In many a town meeting of America's 19th century past, every landowner 21 years of age or older had a say and a vote. Of course, women, renters, tenant farmers and slaves were not enfranchised, but at least the theory was democratic. Of those who enjoyed suffrage, each of their votes counted -- one neither more nor less than the other.

The most articulate fellow with the most mellifluous voice and an understandable point of view was likely to be heard and heeded more readily than a poor speaker with a garbled message. Yet each had the right to speak. And vote.

It was not how much money or land an elector possessed that mattered. In most town meetings, a one-acre owner could speak as long as a 10-acre owner to get his point across. 

Occasionally, a whole town spoke as one, even if individual rhetoric differed in form or decibel. That's what's known as the vox populi.

Even though, as has been noted, universal suffrage was then but a dream, the reality was that individual votes in the aggregate had to be reckoned with. Delegates to those legislative bodies above and beyond the town meeting did well to heed the vox populi if they wished to be re-elected or enabled to govern. As democracy goes, it wasn't a bad deal.

How in our day is the vox populi heard and heeded? Let us count the ways. It depends on what populi. Those with fabulous fortunes who wish to dictate law and policy may now legally do so with their millions. They make generous campaign contributions and thereby command the legislative votes of those whom they support. In plain English, they buy them.

The zillionaires finance the attack-and-smear ads that now are a regular feature of campaigns in all 50 states. Such ads tell half-truths and total falsehoods -- all to gull those voters, whose eyes are permanently glued to their TV screens, into believing nefarious things of those whom the moneyed want defeated and gloriously wonderful things about those the swells want elected.

On the face of it, the reasonable person would not think it could work. But it does. It works very well, thus explaining why laws are regularly enacted by Congress and state legislatures that go against the grain of popular sentiment and even sometimes what passes for popular wisdom. Consequently, the vox populi being heard is an elite chorus of those with bulging wallets.

Were one to ask most people of average or better IQ whether or not tax rates should be lowered even if doing so would mean at local and state levels the defunding of public schools, reduced police and fire protection and the withdrawal of other basic services that a civilized society requires, they would say "no." Yet in many venues, the clear tendency is to cut taxes. Why? Because the big money people want them cut, never mind the civic damage that results.

Or let there be a budget surplus in a given state or municipality where Tea Party people make their homes, and demands are made to return that surplus to the taxpayers one at a time. A medium-sized city in Michigan several years ago discovered that its exchequer had such a surplus. The public works people there rejoiced because they had a few dollars to repair roadways some of which had deteriorated due to inadequate maintenance.

But, no. The city council, bowing to the hardball demands of the low-to-no-taxes crowd, returned a few measly dollars to each taxpayer, though not enough, one of them told me, "to take the wife and kids out to dinner one night at an Olive Garden." The populi wanted the roads fixed. The political theologians, backed by big money, wanted to make a point.

Is it the American vox populi one hears on the noisy and ubiquitous talk radio shows into which Ralph from Hogwaller calls every other day to drone on about what a skunk Barack Obama is? Is it to be heard in the bombast of a Rush Limbaugh, the slick rhetoric of a Sean Hannity, the downright meanness of a Bill O'Reilly or the deceptive country palaver of a Mike Huckabee?

One devoutly hopes not.

So how is the voice of the People -- as in "of the People, by the People and for the People" -- to be heard and heeded? Certainly not as Der F�hrer heard it as panting, sweating thousands brayed "Heil Hitler" or their swooning fascist counterparts in Italy shouted out "Duce! Duce! Duce!" Certainly not as Christian gospel writers depicted crowds telling Pontius Pilate to "Crucify him, crucify him!"

Sad to say, the prevailing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court bench has fixed it so that for a long time to come the voices of the Brothers Koch and their ilk spoken in piles of cash will always be heard and generally heeded.

Few with power heard the cries of Russian peasants, often asking merely for bread. Those voices went not only unheard but unheeded until 1917 when the Bolsheviks co-opted them into a disastrous revolution. Russian nabobs ran for cover, and many ended up literally in pieces. That is no way to hear the vox populi, because, for one thing, the populi end up screwed either way.