Candidates for Office

Terribly early in the morning yesterday I was out for a bike ride on the Hudson River Greenway with my friend and fellow Democratism supporter Paul Greenberg (who says he’s off social media for the summer, so he probably won’t even see this). You have to lug your sleeping body out the door at daybreak to catch a ride with Paul, and often I do. When we hit the end of the trail in Inwood, Paul suggested we stop for breakfast before turning around. I said great, as long as we don’t have to talk about Donald Trump. “Sure,” he said, so we locked up outside Albert’s Mofongo House on Dyckman Street, and then, as soon as we’d strung our helmets over the corner of a chair and ordered a cafe con leche, it was, “I know you said you didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump, but ….”

If he hadn’t started it, probably I would have. Who can think about anything else?

I haven’t written much here about elections, because elections aren’t particularly what Democratism is about. That may seem a funny thing to say about a democracy project, but only because our own “democracy” doesn’t have much democracy in it other than elections. Our democratic experience isn’t about deciding what we want for our society; it’s about deciding who will decide for us. Even when we fight for an issue we care about—when we protest, rally, write letters—we aim to do it by affecting elections or influencing people who who’ve been elected or might be. That’s the context—the anemic democracy we know—that constrains our vision. Democratism, on the other hand, is about extending democracy beyond elections, to solve problems that politicians can’t solve for us. In the first instance, we’ll have to extend our imagination.

None of this makes elections unimportant. They may be a thin slice of democracy, but the one we’ve got coming up in November could affect all of humanity for generations or longer. I plan to play my own minuscule part in it by knocking on doors or driving people to the polls in a swing state, or making phone calls, or something else they tell me will help. It’s not one to sit out.

Even so, let’s not fool ourselves about where we are, how we got here, and how we’re going to get somewhere better. “In general,” Gallup asks Americans, more or less monthly, “are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?” Satisfied hasn’t taken it since January 2004. This month it was Dissatisfied 82% to 17%. Eighty-two percent! Apparently we’re not as divided we thought. (NBC/WSJ gets similar results on whether we think the country is “on the right track”: 73-18.)

An uninformed observer might look at those numbers and assume we’re facing a national catastrophe—famine, flood, or subjugation by a foreign power. Of course, the opposite is the case. Havoc may be around the corner, but now? These should be the best of times. We’re richer than we’ve ever been, better educated, unrivaled in military might. We have more than plenty to work with. If it isn’t being used right, it’s in our power to redirect it. If it isn’t divided up right, we can redistibute it.

We can do it, but our leaders can’t. If choosing the right people to be in charge of us were enough, Satisfied wouldn’t be losing 82-17. It isn’t enough, because our system of elections and government action isn’t capable of identifying and implementing our priorities with anything like the precision, dynamism, and force that our world demands. We need to pick the right people, yes—if you don’t live in Florida, Ohio, or Pennsylvania, by all means get yourself there as soon as possible; there’s plenty of room for things to get worse than they are. But whoever wins, we need to decide our future for ourselves.

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source & rights: bit.ly/1pN5mjR (modified), bit.ly/1WOXwAj (modified)

This hideous U.S. election season could lead a person to doubt our capacity for self-government. A new poll on energy policy is thus a welcome reminder that we’re often better on policy preferences than on electing officials. Seventy-three percent of Americans, Gallup says, favor emphasizing alternatives to oil and gas production in addressing our energy problems. That number includes majorities of both major parties—89% of Democrats and 51% of Republicans.

Unfortunately, while we favor emphasizing alternative energy, we often elect politicians who don’t. There’s no getting around this kind of discrepancy in electoral politics. We have views on issues, but we choose politicians more for their imagined personality traits. And when we do choose someone based on issues, it’s never more than a few issues that control the outcome of an election. Politicians don’t tend to care about our views on the others issues, or at least not as much as they care about the views of the moneyed interests that donate to their campaigns.

The democratist solution is to take resource allocation questions like this—questions that, as Gallup framed it, are about emphasis—out of electoral politics. Here’s a democratist proposal for this one: Let Congress set up an online voting system, open all the time to everyone with the right to vote, that would modify tax rates on various types of energy production. That is, you could vote to increase or decrease taxes on oil, gas, coal, solar, wind, etc., and then every three months, the rate would shift up or down a small amount, based on how we voted during the quarter.

A tax increase on gas or oil production or a tax decrease on alternative energy would shift investment from the former to the latter, reducing carbon gas emissions in the same way that cap-and-trade or a static carbon tax would. The difference is that a system like this would allow the people to decide how much to emphasize what, and keep adjusting it until it hit the desired level.

You might object that ordinary people aren’t experts in this, but that objection dissolves when you consider how the decision is made now and compare it to the polls. And it’s also a safe bet that the self-selecting group that would actually participate would be better informed than average.

Admittedly, there’s a big electoral-politics hurdle to getting a system like this through Congress. I have plenty to say about that, but it’s another post.

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