Gene Miller, Victoria, BC

I like my politicians scared and my fellow citizens informed and engaged. And voting.

Otherwise, everything slides: The public feels it has no voice, the politicians think God’s in their corner.

Then, people wonder why “democracy” seems diminished to ritual language and proportions.

This is all about who controls the levers of power or, literally, who owns power.

While the workings or the essential nature of power may be murky, its applications and outcomes are all too easy to spot.

Democracy seems, in this context, a radical idea about the locus and distribution — and even the design and purposes — of power.

Lofty and stirring rhetoric aside, it’s an incredibly sophisticated and abstract social idea, very fragile and subject to attack from all corners.

In our own times, democracies have suffered damage or outright destruction in a number of countries, replaced always by dictatorships or autocracies.

In every case, a directionless and agitated or debilitated public chose a person who said: “Follow me!”
Public thinker Terence McKenna believes the level of contradiction imposed by rapid change is rising, that the forces that keep the world sane are collapsing. “Fire in a madhouse,” he suggests.

He speculates that this reflects an enormous increase in novelty, a proliferation, a flood, of “nexts” that renders norms and conventions quickly obsolete, unresponsive.

This destroys the social map and scares the hell out of people.

This may explain the society-wide move, these days, to the ideological right.

People are looking for security, not social adventure.

The prelude to takeover happens as a softening by degrees, and I can almost guarantee that people in every former democracy proclaimed: “It can’t happen here!”

In other words, democracy cannot be lazy. If or when it is, it fails.

But this is Victoria and, of course, it can’t happen here!

“It” starts with a distracted, preoccupied or even indifferent public and leads, by the smallest of increments, to political overreach: a mayor and council who, having lost the habit of, and intellectual investment in, citizen courtship, begin the slow and nearly invisible march toward imperial behaviour.

Dissenters and critics, letter-writers and public hearing counter-voices turn, in council’s thinking, into pests making self-interested and dismissible noise.

And in this process of de-democratization, that is exactly what legitimate critics and objectors turn into.

They seem so isolated, so like outliers, that they can’t possibly be speaking to, or for, public interest and concern.

A few weeks ago, this column considered the political and social collapse to the south of us, and Canada’s exposure to U.S. presidential whim and aggression.

From Donald Trump’s mouth: “Democrats are the party of hate, evil, Satan … dangerous socialists … destroyers of American values … enemy from within ….”

All but the words borrowed from another playbook: “das Ende des europäischen Judentums – die Vernichtung der Jüdischen Rasse in Europa.”

Friends, please understand that we are living in the middle of a crisis. It’s hard to recognize this because the middle, the “here”, feels calm, and things seem to be burning only out at some distant edge.

This is exactly how democracy vanishes: “It’s not happening here ….”

What do we do in little Victoria?

We do what we can.

In that earlier column, I floated an idea: “Block Party.”

What led me to the idea in the first place was a structural deficiency: It’s hard to get and share information.

The entire citizen populace needs informational tools — ways to receive timely facts and details on a range of city policy concerns and planning intentions — and also conversational tools, actual physical settings to discuss ideas and viewpoints.

Think about it: With the exception of interest-bound community associations, this civic “machinery” does not exist.

To give due credit, the sole institution that undertakes some of this work is in front of your eyeballs right now: the Times Colonist.

Block Party doesn’t ask the city for legitimacy, approval, funding or partnership (remember Gene’s city hall maxim: “If you have to ask, the answer is no.”).

It does, however, extract city policy and project thinking by every available means.

Others with skills I don’t have can work out the critical methods and details, but the idea is to engage people at the smallest practical social unit in civic life.

Block Party convenes a geographically local group large enough for a mix of viewpoints, small enough for friendship.

It treats renters and owners alike.

It’s run by enthusiastic citizen volunteers.

It makes sure that mayor and council are well aware of citizen disposition.

Are members of council welcome at Block Parties?

Of course!

Just so long as they leave the scripts at the door and show up scared.

Contributed by Dale Perkins, Victoria.