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?

Conversations about politics

One of my instructors in college, soon after the end of World War II, insisted that if the US government had wanted to establish concentration camps, it would not have had difficulties finding guards. In every nation, he insisted, one could find people given to violence and brutality to match the guards in German concentration camps.

The separation of babies, infants and children from their parents as they come across the border with Mexico, reminds me of these conversations in college. It appears that there is no shortage of border guards who are willing to take children from their parents. According to one story a nursing baby was taken from its mother's breast. The President has succeeded in persuading enough people of the evils of unlawful immigration to dispose over an adequate force of men and women ready to detain those immigrants and to split up their families.

How can we deal with these fellow citizens who loyally execute presidential policies that a majority of Americans regard as repugnant and inconsistent with our values?

Democrats are rallying to take back majorities in the House and the Senate by making sure that everyone on their side will actually go and vote this November. That is clearly a good policy but, by itself, it is incomplete. If they succeed and House and Senate will once again have democratic majorities, the quarter or a third of our population that is persuaded that their economic problems are to be blamed on illegal immigration, on Muslims, and other people from abroad will, once again, not have effective political representation. But they will remain where they are, waiting for another electoral cycle when they, once more, will have significant political power. Conservatives currently force their vision on liberals and progressives. If the Left wins the upcoming elections, they will be in a position to force their views on the Right. But the conflict will remain unresolved. The democracy we aspire to in which all the people govern themselves together will remain as remote as ever.

If we are to strengthen the democratic aspects of our society, we need to reduce the extent to which opponents coerce each other. Besides changing the majorities in Congress, we need to talk to our fellow citizens whom Trump inflames with his rhetoric. But how will we talk to them? Can we persuade them that they are wrong and we are right?

Conversations about political disagreements, for instance about immigration usually begin as attempts of each side to convince their opponents that they are mistaken, that what they regard as facts are actual errors, that their inferences are faulty, and their values questionable. But soon these attempts at mutual persuasion degenerate into shouting matches. Emotions rise, mutual understanding fails completely.

We tend to blame this failure of conversations about politics on the irrationality of our opponents. Instead of listening carefully to our arguments, examining our evidence and trying to pinpoint agreements and disagreements, they reject out of hand what we have to say. Irrationality manifests itself as unwillingness to listen carefully and respectfully. Rationality involves respect of the opponent in all but the most extreme cases. A necessary precondition of serious conversations between political enemies is mutual respect. We cannot talk to each other if we secretly believe the other side to be stupid, misinformed, brainwashed by propaganda. Any sort of political conversation that might actually be useful presupposes that each side is willing to recognize the other side as an equal partner in the conversation, as a partner to learn from and not merely as a benighted ignoramus to be an enlightened by our superior understanding.

But this form of irrationality is not the exclusive characteristic of conservatives. Leftists and progressives too often fail to listen with care and respect to their conservative opponents. Both sides to political controversy need to make, often difficult, efforts to listen and respond respectfully to their opponents.

You cannot have that kind of mutually respectful conversation with everybody. Some opponents may be too rigid or, yes, too unintelligent to be able to participate. Some are unable or unwilling to manage their strong commitments to a specific political stance. But there are enough people one could have a useful conversation with if only one tried.

Many families have members on either side of this political divide. If family members do not get along, have never gotten along, have always secretly despised each other, a useful political dialogue is not in their future. But there also are family members who sort of like each other except for their very different political orientation.

These are the people that should give each other the benefit of the doubt and explore quietly their differences as well as their shared values in order to discover why they have such different assessments of the President's agenda. Here is a chance for each to learn something, to broaden their understanding of one another and perhaps even to learn from each other.

Similarly, friends and acquaintances, co-workers are in relationships that allow for possibly enlightening conversations. Rarely will they persuade each other to give up cherished political principles. But instead of remaining completely at loggerheads, unable to understand each other or to have informative conversations, they may find enough agreements to engage in joint actions. Even though they continue to differ in deep ways, they can resolve disagreements sufficiently to act in concert.

As long as each party to current political divides insists that they are right and their opponents incompetent, bumbling, and mistaken our political system will oscillate between "progressive" and conservative majorities coercing their opponents. When each is in power they will force the others to follow their policies. Cooperation will be rare and insignificant.

Cooperation is possible only among groups that manage to have useful conversations and those are possible only when each party is genuinely willing to listen to the other and is prepared to change its mind, to appreciate the insights of the opponent in order to forge some kind of, however limited, consensus. The determination of each side to shoe the other side the error of its ways, instead of being of the essence of rationality, makes rational conversation impossible.

For that to happen both sides need to speak to each other respectfully.

Rule of the People or of Majorities

We say two things about democracy. Both of them are sort of true. But it is easy to see that they cannot be true at the same time. And that creates a problem for our understanding of what democracy is.

The first thing we say is that in a democracy the people rule. To be sure, we do not govern. We do not issue executive orders, issue driver's licenses, or building permits. The government does that. But we always have a supervisory role because we elect representatives to the legislature and we elect the head of the Executive, the president. Persons to fill many other important jobs in the executive must be approved by the elected representatives. All of this is familiar.

We also say that our democracy is an electoral system where there are periodic votes, with every vote having the same weight and getting counted only once. Votes are secret so that no one is exposed to political pressure for the vote they cast. When not everyone casts votes for the same candidate, for instance, the majority wins. Where two or more candidates compete the one who has more votes gets elected.

The people who vote for the majority, whose candidate gets elected thereby gain some influence over the next government and thus may be said to rule.

But what about the minority? What about the people who work really hard for their candidate who is, for whatever reason, less popular and does not win? They have no influence over the government. They have no influence at all. They cannot really be said to rule.

Here is our problem then. When we practice electoral democracy with majority rule only the winners of elections maybe said to rule and the other people do not. When we say that democracy consists of an electoral system with majority rule, we seem to contradict the other thing we say, namely that in a democracy, the people—meaning all the people—rule.

Many people are fully aware of the tension between the different ways in which we describe democracy. If it were easier for us to come to agreement on different things or on who is the best candidate for a particular job, obviously this would not be a problem. The people would make their choices by "consensus" as it is called. They would discuss a matter, consider alternative proposals for resolving an existing problem and then figure out the best resolution of the problem and adopt that. Once everyone agreed, the only thing remaining to do would be to execute the policy agreed on.

That scenario would obviously be lovely but it is, in our world quite unrealistic. In almost any situation we are unable to reach agreement. To this many people say: “Yes, majority rule is a second best arrangement but it's really not so bad.” Electoral systems with majority rule are widely accepted as an acceptable form of democracy. 

But to do so is a mistake. Decisions are made only by a portion of the citizenry. The minority has nothing to say and it is not  accidental who belongs to the winning majority. The people who can pay for expensive lobbyists,who can afford to hire high-class advertising agencies to promote their perspectives  win most elections; the people who are poor, who work more than one job and therefore have no time to agitate on behalf of their points of view usually lose. Electoral systems with majority rule are not democratic. They produce oligarchies, the rule of mere portions of the population, of the wealthy, the owners, the employers.

The defenders of electoral democracy will argue that we have no choice because people just cannot agree and therefore we need to fall back on majority rule. But this defense of majority rule completely ignores the fact that there are a whole lot of trained and highly skilled people in our country at this time and, in fact, all over the world who know how to get people who have different perspectives on something to agree in spite of their differences, but many of these people make their living helping different groups to overcome serious disagreements and forging agreements that everyone is pretty happy with.

This sort of technique is called alternative dispute resolution (ADR). Thousands of practitioners of ADR all over the world have training institutes, trainings and conferences. They have different domestic and international organizations that accredit practitioners. Their members write many books and pamphlets. The different versions and techniques and theories of ADR are readily available to anybody who wants to know anything about it.

ADR differs from the typical political. In ordinary political conversations people debate with each other and are at pains to win and to show that the other is mistaken. Businesses cannot afford to waste time on debates that do not reach a speedy and mutually acceptable agreement. In the business world, the conversations between groups of people who disagree are often facilitated by trained experts. These experts learn to remain neutral. They do not take sides. Their only interest is in getting the conflicting parties to come to some desired agreement, be that about a policy, or about the possible candidate for an important position, or about some more general principles of politics. The facilitators have many tasks. Often political debates go round and round because people misunderstand each other. A facilitated debate will make quite clear what they disagree on.

In a political debate each side is wedded to their particular proposal; in contrast, facilitators will encourage parties to be creative and find new solutions that both parties might accept gladly. Political debates are often hard to close because the parties make assumptions that they have not really examined or fact-checked. Facilitators will probe gently to encourage each party to examine any unexamined assumptions. That process will often open up new conversations.

Using such techniques, facilitators, mediators and others resolve problems every day --often problems that have festered and have created serious hostilities. Testimonials to that accomplishment come from large corporations, important law firms, and other powerful people whom we can trust not to spend money for help with their disagreements unless that help is indubitably worth its price.

If we applied these techniques to our political disagreements many of those would disappear and our decisions would more often be based on consensus and not exclude electoral minorities from ruling. Using the skills of various professionals in facilitating agreement and consensus, we would be able to turn our back on the injustice of majority rule. Using the techniques of facilitation and mediation, democracy resting on consensus may well be possible.

“But this will take too long” the defenders of majority rule will tell us. However, the reality is that mediation and facilitation have not so far being used to any extent  to settle political disagreements. We do not know how difficult  or time-consuming it  would be to apply these techniques in politics. A lot of experimentation will be needed before we are in a position to have reliable opinions on the feasibility of resting consensus democracy on mediation and facilitation techniques. The encouraging results in various business situations should encourage us to engage in that kind of experimentation.

We do not know today how well a mediated and facilitated democracy would function. But we do know that it is a real alternative to our present. The insistence that majority rule is the optimal procedure is clearly mistaken, given the positive experiences many enterprises are having with mediation and facilitation. Electoral techniques and majority rule  or not unavoidable. Using electoral systems and majority rule is a choice we make. It is, as we saw above, a choice of oligarchy over genuine democracy.

The dogma of the inevitability of majority rule is being promoted by the winners in existing oligarchies. It is in their interest to make everyone believe that there are no other options. But there are. We should take back our democracy by trying large-scale experiments with mediated and facilitated democratic conversations.

Has democracy failed?

       

2017 is the year of the right wing. In the US, we have elected Donald Trump who has come to the presidency on a platform opposing immigrants and opposing international cooperation. The wall to be built along the Mexican border is symbolic of his stance, as is the plan of levying import duties on foreign-made products. Similar sentiments, especially hostility towards immigrants, motivated a majority of Britains to vote to leave the European Union. The same political position is giving Marie LePen a shot at the presidency in France, and is bringing far right groups closer to political power in Germany, in Italy, and in Greece. These groups are nationalist chauvinists, they cheer on leaders with explicit authoritarian leanings. They are contemptuous of the democratic process which is about to allow them to gain significant political power.

We are seeing democracy at its worst when it allows the anxious, the angry, the groups that feel left out to have their revenge by encouraging leaders that come to power on a platform of hatred, of arrogant contempt for people who are different from them, people who are not “White Aryans.” 2500 years ago the Greek philosopher Plato complained about democracy being unsteady, subject to constant change depending on the constantly changing moods of the people at large. Our experience bears out his criticism. It is hard to imagine a greater difference between the government of Barack Obama and that of Donald Trump. Democracy is prone to sudden and violent changes.

Winston Churchill remarked that “democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the other ones.” The other ones are authoritarian or fascist governments. The authoritarian leader controls everything. Even if there is an elected legislature, it is a rubberstamp that simply passes the rules laid down by the Leader. The judiciary in an authoritarian government is also dominated by the Leader and his party. There is no independent judiciary. There are no checks and balances. Authoritarian rulers tend to be worried about possible opposition. No one is safe from government spies and violence.

A fascist government is authoritarian but adds to its centralized power the total control over all social organizations. Professional organizations, for instance, of teachers, lawyers, or physicians are now run ( and closely watched over) by the government. Instead of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, there are now government run youth organizations. Any workplace organizations now become branches of the government. There is little privacy left. The entire nation is unified by being organized into official groups.

The glaring defect of democracy is the ever present possibility of electing leaders who lean in the direction of authoritarianism and, perhaps, even of fascism. Adolf Hitler was elected by the German people in 1933. Recurrence of such catastrophic choices is a real possibility in democracies. But regular elections are only one aspect of democracy. Of equal importance is the effort to have a legislative and a judiciary branch that are independent of the executive. Our Constitution deliberately limits the scope of executive power. We already have seen examples of that: the courts have refused to approve of Pres. Trumps immigration executive order.

(To be sure the independence of the judiciary is limited. In our two-party state, the party that is dominant will have a serious effect on the judiciary by appointing Supreme Court justices.)

Similarly even where both the president and Congress and many state legislatures are dominated by the same party, the actions of the president may well be limited by the legislature and vice a versa. An elected leader with authoritarian leanings cannot do what he chooses as long as out constitutional protections remain in force.

Ordinary citizens play an important role in a democracy and how well will this democracy works depends on the people themselves: are they well-informed, do they participate, do their media do the job of informing everyone, is there a limit on the role money can play in the democratic processes? It matters whether citizens are alive to threats to their democracy. Do they protest loudly against the predominant power of the very rich in the electoral process? Do they rally around the targets of racially motivated exclusions? The survival of democracy depends on the constant vigilance of citizens.

When groups with authoritarian leanings gain power in elections, clearly democracy is not working well. It is a mistake however to blame this on the abstract institution of democracy. The claim rests clearly on the shoulders of all those who refused to take the authoritarians seriously and to work hard to oppose them. For a democracy to work, citizens have to be willing to pay attention, to spend the time to go to meetings and work in electoral campaigns. If they have money they should be willing to support candidates. The democratic process is not going to work well if the central component - the people - refuses to participate.

That clearly happened in this last electoral campaign. Many citizens are understanding that and joining the opposition to prevailing authoritarian inclinations. Our democracy is threatened, but it still has a fighting chance of surviving.

Message for the new year 

Since the election of Donald Trump as president, there has been a great deal of soul-searching. A number of explanations of this unfortunate event are popular. Some people blame the schools for not teaching children how our democracy works. Others blame the media for misleading the public. Others again blame the voters for making a very unintelligent and uninformed choice.

These and other explanations ignore a very important fact about the American public. Americans live by a number of myths which are widely shared and never subjected to any critical scrutiny.  If the voters have proven ignorant in this election the ignorance is shared among all layers of the population and is supported and perpetrated by the media, by school teachers, and ministers.

No one wants to talk about capitalism. Creating jobs, for instance, was a big theme during the last electoral campaign. All candidates promised to create jobs. No one wanted to talk about why that was a necessity. Donald Trump blamed the export of jobs to Asia and has all kinds of remedies for that. But he did not want to talk about why jobs were exported to Asia. Nor did anybody mention, what should be common knowledge, that many manufacturing businesses are buying more and more robots that replace living workers. Why are they doing that? No one talks about that either.

The truth is that in our economic system profits are the main goal of all enterprises and making a profit is more important then treating good workers decently and preserving their jobs at  a good salary. Jobs get exported to Asia where wages are much much lower than here. Robots replace human beings because robots do not join unions, robots do not go on strike for higher wages or better working conditions. Buying robots increases profits and in our economic system profits come before people.

There is a problem about jobs and pay for the working and the middle class because corporations care more for profits than they care for people. Corporations do not  care more for profits because their managers are any greedier than the rest of us but because they work in a specific economic system which expects them to change well-paying jobs into jobs that pay really poorly, that anyone can do after half a day's training. That way the wage bill is lower and profits higher.

But nobody wants to talk about that. If anyone talks about capitalism they talk about its blessings, the newer and more powerful cell phones and all sorts of other gadgets which are making life easier - except if capital has taken your good job and converted it into one that barely keeps you alive.

For one group of Trump supporters - middle-aged white working-class men who have not gotten a decent raise in 20 years - their experience is totally incomprehensible as long as they're being told over and over again that the economic system is the best there is and is the source of their well-being. If the true nature of capitalism - its motto  " profits before people " - were better understood by the people who are its victims, they would not be as likely to be taken in by Trump’s promises.

But the mythology of the benign capitalist system goes hand-in-hand with another mythology, namely that the U.S. is a democracy.  In a democracy the people are the source and seat of power and they manage the government through the mechanism of periodic elections. But for the white working-class male who has been treated shabbily by the system for a long time that is again very confusing because if he has any  power to change his condition he has not noticed that.

 But, of course, the United States is not a democracy but an oligarchy run by the very rich and by the leaders of the economic system. They managed not only the government but also what everybody is told to believe every day. It is not surprising that the mythology of capitalism and democracy are so dominant.
That is just what a capitalist oligarchy wants everyone to believe.

 While freedom of the press is always in danger it still exists to a considerable extent. If you want to inform yourself and be able to see behind the “great blessings” of capitalism and the US democracy, here is a list all websites that I would recommend. They are more likely than the New York Times, or Washington Post to give you an honest account of our current condition:

Common Dreams Your daily news presented without concealing the problems of the existing institutions.

Democracy Now! - youtube.com/user/democracynow. Democracy Now! is an independent, global weekday news hour anchored by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González.

The Guardian.  Latest US news, breaking news and current affairs coverage from theguardian.com

The Nation. The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of progressive political and cultural news, opinion and analysis.

Truthout is a progressive news organization in the United States that operates a web site and distributes original political news articles, opinion pieces.

Look at any of these sources of news and you are less likely to be misled by the dominant myths of our society.

                            Democracy at home and abroad.

 
Together with untold destruction and suffering, we did bring democracy to Iraq. To be sure their elected parliament has not been able to legislate or to govern because they have been too busy yelling at each other, pelting each other with water bottles, or even getting into fist fights. They have democracy but it does not work.

But that is for us only too familiar a phenomenon. Members of our Congress have not gotten into fist fights but they also have been unable to legislate. They are too busy bickering. They have been unable to ascertain how the government is working. Congressional hearings  have become public relation events in which each party is trying to blacken the name of the other.

What is worse there are now two kinds of citizens: citizens with money and citizens without. The former have influence on the government. The latter are pretty much left out in the cold.

Citizens--the kind without money--have however rallied and during several days during the middle of April significant numbers of protesters sat in in front of the capital in Washington, DC. 400 citizens, practicing civil disobedience, were arrested on one day. Not only does  everyone know  of the blatant corruption of our democracy but there are many citizens who are not willing to put up with that. 

They are asserting their democratic rights by protesting, by committing civil disobedience, by getting arrested.

In a democracy the people rule. When the democratic system works smoothly, everyone has a say, everyone is heard, and all work together to govern themselves. When the democratic system does not work, as is the case in the US as well as in the Iraq, ordinary people need to come to the seat of government to claim their rights as autonomous citizens of the democracy.

This is what has been happening in the United States. Today's news reports that it is now also happening in Iraq. Ordinary folks in Baghdad invaded the Green zone and the parliament building and the elected legislators either ran away or hid in small rooms in the parliament building making a rather disgraceful spectacle of themselves.

That, of course, is excellent news. People in Iraq are learning the real lesson that democracy does not consist of having periodic elections, often paid for by rich citizens or corporations, but that when the government is not functioning, the people have a duty to take back their power and demand that their elected representatives either do their job with integrity, or leave town and go back to where they came from.

The Iraqi protests made the front page of the Sunday paper. The protests in Washington DC were barely mentioned in the media. The free press, which is an essential ingredient in any democratic system, is in the pay of billionaires and chooses what news is suitable for their readers to hear and what news is better hidden from them.

When, after living in the United States for five years as an immigrant, I became a citizen, the judge in the downtown Chicago courthouse insisted on reading the entire Declaration of Independence to all the new citizens before him. In his final comments he urged us to never forget that the United States was born in a revolution. It is not periodic elections that makes our republic remarkable. It is the revolutionary spirit in which citizens are willing to go to great lengths to assert their rights to govern themselves and not to be governed by corporate managers.

We are indebted to the protesters in Baghdad, in Washington DC, and many other US cities for remembering the revolutionary history of democracy and for remembering that that history has not yet come to an end. The revolutionary impulse remains the soul of democracy.

                                Death of Democracy

In Mitt Romney’s frontal attack on Donald Trump you can find this interesting paragraph:

“Ronald Reagan used to quote a Scottish philosopher who predicted that democracies and civilizations couldn't last more than about 200 years. John Adams wrote this: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." I believe that America has proven these dire predictions wrong for two reasons.” (http://www.politico. com/story/2016/03/full-transcript-mitt-romneys-remarks-on-donald-trump-and-the-2016-race-220176#ixzz41xdjpx5E) Mitt Romney cannot, of course, take James Madison’s ominous prediction seriously. Being a politician, he must insist that our democracy is as vigorous and flourishing as it was in 1789. But it is very important for us to try to understand what Madison had in mind and to consider his forecast more seriously than Romney does.

We frequently think of democracy as an electoral system in which the citizens have to go to the poll one day every two years to select their Congress persons, one day every four years to elect a president and one day every six years to elect their senators. That is not very burdensome but, if that is all citizens do, ours  is going to be a fairly poor sort of democracy.

Citizens going to the polls by itself will not accomplish a great deal. If citizens are not well informed about the issues before the voters, if they have not considered their decisions carefully in the light of the best information available, political elections differed little from the Grammys or the Oscars or some other popularity contest. The original idea of our democracy was not  that people choose the most popular person as their leader, but that they chose the person they regarded as the most competent, the person with the best judgment, the person with a suitable calm and impartial temperament to make the difficult calls that most presidents and Congressional leaders will confront in the course of their political careers.

Citizens have to be well informed. That means that they are willing to dedicate a good deal of time and energy to reflecting about the issues confronting the nation. They have to be willing to discuss current issues with people who have different opinions. In these conversations they need to be open-minded. They need to make real efforts to understand what moved their political opponents and what shapes their thinking about current problems.

This requires a serious commitment to democracy, to self-government by all the people. Sometimes that is boring. Sometimes it is enormously aggravating to listen to people whom you can't help regarding as prejudiced, ill-informed, irrational and overly emotional. Participating in a democratic government is not all fun and games. It involves a willingness to work hard for the sake of the general well being.

And this brings us to the heart of Madison's dire prognostication about the death of democracy. The democratic process works if people are willing to do things they themselves don't particularly like but which they believe to be important for the common good. Democracy works only if people think about what is good for everybody and not just about what is good for them individually. Frequently when people talk about democracy they talk about people voting their interests. Madison was quite clear that a people whose citizens vote their own interests will soon lose their democracy: "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” (http://www.veterans today.com/2011/08/21/democracys- violent-death/) The citizens of a democracy must be moral, they must be willing to put the common good ahead of their private interests. A functioning democracy is run by active hard-working citizens who are interested in taking measures that benefit everybody even if those might be against their own private interest.

Madison was clearly aware that this made extraordinary demands on human beings. Democracy makes extraordinary demands on all of us. Those demands are even more difficult to fulfill in a country like ours dedicated to capitalist competition. The central dogma of a capitalist economy holds that a country flourishes when everybody pursues his or her private interest. In his praise of the free market, Adam Smith, an early advocate of free markets, pointed out that we are supplied with bread and meat not "through the benevolence of the butcher and baker," but because each was doing what was best for them and their business. The leaders of capitalist enterprises must put the interest of their own businesses above everything else.

Our children are brought up to work in capitalist enterprises and if they are fortunate to lead them. They must learn to be good competitors and to look out for themselves. But, as democratic citizens  their orientation must be the opposite of their orientation as capitalist enterprises. As citizens of a democracy they must look for what is good for everybody. They must be, in the words of James Madison, "moral"-- not self-interested by dedicated to what is good for all.

James Madison thought that it is hard for fallible human beings to be good citizens. He did not live long enough to see that being a good citizen of a democracy is particularly difficult for those living under capitalism because they are constantly being steered to consider their own good at the expense of that of everybody else. People like that may thrive in capitalism and become billionaires--not mentioning any names--but they are not suited to be good democratic citizens.

Where everyone pursues his or her own private interest, agreement is very difficult to reach. Few people want the same thing and the more people are involved in decision-making the more different interests have to be reconciled. In order to get a capitalist democracy to work, it is best to reduce the number of people who have real decision-making power. Most members of Congress count for very little. Their leaders are, to put this very bluntly, bribed to take positions favorable to large corporations. In the end the number of genuine decision-makers becomes quite small and the affairs of all American citizens are run by a very limited number of corporate leaders. Democracy comes to an end.


James Madison's prediction of the death of democracy foretold with precision what would happen to a self interested citizenry. It has come out just as predicted.

Democracy in the US

 

    In my last blog I pointed out that our government regularly lies to us. It does not matter whether the President is a Democrat or a Republican, or whether Congress has more members of one party or another. Our government again and again acts in secrecy not from some foreign power but from American citizens. Our government again and again misrepresents what it does and conceals some of its activities.

    The point of repeating these familiar facts was to argue that we do not live in a democracy as it is usually defined for us, namely as a government that is  "of, for, and by the people." It is definitely not by the people because they don't even know what the government is doing. It is not government for the people because the secret acts often do not benefit the people. The war in Iraq is one example of that. It is not government of the people because they are being lied to by a ruling group of politicians and business people who hold the rest of us in sufficient contempt to lie to us without shame.

    That is an important lesson that many Americans have not yet learned. They are confused by other aspects of our electoral system, by other aspects of our media which have more freedom than media have in many other countries, and by our judicial system which provides fair hearings to a significant number of citizens.

    All of those, are of course important. In electoral campaigns and in various more or less official media – from the New York Times and Washington Post to random blogs and tweets, citizens express their views on many things and sometimes those views make a difference. There has been – to begin with a negative example – a vigorous opposition to the Iraq war from the very beginning but neither President Bush nor Pres. Obama was very much moved by that. The opposition to the Vietnam war, on the other hand, was so massive that the government could not ignore it. Support for gay marriage has made a difference in courts and in legislative bodies. Support for legalizing marijuana has also affected government policy and the opinion of legislators.

    In our country, what people think sometimes makes a difference. But that is of course true in every country. The Germans did not advertise or talk publicly about their killing Jews, or homosexuals, or communists. They knew better than to stimulate opposition by letting people know what was going on. The secrecy of the Stalinist regime teaches us the same lesson: even brutal dictators care about what people know about them. All governments are vulnerable to public opinion.

    But it may well be true that ours is more vulnerable than a firmly entrenched dictatorship. The free speech we have, which is not unqualified by any means, does allow us to speak out in ways which other countries would not allow. My blog would quickly end me in hot water in no time at all in China, in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia and many other places. Being able to speak out is a real advantage and I am the last person to deny that. I enjoy the leeway that I have  been given.

    As a white person which some resources I am not afraid of the police and I would be confident to receive fair treatment in the courts if that came up. There are many other Americans who cannot be that confident, but some of us can and that, too, is very good.

    But all of these privileges, however valuable they are, do not yield a government "of, for, and by the people." That does not exist in the United States of America.

Lies that Kill

     Osama bin Laden at one time lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan. When he moved to Pakistan he left behind a collection of 1500 audiotapes which by a circuitous route came into the hands of CNN.

    Among these tapes was the entire speech from which American journalists extracted what has come to be known as the "Declaration of War against the United States" speech. A journalist by the name of Flagg Miller, who speaks Arabic, has listened to the entire speech and in his judgment calling it a declaration of war against the United States is a complete misrepresentation. According to Miller the main targets of criticism in that speech are authoritarian Muslim regimes. (https://news.vice. com/article/what-i-learned-about-al-qaeda-from-analyzing-the-bin-laden-tapes)

    Obviously that puts the conflict in the Middle East in a very different light. What has been presented to us an enemy of the US, Al Qaeda was, at least originally, a much more complex and disunited movement. We have spent the last 15 years making sure that we would become the main enemy of dissident Muslim movements like Al Qaeda.

    This reminds us once again that the political system we live under has ceased being a democracy. In a democracy the citizens at large have, at least, an important voice in setting government policy. But if the opinions and judgments of citizens are manipulated by making them believe, for instance, that they are in danger, when in fact they are not, they no longer are the independent rulers of their country but are no more than pawns in a high-level power game that few understand.

    Many Americans believed that Al Qaeda was dedicated to only one goal, the destruction of America. That seemed to justify the expense in life and in money we suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now it turns out those stories were made up. The situation is and was much more complex as were the conflicts in which, at first, we were at the margins and the enemies were Muslim dictatorships.

    Al Qaeda was not the threat we were told it was. Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. Our country has spent excessive amount of money which was needed at home, on killing and destroying in faraway places. The decision to do that was not made by well-informed citizens but by voters manipulated by journalists and politicians, for reasons of their own – reasons that are often still opaque.

    The attack of 9/11 and its aftermath of manipulating public opinion into two wars which we lost, have indeed dimmed the reputation of the United States.. But the authors of this loss were not primarily Arab conspirators but manipulators of the news in the United States itself.

    It is really alarming to realize that. Our enemies are not overseas. They are not the youngsters at the margins of American society who dream of glory fighting with ISIS. Our main enemies are the manipulators of news, the manipulators of congressional actions, the public relations experts who misrepresent to us the world in which we live.

    These hidden enemies are assisted, often unwittingly, by local politicians, by high school history teachers, by notables who give commencement addresses, and others who pass on the misrepresentations foisted on us by the media and the people who own and run them.

    The upcoming generation grows up misinformed about their, and our, world. When young people talk about the 1960s, they know about the "hippies" but know little about the antiwar movement. They know about Martin Luther King but do not know the cruel and, at the same time, inspiring history of centuries of black resistance. The relative changes in the position of African-American is presented to them as the action of benign government that passed civil-rights legislation after Dr. King addressed a large crowd on the Mall in Washington

    Anyone who suggests that there is a group of people manipulating government policy by manipulating the information voters get, is likely to get accused of being paranoid, i.e. crazy.

    Were I to say that there was a secret cabal of powerful people who run everything, that accusation might be deserved. But of course the situation is much more complex. We were manipulated into two devastating wars – devastating for us, and even more devastating for the people in the Middle East – by a group of warmongers, with macho fantasies about US military power and glory, with an important side interest in controlling Middle East oil.
  
 The mythology about capitalism and the free market system is obviously perpetrated by a different group consisting of businesses large and small that receive government subsidies but want to resist regulation. These myths have tended, at times, to produce a workforce that will,  without complaint, accept layoffs in the interest of stockholder dividends. They have tended, at times, to produce a working class that does not get rewarded appropriately for its efforts but accepts that by blaming itself for not having more education.

    The mythology that global warming is the invention of scientists greedy for research grants is pushed by different groups again.

    The perpetuation of racism must be blamed, in part, on media who sell more copy "if it bleeds." Stories about addiction, drug dealing, gangs are preferred. Stories about decrepit schools, unjust treatment by social workers and police, of being taken advantage of by landlords – those stories are not heard very often.   

      If the people are fed many mythologies about their own country, they are not in a position to rule. What we call democracy is no more than an elaborate charade. The strings are being pulled by those who manufactured the information that most people get. The misrepresentation of Osama bin Laden’s "Declaration of War against the United States" is just one horrifying example of that.

Participatory budgeting

With the presidential campaign front and center and money flowing like manna from heaven the, question of democracy – what it is and whether we can still claim to live in a democratic country – is coming to the fore again.

In these discussions about democracy, descriptions of alternative mechanisms for ordinary citizens to express their thoughts and desires allows considerable interest.

One of the favorite examples of alternative institutions that have made a genuine political difference is the participatory budgeting process in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Here neighborhoods – especially poor neighborhoods--  come together to discuss their needs, to decide what everyone would like to have financed in the coming year. These groups then choose representatives who will meet with representatives from other neighborhoods to determine portions of the coming year's city budget. Once the neighborhood representatives have agreed on a plan, they need to persuade city administrators to adopt the budget as they have formulated it.

Serious issues are decided by the neighborhoods and significant amounts of investment funds are involved. For instance, in one year some people wanted to establish a neighborhood health clinic because at the present time healthcare was only available at a fair distance and not easily accessible to pregnant women, or women with several small children. But there was an alternative project to build a pedestrian overpass at a very busy intersection where four people have been killed in traffic during the previous year. After a good deal of discussion, the representative groups decided that the health clinic was more important and apportionment investment funds to establish it.

Instead of the bureaucrats and technicians in City Hall deciding what the neighborhood needed, citizens of the neighborhood itself determine what fourth most important to them.

It is easy to see that this participatory budgeting project does add a new dimension to the previously existing electoral democracy. The question of what people need in a particular part of town is not decided by representatives chosen to represent citizens with respect to all topics, but is decided by people chosen specifically to advocate for a definite, clearly specified project. The decision of what to build in the next year is made by the people who live in the area not in some centralized city government office.

Participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre has become well-known and is widely regarded as an important model for democratic procedures, at least among liberals and progressives. There are also a number of cities in the United States that practice something they call "participatory budgeting."

One example is participatory budgeting in New York City. The city has a budget of $77 billion. Of those, $30 million are assigned to community decision-making about the budget. That comes to roughly 1/3 of 1% of the total budget "'New York City's participatory budgeting process is a model for empowered, community-based decision-making across the country and around the world, and the City Council is proud to do its part to strengthen and innovate democracy' said New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito."

Is that an accurate assessment of New York City's participatory budgeting, or is it propaganda?

In Porto Alegre, citizens in a specific neighborhood choose a favorite project. They then elect a representative whose job it is to consult with representatives from other neighborhoods to select what seems to all the best project. Together these representatives decide what the chief projects should be for that year and go to City Hall to persuade the City Council to adopt their priority. The extent to which neighborhoods have a real voice in budgeting depends on the Mayor and the City Council. Participatory budgeting exists due to a group of voters deliberating together and the officials in the city government respecting those decisions.

In New York City, the process is firmly controlled by the City Counselors. They solicit suggestions and once a list of proposal has been established, citizens vote on the list and choose the proposal to be funded. What is called "participatory budgeting" is more like soliciting suggestions from citizens about very specific and narrowly circumscribed questions that always rather peripheral, limited to schools, libraries, parks.

The project involves such items as carts on which to store computers in schools, or and upgrading of the security system in the public library.

There are two ways of considering these North American projects. One can applaud them because they add another mechanism for democratic control of government by ordinary citizens. But one might also take a more negative view according to which this is a deceptive undertaking which does not, as claimed, "empower" citizens because the traditional distribution of power is unchanged except for one third of 1% of the total budget of the City of New York. Compared to the problems New York City faces in its schools and neighborhoods with poverty, addiction, crimes committed by citizens and by police, the decision to buy computer carts for the local school does not seem to me to empower citizens to participate in running their city.

The language of "participatory budgeting" and "citizen empowerment" is being misused to deceive citizens about the poverty of their democracy.