At democracy's edge.

• Author: Lappe, Frances Moore
• Position: ESSAY

It's far too late and things are far too bad for pessimism. --Dee Hock Under the banner of exporting democracy, Americans are sacrificing our lives abroad--even as many fear we are losing democracy here at home. But it's not too late, not if we seize the power of democracy itself.

The trouble is, we first have to believe in it.

Yet three-fourths of us--a share that doubled from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s--feel our "government is run by a few big interests looking out only for themselves." Booming flag sales notwithstanding, our confidence in democracy is waning because our received notion of it is proving too shallow to inspire confidence, too weak to be effective. We now see that our "thin democracy" can't save us from poverty's spread--up 17 percent in five years--or from a health care disaster placing us 43rd in infant death rates worldwide, or from Katrina.

By thin democracy I mean a society that behaves as if the best possible outcomes flow from a simple combination of elected government and a "free market" ruled by supply-and-demand "laws" divorced from ethical values. Inexorably, wealth and power concentrate to the point that both a competitive market and an accountable political process are undermined, and citizens' voices are increasingly sidelined. (Today Washington lobbyists outnumber elected representatives 56 to 1.) Thin democracy leads to an instant-gratification ethic that seeks only short-term results and to shrinking public investments that compromise public safety and allow social and physical infrastructure to decay.

Perhaps worst of all, thin democracy's narrowly selfish and material premise warps our sense of self, denying deep human needs for caring connection, personal effectiveness, and meaning.

Thin democracy deadens our souls.

In defining thin democracy, I use the phrase "behaves as if" because few Americans would actually endorse such an obviously unworkable setup! Nonetheless we act as if we do because we see no credible alternative. We go along because we feel powerless.

Thus it is our feeling of powerlessness that is the real crisis. Solutions to our problems are in most cases widely known, but we feel powerless to act because we fail to see the causal pattern creating our misery--thin democracy--or the powerful tool we have to uproot it: democracy as a living practice.

"Living democracy" is a society that believes in its citizens and their values, and thus assumes that the best outcomes flow from engaging...