Column by George Sibley
Politics – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
“That’s what democracy is about: sometimes you lose.”
I’ve been thinking about that. Martha Quillen said that in last month’s Colorado Central, in a sidebar to Allen Best’s story about Granby, bulldozer operator Marvin Heemeyer and “the dark side of Paradise.”
I can live with the idea of “losing sometimes.” This is obviously true for a Rooseveltian progressive living in Colorado, or America for that matter, this past quarter century; I’d be dead or defected if I couldn’t live with losing.
What I’m wondering is, what starts to happen if or when you get the feeling that things are being set up so you are always going to lose? That the guys who are currently winning are trying to redistrict the state and mechanize the voting process so that people who don’t think like they do are going to be permanently stuck off in little ghettos where their votes will be able to elect nothing more than a minority “loyal opposition”?
So I guess I would want to amend Martha’s statement: what democracy is about is at least always having the feeling that you have a chance to win, even when you are losing. If you don’t have that sense, then it is no longer democracy. And I am starting to lose that sense, at least when it comes to the state and national levels. I don’t believe that the people in charge today have any sense of what democracy really is.
At the local level, on the other hand, we’re seeing some pretty good democratic process in action, at least over here in the Upper Gunnison valley, as we try to come up with The Perfect Land Use Resolution. This is clearly a difficult ambition in a valley where you have a lot of people who are prepared to lie down in front of bulldozers to control growth and a lot of people who are deeply invested in real estate and contracting.
The county Land Use Resolution — the set of regulations that more or less determines how easy or how difficult it is going to be to exercise the American privilege of doing any damn thing you want on your own property — has been a contentious thing almost from the beginning. Back in the mid-90s, it actually served its major purpose in making the owners of the ski area think twice about a planned major expansion, and thinking twice that time, they decided not to do it. That of course upset the pro-growth people. But the anti-growth people were already upset because the LUR wasn’t making enough people think twice about building whatever they pleased.
So for different reasons, a lot of people were interested in rewriting the LUR, and a good representative committee was appointed that proceeded to fight it out for about three years. When the draft was finally done, nobody felt like a big winner, but the general consensus was that it was a tougher set of rules that favored the slow-growth position. This was taken by those forces as a sign that right was on their side, which may be true, but it was also because their representatives on the committee did their homework and were articulate. Basic skills count in real democracy.
THE COUNTY COMMISSIONERS passed the new Resolution — despite the fact that they are 2-1 pro-growth over anti-growth most of the time. However, in passing it, they said they considered it a “loose-leaf law” that they anticipated would see many changes.
The pro-growth forces became galvanized by what they perceived to be a loss, and they got organized into a new group — Citizens for Economic Revitalization (CFER). They began to look for the weak spots, which are inevitable in such a complex and detailed document as the Land Use Resolution. They found a couple of weak points.
One involved an affordable housing proposal in a trailer park by a developer that the Land Use Resolution seemed unable to accommodate. After a few months of hassling and harrumphing by the commissioners, the developer began to look like Christ on a cross and those defending the Resolution like the evil high priests. A tanking economy nationwide also helped: CFER, with Bushian logic, blamed that on the LUR too.
So petitions circulated, and the commissioners agreed to consider some changes. But the affordable housing issue turned out to be only part of a host of proposed changes that included things like the number of houses on a 35-acre plot, and relaxing the restrictions on “æsthetic solid-fuel burning devices” to allow open fireplaces, on the dubious claim that people would not build here if they weren’t free to pollute the air.
Despite a lot of agitation from the anti-growth side, the commissioners approved the proposed changes (2-1). And CFER immediately began to draw up another set of changes based on potential weaknesses in the LUR. But at this point, we seem to be down to quibbling about things like whether a sixty-watt bulb outdoors creates enough light pollution to require shading.
DEMOCRACY AT WORK: After a few more years of this, we are going to have a Land Use Resolution that will contain, or not contain, enough to make everyone somewhat unhappy — and once everyone has forgotten what a torturous process this rewrite was, we may even get another big push for reworking it. When it is allowed to function, uncorrupted by what Madison called “the violence of faction,” democracy uses our base instinct to have things our way to make sure that nobody wins all of the time.
But at the state and national level, the people who are winning at present don’t seem to understand that process. They think life is a football game: that winning is all there is. What they don’t seem to see is that there is no final whistle, at which point winner takes all.
So as their victory unbraids itself in the consequences of their naive policies, and the deck is still stacked for more of the same, all they are going to do is drive a lot more Marvin Heemeyers and Terry Nicholses into their shops for night shifts, more Saudis (and probably some natives) into flight schools, and in general build toward the kind of chaotic mess that true democratic processes would defuse.
And if I get to the point where I feel like I’m destined to lose for the rest of my life, I may be thinking about a little revolution myself. What does one have to lose at that point?
George Sibley teaches and writes in Gunnison. He also organizes the annual Western Water Workshop, scheduled July 28-30 (www.western.edu/water for more information).
