A Practicable Organization of Democracy

So long as space, in contradiction to Kant, asserted its substantial reality by holding men apart, social relations were limited narrowly, and the process of their orderly organization was very slow. In this matter our age has experienced the most marvelous of the great changes of circumstance that have occurred in the life of mankind. We have seen space become so collapsible, as we may say, in the hands of the engineer and the electrician, and so feeble an obstruction to human intercourse, that it is hardly, any longer, in the reckoning of difficulties to any social undertaking, however big. As a consequence, the organizing of human relations, in every possible articulation of common interests or reciprocal services, is now the busiest and most important work of our time. Everywhere, on an always expanding scale, people are giving the organic corporate structure to everything they do: to their industries, their commerce, their works of education, their pursuits of science, their entertainments, and equally to their iniquities and their reforms.

In other words, society is being organized with remarkable completeness in a disjunctive way; while integrally, in its wholeness, it has no more organization than it had a hundred years ago. Its organizable wholeness is, of course, only that of its political incorporation, through which runs the single thread of social relationship that ties each to every other of the individuals who inhabit given sections of the earth. In this relationship the social organization of mankind is showing nowhere a distinct advance. To us, whose political incorporation is that of a representative democracy, undertaking entire self-government, this unorganized condition is a serious fact; and the more serious because the process of disjunctive organization has been applied to it with alarmingly disjunctive results. Its members, so far as they will submit to it, are organized to mechanical perfection as political partisans; but as constituents of the sovereign democracy, — the basic social body, — they have no organization, and seem generally unconscious of their need to have any.

The needed organization for democracy in its wholeness is one that shall be inclusive of everything requisite for party organization, carrying in itself such forms, agencies and processes as will offer free and ready service to all assortments and combinations of differing political opinion, equipping them with equal opportunity to contest the ordering of public affairs. A true democracy is impossible without the fluency of popular action in politics which these conditions would secure, and which can be lost under despoticparties as well as under despotic kings.

Primarily, the needed organization must be based on a representation of the people in their government by a truer assorting of them than is possible to our present method, which takes them as they are grouped by the mere accident of their residence together within given districts of ground. Of course it is impossible to devise a system of selection (nomination) and election which would give exactly correct weight to agreements and disagreements of choice, and make every functionary of government a strictly true representative of his constituency; but it cannot be impossible for an intelligent, ingenious, resourceful democracy to achieve something nearer to that result than has been thus far realized. It has never even attempted to make opinion the basis of its political representation. It has never tried to form constituencies for representation by an assortment of voters according to what they most strongly desire their government to do. It contents itself with bunching them in districts of territory, as they happen to be living together, and thus representing, not the voters and their opinions and wishes, but certain areas of house-lots and farms, within each of which whatever happens to be the uppermost disposition of mind, as expressed at the polls by any majority whatsoever, shall be taken for an expression of opinion and will from the community entire.

In all cases this annuls some large part of the votes cast; in most cases nearly half of them; in many cases more than half (when pluralities instead of majorities prevail); extinguishing completely the public opinion and will expressed in these minorities of votes, and carrying into government a delegation of authority and a dictation of policy which rarely come from any large proportion of the governed. When we bring our political beliefs and desires to the polls of such an election, the best we can do is to pick out one or two, on which we may possibly combine votes with enough of ouraccidental neighbors to secure some chance of accomplishing an election, with some hope that the chosen representative of our patch of ground may coincidentally represent our individual selves in some fractional way. It seems farcical to call this a system of government representative of the people.

Naturally, in such circumstances, we have drifted into the two-party division of the mass of voters in our districted constituencies; and just as naturally those make-shift parties are steadily losing their last remnants of meaning and purpose as organs of popular opinion and will. A few people among us — prohibitionists, populists, socialists — are sufficiently earnest in particular aims to throw away their votes on hopeless candidatures, rather than contribute to a misrepresentation of what they care for most. In this there is a fidelity to democratic principle which claims high respect, and which ought to have the encouragement and the cultivation that a reality of representation would give it.

If the best were made of the geographical formation of representative constituencies it would still be farcical in its pretension to organize self-government by the governed. But the best is never made of it, and never can be, for the reason that, in the working of our two-party politics, one or the other party will always have power to gerrymander the carving of districts, for the wasting of its opponent’s votes, and will never fail to employ that, fraud.

I doubt if an instance to the contrary can be found in any districting of constituencies, for city, county, state, or national elections, within these United States. Examples of the gerrymander and its juggling are everywhere. I take the one that lies readiest: to my hand, in the ward elections of 1911 in my own city. The city is divided into twentyseven wards, of a carefully calculated eccentricity in their shapes. It had one alderman to elect in each. Regular nominations were made on each side of our ridiculous two-party division; a few independent candidacies were undertaken; some scattering and some blank votes were cast; and the whole aldermanic vote in the city was 70,611.

By majorities or pluralities the nominees of one party were elected in seventeen wards, where that party polled 26,993 votes, against 20,772 in opposition. The other party was successful in ten wards by an aggregate vote of 11,729, against 11,700. The number, in all wards, of votes cast successfully, — cast, that is, for candidates who were elected, — was 38,722. The total number of unsuccessful votes was 31,889. The party which carried ten wards (which was the party that had planned the ward divisions, to its own advantage) secured its representation in the board of aldermen by an average of 1173 votes in each ward. The other party suffered a wasteful expenditure of 1588 votes in the average of its seventeen wards. If the twenty-seven elected aldermen had represented equal constituencies of voters, the 38,722 votes which elected the entire twentyseven should have elected only fifteen, and the 31,889 votes which elected none, and had no voice in the city government, should have sent twelve representatives to the board.

This is a fair, common example of the working of the system under which we try to persuade ourselves that we are operating a government representative of the governed. To state the facts is enough to show how crude, how rudely fashioned a piece of social mechanism it is; how well designed to become the ready instrument of self-seeking and intrigue in politics; how very far from realizing any rational conception of a representatively self-governed democracy. The bare facts, too, show plainly that the evils which infest our politics are mostly inseparable from the practice of representing in government, not sections of public opinion, but sections of a map. It is the difficulty of making any other than the coarsest assorting of our oppositions in political opinion, within these hard-and-fast boundaries of residence, that has driven us into our two-party organization, with its utter misfit, as to all questions of local government; with its machine-like structure and working; with its wide opportunities for turning public service to personal profit, — its open temptations to corruption, — its emptiness of any inspiration of political ideals.

In the primitive evolution of representative government a districted election of representatives was fallen into inevitably, because it was the simplest, easiest, mode, and because it was naturally satisfying to peoples who had had no voice in government before. Habit then fixed it in use, and it was justified, perhaps, so long as restricted means of communication limited all kinds of combination to narrow neighborhoods. But that justification exists no longer. To-day, for every purpose of social cooperation, the areas of neighborhood are stretched less by a hundred miles of distance than they were by ten miles a generation or two ago.

In my belief we have nothing now but habit to hinder us from organizing undistricted constituencies of agreeing opinion, and giving them a representation in government that will be uncontested and complete. As I hope to show, it is a rearrangement of representation which need not be undertaken sweepingly, at once, in a revolutionary way, but which can be tried here and there, now and then, side by side with the existing system, beginning naturally in the fields of local government, city and county, and extended later into the larger fields of state and national politics, or abandoned, according to the satisfaction or otherwise that it gives. If it should carry the will of the people into government with more directness and better effect than the districted method, the old political parlies might be constrained to adjust their own organization to it, with advantage to their character and usefulness; but no legitimate function of theirs would be menaced in the slightest degree.

Already, it seems, there are younger communities than ours, Pretoria and Johannesburg, in South Africa, for example, in which an assorting of voters in constituencies of agreeing opinion has been accomplished with success. This is done in connection with a method of preferential voting, under a law which confers election on any candidate who receives a prescribed number of votes. The preferential voting involves some complexity which may not be serious, but which I think it possible to avoid.

As I have the thought of such undistricted constituencies, they involve no change in our present mode of preparing or polling votes. The ballot may be unaltered; the same election districts may be maintained—each citizen voting in the district of his residence, as now. The change of effect in the voting would come primarily from a more systematic registration of voters,—a complete and exact enrollment, — such as all communities need for other than political purposes, and the lack of which is a fundamental crudity of our social organization.

With such a registration established and maintained, I can see no slightest impracticability in the idea of forming constituencies of people who are most nearly in agreement on the measures and policies to be dealt with by the representative whom they elect. The formation of such constituencies, according to my conception of them, would start naturally and easily from the gathering of what may be called electoral, groups, made up of kindred-minded people, resident in the same election district. Let some state, in its election laws, simply permit any number of voters in any election district to form such a group, and to associate themselves with other electoral groups of like-minded voters in other election districts, to such an extent as will make up some prescribed number of voters, sufficient for the constituency of a representative in their city board of aldermen, or their county board of supervisors, or either branch of their state legislature, or in the national Congress. If action is taken on such permission, let the law provide that the electoral groups formed in election districts, and the constituencies made up by their association, shall be officially numbered and recorded, and that the registration of citizens in each community shall cover full particulars concerning them. That is, the register of a citizen must record the electoral group, if any, to which he has attached himself, and the register of a group must record its membership and the constituency or constituencies of which it forms part.

The only needful innovation in procedure on election day would seem to be in the marking, counting, and reporting of votes. Each vote cast by a voter registered as belonging to an electoral group would bear the number of the group, and the count and return of votes would be required to show the number to the credit of the several groups so designated. If the groups united in a given constituency were shown by the returns to have polled a number of votes which satisfied the requirement from such constituency, and if the same person had been named by all or by a majority, that constituency would have elected its representative. This is all that I can see of complication that would be added to the present process, and it is too slight to have weight for a moment against the reality of representation in government that would be brought about.

Taking for illustration the circumstances of the municipal election already described, the working of the method would be this: the total of votes for aldermanie candidates in that election having been 70,611, the average per ward was 2615. The latter number, then, or an even 2600, would have been the fair minimum of membership to prescribe for the making up of twenty-seven undistricted constituencies to be represented in the aldermanic board. If a municipal representation on that plan had been authorized by law, as an alternative to the representation of wards, and if the existing political parties had already found it desirable to adopt this construction of constituencies, and if the array of voters in party ranks remained unchanged, one party could have formed groups in the election districts sufficient to make up fourteen constituencies, and could have seated that number of aldermen in the board, representing the exact ratio of its supporters to the total voting population of the city; while the other party could have seated eleven, and the scattered and blank votes could have filled two independent seats.

But this hard-and-fast division on national party lines would nothave been maintained; for the reason that there happened to be a local situation at the time which made the party yoke more than commonly oppressive to many citizens. On the question of a new city charter, to increase the measure of home-rule and to concentrate responsibility in the city government, thousands from both parties would have thrown their votes together, if an effective combination had not been so difficult to organize. What I suggest would seemingly take most of that difficulty away. Occasions which call loudly, as in this instance, for some special demonstration of public opinion and feeling, but which are afforded no effective response under a districted representation, are of frequent occurrence everywhere. Some measure of legislation or some line of policy, in city, county or state government, which the professional politicians of established parties antagonize, is desired very earnestly by a large body of citizens, numerous as a whole, but so divided by district lines in their voting that they can make little or no showing of their numbers in the election of representatives to the legislative body from which action must come. By the offer of the undistricted constituencies their feebleness of political influence would be converted at once into something of effective weight, scaled with mathematical precision.

If there is anything of serious new difficulty or troublesomeness in our political action involved in this method of organization I cannot see it. Nothing is commoner among us, nothing more familiar to our social experience, than the forming of associations or clubs; and an electoral group would be no more or less than a political club, affiliated with other clubs of like opinion and aim to form a representative constituency. The work incident to the movement would be mostly within the local circles of the groups, and not likely to be greater than goes into the action for which religious or benevolent or business associations are formed.

Citizens who did not choose to enter an electoral group could continue to vote under the districted system of representation, so long as political parties continued to put forward candidates in districts. The only necessary interference with the existing system would be the prescription of some minimum of votes that must be cast in a districted constituency, as well as in an undistricted one, to validate elections in either. If there came to be, in time, a considerable use of the offered opportunity for representing constituencies of agreeing opinion, the permanent parties might find so many of their districted votes drained away into the new constituencies, that they could not hold their ground in politics without accepting for themselves the more rational plan. A systematic representation of all political opinion might thus be instituted, displacing the crude representation of majorities and pluralities in territorial districts, by the simple effect of a permissive law, if the people found it good.

Action under such a permissive law would naturally begin, as I have said, in the spheres of local government. It is there that the joining of group to group, in the associating of a fixed number of voters, could be effected most easily. A widened grouping and association, however, extended from wards and townships to legislative and congressional districts, would only widen the communications to be employed; which is almost a negligible consideration at the present day. And if undertakings in this suggested line should be carried no further than into municipal representation, they might with reason be expected to do much in that sphere toward the accomplishing of a political reform which is foremost among our needs. They would weaken to easy breakage the fatal domination of national politics and national party organization, which paralyzes municipal politics and denies to local questions and interest their due share of attention in the public mind. To break the unnatural and mischievous connection of municipal with national and state polities would be the breaking of our political parties from the most powerful of the influences and the most pernicious of the conditions which vitiate their management now.

It must be confessed that undistrioted constituencies can be of no advantage in the election of administrative officials, city or state, where the voting, of necessity, is undistricted; but neither can they be troublesome to it. No difficulties could attend the attaching of the election of a mayor or governor to any balloting for which electoral groups and open constituencies have been specially formed, if it connects with their other aims.

When the most has been made of all objections to the suggested system, let. the following considerations to its advantage be set down —

Public opinion and desire on political questions of the day would be represented, in all of its important divisions, with a definiteness and an accuracy which cannot conceivably be attained by a representation of mere majorities and pluralities among the voters dwelling within given areas of ground. To accomplish that state of things would be to realize a government of the people by the people, in true operation for the first time. Unless the theory of democracy is a delusion, this is what must be realized; for otherwise the theory becomes a doctrine that one hundred members of a free and equal body politic may silence the voices of ninety-nine, and exercise the rankest of tyrannies, while conducting, nevertheless, the freest form of government attainable by mankind. Practically, such is the implication of the democratic theory, so far as it has yet been applied in a general way. Varied devices for its modification, to prune the absolutism of majorities, by some small concession of effect to minority votes in a districted constituency, have been long under discussion and occasional trial; but their complicated operation and defective result are discouraging to their adoption, and there appears little promise that any among them will ever have much use. Hence, while the ideals of democracy are the most rational that humanity can entertain, I discover no hope that they can be realized politically until a free and fluent representation of public opinion in its differences is organized in some such fundamental mode as I have described.

The worst working of our system of districted representation is in the primary and most important movement of the elective act, — namely, the seeking and naming of candidates from among whom the election is to be made. Out of the mixed population of a constituent district, whether it be the ward of a city or a larger legislative district, the manipulators of party organization, who control the sharing of political spoils, can generally command a body of supporters against whose obedient unity in the primary voting there is seldom an opposing rally that can be organized with success. Present demands for legislation to provide for the nomination of candidates by direct popular vote may produce something to curtail the dictatorship of the party ‘boss’; but nothing yet realized from this important reform gives assurance that its effects will go very deep. The self-interested agencies of party organization will still be active at every polling place, with large advantages of unity and plan in what they do.

But if our mixed constituencies, of districted populations, were broken into constituencies of citizens assorted by their agreements and disagreements in political opinion and purpose, then the kind of voters who serve political bosses would have to go together, in separated groups and constituencies of their kind, while citizens of the other sort, having political beliefs to assert, ideals of government to st rive for, and standards of quality to be satisfied in the choice of their representatives, could make an uncontested choice. Organization would have been ready-made for both, and the contest of political independence with political bossism, fought then on level ground, would have its right, result.

Citizens who cherish political ideals, coming together in electoral groups and then united in constituencies, would be fastidious and critical in their choice of representatives, as no constituencies of the present system can ever hope to be. The man of their preference would be sought by them, and solicited, not to submit himself to the indignities of a vulgarized political contest, uncertain in result, but to accept a service of honor, lying entirely within the gift of those whoo proffered it. Public life might then offer careers which would appeal to one of the worthiest of ambitions, be responsive to one of the highest calls of duty, and yield one of the most substantial of satisfactions. Men who scorn the servile terms on which public office is now most commonly conferred, would accept it then from the hands of their fellow-citizens with well-justified pride.

The character of our legislative bodies and of our whole public service could not fail to be raised. The better political motive and intelligence of most communities might still remain in minorities of their citizenship; but they could secure their representation, proportionately to whatever weight they had; they could have full expression in legislative chambers; their demands, their protests, their appeals to reason, could be carried where they must have the hearing and the influence which they seldom get now.

All of which leads to these final questions: Is there any other political reform that could give us so much of the reality of government by the people governed, and determine its possibilities so conclusively, as an organized representation of undistricted constituencies of agreeing opinion ? and, Why do we not undertake that natural and very simple organization of democracy ?