COLUMN LEFT/ TOM HAYDEN : A Revolutionary Idea for L.A.: Put the People in Power : The structures of governance are out of reach. Will the next mayor be an insider, too?

The Los Angeles mayor’s race is more than an opportunity to replace a retiring incumbent. It also is a chance to challenge the philosophy of imperial bigness of the willful men who have dominated Los Angeles life for a century.

These land developers and their political allies--historian Kevin Starr calls them “the oligarchy”--believe they have built a perpetual growth machine, overcoming any laws of nature or need for human scale. What is new in today’s climate is not the growth mania mentality, but the growing signs of failure.

This year, Los Angeles was listed by Time as one of the world’s new mega-cities, where dreamy promises of progress have turned into nightmarish breakdowns. Los Angeles is simply too big for individuals or communities to feel they matter. Every decision about how one lives is made downtown, remote from ordinary life, by a system resembling Eastern Europe under communism more than the early America town meetings --the “ward government” of Jefferson’s ideal.

In April, 1992, the system of centralized power went into flaming dysfunction. A friend, Marilyn Ferguson, has reminded me that the rioting erupted at a crossroads with mythic meaning: Florence and Normandie--the first a capital of the Renaissance, the other a bloody battlefield. Toward which future is Los Angeles gravitating--renaissance or death?

That question depends on renewal from below against bureaucratic rigor mortis. The rioting disproved the concept that a hierarchy based downtown could “keep the lid on” the ghettos and barrios. In its wake, Los Angeles voters made a historic choice to reinvent the way power works, by supporting “community-based policing.” Whether or not the decentralized system lives up to its billing, the very idea has critical implications for our system of governance as a whole. Why not community-based education, community-based development, community-based government?

The next top-heavy institutions stumbling toward community control are the Los Angeles school district and the Community Redevelopment Agency, both accused of Frankenstein-like indifference to local concerns. Interestingly, even these agencies’ defenders are calling for complete overhaul and decentralization; their critics prefer starting over with structures that are more community-based.

Then there is city government, one of the least accountable in the country, surpassed in remoteness only by Los Angeles County government. There are only 15 members of the City Council; by contrast, New York City has 51. Funded mainly by special interests doing business with the city, the incumbents rule like mini-monarchs; until his recent death, one councilman described himself as the emperor of downtown Los Angeles, a title that went unchallenged.

When the structures of governance were paralyzed after the riots last spring, Rebuild L.A. was invented as a top-down alternative to failed giantism. But despite its best efforts, Rebuild L.A. cannot replace the established modes of power. “What’s most discouraging,” its executive director candidly noted a few weeks ago, “is (that) the business leadership hasn’t stepped forward. It’s almost like they feel they don’t have a stake.” He was right; the oligarchy has been invested historically in a culture and structure of power, not in living communities of people, and its decisions have caused the centrifugal growth of affluent “edge cities” at the fatal expense of inner-city neighborhoods.

The usual defense of centralized governance is that too much democracy is a danger, that we need a centralized system to save us from selfish mobs who cannot see beyond their own neighborhood interests. The CRA defenders say that eminent-domain powers are necessary to build housing; the school district says that a centralized board is the key to school integration; the City Council says that community objections must be overruled to site AIDS hospices; the mayoral candidates say that the mayor needs more power over the permanent bureaucracy and the chaotic City Council. There is also an understandable fear of chaos and Balkanization that arises whenever “too much” decentralization is proposed. The attachment to Big Brother lingers in the otherwise democratic soul.

But the city is already fractured and Balkanized in extremis under the present system. In a city of spreading apartheid, the one grievance most citizens have in common is alienation from the “downtown interests,” which are perceived as underdeveloping the inner city while overdeveloping the outer residential rings.

As structures fail, they fray the bonds of civic life. A stunning 43% of L.A. residents say they live here basically because they cannot afford to leave; that includes half of all blacks and Latinos, 44% of Asians and 35% of whites. How many more citizens would want to leave if they could afford it?

In the midst of this sullen withdrawal, there are signs of a new culture of protest at neighborhood levels. Anger at centralized power is the invisible connecting bond between frustrated homeowner groups, rappers and graffiti artists, teachers preparing to strike and the young who gather at all-night coffee houses. Their alienation demands serious attention in the mayor’s race.

The public should set the mayoral agenda, asking such questions as these: What will the candidates do about special-interest money? Will they appoint contributors and downtown insiders to important commissions, or independent grassroots people? Do they believe that centralized governance is functional and simply needs new faces? Or would they promote a more democratic system of governance altogether? Merely selecting a mayor on the basis of competence is like choosing an experienced captain for the Titanic.

The stakes are grave. Abandoned by state and federal politicians seeking suburban votes, mega-cities like Los Angeles are on their own, boiling with all the crises of the planet in one caldron. If Los Angeles cannot address its crises through more self-government, where is hope?