** 3000 counties, 20,000 city councils, 16,000 townships, 13,000 school boards and tens of thousands more: 87,525 peacefully decision-making bodies in all. **
by Willem Meiners
THE U.S., people say, is more divided than ever. With fissures that run deep through society, right through the middle, fifty-fifty. America, they say on TV, has never before disagreed so much among themselves.
Pfff.
Four hundred years ago, the Dutch introduced the polder model in New Netherland. Is that gone? And when they say: more divided than ever, do they mean before or after the Civil War? Before or after the brave marching women who demanded the right to vote? Before or after Joseph McCarthy’s red witch hunt? Before or after Rosa Parks, or the Vietnam War?
Brooklyn’s coat of arms has a telling motto. It dates back to when it was still called Breukelen, named after the Utrecht town that was surrounded by marshes. The motto reads, Eendracht maakt macht, Unity Is Power, stated not in English but in Dutch.
THE DUTCH polder model got its name because it has been used for eight hundred years as a deliberative decision making format that started out by creating polders: reclaimed land behind the dikes. Dams that weren’t there before, therefore the land wasn’t there either, initially. But together, based on decisions that were democratically arrived at, the Dutch built … well, they created the Netherlands. Majority votes won. The Dutch water boards, all 21 of them, are today still the world’s longest-standing democratic form of governance.
Who and what is divided in America? TV stations are divided because there’s money to be made in that. The House of Representatives is divided and sometimes makes a clown show of it, magnified by cameras and social media. The 50 state houses are sometimes, though not remotely as often as it seems, deeply divided. And there are school boards where they are arguing about banning some books from the classroom and the school library. This bickering over books is happening in 138 of those boards. Is that a lot? No, it is not. America has nearly 14,000 school boards. Noisy, book banning boards make up one percent of the total. But they get 100 percent of the media coverage.
America was founded on the Dutch polder model. That’s why it has many elected deliberative bodies with decision-making power, very, very many. Three thousand counties, twenty thousand city and town councils, sixteen thousand township boards, villages that report to their county, seventeen thousand school boards, and tens of thousands of special purpose districts that deal with fire departments, ambulances, public libraries, and some police departments. That adds up to a whopping 87,525.
THERE ARE only few laws in America that you, smash!, run into every day. But the road signs and the traffic lights, the public works trucks and the ambulance, the school bus and the bridges, trash collectors and Hamburger Joe’s mobile food van, the public scooters on the corner by the post office that everyone may use, the Memorial Day parade next week – each time, it took an official decision before they became a fact. Just about everything you encounter on an average day in America, and the way you encounter it, is the result of decisions made democratically in one of those nearly 90,000 deliberative bodies. They do not make Democratic or Republican decisions, they follow the polder model.
So no, America is not at all more divided than ever. It is, like the rest of the world, working its way through profound and super-fast technological change, and it is in the process of bringing order to it. That’s not easy, and, like everywhere else along the way, it’s generating resistance. But on balance it is a well-oiled society – even under the unique and demanding circumstances of pandemic after-effects. The Dutch introduced the decision making system here, and the Independence of 1776 reaffirmed that. The people, with a few periods of exception, liked it just fine.
Demagogue politicians in Washington with the megaphone of a camera in front of them have always been there, and will be there again in the future. They always leave as fast as they came. But at the base, around the corner, in the neighborhood, where by far the most decisions are made that affect the neighbors’ lives, absolutely, everything continues to polder as usual.
* Willem Meiners is the Editor of De Daily Dutchman.
* Polder Drive in Memphis, Tennessee.
