Don't Lose Your Head Marie

I may have mentioned once or twice over the course of the past couple of years that I am something of a government bureaucrat; a very low level nobody in an enormously complex machine of local governance. As such, it is very much to my benefit to not discuss issues which have more than a very general political significance within the geography associated with my employment. Not so much because people are harsh and vengeful, which they can be, but, rather, because a government bureaucrat, whatever their personal sensibilities are, should always give the diverse and conflicted masses of citizens the impression that said bureaucrat is objective enough to maintain the emotional detachment necessary to make equitable decisions. I often say (repeatedly) that it is not my job to tell people what to think, and logic frequently dictates that I side professionally with people who I would personally prefer to decapitate with a rusty paring knife and partially dump in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Although this may sound like a less than optimal career situation, it is important for the reader to understand that this is a completely necessary element of government in a free nation. Faith in the fundamental fairness of government is required for government to preserve its legitimacy and those of us who have chosen to ignominiously toil in this profession always need to remember that we are only paid for our qualified professional opinions, not our personal ones.

Anyway, that being said, I’m going to sort of violate my rule in an obtuse and obscure manner. Without going into details, or dwelling on specifics, or really even knowing what the hell I’m talking about, I’m going to address the issue of direct democracy in America. As most of you may remember from high school, America is a republic where the nation’s leadership is chosen through democratic elections to represent the people, within constitutional limits. A republic is actually any of a number of arrangements where there is no monarch and at least some definable element of the population controls the functioning of government. That’s why we have ridiculous sounding names for ignoramus dictatorships like “The People’s Republic of China” and “The Poorly Fed and Emotionally Unstable Democratic Republic of North Korea”. They would both technically be republics, but not as we know them. The key issue here is that as Americans, we have committed ourselves to democratic representation and a universal franchise for those of at least 18 years of age, without regard to any other definable qualifications. Whether this is truly wise or not is certainly subject to discussion, but it is the American way (since 1971).

Recent events (in the past 234 years) have led many Americans to question the ability of their elected representatives, especially at the state and local level, to effectively address the pressing issues faced by our nation. Perhaps state and local governments are the target of most of this discontent because they actually provide services to people, as opposed to the Federal Government, which only takes citizen’s money, makes huge bundles out of it, and drops it on Muslims, hoping to either kill or convert them. Many people feel that the influence of special interests, especially as it relates to campaign finance, is so pervasive that it is impossible to establish a majority of representatives who are responsive to what the majority of citizens really want. This appears to be especially true with respect to issues like taxation, control of land development and anything socially divisive, like immigration reform or same-sex marriage. This discontent has led to a fondness for citizen’s referendums or “direct democracy”. The promoters of these approaches believe that by subjecting these various important decisions to a direct vote of the people, we will get a result which more accurately reflects what the “people” want, rather than the bastardized results from co-opted “representatives”.

Direct democracy is a complex and controversial subject which elicits emotional responses from many. But what the hell is it, really? Since in most elections seldom more than 50 percent of those registered to vote actually do, and since nationwide only about 70 percent of those eligible to vote are registered, in most elections less than one-third of those who could vote do vote. Does that mean that two-thirds of those who could vote just don’t care or have no opinion? It would not be unfair in a democratic system to say that if you don’t bother to vote that you can go f**k yourself, but if only one-third of the eligible citizens vote, it is really difficult to say that you have a real picture of the “will of the people”. The reality is that even 50 percent voter turnout is usually pretty optimistic, so the typical turnout is probably more like 25 percent of all eligible voters, and it is not unusual for turnout to be even worse. The point is that a direct democratic approach is no guarantee that you are getting an accurate representation of what the majority of people want any more than the representative approach. You only get a representation of what those who bother to vote want, so there is probably no actual superior electoral purity in public referenda. People chose to vote, or not, for a variety of reasons, but it would not be unreasonable to suggest that the more passionate a person is about an issue, the more likely they are to vote when that issue is at stake. It would also not be unreasonable to suggest that the more passionate one is about anything, the less objective one tends to be and the less receptive one is to contrary information. So, most elections tend to be decided by extremists of various stripes who are unlikely to carefully and objectively consider information, but rather act on emotion, and the side with the most extremists wins. Welcome to democracy.

The Athenians had a form of direct democracy around 400 B.C., but they didn’t let just any lame jamoke wander off the street and participate in the assembly. You had to be a “citizen” and you couldn’t be a citizen unless you had completed your military service. This left out women, slaves, and conscientious objectors. I assume the idea was that you had to earn the right to participate in the governance of the nation, an honor we consider to be a birthright. I’m not in any way suggesting limiting the franchise in America; I’m simply pointing out that there is no realistic nostalgia for direct democracy in America since there has never been a sustained experiment in pure direct democracy at any scale above the level of hippy commune in human history. With 60,000 voting citizens in the assembly, I can scarcely imagine what passed for public debate in Athens 2,400 years ago, but it is almost certain that there was a hierarchy even among free citizens and they probably weren’t taking voice votes.

The problem with all this is that in America we have a fascination with trying to mitigate fundamental human failure through modification of process. There is no reason to think that apathetic and ill-informed voters will be any less susceptible to the influence of massive media expenditures when considering single-issue referenda than they are when electing the representatives they feel don’t represent them. If the influence of money in politics is the problem, then we should address the problem, not the process. If we cannot trust our elected representatives to promote our best interest because their loyalty is to their corporate and political financial masters, then we need new representatives, not new processes. If representative democracy cannot survive the evolution of electronic media and the civic disconnection of diverse communities of interest, then investing unfettered decision-making authority in those who are subject to being inflamed by fear and disappointment, and who are accountable only to themselves, is probably not the best idea. Nothing is, in fact, more American than a cautious attitude towards control of legislative process by the unwashed masses. We don’t have the Electoral College to promote democracy, but to protect against it.

And most people are really sort of ok with that; as am I. Understanding that there is no perfection in any human institution, we must realistically strive to find the least imperfect alternative available. Even the most decent and thoughtful of people will make errors in judgment and sometimes be betrayed by their own biases and failures of reason. The Founding Fathers, in their still often underappreciated genius, established a torturously cumbersome system of decentralized authority which makes it damn near impossible to get anything done unless there is nearly unanimous support for it. This system has bedeviled modest majorities throughout our nation’s history and has been the subject of numerous attempts to overturn it by various political figures from time to time. This system has been imitated closely by most state governments and even has significant analogs among local governments. Proponents of direct democracy would cut through all this Byzantine molasses and shed the dead weight of vested interests and false prophets and renew American democracy by returning a power to the people that the people never truly had. Maybe this is the right thing to do, but I’m not going to be handing my 17 year-old son the keys to the Hemi-Charger, a bottle of Jack and $100 in cash and telling him to celebrate freedom any time soon. Alexander Hamilton would not approve.