Fighting the Wildfire with Upgraded Governance

If we don’t get serious about the science of democracy, we can kiss self-government good-bye.

A new graphic for the ‘America as a Bear in a Trap’ series, by our resident artist!

In my last column, I laid out an agenda for fighting the wildfire that is bearing down on us as a consequence of social, economic, and climate change on a global scale. That agenda has three parts. We need responsive, resilient governance from a constitutional democracy that works. We need a path to securing the general welfare through shifting power in our economy and society back to ordinary people. And we need strategies for domestic tranquility and the common defense that put the blessings of liberty front and center.

I know we’re all itching to get to the second and third agenda items— the economic and security questions. But we need to spend one more beat focused on how to have governance institutions that work. We can’t do anything else unless we figure this out.

Think about it this way: Donald Trump is moving his substantive policy agenda forward apace because he first figured out a governance agenda: a maximalist unitary executive. That approach may deliver energy and theoretically even effectiveness in government, but it also obliterates what the authors of the Founding Fathers called “republican safety”— protection of our basic rights and liberties.

We need an approach to governance that delivers both energy and republican safety. How do we get there?

I realize that the technical, engineering work involved in setting up the institutions of democratic governance isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It certainly isn’t sexy. But unless we get serious about the science of democracy, and figure out some new engineering for our institutions in our new conditions, we might as well kiss self-government good-bye.

The good news is that in addition to getting rid of party primaries, as I have argued in previous columns, there’s much we can do to upgrade our democracy to make it effective and resilient in these turbulent times. Democracy renovation isn’t just the one change— it’s a whole suite of actions.

Step 1: Gerrymander-proof Congress.

We do that by getting back in the business of growing our House of Representatives as our population grows, something we did until about 100 years ago. We combine a bigger House with reorganized, multimember districts so that voters elect three members at once, instead of just one, and we use ranked-choice voting for those elections. That will give us a House that proportionally reflects the full range of interests and opinions. And there’s a bonus: This arrangement is largely immune to gerrymandering, as modeling by mathematician Moon Duchin and others has shown. It would take ownership of our political institutions away from the politicians and restore it to the people.

Step 2: Help Congress work.

Our bigger Congress also needs to work a heck of a lot better. And it needs to recover legislative supremacy with respect to the executive branch.

Our ancestors overthrew a monarch precisely to create modes of governance that did a better job of channeling the full diversity of perspective of the population into decision-making, leading to negotiated settlements and a stable society. Right now, we are careening back and forth between different versions of executive power. President Biden wanted equity to be a whole-of-government project. President Trump wants to make getting rid of DEI a whole-of-government project. We’re all wrecked by whiplash.

Enough. The people’s voice, channeled through Congress, and therefore built out of both majority and minority opinion, is the path to legitimate negotiated settlements to our problems. A partisan unitary executive simply cannot fulfill this vital democratic function, precisely because its lopsided agenda will always represent too partial a point of view.

Our renovation work order: We need to re-empower Congress to find negotiated settlements to our problems. That means an overhaul of how Congress operates— its committees, its rules, everything. Congress needs a re-org in the same way that private-sector organizations sometimes need to function better and more efficiently in relation to their mission.

Step 3: Put tech to work for us.

All the way through our system of government— from the municipal to county to state to federal level— we need to put technology to work upgrading representation.

Representation has three basic components: citizen participation, decision-maker decision-making, and government implementation, whether through the enforcement of regulations or delivery of services.

Call these the three vertebrae forming the spine of the representative processes that define our representative democracy. We need to deploy technology to improve the experience of citizen participation, to help decision-makers better understand the interests of their constituents and broaden the space for solutions, and to more effectively implement government decisions.

All three parts of representation can be more efficient. But efficiency isn’t our only goal: We also need to deliver open, accountable, and transparent government. New technologies can help us do all of that a lot more powerfully. There are models in Taiwan, Japan, and Estonia to look to.

Step 4: Rebuild our education system around civic education.

We need STEM education, for sure. But we also need to make certain that every generation grows up understanding the design principles of constitutional democracy and how to operate our political institutions, as well as having the motivation to participate in self-government. If we renovate our institutions but not our civic culture, all the hard work of institutional change will have been in vain.

The wildfire adds urgency to our project of democracy renovation. We need to clear away brush, create fire breaks and install sprinkler systems, but how can we do any of that while caught in a trap surrounded by wolves?

One thing we can take heart in: Wildfires aren’t new. The fire we face is a big one, but fires of change have always burned across the world— which is why we need to do the work of renovating our institutions into good working order. As we break free, these steps will help us form a more perfect union with the capacity to deliver the general welfare in a world in constant flux.

But one more thing.

These steps will help us deliver a way of governing the people that is also both by the people and for the people. A maximalist unitary executive certainly governs the people, but it squeezes out self-government by the people, trampling that in every direction. Neither does it operate for the people. Why? Because absolute power corrupts. Power shared among the people is what we need in order to have government in the interest of the people.

Catch up on Danielle Allen’s “Bear in a Trap” series today!

• “America as a Bear in a Trap,” Aug. 18

• “A Bear in a Trap, Part 2,” Aug. 21

• “Don’t Be Afraid to Free the Bear,” Aug. 26

• A Three-Part Agenda To Fight The Wildfire, Sept. 2