This post on Best Of A Great Lot is a part of a series on the subject of designing a new form of governance. Each piece aims to stand alone, but fits together on the Table of Contents.
Many of the Founders of the US viewed the American experiment as an exercise in the idea of self-governance1. Since I'm aiming to talk about a replacement for this system, I think it's important to grapple with what “self-governance” means. It’s tempting to suggest that it’s obvious: if we’re all involved in our government, then it’s self-governance. But at a scale of millions of people, we just can’t all be equally involved.
The Soviet system was supposed to be self-governance, too, but it's hard to take that claim seriously now. Can a new system qualify as self-governance if it doesn’t look fundamentally the same as ours? When your boat sinks and you're left to survive on an island with a few strangers, the difference between self-governance and autocracy seems pretty clear. But the moment that your fellow castaways vote to eat you, it might seem less obvious.
Let's dispense with a few commonly held beliefs off the bat. Self-governance is not synonymous with voting. Plenty of fake democracies hold sham votes without providing any semblance of self-governance. Schools often elect class presidents without giving them any actual authority. There are plenty of votes that don't mean anything even in the best-run democracies. On the flip side, there are long-running consensus based organizations that are clearly self-governing but do not elect leaders or make decisions by voting. Voting is a technique, not the one true path.
Voting as a technique is a compromise between inclusion and speed. Consensus processes are slow and frustrating and often require significant training to be successful at all. Autocracy in all its forms is vastly faster and less visibly contentious. Voting is somewhere in the middle: a straightforward decision-making method that everyone can understand and accomplish relatively quickly, but one that ensures that there are people on the losing side.
But most of us accept some people losing out and still consider democracy to be a form of self-governance. Self-governance isn't synonymous with getting what you want. It cannot be possible for a society of millions of people to ensure that everyone gets what they want through any process.
Many people seem to believe that getting what they want is the single most important thing in a governance system. When one side doesn't get what it wants and blames the system for allowing the other side into power, we see a fundamental misunderstanding of what self-governance means. This kind of argument is particularly galling when it's about the extent of the power of the Executive branch, but as soon as the party complaining gets into power, they grab more power for the President.
Self-governance isn't synonymous with effective governance. The argument that we prefer prefer self-governance because it provides better outcomes is common, but dangerous. It opens the door to the on-time trains argument -- at least Mussolini made the trains run on time. If autocracy is more effective than self-governance, should we prefer it? The fascists and neo-Monarchists love this idea, because it gives them a wedge to try to sell their horrific ideas.
Sometimes people respond by saying that self-governance isn't about high effectiveness, it's about protecting us from the worst outcomes. Who cares if the trains run on time as long as we don't allow Hitler in the door, goes this line of thinking. But this is a difficult line of argument to swallow, for while it's obvious we don't want to let Hitler in, few of us are satisfied with the idea of accepting a permanent mediocrity. This argument is particularly galling when those crying out that we should accept the lesser of two evils are themselves doing quite well.
As tempting as it is, self-governance isn't actually synonymous with "having our say". A simple thought experiment: imagine living in an aristocracy where the aristocrats were brought up to believe they should regularly go down and listen to the common people. This seems to satisfy the idea of "having a say" without at all qualifying as self-governance.
The last of the common claims I'm aware of is that we have self-governance when anyone could (in theory) participate in government; i.e. self-governance is simply the opposite of aristocracy or hard class divisions.
Historically this makes sense. The American Constitutional Convention was grounded in the Enlightenment view that we’re all equal and so hereditary aristocracy cannot be unjustified. Many of the previous Republics, such as the Roman and Venetian, are better explained as an oligarchic compromise between powerful families than they are as ideologically self-governance. If anyone can become a leader, and it only takes work to do so, it would at first glance seem obvious that this qualifies for the 'self' in self-governance.
Let’s step back and think about how leaders have been chosen historically. In aristocracies and many oligarchies, leaders are selected by birth. In the Athenian democracy, leaders were selected randomly (sortition). We have the concept of nepotism because when we take away the idea of leaders being automatically selected by birth, many people still try to pass advantage that they’ve gained within their family. And we have the concept of meritocracy, of leaders being selected because they are the best, the most capable. We largely haven’t come up with a lot of other ideas for how to select leaders.
I’ve pointed out some of the challenges with sortition here and written a scorecard on it as a system here. Scott Alexander writes in defense of meritocracy in various places, but I think he got it most succinct here.
If your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.
Notably, this means in a meritocracy, everyone cannot equally participate. We want only the most capable people to be leaders, so only certain people are actually going to be picked. Vanishingly few of our representatives have ever been homeless, and none of them are now. Even those who came from poverty won't continue to experience it once they reach a leadership role in a democracy.
But if we carefully select the best people to be leaders, and then they make decisions that only benefit themselves, can we really call that self-governance?
Imagine the extreme sci-fi case: we can identify who is the most capable using a simple blood test, and those people are granted the right to be leaders for life. Anyone could, in theory, be chosen. In so doing, we cut them off from the rest of us and tell them that they’re special and give them the ability to make choices about how society will be run. I think we shouldn’t be surprised when humans put in that sitution largely make decisions that make their own lives better. It takes a certain amount of benevolence and a certain amount of connection to the problems that the rest of us face to give leaders the ability to lead well. Fear of being voted out of office can help, but isn’t always enough.
By selecting people as leaders, we have immediately created a new kind of class divide between the leaders and the followers. There's little that humans love to create more than in-groups and out-groups. When leaders pursue their own interests, they strengthen that class divide and weaken the legitimacy of such a form of governance. This is a key problem with our current system.
Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
In this view, I propose language around the idea that self-governance is a spectrum. We have a weak self-governance where we select leaders, and they have some mix of benevolence and fear of being kicked out, so they do some governing that is intended to help everyone, and some that’s for themselves. Strong self-governance would be where our governance allows everyone to participate as much as they can and is strongly aimed at making life better for everyone. To build a system that does that, we have to go beyond simple leader selection and look at how decisions are made, and what drives those decisions to be good for everyone.
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I frequently use the American system of governance in comparisons because it is well-known. It's certainly not the only system or the first, nor do I propose that we treat it as inherently superior, only that it gives us a good baseline to describe aspects of governance systems generally.