Commentary
More on Direct Democracy
I live in the town of Tamworth, New Hampshire, USA, in a country that claims to be a bastion of democracy, ruled by the people for the people. While there are parts of the structure here that abide quite closely by this principle, there are many contradictions, flaws and ways in which our democracy is imperfect, and at present some of the pillars of this house are severely undermined, shaky and even literally under siege.
To examine all the levels of government in this multilayered society would require a book - complexity is part of the problem. However, I need to make some generalized and unsupported statements at this point, for reasons that I hope will become clear.
Tamworth is one of the small New England communities that still has an annual town meeting. From the earliest days of its history once a year the residents of the town gathered to approve the functioning and budget of the town's administration and its various services, the schools, the maintenance of the roads, the dump, the police and fire services and much more, mainly paid for by the all-important property taxes paid by the residents. The traditional day-to-day administrators of the town are elected “selectmen”, who for reasons varying along a spectrum from pure altruism to a desire to keep a finger on the pulse and in the town pie, give much time through the year for negligible direct monetary compensation. Other monies come into the town's finances from many instruments of the state and the federal government, and these were not generally discussed, but they didn't loom large. There is no doubt that in its pure form this system was highly democratic, with the people having their say, their vote and their oversight of the way their town was run. No remote authorities, no political parties, at least not obviously, the town's resources being allocated by citizens who could look each other in the eye. Decisions were made by voice, with a secret ballot only if the balance of the ayes and nays was not clear
It's not quite complete and unadulterated today. In addition to the traditional meeting, there is voting by secret ballot the day before where important measures can be decided without discussion, and the selectmen are elected. A wide variety of issues can be presented for a yes/no vote, which might otherwise come up the next day at Town Meeting - a different mechanism. Other towns have less Meeting decision-making than Tamworth, and pride in the old ways remains here strongly. The feel is still of grass-roots democracy, however incomplete.
In New Hampshire there are counties, where there is a small but separate set of responsibilities and officers such as sheriffs, but this level of government is not very significant compared with other parts of the US – the towns are the main level here. Larger towns and cities have mayors, with a different apparatus.
The next level for examination is therefore that of the State, our New Hampshire. There are many overlapping functions and responsibilities here, most of which make perfect sense. As far as the democracy of the state is concerned, New Hampshire has a huge House of Representatives, with each representative having a quite small district to be responsible for. At this level the main national political parties begin to rear their ugly heads. The division of functions between a chief executive, the governor, an executive council and a state bureaucracy, the law-making House and senate and an independent judiciary mirrors the federal level. Political discussion carries at least some of the individual opinions of representatives from the districts, and the feel of small community access to decision-making is to some extent preserved. This is precious but inadequate.
Moving up to the federal level, we see our very imperfect and peculiar national democracy currently under considerable threat. We have two senators and two members of congress, and in their different election cycles all the ills of the system emerge. Gerrymandering, voter suppression and other gross manipulations of the system are less here in our Yankee stronghold than in many other states, but in most ways we are subject to the same political pressures, where vast amounts of money are expended, and where a notional “elector” rides off on horseback to a notional “college” to vote for a president on our behalf under rules developed a quarter of a millennium ago. There is of course much more to be said here, but I would rest my case that the process we have is far from clear and a long way from one citizen, one vote of equal power.
So how much do the inconsistences, the failures and the outright manipulations matter in the end? Isn't it inevitable that a system so old and complex, developed for a vast country of many local cultures and diverse populations, should have its creaks and outright contradictions and end up not being equally fair to all its turbulent citizenry? To make a huge and questionable generalization, I'd say that for most of its existence the system has delivered acceptable results for the majority of voters, for all the injustices suffered by significant minorities, which I have no right to gloss over.
Until now. Trump, “Stop the Steal” January 6th. 2021 and the 25% of voters who it seems can be persuaded of almost anything however unlikely, are symptoms and causes of an unprecedented crisis of US democracy. The two main political parties are divided, ineffective, often powerless in their divisions and gridlocks, and are being manipulated by extremists. None of these ills are entirely new, but the accumulated weight at present is truly unprecedented.
The present crisis will have to be fought immediately among the pillars and weeds of the existing system: but what of the future ?
We have the means to achieve direct democracy in mass society, to have our Tamworth Town Meeting format at state and national level – and eventually global level. What is required is a universal electronic voting system, so that in effect there would be a parliament of citizens with no intermediary representatives. Voting could be restricted to specific groups for decisions and law-making for localities and special interests and people for whom the decision was relevant. The executive and judicial branches of government would adapt to the changing demands of the times, but the simplicity of the voting system would be a major force for social stability and creativity.
There is no question that we have the technical ability to make this a safe system – that ordinary citizens can participate in legislation by plebiscite. Once the registration system is securely in place, it can easily be employed at the global level, and we can at last begin to rise above the level of national politics. The reactionary forces of the old elites and supremacies will scream fraud and the openness of such a system to abuse everywhere, but they will scream at any change for the better, fairer and more just. I would argue that the change is not just desirable, but essential in today's conditions – and that the real choice we have is ultimately between effective democracy and totalitarian rule. (The latter is all too conceivable – and if we can survive the planetary environmental crisis who would care whether we lived under dictatorships in 5000 years' time? I do not say this tongue in cheek, but should make it clear that I believe that route produces untold mass suffering of the most brutalized kind.)
The plain fact is that we are not built to believe that the Common Good includes strangers, foreigners and humans of other cultures, ethnicities and genders. Unless something fuels a significant change in this very human mindset, we shall find a way to destroy ourselves, at least through one way from the choice with which we are presented. Spirituality, religious conversion or the operation of superior logic based on adequate information would seem to be the only adequate ways forward. Our track record indicates disaster: we need literally to rise above ourselves. This also seems to be a human possibility. I vote for democracy: how about you, and you ?
To be continued...
