The Direct Democracy Transition
Authoritarianism and democracy exist on a spectrum and there is work to do
Americans, particularly Americans in government, tend to wax triumphalist about the perfect nation on a hill that won a revolutionary war against tyranny and spent the next couple hundred years ensuring peace, tranquility, and the equal distribution of power to people. I won’t spend any time trying to convince you that power is currently unevenly distributed as, if you don’t see that, you need to get a library card or to go for a twenty minute drive down any US street. But I will try to convince you, you democracy lovers you, that you do not currently live in much of a political democracy if you live in the United States.
Sure, you get to vote for people. And every once in a while, you can vote directly on a policy or two by referendum. But this is a sham, a partial paeon to not democracy but elitism. I don’t just mean “a bunch of senators went to Harvard and Washington, DC, is a swamp”. Rather “representative democracy” itself is a glass house built on a marsh.
What is democracy? It’s a government by the people, for the people. And people means not some abstract mass of humanity that can be measured and nudged via algorithm-tested libertarian paternalism, it means the individual citizens of the territory over which a given government defends its claims to sovereignty. Monarchs were the individual embodiment of that sovereignty, and in so embodying made choices that were the government’s will (these decisions did not represent the government’s will, they were the will itself). An elected legislature and executive are the government’s will in exactly the same way. The will of Congress and the President do not represent the people’s will, these individuals have the power to become the government’s will incarnate after winning their elections. All well and good that the people can elect someone else next time; US citizens have permanently abrogated their right to be their own government, outside of those few who by money, luck, family, and shots of the beautifully alchemical hard word juice ascended above the mere people to wholly or partially become the government.
Much is made of money in politics, corporate influence peddling, and billionaire ownership of politicians and news organizations. These issues would still be relevant in the case of full democracy, but they would be relevant in a different and less important way. Without Sinemas to turn, Trumps to fund, or Vos’s to keep in power, money takes a back seat to the actual willing of the mass of people; there’s not enough cash in the Fed to pay every citizen to vote with the Oligarchy Party in even one referendum.
What is direct democracy? It’s the government’s will expressed and executed via the people’s choices. No more legislatures, no more single chief executive (though organs of the state may still have administrators who are elected, but no more single monarchic figure), no more supreme court. Laws will get framed and debated by people, and then put to a vote. A lot of work, you say? No progress would be made? I ask you: how’s Congress doing at moving things forward? Court cases might have temporarily appointed facilitators, but all decisions would be made by juries (and in the case of the current Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, by full-country popular vote).
I say pah! to the claim that the people are not sufficiently informed to make decisions in their own interests. I say that the people who are currently “representing” citizens have so much knowledge that they primarily apply in the service of their own interests. All the political journalism that is currently a soap opera focused on the American Royals would refocus to dissect upcoming votes on legislation, organized state actions, international relations (democracy doesn’t even exist before the water’s edge, come at me foreign policy blob), and legal interpretations (that which is today called judicial).
Inequality and economic failures would have their answer: a populace that doesn’t put up with manipulation and degradation at the hands of the wealthy who framed this country’s system in the first place. Good on them for building a “democracy of the few”, I guess. But it’s time for that to end. And without revolution. It’s in the interest of the people with less power (today, so many people) to change the rules and take away this representational farce. The senators and governors will build many scarecrows to protect their cement and marble castles, but all we need to do is use the tools we already have, constitutional tools and, until they are no longer extant, representational tools, to fight for real democracy. Elect representatives who will not stand for representation. Inject political parties with the will to undo their privileges. Or remain in the sludgelandia of hypocrisy and despair that the United States of America threatens to defend.