Thoughts On Democracy

Campaign Technology - John Stossel

Campaign Moments and Message - John Stossel

How Debates Are Won - John Stossel

When most people tell others to “go vote”, they don’t really mean “go vote”. What they’re really saying is “go vote for my guy”. For example, young people tend to vote Democrat, so Democrats will send out hordes of people to college campuses to sign people up, drive them to polls, etc, while Republicans will try to keep college students from voting by making it arbitrarily difficult. Likewise, “Pro-voting” organizations typically target young people and POC, but you’ll never see them visiting rural America or manufacturing and construction sites to get those demographics to vote, and it’s not hard to figure out why. None of it is driven by genuine pro or anti voting sentiment. It’s all just gamesmanship.

Related: Democracy is a Tragedy of the Commons.

Consider a list of ideas that could potentially improve how our democracies function:

• Implement voter-ID laws with government-issued ID cards (free for all citizens).
• Have more educated voters (see: Why It’s So Difficult To Change People’s Minds).
• Restructure the government in such a way that discourages corruption and corporatocracy.
• Completely eliminate gerrymandering: Remove party affiliations at the time of voter registration. Do not track home addresses on ballots. Voter ID is done through government-issued ID cards, but does not require you to retain the information together. Now politicians don’t know where you live and can’t draw districts with biases.
• Replace the electoral college with the popular vote.
• Implement consecutive and/or lifetime term-limits for all legislative and bureacratic offices.
• Pass laws regulating campaign finance.
• There should be the politician cut-off age around the retirement age.
  • This would prevent the likelihood that people with dementia (e.g. Joe Biden), politicians with cognitive problems (e.g. John Fetterman, Dianne Feinstein, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, etc), or people with perverse incentives get elected.
  • Many of these elderly politicians don’t have to worry about the consequences of their decisions because they’ll be dead soon enough.
• Localism.
• Et Cetera.

Democracies would improve to some extent if the campaigning process for all political offices was shorter and more fast-paced. The US presidential election cycle goes as follows:

• A newly elected candidate works for ~2 years as the candidate, during which they tend to be the most productive and gradually build up support for running for re-election, if they choose to do so.
• During the third year, potential candidates start debating against their competitors on national television to help determine who will run for the primaries and caucuses in the fourth year.
• During the fourth year, candidates prepare for the state primaries and caucuses, starting in Iowa on January 15. The candidate is usually determined by early March, since the first Tuesday in March is Super Tuesday, where 15 states run their caucuses and primaries all at once and candidates compete for one-third of the delegate votes for receiving the nominations of their respective parties.
• Between early March and early November, primaries and caucuses continue for the rest of the country, but they’re mostly pointless since the party nominees are usually already chosen by then. The nominees are then officially nominated in June, campaign rallies are scheduled across the country, and three finalist debates take place in the 1-2 months before the election. This 8-month window is far too long. During the fourth year, the president/finalist is generally less productive than at any other point in their term, since they focus more on campaigning and less on doing things that a president/politician should do.

The long campaigning process causes less work to get done, since politicians spend more time on the campaign trail and less time doing actual work. More talk, less action. Another thing is that since the campaigning process is so long, it discourages some people from participating in it since it raises the opportunity cost of competing in an election. Shorter campaigning processes would thus reduce the opportunity cost of competing in an election, which may incentivize a more diverse set of candidates to run for office.

It would be best if there was no more than 1 month for party candidates to debate, 1-2 months for primaries and caucuses, and 2 months for official nominations, finalist debates, and the finalist election.

Election day should also occur before tax collecting day, so that voters think more about reducing taxes and deficit spending.

Private entities could use democracies as a means of compromise under limited circumstances. In situations where there is no single right answer and/or there are different competing values and value systems, democracies are often proposed as a potential solution. However, Reason is a superior decision maker to Democracy, so decisions should made with Reason instead of Democracy whenever possible.

Democracy an be a solution for resolving multiple different values, perspectives, and ideologies, as imperfect as it may be. Nevertheless, I agree with all the criticisms in The Deep State and Myth of Democracy, and I believe that we can make a system with similarities to democracy that is still better than anything that’s ever been tried before.

Approval Voting: For every choice/option/candidate, everybody votes yes or no to signal whether or not they approve of the option. The option(s) with the most approvals is/are selected. People can vote multiple times, vote once, or not vote at all. This method is quick, simple, will work for most situations, and is better than first past the post voting. CGP Grey has a video explaining how Approval Voting works.

Single Transferable Voting: The single transferable vote (STV) is a voting system designed to achieve proportional representation through ranked voting in multi-seat organizations. Under STV, an elector (voter) has a single vote that is initially allocated to their most preferred candidate. Votes are totaled and a quota (the number of votes required to win a seat) derived. If their candidate achieves quota, he/she is elected and in some STV systems any surplus vote is transferred to other candidates in proportion to the voters’ stated preferences. If more candidates than seats remain, the bottom candidate is eliminated with his/her votes being transferred to other candidates as determined by the voters’ stated preferences. These elections and eliminations, and vote transfers if applicable, continue until there are only as many candidates as there are unfilled seats.

The Nazis attempted a revolutionary strategy when they tried to overthrow the government during the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The revolutionary approach failed, so they decided to obtain power via reformist and legal means instead. In the May 1928 federal election, they only achieved 2.6% of the vote, but then they formed a temporary alliance with the larger and less extremist German National People’s Party (DNVP). This alliance (as well as the onset of the Great Depression and other things) contributed to weakening the DNVP’s share of the vote in the September 1930 election to 7%, while boosting the Nazis to win 18.2% of the vote that same year. By temporarily using a moderated Big Tent approach, the Nazis gained the propulsion that they needed to seize power and start radicalizing towards their true ambitions.

Wikipedia Excerpt about how Ernst Röhm wanted to create an even more radical version of the Nazi Party, which was one reason why Hitler purged him and other members of the Sturmabteilung.

After their victory in the 1933 election, some of the Nazis were plotting to create an even more radical version of the Nazi Party that would seize power via a coup d’état and start a war. Hitler wouldn’t allow this though, so he ordered the assassination of Ernst Röhm in order to maintain his grip on power. It’s possible that might have prevented the Nazis from starting WWII on an earlier date. If that’s true, then it was a smart move for the Nazis to take a moderate position on politics for the time being while gradually radicalizing.

Many Ancaps try to recruit Libertarians into becoming Ancaps, but they can’t promote Anarcho-Capitalism or Voluntaryism directly because then their movements would be too small and would have less influence. For this reason, many Ancaps participate within and vote for Libertarian political parties. They may prefer to start Anarcho-Capitalist political parties from the very beginning, but there’s no chance that they would ever gain much traction because that would been too extremist for many Libertarians and anti-Anarchists to ever consider joining, and it might even be illegal to have anarchist political parties or organizations in some countries.

Amanda Sukenick and other Efilists are trying to co-opt the much larger Anti-Natalism movement and “Efilize the Anti-Natalism movement from within”, in an effort to recruit more potential Efilists. If the Efilism movement ever grows large enough, Sukenick is definitely going to stop promoting Anti-Natalist activism and start pushing Efilist activism instead. She has said all this on video.

All political factions that are apart of a larger, more moderate coalition are also using the Big Tent Strategy to gain power and achieve some of their objectives, even though it requires sacrificing their more radical yearnings. Every faction in the coalition is only part of the coalition for convenience, and if any of the factions see an opportunity to persuade, influence, or manipulate the others towards their cause, they’ll readily do so. Whenever a bunch of factions unite together to form a coalition, each faction is hoping to eventually out-compete the other factions for control of the entire coalition once the coalition’s goal is finished.

Religions (and ideologies in general) have a tendency to branch off into different subgroups over time.

• Judaism branched off into Christianity, which branched off into Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox, Protestantism, Coptic Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox, Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientism, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.
• Islam branched off into Sunni Islam, Shiism, Ibadi Islam, etc.
• Hinduism branched into many different local beliefs.
• Buddhism branched into Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana Buddhism.

In a sense, each one of these major world religions can be considered a big tent of sorts, especially from the perspectives of outsiders. But internally within each tent, some (perhaps most) of the people in each of the different sects don’t see members of the other sects as belonging to the same religion. For instance, many Sunni Muslims don’t consider Shiite Muslims to be true Muslims and they view them as belonging to an entirely different religion. The same goes for how Catholics often view Protestants, how Christians often view Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses, and so on. Just like every big tent, there are different factions inside the tent that gatekeep and insist that the other factions under the tent are not true believers. On the other hand, outsiders that oppose the big tent movements in question will tend to view and treat all the factions of the tent as belonging to the same ideology, as outsiders are less likely to understand what makes each of the different factions different from each other.

Ideologies need labels in order to propagate effectively since labels define the “in-group” and the “out-group”. Being able to identify with an already established label can help an ideology propagate better (as opposed to a newly made-up label), which may help to explain why Shiites are likely to identify themselves as legitimate Muslims and why Protestants view their religion as having more similarities than differences to Catholicism, even though Shiism and Protestantism both branched off an already established religion whose members are more likely to see the new movements as being heresy.

Wikipedia: Intragroup Conflict.

Wikipedia: The Narcissism of Small Differences.

Wikipedia: Sectarianism.

Wikipedia: Neotribalism.

When a big tent movement arises, it’s pretty typical for the tent’s ideology and ideals to evolve over time or get watered down, especially if it propagates to many different peoples in high numbers. The bigger the tent, the more likely some faction and/or another is going to diverge into a distinctly different ideology that only has veins of similarity to the original big tent. At the same time however, a lot of what enables a successful big tent movement to propagate effectively comes from its number of members. Big Tents are best at accomplishing short-term coalition goals and propagating core ideas to a somewhat wider range of people, but they will always have the downside that the perceived differences between the tent’s members will come to outweigh their similarities and cause the tent to evolve, diverge, or fall apart entirely from within.

Would redrawing state borders in the United States according to political ideology increase or decrease political polarization?

It depends. It would probably decrease polarization within states, while increasing it between states.

Redrawing state borders would make more states become echo chambers, which would increase polarization between states and in the country as a whole.

Most people across the country already lives in echo chambers thanks to the Internet. So, redrawing state borders isn’t going to change that much at all.

Granting greater autonomy to more separatist regions often tends to reduce polarization within those regions, hence why many countries do it. It follows that redrawing state borders would reduce polarization within states as well. However, granting autonomy to a separatist region could create tensions between that region and the rest of the country, depending on the rights and obligations between the two. For example, there is tension between Quebec and Canada, Catalonia and Spain, Russia and Chechnya, etc.

The state who is being seceded from (usually blue) would be more polarized on the federal level, and less polarized on the state level. Without the more rural conservative region(s) to balance out blue states on the state level, the leftist urban centers would probably even more radical politics than before on the state level. Redrawing state borders would also reduce polarization in the rural areas, since those people would be able to live under the state of their choice.

Moving Oregon’s border to form Greater Idaho would also create a precedent for other states to make similarly radical border changes. Again, most of the political tension would occur on the federal level, unless reforms are made to address it (e.g. switching to a parliament).

Redrawing state boundaries would could be called “state-level gerrymandering”. But the key difference is that petitions to move state boundaries would have the support of the people who want to secede from a state and join another one instead. On the other hand, gerrymandering tends to be driven by politicians who want to gain an upper-hand in elections.

We can think about this in two ways:

• People moving to states that better conform with their political beliefs.
• People moving state boundaries so that their governments better conform with their political beliefs.

Most people are unlikely to label the former as gerrymandering, although some people might label the latter as gerrymandering. Regardless, both of these phenomena are symptoms and reactions to political polarization.

Letting people move from one state to another would reduce polarization, rather than increase it. If people are prevented from moving to the state that they want to live in, then that would increase political polarization because some people would become more frustrated. Letting those people migrate between states thus appeases them and reduces tension, across all levels of government.

Politically-motivated migrations can also change the politics of states. Like how immigration to Texas has actually been keeping the state red. Or how Florida became red due to older, conservative people migrating to Florida.

If all the red areas of states seceded from their urban centers, then political representation in the US Senate would remain the same, if no new states are created. I hypothesize that it could slightly increase Republican representation in the House of Representatives, since many red states don’t have enough people to get another representative.

Aside from that, representation in both congressional chambers would remain the same, if state borders were redrawn. If a Republican representative from an area of a blue state switches to representing an area of red state instead, then the number of Republican and Democrat representatives would largely stay the same.

The US presidency is determined by the Electoral College system. So, increasing the population of red states while decreasing the population of blue states would cause red states to have more electoral votes, which would make Republicans more likely to win the presidency in elections. This would be the greatest effect of the “gerrymandering” within the US Federal Government.

The leftists and the blue states would obviously be the most upset about this, unless the Electoral College system was replaced by a popular voting system. Better yet, the US should switch to a parliament, rather than a presidency. If either of those reforms were installed, then I don’t think redrawing state boundaries should be considered “gerrymandering” since it largely wouldn’t change political representation within the federal government, although it would generally increase people’s satisfactions with their state governments.

Redrawing state boundaries would increase corruption, as usually happens in one-party states.

That seems unlikely. For example, Japan is a one-party state, and it is relatively low in corruption. A key distinction should be made regarding why a jurisdiction is a one-party state. One-party states caused by Communist or authoritarian regimes are going to be corrupt regardless. Whereas one-party states caused by voter preferences are not necessarily going to be corrupt. It’s also conceivable that the corruption levels of governments are probably influenced by population genetics to some extent.

This also depends on what is considered to be “corruption”. Almost everybody would agree that benefiting oneself at the expense of the rest of society is corruption. Beyond that, a lot of corruption seems to depend on a person’s perspective. Is a politician who gives into the demands of the voters “corrupt”, even if will make the country unsustainable in the future and will hurt the future of the short-sighted voters? Is a politician “corrupt” if he bites the bullet and tries to make the country more sustainable, at odds with the people? My preference is to define corruption according to the long-term interests of the country, rather than the short-term interests.

Regardless of whether redrawing state boundaries would increase or decrease political polarization, the US and the rest of the West are destined to decline and destroy themselves regardless.