Our Latest Stories:

The following represents a musing on my part, not an affirmation of strong opinion, about how we might reformulate our nation’s system of representation.

The House of Representatives guarantees some representation according to geographic proximity, which made a fair amount of sense in the 1700s, when the Constitution was ratified in its initial form. At that time there was no integrated national road system, there were no cars, there were no trains, there were no planes, there was no internet, there was no telephone, and there was not even a telegraph system. The easiest way of communicating with individuals over long distance was through letters, which was not universal and required some money. Circumstances have changed. Not only do we have a relatively inexpensive post office with universal coverage across the nation, we have multiple modes of transportation, we have the telephone, radio, television and the internet which allows instantaneous or near-instantaneous communication across the nation. People feel comfortable moving multiple times in their lives, far across the country. People communicate with other individuals one-on-one across the country, and what used to be distinct regional cultures have been blended into one another as national radio and television networks make cultural elements available to just about everyone.

This means that the country is less geographically organized and constricted than it used to be. I think we’ve all felt at some time or another that our cities and towns have a weakened sense of community and a smaller sense of purpose. As our place of residence becomes less central to our identities, could it be that the country needs a geographically-based system of political representation less than it used to?

What are the ways in which we’re becoming more organized? We’re becoming more organized along lines of ethnicity (BET, Univision) age (with separate channels for younger people, like MTV and the Comedy Channel) or combinations of demographic characteristics (Spike TV for young men, Lifetime for middle-aged women). If you don’t like what MTV or BET or FOX News is playing, you can go to iTunes or YouTube and organize your own viewing or listening experience. Places like MySpace and FaceBook bring people together. Even socially organized news sites like Digg or StumbleUpon allow people to recommend to one another the sorts of news that is relevant to them. Blogs allow people to create their own news and commentary, along with criticism of the sort of corporate news that used to be shoved down Americans’ throats Monday through Friday from 6:30 to 7:00 pm Eastern Time. There are news sites for hunters. There are news sites for video gamers. There are news sites for people who like to dress up as furry animals. Even within the scope of traditional news, we have the ability to read newspapers from across the country and across the world, no matter where we live. People often choose which of these papers to read based on their non-geographic ideological or cultural preferences.

All of these developments mean that people are organizing already in communities of various size along lines of various interest, despite their physical separation from one another. These organizations are already popping up organically, whether on a passive medium like a cable channel, a distributive medium like iTunes, or a creative medium like a YouTube channel or blog community. But they’re not necessarily going to be reflected in our national political scene.

Why is that? There may be a million transsexuals in this country, but those transsexuals are not likely to all live in one place, and are in a minority wherever they are geographically speaking. They’re never going to be able to elect a member of Congress dedicated specifically to transsexual issues. There are certainly more than one million vegans in the nation. And yet these vegans are geographically dispersed, although they are a community of similar interests that has internal communication, they don’t form a distinctive geographic community that could elect a congressional representative dedicated to the pursuit of vegan policy interests. There are millions of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists in this nation. Yet they don’t all live in the same places. So what’s the likelihood that an open atheist is going to be elected to Congress? Empirically speaking, the chance is zero. There has never in the history of the Congress been an election of an openly atheist member to office. The only open atheist to serve in Congress is California Representative Pete Stark, who made his announcement after winning several elections in a safe seat, and only after such an announcement was strongly solicited by a movement of geographically-dispersed and yet well-organized atheists. Now, if you talk to an atheist or agnostic or secular humanist, you will hear most likely a set of articulated ideas and principles relating their outlook to policy preferences. But as we have it now, those ideas and principles won’t be expressed, because in any congressional district atheists and their ilk are outnumbered by the religious. An individual member of Congress who expresses atheist leanings is likely to be thrown out in the next election.

In the meantime, we have these strange geographic contortions drawing the boundaries of congressional districts and these are known as gerrymanders. Gerrymanders were named in the 1800s after a district in Massachussets that was stretched out and contorted into a weird shape resembling a salamander. Gerrymandered districts are drawn to make some districts safe and other districts competitive, giving some members of Congress incumbency advantages. Gerrymanders draw together voters with common race, social class or occupation in a way that leads to a predictable electoral outcome. What makes those gerrymandered districts any more reasonable as a way to represent community than a wholly non-geographic representation according to openly declared sets of shared interests such as atheism or transgendered identity?

What I’m suggesting as a thought experiment is that we make gerrymandering official. Why not ditch the idea of geography altogether? What would happen if instead of having a House of Representatives organized by geographic district into uncleanly divided sets of 1/435th of the population, we organized a House of Representatives into a set of 435 seats representing groups still equally divided into equally-sized units of 1/435th of the population, but with those units organized in a non-geographic process? What if those 435 politicians sitting in 435 seats in the House of Representatives were not elected every two years in districts (drawn up conveniently by the politicians themselves in order to further the politicians’ interests), but instead were sent to Washington by caucuses?

This is how it would work: any set of people who could muster 1/435th of the population of the United States gets to have a representative. All such individuals would get together and caucus either virtually or in person and affirmatively declare through, oh notarized signatures or something like that, their membership in that caucus. If 1/435th of the population could caucus together, they could get a seat in the House of Representatives just like that.

In the simplest version of this idea, an individual could only have one representative, so if they moved to a new caucus, any old caucus membership would disappear. If I had previously organized under the Cat Lovers’ caucus and I wanted to move on to join an Agnostic caucus, then my previous membership in the Cat Lovers’ caucus would disappear. If membership in the Cat Lovers’ caucus declined to less than 1/435th of the U.S. population, the Cat Lovers would no longer have a seat in the House.

A slightly more complicated version might allow an individual to join up to five caucuses, and a person could decide on a continuing basis what the set of five caucus memberships would be, permitting more nuanced, multi-dimensional decisions about the sort of interests that citizens would like to see pursued. I might join a Progressive caucus, an Agnostic caucus, a First Amendment caucus, a Writers’ caucus, and even a Columbus Ohio caucus (there’s nothing to prohibit the persistence of geographic caucuses where the inhabitants of a community consider it to be sufficiently important to declare their membership therein). Under that system, a caucus would have to muster 5 times as many people to grab a House seat.

This would be a political system in which political organizing could be constant. This is not the same as election organizing, which for many people is all that they mean by politics. No, this is issue advocacy work, it’s social movement work, it’s pull-together-the-grassroots work. Groups would be talking about issues, spending their time in persuasion, trying to garner enough people around not a particular person but a particular interest or policy platform. Boundaries and divisions within American political discourse could be constantly shifting. The makeup of the Congress might shift in a continual manner.

The system is flexible. If Americans didn’t want constant realignments, we could have a national caucus system as we have a national elections every two years. If not every American participated, then perhaps only 1/435th of the active citizenry would be required for a caucus to grab a House seat. Those who hadn’t been participating in the caucus system might enter it if they got fired up about a topic, enlarging the common demominator for representation.

Each caucus that successfully organizes only manages to get 1 Representative out of 435. I imagine you’d have white supremacists as well as radical communists in the House of Representatives, Christian fundamentalists and Muslim extremists too. But by themselves these extremists would have no power, no ability to get anything done, because in order to get any work done you have to form coalitions. What would we get? We’d get real pluralism, in which caucuses based on particular interests find themselves organizing into meta-caucuses (caucuses of caucuses) of aligned interests along dimensions we might be surprised by in order to get laws passed. Notice that these are not caucuses that require parties any longer. Political parties go away and are replaced by these meta-caucuses which can redistribute themselves into coalitions at will as circumstances change. There could be two meta-caucuses, there could be three, there could be five. They might call themselves by particular names, but there’s nothing to mandate a two-party system any longer, which addresses of one of the complaints made by citizens so long, that we’re stymied by two competing parties satisfying few people and leaving many people feeling unrepresented.

Undergirding this fluid, dynamic caucus system would remain a United States Constitution, which clearly would have to change to allow this to happen, but which would continue to contain a Bill of Rights, would continue to articulate the separation of Executive, Judicial and Legislative powers, and which would continue to require that two-thirds of each federal Legislative body and two-thirds of state legislative bodies agree to any constitutional change. This would guarantee that no matter which substantive caucuses and meta-caucuses held power, minorities would continue to be protected and civil rights would continue to be maintained.

So there’s my idea for the United States of America. I’ve thought about how it might apply outside the United States of America: if we’re transcending geography, why not apply the system to the whole world? You’d have caucuses dispersed across the world, with members of different caucuses all living next to one another. How could you possibly start a war that way? Is this a way to ensure peace in the world, to ensure security through integration? Possibly. A counterpoint to this is that, were a civil war to begin, you would find neighbor butchering neighbor and all hell breaking loose with very little protection given the lack of national boundaries.

And this is where I start to consider the downside to the caucus plan, even for a single nation such as the USA. If the idea is that individuals sign up for caucuses under notarized signatures and thereby elect a member of Congress to a position of power, it becomes very important that each individual citizen be educated, be literate, be aware of their choices, and be free from manipulation. Not every citizen in the United States can read. Not every citizen in the United States is a critical thinker. Many individuals in the United States have been victims of panics. Satanic panic, the idea that there was a Satanic cult of people in our day care centers, proved to be unfounded. The razor-in-the-apple panic has gutted so many Trick-or-Treats nationwide but was based on an unfounded fear. It was real in its effect, though. Terrorist panics. Anti-Muslim panics. Anti-Jew panics. Lynch mobs. What’s to prevent uninformed panic from overtaking a caucus system and driving our government to policy madness?

I don’t know the particular answer to that, but the general answer is that Americans must be more educated. If we had a more educated and more aware population overall, we might have a better political system under our current geographic representation, mightn’t we?

There’s another problem related to connectedness. Some individuals in our country are more connected than others. Some find it easier to connect with others. This includes the more gregarious who have always found an easier place in politics, with the backslapping and handshaking and babykissing required. But there are also economic factors. It takes money to buy a computer and to pay for a broadband internet connection every month. Not everyone has that kind of money. To be certain, these are becoming more affordable, but there still an economic barrier, especially to the large number of Americans with negative wealth. Such people should not be disenfranchised.

And then there’s corporate influence. If corporations are able to employ their money to organize petition distributors, to organize notaries, to collect signatures from the uneducated and unaware, or to manipulate the information available to citizens and thereby gain signatures, what’s to keep a set of corporations from gaining control over a caucus-based political system? We might have a Clean Skies Caucus be a front for the interests of mining interests and coal-fired power plants. The redeeming feature of this system, I think, would be the ability of members of a caucus to withdraw their membership if those members noticed that their representative in the Congress had behaved in a manner opposed to their interests. If enough members withdrew, the representative would lose their seat in the Congress and a new representative would take his or her place, one with more representative political views.

Of course, for that check of the citizenry upon the Congress to work, we’d need to have an aware and informed and critically thinking citizenry. That’s what I keep coming back to. We might want to think about reorganizing our political system to change the way we represent the American population in the halls of power. But the best way, and the simplest way, to heal our political system is for more members of the American public to become aware of what’s going on around them, to enhance their critical thinking skills, to hone their skills of self-expression, to communicate with one another more often, and then to organize themselves in some fashion or another regardless of the fashion in which DC politicians would like to have them be organized. This means we need a stronger education system. This requires a higher respect for civil liberties in the United States. This requires those of us who want to be good citizens to talk to each other more, to express ourselves more, and to find areas of agreement around which we can organize. Add any new-fangled system of political organization you like, but I think these needs remain the same.