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.
