Democracy, Straight-Up!

Get ‘Read In’ On The Mission

The CRCL Initiative:

Connecting the Will of the People to the Law of the Land

Various efforts are currently underway in our country to address what is seen as ‘dysfunction’ in American democracy.

We can divide these efforts, roughly, into two groups, based on their diagnosis of the problem:

Our politics have become toxic and divisive because the citizens are engaging in tribalism and ‘othering’ which has led to polarization. The solution is to bring people together to work out their differences so that they can agree on solutions that benefit everyone.
The problem is the system, which fuels the kind of politics that lead to division. The solution is to improve the system through term limits, rank choice voting, campaign finance reform, sorition, dissolving the electoral college, citizen assemblies, a system of initiatives at the federal level, etc.

One good example of the first approach is Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, which diagnoses the problem as, “Citizens are often uninformed about key public issues.” To this end they recently “brought together 500 representative American voters for a structured examination and discussion of key political issues,” in a program called America in On Room. They also advocate something they have branded Deliberative Polling®. The list of organizations adopting related strategies to ‘heal the divisions’ or ‘educate the public’ is long and impressively well-funded.

The second strategy is embodied in organizations like FairVote, Common Cause, and RepresentUs. We’ll single out Unite America as emblematic of this type of effort:

Through the Unite America Fund, we invest in nonpartisan electoral reform campaigns so that the right leaders have the right incentives to solve our country’s greatest problems.

Of course, it is common to use elements of both diagnoses to advocate for any particular solution.

The Democracy, Straight-Up Project Rejects Both Strategies

The Voters are Not to Blame…

Whether the voters are united or divided on certain issues is not a measure of how well a democracy is functioning. In a free society, such divisions are bound to arise, and to appear worse at certain inflexion points. If anything this phenomenon is a characteristic of how democracy works when it is working well, in contrast to authoritarian systems that suppress dissent.

When such conflicts spill over into mass protests and violence, however, that is clearly dysfunctional. But is the dysfunction actually due to the fact that people disagree–which is inevitable–or that democracy ‘doesn’t work’–all evidence to the contrary? Or is the dysfunction due to something else?

We answer that question in the affirmative.

The Big Disconnect

We call that ‘something else’ The Big Disconnect. Broadly speaking the problem is that voters see their own government as an alien force, manipulating their rights and freedoms–and spending their money–in ways that are beyond their control. They imagine that various sinister conspiracies are at work pulling the strings of power.

This creates division, but not the honest divisions that arise from conflicting values and beliefs. What is created is the opportunity–for those in a position to exploit it–to weaponize disagreement to consolidate political, social, and economic power.

A Feature, not a Bug

It can be argued that ‘The Big Disconnect’ was a feature, not a bug, in the design of the American system. And the rationale for this feature is a series of dire predictions about the adverse outcomes that would befall any nation that employed direct democracy. And when those arguments fail to persuade, direct democracy is characterized as, regrettably, unworkable even if it were desirable.

Direct Democracy: Doable and Better

The Democracy, Straight-Up! Project asserts that this characterization–that direct democracy is some combination of unworkable and undesirable–is wrong. In fact, it is perfectly doable, and would be better than the current system. We say that it is this misunderstanding, which goes back to the founding of the republic, that is the cause of the most toxic aspects of our dysfunction.

Uninspiring Half Measures

Proposed remedies for this dysfunction are often logical and helpful on their face: ranked-choice voting, citizen assemblies, sortition, lowering the apportionment ratio, etc. But they have the savor of Ptolemy’s model of the solar system about them. Based on the idea that the earth is the immovable center, Ptolemy’s mechanics work well-enough. But, as Capernicus infamously pointed out, they depart from an erroneous premise.

The erroneous premise in our case is that the current system–which we like to call the ‘legacy legislature,’ just to be a bit cheeky–is the immovable center, and all of our efforts to increase truly democratic rule, and to implement aspects of direct democracy, need to take place within that context.

These improvements–which are mostly quite sound and which might rightly be a part of a functional direct democracy–strike the voters as uninspiring, difficult to implement, and possibly even dangerous. What’s more, taking as an example, initiative and referendum advocacy, over a hundred years of effort have achieved only modest and qualified gains at the state level, and no movement whatsoever at the federal level. Its history has been marked by legacy legislatures fighting tooth and nail to thwart it.

A Rallying Cry Should Not Need Footnotes

“Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”

“Give me liberty, or give me death!”

“Liberty, egalite, fratenite!”

We feel that a large-scale reworking of the current system requires a mass movement with a narrow focus. It needs a rallying cry that succinctly says everything we need it to say. And this is the problem with half-measures. What motivates people to adopt them?

“Make incremental improvements to a fundamentally flawed system to slightly increase the voter participation in the lawmaking process!”

“Advocate voting reforms which weaken, to some extent, party political power!”

Zzzzz….

“My Freedom, My Vote!”

That is the rallying cry of The Democracy, Straight-Up Project. We frame direct legislation as a right denied which we must reclaim. We are aware of the dense academic literature on the subject of rights, but a rallying cry does not need to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is taken as given that we are each in possession of our personal freedom, but that, in order to live in a society we must consent to certain limits being placed on that freedom.

And so, since the law of the land constrains my individual freedom in equal measure to anyone else’s, I should have a vote–a direct vote–on the form those restrictions take–a vote exactly equal to everyone else’s.

Empowering, without patronizing

We can’t expect the legacy system to vote itself out of existence. Its own internal logic, and the people that cling to it, will resist its demise with increasing ferocity as the forces of opposition gain strength. The only chance for transformation rests in overwhelming force–exerted, of course, in a legal, peaceful way. But swift and overwhelming force nonetheless.

Voters as the ultimate problem-solvers

We reject efforts, which we view as patronizing and elitist, to ‘educate’ voters and instill civic virtues. We reject, in fact, any unnecessary obstacle standing in between the will of the people and the law of the land.

We see the voters as having all the education, all the access to information, and all the skills they need to function as a full-fledged legislative body. We see them as having those qualities right now. We see the legislative process, not as being driven by the learned, and those with special expertise. We see those people as resources to be utilized by the voters, who are rightfully in charge. The voters are not only the most qualified to make law, they are the only truly legitimate source of legislative decision-making. They are the ultimate problem solvers–and all we need to do is remove the obstacles that prevent them from getting their hands directly on the problems.

The ‘Legacy Legislature’ is an Obstacle that Must Be Removed…

The democratic reforms that so many of us advocate cannot be effectively implemented through the existing system. It is the legacy system itself that is causing the problems.

So, if we want better democratic practices to take hold and become a part of our body politic, we have to put the power to make those changes in the hands of the voters themselves. That means lawmaking power. And, since we can’t expect the legacy system to vote in favor of destroying itself, we have to do it in a way that requires no changes to existing law and no changes to the constitution–cutting the current crop of legislators completely out of the process.

But legacy legislators and the current political establishment are not the only group standing in the way of direct democracy in America…

Do Gooders are Control Freaks who Fear the People

Getting their spit on it…

Fear of the other, and wonkish pedantry, are epidemic among the mostly left-leaning advocates of democratic reform. They want the voters to have the power, sure, but they want to get their spit on exactly how they use that power before the voters get it. They want sorition, they want rank-choice voting, they want a ‘leaderless society.’ They want voters to carefully study issues, engage in focussed, out-come oriented deliberation using the best available information, i.e., they want to stop people from opening up their bibles and saying, “Well, God wants us to do it like this…”

Fear of the voters…

Reformers are terrified by the idea of a Straight-Up system, such as we propose, because it truly puts the voters in charge of making the decision as to whether or not to employ any of these nifty ideas. Because the ‘do gooders’ are afraid of losing control, they convince themselves they have a better shot with the legacy legislatures than with the people themselves. The people are never quite ready. They are still a bit too unruly, too uneducated, too vulnerable to manipulation.

Self-defeating advocacy…

As a result, well-intentioned reformers settle on a strategy of trying to motivate just enough legacy legislators to vote in favor of their improvements to make them law, using the tricks schemes currently available. And, yes, one of those tricks is whipping enough voters to put pressure on their representatives to pass the reforms. But this is not the same as empowering voters. It is a process that, in fact, winds up actively perpetuating the source of the very problems they are trying to address.

Voter Orbit Rendezvous

Those familiar with the history of the Apollo space program, which landed humans on the moon and brought them safely back to earth, will be familiar with the story of Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR).

At first, the idea of a small vehicle departing from a main craft and then bounding back up and docking with it–while in orbit around the moon, which is, by the way, a quarter of a million miles away–seemed to be a dangerous folly. For years, some of the smartest people in the world ridiculed the idea. Each and every one of those smart people made the same error. They were so terrified by the idea of the failure to successfully rendezvous–resulting in two astronauts floating helplessly out into space, slowly suffocating to death–they couldn’t think rationally about any plan that might possibly bring that about.

Of course, they were wrong. LOR turned out to be, not only a good way to get the job done, arguably the only way to get it done.

The DSUp proposal puts all the power, all the decision-making, in the hands of the individual voter, without telling them how to behave, without trying to educate them first, without instilling civic virtues, without exhorting them to link arms and sing Kum Ba Yah. And, to the experts, who are all suffering, in our view, from the same misunderstanding, this is terrifying. The adverse outcome they envision is the equivalent of helplessly watching democracy become unmoored and fly off into space to slowly suffocate and die.

But they simply haven’t thought things through carefully enough. They have miscalculated the extent of the risk. They are relying on unexamined assumptions.

In short, they are wrong.

We are Not Asking For Permission…

The Democracy, Straight-Up! Project will unite voters under the rallying cry, “My Freedom, My Vote.” We will be able to use this to stir up a righteous, well-placed anger that a fundamental right–that of direct legislation–has been denied them. Our strategy is to appeal to the desire to exercise and protect one’s own individual liberty. We are not appealing to voters to be reasonable and make compromises. We are encouraging them to take control of what is rightfully theirs. And we are not asking the powers that be for permission to please let us do it.

We’re just gonna do it!

Start by Replacing the Legacy House Rep

We intend to take advantage of a feature of the legacy system that allows us to peacefully replace it with a better system. That feature of the current system is this: a representative in The House can cast their vote as they see fit and no one can force them to do otherwise. They can vote with their party, or for the benefit of their donors, or for personal ideological reasons. They can flip a coin. They can ask themselves, “What would Kanye do?” No one can say ‘boo’.

That being the case, let’s make it so the House Rep always votes based on one, consistent criteria–the will of the majority of the voters they represent.

So, now we just need to connect the vote that the House Rep casts on the floor to the will of the majority of the voters they represent. Shouldn’t be too hard…

Replacing The Big Disconnect with The Big Connection…

The first step is not to give voters the skills and information they need in order to take part in the legislative process. The first step is to put the voters in charge of the legislative process–as soon as possible, as directly as possible, without changing any laws, and without amending the constitution.

This strategy streamlines and facilitates the process of connecting the will of the people to the law of the land.

In keeping with our principle of not standing in the voters’ way, and not trying to control their behavior, we need a system that allows each individual voter maximum flexibility and choice when it comes to how they wish to participate. At the same time, we need to maximize their personal power to influence others, and their connectedness to others that would like to influence them. Given this set of guidelines, such a system would have to look much like the one we propose.

We characterize it as Connected Representation plus Connected Legislation, or CRCL, for short (which is, naturally, pronounced ‘circle’).

The CRCL Initiative, Briefly Explained

While this is not an e-democracy concept, we will, of course, make use of digital technology as a tool. We will offer The Voting Portal, a software tailored to the needs of The CRCL Initiative. It will provide all the functionality needed to organize a district’s voters into a Connected Legislature, with their House Rep as its representative.

Let’s get into the nuts and bolts of that idea.

You are already connected…

There are 435 US congressional districts that elect a representative to The House. We will create a Connected Legislature for each district. A voter in a given district starts by Claiming Their Seat. The idea we are trying to cultivate is that this body already exists, and there’s already a seat for each voter with their name on it, just waiting to be filled.

Join a Circle, the rest is up to you…

Since this entity promises Connected Representation, in order to access Connected Legislation (that is, in order to vote directly on a bill, and have your vote count) each voter must join something we call a Circle and put forward a delegate. A Circle will have a minimum of six and a maximum of twelve members. No Circle will ever be without someone to represent its members, someone we call a First Delegate. The job of the F-Del will be to keep their voters informed on the issues they care about, put forward their ideas and report back to them, and/or to hold and cast revocable proxy votes for members who don’t want to participate directly in the process.

The end result of the Circle formation process will be a District Assembly of a hundred or so delegates–small enough to meet as a group should the need arise.

The next step is simply a matter of linking the Circles to the District Assembly.

Just two links between the voter and the assembly…

The First Link

The F-Dels will be automatically put together in groups of about 12 to form First Links. F-Dels may also form their own First Link groups according to the same principles as Circle formation. But every voter will always remain connected, thanks to how the software works.

The Second Link

The First Links put forward Second Delegates, and the Sec-Dels engage in the similar process of Second Link formation. They put forward a delegate who will be one of a few hundred Members of the District Assembly–we call them MoDA’s.

The District Assembly

At this point, the elected House Rep could potentially meet with all the MoDA’s as a group. But, one more step will make that process more efficient. The MoDA’s will organize into legislative caucuses, each with a delegate of their own. Our plan now is there will be exactly ten such groups, each with its own Head of a Legislative Caucus, which we will call a HoLC.

The HolC’s and the House Rep

The point of keeping the number of HoLC’s to around ten is that they become a group that can realistically meet with the elected House Rep on a regular basis–a bit like a cabinet meeting. Also, each HoLC becomes, effectively, a representative of one-tenth of the district’s voters, which conveniently solves the apportionment problem.

But it is important to keep in mind that all this is just scaffolding. Once a CRCL Assembly achieves a quorum, it can vote, by the consent of the majority, to organize itself anyway it wishes. (see Life After Quorum below)

And everything is changed forever…

By this simple, straight-forward method we achieve a stunning result: every voter, should they choose to participate at all, is directly connected to their representative in congress. The system allows for ideation and requests for information to flow forward through the system, and for feedback and responses to flow back to the voters. To help us all keep in mind who is in charge of this process, we say the voters ‘give the orders,’ and the delegates ‘report back.’ The Voting Portal software will accommodate this process through a function we call the ‘Back and Forth’.

Life After Quorum

A CRCL Assembly will have achieved a quorum when it has put one of its own members in the district’s seat in The US House. This person will not need to campaign. They will not need to raise money. They will not need to belong to a political party. In a sense, they will make only one campaign promise–to vote with the majority of the voters in the district’s Connected Legislature.

The number of voters it takes to put someone in congress varies from district to district. We calculate that, on average, it will take about 150,000 votes on election day, and we are anticipating that a Connected District Legislature will need to grow to that size to pull it off. So, that is what we mean by a quorum.

After achieving a quorum and installing one of their own in the district’s House seat, the DSUp Project will work with the CDL to become an independent and self-sustaining body.