It's not easy, and perhaps impossible, to be in a group without leadership. You can make decisions collectively but someone has to count the votes, someone has to take roles of leadership to get things done, if only temporarily. In the end, in my experience, groups evolve so that certain personalities, extroverts, begin to embrace more power and influence than quieter sorts. This happened in the sixties as groups began meeting with the same democratic ideals, and naive expectations, as the groups meeting today.
What's always troubled me about democracy is what I consider a wrong popular focus. What matters most is not that majority rules but that minority rights are preserved. Majority rules in America frightens the hell out of me because I see no evidence that the majority are educated enough to understand the contexts needed for the best decision making. And a third of the population, according to some polls, consider themselves evangelicals. I find this frightening. Democracy depends on an EDUCATED citizenry, as Wayne Morse so passionately states at the end of my play about him, and when the citizenry is not educated, we get the kind of dumb politicians we see today, and have seen before.
I wonder what the country would be like if we actually learned from history, if each generation didn't have to reinvent the wheel.
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