and are empowered to carry out the laws and regulations made at higher levels, but all the really important matters, particularly having to do with economics, banking, trade, and currency, are made at the national level, even in states that trumpet their allegiance to “democracy.”

The exceptions are to be found in just two places—Switzerland and the United States. In Switzerland, some important decisions are still made at the level of about 3,000 communes that average about 4,000 people each, and in two places, Apenzell Innerrhoden (population 5,587) and Glarus (38,000), there are annual meetings of the entire population (Landsgemeinde) over the age of 18 to decide major matters. In addition to which, to assure direct democracy as much as it can be in a nation of 7 million people, Switzerland has regular referendums, recalls, and initiatives, at both cantonal and national levels, by which people (since 1993 both women and men) can and do influence significant policies—as is clear from the fact that more than half the provisions of the Swiss constitution were the result of referendums or ballot initiatives.
In the United States, as near as I can tell, there are meaningful town meetings only in the six states of New England and in four anomalous towns in Minnesota originally settled by migrants from New England. As is clear from Frank Bryan's masterful Real Democracy, an analysis of “the New England Town Meeting and How It Works” (Chicago, 2004), this is an institution that still has some significance and in a general sense is an effective expression of the people's will—or at least as much as any institution can be in a huge and populous nation like this.

Not that town meetings are a perfect panacea. To be effective, they can operate only on a small scale—as Bryan shows, a quarter of the meetings are held in towns with fewer than 1,000 residents, 7 per cent in towns under 200, and only 2 percent with more than 5,000. What's more, he shows that as the size of the town increases, the meetings become less democratic, in the sense that a smaller percentage of the town participates and fewer people speak. Attendance varies not only by town size, but also by state—in Connecticut, an average of only 9 per cent of the eligible population turns out. Even in Vermont, which has the highest, an average of only 26 per cent of those eligible actually comes to vote.

That suggests some real weakness in the system, and yet it reflects another aspect of democracy—you don't have to go vote unless you want to. Of course, in an effective democracy high attendance is not only more representative but more efficient, since more varied ideas and approaches are aired, but choosing not to attend is a form of voting, too.

You might call it pre-voting abstinence.

And one reason that attendance is sometimes low is that the matters to be discussed are just not relevant to many people, or they decide they aren't, or there is no strong impetus to change things that have been settled by other folks for a long time. In Vermont in particular, a great many matters of importance are settled on a state level, which is why there is such a good turnout for most state elections, and why they happen every two years—and why there are more state legislators per capita in Vermont than any other state save New Hampshire. Since there are no real county or district governments, matters of almost any size that extend beyond town borders have to be dealt with by the state legislature.

Nonetheless, the town meetings represent real democracy, with all its shortcomings, and have proved to be an effective way of conducting town business for more than 200 years. As in times of yore, they continue to operate because they work, which is the finest proof that the voice of the people, expressed in a direct face-to-face meeting, is the best form of government the world has yet come up with.

In fact, so good not only in its achievement but in its image, lying in the minds of all Americans at some not-necessarily-verbal level, that “town meeting” is now used in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with governance at all. Starting some time in the Carter era, I think, politicians began to assemble ordinary folk in an assembly hall, let them ask questions, and call it a “town meeting,” though the people there were not going to propose any laws or vote on any resolutions. Bush would have hand-picked Republicans with hand-picked softball questions assembled every so often on his campaign trail, and call this perversion of democracy a “town meeting.” And now it's gotten so that any group of ordinary folks brought together for a discussion, be it of AIDS, or a new product, or qualities desired in a university president, gets called a “town meeting.”

Such perversion of language, typical of a mass society that needs to twist words to disguise its true nature, is at least a sign of one thing. The fundamental idea of rule by the people, and at a modest scale, is so fundamental to the human soul, perhaps by now even coded in our genes, that it can probably never be eradicated.

As the New England town meeting still reminds us.