The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government

OUR political life is stagnating, capital and labor are virtually at war, the nations of Europe are at one another’s throats—because we have not yet learned how to live together. The twentieth century must find a new principle of association. Crowd philosophy, crowd government, crowd patriotism must go. The herd is no longer sufficient to enfold us.

Group organization is to be the new method in politics, the basis of our future industrial system, the foundation of international order. Group organization will create the new world we are now blindly feeling after, for creative force comes from the group, creative power is evolved through the activity of the group life.

We talk about the evils of democracy. We have not yet tried democracy. Party or “interests” govern us with some fiction of the “consent of the governed” which we say means democracy. We have not even a conception of what democracy means. That conception is yet to be forged out of the crude ore of life.

We talk about the tragedy of individualism. The individual we do not yet know, for we have no methods to release the powers of the individual. Our particularism—our laissez-faire, our every-man-for-his-own-interests—has little to do with true individualism, that is, with the individual as consciously responsible for the life from which he draws his breath and to which he contributes his all.

Politics do not need to be “purified.” This thought is leading us astray. Politics must be vitalized by a new method. “Representative government,” party organization, majority rule, with all their excrescences, are dead-wood. In their stead must appear the organization of non-partisan groups for the begetting, the bringing into being, of common ideas, a common purpose and a collective will.

Government by the people must be more than the phrase. We are told—The people should do this, the people should do that, the people must be given control of foreign policy, etc. etc. But all this is wholly useless unless we provide the procedure within which the people can do this or that. What does the “sovereign will” of the people amount to unless it has some way of operating? Or have we any “sovereign will?” There is little yet that is practical in “practical politics.”

But method must not connote mechanics to any mind. Many of us are more interested in the mechanism of life than in anything else. We keep on putting pennies in the slot from sheer delight in seeing something come out at the other end. All this must change. Machines, forms, images, moulds—all must be broken up and the way prepared for our plastic life to find plastic expression. The principle of democracy may be the underlying unity of men, the method of democracy must be that which allows the quickest response of our daily life to the common faith of men.

Are we capable of a new method? Can the inventive faculty of the American people be extended from mechanical things to political organization? There is no use denying that we are at a crisis in our history. Whether that crisis is to abound in acute moments which will largely wreck us, or whether we are going to be wise enough to make the necessary political and social adjustments—that is the crucial question which faces America to-day.

Representative government has failed. It has failed because it was not a method by which men could govern themselves. Direct government is now being proposed. But direct government will never succeed if (1) it is operated from within the party organization as at present, or (2) if it consists merely in counting all the votes in all the ballot-boxes. Ballot-box democracy is what this book is written to oppose.

No government will be successful, no government will endure, which does not rest on the individual, and no government has yet found the individual. Up to the present moment we have never seen the individual. Yet the search for him has been the whole long striving of our Anglo-Saxon history. We sought him through the method of representation and failed to find him. We sought to reach him by extending the suffrage to every man and then to every woman and yet he eludes us. Direct government now seeks the individual; but as we have not found him by sending more men to the ballot-box, so we shall not find him by sending men more often to the ballot-box. Are our constitutional conventions to sit and congratulate themselves on their progressive ideas while they are condemning us to a new form of our old particularism? The ballot-box! How completely that has failed men, how completely it will fail women. Direct government as at present generally understood is a mere phantom of democracy. Democracy is not a sum in addition. Democracy is not brute numbers; it is a genuine union of true individuals. The question before the American people to-day is—How is that genuine union to be attained, how is the true individual to be discovered? The party has always ignored him; it wants merely a crowd, a preponderance of votes. The early reform associations had the same aim. Both wanted voters not men. It makes little difference whether we follow the boss or follow the good government associations, this is all herd life—“following the lead”—democracy means a wholly different kind of existence. To follow means to murder the individual, means to kill the only force in the world which can make the Perfect Society—democracy depends upon the creative power of every man.