Jerry Large / Times staff columnist
Democracy is all about compromise, in Iraq and here

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It's hard designing a transition to democracy.

Maybe democracy will take in Iraq, maybe it won't, but I hope our experience with Iraq gives us a nudge toward appreciating our own democracy, which too many of us take for granted, and too few of us understand.

Watching democracy being tried there and in Haiti, Russia and numerous other places around the world, nothing is clearer than how difficult a plant it is to cultivate.

So many things have to be in place for a democracy to work.

It's a matter of culture, and creating a set of institutions that balance each other well enough to prevent any one of them from taking total control of the whole works. It's about an idea, that the people are sovereign, which though not entirely true, has to be believed.

(Holding one share of stock makes you an owner, but you can't go in and fire the chief executive or sample the wares. Your ownership only counts in combination with other shareholders. You get a vote.)

One of the complications in Iraq is that grass-roots democracy may not be good for national unity, and you can't have national democracy if people don't believe they are one nation. It's not an unusual problem; forging a national identity is a difficult task and one that does not lend itself to textbook solutions.

It's naturally easier for people to come together in local and regional units, because they can see what they have in common and recognize they are in it together, but the larger, the more diverse, the more spread out things get, the harder it is to see kinship.

Lots of analysts have blamed Saddam's brutality in part on the need to hold together disparate groups of people who had no affinity for one another. Look at how quickly the Soviet Union flew apart once the force that kept it together was removed.

We had to fight the Civil War before we really became a nation instead of a collection of states whose interests lay primarily within their own borders. It was that war that led people to change their grammar: They stopped saying the United States are, and started saying the United States is.
 
Read the history of any democracy you choose, and you'll see that it didn't come easily or quickly — not in England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain. Its evolution can take decades, sometimes centuries. OK, maybe Canada had no problems (no, wait, there is still that French/English thing). Political marriage is hard work, and the work is never done.

A few weeks ago, I was helping a colleague from South Korea study for her citizenship test, and I kept thinking most Americans would have no idea how to answer the questions she was tackling.

How can you be a good citizen if you don't understand the mechanics of government or the theories that underlie it? Can you do your civic duty intelligently if you don't know the country's history, or if what you do know is just the elementary-school version of things?

Even more troubling, the conditions that support democracy are changing. Democracy requires a degree of social equality that we may be losing, as income and wealth disparities grow wider.

What happens when the pressure to get ahead is greater than the pressure to advance the community?

Tax revolts in this state and nationally could be an indication that many people are willing to say to hell with the community as long as I've got mine.

People always have and perhaps always will see to their own needs first, but I believe that in the past more of us also saw the needs of the community having a claim on us.

We still have a North/South political divide, which is often as much philosophical as geographical. Political pundits say white Southerners won't vote for a northern presidential candidate — not conservative enough.

Democracy is all about compromise. Democracy gets distorted when one part of the population never compromises. That's a big part of the problem in Iraq, and it is part of the problem here, too.

I participated in a presidential election caucus this month, and there was some talk about finding a candidate who could appeal to people who are further to the right than the folks at the caucus.

Even though I'm worried about our democracy, I left that caucus meeting feeling like I had played an important part in the American endeavor. I felt good about the people who sat in that meeting with me.

They were thoughtful. They took their positions seriously, but they treated differences with good humor. People listened to each other.

That's what we need to nurture, right here at home.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.

More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists.

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