It’s time for Thomas Jefferson's village-states

et’s create lots of democracies. We’d create one for every sixty to a hundred citizens or so. Each democracy would discuss, decide on, and execute policy for everything in its neighborhood.

We'd keep our Constitution's fundamental structure—its federalism, its guarantee of each state’s republican government, and its three balanced branches of national government. But we'd extend the Constitution's federalism upward to the associational level of neighborhoods.

Thomas Jefferson wanted this. From 1810 to 1824, Jefferson wrote at least eight letters proposing that Virginia, and by extension America, divide their county governments into “ward republics” the size of Saxon hundreds to encourage the practice of public freedom.

These ward republics, Jefferson argued, would become “the salvation of the republic.” He believed that if we didn’t practice direct democracy in our neighborhoods, America would lose its republican form of government. To Jefferson, it wasn't enough for each citizen to vote. We had to exercise public freedom: we had to discuss and debate face to face—to engage in decision-making with neighbors.

We Americans love our private freedoms, which allow us to work, play, buy, sell, and travel as we wish. But private freedom isn’t public freedom. Public freedom isn’t even civil rights, which protect us from discrimination and governmental overreach and oppression. Instead, public freedom, political theorist Hannah Arendt said, "is participation in public affairs, or admission to the public realm."

To rediscover public freedom and to revive the American republic, let’s adopt Jefferson’s idea of ward republics and update these republics as what I call village-states.