There Is No Democracy in the Lehigh Valley, but We Can Build One
There is a pervasive feeling among citizens of the US that the country is not a democracy. More than a feeling, this critical diagnosis of our political system increasingly manifests in polling. For instance, Pew found 58% of people in the US are unsatisfied with how democracy is working, and in a Latana poll, only 49% said the US is a democracy. Many commentators offer a variety of explanations for this phenomenon, including: polarization in US politics, the decline of civic values, conspiracy theories, and the obvious lack of virtue among politicians themselves (especially the president, whether it’s a D or an R). These explanations are more symptoms than the problem itself.
Americans have many good reasons to question if we truly live within a democratic society. For example, in the last two Democratic presidential primaries, we saw the populist, insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders crushed by the maneuvers of party leadership, which subsequently failed to enact any of Sanders's popular policy proposals. While the GOP got their outsider candidate into office, Donald Trump hardly affected any real change. Despite Trump’s promises, “the swamp” was not drained (regardless of how one interprets his meaning). Moreover, institutions like the Supreme Court, the Senate and the Electoral College are all mechanisms for safeguarding elite, minority rule, against the democratic will or benefit. Voters are left with a gnawing feeling that significant change cannot be won electorally.
This isn’t paranoia, it is empirically born out. Research has shown the policy preferences of average people have little effect on the actions of Congress. Rather, the votes of legislators are strongly correlated with the preferences of the wealthiest Americans. In a real democracy, one might expect legislators’ votes to reflect the will of the electorate, but that is not really the case in the US.
Anti-democratic processes govern not just our national politics, but are reinforced by the day-to-day operations of our municipal and county governments.
This is unfortunate, because people often turn to local politics in the face of disillusionment with national politics. In fact, we are regularly told that our influence is greatest at the local level where our voices can be clearly heard. To that end, we are advised to engage with our local community by talking to people door-to-door, going to municipal council meetings, collecting signatures for petitions, holding protest rallies, and directly speaking with elected officials. This attitude is embodied in the idiom, “think globally, act locally.”
However, two recent examples in the Lehigh Valley show that this appeal to the local level as the political arena for real change–where one’s democratic voice can be heard–is regrettably not true. The local level is just as recalcitrant to change as the national level.
Our first example comes from earlier this year in Allentown. Since the BLM movement of 2020, there’s been widespread acknowledgement that we must offer a broader range of emergency response service besides law enforcement. However, we’ve mostly seen talk and little action from our elected officials. Fortunately, Allentown’s charter has democratic features which allows for direct participation; if citizens gather at least 2,000 signatures in support of a given proposal, then Allentown council must enact it or it will become a ballot initiative, meaning the general population of the city will have the opportunity to approve or disapprove the proposal.
Working Families Party (WFP) saw Allentown’s democratic charter as a good way to get through a progressive reform and earlier this year began gathering signatures for a proposal that would see Allentown hire mental health first responders to answer non-violent, mental health related 911 calls. With the help of members in the community as well as progressives like Lehigh Valley Stands Up (LVSU) and socialists like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), they were tremendously successful and easily gathered over 3,800 signatures.
To put it briefly, the Allentown establishment moved in lockstep to crush support for the proposal, immediately and disingenuously coming out against it. After a couple contentious council meetings, they struck it down 4-2 (with only Ce-Ce Gerlach and Natalie Santos in favor). This meant the proposal should have been on the November ballot as a referendum. However, it was never added to the ballot. With barely twenty-four hours’ notice, the Lehigh County Board of Elections announced they would be holding a meeting to decide the fate of the resolution in the middle of the workday on Wednesday August 30th. With no public comment, they followed the Allentown government’s solicitor’s advice and refused to allow the proposal to be voted on as a referendum. Rather than let the people decide and have a public debate over the merits of the proposal, opponents of the proposal engaged in parliamentary maneuvers and had an unelected board decide what the citizens should be allowed to vote on.
Our second example comes more recently in Easton Council's refusal to consider a Ceasefire Now resolution. Twice, Easton Council has been given the opportunity to vote on a resolution that would call on our representatives in Washington DC to support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Unfortunately, the first time the council refused to vote on it by deferring it to a committee and the following meeting they refused to second Councilwoman Taiba Sultana’s motion to call a vote. This happened despite scores of community members packing the council chambers and personally appealing for Easton Council to support a ceasefire. Later, community members turned out in hundreds for a protest in front of city hall, which has been similarly ignored.
In both of these examples, residents of the Lehigh Valley engaged in exactly the kind of local activism that defenders of our supposed democracy demand: gathering petition signatures, protesting, attending government meetings, and speaking to local elected officials. Rather than being met with enthusiasm from our representatives, these groundswells of local participatory energy were squashed. It is unclear what levers people have left to pull. One option is continuing in these actions to build power, but it is unclear what number of demonstrators or signatures would result in a policy change from these municipal governments. Another option, not exclusive from the first, is to withhold votes from these politicians. In other words, we are in the same bind locally that we are nationally.
More concerningly, in both the Easton and Allentown examples, the people in power were angered that citizens would do something like gather thousands of signatures for a petition or pack a chamber asking them to stand against a US funded genocide. In Allentown City Council meetings, Mayor Tuerk and APD Chief Rocca incessantly and indignantly repeated that “we were not consulted” regarding the proposed non-law enforcement emergency responders program, as if citizens seeking to shape government without first getting permission from the Chief of Police and City Executive was a personal affront. In Easton, Mayor Panto insisted council could not vote on the ceasefire resolution because it had not first proceeded through committee, a rule that, as Councilmember Melon noted, is at best irregularly applied to city business; indeed council voted on several proposals that evening that had not proceeded through committee.
In both cases, Mayors Tuerk and Panto insisted disingenuously that they might even support the policy proposals or resolutions in question, if only each had been brought through “the appropriate channels.” We read this as a thinly veiled declaration that respect for their power must trump moral, democratic will.
Men like Mayor Panto, Mayor Tuerk and APD Chief Rocca were against the notion of citizens speaking out or bringing proposals to the city without sufficient deference to their authority (which in practice means them not speaking). Moreover, all of these officials had the gall to repeatedly express that their feelings were hurt when citizens exercised basic democratic rights.
It can be easy to become pessimistic. If Americans are right to question the supposed democratic processes of our federal government, and local politics offer only more intimate forms of minority rule, where are we to turn? This is not fatalism–we believe in democracy–it is strategic clarity. We must clearly diagnose our present situation if we are to change it. As bitter a pill as it may be, the reality is that we do not engage in politics on a terrain where the majority wins, where social benefit is the goal, or even a terrain where debate is encouraged. Instead, the wealthy (more precisely, the capitalists) consolidate power, organize society for their narrow benefit, and discourage discussion. In the face of this challenge, our answer is that we have no choice but to organize everywhere and anywhere, knowing full well we do so against the grain of a political system built by and for the ruling class. Ultimately, we believe that the organized working class will win and build a better world. For those of us on the socialist left, it is clear that we live in no democracy at all. Rather, our task is to build one.