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III. The Merits of “Democracy as the Dispersion of Power”
What, then, is desirable about democracy as the dispersion of power? What is
democratically advantageous about dispersing power and enabling many non-sovereign
nodes of
power?
First, it
fosters people’s agency and enhances their political power
. The dispersion of
power entails a decentralization of action, meaning that people will often engage in politics at
fairly local levels. The active participation of people – a key element of any robust definition of
democracy – tends to bear more fruit in local contexts. As Wolin (2008, 291) argues, democracy
“is most
likely to be nurtured in local, small-scale settings, where both the negative
consequences of political powerlessness and the possibilities of political involvement seem most
evident.” By shifting political action away from the state and into diffuse, local contexts, people
are likely to have greater political
power
vis-à-vis
the existing forms of concentrated power.
However, as I hoped to show in Chapter IV, this is not simply a call for a return to the old ideal
of local, direct democracy. Such a move would be both impossible (we live in an interconnected
and interdependent world, with ubiquitous boundary crossings) and undesirable (collaboration
and coordination across localities is often necessary to resist the imperatives of centralized power
and to construct alternative possibilities). In contrast, a network democracy fosters
coordination
and cooperation across a range of geographic spaces. Through processes of reverberation and
“contamination,” people’s relatively small-scale direct actions can have significant cumulative
effects.
Second, a democracy premised on the dispersion of power
enables
pluralism and
diversity to coexist with cooperation and collective action
. If a primary challenge for a
contemporary theory of radical democracy is to enable self-governance in the context of
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difference, networks are an ideal organizational form to accomplish these objectives.
I spent a
great deal of time on this point in the previous chapter, so I will not dwell on it here.
Third, democracy as the dispersion of power
minimizes relationships of domination
, and
more broadly,
limits the negative effects of badly-used power
. Domination depends on
concentrated power and, thus, efforts to disperse power make dominating relationships
harder to
sustain. That said, this is not a utopian vision. In the context of dispersed power, there will still
be people who want to use their power for malevolent purposes, whether that means dominating
other people or engaging in other nefarious practices. The difference is that concentrated centers
of power can be very effectively put to work toward disastrous ends. This was Thoreau’s
insight
at the beginning of his essay “Resistance to Civil Government.”
The objections which have been brought against a standing army…may also at
last be brought against a standing government…Witness the present Mexican war,
the work of comparatively few individuals using the standing government as their
tool: for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure
(Thoreau 1993, 1).
Thus, in the terms of Thoreau’s example, a standing army would constitute a concentrated
power, while citizen’s militias would constitute a dispersed power. Certainly the individual
citizens’ militias
could carry out atrocities, but not at the same scale or with the same efficiency
that the standing army could. Chiefly, if people’s participation is voluntary rather than
compelled, it would at least be harder to mobilize people in service of such ends. As we saw,
many “Indian” societies were are perfectly peaceful and, indeed, some are quite warlike.
However, in separating war from the state, destructive wars became much less common.
Dispersing power does not eliminate war, or violence, or other “bads,” but
it does change the
dynamic. Whereas a state or other centralized power can simply compel behavior, dispersed
power cannot. In the latter context, many different people, many different nodes, many different
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centers of power must agree with a course of
action and take it up, in order to make it real.
While any individual node of power may itself engage in undesirable practices, the dispersal of
these nodes of power reduces the likelihood that such practices will spread. That said, the
obvious corollary to this is that dispersing power makes it more difficult to achieve “good” or
desirable ends, as well. The question, I suppose, is whether this trade-off is worth it.
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