Everyone reading this knows something is rotten in the States of America.
Our representatives don't listen to their constituents anymore; they listen to their wealthy donors. This is because communications between politicians and constituents mainly go through expensive, corporate-run mass media.
The problem can be fixed, and here is a plan to do so:
- Objective: To reform our democracy to be more like an ongoing conversation with everybody included.
- Approach: We should move citizen-politician discourse away from mainstream media and traditional forms, and towards the internet.
- Method: We should organize nonpartisan online discussion forums, one for each elective office, and invite our neighbors and political leaders to join us at these.
- Experiment: To determine if this method is useful we should try it at a competitive district, using this prototype forum as a template.
- Moving forward: If it works, we'll set up other forums in other districts. If it doesn't, we'll try something else using what we have learned.
Follow me below the fold for more. Warning: much, much more.
As Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, on September 18, 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel shouted out to him: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a Republic or a Monarchy?,” and Franklin responded: “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Have we been able to keep it? Many people such as Jimmy Carter agree with me that the answer is no, and that the U.S. is currently closer to being a civil oligarchy than a representative democracy.
This is because many candidates, most but not all in the GOP, accept campaign money from oligarchs to get elected. Once in office, these politicians corruptly pay back their benefactors by tilting politics and law sharply in the oligarchs' favor. To make matters worse, many of the same politicians have adopted extremist positions and tactics which are crippling responsible governance and keeping Congress' job approval rating near the 15% level. Maddeningly, they benefit politically from the anti-government sentiment caused by their own actions, due to the lack of accountability in American politics.
Eighty three years ago, at a similar time in American history, FDR called for bold action:
We need enthusiasm, imagination and the ability to face facts, even unpleasant ones, bravely. We need to correct, by drastic means if necessary, the faults in our economic system from which we now suffer.
Roosevelt's call was heeded, and a golden age of economic equality followed. Today drastic measures are again necessary because, as
Robert Kuttner recently put it, “[t]he remedies that would restore economic opportunity and security to ordinary Americans are far outside mainstream political conversation, and will not become mainstream until forced onto the agenda by a genuine mass movement.”
Here I set out some ideas on what such a reforming social movement might aspire to and what actions it might take. My goal is to start a discussion that will lead to action. Other ideas than mine might be better; my hope is that the best ones will come to light and that we can get to work.
A New Objective
There is no consensus on how to define democracy, so if we are going to try to reform ours we first need to decide on a concrete objective to work towards. Using the invaluable “
I know it when I see it” criteria, here is a list of four basic actions that should be common in a real democracy but are extremely rare in ours:
- Citizens publicly discuss among themselves what the community preferences for policy are
- Candidates inexpensively campaign to tell the community how they propose to implement its policy preferences
- The policy preferences of the entire community, not just its wealthiest citizens, make it onto its representative's agenda
- The representative communicates her positions and tactics to the community
I propose that a good working objective is to make these democratic actions easier to do and more common, or (to borrow a phrase) to work towards conversational democracy. This objective is well-defined, quantifiable, and can even be summed up on a bumper sticker: Democracy must become a conversation.
Conventional politics is very unlikely to be helpful in achieving this objective. For example, a common sense reform would be to reduce corruption by publicly financing political campaigns. But the oligarchs block conventional attempts at this. Movements towards it have stalled even though the Citizens United decision has greatly increased the flow of private money into elections. Furthermore, even if public campaign financing were achieved, it would only directly impact action 2, and indirectly through this, action 3.
So is there an alternative, more radical, approach that we can use?
A New Approach
The internet has revolutionized many aspects of society, but so far its impact on politician behavior has been comparatively minor. Significant
e-democracy advances have occurred
mainly in terms of information provision and delivery of public services. What have been conspicuously missing are advances incorporating dialogue, the core of democratic governance. An e-democracy project with a focus on
deliberative democracy thus seems like a promising approach to consider.
What kind of project? Let's consider the four democratic actions listed above from the perspective of e-democracy theory. Academic Stephen Coleman posits that effective representative democracy requires that information flow in various channels and offers this appraisal of their status:
- Citizen to Citizen (C2C) - is the basis of a healthy civil society, but is in decline
- Citizen to Representative (C2R) - is very limited
- Representative to Citizen (R2C) - is limited outside of election campaigning
From this point of view, the underlying problem is that there is not enough communication among citizens (C2C) and especially there is very little between representatives and citizens (C2R/R2R). In terms of information flow, our objectives are:
- Citizens discuss what policy should be - C2C
- Candidates can affordably campaign - C2C
- Community policy preferences are on representatives' agenda - C2R
- Representatives communicate their positions - R2C
Coleman subsequently surveyed 2,273 UK citizens to characterize what they ideally wanted in their relations with their representatives. He found a strong desire for a connectedness, and that they specifically wanted:
- To be heard
- Conversations, not consultations
- Ongoing, rather than episodic, contact
- Honest yet not adversarial discussions
- Representatives to account for themselves
All this suggests that we create something online to facilitate new channels, between representatives and their constituents, of conversational and continuous information flow. If we can do this, and get enough people to participate, a new and desired connectedness should result.
A New Method
An
internet forum/discussion board centered on a single political office is an obvious software platform to consider as a method to achieve our objective. A discussion forum is a
more focused and organic medium for online discussion than the newer, much more commercial social networks such as Facebook and Reddit.
We can use lessons from previous reform movements to optimize a discussion forum's functions, organization and norms (see Appendix 1 below). The result is a specialized forum which I have labeled an electoral district forum.
A district forum is for the constituents of a single officeholder to talk among themselves, and with their representative plus any candidates for the office. Its administration is nonprofit and nonpartisan so as to provide a neutral public place for voters of any political persuasion to reason together - as with a debate hall. It is non-anonymous and moderated to keep trolling and rude behavior to a minimum.
Although the concept of a district forum is new, it can be considered a mash-up of five familiar things:
And those are five great tastes that taste great together!
District Forum Activity
Constituents can use the forum for a wide variety of activities, such as promoting common sense ideas, learning about their neighbors' ideas and dialoguing about them, educating themselves about what their officeholder is doing and dialoguing with him, etc.
There are many ways in which this spontaneous activity would improve the current state of our democracy. For example, with increased Citizen-Representative contact the constituents can:
- counterbalance the pervasive influence of lobbyists,
- correct bias in their representatives' perceptions of their views, and
- make their representatives more accountable for their policies and tactics.
Representatives can:
- tap the ideas and expertise of their constituents,
- educate them about what is happening legislatively,
- tell them what is politically possible, and
- rally them when an important cause needs it.
And because participants must support their assertions with facts, the increased Citizen-Citizen contact can:
In general, district forum activity is designed to strengthen the hand which ordinary citizens have relative to the oligarchs (see Appendix 2 below).
Opening Minds
Minds work much better when they are open. Unfortunately, people have an innate
tendency to seek out only information which reinforces their pre-existing views. To make matters worse, in those important cases where opinion is
bound up with identity, a straightforward presentation of facts will often be rejected without being considered first.
A district forum aims to fight these effects by encouraging participation (active or passive) in a neutral forum where users will routinely encounter information and views which have not been pre-filtered.
Can dialoguing on forums result in people learning new things and viewpoints, and perhaps changing their opinions as a result? Certainly, but the process of opening a closed mind can be slow. An e-democracy pioneer who started a political discussion list more than 20 years ago has observed:
I think it takes three or four months for someone participating in this to actually change their mindset from, “I'm just going to tell you what I think,” to, “boy there are all those different opinions out there, maybe I'll just listen a bit, or maybe I'll think a little more before I push reply and say.”
Relatedly,
personal contact has been shown to be an effective way of reducing prejudice towards out-groups, even when the contact is
computer-mediated. A recent study
has demonstrated that reductions in intergroup bias and anxiety occur after only two weeks of online interaction. The oligarchs have long used a
divide-and-conquer strategy of fanning prejudicial resentment to gain the support of people who are hurt by their policies. Setting up district forums is one way of fighting back.
Prototype Software
I have put together a fully functional prototype district forum using the popular and secure open-source
phpBB software. This software is able to handle very large communities - the
largest one running it has over 100,000 registered users and over 28 million posts.
This screen shot of the prototype's homepage shows one way in which the categories and subforums could be organized:
Note that the Citizen-Representative discussion structure is broken into two subforums to create dialogues. Constituents start the process by submitting, discussing and ranking questions in the
QuestionsAsked subforum. Later, when a politician decides to engage in a dialogue based on a top-ranked question, she creates a new topic in the
QuestionsAnswered subforum in which she repeats the question, and gives her answer.
The constituents who asked these selected questions (and only they) are able to post follow ups in this subforum. This dialogue will terminate by mutual consent, and many conversations will end with the constituent and representative agreeing to disagree.
The prototype software includes both a “like” button for every registered user, and a “+like” button that is only available to district residents. Tallying likes allows the best questions, petitions, etc., to get ranked above the less interesting ones.
Very importantly, the posts and likes of district residents can be easily distinguished from those of non-residents. This allows non-residents to participate while also enabling a politician, if she wishes, to respond exclusively to her constituents.
Take a Method and Try It
To test whether district forums could work and have the benefits I have described, the first step is to run a trial forum in a competitive district. Since the prototype software is ready, a trial could commence immediately.
To catch on, a trial probably requires at least one politician (incumbent or candidate) to agree to participate. The novelty of a politician participating in a continuous Ask-Me-Anything type event should generate enough voter interest to assure a steady stream of good questions. However, it is feasible that a group of activist constituents could start a forum, with the idea being that they would entice (pressure?) their district politicians to join them after they fill up the forum a bit.
Any U.S. state or federal electoral district could serve for the trial. The smallest state legislature districts have well over 50,000 people in them; if only 1% of the constituents participate in their forum that still implies more than 500 active users. This would make for a quite active discussion forum, which would in turn provide a lot of material for the ‘lurkers’ to read.
What result would constitute a success, from the point of view of rewarding a politician willing to dialogue with constituents? A successful get-out-the-vote effort is thought to be worth about 3%, and this is enough to transform a close race into a win, or a uphill race into a close one. So a 3% increase in the polls would be an excellent result. Is that possible?
There's no way to know this in advance, but it is useful to do a thought experiment. Consider your response, and imagine that of ordinary voters, to this question:
Candidate A is willing to publicly answer in detail any question submitted to him by a constituent, as long as it is interesting enough to be voted up. Candidate B has been invited to participate, but refuses to do so. Does this make you more or less willing to support Candidate A?
It seems reasonable to me to expect that Candidate A would get an increase in the few percent range just from voters appreciating his responsiveness, and
survey results are consistent with this expectation.
If the method is a success, we'll set up other forums in other districts. If it doesn't, we'll analyze what went wrong and try a different approach and method.
Conclusion
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (22 May 1932)
Corrupt politicians
do very well at the ballot box despite their indefensible policies strongly tilted towards the oligarchs. This is because communications between politicians and constituents mainly go through expensive, corporate-run mass media.
I believe that we need to move citizen-representative discourse towards the internet, where it can become more like a conversation where every citizen is included.
My proposed method to do this, that we set up and participate in electoral district forums, is an innovative one that will seem far-fetched to many. Other objectives and methods may be better, and I invite you to share your own ideas (see Appendix 3 below). For the time has come to take Roosevelt's advice and try something.
Appendix 1: Learning From Previous Reform Movements
There have been many previous social movements which have campaigned for reform to advance economic and social justice. The more recent ones have all had a significant online component.
From knowledge of their successes and shortcomings we can make a list of helpful attributes for our district forum method to have:
Politician Participation:
- good information flow in all relevant directions - C2C, R2C and C2R
- covers a single electoral district - to narrow focus onto one geographical area and one political office
- full participation open only to district residents - to encourage the politicians to participate
- site publicized and integrated with social media - again, to encourage participation
- with a simple and easy Politician-Citizen dialogue format - so they don't have an excuse not to show up
- with a reasonable request, that democracy should be more of a conversation - again, so they show up
Inclusiveness and Civility:
- online - so it's easy to participate
- nonpartisan - so everyone feels welcome
- moderated - to keep things civil and to suppress trolls
- non-anonymous - so people take their posts seriously
- user limit on number of posts per day - so the conversation isn't monopolized by a small number of people
Communication Format:
- emphasis on dialogue - to prevent uninformative “defense by talking point”
- emphasis on fact-checking - since people are not entitled to their own reality
- mainly text based - to keep it simple, inexpensive, informative and searchable
- video discussions also possible - because footage can be much more dramatic and viral than text
- continuously run - a continuing conversation, not a one-off or an occasional interview
- message, chat and forwarded e-mail systems - to make it easy to communicate privately
Making the Content More Useful:
- “like” voting system - so posts can be ranked by popularity
- polls - to quantify what the community thinks
- keywords and tags - to help find what the community has discussed in the past
- restricted number of people in conversations - when needed to prevent a cacophony
- disclosure of interests - OK if someone is posting as part of their job, but they need to make that clear each time
Autonomy:
- simple software - so people can moderate or admin without extensive training
- volunteer run and hosted - so it is independent
- inexpensive to host - to make it possible to be independent
- nonprofit - to focus on community serving and not profit seeking
Any basic discussion forum will have features 7, 14, 16, 23 and 25. The remaining features can be added in the following ways:
- additional software code: 4, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20
- website rules and organization: 2, 3, 6, 10, 11, 22, 24, 26
- discussion forum structure: 1, 5, 21
- forum moderation and norms: 8, 9, 12, 13
Appendix 2: Using Citizens' Strengths and Attacking Oligarchs' Weaknesses
District forums are a populist method designed to work with the weaknesses and strengths which ordinary citizens have relative to the oligarchs.
For example, in a traditional election campaign conducted over the airwaves, the oligarchs will always be at a huge advantage because media buys are so expensive. On a nonpartisan discussion forum, however, the playing field is level since money can't buy more convincing arguments, or favored treatment.
Two other aspects which minimize voters' weaknesses:
- No central authority or infrastructure is needed to create and run a discussion forum.
- The costs (~$2 a day for hosting) per forum are low and can be borne by a single activist. No billionaire donors needed!
These are some aspects of the method which leverage voters' strengths or attack the oligarchs' weaknesses:
- Exposure to a nonpartisan discussion forum would help breach the epistemic closure and exposure to deliberate misinformation which the oligarchs have worked to create.
- A discussion forum relying mainly on text is a good platform from which to counteract propaganda relying mainly on video.
- In a text discussion, common sense policies are easy to explain and defend.
- Many oligarch policies rely on tissue-thin rationalizations and these are difficult to defend in a text discussion.
- The oligarchs have long used a divide-and-conquer strategy of fanning resentment to gain the support of people who are hurt by their policies; ordinary voters can fight back on the forum with personal contact, which even when computer-mediated and of short duration has been shown to be an effective way of reducing prejudice towards out-groups.
- The oligarchs use their control of corporate-run media to censor and ridicule common sense ideas, but this is significantly harder to do when people are communicating via the internet.
Appendix 3: Your Turn
Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but the task of remaking the world which you will find before you.
- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (22 May 1932)
I invite you to share your own ideas for new democracy reform projects, whether e-democracy or not. Please use the same Objective-Approach-Method format when summarizing them to help us compare. If you write up a separate post on the idea, I ask that you use the tag “FDR Challenge” to make it easy to find.
Be boldly experimental! As I said above, my proposed e-democracy project will no doubt seem bizarre to many. In summary form it is:
- Objective: To reform our democracy to be more like an ongoing conversation with everybody included.
- Approach: We should move citizen-politician discourse away from mainstream media and traditional forms, and towards the internet.
- Method: We should organize nonpartisan online discussion forums, one for each elective office, and invite our neighbors and political leaders to join us at these.
But is this so bizarre? Here is a similar e-democracy project:
- Objective: To influence and strengthen the Democratic Party with a particular focus on progressive policies and candidates.
- Approach: We should move partisan citizen-citizen and politician-to-citizen discourse away from mainstream media, and towards the internet.
- Method: We should organize a nation-wide, partisan group blog and discussion forum, and invite our Democratic neighbors and political leaders to join us there.
Of course, this second project was implemented way back in 2002 as DailyKos, and it has been quite successful.