Is This A Good Idea : Science Channel

January 23, 2012

The other day, a puzzling phenomenon -- at least to those of us not steeped in the arcane art of legislative procedure -- occurred on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. According to an account in The Hill, a political newspaper, Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-AL, pounded the gavel to begin what is known as a pro forma session, in which a quorum of members gather for a prayer and the saying of the Pledge of Allegiance, and then immediately adjourn. The idea, essentially, is to create the pretense that the House is in session, in order to satisfy the requirement in Article I, Section 5 of the U.S. Constitution that neither the House nor the Senate can adjourn for more than three days without the permission of the other chamber. The fly in the ointment on this particular day was that another legislator, Rep. Jim Moran, D-VA, asked to be recognized to speak about a soon-to-expire piece of temporary legislation that Congress urgently needs to deal with, the federal payroll tax cut. The presiding Republican ignored him, and the session was gaveled closed. Not to be deterred, Moran then apparently gave a four-minute speech to the emptying chamber, protesting the other party's intransigence on an issue of critical importance to middle-class Americans, who would see their taxes go up by roughly $1,500 a year if the cut expires. Of course, as The Hill noted, that feigned outrage was undercut by the reality that many of the Democratic conferees who would be needed to work on the tax bill weren't even in Washington at the time, either. Both sides seemed to be content to jockey for political advantage, while getting nothing actually done.

We're seeing more and more of this sort of political theater, which bears less resemblance to the impassioned disagreement over issues in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington than it does to Ubu Roi, Alfred Jarry's 1896 absurdist satire of ossified Fin de siècle European society, in which the pompous, power-mad "overgrown puppets" rant nonsensically at each other about protocol as they perform various disgusting acts. It's no wonder that, according to Gallup just 11 percent of Americans currently approve of the job Congress is doing, marking the lowest rating since the pollster began asking the question in 1974.

Does a Representative Democracy Still Work?

The problem, perhaps: We've been using a system of representative democracy that, except for a few changes —such as the switch to the direct election of senators and the installation of C-Span cameras in the Capitol -- is pretty much the same one that was created by the original authors of the U.S. Constitution in 1787. Some view it as a testament to the wisdom of our nation's founders and sophistication of the system's design that it's lasted for this long and functioned at least some of the time. And indeed, when the American political system has come into conflict with other competing systems of governance -- monarchism, fascism, fanatical theocracy and Soviet-style state socialism, to name a few -- our system has almost always has emerged the victor. But when you look at the current mess, you've got to wonder whether this 18th-century social invention may finally be nearing obsolescence, just as flintlock pistols, chamber pots and medicinal bleeding with leeches have fallen by the wayside. That said, Congress seems like the old joke about the weather: Everybody complains about it, but nobody does anything.

Or maybe not. A small but apparently growing number of political visionaries on the Internet have come up with a solution, albeit one that would require radically altering our 225-year-old system. They want to shift away from allowing elected representatives to ponder policy and make decisions. Instead, they'd like to replace representative democracy with direct democracy, in which the nation's citizens would come up with prospective courses of action, debate the issues among themselves, craft compromises and ultimately vote on which ideas become law. Congress and some of the other institutions and agencies of our existing government might remain, but their role would be reduced to implementing and facilitating citizens' wishes, not to lead the way.

On IdeaScale.com, a website established by the National Academy of Public Administration (which is, ironically, a Congressionally chartered nonprofit organization), one poster writes:

The strategy of having elected Congress members to represent constituencies was applicable when we had such a spread out citizen population and no technology to get every voice heard.
We now have the technology available to truly have a government by the people. We will of course need congress-people, but their and their staff's role will be merely to sort through people-generated ideas (like this website) and to formulate, propose, and manage laws based on what the people vote.
Monies will be needed to create the infrastructure so that ALL people of the Union can vote, such as voting centers in every neighborhood (like an internet cafe but for voting on a regular basis).
If we are serious about a government BY THE PEOPLE, let's do it. Let's stop bottlenecking the power-load through Capitol Hill and open wide the gates of Democracy.

A System of Self-Rule

If this notion of direct democracy sounds vaguely familiar to you, there's a reason: It's based upon what may have been the first-ever system of self-rule, the one devised by the ancient Athenians circa 500 B.C. The 30,000 citizens of Athens -- that is, men who weren't slaves or foreigners -- who were eligible to participate in self-government met almost every week in a great assembly called the Ecclesia, on a hill to the west of the Acropolis, and voted by putting either a dark (for no) or white (for yes) stone or bean in the jar on important decisions. The Ecclesia, it should be mentioned, didn't have unlimited power. The Athenians also had the Council of 500, a group of representatives from various districts in Athens who were chosen by lottery, rather than election. The council helped set the agenda for the Ecclesia. In addition, there was a court system, which consisted of both judges and juries composed of ordinary citizens. (For a more detailed account of Athenian democracy, take a look at Mogens Herman Hansen's The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. )

One of the Athenian system's biggest flaws -- aside from the fact that not everybody was allowed to participate -- was that it wasn't all that scalable; indeed, it was downright impractical for a democratic nation-state with thousands of square miles of territory and many millions of far-flung inhabitants, which needed to elect public officials and delegate power to them. But contemporary proponents say that problem has been solved by the rise of the Internet and other two-way interactive mass communication and social networking technologies, which theoretically make it possible for vast numbers of citizens to interact in cyberspace. About 400 million people -- more than the current U.S. population -- use Facebook on a daily basis. Twitter has 100 million active users. Web conferencing software, which would allow large numbers of citizens to come together online in the equivalent of the Athenian Ecclesia, hasn't quite caught up to that, but already it's possible with existing platforms such as ReadyTalk to bring together several thousand participants for a single online event.

Online voting probably wouldn't be that difficult to manage -- as direct democracy advocates note, if we're willing to make financial transactions online, why should casting ballots over the Internet be considered any more of a risk? (Besides, as we learned from the infamous Palm Beach butterfly ballot, in the 2000 presidential election, showing up and punching a hole in a paper ballot in person doesn't guarantee that an election result is going to be accurate.) Here's a 2009 Wired article about a successful test of an online cryptographic electoral system that could allow citizens to cast their votes without sacrificing privacy or being vulnerable to vote-stealing.

Ecclesia Online for Voting

Switching to online direct democracy, adherents say, might be a quantum leap in the democratic process. Lobbyists, bundlers and political action committees would become obsolete overnight, since there no longer would be any point in spending millions to influence public officials. And bringing a broader, more diverse group of individuals into the problem-solving and decision-making process might lead to considerably smarter decisions, particularly on issues that involve science and technology. Today, if a U.S. senator from an oil-producing state who gets a lot of political contributions from energy companies insists on denying that human-caused climate change is a problem, he can utilize his position to stymie any government effort to curb carbon emissions. In a direct democracy, in which climate scientists could go directly to other citizens and make their case with the facts, we might finally get some real action. And people from different sides in a debate could interact directly and try to sort things out and find a consensus, rather than depending upon elected leaders who sometimes strive to keep their jobs by pandering to their supporters rather than thinking of the public interest.

There are potential drawbacks to online direct democracy, as well. It wouldn't totally eliminate the unsavory influence of money on the political process. Shadowy deep-pockets groups, like the ones that take advantage of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to dive-bomb opposing political candidates with attack ads, could still spend huge amounts of money on TV commercials and radio ads to influence their fellow citizens. (I don't see a technological solution to this problem, unless we either rewrite the First Amendment or replace the Supreme Court's current membership with a group that's closer in ideology and wisdom to the Vulcan Council.)

Another problem is that we'd also be shifting to a system that would negate the sober, steadying influence of what used to be called "wise men" -- that is, individuals who've spent their lives making government policy and working behind the scenes to ensure that the best decisions, rather than most politically expedient ones, are made. Instead, we would depend upon the citizenry's abilities to ponder an issue fairly and opt for the best solution, rather than whatever most readily conforms to their fears and prejudices. For all the esteem in which Athenian democracy is held, for example, it's worth noting that a jury of Athenian citizens voted by a 360 to 140 margin to put Socrates to death, essentially because they didn't like the elderly philosopher's unpopular view that the masses were incapable of attaining virtue and wisdom, and his irritating habit of rolling his eyes dismissively at whomever disagreed with him. (If we ever do transition to a similar system, the famously caustic talent judge Simon Cowell might want to relocate to someplace without an U.S. extradition treaty.) And if we suffer calamities as the result of bad decisions, we won't have anyone but ourselves to blame. That could get ugly.

So what do you think? Express your opinion below.

Image Credit: John Springer Collection/CORBIS |