How We Save the World

The political crisis we face in the U.S. is not the result of the entire concept of “Democracy” failing.  It’s that the specific type of democracy we practice – known as “Representative Democracy,” has outlived its useful life and become corrupted due to its own internal limitations and contradictions.  It is not worth restoring or revitalizing -- even if such were possible. 

One big part of the problem is the lack of imagination and engagement on the part of the left.  We’ve simply failed to pursue viable alternatives to our form of Representative Democracy (RD), preferring instead to engage with the right in an ideological war of their choosing – one we cannot win.  

Through 60 years of amoral strategy, the right controls the narrative on this issue, so much so that they are getting traction for their “solution” of a warmed over authoritarian-totalitarianism-oligarchy indistinguishable from the Chinese government model.   

The left is spending all its energy trying to restore the archaic, failing system, and in doing so, fallen into the right’s strategic trap. In essence, the right is expending its energy and treasure trying to do the wrong thing that can be done, and the left on what cannot and should not be done.

What we progressives need to do is seize the initiative by offering a compelling narrative and pathway for Participative Democracy (PD) – a viable, proven, and successful advancement in political theory that can be honestly sold and defended as both the logical next step in human freedom, and the last best hope of earth.    

This effort will upend the equilibrium that has locked in the Republican base.  Meaningful participation and an increased sense of agency -- followed of course by meaningful results -- are the only outcomes that will eliminate the grievances that bind hard core Republican voters to elites that couldn’t care less about their lives, and of all our options only Participative Democracy can deliver them.  The same vector will galvanize and reenergize the left – which is why it’s the right near-term strategy to reverse the vicious cycle destroying American Democracy.

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This next section combines American History and Political Theory.  We think the information is important and relevant to this discussion but feel free to skip ahead to the next section if you already have a good grasp on these subjects.

There are – and always have been - multiple types or forms of the political system we know as democracy. Forms of this system were practiced by tribes and other human groups tens of thousands of years ago, but forensic anthropology and related sciences are just yielding the first glimpses into how the systems worked in practice.  The existing evidence indicates that: democracy as at least as old as authoritarian, hierarchy-based organizational systems; all known forms of democracy have been successfully applied by multiple human societies; and the downfall of all historical Democracies was internal failure to adapt the political system to changed circumstances – not the superiority and belligerence of external forces.

For reference, the major types of Democracy are Direct, Representative, and Participative. 

In a Direct Democratic (DD) System, the entire electorate votes for laws and policies without the mediation of elected or non-elected government officials.  Direct Democracy has not been practiced by any large or modern societies so there is no track record to evaluate.  While a DD system could technically be managed, and some form of it should probably be a long-term societal objective, it is likely too radical to gain much traction now, and its aggressive pursuit in the near term would likely be counterproductive, especially in the United States with its high percentage of authoritarian-leaning citizens.    

All modern democracies are Representative Democracies, in which decision making and legislating are conducted by a limited number of people elected specifically to serve as proxies for much larger groups of people, thus mediating for the larger groups based on a tacit agreement to represent them faithfully in exchange for a salary.   

Participative Democracy is a hybrid of Direct and Representative Democracy in which citizens (not limited to the electorate) can influence policy and legislation through mechanisms that reduce the mediation power of elected officials. It was practiced to good effect in ancient Athens, and it is currently working well at the level of the European Union and in many European nation states and municipalities. 

The Founding Fathers were aware of historical (primarily Greek and Roman) and ongoing (primarily Native American) examples of all types of Democracy, and there was fierce debate about the relative merits amongst them and other American thought leaders.  However, they did achieve a consensus for Representative Democracy (RD) because they perceived it be the least problematic direction of advance towards freedom. 

They were aware of the potential pitfalls of RD in theory and practice, and thus through the Constitution they did not attempt to structurally prevent further evolution towards systems of greater freedom and citizen agency.  The U.S. Constitution was a political systems optimization known as a “compromise” – that has since become suboptimal.  The mistake we’re currently making in political analysis is to denigrate the value of compromise – or optimization if you will, as a general framework, when the error was simply our failure to re-optimize to changed circumstances.

The reasons the U.S. settled on RD were: the logistical impracticability of gathering votes of large numbers of citizens in time to action them effectively, the fact that most citizens at that time were insufficiently educated to understand the policy issues and the implications of their votes, and the fear of elites that the majority would impose a type of tyranny over minorities --  including elites – which would cause the Republic to devolve and open the door to a return of the very authoritarianism we had just shed ourselves of.  These challenges essentially ruled out both Direct and Participative Democracy.

With modern technology, every voting eligible citizen could vote on every issue without leaving home, the average citizen is as smart as the average legislator (both groups have regressed towards the mean over time), and it’s clear that legislative majorities elected within the RD framework can be just as tyrannical and disdainful to the needs of minorities as the worst sorts of authoritarian systems.  There is substantial empirical evidence that RD systems may be even worse in their relations to minorities than other historical and extent political systems. 

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Back to the present.  Americans are searching exhaustingly for meaning -- but RD as we practice it precludes them from meaningful participation in the most impactful area of their lives.  Naturally, they are frustrated with the lack of agency and lashing out at politicians and institutions.  We are all aware that this leads to the political pathology plaguing us.  

Most Americans are unaware though that this denial of our natural right to political expression leads also to anomie, substance abuse, reduced lifespan, despair, and suicide – which then feed back into political pathology in a vicious cycle.

A compounding challenge is that to most Americans, politics is a pejorative term, and its practice is considered a corruption of the “purer” form of living most citizens practice.  But because we perpetuate this disdain for all things political, we make the situation worse and difficult to reverse.

Another challenge democracy faces, and again it is worse in the U.S. than elsewhere, is the confusion over democracy as political system and capitalism as economic system.  The concepts have intertwined and become inseparable in most people’s minds but are distinct systems that should be so considered. Democracy does not demand nor depend on capitalism to flourish – and there is much evidence that it is more effective when linked to socialism.   

One of the biggest reinforcing loops constraining RD’s long-term effectiveness is that it cannot – because of its design -- overcome the externality known as the “tragedy of the commons.”  “The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, if numerous independent individuals should enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource e.g., a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up by destroying its value altogether. To exercise voluntary restraint is not a rational choice for any one individual - if he did, the others would merely supplant him - yet the predictable result is a tragedy for all,” Wikipedia. In the American form of RD, our elites directly benefit from this “externality,” but there is no constituency holding them accountable for its exploitation.

A final problem we wish to bring out here is that RD suffers from an inherent contradiction – it relies on the goodwill, patriotism, and generosity of the officials we elect to ensure that the bargain between leader and led is upheld and forms some kind of balance of interests over time.  In the U.S., dark money and the failure to close the loopholes in the Constitution have resulted in an acceleration of the widening interests between the two elements.  And because it benefits elites to pretend that this is either not happening (right) or is tweakable (left), they’ve become complicit in maintaining entire systems of denial that are difficult to penetrate.      

We know you realize there are many intertwined problems we did not mention in this piece, and the challenges we face are complex.  We have detailed these in previous works, factored them into our models and forecasts, and are comfortable that while they are worth understanding, their absence here does not lesson the validity of the recommendations we make in successive paragraphs.

Participative Democracy offers us the best opportunity to optimize the requirements of a diverse, global citizenry over all time horizons.  It offers us the only chance to overcome the tragedy of the commons problem in general, and the existential challenge specifically posed by climate change. 

The U.S. Constitution does not prevent or even constrain the adoption of Participative Democracy practices. The major constraints to its adoption are cultural – specifically a combination of ennui, inertia, apathy, and misguided faith in American Exceptionalism. 

As you know, the whole point of our work is actionable situational understanding – so we can fight the right fights in the right way.  Here’s our outline of a pathway towards making the U.S a Participative Democracy, thereby saving the world, with emphasis on how you can, well, “participate:”

·      Educate yourself on the general concepts of Participative Democracy – “We Decide: Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy,” Michael Menser, 2018, Temple University Press, is a great book, and this European Commission organization and guide is a tremendously useful resource.

·       Determine where you can do the best within that frame – “Breaking Together,” Jem Bendell, 2023, Good Works, is not only a great help in that regard but probably the most important non-fiction book you haven’t read.

·      Choose an issue to Champion.

·      Join or form a PD Issue Team.

·      Link your team in domestically and globally. 

·      Approach your legislators from a position of strength and highly recommend they join forces with you.

There’s no easy path to victory.  But with Participative Democracy as a key plank in our strategy, at least we know we’re pulling on the right levers, putting our resources where they can have the most impact, and enabling us to apply our numerical and moral advantages – whereas we’re currently doing none of these things.