The Future of Democracy

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Perhaps the best index to rising disillusionment with democracy in the United States is the remarkable growth of an antistate ideology and the equally remarkable acquiescence on the part of those most adversely affected by it in the extension of private government. The Republican campaign against “big government” struck a responsive chord in the American people in part because of the rise of the welfare state, an institution with a mandate to interfere directly in the private lives of individual citizens. The federal government has assumed responsibilities that not so long ago were seen as the exclusive province of the individual himself, his family, or his village or neighborhood. Less than two generations ago, in fact, a citizen’s encounter with the federal bureaucracy was largely limited to chance encounters with a forest ranger in a national park or a county agent from the Department of Agriculture, but now large bureaucracies have been created to protect us from poisonous air and dangerous work, to inculcate social values through the school system, to look after us in old age, and even to intrude in one way or another into sexual relationships. More than ten percent of the gross national product is transferred from one group of citizens to another through the mechanism of government, which has become, in the process, a major employer of the middle class. Now, however, the state is seeking to reduce its obligations in the fields of education, health maintenance, and welfare, and millions of people who belong to the middle class by virtue of their consciousness rather than their pocketbooks and who have profited from those programs appear to applaud the idea. One of the few clear expressions of popular will in recent years, the approval of local referenda to cut tax revenues such as Proposition 13 in California, results in the reduction of exactly those services on which the overwhelming majority of citizens depends. Why should that happen?

As government has become more pervasive and intrusive it has become, so it is widely believed, less subject to popular control. Faceless bureaucracies with their own trajectories defy the traditional democratic steering mechanisms. Expectations of participation in the political process were raised dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s, and, indeed, the existing democratic structures were significantly broadened. There is far more popular participation in the selection of presidential nominees than was the case twenty years ago, for example, and the seniority system in Congress, under which the legislative process was ruled by a few old-timers from the South, has been reformed. But despite these significant indicia of democratic vitality, feelings of public powerlessness have grown. Again, why should that happen?

In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published three essays, one by a Frenchman, one by a Japanese, and one by an American, on “the crisis of democracy.” Two common threads run through the essays. One is “system overload.” The very complexity and size of government cause paralysis in a democratic system because too many people have to be heard before decisions can be executed. There are too many vetoes. The public is drowned in a flood of information. No longer high priests with magical powers, leaders are now actors operating in the relentless glare of publicity with a hundred opportunities daily to stub their toes and to cause the crowd to turn on them. Professional bureaucrats, working backstage, keep the country running, and the chasm separating the democratic rituals of the electoral arena from the actual process of decision-making grows wider.

The second thread is the breakdown of community. Every society is becoming what Lester Thurow calls a “zero-sum society.” The government becomes less legitimate because it falls ever short of the increasing claims made upon it, and the various interest groups begin to view it as a treasure chest to be divided. Faced by unexpectedly low profits, corporations demand that the government divert capital to them rather than to labor or to the poor or the aged: in times of slow growth, powerful interests in a society become perceptibly less generous about sharing the national treasure with the less powerful. Printing money, going into debt, and other inflationary policies have been used over the past generation to mask or to moderate struggles over the fair division of the national product—between classes and between regions. But these inflationary expedients have only exacerbated the problem, and now that inflation is perceived as a crisis rather than a natural phenomenon, like death and taxes, the response is an austerity program that shrinks the range of economic opportunity for the majority.

The new austerity is now being enforced in virtually every parliamentary democracy, but it is most pronounced in Britain and the United States, and it is producing a stunning redistribution of income. Today in the United States one half of the income going to the elderly comes from government transfer payments. Black unemployment has been twice the rate of white unemployment ever since the Second World War, and the loss of such “frills” as government programs aimed at increasing minority participation in employment obviously increases this inequality. As government programs in support of social service, teaching, and related professions are cut back, lower-middle-class unemployment is rising. The lowering of the “safety net” created by the welfare state to protect the unemployed acts to depress wages in the industrial sector by creating a formidable “reserve army” of the poor. In the austerity state, the economic security of the citizen—indeed, his very legitimacy as a human being—is tied to a job, and thus the competition for a dwindling number of jobs becomes ever more fierce. When freedom to choose is limited to the freedom of a minority to make money and to spend it, the egalitarian myths on which the very idea of democracy rests are shaken.

In the postcolonial dictatorships of the Third World similar forces are at work. These societies become tragic caricatures of the developed economies, although in many there is not even a theory or pretense at development. In places like Samoza’s Nicaragua, Amin’s Uganda, and Duvalier’s Haiti whole countries have been run like personal fiefdoms or family corporations. A large number of the one hundred seventy political entities that send ambassadors to the United Nations are oligarchies, in which a few families own most of the land and whatever other wealth there is while the overwhelming majority of the population goes to bed hungry. In a number of countries half the babies die from malnutrition-related disease before the age of five.

A few of the more “successful” countries of the Third World have imported a particularly brutal form of austerity devised by theorists in the developed world. The so-called Chilean model can serve as a sample. Those who oppose the regime in power are simply disposed of: perhaps thirty thousand Chileans have been killed by the government since the coup of September 11, 1973, and a hundred thousand more have been sent into exile. Opposition parties are banned and labor militancy outlawed. Foreign loans and foreign debt are used to develop an export industry which employs a fraction of the work force. Unemployment is probably more than twenty percent. The peculiar prosperity is fueled by policies that avowedly favor the rich on the charming theory that the country needs savings and only the rich save. Scarce foreign exchange is devoted to consumer goods for what appears to be a steadily shrinking class of people who can afford them. The country becomes more and more integrated into a world economy and the gap between rich and poor within the country steadily widens. Argentina, Brazil, and other countries of Latin America are pursuing variations of the Chilean model.

In the socialist world the crisis is different. For more than three generations an elite in the Soviet Union has defended its dictatorial powers as a temporary expedient, a transitory stage on the way to a classless society in which opposition parties are unnecessary because all interests are harmonized. This justification has become less and less convincing. No matter how many “counterrevolutionaries” are destroyed, their number is continually replenished, and “vigilance” (which is to say party authority and acceptance of official repression) is always required. The Second World War served for a long time as a plausible explanation of Russia’s political woes, but it ended almost forty years ago and people are increasingly impatient, despite impressive economic progress, about the gap between promise and reality. In the socialist world—in contrast to, say, formerly democratic countries in Latin America such as Chile and Uruguay—there has been an increase in freedom and popular participation since the days of Stalin. But the party bureaucracies rule with an arbitrary hand, and the inevitable consequence is increasing social tension of the sort we now see so dramatically in Poland. Public confidence in the leadership has dimmed as the system of bureaucratic privilege has become calcified. In China fitful experiments in freedom of expression have been called off, leaving the society with neither a pure socialist ideology—Mao’s moral incentives and efforts at radical mass mobilization are now ridiculed—nor a market-based theory of freedom. Notions of development through foreign investment, harder work for better pay, and social participation through consumerism have all been imported and tried on for size, but the system still seems to be in crisis.

Winston Churchill offered what is quite possibly the best defense of democracy when he called it a completely unsatisfactory method of government—except when compared to all the others. The very conditions that make democracy so difficult to maintain are the conditions that make it crucial to survival. To the question, “Can we survive with democracy?” we must, it seems to me, counterpose the question, “Can we survive without it?”

The prospects for humankind are grim unless the species can adapt rapidly enough to head off three disasters which threaten its very existence. The most obvious and immediate threat is nuclear war. A full-scale “nuclear exchange,” to use the curious official euphemism, could wipe out large numbers of human beings immediately, produce hideous mutations in the survivors, and so disorganize the environment and social system as to cripple the adaptive mechanism of the race.

The second crisis goes by many names—massive underdevelopment, social breakdown in the “poor” countries, global maldistribution of resources. The essence of this crisis for the human species is the prospect of one half or more of humanity remaining on the verge of starvation, without remunerative work, without a valued role in society, deprived of hope for the future or even a recognized right to life. Massive debt, repression, and suicidal ecological assaults on the landscape in the name of progress are familiar accompaniments to this kind of maldevelopment. It is obvious that the survival prospects of a divided planet—half human and half subhuman—are not encouraging, and I will return to that point below.

The third crisis is a spiritual one that cripples human efforts to tackle the other two. The political and psychological environment in which we live is increasingly hostile to the kind of fundamental rethinking we need for successful reorganization of planetary affairs. A pathological pessimism that goes by the name of realism, feelings of meaninglessness in individual lives, a breakdown in the sense of community, a loss of hope and enthusiasm—these have the effect of immobilizing constructive efforts to think our way to survival. Modern society has developed an elaborate system of incentives to motivate human behavior, but the incentives seem to provoke behavior that creates more problems than it solves.

What has all this to do with democracy? Among other things, the three crises I have identified can be traced to the loss of legitimacy of previous systems of social and political control. Within the last four hundred years or so a number of important political ideas have died. For one thing, theocracy is dead in most of the world. Even in revolutionary Iran, where its vestigial hold is strong, the idea of rule by priests who command authority in the name of God is widely rejected by millions who have been touched by modernism, and the twentieth-century brand of theocracy represented by Stalinism has not been spectacularly successful either.

Feudalism hangs on in various parts of the world, but the radical transformation of agriculture and the removal of hundreds of millions of peasants from the land has accelerated the assault on feudal relationships that has been going on for several centuries now. When feudalism disappears, so does the internalized sense of place that has perhaps been the most effective means of social control for most of human history. In a legitimate hierarchic structure it rarely occurs to people to challenge their place in the order of things. As the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, some people are born to be rich and others poor. Social and geographic mobility are outside ordinary consciousness; one simply does not leave family, village, or plot. People have moved throughout history, to be sure, but the mass migrations of modern times—farmers moving from countryside to city, refugees moving from one country to another, migrant workers on a permanent quest for jobs—have sealed the fate of the feudal order. Television and radio, moreover, have expanded intellectual horizons almost everywhere, and this has had the effect of exposing masses of humanity to the subversive idea that social and political organization can be different. Expectations rise and greater claims on authority are made.

Aristocracy, at least in the classical sense, is also in eclipse. Oligarchs abound, but public-spirited aristocrats are few. The rise of capitalism dislodged the old aristocracy, and business leadership has had difficulty in establishing itself as a new one because on so many crucial issues—environmental protection, worker safety, consumer protection, and so on—it simply has interests adverse to important segments of the public. The accumulation of private wealth by a corporate elite is not a particularly noble or ennobling pursuit; it creates political power, but the legitimacy of that power is forever shaky.

Thus, throughout the world the traditional forms of legitimacy have been eroded, and the rulers of the modern industrial state find themselves unable to carry out the two tasks for which that state was originally created. No one knows how to use classic military means to defend national territory and “national interests” in the nuclear age, and no one knows how to fine-tune an economy to control the inflation and unemployment that threaten individual security. Max Weber had hoped that the efficiency of the modern state would provide a new basis for legitimacy: professional bureaucrats, a new priesthood untouched by special interest, would guide the state along democratic lines. The resource crises of the 1970s, however, demonstrated that Weber’s hope would not be realized, and thus one of the principal tasks of governments today in the industrial West is the restoration of public confidence. Most military expenditures are designed not for defense, strictly speaking, but to provide a psychological lift, to give the illusion and feel of power. The radical surgery of the austerity budgets is designed to accomplish the same end. The Reagan economic plan is built on a single premise: The redistribution of income to the “productive”—that is to say, the rich—creates a climate in which human energy and creativity will flow in greater abundance. The austerity state seeks legitimacy by offering services and enhanced prospects of enrichment to a minority who, it is assumed, will act as an engine for the whole society and eventually spread benefits for the rest.

A state run ostentatiously for the benefit of a minority, however, is inherently unstable, since it must find ways to control those for whom the myth of opportunity has no meaning. In many countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia the instruments of control are straightforward and brutal: death squads, torture chambers, and other forms of mass intimidation. In the United States, the instruments of control are more subtle, as when intrusive methods of data collection and surveillance by computer are proposed to enforce cutbacks in welfare and employment benefits. In either of those cases, though, the state engages in a form of warfare against the population—from low level psychological pressure to serious search-and-destroy missions—all to preserve a precarious social peace. Legitimacy for internal repression is invariably sought by invoking the magic words “national security.” The more unsuccessful the state is in maintaining social peace, the more foreign threats—communist conspirators, greedy sheiks, Japanese manufacturers, or whatever—need to be identified as the source of the problem.

A world of states run by regimes lacking legitimacy is a world at risk. When internal class tensions are controlled by invoking some external threat, the international tensions that follow are bound to erupt periodically in war. As nuclear weaponry continues to spread throughout the world, the risks of nuclear war increase, for the most likely way for a holocaust to occur is not through the initiative of either superpower but through an unwanted confrontation over a little war in some “strategic” area of the world. Because the superpowers continue to spread vast quantities of lethal hardware to some of the most underdeveloped countries, their power to control the process of escalation is diminished. So-called client states, such as Iraq or Iran, once given billions in military equipment, are, as we have seen, capable of acting quite independently.

The “national security state”—austere in everything but military expenditures—is a political phenomenon almost everywhere. The world now spends more than $600 billion a year on arms. The militarization of politics not only increases the risk of confrontation but it also contributes to the second peril to humankind that I mentioned earlier—economic and social maldevelopment. Scarce investment capital goes for arms instead of education, health, or food, and scarce talent is preempted for the military management sector. The business of the state becomes military planning rather than social or economic development.

The attempt to create an artificial consensus by substituting the idea of national security is always threatened in societies where opportunity has been extinguished. If there are no educational or career prospects for children, no hope of adequate food or shelter, and nothing to look forward to but a perilous life and an early death, security is robbed of all meaning. The national security state cannot compel real loyalty, and it can confuse people with promises only for so long. Its survival depends ultimately on being able to exclude from the benefits of society a large majority of the people. By necessity it must resort to intimidation, pacification, and depoliticization.

Ideologies for the protection of privilege and exclusion of the “unproductive” majority have already been developed. There is much talk of “triage,” “lifeboat ethics,” and “basket cases.” “Freedom to choose” is celebrated, but the “right to life,” it seems, is an exclusively prenatal privilege. Yet the crisis of the poor is eventually visited on the rich, for the economic costs of class warfare are escalating. The poor have a way of exacting public money in all sorts of hidden and unintended ways, whether it is $36,000 to pay for a year in jail, $100,000 to save a premature baby (far more than a decent education or prenatal care for its mother would have cost), or billions in military aid to shore up repressive governments that live in fear of their own people. These escalating costs, of course, are inflationary: they contribute to an economic instability that constitutes the soft underbelly of the austerity state.

Such strategies have other serious self-defeating consequences as well, for large groups of excluded or exploited people are a much greater threat to society than has been the case before. The costs of using “throwaway” labor are now being visited upon European countries, for example: mounting racial tension in Great Britain, France, Germany, and Switzerland has become the price of failing to integrate millions of foreign workers into those societies. The United States, which has had a respite in racial violence since the 1960s, is not likely to remain so fortunate if the prospects for excluded minorities continue to decline. As society becomes ever more complex, furthermore, the opportunities for “monkey wrench politics” increase—everything from terrorism, blackmail, and sabotage, to blockage of nuclear plants, “sick-ins,” and other strategic nuisances that can bring the economic life of great cities to a standstill.

Real growth is impossible in such a situation. The society must pay an ever-increasing tax in guns, guards, armies, jails, and locks, just to maintain a minimum of order. Markets do not grow because unemployed, repressed, and rootless masses make poor customers. And the greatest cost of all is the one that is hardest to measure. In a society under siege, creativity is threatened. The illusion that authoritarian regimes can “get things done” rests on the fallacy that people in authority know what to do. But the problem is that even the brightest and most far-seeing of people rarely have the conceptual tools and the experience to deal with the unprecedented problems of the late twentieth century, and those who shoot their way into power or talk their way there through demagoguery are usually not the brightest. People with the greatest potential for creativity do not take chances, it would seem; they go into physical or spiritual exile. A society in which leaders devote most of their talent to preserving their own power, whether they are candidates who begin campaigning for reelection on inauguration day or corporate executives whose jobs depend upon the next quarterly performance, cannot mobilize the intellectual capacity and moral energy for survival.

If, as I have argued, democracy is the only legitimating principle of government in the historical era into which we are moving because all the alternatives are even more unsatisfactory, are there principles for adapting democratic ideology to the realities of the contemporary world?

In the first place, democracy cannot survive in islands of affluence. The calculation that led the Roosevelt administration into the Second World War was that American democracy could not survive in a world organized on antidemocratic principles. And it is more true now than ever before that nurturing domestic democratic institutions in an antidemocratic global climate is difficult, all the more so if the democratic state has contributed to that climate. When the United States finds itself compelled for reasons of national security to make alliances with regimes whose true nature would offend an alert citizenry, a certain amount of public deception and secrecy is required to carry out the policy, and that, of course, undermines the theoretical assumption on which democracy itself is based—an informed public. Our foreign policy has been dedicated to spreading capitalism and anticommunism and calling it democracy. Just as the Soviet Union has elaborately confused the fate of worldwide “socialism” with the particular fears, appetites, and prejudices of the men in the Kremlin, the United States has asserted against all evidence that what is good for this nation (or more accurately what any given administration thinks is good for this nation) is good for democracy. Our political discourse is so debased that the fact that many of the forces we oppose in the world call themselves democratic, while a majority of the recipients of our most lavish aid do not, is hardly disturbing.

Enormous cynicism has developed about the American commitment to democracy because our methods for spreading it have been so bizarre—military and paramilitary operations, heavy-handed propaganda, attempts to infiltrate, control, or secretly subsidize such institutions as newspapers and unions. The fact surely is, however, that the spreading of democracy can best come about through example and clear commitment. John Quincy Adams pointed out clearly in the early years of the Republic that the world is hungry for a successful political model that enhances the dignity of human beings. If the Americans made their experiment work, he said, it would be adapted and modified to the very different historical and cultural circumstances of other lands. That thought is as true today as ever. Forms of authoritarianism of both right and left have brought misery to billions of people, and there are few models for imitation anywhere. The Soviet Union is admired nowhere. China is in deep difficulty. The social democracies of Europe are in disarray. There is a demand for greater participation everywhere—Poland, South Africa, Central America—but the institutions to accommodate popular democracy and public order are either undeveloped or nonexistent. The United States has no monopoly on democratic imagination, but by virtue of our history, tradition, and wealth, we have unique advantages for taking the lead in shaping the institutions of the late industrial civilization to the principles of modern democracy.

The idea of human rights is a crucial starting point. In the Orwellian world we inhabit, insisting upon minimum standards of treatment for human beings everywhere is called “interference in domestic affairs,” while sending arms to repress populations in revolt is called a blow for freedom. Firm standards of human rights are especially crucial in today’s world because the traditional bases for valuing human life have been seriously eroded. Religious faith no longer compels respect for individual souls in the way it once did. For hundreds of millions of people the traditional restraints of family or village life no longer apply; communities based on reciprocal rights and obligations have been relentlessly destroyed in the quest for “development,” and no new communities have been created to take their place. The economic value of human beings, which even in the darkest days of predatory industrialization afforded some protection to workers, has been depreciated. Approximately one half of the world’s population is “redundant,” as the British call it; either it is not needed to produce the goods the world is able to buy, or it is needed only at certain times and places. Those hundreds of millions who are irrelevant to the productive process either as consumers or producers are at great risk. At best they are nuisances; at worst, targets for government programs of pacification or elimination.

To be effective in establishing the grounds for democratic institutions, the protection of human rights must be universal. Every person has a vested right to a minimal share of world resources by virtue of having been born. The only alternative to making human rights truly universal, in fact, would be a position that permits dividing humanity into superior and inferior races, productive and nonproductive individuals, the lucky and the unlucky, the worthy and the unworthy. The genocidal mind-set that can imagine writing off whole peoples and classes threatens the survival of the whole human race because it is subject to no natural limits. Equality of opportunity is the essence of the democratic idea, but it is meaningless if children are handicapped at birth because of the malnutrition of their mothers or themselves, or because they belong to a class destined to be forever deprived of the chance to read or write or to go to bed without the pain of hunger.

A truly democratic consciousness must also transcend what Karl Polanyi called the market mentality. The connection between markets and freedom is not well understood. Under certain conditions market mechanisms work well to enhance equality of opportunity; under others they do not. Clearly, a pure market-oriented antistate ideology, for reasons already discussed, produces undemocratic incentives and undemocratic behavior. But a larger question remains: how can we promote a sense of common interest that transcends individual self-interest? Since the industrial revolution modern societies have done what John Stuart Mill accused Jeremy Bentham of doing—”committing the mistake of supposing the business part of human affairs was the whole of them.” Production has been the goal of modern life, and the dream of personal enrichment and the nightmare of starvation have been the incentives to keep the world working. Whether the exaggerated egoism and preoccupation with self were necessary survival mechanisms in the age of capitalist accumulation is a matter for debate, but they are manifestly not survival mechanisms in a world where the need is not for indiscriminate production but for community organization and rational systems of distribution. A better fit between basic human needs and the world’s supply of goods is essential to head off the crises of war and maldevelopment. Such a fit would not in itself deal with the third human crisis, the spiritual bankruptcy that saps creative vitality, but it is a precondition for dealing with that problem as well.

In developing a democratic ideology for the twenty-first century it is well to recall the words of Walt Whitman: “Democracy,” he said, “is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.” It may be well to note, then, that in the midst of the authoritarian wave we have been discussing there are powerful democratic cross-currents at work, and they are, in my opinion, the hope of the future. Moves toward the democratization of modern life are occurring both in the industrialized world and in the underdeveloped countries, even as traditional devices for sharing and legitimizing political power encounter ever greater difficulties. For example, there is a growing movement for workers control of plants in the United States and Europe, East and West. Increased participation of workers in the management of the productive process appears to be a key to improving productivity, and enlightened corporate leaders seem more ready to experiment with that idea. One reason is that harder work for more pay no longer motivates workers when the pay disappears in inflation and the worker comes to see himself as a mere extension of a machine. Without security, equity, and dignity, workers produce less and at greater cost. Increasing productivity through participation seems to work best when the fruits of increased productivity are equitably shared. Workplace democracy cannot evolve unless workers are able to share in the management function, as they do to a degree in the social democracies of Europe. In poor countries the great need is to mobilize the skills and energies of the people, and neither charismatic leadership nor authoritarian rule does that effectively for very long. Societies seem to develop best when people mobilize themselves—when they understand the need to store grain and dig wells properly, for example, and when they can see that they will benefit from socially constructive community action.

The old idea in democratic theory that people had to be informed before they could govern themselves is more true than ever. The gap between the education system and what is necessary to make democracy possible in a complex society has never been greater, but here again many innovative ideas and experiments are springing up. The phenomenal success of some underdeveloped countries in mounting mass literacy campaigns and in catapulting men and women who not so long ago were ignorant peasants into positions of responsibility suggests that education for democracy is possible if there is a commitment to try.

Nowhere is there greater need for democratization than in agriculture. Much of the extreme poverty and degradation in the world is directly or indirectly related to the maldevelopment of the world food system. Fewer and fewer people are now raising the world’s food. Millions of people once engaged in subsistence agriculture are being uprooted from their land and physically separated from their traditional food supply. Land in poor countries, once used for self-provisioning agriculture, is now being reserved for export crops. Typically, when high-technology agriculture—spearheaded by multinational food conglomerates, fertilizer and seed companies, farm machinery manufacturers, grain traders, and food packagers and processors—moves in, the people who once were subsistence farmers move out, usually to the city. Those who were “self-employed,” then, to use the familiar terminology, enter the job market and the money economy. Separated from their land, they must now buy the food they once raised themselves; but hundreds of millions of them cannot find work and hence have no way to provide their families with adequate calories. Even among those who still farm, the cash required for “inputs”—especially seeds, fertilizers, and machinery—is now so high that they must sell a good part of what they once retained for family consumption and thus do not always eat adequately themselves.

If the basic human right of survival is to be secured, countries with hungry populations must become more self-sufficient in agriculture. Democratization of the food system—by permitting those who farm to make the major decisions about what is to be grown and how, and by instituting land reforms that will produce greater equity—is a prerequisite for increasing productivity and reducing waste. A number of studies confirm what common sense would suggest, that food security for those who produce food is necessary for a stable agriculture system and that there is an optimum size beyond which farms become less productive and more wasteful. (New seed technologies now make small-scale farming more productive than ever, but, ironically, such innovations have usually led to ever more concentrated control of land.) The essence of democracy is control over the essentials of one’s life, which in this instance would mean more control by the cultivators over the land, a greater stake in the harvest, and a greater opportunity to bring to bear their own special knowledge and experience of local land conditions. By this definition the life of peasants is thoroughly undemocratic and insecure now, and the rest of industrial civilization, while profiting from the exploitation of the food growers in the short run, will remain at risk so long as a billion or more peasants fail to be integrated into a world political and economic order.

In the United States great popular movements have often served to goad the elected leaders when they proved incapable of making historic changes required to stabilize and build the society in the face of new challenges. The civil rights movement and the antiwar movement had a profound effect on the national scene, for example, and at the local level a variety of citizens’ organizations sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s dedicated to direct action on consumer issues, welfare, health care, taxes, and even such neighborhood matters as the location of traffic lights. Extraparliamentary organization has been spectacularly effective in West Germany in slowing the nuclear energy program. In Poland a grassroots organization managed for a time to transform the governing structure of the nation against extraordinary odds. The spontaneous outpouring of literally millions of citizens into the streets brought down the heavily armed regime of the Shah of Iran.

It is dangerous to romanticize popular movements. Even though they create democratic space when they succeed, they are not easily converted into institutions of self-government. Yet the impulse to organize and to take control over critical arenas of public life because the existing institutions are too corrupt, indifferent, or inefficient is a powerful political force that can be institutionalized in new and creative ways. Much of the impetus for the antistatist ideology in the United States, now leaning in an undemocratic and antiegalitarian direction, comes from a widespread disillusionment with big institutions, both public and private. A government bureaucracy can be as unfeeling and as maddening in its relationships with citizens as any corporation. Institutions designated as “public” and “for the people” do not necessarily play that role. But surely in a society as resourceful as the United States there are other alternatives than vesting power in huge, remote public bureaucracies or vesting it in “private” corporate bureaucracies—equally inappropriate planners of a democratic society.

The challenge to any democratic state is to balance the society’s need for discipline and the individual’s need for freedom. The tension between the two can be managed only where people freely discipline themselves, but self-discipline never comes in response to exhortation. How people treat one another, how they treat the environment, whether they honor or dishonor the future, depend on the nature of the incentives operating in society. In the United States we have erected a complex set of incentives that produce the wrong results from the standpoint of society: we regularly reward waste, sloppiness, and indifference, and we make it difficult for individuals or corporations to put human considerations above property considerations. Our tax policies, our school systems, and our popular media regularly transmit messages that are simply inconsistent with the revitalization of democracy.

How do we encourage people to discipline themselves in the interests of society? The most powerful incentive is a vision of a just society that is credible because it springs from a popular political movement or party. Although, as I will argue, management functions ought to be decentralized to the greatest possible extent in order to promote efficiency, to encourage participation, to offer alternative arenas for experimentation, and to develop new institutions of checks and balances, the process becomes anarchic unless it takes place within the framework of a unifying vision. The great failure of the political parties in the United States is their abdication of the responsibility to develop such a vision along with the programs required to bring it to reality. It is, among other things, a failure of imagination.

Democracy is a system for sharing power. As society has become more complex, the problems of relating local authority to national and international authority have grown. “Getting the federal government off our backs,” now a popular slogan as well as a worthy national objective, can be accomplished in a variety of ways. National bureaucracies are essential in a democracy of continental reach, but they do not have to operate as police forces, and indeed they did not always do so. Centralized authority can set standards, supply technical assistance, monitor how the incentive systems are actually operating, and act as a redistributive mechanism without undertaking to govern directly at the local level. (Thus, for example, the government could make it expensive for factories to injure workers rather than itself take responsibility for plant safety.)

The primary task of the federal government in promoting a democratic revival is to establish the enabling procedures for local authorities to achieve greater economic self-reliance and greater freedom to experiment with the democratic organization of health care, housing programs, and education within the guidelines of a national program that has been debated in the political process.

As things now stand, however, most local communities are at the mercy of the federal government and multinational corporations. They have neither a secure independent tax base nor control over the basic resources needed by their people. Without a major effort to develop their own alternative energy sources the cities of the northeastern United States will remain dangerously dependent upon the oil-producing regions of the south and west. The economics of energy production now benefit certain regions at the expense of others, and the gap between the prosperity of the one and desperation of the other will grow, threatening the very stability of the United States as a single nation. The only way to preserve national unity for continental conglomerates such as Canada, the United States, and the Soviet Union is to redistribute power so that citizens at the local level can take greater control through a participatory political process over the life-and-death issues that affect their lives.

The requirements of compromise and sharing, on the one hand, and the need to build stable self-reliant communities on the other pose less of a contradiction than it appears. It is true that there is always a danger that a community, once given the power to develop a resource base for itself, will become isolationist and will secede—at least spiritually—from the larger community. But the realities of an irreversibly interdependent economy are such that isolationism is not a real option. The more secure a community is, the more able it will be to take a longer view of its own self-interest and the more willing it will be to subordinate short-term parochial interests to the requirements of a stable global economic system—provided it has a sufficient stake in that order.

As society becomes more complex, the need for self-regulation in various forms becomes ever greater. The problem with centralized hierarchic bureaucracies is that they tend to issue conflicting, confusing, and demoralizing directives, producing the wrong political materials for building genuine communities. The judgment, skill, and incorruptibility of the regulators, moreover, are taxed to the breaking point. But a great deal of essential regulation in modern society could be done by those most directly affected. Thus unions could be empowered to play a much more vigorous role in policing health and safety conditions at the plant: they are likely to have a greater stake in reconciling their own health needs and the health of the firm on which their jobs depend than an official from Washington would have. Or neighborhood organizations could be empowered to play a significantly greater role in such local issues as consumer education, the delivery of health services, voluntary housing rehabilitation, and neighborhood planning programs. Some of the most critical choices of the next generation have to do with the development of alternative energy resources and the employment of new technologies. No science and technology policy can be called democratic without vigorous local popular involvement in these matters. Whether a city or region develops a coal economy, decides to become a seller of “software,” invests its health dollars in environmental improvement or prenatal care rather than in high-technology medicine, are critical public choices. If issues which affect the quality of public life as much as these do cannot be subject to popular deliberation, then the deepening suspicion that nothing of importance can be democratically decided is justified.

The buildup of what Peter Berger and Richard Neuhaus call “mediating structures”—voluntary institutions with quasi-governmental authority—could be, perhaps, the basis of a new democratic consensus in the United States that would unite left and right. More and more people across the political spectrum are impatient with big intrusive government. We could make much more imaginative use, too, of what Tocqueville and others have identified as the most unique feature of our system, the crucial place of private, voluntary associations in everyday life. The large corporation, while legally fitting into that category, is now clearly a different kind of structure: it is becoming increasingly public in its function and impact by virtue of its size and scope. The ideological assault on big government, then, could turn out to be a healthy democratic corrective, but only if an important and ominous trend is resisted. A transfer is taking place in the United States, as the government shrinks in size, by which control over education, police, scientific research, and resource development is being handed over to global corporations with little or no loyalty to local (or even national) communities and virtually no institutionalized public accountability. To consign the most crucial public activities to organizations with narrow economic goals is simply to give up on democracy.

Democracy is a system of government that places a high value on individual dignity. It is difficult for people to achieve dignity in the contemporary world without actively participating as citizens, and thus the most critical contribution democratic theory and practice can make to the species is the restoration of a sense of self. Without a proper intimation of individual worth, human beings cannot locate themselves in a puzzling universe. They cannot understand the meaning of humanness. And unless that meaning is deeply internalized, it will be very difficult to avoid intraspecies warfare and other global disasters. No rational, informed individual could support nuclear war today, presumably, but a frightened mob, unsure of itself and the humanity of some enemy, could demand policies that make it inevitable. Only when we understand that the irrational forces impelling us toward nuclear war and ecological disaster are a far greater threat than the Russians (in Moscow read the Americans) will the planet be mature enough for survival.

A heightened awareness of self and one’s own possibilities is necessary before there can be any human identification with others, particularly those at great geographical and cultural distance. Self-awareness is also crucial for the development of effective self-discipline, the essential mechanism for organizing a stable society in an increasingly complex world. And since democratic participation and self-awareness are so closely linked, have we not come to a point in evolution where only a democratic environment offers a real chance to be human?