Author testing the limits of free speech on the Acropolis ©UrbisMedia 1979
Ever since the Athenians of the Golden Age of Greece contributed their word demos to a new system of governance, but failed to include thousands of slaves in the process, democracy has been a more protean concept than the soaring rhetoric and sound-bite certitudes written for George Bush’s regrettable second inaugural address. Nothing has exposed some of its ironies more than a president who was “elected” by less than a majority of the people, under a cloud of rigging votes in key states, and eventually (first) “selected” by a favorable judge, anointing himself democracy’s sword-handed champion. Then, incurring the blowback of the refusal of democratic nations to join his crusade, and the “election” of regimes in states in the Middle East and South America that are in ideological opposition to him and his policies, for George Bush, democracy might turn out to be the wish he should have taken care not to make. [1]
Had George Bush been a graduate student in the Seminar in Planning Theory that I gave for three decades (we did occasionally meet over pictures of beer, George) he would have paused before launching his democracy crusade for the Middle East. American planners grapple daily with democracy at the grass roots, at the urban level, down there where the demoi live, work, play, and contend on the battlefields of urban space. Pampered daddy’s-boy George never had to do that, or he would have learned a thing or two about democracy. As a planner he would have learned that planning efficacy and democracy are uneasy mates.
Governing is about the exercise of power, and democracy is about getting that power from the people, the demoi. But it’s a lot easier to “get things done” (and Georgie fancies himself a “can do” guy) if you get your power from elsewhere. Power is a bit like a bunch of beads of mercury, it has a natural tendency to centralize; you have to force it to break up into little beads. Centralized power makes things easier to get done. If you’ve ever been on a faculty committee you understand that. So democracies have to continually struggle to keep those little beads from consolidating.
The first lesson that urban planners get in the dual edges of democracy is when they study urban history. They find out that the Greeks envisioned their democracies for rather small, and steady-state cities. They wondered about “ideal size” and came up with the number of citizens (that excludes the slaves) that could be heard by a public speaker from a podium in theagora —about 3,200 people. Small number, but at least they felt that being informed was crucial to the notion of democracy. Wonder what they might have thought of photo-ops and sound bytes?
The second thing planning students learn is from comparative urbanism. They look at those beautiful cities of the past and other countries and observe their architectural continuities and the magnificent public buildings and the grand designs of cities like Paris and Vienna, only to learn that they were not created buy democracies, but quite the opposite. By contrast, their shapeless and uncomely American cities pale in physical comparison, are so often a dull or ugly pastiche of the decisions of councils and committees, neighborhood organizations and planning groups, contending special interests, business interests and, finally, individual citizens who regard themselves as sovereigns over their own little quarter-acre domains, and will vote and petition and create legal initiatives, and punish local politicians when they don’t get their way. That’s democracy—sloppy, slow, and often homely in its results. Planners with dreams to author the golden city on the hill, the new Rome of marble, or Hausmannian Paris, are defeated by such democracy. Even those grass roots planners who champion “power to the people and their neighborhoods” can be disappointed by the narrow self-interest of those little beads of mercury.
And then there is this: when democracies get to doing business with other states they often find it easier to do it with those with centralized and authoritarian power. That includes the good ole US of A. Where do you think those photos of American officials shaking hands with dictators like Charles Taylor, Noriega, Pinochet, Mao, Saud, and then there’s that great shot of Don Rumsfeld with his buddy Saddam Hussein, come from? It’s easier doing business with these guys: one, you know who really has the decision-making authority; two, it’s easier to bribe one guy and; three, it is also easier to lop off one head when things don’t go the way you want them to. Saddam is only the latest.
Then there are the problems you can have when democracy rears its ugly head in within democratic states – Hitler and Mussolini were both elected – or within erstwhile authoritarian regimes. Of the latter, it may have been a safer USSR we dealt with than a Russian Federation that has a tenuous control over its nuclear stockpile and its bio-weapons. In any case it is drifting back towards a re-constitution of authoritarianism. Sudan held “free and fair elections” in 1986, after overthrowing a military regime, and look at the place today, if you can stand the sight of blood and guts. Robert D. Kaplan, who knows the parts of the world that Bush sees fertile for democracy better than Bush could ever dream of knowing them wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: I submit that the democracy we are encouraging in many poor parts of the world is an integral part of a transformation toward new forms of authoritarianism; that democracy in the United States is at greater risk than ever before, and from obscure sources; and that many future regimes, ours especially, could resemble the oligarchies of ancient Athens and Sparta more than they do the current government in Washington.
Don’t get this wrong; I sure am not making a case against democracy. I am making a case against democratic hypocrisy. Americans have never been that convincing to me that they are, down deep, great democrats. There was that slavery business, of course, but it was also easier for Americans to avoid having to deal with the exigencies of democracy by virtue of our expansive geography and rich resources. We have been great ones for migrating from what Richard Sennett called the “disorder” of America’s urban cultural pluralism. If you didn’t like living with those people of color, or of “alien” culture, it was easy in America to move to the suburbs, or keep moving westward. Space not only diminished contact, it opened the prospect of creating your own little suburban “city-state” where it was easier to practice “democracy” with people just like yourself. [2]
It may be that even some Republicans are finding the irony inescapable that George Bush (and I won’t repeat what I said about his “election”) poses himself as a champion of democracy while arrogating to himself the authority (as “war president”) to detain “enemies” for years withouthabeas corpus (and ignore the Supreme Court’s dictum to the contrary), torture them, look the other way when his minions court treason and “out” our legitimate spies, promote the seepage of religious authority into government, and unleash the NSA to spy on its own citizens. The man just doesn’t “walk his talk,” and, in a true democracy the people need to wise up to that before it’s too late.
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©2006, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 4.1.2006)
[1] This is Dragon City Journal’s third essay on this subject. For consistency (or lapses) in its views you are referred to Nos. 9.6 and 12.8. More extensive remarks on the relationship between planning and democracy were made in my paper “Planning and Democracy: Uneasy Partners,” World Planning Schools Congress , Shanghai, China, July 13, 2001
[2] The Uses Of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life ( New York, Knopf, 1970)