The Failure of the Demos

Good article in Time this week about the current state of California’s budget woes. And I completely agree with Mr. O’Leary on one point in particular: the state of the State of California demonstrates the failure of direct democracy.

“Democracy” itself is a Greek word, from demos or demoi, originally a phrase for an Athenian municipality but a word that came to mean “the people” generally, combined with kratos, which means power. And since they basically invented the idea, the Greeks got the naming rights. Originally, democracy in Athens was pure and direct: when a vote was to be taken, every single citizen was compelled to go to the Pnyx. (And I do mean compelled: servants would roam the city with a rope dipped in red paint, and any citizen caught wandering the streets instead of going to the Pnyx was slapped with the rope, leaving a red stripe for all to see. They called it “ruddling.”)

But of course this direct democracy was only possible for two reasons: only about a third of the residents of Athens were considered citizens, and only adult males were allowed to vote, so it was possible to cram everybody onto a hillside for the requisite speeches and poll-taking. But even then there was something called the Council of 500, a group of leading citizens who actually made most of the day-to-day decisions. So even at its birth, there was already the necessary beginning of what we now call representational democracy.

Representational democracy is what we have here in most of the U.S. We elect people who go to the state capital or to Washington and who cast votes on our behalf. We cast one vote for a representative who then casts all the others. But in California, we have found a way around representational democracy and back to something very like the original direct form, through the referendum system.

It’s been a disastrous failure. Just about every issue gets submitted to the voice of the people through a ballot initiative, often through expensive special elections where they don’t wait for a national contest to be held but instead call for everyone to come out and vote again and again. This creates voter fatigue, where turnout gets lower and lower with each special election that gets added to the calendar (particularly when no one is getting ruddled...), so that only the people fiercely committed to a particular issue actually bother to turn out and vote. Which has the effect of actually perverting democracy, because only the ideologues end up having any voice. You can end up with some mighty strange laws that way.

But to make matters worse, when one side doesn’t get what it wants, it simply creates another referendum and submits that for a new vote a year or so further on. Exactly this is happening right now with the infamous Prop 8: having lost the first round, the opponents of Prop 8 are collecting signatures to submit the same issue to the voters again, as soon as possible, so that they can try different tactics and hopefully get a different outcome. But what’s to stop the people in favor of Prop 8, if they should lose the next round, from coming back themselves a year after that? Potentially there’s no end to it, not so long as the vote-count is close. So even though I happen to be on the side of the opponents of Prop 8 and would love to see that appalling decision done away with, I just don’t see where this endless referendum cycle does anyone any good.

But of course the classic example of failed direct democracy involves Prop 13, which limited property taxes (and thereby the amount of revenues the state can generate), and declared that the state legislature cannot pass any budget without a two-thirds majority. Combined, this double-eyed whammy means that the state has a nearly impossible time raising money when it needs it, unless it goes directly to the people and asks for the passage of a bond initiative. And as we saw in the last special election, the people are perfectly willing to vote for spending for new mandated services, but they are considerably less willing to vote for anything that even remotely sounds like higher taxes.

We the people want everything for nothing. It’s understandable, but it’s also horrific from a governance standpoint. And it is most definitely related to the Era of Excess we just lived through, where people spent money they didn’t have to buy things they didn’t need and then found themselves deeply in debt, and clueless as to how they got there. (Obviously that’s not the whole story--there were plenty of corporations perfectly happy to exploit our something-for-nothing weakness. But for now, I’m focusing on our own culpability, on why direct democracy has failed so badly.) The entire global economy rode a massive bubble of imaginary wealth and has now come crashing to the ground. Because you cannot have everything for nothing. TANSTAAFL, as Heinlein was fond of saying. (See? Sometimes I do agree with Milton Friedman.)

The result of all this in California was inevitable: at some point bills would come due that the state couldn’t pay, which is where we are right now, leading to what will surely be massive cuts to all sorts of state programs. And the inevitable result of that? Every group facing funding cuts is taking to the airwaves begging We the People to demand that funding not, in fact, be cut.

It’s only a matter of time before someone writes a new referendum, whereupon We the people, upset at the loss of such things as our lovely state parks, will vote to re-fund everything that the governor has cut--while still refusing to pay for a bit of it. And we’ll blame it all on the governor, refusing to acknowledge that in reality, it’s our own fault for creating this unworkable system in the first place.

Once we’ve done that--once we’ve had one more round of demanding the restoration of our pretty little baubles without paying for it--the state will be doomed.