is the U.S. too big for democracy?

[neon tetra]

an excerpt from a NYT op-ed piece by Gar Alperovitz.
from 2007, but still extremely relevant -



No nation — not even the United States — can be managed successfully from the center once it reaches a certain scale.
. . .
The United States is almost certainly too big to be a meaningful democracy. What does "participatory democracy" mean in a continent? Sooner or later, a profound, probably regional, decentralization of the federal system may be all but inevitable.

A recent study by the economists Alberto Alesina of Harvard and Enrico Spolaore of Tufts demonstrates that the bigger the nation, the harder it becomes for the government to meet the needs of its dispersed population. Regions that don't feel well served by the government's distribution of goods and services then have an incentive to take independent action, the economists note.

Scale also determines who has privileged access to the country's news media and who can shape its political discourse. In very large nations, television and other forms of political communication are extremely costly. President Bush alone spent $345 million in his 2004 election campaign. This gives added leverage to elites, who have better corporate connections and greater resources than non-elites. The priorities of those elites often differ from state and regional priorities.

James Madison, the architect of the United States Constitution, understood these problems all too well. Madison is usually viewed as favoring constructing the nation on a large scale. What he urged, in fact, was that a nation of reasonable size had advantages over a very small one. But writing to Jefferson at a time when the population of the United States was a mere four million, Madison expressed concern that if the nation grew too big, elites at the center would divide and conquer a widely dispersed population, producing "tyranny."

Few Americans realize just how huge this nation is. Germany could fit within the borders of Montana. France is smaller than Texas. Leaving aside three nations with large, unpopulated land masses (Russia, Canada and Australia), the United States is geographically larger than all the other advanced industrial countries taken together. Critically, the American population, now roughly 300 million, is projected to reach more than 400 million by the middle of this century. A high Census Bureau estimate suggests it could reach 1.2 billion by 2100.

If the scale of a country renders it unmanageable, there are two possible responses. One is a breakup of the nation; the other is a radical decentralization of power. More than half of the world's 200 nations formed as breakaways after 1946. These days, many nations — including Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Italy and Spain, just to name a few — are devolving power to regions in various ways.

Decades before President Bush decided to teach Iraq a lesson, George F. Kennan worried that what he called our "monster country" would, through the "hubris of inordinate size," inevitably become a menace, intervening all too often in other nations' affairs: "There is a real question as to whether ‘bigness' in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name."

[Trishntek]

The United States, in its original creation and by design is a Constitutional Republic. Pure democracy only works with small geopolitical communities. The U.S. is much too diverse for democracy to function without bias. That is why you see such a heavy influence of the coastal regions while the heartland is decreasingly influential.

[Token]

Cesar killed democracy a long time ago.

I think we have moved on since then.

[Ugly Dougly]

We need to keep governmental units down below 100 people.

[ygmir]

to me, the best government is a "benevolent dictatorship"...........

if, you have to have government, that is..........I'm for
anarchy..........classic, not neo..........

[Ugly Dougly]

I really like MOB RULE!!

[Trishntek]

I really like MOB RULE!!

Ummmmm that is what a pure democracy is!

[theCryptofishist]

I;m for slide rule!

[ygmir]

wasn't there, in an old Sinbad movie, a slide,that turns into a knife at the end?..........One slides down, two drop off?

[can't sit still]

Good memory ygmir. I believe that it was The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. One knelt at the top of the curved slide,,, and they tipped your platform.

[1durphul]

wasn't there, in an old Sinbad movie, a slide,that turns into a knife at the end?..........One slides down, two drop off?

[Trishntek]

http://www.imdb.com/rg/VIDEO_PLAY/LINK/ ... 379978009/

[geekster]

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter. -- Winston Churchill

[knowmad]

Nowadays, "democracy" rules the world. Communism has fallen, elections are happening more and more in those poor underdeveloped third world nations you see on television, and world leaders are meeting to plan the "global community" that we hear so much about. So why isn't everybody happy, finally? For that matter—why do less than half of the eligible voters in the United States, the world's flagship democracy, even bother to vote at all?

we espouse to believe; Every little child can grow up to be President.

No they can't. Being president means holding a hierarchical position of power, just like being a billionaire: for every one president, there have to be millions of people with less power. And just as it is for billionaires, it is for presidents: it's not any coincidence that the two types tend to rub shoulders, since they both come from a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Our economy isn't democratic, either, you know: resources are distributed in absurdly unequal proportions, and you certainly do have to start with resources to become President, or even to get your hands on more resources.

Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn't help the millions of us who inevitably don't, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This is an intrinsic structural difficulty in representative democracy, and it occurs on the local level as much as at the top. For example: the town council, consisting of professional politicians, can meet, discuss municipal affairs, and pass ordinances all day, without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances inconveniences or angers some of the citizens, they have to go to great lengths to use their free time to contest it, and then they're gone again the next time the town council meets.

If there was no President, our "democracy" would still be less than democratic. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, our system purports to operate by majority rule, with the rights of the minorities protected by a system of checks and balances—and this method of government has inherent flaws of its own.
The tyranny of the majority

If you ever happened to end up in a vastly outnumbered minority group, and the majority voted that you must give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe in recognizing the authority of a group simply because they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us—and those it does threaten are already silenced before we can hear their misgivings.

No "average citizen" considers himself threatened by majority rule, because each one thinks of himself as having the power and righteous "moral authority" of the majority: if not in fact (by being so-called "normal" or "moderate"), then in theory, because his ideas are "right" (that is, he believes that everyone would be convinced of the truth of his arguments, if only they would listen sincerely). Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were clear, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action—without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But such is not always the case—even if "the facts" could be made equally clear to everyone, which is obviously impossible, some things simply can't be agreed upon, for there is more than one truth. We need a democracy that takes these situations into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class. . .

To visualize this within context of Burning Man, Imagine yourself as a "Darhkwhad"; a conscious-I-have-a valid-reason-and-ability-to-not-conform-to-light-pollution-self-thinker.
You will: Stand out in the crowd and be lectured, persecuted, will be a minority, your argument is invalid no mater how well articulated. and you will be denied an avenue of regress. you will have opportunity's to Listen to how stupid you are without exercising your right to be self reliant, you might be excluded (by your own stupidity, as will be adamantly pointed out as you are denied)

But then again I'm glad I'm not delusional enough to believe that BM is a Democracy, or fair, or logical. nor that my participation's warrants rights, or expectations but rather an obligation to discern my desires and articulate them in a manner that is mutuality beneficial.

Another way to look at this is to think about the comparison of ones body as a State. Did you hold a vote about when the Bladder would be emptied? when the aprppo moment for a "moment" would be? no.

Voting never changes anything, if it did, it would be taxed, regulated and considered a vice. kinda like the knowledge of firearm possession and construction.