Are We Capable of Democracy?
All these town hall meetings have got me thinking about whether or not people are capable of democracy.
Plato certainly didn’t think so. He thought we should be ruled by a group of philosopher kings. Our founding fathers didn’t think so either. They thought only white, male landholders were capable of making those kinds of decisions. Marx and Guevara, who ostensibly believed in us workers being capable of running our own lives, thought we needed a “vanguard” to shepherd us poor schleps into a higher plain of being first.
It’s easy to look at the screaming maniacs from the town hall meetings and conclude that some people are beyond reason. And there is no doubt that majorities of people have supported reprehensible things. But I still maintain that we should trust democracy.
If not democracy, what? If only certain people can make decisions, who? Who gets to decide who is capable and who isn’t? Shall we have tests like Plato wanted? They have tests to get into Yale. Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush passed those tests. Pretty much everyone can find something to dislike there.
Shall we have property ownership be the criteria as the founding fathers suggested? They thought property owners were responsible businessmen who knew how to manage money. They apparently had no issue with how some of those responsible businessmen obtained their property or what they did with it. (Can you say massacres and slavery?) And we all know how that “vanguard” turned out for the communists.
No. The only hope we have is for everyone to have a say.
The problem is not that we are incapable of democracy. The problem is that we have no practice actually participating in one.
Some of us get up off our butts to vote every few years. Many don’t even do that. The rest of the time we disappear into our homes. We barely pay attention to what our supposed representatives do. We allow talking heads on the cable channels to do our debating for us (if you can call that debating, and if we even watch the news at all).
Imagine if we had town halls all the time. Imagine if those people in the town halls were people you saw all the time. How many would feel comfortable screaming like nutters if they knew they would have to see everyone again? And wouldn’t the rest of the group come up with a way to deal with the nutters if they kept coming back every week?
It is the process of participating in a democracy that teaches you the skills to make a democracy work. It is being involved in governance that informs people. That rage, frustration, and powerlessness we feel when the government doesn’t seem to be representing us is alleviated only by actually participating in the decisions that affect our lives.
We are capable of democracy, but we need to stop abdicating our responsibilities to representatives and talking heads.
