Al Swift of Colling Swift and Hynes posed that question this week to a class of students at American University. The retired sixteen year veteran of the US House was invited to lecture the government class.

His answer to the question: “It would take them about half an hour to do something stupid.”

Swift’s thesis was “We rarely teach the realities of the group decision making process which is, after all, what democracy is. We think of Congress or legislatures or city councils – even the Board of the Kiwanis Club as though they are single entities rather than merely groups of single entities.”

The difference Swift told the class is that every single decision maker in the group may have sound, consistent and logical reasons for his or her vote but when the votes are tallied you merely have arithmetic – so many yeas and nays. But there is no inherent logic to the group’s decision.

“Failure to understand this,” Swift opined, “often leads, I believe, to citizen dissolution. Things don’t work quite as smoothly as they seemed to in our civics lessons in school.”

Democracy is s messy and inefficient way to run a government, he further asserted, noting there are many other forms that are more efficient where decisions can be made faster, more consistent and have more coherence. What those other governmental models lack however, Swift argued, is the ability to protect the citizen’s individual freedom.

“Essentially in a democracy,” he concluded, “we enter into a social contract that permits no one person to rule but allows every citizen a say in things. That protects our freedom. For the protection we pay a price in the form of the inefficiencies in heart in group decisions making. “