Civic associations are not elected. The people who get involved are the loudest. They impose their will on the quietest. In some cities, they also have advisory boards where citisens get involved but these boards become more like boosters. Members on these boards get promoted by the public agency, so the ones who make the most noise or speak up are discouraged. In fact, these boards constitute co-optation, not representation. And yet de Tocqueville wrote that these institutions were the very basis of American society. Who is right? Where are we going? Some societies have strong feudal traditions of what sociologists call "private ordering". Yet private ordering is also used to describe organized crime.
