SECESSION AND DEMOCRACY; OPPONENTS OF SAN FERNANDO VALLEY MOVEMENT WRONG FOR DENYING RESIDENTS RIGHT TO DECIDE FUTURE.

Byline: Stephen Mack 

NOTHING can be more lethal to democracy than high principles.

For exhibit A pay close attention to the undeniable virtue of the arguments opponents of San Fernando Valley secession from Los Angeles are likely to raise. They illustrate how much safer we'd be with a little honest expression of greed by politicians hungry to maintain control over a more affluent tax base.

Two worrisome arguments come specifically to mind. One might be called the Sarajevo argument. Citing the tragedy of that once great showcase of multiethnic harmony now rent apart by factional warfare, concerned legislators will attempt to preserve the old Los Angeles as a monument to the principle that a collective of diverse peoples can be governed.

The second argument revolves around the challenge of social justice. Advanced by thoughtful politicians who represent blighted inner-city neighborhoods, this argument asserts that it is a mark of moral and social degradation for upper- and middle-class communities to abandon their poorer neighbors on the other side of the mountains.

What is so dangerous about these arguments is that, basically, they are right.

Social justice and a cooperative pluralistic community are the moral imperatives of an enlightened democracy. The trouble is that these goals are so unassailable morally that, in the hearts of many, they trump the less sexy principle of self-rule.

A righteous cause, it's felt, justifies rigging the democratic process to get the ``correct'' results.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should.

Democracy in America has largely been a common people's religion. But the exuberance of our democratic rhetoric has never been so loud as to completely muffle a powerful and persistent anti-democratic minority.

The elites of every generation dating back to the founding of this republic have anguished over the ``dangers'' of democracy, and rationalized a thousand different schemes to make it more ``reasonable.''

The idea is that it's OK to circumvent the will of the people when the ``good'' of the people demand it.

And why not, if, as founding father John Jay believed, the country should be governed by those who own it? After all, how could common people possibly know what's good for them when they are, in H.L Mencken's words, ``a vast mass of undifferentiated human blanks''?

Walter Lippmann put the case against democracy succinctly in 1925 when he wrote that ``the number of mice and monkeys known to have been deceived in laboratories is surpassed only by the hopeful citizens of a democracy.'' Of course governing should be left to the ``experts,'' he believed; voters in a democracy are just too easily duped by pandering populists to be trusted to govern themselves.

I imagine all of these men nodded approvingly from the grave when state Sen. Richard Polanco justified his tireless campaign to deprive the citizens of the San Fernando Valley the right to decide their own future by observing that it ``opens up a Pandora's box.''

Pandora's box always has been the high-minded oligarch's vision of the unpredictable will of ill-bred voters in a democracy.

Were Polanco and company to believe that democracy was anything more than just a scheme to gain legitimacy, they might understand what many of our deepest thinkers so often have said: Democracy transforms people. It is, as Walt Whitman put it, ``life's gymnasium.''

This is especially true - perhaps only true - of local democracy.

Local democracy requires that more individuals actively participate in the management of their own community. By so doing, it turns individuals into citizens, neighbors who have learned the political art of cooperating with each other in the stewardship, their neighborhood.

At the local level, citizenship means more than ranting anonymously to a talk radio host or casting an occasional ballot for somebody one is never likely to meet.

As political power becomes increasingly and inevitably centralized in Sacramento and Washington, D.C., city government is the Valley resident's only hope for any real democratic engagement.

But with 3.4 million people, democracy in Los Angeles is a remote abstraction. An Election Day formality.

Admittedly, at 1.2 million inhabitants, the San Fernando Valley will not be many people's idea of a small, local community. Should it incorporate it would be the sixth-largest city in America - larger than San Diego, San Francisco, Dallas, or Boston. Twice the size of Memphis or Seattle.

Still, at its current bloated size, the city of Los Angeles is only slightly smaller than the entire United States at its founding.

And what a useful comparison that is. Those first American citizens were represented by 26 senators and 65 House members - not to mention an even more accessible host of state and local politicians.

By sorry contrast, local democracy in Los Angeles today means that a near equivalent number of people are represented by an imperial tribunal of 15. No democracy there.

Just easier for one hefty Polanco to keep the lid on those pesky people of Pandora's box.