Two Saturdays ago, I went to a Cracker Barrel. But at this Cracker Barrel there was no chicken-fried steak, no gravy, and no checkers. This was a legislative Cracker Barrel, one of the unique aspects of the state in which I am blessed to live, South Dakota. A legislative Cracker Barrel is a meeting of local constituents with their state legislators, enabling a back and forth of legislators informing the public what they are up to. Then there is the opportunity for constituents to ask questions of their legislators.
A quick Internet search tells me that the term “cracker barrel” derives from the practice of people gathering around a literal barrel of crackers at the country store and shooting the breeze. That’s where the restaurant got its name and why it adopted the country store motif in its décor. The term “cracker barrel” came to represent any informal meeting of buddies where they might engage in friendly chatter and pass the time.
Perhaps I am wrong (and feel free to correct in the comments), but I don’t know of another state that regularly engages in this practice. In South Dakota, like most states, our legislative session starts in January, typically the second full week. Unlike most states, South Dakota’s legislative session is extraordinarily short. They only meet roughly forty legislative days, meaning they are out of session by mid-March. In the meantime, legislators come home for the weekend from our capital in Pierre to face their constituents.
Where I live, in Brown County, we typically have four Cracker Barrel sessions over the course of the legislative session. This one on January 28 was the first of the year. There are three state legislative districts that touch Brown County. District 3 is essentially my town of Aberdeen and is thus fully within the county. Two other districts, Districts 1 and 23, represent part of the county, thus their representation is also invited to the Cracker Barrel that takes place in Aberdeen. In South Dakota, each district has one senator and two at-large representatives, thus three total legislators. At our Saturday meeting, eight of the nine possible legislators attended. That’s a good percentage, especially since some of the legislators from Districts 1 and 23 have to travel over an hour to get to Aberdeen.
This makes the Cracker Barrel a remarkable event. Legislators, who have worked hard all week, then take their day off to visit with constituents. And citizens, who could be doing almost anything on a cold South Dakota Saturday morning, bundle up and come to a political meeting. Granted there is coffee and pastries (I was quite disappointed in the pastry selection, by the way, as it lacked any donuts, and the coffee is like church coffee, more of a warm, brown, coffee-flavored water than real coffee). Still, there we were. If you can’t make it in person, modern technology has allowed us to stream the event.
Sometimes the Cracker Barrels can be contentious. I’ve witnessed conflagrations over taxes, budget cuts, teacher pay, surrogate motherhood, transgender issues, and more. This year the number of hot button issues is low. The state has a decent amount of money, so we aren’t fighting over cuts, but not so much money that people are falling over themselves to claim a piece. The contentious social issues have been dealt with in past sessions. Legislators seem to be taking this session off from most of that. At our Cracker Barrel there was discussion about the budget, a new state prison, what kinds of contracts landlords and tenants can sign, how much information that state can get to us on pending legislation. The big debate in our state is over a carbon pipeline. To put it briefly, thus somewhat simplistically, a private company wants to use eminent domain to run a pipeline through the state that would sequester carbon emissions underground. So, it is both pro-environment, but also pro-corporate. The company expects to make money, naturally. Many landowners object to what they see as high-handed tactics by the carbon company in its efforts to gain the land necessary for the pipeline. We got a couple questions about that, with all discussion taking basically a pro-landowner view.
This is democracy at its best. That doesn’t mean it’s always high minded. We’ve had some legislators (not currently!) who clearly didn’t know what they were talking about half the time. It will not surprise that such meetings also tend to bring out the local cranks. The questions are not always good. Sometimes the questioner doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. Sometimes they are just not very articulate. Sometimes they represent a distinctly minority view that makes up for lack of popularity with extreme passion. I think we all know the type. But that’s democracy for you. No one said it had to be elegant.
In American political thought, there is a continual debate over who was right, the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists. In the debate over the United States Constitution in 1787-1788, Federalists tended to favor a stronger, more nationalist and centralized government. Anti-Federalists were proponents of the “small republic” theory, namely that democracy can only be successful on a relatively small scale, with large republics necessitating a government so strong that it would inevitably become inconsistent with protecting the rights of the people. The best distillation of Anti-Federalist thought as well as the Federalist reply remains Herbert Storing’s What The Anti-Federalists Were For.
I am on the Federalist side generally. I do think that one thing the Anti-Federalists got right is that a vibrant local government is necessary to instruct the people into the habits of citizenship. A large, distant government would be hard for the people to connect with and participate in. But local government, as Alexis de Tocqueville also noted, allows citizens to easily take part in their own self-government.
We are citizens, not subjects. As Aristotle notes, a citizen is someone who governs and is governed in return. Unlike a subject, who is passive and literally subjected to the rule of a king or something of that sort, a citizen both is governed but also participates in governing. That requires certain habits, a certain kind of character. The virtues of self-government are most easily cultivated at the local level where there is an ease of participation as well as a clear notion of how local decisions affect your life. It’s one thing to think about grand health care policy or what is going on in Ukraine, but when someone argues that they should be able to run a pipeline through your property, that really grabs your attention. And while for most of us our national representatives remain abstractions, and we are most certainly abstractions to them, local government allows for a personal connection with our representatives that makes that representation feel concrete rather than abstract.
I like our Cracker Barrels and the strong history of citizen involvement in my state. If we could just get food as good as they have at the other kind of Cracker Barrel, it would be pure perfection.
“We are citizens, not subjects. As Aristotle notes, a citizen is someone who governs and is governed in return. Unlike a subject, who is passive and literally subjected to the rule of a king or something of that sort, a citizen both is governed but also participates in governing. That requires certain habits, a certain kind of character.”
Nicely put, and so important!