...Town meetings are the last vestige of true direct democracy in the United States, and about as close as you can get today to the sort of government practiced by the Greek city-states that invented the form 2,500 years ago. Early New England settlers, whose quotidian affairs lay beyond the control and attention of the British crown, formally adopted town meeting as early as the 1630s, and that apparently gave them a taste for democracy. While some founding fathers saw the town meeting as taking things a bit too far—James Madison wrote, “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob”—it’s clear that town meetings served as early inspiration for the American Revolution.

In my middle-class town of 18,000, the meeting was held this spring in the high school’s cavernous auditorium. The atmosphere was festive, and in the hallway outside the Westborough Women’s Club ran a bake sale, with proceeds from their banana bread and maple syrup muffins going to a local food pantry. The gym was turned over to a free childcare operation, with moon bounces and craft tables. When townspeople signed in, they received strips of mint green copier paper to hold aloft so volunteers called “tellers” could count the vote. Majority ruled, except in the few cases where a two-thirds vote was necessary. Few measures were controversial, so it was usually easy to gauge whether a motion carried by eyeballing the sea of green.

Some 450 people packed the auditorium at the height of the meeting—a small percentage of registered voters to be sure, but then again, they were being asked to do more than just mark a ballot. Town meetings consist of two four-hour sessions, with a two-hour dinner break in between. One long-time attendee told me that the meeting frequently required a third session the following week to complete all the scheduled business. It’s not quite government by the people—it’s government by the people who are willing to sacrifice a weekend.

But the people who came had come prepared. They had pored over the budget and done their research and, in some cases, their own math. They came armed with numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and news about neighboring towns’ property tax increases. In a country where just over one-half the eligible population can’t even be bothered to vote for president, it was incredibly heartening.
...