Democracy 2.0: Why we need to become specialized voters - Part 1 of 2

[arendt]

This is the second essay in a series. The first one is posted in my DU Journal, with the title "Seven things we need to fix if we are to restore a functioning democracy in America".

This essay is simultaneously far too long and far too short. What I am attempting to describe requires something as lengthy as the Federalist Papers - which I do not have time to write, and you probably do not have time to read.

The essay is so long, I had to cut it into two parts to be able to post it on DU. It took me 35 minutes to read this thing, and I wrote it. Be prepared for a long read! Happy New Year!

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DEMOCRACY 2.0: WHY WE MUST BECOME SPECIALIZED VOTERS
by arendt

PART ONE: THE PROBLEM

1. The Need for a Political "Division of Labor"

...."The political world and the choices that have to be made therein are incredibly complex, very difficult to grasp
....and negotiate. The idea that even its essentials can be properly understood by anyone lacking a high degree of
....intellectual ability and trained expertise is frankly absurd. But electoral democracy has to resist acknowledg-
....ment of this truth: in both its theory and practice it assumes a degree of political competence on the part of the
....citizenry - in the ideal of the 'well-informed' citizen - that it does not (indeed cannot reasonably be expected) to
....possess. Citizens are effectively encouraged, indeed they often feel themselves obligated qua citizens, to
....formulate what often turn out to be incorrect, over-simplified or otherwise flawed views on a whole range of
....issues without a concern for these failings being properly accommodated in either the mindset or the
....institutional embodiment of democratic deliberation."

........Mark Evans, "The Republic of Bullshit: On the Dumbing-Up of Democracy" an essay in
........"Bullshit and Philosophy", Volume 24 of "Popular Culture and Philosophy", ed. G. Hardcastle & G. Reisch

Whereas it is perfectly acceptable, if not mandatory, for skilled workmen or engineers or scientists to say "that area is outside my expertise", voters in our 21st century democracy never acknowledge any limits upon their right to an opinion - no matter how uninformed, not to mention manipulated, it might be. We have accepted the "division of labor" in our economics, but we seem to have banned it in our politics.

The main point of this essay is to argue for a "division of labor" among both voters and legislatures, in order to rescue our moribund form of democracy from, respectively, the paralyzing cognitive overload that has marginalized individuals, and the hijacking of our undermanned legislatures by corporate lobbyists.

This essay delivers only the motivation for a political division of labor, plus a few hand-waving arguments as to how the algorithms of such a government might work. It does not contain the details. I have worked out a first cut at the details, which I will present in a later essay. But, discussion of and agreement upon the details, in parallel with trial implementations of code and bulletin boards and open-source voting schemes is a huge body of work. (And securing that discussion and coding against the inevitable sabotage by the status quo gang of crooks and liars, known as corporate politicos, is an even more daunting task.) This essay, therefore, is just to get you thinking in new terms, to let you know that there are possibilities.

One way to motivate the need for division of labor is to borrow simultaneously from Tip O'Neill ("All politics is local.") and the environmental movement ("Think globally, act locally."). The Democracy 2.0 slogan is "Think locally, act locally." - but the Internet changes the meaning of "local". Politics is like a huge multi-front war, where soldiers on one side of the world have only the fuzziest notion of the details of what is happening on a battlefield on the opposite side of the world. "Think locally, act locally." reminds us all to fight the enemy in front of us. It may be a "come down" to perceive ourselves as rank and file dogfaces. But, we have all seen enough of the bogus "anyone can ask the candidate a question" media events to understand how these asymmetric, scripted psuedo-encounters are theatre, as opposed to genuine political debate. We should get much more satisfaction from out-arguing some arrogant schmuck in person at a local political event. We should understand that the Internet can give us the ammunition needed to outfight the opponents that we already outnumber.

In order not to dissipate our energies and relapse into passivity or withdrawal, we each need to recognize our finiteness and limited resources. We need to pick enemies in our own "location" and at our own scale - enemies we, as individuals or members of local groups, have a chance of fighting and beating. Settling on a specific group or specific politician to target is highly motivating. You are forced out of your passive role as a "consumer" of distant political news. You are forced into an active stance, doing your small part in a bigger fight. (I'm sure I should be quoting Saul Alinksy here, but I've never read him.) As you commit to the fight, you will discover allies at your level and other levels. And, Speaker O'Neill has shown us that this personalization is true all the way up the ladder, where national level politicians fight national level politicians.

Once you've recognized that you are in a fight (as opposed to watching a fight) and that you have finite resources, you begin to focus on what you are good at, or what you need to become good at to win the particular fight you have chosen. To continue the military analogy, there simply aren't enough years in a life for a serviceman to be trained to use all the weapons systems in the military. A soldier would much rather be expert with one or two weapons than mediocre-to-poor with a large number of weapons. Expertise in battle-relevant weaponry means survival. Incompetence or irrelevant expertise means death.

At bottom, Democracy 2.0 is about raising New Model Armies of self-motivating political fighters to bring down the corporate Cavaliers dining out on the American Middle Class. It is about breaking through the media hypnosis and defending yourself and your fellow taxpaying citizens from the enemy inside the gates. It is not about sitting around bulletin boards tossing in your (usually uninformed) two cents worth about the hot topic of the last five minutes.

2. Democracy 1.0: The Historical Circumstances that Permitted an Un-specialized Polity

....There were no newspapers, except for a tiny handful of the middle and upper classes - 5,000 was the usual
....circulation of a French journal in 1814 - and few could read in any case...the world of 1789 was overwhelmingly
....rural...outside of a few very flourishing industrial or commercial areas we should be hard put to find a sizable
....European state in which at least four out of every five inhabitants were not countrymen. And even in England
....itself, the urban population only just outnumbered the rural population for the first time in 1851...With the exception
....of Britain, absolute monarchies ruled in all functioning states of the European continent; those in which they did
....not rule fell apart into anarchy and were swallowed by their neighbours, like Poland.

....Eric Hobsbawm, "The Age of Revolution", Chapter 1: The World in the 1780s.

The current form of Constitutionally-based, representative government (henceforth referred to as "Democracy 1.0") was proposed almost 300 years ago. The proposers lived in a society whose worldview was Newtonian determinism and Cartesian rationalism. At that time in Britain (the only country with a functioning democracy and separation of powers), only the tiniest fraction of the male, land-owning or propertied population was allowed to vote; and the role of government was very limited compared to today. Because of that extremely limited suffrage, the conventional explanation of representative government at that time was, to a large degree, true. The conventional explanation is that: government is in the hands of the voters; elected representatives reflect the rational choices of those with suffrage; the voters analyze the situation, decide what is important, and tell their elected represenatives how to vote.

However, Democracy 1.0 has a latent flaw, which did not surface until recently. As a computer scientist would say, "democracy doesn't scale". That is, as the number of voters and interest groups increases; the amount of communication needed to settle issues increases much faster. (Much more on this below!) Eventually, the limited bandwidth of political communication (i.e., voter to legislator) becomes a valuable commodity instead of a basic entitlement; and it gets sold to the highest bidder.

There are several ways to avoid the latent flaw, and they all have to do with simplification (i.e., keeping the scale small). The earliest simplification, already noted, was the limitation of the franchise to men of property. But, in America, that was ruled out. Luckily for the Americans of the early 19th century, the number of issues under discussion was extremely limited. In addition, without mass communications, the relevant political entity in a much less populous country than today was usually the county or state, not the nation. The economic uniformity of a frontier nation, composed largely of yeoman farmers who were busy exploiting a seemingly limitless territory, also helped contain the latent flaw.

By the time of the Civil War, there were telegraphs and newspapers, but the number of national issues was still manageable. Slavery, discrimination, and suffrage for various groups made up one issue cluster. Wage slavery, labor organizing, and industrialization was another cluster. Finally, immigration, internal infrastructure, and internal expansion made up the last general topic of the national debate. While some of these issues were morally complex, none of them was (at the time) anywhere near as technically complex as the kinds of systems we implicitly rely upon today, such as a well-functioning power grid or an educational system that creates the talent needed to run our technical society. Most of the late 19th century issues were simple "choose sides and fight" kinds of issues. This political simplicity continued right up to the end of World War 2, although misadventures like Prohibition and the crash of the unregulated stock markets were starting to expose the latent flaw of Democracy 1.0.

3. The Obsolescence of Democracy 1.0

The decline of democracy in America over the last fifty years has come about due to technology and the increased societal complexity and huge (by historical standards) populations made possible by technology.

It is a truism of recent history (first enunciated by Max Weber) that full-suffrage democracy rises and falls with the need for mass armies. If the military technology becomes dominated by small elites of weapons, like armored knights, then order can be maintained by a moneyed elite. If, however, mass armies are the dominant military factor, then democracy is needed to pursuade the masses that they have a stake in the fight. As the first Gulf War demonstrated, the military has moved to an elite of jet pilots, special forces, and expensive naval weapons platforms. Masses of first world ground soldiers cannot be used for fear of politcally disastrous casualties and huge economic costs (which is exactly what has happened in the current Iraq War).

Similarly, it used to be that mobilizing voters was an important part of politics. Labor supplied "armies" of campaign workers. Technology has rendered such mass political armies obsolescent. With the dominance of TV advertising, we have moved to a small elite of pollsters, pundits, and advertising agencies. These elite weapons can easily be afforded by corporations, but not by voters.

Furthermore, the increasing complexity of interest groups in the society makes it hard to create broad consensus on incremental, focussed policies. There are very few genuine solutions to problems that can achieve a majority; but there are immense numbers of manufactured, phony, emotionally provocative, wedge issues that we can be used to divide us. We witness the most bigoted and toxic of these wedges, shamelessly rolled out by the dozen, as "ballot initiatives" in every election. Meanwhile, the people who are actually interested in making government work are mocked as "policy wonks" or replaced with incompetent cronies and ideological wreckers by the Bush regime.

3.1 Democracy 1.0 Does Not Scale

In fact, as the size of a Congressional district has grown to almost a million voters and campaign costs have risen into the tens of millions, citizens have been effectively disenfranchised - because their representatives respond only to the legalized bribery of campaign contributions. The frustration caused by this disenfranchisement makes voters easy targets for anti-democratic ballot initiatives, which increasingly resemble the proto-totalitarian "plebiscites" that swept through Europe in the aftermath of the 1918 Treaty of Versailles. Each day, fewer Americans understand that "one vote, once" is not democracy - even with the Patriot Act and the Iraq War Resolution as radioactively-glowing examples of this mistake.

Today, in an era of 500-page Congressional omnibus bills and 10,000 page tax codes, with 80,000 lobbyists dispensing hundreds of millions of dollars of PAC money, and a billion dollars of attack ads run every election year, the conventional narrative of Democracy 1.0 is a complete fantasy.

The recognition of this fantasy, experienced as incompetent or corrupt government, is a legitimate and profoundly moving personal experience. However, the energy from this experience has been hijacked by a massive propaganda campaign to bring back the Middle Ages in all its Inquisitorial squalor. This campaign has conned those voters less inclined to critical thinking into rejecting rationality and complexity in government. Some of the people who have seen through the fantasy have been strong enough to resist the anti-Enlightenment jihad roaring through our country. They have a more realistic understanding of how our country is run by a narrow elite of media gatekeepers and corporate placemen. That understanding recognizes our government for what it is: a puppet of corporate money. Here is a sketch of how the fraud that Democracy 1.0 has devolved to currently operates:

The mass media decide what issues will be given coverage. The media, by the amount of time or column inches, decide what weight will be given to each issue. (Of course, the concentrated mass media have now been completely conglomerated into a pro-corporate propaganda machine that reflects only the corporate viewpoint - often manipulatively and deceptively.) Once every couple of years, the voter gets to pick from one of two corporate-vetted candidates (looks like Hillary and McCain in '08) by "rationally" weighing those candidates' votes or positions on all the media-determined issues that have occurred during the intervening years. To a market-savvy population, this having to pick one person to represent every issue from the military to abortion is classic product "bundling", in which the customer is forced to accept things he doesn't want to get the things he does want. This tactic is unscrupulous when buying a car, but fatal when picking a government.

Throughout this "choice" between bundles, the voter is bombarded by a bunch of partisan-sponsored polls and focus group-tested advertisements which are crafted to appeal to the emotions. Sound-bite and factoid media coverage, censorship by means such as burying stories on the back page on Saturday, and outright lies from propaganda outlets like Fox News further obscure the true issues and prevents this "choice" from being anything resembling the kind of rational analysis espoused in the Democracy 1.0 explanation of government.

Democracy 1.0 posits that each citizen is supposedly capable of informing himself on all important issues. But, everyone knows this is nonsense, so we pretend that today's politicians "represent" us as faithfully as an 18th century Parliamentarian represented the handful of nobles who ran his borough. In reality, today's politicians are a "homunculus" - a little man inside our brain that does the thinking and tells us what the answer is. Once representative democracy has been reduced to homuncular behavior by issue bundling, media conglomeration, and by the drastic increase in complexity required to manage a mixed, global economy, it is only a matter of time before that homunculus will be captured by the most powerful elements of the society. This is exactly what has happened in the U.S.

The situation is not completely a matter of corruption, although there is certainly an immense amount of that present. The capture of homuncular representatives by corporate lobbyists arises from an inadequate organization of governmental information processing. Since the structure of checks and balances, committees, party discipline, etc. was codified over two hundred years ago, it is not surprising that it is inadequate to the 20th century situation.

4. Recognizing the Problem is the Beginning of the Solution

...."...a representative for every thirty thousand inhabitants will render the latter both a safe and competent guardian of the
....interests which will be confided to it.

....James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 56.

...."The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each state shall have at least one
....Representative."

........The Constitution of the United States, Article I, Section 2

The American version of Democracy 1.0 was created after thorough historical research by some of the best political minds of the Enlightenment, unencumbered by the need to kowtow to an established aristocracy. The Federalist Papers lay out the thinking behind the Constitution, while the Constitution itself is as compact and to the point as a piece of computer code. Both documents agree on the need to get the size of the district of representation correct. Too small and it can be taken over by some cabal; too big and it becomes nothing more than an emotion-driven mob.

This fundamental rule of district size was never brought into law, due to political maneuvering at the very beginning of our country. The politicians who killed this law knew full well what they were doing; but the typical voter did not see the scaling problem or, more likely, did not know how to deal with it. So they let it continue, like a person slowly gaining weight. Unfortunately, our democracy is now morbidly obese and about to expire. So, we require some drastic surgery in order to survive.

This essay is hardly the first to point to the "30k problem". All sides of the rational political spectrum have identified it, and have proposed to enlarge our assembly. (One website that is a good introduction to the problem is: http://www.thirty-thousand.org) And there is where the thinking stops, because enlarging the assembly was known to be unworkable already by the Founders.

...."In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason.
....Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates; every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

....James Madison, The Federalist Papers, Number 55.

None of these rational actors, to my knowledge, seem to have considered restructuring our legislature! We see various "hacks" being considered to restore fair representation, such as the proposal that large states voluntarily break themselves into several smaller ones in order to equalize the representation in the Senate. None of these proposals disturbs the status quo. Everyone seems to hold the arbitrary form of a bicameral legislative branch to be untouchable, sacred. The main point of this particular essay (one in a series) is to give an example of how the legislative branch of the national government could be reorganized to facilitate a political division of labor that can revive genuine representative democracy.

5. A Large Number of Representatives is not a Technical Issue. It is an Organizational Issue.

A quick calculation shows we currently would need ( ~215 M eligible voters / 30,000 voters per representative = ) ~7,200 representatives to meet the requirement in the Constitution. Of course, if these were organized as a single legislative body, we would have mob chaos. But, look at Congress today. There are on the order of 20,000 Congressional staff members - the people who really do the committee and sub-committee work. The Congress is a slow-moving bureaucratic machine, not a chaotic mob. There is organization, and it succeeds in producing legislation. The fact that this legislation serves only corporate interests does not negate the fact that Congress works for the people who control it.

Part of the reason corporations control Congress is that most voters do not have direct access to the critical, but obscure, Congressional staff who do the real bureaucratic work. Corporations, on the other hand, have a revolving door deal with the Congress; and all the staff members are anxious to please their real constituents, who just happen to be their future employers. (Talk about conflict of interest!) Meanwhile, the interface presented to the voter is the horrible, pseudo-celebrity "bundle" of the candidate. If, instead, the voters could interface directly to the staff, the ratio would be ~10,000 voters per staff member! Plus, the limited responsibilities of the individual staff members would make it clear who was responsible for what, and avoid the shell game of "not my responsibility" that is often used to dodge voter pressure. And, most importantly, staff members would now be accountable to voters long before they are ready to exit via the revolving door.

5.1 Candidate Bundling and Gerrymandering Obscure Genuine National Issues

Rearranging the voter interface exposes a critical fact: most national issues have nothing to do with a particular state or district - excepting "pork", which is the graft that prevents people from seeing the critical fact. Most people care more about their issues than they care about the personality of some candidate (i.e., a self-aggrandizing hairdo spewed from the endless pipeline of the political polling and consultancy industry, or some millionaire who wants to play government with the taxpayers money). But, the current American system of voting for national politicians on a local and bundled basis frustrates issue-oriented voters; and it is issues that drive politics. No wonder that voter cynicism is at an all-time high.

5.1.1 The downside of winner-take-all voting

On top of candidate bundling, the United States is saddled with a "winner-take-all" voting system, which is much less representative than the "proportional representation" systems used at the national level in other first-world democracies. Winner-take-all systems are well-known to be wide open to gerrymandering, which has been taken to new lows by Tom Delay and the GOP during the Bush administration. Together, candidate bundling and winner-take-all gerrymandering reduce national politics to two parties that cater to their extremes and win at the gerrymandered margins. It is often repeated that less than 10% of Congressional seats are seriously likely to change hands in any election due to the gerrymander.

Representatives in gerrymandered districts are sheltered from small (and often, large) changes in voter sentiment. Often, the party that has been gerrymandered "out" puts up a sacrificial candidate or no candidate at all. This contributes strongly to the feeling that "my vote doesn't count" and to the dismal voter turnout statistics in America. It causes voters to over-focus on presidential candidates, where the gerrymander is reduced (but not eliminated - the Electoral College is still a gerrymander that over-represents small states). This mis-focus reduces voter vigilance to various kinds of "stealth" candidates at the Congressional level.

5.1.2 The downside of candidate bundling

Bundling many issues into one candidate allows legislators, once elected, to sandbag one or more individual issues on key votes, and bury this betrayal in an overall "good" voting record. In fact, this scripted farce is now so sophisticated that legislators take turns pretending to "buck" their party on votes that are sure things, in order to show their "independence" and "character". This is job security by loyalty obscurity. It is because of bundling that the idea of solving the 30k problem by increasing the number of legislators seems like pouring gasoline on the fire. It would make sell-outs on important votes so easy to hide that all semblance of representation would vanish.

The candidate bundle implicitly includes a large staff (~20,000 staff / ~500 reps = ~40 staff/rep). This immediately raises the candidate to a position of authority vis-a-vis the voter. How many voters are in charge of a staff of forty? This implicit authority gives voters the social cue "not to disturb" the important personage with their petty concerns. That is, it sets up a master/servant dynamic in exactly the opposite direction of the truth: the candidate should defer to the voters, not the other way around. Furthermore, the only reason the candidate needs this huge staff is because so many issues have been bundled onto his plate that he can't possibly be expert in all of them; instead, he manages a staff of experts. Talk about circular justification! Representative as office manager was not what the writers of the Constitution experienced or expected.

Bundling also contributes to cognitive overload in voters. With the vaporization of meaningful party platforms (and, courtesy of Joe Lieberman, the vaporization of meaningful party affiliation), voters are asked to calculate, for each candidate, the relative importance of all issues. For example, I would like to vote for candidate X's strong stance in favor of a balanced budget; but he will vote for concealed handguns. At some point, the time and mental resources needed to become expert on multiple issues exceeds those available to the voter and he becomes some flavor of "single-issue" voter. (Hence, the opening quote of this essay.) Candidate bundling, then, inserts the roundly condemned process of "logrolling" (i.e., trading off totally unrelated issues) into the legislative process long before the legislature has even convened.

The current, totally arbitrary system of Congressional committee assignments adds even more counterproductive bundling to the candidate's personal baggage. Over time, legislators accumulate seniority (i.e., power and influence) on committees they were at first arbitrarily assigned to before they had seniority. This randomly acquired power adds more irrelevant dimensions to the voter's problem of candidate picking.

To summarize, candidate bundling is an idiotic sort of marketplace where a few entitled guys sell all kinds of products, instead of a rational marketplace where a lot of people specialize in selling only products they know. In this idiots' marketplace, all these different goods are jumbled in the same heap and can only be extracted with a lot of haggling and "help" from the representative (a.k.a., middleman). Whereas in the rational marketplace, the goods are easy to find and negotiations are straightforward because the goods are separated by type and the negotiations are unbundled and direct buyer-to-seller (voter-to-elected-official).

(Technical aside: From a complexity theory point of view, bundling increases the dimensionality of the choice problem; and it is well-known that the solutions to high-dimensional problems are often inferior "local minima". In fact, many complexity theorists argue that even the global minima of high-dimensional problems are inferior, and that the only way to proceed is to reduce the dimensionality of the problem by "decoupling" the dimensions. This solution is actually taught in business schools under the name of "patching".)

END OF PART ONE. CONTINUE WITH PART TWO.

[arendt]

1. The silence is scary...

I recognize this is a long essay, but I had hoped it was clear enough that people could respond to it.

After 12 hours, no one has said a word. Maybe everyone really is more interested in making uninformed comments about the latest hot celebrity gossip about the 2008 bundled, psuedo-celebrity candidates.

Or, maybe, this is simply the wrong forum - why would political acitivists want to read a document about government?

Maybe I've disproved my own point. Perhaps people here are smart enough to know that they aren't expert enough to have an opinion on this. :-) NAAAAH!

This half of the essay is the easy part - I'm just describing what a mess we are in.
The next part is the one I expected to get some feedback about.

Talk to me, please.

arendt

P.S. Thanks for the "greatest" votes.