Oh what a difference two years makes.

Back in 2013, municipal elections were nice. Candidates spoke to each other, supported each other, considered each other’s views. The tone was friendly. You’d see the candidates smiling and laughing with each other at the polling sites, even as they competed for the same votes. (Here’s the photographic proof, with Loren Hintz and George Cianciolo.) The niceness was everywhere. Just before Election Day I even posted this piece on Chapelboro, challenging the local candidates to stop being so sweet to each other and start playing some friggin’ hardball.

But I was being sarcastic, y’all. I was being sarcastic!

Fast forward to 2015, and…well, things were a little different. It got petty. It got snippy. There was actual bitterness. How bad did it get? Depends who you ask. Some candidates were nonchalant about it, but I saw others who were just about ready to be done with politics altogether. I heard some people say this was pretty tame in the grand scheme of things, but I heard others say they hadn’t seen anything like this anywhere. Either way, though, Chapel Hill hasn’t seen a local election this nasty in a long, long time.

What the hell happened?

Now, folks who’ve been around a while say this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an election like this in Chapel Hill. In fact it happens pretty regularly, every 10 or 15 years or so.

But why? Forget for a second about the specific issues that divided people this year. More abstractly: why do these divisions occur in the first place? Why do they only bubble up every so often? And why does it seem to get so bitter when they do?

We were all nicey-nice in 2013. How did it get so contentious in just two years?

Here’s one answer: what if the two are connected? What if it got so heated this year not in spite of the fact that we’d been so nice before, but precisely because we’d been so nice before?

This is why…

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When we think about democracy, more often than not, we think of it as a struggle between opposing sides. Parties and candidates compete against each other for votes, you vote for whichever side best represents your interests, and everything gets hashed out in the legislature as all the different groups fight for control. “Interest-group democracy,” it’s called, and we do it this way on purpose. It goes back to James Madison’s theory (in Federalist 10) of how to keep the government from turning tyrannical. The trick, he said, is to keep a single group (or “faction”) from taking over – and the way to do that is to build a diverse society with many factions, all of them constantly in competition, each of them checking the power of the others.

It’s ingenious. But it’s not enough. If we’re all just competing against each other, then what’s the point of sharing a government in the first place? You can’t sustain a community without something that unites people together, a common interest that everyone works toward. And for that, you need a government that’s built on something more than conflict. You also need government to be a place where people come together to work out the best way to reach their common goals. Government can’t just be “adversarial” – it has to be “consensual” too.

The political scientist Jane Mansbridge wrote about this in a book called “Beyond Adversary Democracy.” When we think about politics, she said, we typically think about institutions like Congress, where it’s all about the power struggle and there’s almost no effort to reach “genuine unanimity.” (There’s compromise, true, but that’s not the same thing as unanimity – that’s just different factions making deals with each other in order to maximize their own interests.)

But what if we go down a level? What if we look at small towns instead? Or local organizations? Or businesses where the workers make decisions collectively? There, Mansbridge said, you’ll find not “adversary” democracy, but “unitary” democracy. Rather than different factions competing with each other, you’ll find a single, un-divided group of people, united by their shared interests, coming together as a community to identify their goals and agree on the best course of action.

To illustrate this, Mansbridge visited a small town in Vermont. (She called it “Selby” in the book – not its real name.) Selby makes all its big decisions in one giant annual town meeting: everyone’s invited to gather together in a big room and talk, and talk, and talk, until they agree upon a course of action, one agenda item at a time.

The underlying assumption (says Mansbridge) is that all the folks in Selby share the same interest. There’s no need to make sure all the factions are represented, because everyone’s on the same side – all the town has to do is get people together and talk it out. Not everybody shows up to the meeting, of course, and some people are more influential than others – but that isn’t necessarily a problem, because everybody’s working toward the same goal regardless. (And in fact, Mansbridge says, the townsfolk actually become more likely to share interests in common because they start by assuming shared interests. It makes them more likely to emphathize with each other and to think first about “the good of the whole,” even if they have to sacrifice their individual interests to do it.)

It all sounds very idyllic.

But it’s not perfect either.

For one thing: even though it’s called a “consensual” democracy, Mansbridge says debates can actually get more heated and passionate than they do in an “adversarial” system. Which actually makes sense if you think about it. Adversarial systems are based on conflict, but the actual decisions get made pretty mathematically: add up everybody’s interest and divide by the whole, and there’s your compromise. It’s all very un-emotional. You’re not trying to persuade each other, because you’ve already agreed to disagree.

But in a consensual system, the goal is total agreement. Everyone supposedly shares the same interest, so if there’s disagreement, you don’t just split the difference – you talk it out until you agree.

We’ve all been in those conversations. How do they usually go?

Well, they get heated. They get emotional. People get angry at each other. Very angry.

And that’s what happens even in a Mayberry-esque town like Selby, where everyone is friends with everyone else. “(One man) acquires a splitting headache,” writes Mansbridge. “An older man claims he stopped going because he is afraid for his heart. A man in the next town tells how his hands shake for hours after the meeting. Altogether more than a quarter of the people I talked to suggested without prompting that the conflictual character of the town meeting in some way upset them.”

How does a community deal with this? How do we ease tension, when we’re trying to work through a passionate difference of opinion?

Well, how do you do it?

We all have the same basic strategies. First we remind ourselves of our friendship, our common bonds. We refer to each other by our first names. Make it informal. We break the tension by joking with each other, especially when things get really intense. And worse comes to worst, we can just avoid having the conversation at all. That way at least we’re not arguing in public.

Sounds familiar, right?

That’s how it happens in Selby. In the meeting, they refer to each other by their first names. They crack jokes. And most importantly, the biggest decisions – the ones that are most likely to generate the biggest fights – are not made in public. Not really. Town leaders meet ahead of time, Mansbridge says, and work it out in advance – so while the official vote gets taken in the meeting, the consensus has already been reached in private. (When Selby had to appoint a selectman, for instance: several prominent people were nominated, but nearly all of them declined the nomination, and the final vote was almost unanimous. But the whole thing was a show: the ‘winner’ had been selected and the other ‘candidates’ had already agreed not to run before the meeting even started.)

These methods are important. They’re good. They ease tension. They keep the peace. And this consensual system has real advantages. It encourages everyone to get involved. It inspires people to think about the community and set their own interest to the side.

But…

There’s an obvious downside too. If the goal is to preserve a spirit of consensus, then real differences of opinion can get suppressed. If the big decisions are made by elites, other people get shut out. “If you don’t say what they want to hear you’re not even acknowledged,” said one Selby resident. (Didn’t CHALT’s supporters say exactly the same thing?)

And there’s more: when real differences of interest arise, a consensual system doesn’t have a way to address it. Adversarial governments can just compromise, but when you don’t allow your government to act without total consensus, you often end up with “deadlock” – or worse, “social coercion.” (We know this from U.S. History class. Remember what we learned about the Articles of Confederation? They failed, because they required every single state to agree before the federal government could do anything at all. Total deadlock. And if it’s “social coercion” you want – go look up the history of how the U.S. Constitution got ratified. Fascinating stuff.)

Now, Mansbridge likes consensual democracy. Her ultimate point is that we’re too adversarial – that we ought to be making more decisions locally, in small communities with shared interests, in institutions that seek consensus around a common good. (Let’s be more like Chapel Hill than Washington, in other words.)

But she also said this, by way of warning:

“In a town meeting, each decision to resolve a matter beforehand to avoid hurt feelings becomes simultaneously a decision to withhold information from those who need it most…

“The final and major weakness of the consensual system is ‘people being bullied into consensus’ and ‘just kind of going along with it.'”

And even in the idyllic little New England town of Selby, that weakness eventually turns into open conflict, after years and years where everyone seems to be on the same page.

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Okay, back to Chapel Hill.

Did the same thing happen here?

We pride ourselves on being a politically active, passionate town. We all know the line. “For every three people in Chapel Hill, there are four opinions!” Ha ha.

But for all our talk about valuing differences of opinion, we’ve put an awfully high value on consensus.

Look at our government structure, for instance. Many cities divide themselves into districts or wards and elect separate representatives from each. Not here. All our town council members are elected at large. Every member represents the whole community – the common interest. Our system makes no effort to guarantee that different interests are represented, because our system assumes that different interests do not exist. There is one shared interest, one common good for all. That’s it.

Better yet, look at “Chapel Hill 2020,” the massive town-wide project in 2011 and 2012 to develop a new comprehensive plan. Chapel Hill 2020 was conceived as a giant New England-style town meeting: invite literally everyone in town to come together and talk…and talk…and talk…until gradually we reach a consensus, a plan that everyone had a part in shaping and that everyone can get behind. And we did it! Thousands of people came together. Everybody had their say. And the Town Council approved it. Unanimously, of course.

And look at the election of 2013. Nine candidates for Town Council, and they mostly agreed on everything. The mayor was running unopposed. The most obvious candidates to challenge him had all declined to run. The incumbents were all but guaranteed reelection. Loren Hintz and George Cianciolo knew they were fighting for one open seat on the Council – but there they are, smiling and joking with each other three days before the election. And why not? There was nothing at stake. Loren and George (first names, please!) had very similar visions for Chapel Hill. They had their differences, but they represented the same “common interest.” George won the election, as it turned out. But suppose it had been Loren. Would the Town Council have acted much differently in the last two years? Would it have prioritized different things, made different decisions? How often has George been the swing vote on a 5-4 Council decision? How often would Loren have gone the other way?

What this is, is democracy by consensus. It’s informal, it’s friendly, it’s participatory, and yes, it’s often unanimous. Chapel Hill has a terrific system of consensual democracy. (Look no further than “Chapel Hill 2020.”) And it works very well – assuming we all share a common interest. The system depends on that assumption.

What if the assumption is wrong?

Writing in 1980, Jane Mansbridge argued that consensus democracy is a fine thing and worth fighting for – but it doesn’t know how to handle real conflicts of interest. Sometimes it suppresses opinions in order to preserve the facade of unanimity. James Madison, writing in 1787, said the same thing. And both of them, especially Mansbridge, wrote that consensus becomes harder and harder to maintain as your community becomes larger. It’s a very real danger.

Suppose you represent a competing interest here in Chapel Hill, one that goes against the “consensus.” You’re probably going to be frustrated, right? Your town leaders all vote the same way, and gosh, they’re awfully friendly with each other. The big decisions all seem to get made behind closed doors. You’re invited to participate, but you represent conflict in a system that’s not really designed to handle it. You don’t get shut down or hushed up, not really, but it might feel that way. And Chapel Hill 2020 actually makes the feeling worse: the town goes out of its way to invite you to the table, then falls back on the same old consensus anyway. It probably felt like a betrayal.

What we saw in 2015 was a bubbling over: the inevitable downside of having a consensus-based democracy in a community with adversarial interests. “When real conflicts of interest arose,” Mansbridge wrote of Selby, “people held back their anger until they were about to explode.”

2015 was the explosion. And sooner or later it’ll probably happen again.

After all, it’s happened before. Every 10 or 15 years or so, they say, Chapel Hill has an election like this. Maybe not quite this bitter, but like this. Consensus, consensus, consensus for a decade or more, then a sudden upswell of discontent. It always seems to come out of nowhere. People get caught off guard. The election happens. There are surprises. Big changes. For a time. Then, gradually, the anger subsides. Things settle down. The consensus reasserts itself. It’s how the system works.

These heated elections we have every so often? This is the cost of consensual democracy.

Should we make changes? Jane Mansbridge would probably say so. “To maintain its legitimacy,” she wrote, “a democracy must have both a unitary and an adversary face.” In other words, rather than seeking only consensus and thinking of conflict as a bad thing to be avoided, we ought to recognize that there are conflicts of interest in our community and try to accommodate them in our government.

And there are things we could theoretically do. We could switch to a district system for Town Council representation, for instance. We could not invite the whole town to write our next comprehensive plan.

But that’d be giving up all hope of finding a common interest. And that’s an awfully pessimistic move. It’s the sort of move you only make when you admit your community isn’t a little village anymore.

And personally, hey, I like Chapel Hill the way it is. I like our consensual system. I like the friendliness. I like the fact that we believe in a common good, and I like the fact that our town government actually tries to identify it and realize it. It puts us way up on Raleigh and Washington.

But this is the price we pay for consensus. We should remember that. Our system isn’t perfect. There are downsides. People feel excluded. Eventually there is anger. The anger becomes a movement. Heated elections take place. Changes come.

Mansbridge says this sort of thing tends to happen wherever you have a “unitary” democracy. It happened in Selby. It happened in Chapel Hill. Carrboro, y’all are on notice.

Still, there’s nothing saying it has to get to that point. We can do better. This is a work in progress. It ought to be. We’re Chapel Hill. We love works in progress. We’re progress-ive.

Will we do better? Will 2015 be the last time Chapel Hill sees an election like this?

Nah. Probably not.

But it’s worth the effort, nonetheless.