Civics 101: Representative Government

“Shouldn’t the community have some say in this before it’s just decided for us?”

I saw that question in a comment this week and have been thinking about it ever since.

Because yes. Of course, the community should have a say. But maybe not quite in the way we have come to think.

Somewhere along the line, a whole bunch of us got the idea that democracy means everybody gets to vote on everything. That if a city council, county commission, school board, or legislature makes a decision without first asking the whole community what it thinks, then somehow the people have been left out of the process.

Except that isn’t really how our government was built.

We have representative government. Which means we vote for people and then, for better or worse, those people make decisions. That is their job.

It is why we have city council members, county commissioners, school board trustees, legislators, and members of Congress instead of dragging the whole town down to City Hall every Tuesday night to vote on sewer lines, copier contracts, and whether the public works department needs a new pickup.

Depending on the week, that might be entertaining. The idea is much older than our local government meetings, of course. The Declaration of Independence says governments get their “just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that is the most important part.

Government does not get its authority from the king. Or the governor. Or the mayor. Or some guy with a title and a nameplate. It gets its authority from us.

But that has become the difficult part.

How exactly do a bunch of free people govern themselves without making an absolute mess of it? The Founders spent a great deal of time on that question. They did not particularly trust government. They also did not particularly trust us.

Which, when you think about it, was probably wise.

James Madison gets into this in Federalist No. 10, which is my favorite of the Federalist Papers and one I keep coming back to. Madison was worried about factions. Basically, people.