* Book: Toward a Bioregional State. Mark Whitaker, 2005.
Two days ago, we presented the ‘Commodity Ecology” as one of the two core concepts of the book above. Here is the second core concept, with which we conclude our book of the week treatment.
The Civic Democratic Institution form (CDI) is a structure for defensibly maintaining and registering local sentiment in a form of a ‘living poll,’ if you will, to recognize any individuals who are admired or culturally trusted in social relations.
As proposed by Mark Whitaker:
“The CDI ‘grounds’ coalition building into existing cultural networks. It uses existing thoughts and feelings towards other citizens, pools them together and delivers a tally to the people of whom they find representative or admire, as a group. This brings local politics into integration with local cultural forms. As a consequence, it makes state elites work to maintain their power. Instead of local actors working to get the state’s or a political party’s attention, the latter groups have to acquiesce more when there is a stronger and more vocal local cultural milieu which is less dependent and more resistant to external ideas about what is ‘good policy.’
The CDI’s checks and balances makes sure that its membership is:
(1) popular amongst various groups instead of merely their own ‘political machine,’
(2) with a cultural sense of creating an intermediary and facilitating role in cultural sense, instead of creating an ideological reactionary influence,
(3) and in addition, the CDI makes sure they are personally motivated to fulfill this role without any incentives besides the status recognition which becomes a symbolic rallying frame for them in a social and political capacity by the CDI recognition.
The CDI aims at popularizing local political coalitional development as a cultural process, within already existing cultural networks. The CDI, per se, has nothing to do with changing government structure, or changing voting law, etc.
The checks and balances in the CDI are effected by its dual-tier voting structure, and that the turnover period of one CDI is short enough (one year) to allow for issues to develop as soon as they become widely pertinent, instead of growing unobserved and unaddressed by government and exploding into violent conflict. The CDI voting mechanism is described in Article I of the Constitution of Sustainability, and I turn the reader to examine it further there.
In the CDI, legitimacy comes from their personal vote totals, though no one is actually running against anyone else which minimizes the mass psychological issues of manipulation to be forced to choose one or the other, or any at all. After the group individual recognitions, organizational politics take a very different geographically local and more complex systemic base than gatekept elite public power structures in society.”