Moreover, merely giving more power to the people does not automatically reduce the hold of the party; some positive measures must be taken if direct government is not to fail exactly as representative government has failed. The faith in direct government as a sure panacea is almost pathetic when we remember how in the past one stronghold after another has been captured by the party. Much has been written by advocates of direct government to show that it will destroy the arbitrary power of the party, destroy its relation to big business, etc., but we see little evidence of this. We all know, and we can see every year if we watch the history of referendum votes, that the party organization is quite able to use “direct government” for its own ends. Direct government worked by the machine will be subject to much the same abuses as representative government. And direct and representative government cannot be synthesized by executive leadership alone. All that is said in favor of the former may be true, but it can never be made operative unless we are able to find some way of breaking the power of the machine. Direct government can be beneficial to American politics only if accompanied by the organization of voters in nonpartisan groups for the production of common ideas and a collective purpose. Of itself direct government can never become the responsible government of a people.
I have said that direct government will never succeed if operated from within the party organization, nor if it is considered, as it usually is, merely a method by which the people can accept or reject what is proposed to them. Let us now look at the second point. We have seen that party organization does not allow group methods, that the party is a crowd: suggestion by the boss, imitation by the mass, is the rule. But direct government also may and probably will be crowd government if it is merely a means of counting. As far as direct government can be given the technique of a genuine democracy, it is an advance step in political method, but the trouble is that many of its supporters do not see this necessity; they have given it their adherence because of their belief in majority rule, in their belief that to count one and one and one is to get at the will of the people. But for each to count as one means crowd rule—of course the party captures us. Yet even if it did not, we do not want direct government if we are to fall from party domination into the tyranny of numbers. That every man was to count as one was the contribution of the old psychology to politics; the new psychology goes deeper and further—it teaches that each is to be the whole at one point. This changes our entire conception of politics. Voting at the polls is not to be the expression of one man after another. My vote should not be my freak will any more than it should be my adherence to party, but my individual expression of the common will. The particularist vote does not represent the individual will because the evolution of the individual will is bound up in a larger evolution. Therefore, my duty as a citizen is not exhausted by what I bring to the state; my test as a citizen is how fully the whole can be expressed in or through me.
The vote in itself does not give us democracy—we have yet to learn democracy’s method. We still think too much of the solidarity of the vote; what we need is solidarity of purpose, solidarity of will. To make my vote a genuine part of the expression of the collective will is the first purpose of politics; it is only through group organization that the individual learns this lesson, that he learns to be an effective political member. People often ask, “Why is democracy so unprogressive?” It is just because we have not democracy in this sense. As long as the vote is that of isolated individuals, the tendency will be for us to have an unprogressive vote. This state of things can be remedied, first, by a different system of education, secondly, by giving men opportunities to exercise that fundamental intermingling with others which is democracy. To the consideration of how this can be accomplished part III is mainly directed.
But I am making no proposal for some hard and fast method by which every vote shall register the will of a definite, fixed number of men rather than of one man. I am talking of a new method of living by which the individual shall learn to be part of social wholes, through which he shall express social wholes. The individual not the group must be the basis of organization. But the individual is created by many groups, his vote cannot express his relation to one group; it must ideally, I have said, express the whole from his point of view, actually it must express as much of the whole as the variety of his group life makes possible.77
When shall we begin to understand what the ballot-box means in our political life? It creates nothing—it merely registers what is already created. If direct government is to be more than ballot-box democracy it must learn not to record what is on the surface, but to dig
