A summary of everything we've learned so far
Autocracy is gaining ground everywhere, but there are steps we can take to make democracy stronger. If we can't start at the national level, then let's start at the regional level.
As I've mentioned before, I started this Substack to be a dumping ground for my research notes. I've been assuming I'll eventually write a book, though everything is taking much longer than I expected. I began the research in early 2019 and accelerated it during the pandemic. I thought I would be done writing the book by the end of 2021, but in fact I have not even started yet. Life ambushes us with various delays.
I've been treating this democracy project like the brief for one of my tech startup clients:
understand what their problems are
design an architecture that solves their problems
Regarding the first step, the problem is that democracy is in crisis. All over the world, populist authoritarian movements are gaining power. Modi has eroded democracy in India, Orban has ended it in Hungary, the PiS has limited it in Poland, Bolsonaro went to war with it in Brazil, Le Pen came closer than ever to gaining power in France. In the USA, President Trump attempted a coup.
The crisis has many roots, but the most important is the way that civic and state institutions, and their boundaries, have been undermined. During the 20th century, the Western democracies were stabilized by an abundance of such entities, the most important of which were:
newspapers
churches
labor unions
political parties (see a bit from Achen & Bartels, and also the Panama Exception)
universities
libraries
In government:
the separation of church and state (difficult in those nations where more than 80% of the population belong to one faith; we will look at the struggles of India and certain Catholic countries).
strict limits on the executive branch
an independent judiciary
Many of these institutions have been weakened in recent decades. Populist theories of democracy weakened political parties, neoliberalism weakened labor unions, and the rise of the Internet weakened newspapers. Attendance at churches has fallen and attendance at liberal progressive churches has collapsed completely, aside from those few who offer community to oppressed racial groups. Even the judiciary has been politicized, overtly in Poland, Hungary and India, but also in subtle ways in the USA. And, over the course of the 20th Century, the power of the executive branch has increased in every democracy.
No single change is critical, but all of them are now combining together to create a genuine crisis.
So, the second thing I would do for any of my clients, let’s figure out an architecture that fixes these problems.
I have spent some recent posts sketching out an ideal architecture for democracy. This writing has been done in an abstract manner, far removed from reality, sketching out an ideal system that I doubt will ever be implemented anywhere. I detail it only because it might offer some ideas which might at some point influence whatever progressive changes do happen during the 21st Century. Assuming change at the national level is currently impossible, it would be exciting to try some of these ideas at the state level, if only to see how the experiment plays out, and whether such experiments point the way to genuine breakthroughs in theories of government.
Here I'll summarize what I suggested:
An intermediate mass assembly. Divide society into districts of 100,000 people. Anyone who wants to can put their name on a list. Every month as many as 1,000 names should be taken off the list and put up for vote. Every voter gets 10 votes. The top 19 vote getters are then elected for 15 years. This elects about 5% of the adult population who then serve as Notables and who can then elect the legislature. To be clear, the Notables are not an assembly and are not expected to ever meet. They are just the citizens who other citizens entrusted with the task of electing the legislature.
Every month the Notables vote for the legislature. There are no districts in this election, all of the candidates are national candidates, like the President of the USA. Every Notable gets 3 votes. The top 5 vote getters are elected for terms of 11 years. This gives a legislature of 660 members, roughly the size of the House Of Commons in Britain. The goal of the long terms is to ensure the leadership has time to learn the difficult skill of governing, and can then focus on actual governance, rather than having to focus on fundraising or running for re-election. The long terms also allow them to acquire real power, and thus contributes to the strengthening of these political institutions. The combination of monthly voting and long terms allows some interesting new dynamics, in particular, fast changes of mood as voters react to new information, while the overall system remains stable.
Because we live in a complex world with a highly specialized division of labor, the omnipurpose legislature is obsolete. It might have worked in the 1700s but it does not work now. Therefore the legislature should only have 2 remaining powers: amending the constitution and appointing people to committees. All of the real work of policy making is done in the committees, which are now reified as mini legislatures — the committees now have the power to make law.
The legislature can amend the constitution with 2 majority votes, separated by a few years. See part 1 and part 2 of the discussion regarding amending the constitution. (Presumably a big part of this work is the constant adjustment of the system of committees.)
The committees are a fusion of legislative and executive tasks. These are not oversight committees, these are action oriented committees. This might seem abstract, but as an example I'll soon give a full list of committees in an upcoming post — a post that will basically take the existing departments of the executive branch of the USA and re-imagine it as a series of independent committees. This change, in particular, should limit the push to autocracy. One factor that has enabled autocracy has been the growing reach of the executive branch, especially in the USA. We’ve developed an Imperial Presidency. Breaking up the executive branch into a series of independent committees makes autocracy much more difficult.
I haven’t yet written about this, but I’ll here add a word about the head of government. In most democracies, the legislature elects the head of government. I strongly recommend this, and I suggest that the head of government be elected to terms of 1 year. That will keep the head of government on a very short leash, answerable to the ever shifting (every month) majority in the legislature. This too limits the possibility of autocracy. Some might say that one year terms means that the head of government cannot effectively govern, but if we move most of the executive branch to a series of independent committees, then the job of the head of government shrinks enormously. No doubt they will oversee foreign policy, and also the military during times of war, but beyond that, they shouldn’t have many necessary responsibilities.
Rather than rely on ancient procedural rules that date to the 1700s, the legislature, and the committees, should use a streamlined process that allows for fast action. We proceed with the assumption that constitutional change should happen slowly, but ordinary legal change needs to happen fast, to keep up with an ever changing society.
If we have time then we will also study how to reform the judiciary, though that is a large topic of its own, and merely studying the legislature and executive, and writing about it, has already taken me 3 years. I will say this in short: the USA has largely given up on jury trials. Nowadays, only 5% of criminals ever face a jury. The other 95% of all cases follow a procedure whose theoretical justification is weak (we lack a comprehensive theory of plea bargins as a form of justice). Therefore, we should abolish the concept of the jury completely and switch to the German system of Schöffen. That system seems to produce less cases of innocent people going to jail, and it has more of a theoretical basis than whatever the USA does now that the USA has given up on juries. The USA seems to be moving towards the German system, but chaotically and without a clean theory of why. It would be better to explicitly adopt the German system.
In addition to the above, these posts help explain why we’ve made such decisions:
An underlying assumption of this architecture is that, in every country and in every century, the current majority is stupid, angry, and irrational whereas the long-term majority is intelligent, calm, and brilliantly logical. Therefore, over and over again, we have made architectural decisions that should weaken the current majority while strengthening the long-term majority. Simply having 11 year terms, and a staggered monthly schedule of voting, means the public never gets to express its current mood very strongly. But the public does, over the course of several years, decide who serves in the long-term majority and therefore who governs. The system is grounded on the legitimacy of the public’s participation, but at any given moment, the current majority faces checks and balances, just like every other part of the system.
Of all the changes I’ve suggested above, the most important is probably establishing an intermediate mass assembly, which can then elect the legislature. When a democracy is healthy, it is healthy because 2% to 5% of the population participates in political activities, often through their churches or labor unions. The decline of the churches and labor unions has therefore weakened democracy, by reducing the strength of the institutions that can act as a civic check-and-balance on the rest of the system. Electing 5% of the adults in a district, and putting them in charge of keeping a close eye on the legislature, thus formalizes this (previously informal) form of participation and gives it official endorsement as a necessary part of the system.
Breaking up the executive branch, into a series of independent committees, is also important. Compare Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to the USA: we see that USA democracy is the one facing the deepest crisis. A big part of the reason is the enormous concentration of power in the executive branch, and the direct control that the President has over that bureaucracy. By contrast, in Britain, there is a long tradition of a strong civil service that can push back against an arrogant Prime Minister. We have already mentioned Dominic Cummings and his desire to break the civil service and bend it to his will. Clearly, the hunger for authoritarian rule is as strong in Britain as it is in the USA, at least among some individuals. But Britain is lucky in that it has a long way to go before it has the whole executive branch in slavish service to a current Prime Minister.
Again, the problem we face is that autocracy is gaining ground everywhere. The processes and institutions that used to support a democratic way of life have all been weakened. Therefore, we must find ways to strengthen democratic processes and institutions, or democracy will go extinct. The ideas suggested here — frequent voting, longer terms, moving the power to committees, shrinking the executive branch, and finding the right speed for changing the constitution — would do a lot to put democracy on a stronger basis.