Where Does Democracy Go From Here?

From Bosnia to Balkanized Los Angeles, the world’s political structures are a mess.

Ross Perot and Jerry Brown served as vehicles through which voters voiced their discontent, and--with their electronic town halls and 800 numbers--symbols into which some invested their eagerness for radical change.

“Third party candidacies, urban breakdown and class antagonisms are signs of the time. They point to a decomposition of the American political structure and its shared culture of hope,” says Brown, joining a disharmonious chorus of voices in the fall issue of New Perspectives Quarterly.

To put matters into a global context, futurist authors Alvin and Heidi Toffler add:

“The liberal democracies of the West are busy merchandising their used political systems to Central Europeans, Russians and anyone else who will listen. Yet, like broken-down jalopies, our political systems are sputtering, rattling and threatening to stall.”

As the Tofflers see it, citizens of democracies have to choose. Will they contort society back into the form of government it has outgrown: the “majoritarian” democracy dependent on mass production and standardization? “Or do we redesign our democratic institutions so that they can handle a higher level of socioeconomic diversity and complexity?”

Before we continue, you may want to pull out your old civics glossary and look up a few terms--such as plebiscite : “an expression of the people’s will by direct ballot of all eligible voters on a political issue. . . .”

You’ll also want to learn a few newfangled buzzwords, most notably subsidiarity .

Subsidiarity merely conveys the idea that government must be rearranged so that tasks are accomplished at the most efficient community or governmental level, from the kaffeeklatsch to the global environmental congress. Virtually every commentator in this discussion lets loose with the term at least once.

How did democracy get so messed up? Several articles blame the media.

James Squires, former Chicago Tribune editor and a communications director for Perot, laments the decline of print journalism both in readership and purpose.

Bill Moyers points the finger for at least part of the problem at the media competing for the attention that serious print reportage used to hold.

He warns that newspapers are an endangered business and bemoans “I Witness Video” and parents who take their kids to see “Juice” to learn about violence.

Then he turns to poet William Butler Yeats: “We have fed the heart on fantasies, and the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

But Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner replies that the “entertainment media” are increasingly responsible for shaping public debate on everything from police brutality (rap) to single parenthood (“Murphy Brown”).

Some commentators here think that these new and increasingly decentralized modes of communication, along with new electronic technologies, will lead democracy to new configurations that will save it.

Hazel Henderson, who 20 years ago raised the idea of “electronic democracy,” remains committed. She borrows from the field of “systems theory” and talks about the necessity for multiple “feedback loops”--from talk radio to E-Mail--to collect and steer informed consent or opposition “back to all decision levels.”

The Tofflers rush headlong into this brave new world of “semi-direct democracy” and suggest it may be time to appoint ambassadors who mediate not between countries, but between minorities within each country.

But Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel worries that plebiscitary democracy, while tempting in these times of unresponsive government, will really amount to “electronic Bonapartism.”

Technology falls short by virtue of the way it channels debate, he says, while “the very heart of democracy is the deliberative process that thrashes about in order to define the right questions and the range of alternatives.”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.--whose recent book, “The Disuniting of America,” caused some stir--concurs: “I cannot imagine a combination more certain to promote social fragmentation and to end in incoherent and incompetent government than single-interest lobbies joined with computerized plebiscites.”

And conservative author George Gilder is down to earth in his analysis. Technology, he says, will continue to increase and quicken public input in the democratic process.

But Perot’s electronic town halls, he argues, would be just “bad public opinion polls,” and such polls have limited use because public opinion is fleeting, fickle, illusory.

“In representative democracy, we elect people to contemplate these issues and to act in our stead--not to reflect on our transitory impressions,” he writes.

The result of the latter, Gilder says, would be “mobocracy.”

All in all, this discussion resembles a late-night college rap session, where a bunch of boozed-up and bleary-eyed brainiacs play off each others’ frenetic energy:

“Yeah! And then, like, we could. . . .”

“No! No! What we should do is. . . .”

Interesting though these folks are, however, there ain’t a Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine among them.

Folks in Billings, Mont., or Chattanooga, Tenn., may even suspect that these political dreamers and policy wonks are a bit premature in declaring the death of the nation-state.

Still, it’s fun reading.

ESOTERICA

Careers & Colleges, published four times a year, is geared toward helping kids get a job or into an institute of higher learning. A glance at its board of advisers reveals the editorial slant. Members represent the National Assn. of College Admission Counselors, Future Business Leaders of America and the National Dropout Prevention Center.

The current issue offers articles about the benefits of a mentor, why extracurricular activities are important, and how public speaking skills can give a job or college applicant an advantage.

(Free, in bulk, to qualified high schools, or $10 a year from 1001 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10018)

REQUIRED READING

* “The American Negro,” Gerald Early says, addressing his 10-year-old daughter, “goes through periodic bouts of dementia when he romantically proclaims himself an African, lost from his brothers and sisters. These tides of benighted nationalism come and go, but this time it seems particularly acute.”

As he speaks, the sarcasm in Early’s parental preaching turns to rage: “Never have I been subjected to more anti-intellectual, proto-fascistic nonsense than what I have had to endure in the name of Afrocentrism.”

Director of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, Early, who is black, goes on to denounce Malcolm X as “this idiot, this fool.”

To which his daughter responds: “But I thought you liked Malcolm X.”

Therein lies the rub that makes Early’s intricate essay in the December issue of Harper’s magazine so compelling.

The complexities of black identity in the 1990s, he argues, are embodied in the contradictions of Malcolm X: “He preached the importance of Africa, yet he was the most American of men.”

* One day after news stories reported that Spike Lee would give preference to black interviewers, film critic David Ehrenstein heard that he’d been turned down by the movie maker.

When Ehrenstein wrote for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, he interviewed Lee twice. Now he is the only African-American writing film criticism for a national publication, he says.

Could the problem be that publication in question is The Advocate--the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine?

In the new Advocate, Ehrenstein suggests that’s exactly why.