once in a while and cast our votes and then go home.
This is meaningless, the article says—this isn’t real participation
in the world. What we need is a functioning and active civil society
in which people come together and do important things, not just this
business of pushing a button now and then.
Then the article asks, How do we overcome these inadequacies?
Strikingly, you don’t overcome them with more active participation
in the political arena. You do it by abandoning the political arena and
joining the PTA and going to church and getting a job and going to the
store and buying something. That’s the way to become a real citizen
of a democratic society.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with joining the PTA. But there are
a few gaps here. What happened to the political arena? It
disappeared from the discussion after the first few comments about
how meaningless it is.
If you abandon the political arena, somebody is going to be there.
Corporations aren’t going to go home and join the PTA. They’re
going to run things. But that we don’t talk about.
As the article continues, it talks about how we’re being
oppressed by the liberal bureaucrats, the social planners who are
trying to convince us to do something for the poor. They’re the
ones who are really running the country. They’re that impersonal,
remote, unaccountable power that we’ve got to get off our backs as
we fulfill our obligations as citizens at the PTA and the office.
This argument isn’t quite presented step-by-step like that in the
article—I’ve collapsed it. It’s very clever propaganda, well designed,
well crafted, with plenty of thought behind it. Its goal is to make
people as stupid, ignorant, passive and obedient as possible, while at
the same time making them feel that they’re somehow moving
towards higher forms of participation.
In your discussions of democracy, you often refer to a couple of
comments of Thomas Jefferson’s.
Jefferson died on July 4, 1826—fifty years to the day after the
Declaration of Independence was signed. Near the end of his life, he
spoke with a mixture of concern and hope about what had been
achieved, and urged the population to struggle to maintain the
victories of democracy.