Our traditional exercise of direct democracy this morning was grand.  Not only was it Sam's first Town Meeting (last year's would've been had the teething infant not melted down mere minutes beforehand), but there were dozens of highschoolers there as non-voting guests, which was a lovely thing to see (even if it was, as I suspect, a civics class assignment or somesuch).  Turnout was so good overall that I ran out of my Healthcare is a Human Right literature.

On a large scale, I'm not a big fan of direct democracy–witness California, for example, as the people let their passions tie their own hands with regard to revenue, and the Tyranny of the Majority tramples civil rights with Prop 8–and generally prefer some sort of republican, representative form of self-government.  But at a sort of atomic level, you can't get much better than what we manage each March in most of our small communities in Vermont.

Thomas Jefferson had a vision of governance that was not entirely dissimilar from what we have here:

I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength.

1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom.
2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it.

But this division looks to many other fundamental provisions…These little republics would be the main strength of the great one. We owe to them the vigor given to our revolution in its commencement in the Eastern States, and by them the Eastern States were enabled to repeal the embargo in opposition to the Middle, Southern and Western States, and their large and lubberly division into counties which can never be assembled. General orders are given out from a centre to the foreman of every hundred, as to the sergeants of an army, and the whole nation is thrown into energetic action, in the same direction in one instant and as one man, and becomes absolutely irresistible. Could I once see this I should consider it as the dawn of the salvation of the republic, and say with old Simeon, “nunc dimittas Domine.” [“Dismiss him, O Lord” from the Canticle of Simeon. – ed.] But our children will be as wise as we are, and will establish in the fulness of time those things not yet ripe for establishment.

Was this ever scalable in the United States back then, let alone today?  Perhaps not, but I'm thankful that we can with few exceptions still do this in Vermont.  I'd like to think our form of government is part of why our state tends to lead the way on things like civil rights and healthcare–because we have an opportunity to politically engage with each other so much–even though one of the biggest debates in Fletcher today was how best to provide an electronic option for voters to receive the town report…

ntodd