The great awful beast of American representative democracy will emerge angry and cussing from it’s filthy hibernatory den tomorrow for one of the rare displays of its erstwhile strength. Should be a spectacle, if anyone bothers to watch.

Gar Alperovitz gave a talk on campus today as part of a lecture series on Detroit revitalization (later, Kurt Vonnegut was on hand promoting his latest anti-glacier book…). In response to a question he made a throw-away remark about democracy and scale. He pointed out that the US is set to hit a Billion people by the end of the century, and that even at far lower numbers, voting-based representative democracy cannot function. He suggested that hope lay in a combination of local scale growth in direct democracy and a loosening of centralized power to meet it. It’s an interesting point. What is the upper bound on the size of a population that can support a functioning representative democracy, and I suppose, what are the structures and policies and cultures which can push that bound up or down? And then, given the culture and policies the US has now, has it yet gotten too big for it’s own democratic structure?

Probably no knowing, but we’ll have more data in the papers tomorrow. Go Blue, as they say around here.