Participatory Government Quotes

Are we ready to hand over our future to the elite, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?

John Calvin, brought characteristic rigor to the question. Luther dreamed of good princes, disliked law on principle, and had little interest in institutions. As a result, Lutheran churches ended up with a mishmash of governing structures. Calvin, by contrast, had trained as a lawyer, knew that structures matter, and favored more participatory government.

The kind of sociopolitical structure that Protestantism engenders—based on free inquiry, participatory politics, and limited government—tends to favor market economics.

It supported participatory governance in both friendly and adversarial countries; it played a leading role in articulating new humanitarian principles, and since 1945 it has, in five wars and on several other occasions, spent American blood to redeem them in distant corners of the world. No other country would have had the idealism and the resources to take on such a range of challenges or the capacity to succeed in so many of them. American idealism and exceptionalism were the driving forces behind the building of a new international order.

Grassroots Tea Party activism therefore marries participatory engagement and considerable learning about the workings of government with factually ungrounded beliefs about the content of policies. If people actively engage in the political process but on mistaken premises, is that good or bad for democracy? Our heads are left spinning.

The council works for the best interest of the whole. Decisions from past councils are weighed to carefully consider the effect of any new proposal, following the self-governing tenets of the Cherokee Indian tribe in eastern America, which made no decision until the effects of that decision were considered for seven generations into the future. The Gathering itself is a participatory workshop in self-government.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote that “whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that, whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them right.” He also said: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” But we are right now in a period of great vulnerability. As noted earlier, when television became the primary source of information in the United States, the “marketplace of ideas” changed radically. Most communication was in only one direction, with a sharp decline in participatory democracy. During this period of vulnerability for American democracy—while traditional television is still the dominant source of information and before the Internet is sufficiently developed and secured as an independent, neutral medium—there are other steps that can and should be taken to foster more connectivity in our self-government.

Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control.

We could have complete, transparent, participatory knowledge accessible to all, audited at every level of understanding, and protect privacy for everyone. Local governance could be both informed and autonomous and we could collaborate with a speed and accuracy that might just give us a chance to solve the problems we are facing before it is too late. Everyone would have the equal ability to make informed choices at their chosen level of understanding. We could have a universal reality, informed by information from all sources, and we could make decisions free of state and corporate coercion.

American citizens are self-absorbed, and the U.S. government devotes its immense resources to achieving the capitalistic demands of its citizenry. Thoughts do not saturate American politics. Corporations employ lobbyist and they fund political action committees that exert inordinate influence in shaping the outcome of this nation’s political agendas. Lobbyist devote their paid for services to sway government officials including legislators and members of regulatory agencies to carry out the programs of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, granting unprecedented socioeconomic power in the hallowed chambers of the American government to wealthy segments of society. American corporations and affluent people exploit American culture, morals, and religion to push their private interests including inexplicable economic and military incursions into foreign counties. I feel increasingly disenfranchised and unrepresented in America’s supposedly participatory democratic government given the entrenchment of power in a select few. American democracy grants material benefits to the wealthy, vulgarizes the middle class, and ignores the disenfranchised poor. Many Americans applaud prosperous groups exploiting the lower classes, presumably because everyone aspires to become rich. A person and a society that employs vanities and greediness to measure their worthiness is hopelessly doomed. Future historians will venerate an empire that pursued achievement of great deeds based upon virtuous principles. Conversely, the historians of tomorrow will skewer contemporary Americans for their compulsive need to consume the ecosystem and trounce upon the rights of other nations to live peacefully. American vanities and unchecked desire to enjoy an easy life could destroy the world, as we know it.

Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?

The old revolutionary chant "Power to the People," usually accompanied by a raised clenched fist, has gone out of fashion. The failure of the socialist model has become too evident. The phrase probably came from the battle cry of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution when the slogan was "Power to the Soviets." In America in the 1960s the Soviet slogan was corrupted into what some called "participatory democracy," and people like "Tom Hayden of Students for a Democratic Society were calling for a transfer of power to the 'people,' whom they were able to identify as themselves." Later on, the "Power to the People" slogan was adopted by Bobby Seale as the chant of the Black Panthers. Needless to say, the last thing many of these people had in mind was actually giving all of the people a real voice in their government. But that is what is happening now.

For an entire class of people to once again be involved in the political process, to directly vote on taxes and financing matters, was a level of participatory democracy at which Alexis de Tocqueville would have marveled: “To have a hand in the government of society, and to talk about it,” wrote Tocqueville in his Democracy in America in 1835, “is the most important business and so to speak, the only pleasure an American knows.

A moral economy is either a moral enterprise that is guided by a genuine spiritual desire to create one, even at the expense of strictly economic considerations, or it will degenerate into another profit-oriented and exploitative use of resources. Citizens who are not prepared to pay higher prices to support such an economy and volunteer their own efforts on its behalf are not likely to be prepared for self-governance in any form. Hence the need for a new municipal politics to become an intensely educational and participatory experience at every level of civic life.

Some of those who say they are worried about erasing history are really objecting to decisions about monuments being taken down by a small group of people, whether protesters or officials. Ideally, communities as a whole should decide, but you cannot impose this as a requirement without the existence of a real process for having these conversations. Today, what we are truly in danger of losing is not history but rather the chance to use monuments, whether fallen or still standing, as paths to get to a better future