Tag Archives: democracy

Berniecrats and Party Discipline

Politics, ,

I somehow ended up reading a blog post from a “New Right” “intellectual” blog about the difference between Patronage vs. Constituent Parties, and why the Republican Party is more prone and capable to punish those supporters who do not sufficiently support the party (or specifically the party leader). I will purposefully not link to it, but I found the argument interesting.

In the American political system, the only party structure best suited to sufficiently punish campaign workers and consultants who are blamed for losing an election by casting them into the outer darkness of unemployment is one which swears loyalty to the party leader, not one which embraces its constituent groups and allows for their challenging of party leadership.

The Democrats, in their decades-long post-New Deal incarnation as a coalition of constituencies, do not get to punish or exile their lesser-performing or confrontational apparatchiks, no matter how tiresome they may be. The Republicans, as a vanguard of the old stock Americans and those who seek alliance with such, do.

The desire of Berniecrats to punish Manchin, Sinema and their enablers in the last Dem trifecta reflected a preference for a party structure which doesn’t exist, and is not allowed to exist, in the Democratic coalition.

Not even the DSA, with its own coalition of constituencies which sought to capture the left of the Democratic coalition, could pull off a party machine which punishes those who fail the platform and campaign.

For the left-of-center to discipline or punish its own would require a significant abandonment of diversity, coalition-building and consensus, in favor of patronage, hierarchy and corporate leadership, in which open dissent or failure results in loss of access to party leadership.

tl;dr: Pick your poison. Internal democracy does not make for a strong party machine.

The Need for Liquid Democracy

Politics, Uncategorized, ,

So let’s talk about democracy as a tool of “small-r” republican governance, and what it is in 2016.

Right now, democracy is a zero-sum game. The two models of democratic exercise we use – representative and direct – are limited in their scalability.

Representative democracy is cheap but hierarchical, in which we select a very small class of people – legislators – to vote on the bills that regular folk don’t have the time to properly process.

Direct democracy is broad but expensive, in which every eligible voter is encouraged to vote, whether or not one is fully informed about a bill or has had a chance to properly process the legislation.

So I think that we need to talk about a third type of democracy, a democracy which takes from the strengths of both representative and direct democracy. One that I have read about is known as “delegative democracy”, also known as “liquid democracy”.

A liquid democracy would look like this: a referendum in which you – Voter 1 – can designate someone else – Voter 2 – to cast a vote for the referendum on your behalf, and Voter 2 can also designate someone else – Voter 3 – to cast the votes which have been assigned to Voter 2 to be cast. A person can accumulate multiple votes from many people to be cast on their behalf, but every individual can take their vote back to vote by oneself for the referendum.

It’s proxy voting on steroids, and it’s being used and advocated by several branches of the Pirate Party movement in Europe for their in-party decision making process. I think it is a third way of decision making that we should hear about more in the years to come.

I think it would also be adaptable to multiple levels of democratic governance, from the national to the municipal. And, even better, I think it would allow for public referendums to be held every day, almost as frequently as in a representative legislature.

If you’re studying political science, this is something to look into.

Liquid/Delegative Democracy in Practice

Politics, Uncategorized, , ,

Reading up on delegative democracy aka liquid democracy. It’s essentially selecting someone to vote on your behalf in referendums, but where your selected proxy voter can also transfer their delegated votes to another proxy voter, and so on, while you can also take your vote back, override your proxy voter, and review your proxy voter’s voting record.

This is meant to essentially replace legislatures and make voting in referendums easier, quicker and more affordable.

To break down #LiquidDemocracy:

Imagine having a vote on a ballot measure, a referendum. Unlike many, you may not have the time to do research on the proposed law or vote on it.

So what can you do?

In #DelegativeDemocracy or Liquid Democracy, you can select someone – say, a friend who is more knowledgeable about the proposed law on the ballot – to cast your vote on your behalf. You might trust this person – Person A – to have more knowledge and be more responsible with your vote than you are. Person A is your proxy voter.

But what if Person A who you select knows someone else – Person B – who has even more knowledge about the proposed law and has publicly announced that they’ve cast their vote along the same lines as Person A? In Liquid Democracy, Person A can select Person B as their proxy voter, and can delegate Person B to cast your vote, Person A’s vote and the votes of others who’ve delegated their votes to that person.

In short, Liquid Democracy is a third way of passing laws, alongside representative democracy and direct democracy. It blends the two and moves us away from both the cost of direct democracy and the isolation of representative democracy.

The issue I have is this:

  • can this function without dependency upon the Internet to facilitate the voting process?
  • Also, what are the means by which this process can account for disadvantaged groups in a population or suspect classes whose rights may be targeted by referendum?
  • This may rid us of the need for gerrymandering and of competitive elections, but what will it do for minorities?