KANSAN Comment
Democrazy in action
Members of the University Senate—KU's representative governing body for faculty and students—attempt to reach a consensus.
Photo by Halina Pawl
Just because 200,000 persons march in the streets for peace, said Spiro Agnew this week, we have no excuse to assume that the marchers represent the millions of American citizens. President Nixon has beamed and pointed to the stacks of letters and telegrams which the "silent majority" have addressed to him since his Nov. 3 speech. And the Moratorium organizers argue that their numbers are increasing rapidly and can cite polls to prove it.
It all points to a staunchly-held American belief that if enough support can be garnered for a particular point of view, then that viewpoint will be considered worthwhile. Whatever "the people" want must be morally right—merely because they want it. Morality somehow has become an offspring of large numbers.
We've seen that viewpoint at KU, where members of the Student Senate have balked on vital action, saying they would like to poll their constituency before voting.
This is the democratic way of government, which has seen America through nearly 200 years. And when we are deciding matters such as the raising or lowering of taxes, the hiring or firing of public officials, or the building or destruction of government programs, majority rule seems to work out okay.
It does slow things down. Referendum votes take time, and so does the building of mass support for any plan of action. The election process, for instance, is spun into several months of psychologically-oriented spiderwebs aimed to catch the voters' minds. Surely a dictator would be much quicker.
But we're not interested in saving time. America began with the intent to provide government of and for the people and we've seen that the idea is basically sound.
Yet in spite of the somewhat steady success of American democracy, several flaws are inherent in the system. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, called one flaw the "tyranny of the majority." Americans have embodied a social myth, an abstraction, with an ethical sanction. Tocqueville questioned whether a nation so conceived could long endure.
Nelson W. Polsby and Aaron B. Wildavsky, in Presidential Elections, carry on this point, saying advocates of consensus government suggest "no external criteria by which policies can be measured in order to determine whether or not they are in the public interest. So long as the process by which decisions are made consists of intergroup bargaining, within certain specified democratic 'rules of the game,' they regard the outcome as being in the public interest."
Polsby and Wildavsky suggest that what "the people" want may not always be the best way to decide what is good for them. External standards need to
be available to limit the control of the majority. Some controls have been built into the American system. An example is the electoral college. Pummeled though it is by criticism, it is a better way to elect a president than by direct popular vote.
During election time, candidates inadvertently exhibit some of the sadder aspects of consensus government. In order to collect votes, candidates apply principles of advertising to merchandise themselves. This engineering of consent and consensus reached its full—and somewhat ugly—flowering during the last presidential elections. The public relations and makeup men today can fashion and remake history.
Within a consensus form of government, where decisions are made by reaching majority agreements, sometimes the battles are bloody before a mass of Americans can decide to agree on something. "Consensus is threatened by sharp disagreement over economic issues, by the diversity of our economic, racial, religious, ethnic and sectional groupings, by our restless and immoderate people and by the tendency of a nontraditional society to push political conflict to its most unfortunate logical conclusion," Polsby and Wildavsky write.
We have seen this tendency toward civil war many times in American history. Again this weekend, we are warned, violence may erupt as thousands of Americans attempt to vote in the streets in the second Moratorium observances.
Then too, there is always the nagging doubt: Is the common man even competent to make the decisions which govern his life? On a national level, we can surely argue that few know enough of the political, historical, social and economic aspects of the war in Vietnam to make a soundly-based decision on U.S. involvement there. At KU, few students know enough about the costs and need for a new satellite union to vote intelligently on its construction.
When ignorance prevails, it is easy for a clever man to lead the people like so many silly sheep.
Such folks as Philip Wylie think the masses are nothing but a bunch of boobs. He is nauseated by the common man. "For it is our American common people," he says, and not the highly-educated ones, who have chucked overboard the critical method and thereby cut loose the ship of state from its sounding machinery, its rudder, its glass and its keel, leaving the whole business to drift where the blather of common men blows it."
I would not criticize government by consensus so strongly as Philip Wylie does. I have a little more faith in the abilities and capabilities of mankind.
But American government does have its faults—faults which we often ignore, standing under the red, white and blue banner of patriotism.
Consensus government, as I have said, contains too few insurances against mass decisions which might be gravely wrong and dangerous to society. It is too easy to provoke popular support for a viewpoint or a person merely by exploiting advertising techniques. Conflict before reaching consensus often means figurative and/or literal headchopping. And sometimes the citizens are simply too ignorant to make the right decisions.
There are other pitfalls in government by consensus, but to me these seem to be the biggest flaws in the diamond. To get rid of all these problems, we would have to throw out the whole system of government—which would be like tossing baby out with the dirty bathwater. Somehow that doesn't seem worthwhile.
Those involved in government—and in America that means everyone—should take a sober look at these and other fallacies inherent in the system.
And they must keep in mind the comment of Joseph Wood Krutch in the Jan. 10, 1953 issue of Saturday Review: "... to confuse The Best with the most
widely and most generally acceptable is to reveal a spiritual confusion which is subtle and insidious as well as fundamental."
Perhaps if we know where the booby-traps are and what they look like, we will be able to avoid them some of the time.
Joanna K. Wiebe
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