What is the usefulness of all this democracy?

You have heard me talk about regional planning, municipal planning, and neighborhood planning, and that planning is all advisory with respect to private land use. We have talked about zoning and how easy it is to get a zoning change, usually, when a developer wants it. We have discussed the extensive amount of public participation in planning and project implementation. We have talked about the impossibility of doing big scale projects in the US, now, because people and organizations that oppose a project will make a lot of effort to defeat it. Zhou Xiaofang, several other students, and a lot of Americans say that this seems to be a great waste of time and money. The product of all this effort is not worth it. Why do we do it?

You have heard me say, many times, that Americans do not trust the government. Everybody in the US, or their parents, or their grandparents, came from somewhere else. Many of the people who came to the US came here as outcasts, or failures, or poor people who were oppressed by the government where they came from. The British colony that became the state of Georgia was founded as a place to store criminals. The people who first came to the area now called Massachusetts came to escape religious persecution in Europe. The people who first settled the area now called Virginia came to make money off the new land and get rich. Many of the people who came to the US in the period from about 1860 to 1920 came as poor people who thought coming here was better than staying where they were. Almost no one who came here was rich or had a good position where they came from. If they did, why would they come?

I am not good at being poetic, but the words at the base of the Statue of Liberty really sound true for Americans-

“…. Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Almost no one who came to the US had a good opinion of the government where they came from. They passed that on to their children and grandchildren, and many Americans still feel that the government is a necessary evil, not a source of hope. We mostly believe that Thomas Jefferson was right- “That government is best which governs least.” By that we mean that government should be as close to people as possible. We give local government the most attention, because in some ways it has the most responsibilities, and has the best chance of meeting the desires of individuals. Many Americans think the federal government should stay away from “local” problems.

We have designed, by intent, a government with levels of government and branches of government that make it difficult for the government to act. We want to control the actions of the government, because we don’t want it to do too much without getting the general approval of the people. We elect aldermen and mayors and state representatives and state senators and US congressmen and US senators and governors and county board members and many other officials, and we expect these people to represent our interests in doing what we collectively want accomplished. We make the legislature approve budgets of government departments and formulate policy for big programs and projects. But we think that electing representatives is not enough, even if we can defeat them at the next election if they don’t fulfill our wishes. So we have created many interim checks and requirements for information so that we can get a sort of intermediate approval on administrative and technical actions of government agencies. Public participation and newspapers and television and blogs and endless meetings are the way we accomplish that. We sue the government and governments sue each other.

There is no doubt that this system makes it very difficult for government to achieve big results or do big projects. There is no doubt that such a system can lead to corruption (every system can lead to corruption). There is no doubt that this system makes it impossible for government to lead very effectively. Every big social movement of the last hundred years- votes for women, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, protections for disabled people, even the more extensive public participation requirements- first started as private movements, and could only be taken up by the government when there were enough votes in the legislature to get a bill passed.

There is no doubt that such a system of government is not efficient. It is not supposed to be efficient. We don’t want it to be efficient. The system is designed to give everyone a voice in the process.

We talk about there being two ways of handling issues or problems in a business, a government, or a society. There is “voice” and “exit.” A person can use “voice” to express opinion and try to change problems. A person can choose to exit the organization- change jobs, leave the city, leave the nation. A person’s sense of loyalty will help determine whether one uses voice or exit in addressing organizational problems.

US presidential administrations that hold up efficiency as a goal- mostly Republican administrations, such as those of Bush and Reagan- use secret meetings, try to implement secret laws and regulations, and try to keep information from the media under the excuse of making government more efficient. For such government administrations, openness and clarity and giving people information is what they try to avoid. They tell people that loyalty demands that people not use their “voice” to express dissenting opinions.

The key to thinking about this system is not what it does accomplish, but what it fails to accomplish. The government cannot act with so much power that it leads everyone “over the cliff.” The government cannot make too many big mistakes. National governments in the last hundred years that could act quickly or decisively – without “voice,” or opposition- all ended up with big problems- pollution, starvation, political prisoners, and big distortions in the economy due to government failure. Even if there is a lot of discussion within the government about what to do, if the government does not get information from outside then it is acting in the dark. That is the benefit of not honoring government statistics or government evaluations or government plans. We don’t think that the government is the holder of the Truth. Someone might have a better idea or better information who is outside the government.

This is not to say that the US does not have its share of big problems. It does. The problems we do have take a long time to solve, and the solutions are often not very good. Sometimes people describe democracy as like being in a life raft after a boat sinks. The life raft will keep everyone safe, but everyone’s feet are constantly wet. Democracy works, but it is not very comfortable.

It must be a common saying in China right now, that big risks provide big profits. I have heard this for several years from students from China. But no smart investor- at least none that I know- believes that. The larger the risk, the greater the chance that some part of the risk has not been carefully evaluated. Big risks provide an opportunity for big failure. Democracy is supposed to avoid the big failures. In exchange for only being able to make small changes at any one time, democracy is supposed to avoid making too many bad policy judgments. One cost of that approach is that democracy cannot do big risk projects very easily.

At the heart of democracy is the thinking of Isaiah Berlin, a Russian political philosopher. His point is that democracy forces a government to acknowledge that humans have many different ideas of what is the Good, and that the government cannot decide for everyone what the best Good is. We have a great toleration for letting people do what they want, which has both good and bad effects. The bad effects are usually easy to see. The good effects are much more difficult to see. There is a line from a Shakespeare play- “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often interred (buried) with their bones.”

Democracy is not, needless to say, a perfect system. It requires an educated citizenry that can make reasonable judgments about proposals for government action, and a citizenry that is interested in public affairs and in keeping control of the government. We are losing both of those aspects in the last thirty years or so. Our primary and secondary schools are often very poor. We focus on television and spending money to fix up the kitchen in the house and on buying things, and fewer people are interested in attending meetings and expressing their views on government plans or policies. When trust in the government falls to very low levels, people lose a sense that the government is doing anything to act for them, and is only acting to serve special interests. When people don’t take an interest in the actions of government, control of the government by special interests is guaranteed. Plato said that democracy will tend to devolve over time into anarchy or mob rule. If people don’t want democracy, and don’t actively take care of it, then Plato will probably be correct.

There is another answer as to why we spend all this time and money on planning that cannot be implemented by the government. This is the answer Jim Ford would provide, if he and I were discussing this issue. He would say that the time spent in planning and public participation is a way of educating citizens and mayors and aldermen and county board members about the important issues of the moment, and giving people a way to think about how their actions affect other people. As you know, there is no career path in government in the US, and there is no requirement that elected officials be smart or sophisticated in their understanding of issues. The time we spend in planning and public participation is a way of educating people about the meaning of the choices they make when they vote, or when they express their opinions about an issue. Jim would say that in that sense, regional planning in the Chicago area has been a success. There is much more of a collective sense of one region now than there was fifty years ago, when regional planning began in the Chicago area. There is some truth in this, but I remain skeptical about this point.