Democracy 2.0 — A Practical Specification
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Somehow I found myself eating ice cream in a midwestern town with a local leader from the opposite [purposefully redacted] party. We didn’t agree on much beyond relative merits of each of the ice creams we tried. This however, I can say with confidence: he was a good man and the rocky road was the best.
What we, and nearly everyone I meet in the United States agrees on is that our Democracy is tragically broken. The common grievances I hear are probably recognizable to every reader and are outlined below. Some of these may be causes, some may be symptoms and others may be both.
- Politicians Placing Party over country
- Gerrymandering
- Media bias
- Voter disengagement and disenfranchisement
- Money brings more influence than votes
- Politicians rarely doing the things they promise
- Corruption, which has eroded public trust
Why Systems Break
For a long time, America was the “blueprint of democracy” and held the spot atop the pedestal. Our democracy has not always been easy but for the most part it’s always been able to serve the public good. I don’t believe a system can survive as long as our democracy has without having gotten the fundamentals right.
However, what has worked is never an indication of what is going to work in the future. When the fundamental truths change, systems can be thrown into chaos. I take the long view on human fallibility. People do noble things on occasion that go against their own best interests, but on average people respond to their incentives. In this world view, there are few bad people, and many bad incentives.
Aligning the incentives of the people with the incentives of their leaders is the grounding philosophical principal on which Democracy 2.0 is founded. If you were to score that alignment on a scale of 1–10 America might be a 3 today. Our goal is to design a system that could self correct itself so it is never below an 8. This metric should be as important to a democratic country as their GDP/Capita.
The New Truths and the Old Truths
Man as the Idea Capsule
A remnant of antique autocracy is the notion of the ‘man in charge’. Some classical men in charge gained their power through conquest, others through bloodlines and most recently through democratic elections.
Society dispensed with the notion that one man should have all the power, but it maintained individual men/women as the vessels of power. We elect people, who then make decisions. Why can’t we elect ideas, values and tradeoffs instead? Then we’d task career workers in governments to implement policies that respect those values and tradeoffs.
On the surface this solves several major problems:
- It curtails the influence of demagogues and charlatans. If you elect ideas persuasive personalities have few vectors to gain power over the country.
- It elevates our public discourse. During the 2016 election there were hours of reporting done on John Kasich eating habits, Donald’s Trump’s ethics, Hillary Clinton’s speeches and Bernie Sander’s haircuts. None of these added to our level of discourse. When elections are human stories, with human names on the ballot, people and their quirks are natural to talk about. If values were on the ballot, there’d be less reason for human dramas to dominate elections.
- Less divisiveness — People disagree on values, but they at least know how to talk about values. Most people don’t have the knowledge to truly argue the merits of policy so rather than have a real conversation they dig in and isolate themselves. Making elections about values would get people talking about something they all understand. It won’t remove all tension, but it could move the ball in the right direction.
- No more partisanship. There won’t be an easy button on the ballot to choose all your conservative or liberal values, that’s been too easy and has eroded the nuance in discourse. On top of that, ballots would become too complicated to for political parties to mobilize effectively. It’s easy to get 100 million people to vote red or blue, but nearly impossible to have them all answer a 30 point questionnaire uniformly.
- Real accountability. Right now politicians have too many roles. They are spokesman, idea guy, executer, fundraiser, and much more. No one person can do all that well and since they wear so many hats it’s nearly impossible to rate their performance objectively. This is why personal traits and charisma often decide election outcomes. If ideas are elected and leaders are hired to implement them there’s just one or two metrics you need to track to rate someone’s performance. If the guy in charge of healthcare can’t get costs down 1%/year he gets fired. That simple.
How does one actually implement such a system? We will get to that soon with an example ballot and an explanation of how a government could be organized around this principle.
Everyone in Charge Should be Elected
Another holdover from our early experiments in democracy is the idea that the people in charge should be elected or appointed by someone who has been. I categorically reject this notion. I’ve been writing Op-Eds every election since college arguing that the skills that will get you elected are of a different class entirely than the skills needed to govern. To use a business example, a Chief Marketing Officer could run a better campaign than a Chief Operations Officer, but the COO would actually be able to do the job while the CMO could not. Since COO types never get the job (Hillary Clinton) and CMO types do (Donald Trump) you’ll rarely get a qualified person in office.
While I was in China last year I got to sit down for late night drinks with a CPC official. We had this young 20-something translator as our go-between so conversation was difficult but we still talked for close to 2 hours. This man had spent his whole life working his way up the ranks of the party and getting promoted based on results, not charisma. I was impressed by what I heard and how sensible many of the party’s advancement polices were. It’s corrupt in many ways, but it’s hard to argue against its ability to elevate effective leaders.
So what do we do? We elect ideas as explained above, and we build a civil service organization that promotes people based on merit. What merit? Their ability to faithfully take on mandates from the people and solve real problems. Every mandate would have a clear goal that had a clear point of termination (an end). Once that point was reached the person running the program would be given some R&R and then reassigned to another challenge, either of more or less importance depending on their past performance.
This has many benefits:
- If individuals are given important assignments, true accountability, and the sweeping power enact solve problems in their particular domain government is far more effective. When you have to worry about the impact on 535 members of a governing body and all their incentives bills get bloated and decisions become difficult to make. Complete temporary power in one domain, with strong accountability measures, is a far more efficient approach might lead to productive governance.
- People in these roles have accountability to ideas that got elected. No more wasted time on placating donors or giving speeches 1/2 of one’s term. Focusing on one set of skills will make these people highly effective.
People in Charge Set the Rules
Whatever side of the isle you reside, it’s hard to argue that the Republican Congress stealing Obama’s final supreme court appointee was anything but a perversion. Worse than a seat being stolen was the fact that this action set a precedent. From now on you’ll only be able to get a supreme court justice if you control congress and presidency. This is not what our founders intended.
The Constitution is 4,543 words. It can’t protect against every loophole. Loopholes (like Gerrymandering) aren’t found until they are, then they become exploited by everyone. Over time all governments will erode as loopholes are discovered and precedents are baked in. Politicians today are not as noble as our founders and few men as noble as our founders want to be in office today.
We need a council of elders, an honor guard, whatever you want to call it for our democracy that calls foul on actions taken or policy made by any branch of government. They would be tasked with stopping any attempted perversion that sullies the spirit of our democracy. Who will watch these watchers? Incentives can be set up to keep these people isolated from any corruption. I can’t say exactly what those would yet, but I think these people could be kept honorable.
This would prevent things like gerrymandering from occurring and fight back against all attempts to erode our democracy.
People are the Base Unit of a Democracy
Since the earliest days of democracy all citizens had the right to vote. This shouldn’t go away, but we should acknowledge that the world has changed. In addition to the citizenry we also have the market and the corporations within it.
Corporations should have influence as well. Never more than the people, and never at the expense of the people, but maybe 20% of the votes should go to companies based on some scoring of how much net-benefit they provide the country (not their earnings).
This may sound like a terrible idea, but give it a chance. Right now corporations spend billions on public influence campaigns. They still get their say subversively and its probably larger than what I’m proposing. They fund winners and ultimately get to influence who ends up on the ballot. Elections become choices between Approved Candidate A and Approved Candidate B.
- When people are the only base unit of democracy corporations have to try to manipulate them. They manage this more effectively than we often like to admit. If corporations had a spot carved out for them where they could focus their political efforts, the power of the everyday person would only rise.
The Ballot
A lot has been written in this essay about electing ideas. How can this be done practically. The following is a model for how this might work. This process would ideally take place every year and as sentiments change so too would policy.
The Preselection (January)
What are the 10 things that are most important to you and your family right now? People choose the issues that are most pressing i.e. My retirement, my children’s education, refugee programs, crushing ISIS, veteran’s healthcare, food security, healthcare, etc.
The preselection is meant to focus the public and the government. You can’t vote in the real election unless you vote in the preselection so there is an inventive in taking part in this “blank piece of paper” election. This isn’t about choosing solutions or hiring candidates to solve them, it’s identifying problems.
Processing (February — November)
Now that we have problems identified, we need to identify the values of the populous and the relative tradeoffs that might need to be made. There are no perfect solutions no matter what politicians claim, everything has tradeoffs. This system is up up front about them so people don’t get mad when they happen. Again instead of choosing a solution or candidate, we want to discern the values of the voters so that our career problem solvers in government can be evaluated against them.
During the processing phase professionals in government put together an objective list of values and tradeoffs that can be voted on by the people. We can’t expect everyone in the public to understand the nuances of these programs enough to write an open ended recommendation but if we can give them multiple choice questionnaires they can work with that. Instead of a person or a policy, values and tradeoffs become the ballot for each issue.
The Election (December)
Ballots have been prepared for every issue raised in the preselection that gets more than 1,000,000 votes. You get a week with the ballots before the elections, long enough to be thoughtful, but not long enough to be corrupted by the advertisements and other forms of bias, which, during this period are banned. All the advocacy should already have happened.
Every citizen of voting age gets to cast votes for themselves. They get to vote for only the issues they raised in preselection AND whatever top 10 issues were raised by the population as a whole. For instance if 7 of your preselection concerns made the top 10, you’d have 13 ballots to vote on. You fill out all your ballots by answering multiple choice questions about your values and the tradeoffs you are willing to make.
Results from the election are aggregated and become the mandate for the officials currently in charge of the issues in questions. If they fail, they’re fired. If they succeed, democracy has won.
Sample Healthcare Ballot
Here’s what a ballot for healthcare might look like. They would be electronic, dynamic. It’d be really cool if these ballots were interactive, almost like a video game where you have to find values and tradeoffs that you find most acceptable.
The voter’s tax returns will be used to personalize the tradeoff sections. The tradeoff section is really the most important part of this system. It’s real, it’s raw, and it makes people acknowledge the tradeoffs that most politicians are too afraid to tell their constituents about. There’s no getting around this, there are always tradeoffs.
Values:
- ☑ I believe that all citizens should have access to healthcare
- ☐ I believe that everyone currently in the country (tourist, illegal aliens, etc) should have access to health care
- ☐ I believe people have the right not to have healthcare
- ☑ I believe it is important for everyone to have healthcare for the good of society
- ☑ I believe people who make poor decisions (i.e. smoking) should pay more for their healthcare.
- ☐ I believe only those who can afford to pay full price should be able to get care
- ☑ I believe those who use the most healthcare (i.e elderly and sick) should not pay more than [3]x what a younger/healthy person pays.
- ☐ I believe everyone has the right to try to live forever.
- ☑ I believe that we shouldn’t spend an excessive amount of healthcare money to keep an elderly person alive if their quality of life will not be good.
- ☑ I believe that people with pre-existing conditions like (x,y,z) should be able to get healthcare
- ☑ I believe that emergency care should continue to be given when someone is brought into a hospital regardless of coverage
- ☐ I believe that if you are not covered by insurance, doctors should not help you in an emergency unless someone else agrees to pay.
- ☐ I believe that health insurance MUST remain private
- ☑ I believe that health insurance MUST be public
- ☐ I believe the free market should dictate the prices of medical services
- ☑ I believe prices should be regulate by the Department of Health
- ☐ I believe the wealthiest citizens should pay more for their healthcare
- ☑ I believe all businesses should have to cover employee healthcare costs
- ☑ I believe the government should provide healthcare to the unemployed
- ☑ I believe veterans should have access to exceptional healthcare no matter where they live
- ☑ I believe we need to reduce our medical spending to no more than [15]% of GDP from 20% by [2030]
- ☐ I believe we need to cap our medical spending on ___% of GDP
- ☐ I believe quality of care should be most important, not our healthcare spending.
Tradeoffs:
Your choices above would require someone earning as much as you to pay more in taxes. What is the largest increase for which you are willing to pay? [$100/month]
Your family premiums would rise under your current selections by around $130/month. This will help cover everybody, which costs more, and is one of your stated values. Are you willing to accept this increase? [YES]
If we make healthcare public and single payer, substantial unemployment in the insurance industry will follow. We predict that 500,000 people might lose their jobs as close to a dozen public companies would be dismantled. We will try to reemploy people in new agencies, but not everyone will get a job. 124,000 of these people are in you state.
Are you willing to accept this? [YES]
Reducing healthcare costs as drastically as you requested would have an impact on employment, earnings and employee compensation across the medical sector (hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceuticals). This will have real financial consequences. Are you willing to accept this [YES]
tl;dr
- Elect values and ideas instead of people. Use interactive ballots that make people grapple with their values and the tradeoffs they’re willing to make at the ballot box.
- Build a meritocracy that elevates leaders based on their ability to bring society in line with values the people have voted for.
The Starting Line
These ideas are not conclusive and they’re not meant to be perfect, rather my the goal is to begin a conversation. How can we make Democracy better? Which of these ideas are good, which could be improved? Please leave your ideas in the comments. What we can agree on is that things need to change. Let’s find a way.
