Decentralized government

Direct Democracy Is the Future of Human Governance – Part 2

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War is not a foregone conclusion or a national necessity. Each successive occupant of the White House only needs you to believe that in order to centralize the power of an increasingly imperial presidency, stifle dissent, and chip away at what remains of civil liberties.

– Danny Sjursen, retired US Army officer, The Pence Prophecy: VP Predicts Perpetual War at the West Point Graduation

Whenever I mention direct democracy, a certain segment of the population always comes back with a very negative knee-jerk reaction. Since this response tends to center around several concerns, today’s post will dig into them and explain how such pitfalls can be structurally addressed.

Minority Protection

The first thing that worries people is a fear there will be no protections for minority populations within such a system. Take the U.S. for example, where approximately 80% of the population lives in urban areas and only 20% in rural. If we moved to a system where direct popular vote played a meaningful role in deciding the majority of issues, rural populations would lose out every single time. It would end up being an oppressive system for people who live in less populated areas and would tear up the U.S. even faster than is happening now.

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It’s Time For Local Communities to Take Charge and Experiment – Decentralize or Die (Part 2)

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And when we mark the progress already accomplished in that direction, in spite of and against the State, which tries by all means to maintain its supremacy of recent origin; when we see how voluntary societies invade everything and are only impeded in their development by the State, we are forced to recognize a powerful tendency, a latent force in modern society.

– Peter Kropotkin

Before I get started, I want to emphasize that while the ideas in this three-part series focus on the U.S. and its particular structure of governance, the basic concepts can and should be applied throughout the world. If I believe in anything at all, it’s the idea that concentrations of power, whether government or corporate, represent the greatest threat to human freedom and liberty, and this must be understood and resisted by all of us. Let’s get started.

Although many crucial functions are centralized, the U.S. still provides its citizens with various ways to exercise local power and we’ve already started to see a resurgence of such efforts across the nation. Whether or not we agree with the various state proposals out there trying to shake things up, we should all encourage the efforts. We all win from local populations experimenting with different ideas. Some will fail spectacularly, while others will pave the way for more reasonable policies across the nation.

Perhaps the greatest success of localized action in my lifetime was initiated by my adopted home state of Colorado, as its residents led the way with cannabis legalization in 2012, following the passage of Amendment 64. If we had continued to wait for the feds to do something we would have ended up waiting forever. Instead, Coloradans put the measure on the ballot and the public overwhelmingly supported it (it passed with a wider margin than Obama won against Romney). The enormous success of the initiative led to a cascade of other states adopting similar measures. Local action led to national change and will result in far more humane drug polices across massive swaths of the country, as D.C. fossils like Jeff Sessions continue to spew clownish and failed drug war narratives.

The success of Amendment 64 should be repeated on a variety of issues across the nation. We can then see what works and what doesn’t. People end up responding more rationally when they’re allowed to try things out for themselves.

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