Out of the Woods

Our Democracy

A friend was recently deploring the state of our political landscape. She was troubled not only by the measures the government was taking and the utter chaos created by the president in his fairly random and unpredictable tweets, but also by the ordinary citizen’s sense of impotence. We can complain, she said, but there is really nothing we can do. We as ordinary citizens are without any power whatsoever to affect the conduct of this government. We have no power at all to moderate its hostility towards our friends or the support we are giving to brutal dictators all around the globe from North Korea to the Philippines to Israel or Russia.

She merely repeated what many other people have been saying: in our democracy citizens seem to be unable to affect legislative decisions or the apparently random policy choices of the executive.

But this time I stopped and asked a question: how can it be a democracy if citizens are unable to affect government decisions? Don't we always say that in a democracy the people rule? But how can the people rule if they have no power over the actions of their government?

We encounter here one of the contradictions in popular thinking about democracy. On the one hand, we consider a country a democracy if the citizens at large rule, that is, if they determine government policy perhaps not in intricate details but at least in broad outline. But on the other hand we think of democracies as systems where periodically the citizens cast ballots in favor of one representative instead of another and, sometimes, in favor or against a policy. In this way voters in different states, for instance, have decided to legalize the use of marijuana. On this view a reasonably well functioning electoral system is all a country needs to be considered a democracy.

But we can learn from our current condition, that casting ballots for representatives and the president does not give us the power to run our own lives in ways we choose. When the government takes small children away from their immigrant parents we can be totally outraged but whether that outrage affects government policy is up to the president and the people he chose to police our borders. If they do not respond to us, we are powerless to change their behavior.

The lesson to be learned from our present condition is that holding periodic elections, even if those elections are a squeaky clean, does not make us into a democracy. Only where the people rule can they claim to live in a democracy, where they have power to change government policy in specific instances, such as taking children away from their parents and detaining the parents under utterly deplorable conditions without proper bedding, clean water, and decent food.

As our government system is set up now, we, the voters, do not have the power to affect government policy. What kinds of changes would we need to restore the power that rightfully belongs to us?

It is interesting and distressing that this question is not being raised very often in America today. There is a great deal of discussion about different voting schemes, but there is no discussion, that I know of, of ways of restoring the power to the people.

But there are of course ideas that bear on this question. The most common example are discussions in different cities about citizens' review boards over police behavior. Here is a suggestion that the actions of a government agency, the police, should be regularly supervised by citizens who are not part of the police but are, instead, expected to represent the interests and concerns of citizens. In many places police behavior, especially towards African-Americans and Hispanic citizens, is often violent and demonstrably unjust. Citizens; review boards would possibly restore the citizens ability to exercise at least some control over police conduct.

Police in different localities have been quite successful in agitating against the institution of such review boards. Typically this particular government agency is quite unwilling to subject itself to the supervision by citizens. The same, of course, is true of many if not most government agencies. They may talk volubly about our democracy but they are really opposed to measures that might make our country more democratic.

We can hope to make our government more genuinely democratic by subjecting specific branches of the executive to citizens' supervision, for instance, by setting up police review boards. Electing school boards is another familiar technique. Citizen control over schools has been enhanced in some large cities by establishing local school boards to supervise the running of local schools by neighborhood groups. In other cities committees of patients at local health centers have been enlisted to mobilize neighborhoods in support of better health care and better health practices.

We actually know how to strengthen our democracy by instituting citizens participation in and supervision of government agencies. But the lack of citizen initiatives and the concerted resistance of government agencies has, so far, stymied many efforts. How can your neighborhood strengthen its ability to supervise government activities where you live?