Without Democracy . . .

            I teach a college level introductory course on American government and politics.  I love teaching this course because it provides an opportunity to wrestle with some of the key questions about American democracy. Like if there is any.

            What is going on in Michigan now provides a compelling case study about why democracy is important and what happens without it.

            The population of Flint, a financially strapped city in what used to be a booming auto manufacturing center, has been poisoned by untreated drinking water from the highly caustic Flint River.  Residents began to complain about the smell and taste of the water, as well as hair loss, strange rashes and other maladies almost immediately after state authorities decided to begin using the Flint River to supply drinking water in April 2014. 

            State officials initially told residents that the water was safe to drink, but four months later, they issued a boil water advisory after coliform bacteria were found in the water.  In October of 2014, a General Motors plant located in Flint found that the water was beginning to corrode car parts and promptly stopped using it.

            By February, 2015, state officials knew that there was lead in the water, and not just a little bit.  The Flint River’s water, which had not been properly treated to reduce its corrosiveness, leached lead off of water distribution pipes located underground and in inside Flint’s homes.  In one home, the level of lead reached almost 400 parts per billion.  Though the Environmental Protection Agency requires action at 15 parts per billion, no level of lead is considered to be safe.

            By September of 2015, doctors were finding high levels of lead in the blood of the children they were treating, but state authorities continued to insist that the water was safe.  A month later, Governor Rick Snyder appointed a task force to investigate.  By the end of the year, the task force acknowledged the seriousness of the problem and blamed the state Department of Environmental Quality.

            A declared national state of emergency exists now in Flint, and residents have to make do with water filters and bottled water.  It’s not been decided whether lead can be prevented from leaching out of water pipes by additional chemical treatment or if all of the lead pipes will have to be replaced.  And nobody seems to have stepped up to address the problems the children affected by ingesting lead-laced water are certain to have throughout the rest of their lives.

            Lots of narratives are swirling around this catastrophe.  There’s a quite reasonable “black lives matter” narrative that holds that this is just another example of the cavalier manner in which white authorities treat places such as Flint that have large populations of African-Americans.  There’s another narrative that finds this is just another example of Republican willingness to disregard public safety in order to keep taxes low for millionaires and billionaires.  And there’s another narrative that focuses on a dysfunctional bureaucratic culture at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality that discouraged employees from blowing the whistle on incidents like this and punished  those who did.

            All of these factors were probably at play.  But the real culprit here was the fact that, because of the Emergency Fiscal Manager law, the local political officials in Flint had no power to react to citizen complaints about the water, and the state officials who did have power had no political incentives to use it.

            Flint has had the kinds of financial troubles that pervade hollowed out parts of the Rust Belt.  Industries shut down, people move away, and the tax base that once supported the commitments the locality had made to its citizens shrinks.  In 2002, Flint had been placed under the control of a state appointed “Emergency Financial Manager‘ to deal with it’s fiscal woes.  Under the relevant law, Emergency Financial Managers assume all of the power a locality’s elected officials ordinarily possess and local officials can only take actions the Emergency Financial Manager allows them to take.  Flint’s first experience with an Emergency Financial Manager ended successfully in 2004.

            But promptly after the Republican sweep of the Michigan state government in 2010, Flint found itself in dire financial straits, in part due to an $8 million cut in state aid.  Governor Snyder found that Flint again required an Emergency Financial Manager, and that’s who was in charge when Flint began getting its water without proper treatment from the Flint River.

            In a properly functioning democracy, when a problem occurs, citizens seek redress from their elected officials.  Elected officials tend to like their jobs, and so they are extremely sensitive to what their constituents want.  They know that if they can’t deliver what the citizens want, they will be turned out of office at the next election.

            Michigan’s Emergency Financial Manager law short-circuits this process.  Citizens can complain about local conditions all they want, but the Emergency Financial Manager doesn’t have any obligation to listen to them.  He or she is appointed by the governor and holds his or her position at the governor’s pleasure.  His or her job is to find a way for the local polity to dig its way out of debt and pay its bills.  To some extent, the job is like that of a bankruptcy trustee whose first loyalty is to the debtor’s creditors.      

            Ultimately, the governor gets credit or blame for whatever the Emergency Financial Manager does.  But this doesn’t insure that the concerns of the people in a locality will be heard.  Governor Snyder is term limited and will never again have to face the voters.  Even if he weren’t, places like Flint would probably not be high up on his list of priorities.  In the last election, the county in which Flint is located gave almost 70% of its votes to Snyder’s Democratic opponent.  One of the most basic rules of politics is that you serve your supporters first, particularly if resources are limited.

            What happened in Flint was not tyranny, or at least the kind of tyranny American democracy was born to prevent.  It was, instead, the steely indifference of rulers to people who have no adequate democratic way of protecting themselves.