Why can’t the United States build a rapid transit system like China’s? Is a firmer hand needed to guide the European Union through the financial crisis? Does California’s direct democracy system need more limits? These were among the questions global political thinkers tackled in a conversation about whether democracy is too slow for the 21st century in a panel at Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum as part of the Zócalo/Cal Humanities “Searching for Democracy” series.

Harvard University East Asia scholar and Deng Xiaoping biographer Ezra Vogel believes that the U.S. can learn from Deng and from what’s happened in China over the past few decades. “We don’t want their system here,” he said of the Chinese. “But why isn’t there room for learning from some of the best advantages, the things that they do well?” Perhaps the world is changing so quickly that some of the slow ways we do things in U.S. government can’t keep up.

China modernized extraordinarily quickly, noted moderator and Zócalo editor Joe Mathews. Would it have been possible in a more pluralistic manner?

Vogel thought not, noting that if you look at the rest of Asia, the two most democratic nations–India and the Philippines–have been among the slowest to modernize. And, while it’s easy to condemn China for its violations of human rights, it’s also easy to forget that the sins committed along the way to successful modernization have been minor compared to the sins committed along the way to failed collectivization in the 1950s and 1960s. Over 30 million people were killed during the Great Leap Forward, and at least 1.4 million were killed during the Cultural Revolution. But best estimates put the number of people killed in Tiananmen Square at 700 or 800.

Democracy, according to critics, may be what has hamstrung the European Union from solving the current financial crisis. But civic participation and EU public policy expert Janice Thomson said that EU decision-making is much more efficient than it looks. Although laws can take five years to pass, when they do pass they change 27 countries in one fell stroke–and the least advanced and newest member countries must rise to the same baseline level as the most advanced. Plus, as a transnational government, the EU has the power to protect citizens in a globalized world where corporations cross borders fluidly and can easily pit countries against one another.

But what about America? Are our politicians listening too much to the wisdom of the crowd–what attorney and activist Christine Pelosi calls “beehive-model politics”?

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with American democracy that can’t be fixed with more democracy,” said Pelosi. In fact, she’d argue that America didn’t have a practicing democracy until the 20th or even the 21st century. Technology has given individuals power that they never had before. And “only American democracy allows someone like a Barack Obama, the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan, to make his way and find himself and burst on the scene and become president of the United States.”

But the ethos of the American system is still problematic, countered Vogel. In America the big companies are looking out for the stockholders rather than for the lives of the people who work for the companies. By contrast, Japanese companies have lower profit margins but keep their employees on for longer.

And according to the Pew Research Center, said Mathews, Americans are among the least satisfied with their country’s direction, while Chinese are by far the most satisfied. Vogel believes that most people in China are living better lives than they were 20 years ago and that their government has brought more good than problems. But, said Thomson, the Chinese are starting from a different place than better educated, wealthier Europeans. “It’s hard for politicians to meet the high demands of modern citizens in affluent countries,” she said.

And in the U.S., said Pelosi, hypocrisy reigns: Californians consistently express their desire for more services–without raising taxes. Our education system has suffered as a result. “Something is wrong when a public education, the backbone of our country, the backbone of our competitiveness with China, is literally bankrupting families,” she said.

We’ve married democracy and consumerism in the U.S., said Mathews–Americans want to have more stuff without paying more for it. Would having less democracy make long-term progress easier? No, said Pelosi, who thinks that the answers lie in reform–taking big money out of politics–and other creative ways of creating consensus hold the answers. But Thomson thinks Americans need a change in perspective. We consider governments to be providers of services to citizens, while in Europe the citizens are part of the solution; “citizens are citizens with responsibilities and not just needs.”

The question-and-answer session opened with an audience member asking what Americans have to want for democracy to work. Some of us want a larger government with higher taxes; other want a smaller government with lower taxes.

“Marrying cost and consumer benefit is always going to be tough,” said Pelosi. “I think in a democracy people get it–it changes every election cycle–which is the beauty or the curse of it.” But Americans need to be comfortable with the inherent hypocrisy of their choices.

According to Thomson, better-informed citizens can go a long way to making democracy work–which is a particular challenge as you see journalism on the decline in the EU and the U.S. “You need a free press and opportunities for people to discuss and look at the facts, and understand the big picture,” she said.

Another audience member directed a question to Vogel: The top leadership in China changes every 10 years, which seems more democratic than certain officials in America who hold office for decades. How does this affect the country’s advancement?

Vogel said he wouldn’t call this system democratic but rather an effort to be meritocratic. “On the one hand the system has worked to bring very talented people to the top,” he said. But the danger is that without “enough fresh air from the outside,” you get more corruption.

To put it another way, U.S. democracy might be slow, but it doesn’t produce Bo Xilai.

Watch full video here.
See more photos here.
Read panelist Janice Thomson’s article on democracy in the EU here.
Read expert opinions on what the U.S. can learn from Asia’s authoritarian regimes here.

*Photos by Andolina Photography.