I Think Representative Democracy is a Good Idea and We Should Give It a Try

I am 60 years old.

I am a (very) patriotic American.

I have never felt represented by any elected official.

Never.

Over the past week, I’ve asked a lot of people this question – have you ever felt represented by an elected official? – and with the exception of a couple of people who have felt represented by a local politician, the answer is always no. Certainly no to any national or even statewide politician. I’m not asking this question pointedly, and I leave the question open, meaning that I don’t try to define ‘representation’ other than to make clear that I’m talking about political representation. I’m genuinely curious. But so far everyone thinks about the question for a bit, then looks at me and kinda laughs.

It’s not that my elected officials represent nothing. They are very clear about the political party and the advocacy/donor groups that they represent, and they talk about that representation all the freakin’ time.

It’s just that they do not represent me.

I am certain this is true – that my thoughts and concerns have never been taken into account by any elected official in their efforts or decision making – because there is no politician who knows anything about my thoughts or concerns.

I have never been asked in good faith about my thoughts and concerns by any politician.

Never.

I’ve been asked what I think about social and political issues plenty of times by advocacy groups and political parties, but only in an instrumental, bad faith way as part of an effort to muster political support for an issue or an election campaign. I’ve never been genuinely asked for my opinion about anything so that a politician could do a better job of representing me.

I am told that we live in a representative democracy, and I am told that my elected officials represent me.

In particular, I am told constantly by my elected officials at every level of government that they are “working” for me. That’s the word, right? That this President or this Senator or this Representative or this Governor or this State Rep is “working” for me. That and “delivered”, like such and such promise was made to me and the politician “delivered” or that such and such government project or goodie was “delivered” to me.

Representative democracy is now just another aspect of Fiat World, where our reality is declared into existence rather than actually lived. Our society begs the question, in the true sense of that phrase, by telling us that we live in a representative democracy because we are represented. And in this way, the idea of representative democracy has been flipped on its head, from a burden on politicians to represent us to a burden on us to find representation!

I’m not saying that everyone fails to find representation in American politics. My sense from reading Rusty Guinn’s magisterial work is that a significant majority of born-again and evangelical Christians believe that Donald Trump authentically represents them politically, that he is their Cyrus, so to speak. My sense is that there are quite a few people on the political left who believed that Bernie Sanders authentically represented them when he ran for President. I’m pretty sure, however, that next to no one felt authentically represented by Kamala Harris in this campaign. I mean, how could you? She was a Cartoon embodiment of party for party’s sake, without even a pretense of representing any actual American voter. And yes, I totally missed all of this in my take on how the election would unfold.

I’m also not saying that everyone feels unrepresented in the same way I do, where I see a dangerously crackpot and frankly un-American set of Republican policy proposals on my right and a dangerously crackpot and frankly un-American set of Democratic policy proposals on my left. I feel unrepresented because I am homeless from a political party perspective. Others are not homeless – they are believers in the core policy structures of either the political right or the political left – but they feel similarly unrepresented because their elected officials merely engage in ceremonial jousting with these core policy structures and in reality just feed at the trough with all the other little piggies.

Either way – whether you’re stuck in the politically homeless center like me or your political home has been overrun by a professional class of grifters – I think it’s fair to say that a significant majority of Americans feel unrepresented today.

I think it’s fair to say that a lot of you, like me, believe that you have never been represented.

The problem, of course, is one of scale. It’s impossible, or so we tell ourselves, to listen to the thoughts and concerns of 761,169 people – the current number of Americans in today’s Congressional districts – much less the millions of people in a statewide election or the 150+ million in a national election. And so, we tell ourselves, it is only natural that our elected officials should represent advocacy groups and donors – the ‘factions’ as Hamilton, Adams and Jay called them – and present themselves to us as a choice between two fundamentally non-representative super-factions that we call the Republican party and the Democratic party.

I think there are two ways to begin to fix our non-representative system of super-factions, two ways to flip the idea of representative democracy back into its proper place. One way is from the top-down and the other is from the bottom-up. Neither will fix this broken system overnight. Both will fix it over time.

The top-down way is to find 27 more state legislatures to pass the Congressional Apportionment Amendment (CAA), which would return us to the Founders’ original intent for the House of Representatives to be a true People’s House, where every elected member represents a much smaller number of voters – somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 – rather than the three-quarters of a million voters represented today. The CAA would explode the number of Congressional Representatives, break the iron grip of political parties over candidates, and allow elected members to know their constituency in a way that allows authentic representation. [for a detailed look at the CAA and other structural reform ideas, see The Projection Racket, part 2]

The CAA is not a pie-in-the-sky thing. It was already passed by Congress in 1789 as part of the original 12 Constitutional amendments, of which ten made it as the Bill of Rights in 1791 and another as the 27th amendment in 1992. The CAA was ratified by 11 states in 1791, falling one state (!) short of ratification. Today we need 27 more states to ratify it by a majority vote in their respective statehouses. This is totally doable. Hell, one centrist billionaire could fund the organization of this effort and totally reshape American politics for the better.

The bottom-up way, which is even more doable and just requires political candidates to act in their own self-interest, is this:

a) reach out directly to the actual voters in your actual district (you have the voter rolls so you know where we live) and set up an ongoing communication system where you ask us about our actual thoughts and our actual concerns, not as an effort to Nudge us or to generate some poll that you can use for fundraising or campaigning, but so that you can actually know us as a prerequisite for actually representing us;

b) commit as a political candidate to representing us no matter what, to acting as our agent, not as a principal or as an agent for advocacy groups, donors, or a political party;

c) do that when elected.

The technology absolutely exists to set up this ongoing communication system with constituents at scale. Yes, it is connected directly to your address as established on a voter roll. Yes, this will clean up the voter rolls. No, if you’re not on the voter roll, like if you’re a donor outside the district or an advocacy group, you don’t get to participate. No, this information won’t be made public, but also no, you’re not sharing anything more sensitive than what you’d write on Twitter or Facebook, so if there’s a leak it’s no big deal.

Yes, this would take money out of politics, as the cost of a web-based/app communication system with constituents is a small fraction of what’s required today to advertise and sell your set of non-representative super-faction policies and symbols. Yes, anyone can do this and put themselves up for public office, without gatekeeping from political parties. Yes, political parties could reinvent themselves from the bottom-up, as authentic groupings of representative agents of large numbers of actual voters, rather than as personal fiefdoms of high-functioning sociopaths.

And here’s the kicker:

It is entirely possible to build a generative AI avatar that embodies the semantic structures – i.e., the meaning – of every individual constituent’s thoughts and concerns as expressed within this ongoing communication system, a constituent avatar that provides real-time support to any elected official who wants to know how best to represent us in any situation.

The end result? Electoral competition shifted from a ‘choice’ between two sets of non-representative super-faction policies and symbols to a selection of the most effective political agent to represent our actual thoughts and concerns. All enabled by generative AI.

I think representative democracy is a good idea.

We should give it a try.