Town Hall Meetings and Democracy

lippmannIt is difficult to watch the video of the various “town hall meetings” and constituent listening sessions that have taken place during the current congressional recess.  The overwhelming feeling engendered by these scenes of screaming faces is a feeling of despair for the future of democracy itself.  After all, town hall meetings hold an important place in our nation’s history as a symbol of the general public’s continuing participation in their own democratic government.

  We are very far removed from the time when the residents of a small New England town could gather together on an occasional basis and make communal decisions that governed their daily lives.  Today, members of congress are expected to use these forums to report back to their constituents, to answer questions and solicit concerns, and then to return to Washington, D.C. with a greater sense of the priorities of the voters.  This is not exactly direct democracy in action, along the classic New England model, but it is the closest that most of us can claim to actually participating in the machinery of our own government.

 At many of these town hall meetings, ostensibly intended to address the topic of health care reform, the proceedings have been anything but an exemplar of participatory democracy.  I am not referring to the “exaggerations and extrapolations” of the pending health care reform legislation that some attendees and some Republican opponents of the bill have espoused.  Trying to prove that something is a lie is like chasing your tail.  The task of separating truth from fiction is simply a never ending part of the human condition.  Nor am I particularly concerned over the shouting and the ill manners of many attendees.  I cannot think of any period in our nation’s history when politeness was the norm in political debate.

 Instead, my concern is with the future of democracy itself.  In 1922, in his book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann presented a pessimistic view of the public’s ability to govern itself through our nation’s democratic process.  Three years later, he followed up his critique in the book The Phantom Public.  If anything, the sequel held out even less hope for the meaningful participation of the general public in the shaping of the government policies that have such a dramatic impact on their lives.

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The Beer Summit-A Restorative Justice Experience?

art.beer.summit.afp.giAs I listened to the political pundits argue about the “beer summit” that occurred at the White House yesterday, I am amazed by the debate as to whether President Barrack Obama, Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lieutenant James Crowley really gave us “a teachable moment.” There is no doubt in mind that they did. The only question is what they and all of us learn from that moment. President Obama appears, perhaps intuitively, to have utilized restorative justice principles when he suggested this meeting. The men came together in a “safe environment” to respectively talk about the harm that was caused by the others, the impact it has had on many people, and how to proceed in a positive way to help heal the harm as each of them saw it. Those are the tenets of restorative justice. People getting together in a safe environment for a difficult conversation on identifying the people who have been harmed (in this case by the others), identifying that harm and how can the “offender(s)” and the community look forward and work to repair that harm.

We certainly could see much of the harm unfold on the news and talk shows. Professor Gates, a highly respected scholar, gets arrested in his own home by a white officer. He (and many others) believes he has been treated unfairly because of his race. The officer, who with his fellow officers, including an African-American, believes he was doing his job because he is investigating a possible home invasion and has a man, in his opinion, who is uncooperative and verbally abusive. And we have a highly respected president, who usually is extremely careful with his words, announce that despite the fact that he does not know all the facts, that the police acted “stupidly.” Then we went on to learn that Lucia Whalen, who called in the suspicious behavior at Dr. Gates’ home, is now receiving death threats and being called racist despite the fact that she never volunteered anything about race to the 911 operator. We can then imagine the harm to the Cambridge police department, the African-American community in the Boston area, the family members of everyone involved and then of course the harm to the thousands and thousands of others who experience the renewed pain of some bad police/community member relations all over this country. We have some political pundits characterizing all police as men and women who routinely engage in racial profiling (never acknowledging that never does an entire profession engage in bad behavior so that the “good cops” are thrown into the same description as the “discriminating cops.”) Those kinds of comments not only demoralize police departments but also devastate family members of law enforcement officers. We have once again publicly displayed acts of racism (a Boston officer writing a letter describing Professor Gates as “banana-eating jungle monkey”). We know that the wounds of racism and profiling in this country are justifiably deep and painful. And we have a president, who is trying to focus on our national health care crisis, in part because of his own words, being embroiled in these events. There is not a question in my mind that this was an opportunity for all of us to watch and learn a better way to move forward other than our continuous name calling.

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The Umpire, the Wise Latina, and the Cabinetmaker

scraper_oblique_rearThe confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor are over, and the reviews have been overwhelmingly negative.  The public tuned in expecting a discussion of the nominee’s qualifications and a debate on the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system.  What they got, instead, was a battle of metaphors.

Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee compared the ideal Supreme Court justice to a baseball umpire.  An umpire confines himself to calling balls and strikes without allowing his preference for one team or the other to influence the performance of his duties.  The umpire metaphor is designed to support the view that judges apply the law objectively and even handedly.

While the umpire metaphor expresses a commendable aspiration, one can’t help but wonder whether this is an attainable goal. 

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