Democracy Rocks!

Hungry, cold, cut off from supplies, fearful of attack, worried sick about the future--just what were the nation’s first homesteaders to do?

Why, politics for starters.

Colonizing America, the settlers of Jamestown began the future with what we now regard as the most ordinary step. At the time they could have been accused of radicalism. They chose a leader. There would be no hereditary royalty, as in the land they fled. No hereditary chief, as in this new continent.

From among themselves they elected a president. The president’s name is all but forgotten: Edward Maria Wingfield.

By autumn of that year, 1607, anxiety overcame the Virginia colonists, and they pink-slipped Wingfield in favor of John Ratcliffe, who was saddled with crisis graver than any president since. During that winter, 73 of the 105 original settlers perished from illness, exposure and starvation.

Survivors assembled and quarreled again about who would lead them. Habits, you see, were being formed. By majority vote, they turned to the adventuresome, self-promoting John Smith. He was elected president of the Jamestown Council on Sept. 10, 1608. Smith’s discipline held them together until they were resupplied and reinforced. Then wouldn’t you know. With improving conditions, colonist began to chafe under the imperious Smith. He lost a power struggle and was ousted after less than 13 months in office.

So it has been ever since: restless Americans in search of the right leader for the moment.

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THE SIMPLE TOWN-COUNCIL MEETING HAS GROWN INTO AN elongated national roadshow, of course. For many citizens, time-worn doubts have hardened into cynicism. Democracy has not failed, but our process debases it. The presidential election system is, by varying degrees, a mess.

“Utterly bonkers,” British critic Gavin Esler said of the U.S. presidential elections. For someone whose country is headed by the House of Windsor, that’s a mouthful. “The dirty secret of American politics,” Esler revealed last year in the London Independent, “is that the system for filling the most important job in the world is rotten to the core.”

Oh, really?

Actually, the unspoken secret of American politics is that it’s more pliant and self-correcting than the glib, ingrained cliches would have us think. And sometimes it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves of this, even though the very durability of the system is secured by our suspicions about it.

“Democracy is still upon its trial. The civic genius of our people is its only bulwark,” said the philosopher William James. That was 102 years ago. The same could be said today.

To give critics their case against campaign 2000: The big money of special interests has corrupted the process already. Voter turnout is likely to be lethargic, per usual. The campaign is scripted, the candidates synthetic. The political news media are obsessed with (fill in your choice) and overlooking (also your choice). The two dominant political parties tiptoe down the white line in the middle of the road. Outside voices aren’t taken seriously.

What many find dispiriting is that it seems beyond control, as if other forces have gained sovereignty at our expense.

But pause. Consider where we are in light of where we’ve been. Behold a system that seeks, over and over again, nothing so much as to please.

“Are the American people getting what they ask for, in a broad sense? Yes,” says Craig Allin, professor of political science at Cornell College. “I liken political relations to business relations: You satisfy the customer or you go out of business.

“Most of the time, given enough time, this is a government that will come to reflect any consensus that emerges,” he says.

The second question begged by the first is more problematic. We’ve argued it for nearly four centuries. Are Americans wise in what they seek?

“I am more conflicted by that,” says Allin. “What they are asking for may not be what they want or need.”

The “genius of our people” was philosopher James’ glorification of citizens in a democracy. Workaday Americans are not typically so generous in their assessment of each other. “The people,” remarked that stubborn individualist Ralph Waldo Emerson, “are to be taken in very small doses.”

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ONE-HUNDRED AND EIGHTY YEARS AFTER JAMESTOWN, THE VISIONARY intellectuals whom we call the Founding Fathers decided they didn’t trust us any more than Emerson did. They didn’t trust authority, either. Mostly they trusted themselves, and that’s what they enshrined in the Constitution. Or tried to.

The popular vote for president was calculated as a means to legitimize a president, but nothing more. An electoral college of state delegates was granted authority to make the actual choice. Further, many of the founders assumed that the college would never achieve a majority for a single candidate--thereby leaving the power to Congress, made up of the Founders themselves and men like them.

The Congress “will have in fact the appointment of the president,” explained Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, one of the designers of the Constitution.

Naturally, those with social and economic interests to protect did not trust Congress or the president any more than they trusted voters. Ensconced in their parlors, the silk-stocking tycoons, labor bosses and ward heelers drew deeply on their cigars and devised ways to ensure that candidates stayed beholden to them. These fixers and finaglers were trusted least of all, and waves of noisy reformers intermittently rose up to challenge them.

Over generations, this pulling and tugging on the electoral process kept it as limber as taffy. Only rarely did things come apart. It took a revolutionary war to secure our rights to democracy and a civil war to decide our obligations under it. And every so often, we must take to the streets to make a point. Protests, peaceful as well as violent, have been part of the American scene since the early 1700s. Political conventions, in particular, have become a magnet for free-wheeling demonstrations--and not always outside the convention hall. Democrats at their 1924 convention objected to each others’ ideas with riotous fistfights on the floor of Madison Square Garden.

For much of the last century, the advantage in politics has swung to the citizenry. The voting franchise has spread. Smoke-filled rooms have been aired out. The campaign now underway for 2000 is, in historical terms, heady proof of a popular power grab. Women vote, minorities vote; candidates are selected by citizens in primaries instead of by party delegates at conventions.

With so many angles of sight offered by today’s news media, we know our candidates for president as intimately as the colonists knew the men they chose as leaders. In fact, democracy today looks remarkably like it did in Jamestown, only more so.

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ALAS, THE RANGE OF CONTENDERS AND THE FORTHRIGHTNESS of their campaigns are curtailed by the vested interests of those who bankroll politics.

In one form or another, it’s been so all along. Even before they set sail for this land of riches, the colonists understood that freedom meant the freedom to profit. The War of Independence was fought for the right to print currency and pocket taxes.

“Money, and not morality, is the principle of commercial nations,” observed Thomas Jefferson.

Not that we like to admit it. And we surely don’t like it when somebody else profits from politics at our expense. Then we call it corruption. Ironically, today’s corruption is the byproduct of reform itself--a reminder about the unintended consequences of good ideas.

Direct presidential primaries were embraced as a way to make candidate selection more democratic. Voters would replace party hacks. What could be more democratic than that?

As much as any single turn, this touched off the modern-day gold rush for campaign financing. What party machines once provided now had to be bought on the open market. Money became the means to reach a busy public. Candidates devoted themselves to raising it. Naturally, it is presumed they must sell something of themselves along the way, perverting the very idea of government by and for the people.

The situation, however, is neither static nor necessarily worsening. For a generation now, Americans have searched for fixes. Reformists began making strides in the 1970s with California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and the Fair Political Practices Act, which required public disclosure of the sources of contributions.

No one any longer questions what was then a much resisted, even revolutionary, idea: The public has a right to know who is giving what to whom.

Subsequent reforms have proven challenging. We hammer campaign signboards into our lawns, but we chafe when others do the same on the grand scale of TV advertising. We fume at the audacity of narrow and venal interests that form committees masquerading as “citizens for good.” We rant when the first hands in the pork barrel are those whose signatures appear on “donation” checks--teachers’ unions, firefighters, software manufacturers, farmers, doctors, aerospace companies, publishers, importers, exporters, children, retirees, investors.

That is to say, us. Few can plead innocent.

The solution? Keep complaining. A century ago, that old crank Henry David Thoreau described American politics as “the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel.” It usually spits out something.

Which is the gift we granted ourselves 393 years ago at Jamestown. Far from being ossified, the electoral process still creaks forward by collective pressure. That also opens it to the ingenious exploitation of loopholes, with the inevitable clamor for another round of reform. Along the way, we feel ground tremors like shifting tectonic plates, but few of us worry about a pent-up earthquake.

“Our system works more effectively than most people who spend time criticizing it will admit,” says Charles O. Jones, author of “Passages to the Presidency” and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s one of the great self-correcting systems in the world.”

SO WHY DON’T WE VOTE?

Last election, for the first time since reliable records were kept in 1932, fewer than half of the voting age population participated in the selection of a president. Bill Clinton received less than 50% of that total--meaning consent to govern was granted to him by less than a quarter of the citizenry. In primaries, candidates triumph or perish by only fractions of that.

For people who hold their system as a model for the world, who cannot be ashamed?

But to what degree should we be alarmed?

If the decline in voting is the result of deepening disillusionment, then the system is running out of gas, just as critics attest.

“A crisis in the electorate,” insists the advocacy group Citizens for True Democracy.

Elsewhere, the rhetoric is hotter still. Witness this unsigned rant from the Internet: “The blame lays squarely at the feet of the elected officials, who continue to run issue-free, smear campaigns, who refuse to talk intelligently about issues, and who block every attempt at meaningful campaign reforms that would enable other voices to be heard. Democracy in the U.S. is a sham.”

Whew.

But the recent decline in voting can be explained more benignly. Studies in the last few years, including one by the Pew Research Center and another by the Census Bureau, found voters were not sulking as much as they were preoccupied. Americans balanced their civic concerns with other demands on their time, and they chose to do something else on Election Day. Others worried about being summoned to jury duty, so they did not register.

“We are at the moment a very fat and happy country,” says Cornell’s Prof. Allin. Low turnout, he continues, “in a way, is a measure of the success of our system, not its failure.”

Public opinion polling may account for the situation. No matter how infuriating it is to be told how we think en masse, this instantaneous finger on the political pulse allows candidates to keep within the comfortable center of national concerns.

Citizens are right to object that this is putting the cart before the horse. But they cannot very well complain that no one is listening. For those only casually absorbed with public policy, this may be enough to ask of the system.

Perhaps that’s why turnout has not risen correspondingly with the scramble by states to make voting more accessible. Casting a vote still requires homework. Many Americans, when confronted with vaguely acceptable alternatives, delegate the chore. Even in Oregon, which is experimenting with balloting exclusively by mail, turnout remains disappointing.

Which is not to say that some segments of society are faking alienation. Those with the greatest needs often have the least faith in the power of a vote. But for others, disgust with the system may be an easy excuse. Can we truly believe that three-quarters of the adult population would hang its head in meek submission if wronged by government? Wouldn’t demagogues raise bigger bonfires from such a powder keg?

The truth, or at least some of the truth, may rest in an old proverb that describes four levels of leadership: laughable, feared, loved and, most sublime, forgotten.

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THE TROUBLE IS, IT’S HARD TO KEEP MATTERS IN PERSPECTIVE when we are carpet-bombed by politics for more than a year.

Front-runners are decided, the viability of challengers is handicapped, running mates are sized up and issues ranked according to importance. By whom? Wait a minute. Voters are king, and someone is usurping our royal prerogatives. Aren’t they?

Last election, writer Jonathan Schell lent sympathy to voters: “whether stupid or smart, they have become by the mid-1990s more strangers to the political system than participants in it.”

Schell reflects a view that the many months of politics leading up to the kick-off caucuses in Iowa and the primary in New Hampshire are exclusionary--the domain of press, consultants, manipulators, financiers and beltway badge-sniffers. Then, within a few short weeks, these few and a very narrow slice of the electorate have their way, leaving the rest of us, yawn, to ponder two well-groomed, properly bred, carefully rehearsed political sons, tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum.

Perhaps the primary process needs a good shake-up, for novelty if nothing else. But those left out have themselves to blame. Even lightly examined, presidential politics serves up raw democracy, great gobs of it, from start to finish.

Ready-made political organizations can no longer be summoned to battle. Instead, they must be assembled from church groups and union halls, from neighborhood and college organizations, from business committees, granges, from cultural and ethnic associations, and anyone else willing to lick envelopes, dial telephones or walk precincts--in other words, from us.

Yes, democracy favors the committed and rewards collectives over individualists, but how could it be otherwise without being something else? As Al Smith, the onetime sheriff who lost the presidency for the Democrats in 1928, said: “All the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy.”

Today, everybody has a seat in the vetting process. Issues are weighed against records. Candidates are tested for their ability to attract supporters, balance interests, manage conflicts, handle criticism and, yes, raise money. They are judged by their ideas, their timber, their temperament, their style, their endurance, by the set of their jaw and the gleam of their smile. Their advisers are similarly scrutinized. These inquiries, both the valuable and the ridiculous, penetrate far deeper than any pose. It is a messy give-and-take, which means that campaign politics is a lot like the politics of governance.

Candidates visit Iowa pig farms to voice global visions. Why? Because the ability to win the few and hold onto the many is a skill necessary in a president. Ditto the ability to distill a complicated idea into a rallying cry--a process commonly disparaged for producing “sound bites” without regard to the alternative of, say, the two-hour policy speech.

With their appetites for round-the-clock information, Americans have fostered a news system that sounds distinctly like an echo chamber. Every event and idea becomes fatigued from repetition. But what a small price for openness. Voters listen to the contenders, they listen to each other, they listen to experts and they listen to every conceivable ilk of crackpot. Just whose opinion is excluded, anyway?

Critics mock the result. In a dispatch to readers of the London Times, correspondent Bernard Levin had a laugh over “the almost unbelievable idiocy of the length of the campaign” in the U.S.

To agree with Levin requires a belief that the long competition for endorsements, the assembling of coalitions, the primaries, the hand-shaking, the relentless travel to pamper groups and regions, the staged theater of conventions, the drama of debates has, as he put it, “degraded the entire democratic system.” In other words, presumably, politicians and ward heelers ought to step in and hurry democracy along.

Watching America’s election horse-trading and horse-racing may be exasperating to some, but it amounts to little more than giving the public entree into the smoke-filled rooms of the past--or into those that still exist in party-controlled parliamentary systems such as Britain’s.

By the willingness to write a check, or through the association of interest groups, or merely by the energy to volunteer--perhaps just sounding off in a letter to the editor or leaning over the backyard fence to talk sense to that damn fool neighbor--America’s politics is open to all to join if they wish. Or they can sit back, observe, digest, worry and, of course, complain.

For the weak of stomach, or those just too busy, there is the “off” switch on the TV, the recycle bin for the newspaper, the vacation cabin in early November. These Americans are disenfranchised by choice, not by the process. Democracy allows this option, too. There are plenty of us Jamestowners remaining.

“The permissive society? What else?” rejoiced the writer Edward Abbey. “I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess--and I hope it stays that way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society, the open society. Who gave us permission to live this way? Nobody did. We did.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue assisted with this story.