Let the People Decide (Part III): The Wisdom of the Crowd, the Madness of the Mob
There is great wisdom inherent in The People, Yes
This is the third of a three-part series on direct democracy. The first part was Let the People Decide (Part I): Democracy is Coming. The second part was Let the People Decide (Part II): Direct Democracy—or No Democracy?
What do Stephen Ayres, who was one of the Capitol rioters on January 6, 2021, and the French Revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre, who lived in Paris in the 19th century, have in common?
They both got caught up in the madness of the mob.
Stephen Ayres described himself as a family man and solid and loyal employee when he testified to the U.S. House Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the Capitol.
Ayres believed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, the candidate he supported. This belief led him to attend the rally Trump spoke at in Washington, D.C. on Janurary 6, and then to march down to the Capitol and enter the building.
Ayres’ belief in Trump’s claims led to his arrest for invading the Capitol, along with his subsequent loss of job and ruin of his life and reputation.
Ayres said he was not expecting to go to the Capitol when he showed up to Trump’s rally on the morning of Jan. 6. He said he felt fired up after Trump's speech and that Trump’s comments about then-Vice President Mike Pence made everyone angry.
He went to the Capitol because Trump got everyone riled up and told them to go there. “We basically were just following what he said,” he said.
Ayres was not a member, nor had any connection to, the extremist groups Proud Boys or the Oath Keepers; instead he was there because he felt justice was being subverted.
Ayres is one of more than 840 people who have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack. His sentencing is set for September, 2022.
After his arrest, Ayres got off social media and looked into the lawsuits that had been filed, which showed that Trump's claims about a stolen election were baseless. He said he now realizes that claims about a massive criminal conspiracy didn’t make any sense.
“It’s too big,” Ayres now says. “There’d be no way to keep something like that quiet.”
Trump’s promotion of the “big lie” about the 2020 election makes Ayres angry, he said, because his life has been so negatively affected. “It makes me mad because I was hanging on every word he was saying,” he said.
Ayres testified that he “felt like I had, like, horse blinders on” when he was following Trump.
“The biggest thing to me is, take the blinders off. Make sure you step back and see what’s going on. Before it’s too late,” he said.
In other words, since his arrest, Ayres opened his eyes to the madness of the mob.
Meanwhile, over 230 years earlier, Maximilien Robespierre was one of the best-known figures of the French Revolution, a time of political turmoil that began with the storming of the French Bastille in 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in 1799.
The ideals of the French Revolution are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy. The values and institutions it created, under the hallmark phrase of “liberty, equality, fraternity,” dominate French politics to this day.
But Robespierre didn’t live to see the French Revolution’s end in 1799; he died on July 28, 1794, by way of execution on the guillotine.
You see, Robespierre also got caught up in the madness of the mob.
His goals were admirable: to create a one and indivisible France, equality before the law, to abolish feudal law and the privileges of the ruling class, and to defend the principles of direct democracy.
But he was also an ideological purist. He earned the nickname “the incorruptible” for his adherence to strict moral values.
He wanted to ferret out the ideologically weak, those who weren’t sufficiently dedicated to the ideas of the republic. By June of 1793, Robespierre ran the Committee of Public Safety, which sparked the Reign of Terror, an attempt to eradicate those who were perceived as counter-revolutionaries.
These counter-revolutionaries were those Robespierre and his Committee of Public Safety believed weren’t fully committed to their vision of what French society should become.
The Reign of Terror that Robespierre oversaw led to the beheadings of over 16,000 people, including his former chief associate, Georges Danton, who was beheaded in April 1794.
The Reign of Terror abruptly ended in July, 1794, with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, sentenced for the violence he perpetrated within the context of the madness of the mob.
The madness of the mob is the dark side of direct democracy. If people have a direct say in how a country is run, can they be trusted to not fall under the influence of demagogues, ideologues, and grifters, and then be turned into a bloodthirsty mob capable of any sort of heinous act?
After all, that’s what the January 6 rioters were, as were the people behind France’s Reign of Terror.
But is it possible that instead of being a bloodthirsty mob, there could be a wisdom to the crowd?
James Madison didn’t think so. In designing the U.S. Constitution, he believed that the masses could not be trusted and if given too much power, would destroy the country.
The founding fathers didn’t want too much democracy, because, as they stated, “a democratic government would go to the devil for popularity and was creating an earthly damnation filled with ruin, poverty, famine and distress, with idleness, vice, corruption of morals, and every species of evil.”
Shades of the moral purity of Maximilien Robespierre—he could have written that statement himself. But he didn’t—it was penned by the founding fathers.
So Madison and the framers of the Constitution did their best to stop what they saw as the possibilities of mob rule by limiting the reach of democracy. They instead created a society that protected the minority, the privileged.
This created what is known as the tyranny of the minority; it is a system that protects the interests of the few over democracy and the interests of the many.
The limits of democracy in the U.S.—the U.S. is an indirect democracy in which people vote for representatives and then cede power to those elected representatives—has caused the U.S. to devolve into an oligarchy, a government run by a wealth class and powerful corporations.
This is no way for a country to function. The good news is that there is a better way.
Yes, a crowd can easily be riled up by demagogues and incited to do things they would come to regret, as January 6 rioter Stephen Ayres realized.
But the truth is that the mob that can be turned into a riotous and bloodthirsty pack is in the minority. As are the demagogic politicians who, in pushing their own agenda predicated on a thirst for power and money, are the instigators of the madness of the mob.
The majority of the populace comprise the wisdom of the crowd. Their desire is to see a country that is just and fair, and affords the opportunity for everyone to potentially thrive and prosper.
The U.S. is not a society that gives everyone the chance to thrive, because of the obstructions of the tyranny of the minority and the mob they continually feed raw meat to.
We only have to look back to the 1930s in the U.S. to see the shining expression of the wisdom of the crowd.
During this time, the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was consistent in its support of legislation that created a more fair society, and for those efforts, FDR was reelected by landslide margins in 1936, 1940, and 1944.
The regular people of the U.S. were the beneficiaries of the legislation FDR created, and were celebrated as the force that made the country strong and more cohesive.
The legendary poet Carl Sandburg immortalized this force in 1936, when he wrote a book-length poem called The People, Yes. In this book, Sandburg lauded everything that was good about the American people, including their strengths, hopes, and dreams.
That spirit of the wisdom of the crowd continued for decades after FDR, through Democratic and Republican administrations, finally seeing its demise with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Once Reagan took office, America was transformed from The People, Yes, to The Wealthy, Yes.
The U.S. is now heading towards an abyss, fueled by the runaway greed of the wealth class. The political structure of the U.S., dominated by the oligarchic class, has no other agenda than continual wealth accumulation, an agenda that comes at the expense of the many.
The people are now powerless. Unfortunately, some of that powerlessness has been channeled by demagogues in order to rile the people up and foment the madness of the mob.
But as history shows, if people are given reason for hope, the wisdom of the crowd becomes the prevailing force.
Where at one time an FDR could come into office with a sweeping mandate to reorient society, it seems now that the forces of the tyranny of the minority—the indirect democracy, the oligarchs, the demagogues, ideologues, and more—have become masterful with their techniques of blocking legislation that empowers the greater good.
Direct democracy, as I particularly outlined in Let the People Decide (Part II): Direct Democracy—or No Democracy?, is the radiant chance to allow the goodness of the people to come through.
The madness of the mob, though seemingly loud and scary, is the minority. The wisdom of the crowd is the majority, and what the majority wants is more democracy that benefits the largest amount of people.
In this three-part series, I have not argued for the elimination of our electoral process—having elected representatives is important. But at the same time, we need a separate, fourth branch of government, a true People’s Branch, that accesses the wisdom of the crowd to formulate laws.
This can be done through Citizens Assemblies, citizen referendums, a reformation of Congress, a rewriting of the Constitution, and other ways I’ve explained in this series—all determined by the wisdom of the crowd.
The executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as currently constituted, are not capable of fulfilling the dreams, visions, and goals of the greatest number of people—one that allows for a vibrant society that orients toward the greatest good and also enacts a social contract that creates a strong social cohesion amongst the populace.
We all want to live in a society in which we can say once again, The People, Yes.
I believe that direct democracy is the path to get us there.