Today's Common Sense

A short, non-partisan book about building stronger democracies.

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Table of Contents

I . Why are we divided?
II . The forces pushing us apart
III . Power without Responsibility
IV. Building a Stronger Democracy
V. Your Fellow Americans

“We can build a stronger democracy — one that works for the people, without dividing us in two. Perhaps that is difficult for you to imagine. We have been divided for a very long time. It has been so long that our divisions can seem natural, even inevitable.

But we know humans are not born into this world divided.

And if we are not born divided, then there must be forces in this world that pushed us apart.”

Philadelphia. July 4th 202█

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Introduction

Did we break our democracy, or did our democracy break us?

Are we just too divided to make our democracy work? Or is there something about the way we do democracy that has been pushing us apart?

You already know the “we broke democracy” story. It is broadcast into your eyes and ears every day. We are divided because we disagree with each other; our divisions have been getting worse because we have been getting worse — less informed and more polarized. The government does not work for the people because the current slate of politicians is corrupt.

Democracy works, just not with imperfect citizens like us…

Without realizing it we let fixing democracy become “fixing” each other. That story hurts the individuals who believe it and the societies who let it spread.

So I am going to tell you a very different story about how we ended up divided; one that doesn’t paint half our country as misinformed, self-interested, or morally backwards people.

Maybe we did not break our democracy. Maybe the way we have been doing democracy broke us.

This solutions in this book are different too. There are no utopian calls for a more informed electorate, politicians who act with more integrity, or the breakup of the two-party duopoly. What you will see are realistic reforms that align the interests of politicians with our own, weaken the forces sustaining the two-party system, and make what we share as Americans more important than our differences.

Helping your side win elections is not going to heal the relationships in this country or strengthen our democracy. Broken personal relationships cannot be fixed by one side “winning” every argument — the same is true in partisan politics. Sure, you can land some blows, and sometimes you might even get what you want, but this strategy does not bring anyone closer together or fix what was really broken. It is time to stop fighting for our sides, and start fighting together for the democracy we all deserve.

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I. Why are we divided?

You cannot see the forces dividing us, but you can see the strange patterns they have left behind. Our democracy is split into exactly two sides, and those two sides are stuck in a never-ending tie. Both parties claim this is an ideological debate — that they are just fighting for their principles — but if you watch long enough you see them trade those sacred principles with the other side.

It was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, who sent the US Army to break up a workers strike at Pullman.¹

William Howard Taft, a Republican, helped create the federal income tax. ²

Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, jailed the editors of anti-war and socialist publications, and led an all out assault on free-speech. ³

Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, led a war that freed the enslaved and forever-after made the federal government supreme to the states. ⁴

After that war, it was the Democrats in the South who resisted expanding civil rights for generations. In one particularly famous example, Democratic Governor Orval Faubus used the National Guard to stop Little Rock’s school from integrating. ⁵

When I was younger I thought we were divided because we disagreed with one another. The left and the right have different ideas about morality and how to best govern. I assumed those ideas were what we were fighting about.

But as you zoom out, our politics looks less and less like a fight over the ideas. We may not be divided because we disagree with one another, even though it feels that way.

Take a last breath, and just watch the political game the way that a child would. See how strange we look playing:

There are exactly two sides, who are always tied near 50 / 50.

Both sides claim to be fighting for their ideological principles, while trading those same principles and policies back and forth with the other team throughout the game.

It is clear that the score will remain tied. There will be no long-term winner. This does not seem to be the kind of debate that can even have a winner.

The “good” side has not always been good. The “bad” side used to champion everything you believe. Neither is consistent. Neither has integrity.

So then, what are we really fighting over?

Why are we really divided?

THE DIVIDING LINE

Instead of talking about specific political parties and their policies, I want you to imagine a small town with a central Main Street and only two restaurants. Both restaurants are pizza shops, one on the left side of the street and one on the right.

Now imagine your ideal pizza order. What combination of crust, sauce, and toppings makes the perfect pizza for you?

On Friday you visit the pizza shop on the left and order your ideal pizza. On Saturday you visit the pizza shop on the right and make the same order. You know what you want (your order), but there are many steps between turning that order — just words on a slip of paper — into a pizza. The chefs need to use all their skills in the kitchen to make the pizza you want. Every time they see you, they ask “how was it?” and use that feedback to improve the next pie they make.

Over time the better chef gains a larger market share. The other chef wants to keep up, so he works hard to improve his craft. Both pizza parlors in the town show steady increases in quality, while balancing each other on price.

This pizza gets better because the two shops are in a genuine competition. The only way for either chef to win is by making better pizza.

The pizza tastes good, the people like it, and each year it is getting better. The chefs get to use the full breadth of their talents and find their work fulfilling. 

Lets change one rule: From now on, each chef is required to sell a single kind of pizza, a specialty pie. The build-your-own option is gone. 

Citizens of the town used to order exactly what you wanted with plenty of nuance, but now must choose between two options. Each pizza has ingredients and toppings that reflect some popular tastes, but there are only two possible combinations at any one time.

Both chefs start by making the best pizza he can imagine. After the first week, the consensus of the townspeople is that the right’s chef cooked a better pizza.

Now the chef on the left needs to do something to respond. He goes back into the kitchen and realizes he has two choices: he can copy the other pie outright to make the competition about quality again, or he can copy the right’s pizza and add an exciting new topping. He goes with the second option and finds that it works.

Now the left pizza shop is making a better pizza, and the word is spreading. The chef on the right goes back to the kitchen and cooks up something new, allowing him to take the lead once again.

For the first few weeks, things carry on like this, with big swings in patronage and interesting new pizza inventions.

Before long things start to settle close to an even stable 50 / 50 split with each change having less impact on the score. This happens for two reasons:

First, the competition is exhausting for the people of the town. Switching sides constantly and having to keep up with the latest pizza debates takes a lot of effort. Once habits and tastes form, they are unlikely to switch sides unless they are very disappointed by a change to their pie, or very enticed to go try the other.

The second, more subtle development, is that the chefs become driven less by a desire to make good pizza and more by a desire to increase their market share. They got comfortable making some compromises in quality to attract more customers.

This first happened after a curious intern polled the passersby. He discovered a big opportunity: people miss jalapeños. So he had his chef put jalapeños on their pizza and buy a billboard. That week, the left’s new pie was a huge hit, getting 65% of the sales.

The chef on the right knew that jalapeños were broadly popular, even with his own patrons. To level the playing field, the decision was made to put jalapeños on their pizza too. From the outside this might look like a compromise between the two sides, maybe even political progress. But the right did not add jalapeños to their pizza to make a better pie. Rather, the goal of the compromise was to remove the left’s momentary advantage.

The worst part of this decision was that the quality of the right’s pizza was compromised. The jalapeños did not really make sense next to the right’s banana peppers. They created an abomination, but a winning abomination it was. Every contradiction and hypocrisy you see in our political parties were born in moments like that.

After a few months there is nobody in the town who can really explain what separates the two pizzas. The town’s intellectuals construct simple narratives to help the people talk about the differences between the pizza shops, but when you push on any of these stories — even a little — they fall down. The same is true in our world.

The environmental conservation crowd share their name and their philosophy towards change with the be-careful-what-you-change conservatives. And the free-market conservative crowd’s hero Adam Smith was a liberal philosopher. 

It is not surprising to us how messy and unsatisfactory the grand pizza narratives are. We know that there was no vision or ideological reason that motivated each chef to put all their toppings together. The pizzas are just a collection of toppings that offer a momentary advantage, all stacked on top of each other.

Eventually both chefs stop asking patrons if they liked the pizza. Instead, they pace around the shop as people are eating and remind them the pizza is great. If a patron seems unhappy, they lean over to explain why the pie on the other side of the street is truly flawed: “You think that’s bad? Have you seen how oily those pizzas are across the street? They’ll slip right out of those fine delicate hands of yours, ma’am.”

Even if in their hearts the chefs know none of this makes sense, they have greater incentive to justify their Frankenstein pizzas than they do to make a better pie.

This goes back and forth for a long time, each side using demographic and survey data to find small changes they can make to their pies that will move a few people from one side to the other. That keeps the game close to a tie, and stops either side pulling too far ahead.

That intern from before is now the General Manager. His big break was realizing that some changes to the pizza recipe have more impact than others. If you put meat on the pizza you’ll get all the carnivores and none of the vegetarians, but at least you can predict the behavior of these people — they are “locked in.” He had discovered wedge issues. Now the shop can add whatever they want to bring in the next person, provided they don’t mess with the core ingredients that keep that base in line. A carnivore who hates onions will even buy a pizza with onions on it, because the alternative is that “damn veggie pie from the other side”.

Everyone in Pizza Town ends up eating toppings they do not like and there are always issues on the side each of us vote for that we do not really believe in. 

When both shops stop worrying about what makes pizza taste good, everyone suffers. The people are still free to choose their pizza, but that doesn’t mean the pizzas they get to choose between will be any good. Everybody is still free to choose their representatives, but that doesn’t mean we get a government that works for the people.

The story of Pizza Town helps explain why the sides have changed in every way but one: they continue to oppose the other. Neither side can pull ahead because there is always a topping to add or remove, which returns the game to 50-50. The more data you have, the easier it is to find these moves. In the modern world, better surveys and machines for tallying the results make the game even tighter.

The form of competition we see in Pizza Town even explains the political pole reversals, those times in our history when the parties flip sides. Political pole reversals are difficult to explain if you believe the debate between the two sides is ideological. They are quite easy to explain if you imagine them happening one step at a time, in pursuit of small political advantages. Each tiny modification to a party’s platform is like adding a pizza topping to gain a new customer.

If growing and sustaining market share is what you ultimately care about, then it does not matter whether the ingredients on your side make sense together, or are consistent with the platform you had last decade.

The final descent of Pizza Town comes when the conversation stops being about pizza.

The new billboard proudly proclaims: “Chef Mark…our pizza is more authentic than ya pizza – Chef Hugo.”

In response, the other shop writes: “Doctors agree – the healthiest pizza in town.”

The pizza is already bad and many people have stopped paying attention to the menu, they just order the pie they always do.

When the shops put culture on the menu, they find the people of the town can once again be corralled into visiting their shops.

By this time, chefs have lost nearly all their power. They are still the face of the pizza shops, but they no longer have the freedom to make good pizza or decide what goes on the menu — that is up to management and the statisticians. Because the rules of the game force even the most talented well-meaning chefs to cook bad pizza, the best talent stopped applying for jobs here long ago. 

Everyone in Pizza Town is doing what they are incentivized to do. The pizza gets worse because no one has incentives to make it better. Market share can be gained and sustained without making a good pizza. In representative democracies power can be gained and sustained without working for the people.

WHY OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM WORKS LIKE PIZZA TOWN

In the 1940s, a French Political Scientist named Maurice Duverger made an observation so accurate that political scientists still call it Duverger’s Law.

Duverger noticed that democracies that vote the way that we do, always end up with exactly two sides. He couldn’t find an ideological, historical or cultural basis for this. The “left” and “right” parties looked different from country to country but there were always two.

What these countries had in common was the way they voted: single member districts, and first-past-the-post elections. Whomever won the most votes won the election, there was no prize for second place. This is how we vote in America and Duverger’s law says that two parties will always emerge in countries that vote this way. ⁶

Let’s assume that Duverger is right, that two sides are inevitable in a system like ours. If this is true, then what does it mean to be on the left or the right? How is that dividing line drawn?

Is the divide ideological? With all the people who believe in liberal principles are on the left, and all the people who believe in conservative principles are on the right?

Between the educated and the uneducated?

Good people vs bad people?

People who look back to old ways vs the people who want to try a new way?

The rich and their friends vs the poor?

There is a problem with drawing any line like that: you have to explain why exactly half of every generation ended up on each side of your line. Why are half the people always good and half always bad? Why do half of the country align with the “elites”? Why are half of us smart and the other half ignorant?

Those are actually much harder questions. What could possibly cause such a finely tuned error in humanity itself? This should make you question the usual story we tell ourselves: that we are divided in half because half of us disagree with the other half. The shape of our divisions do not appear natural.

Let’s return to Duverger. How would he draw the dividing line? All he would do is write “Winners” on one side and “Losers” on the other. It can be that simple. When you give power to whomever wins the most votes, you always end up with two groups. The winning party is the one who got the most votes. The losers stand together on the other side. The biggest loser is the opposition party, but they share the losing side of the line with all the smaller parties who fielded candidates. 

Even if the winners only got 1% more of the vote, they get nearly all of the power. The opposition party can get just one fewer vote, but instead of ending up with slightly less power than the winners, they end up with almost no power at all. This is what makes voting for a third party equivalent to throwing your vote away. Voters realize this and choose not to vote for small parties; as a consequence they never grow large enough to compete even though many voters wish there were more options.

Duverger’s law answers why there are two sides, without requiring us to look at the ideological differences between those two sides. The way we vote split us in two before either side’s ideology even existed. The two sides came first, the ideologies we associate with each side came afterward. 

So how did these ideologies form? To answer that we need only to put ourselves in the shoes of the losers. What would you do if your team just lost an election? 

The only way for you to get back into power is to get a few people from the winning side to walk over the dividing line and join you. You could try to convince people that your side produces higher quality government, that your pizza tastes better, but that is slow and it is difficult to do. Just like we saw in Pizza Town, the easier approach is to adopt one key issue that will get some people to walk over the line. You are incentivized to adopt this new position, even if it goes against one of your core principles. If the cost of going from no power to all the power is a little hypocrisy…who can say no?

Your side believes what it does because at some time in the past each of the stories they tell gave them a political advantage. This is all that ideology is: a collection of simple narratives about what one side believes, and why you should believe it too. 

Each side tells these stories to hold their coalitions together, and to convince voters from the other side to join them. 

It does not matter if all these stories make sense together, or remain consistent over the decades. 

It does not matter if politicians or citizens live up to their principles or put the policies they campaign on into practice. 

Politics isn’t really an ideological debate — even though it feels that way. 

We started our conversation discussing the strange shape of democracies: two sides, stuck in a never-ending tie, that trade places on key issues. Now you can explain why we are divided without talking about the issues.

America was always destined to have exactly two sides. The way we vote cut a dividing line through the population from the earliest days of the republic. When a population is split down the middle, and a tradition of giving power to whichever side is bigger takes hold — it creates massive incentives for each side to constantly rewrite their ideology (the pizza recipe) in pursuit of power. Both parties have proven time and again that they will trade their ideological principles and effective governance for a few more votes.

Our political reality is almost the exact opposite of our initial intuitions. The two parties are not fighting for their beliefs; they are fighting for power by changing their beliefs.

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II. The Forces Pushing us Apart

We broke Pizza Town without taking away anyone’s right to choose pizzas; without making the people less intelligent; without spreading misinformation; and without making half the citizens selfish or morally backwards. All we did was limit everyone’s choices. Taking away each citizen’s right to order the exact pizza they wanted was all it took to corrupt the chefs and ruin the town’s pizza.

The people were not the problem.

The way we vote offers us the same limited choices. We have the right to vote, but not the right to vote for exactly what we value. We are only allowed to vote for certain combinations of political positions. 

At first glance, making citizens eat a few toppings they dislike does not sound like enough to break a democracy. But the way we tell the government what we want matters very much because when we are forced into political conformity, we stop treating each other as individual human beings. 

Being forced to choose between left and right makes voters predictable and easy to “lock-in” with wedge issues. The less options we have, the more we behave like the other members of our demographic groups. We become data. Politicians can treat us like numbers, votes to be won, not individual families to be served. 

In turn, we treat our politicians as mere containers for our political beliefs. A body possessed by an ideology. Not a person, just another vote in congress, a tally mark on our side. We will stay in unhealthy relationships with them even when they put bad pizza in our mouth.

And instead of seeing our opponents on the other side as individual human beings, we group them together into faceless, story-less, drones. In casual conversation we speak of all our opponents at once — millions of unique individuals — as a single them. “We believe this, but they believe that…”

Living in a democratic Pizza Town is changing us and not for the better.

FORCED CONFORMITY DIVIDES

Each of us votes for whichever side champions the 1-3 wedge issues that matter most to us — our favorite toppings. We never get to choose all the other toppings on our pizza, the other positions our side supports. Even when we want a topping from the other side, we are not allowed to have it. When we disagree with something our party supports, we have to support it anyway.

The lines have already drawn for us — our very thoughts are being gerrymandered.

We are told that it is important to support our side even though we do not agree with them on everything. “Don’t throw away your vote! You have to compromise!”

But what if voting for positions you do not agree with is the very thing that breaks our democracy?

The more people I meet, the more confident I am that we would all order the “build your own” option if we could.

If everyone could build their own ballot you would be surprised by all the people on the other side who order the same toppings you do. There are many Republicans who vote for conservative economic policies but do not support unrestricted gun rights. There are many Democrats who vote for liberal immigration policies but do not support changing gender norms in elementary schools.

Those four positions have absolutely nothing to do with one another. They should be completely independent and in the real world all of them can coexist in any combination. It is only in the political world we have built for that unrelated political positions are put into direct conflict with one another. 

It is impossible for you to vote for gun control without also voting for higher taxes. Regardless of your opinion on either issue, consider how absolutely absurd it is that you do not have the freedom to vote for one without the other. These are not opposing positions. They literally have nothing to do with each other.

There are people on the other side who share many of your values. They only vote for the other side because they prioritize their values differently than you do. You should not think of these people as your opponents. They have faces — try to imagine them sitting across from you right now. That face, that person, cannot vote for a position the two of you believe in for no-good-reason. They are trapped in a system that does not allow them to vote for exactly what they value, and so are you.

Given the choice, you would both be ordering the jalapeños …

The way we vote is what makes our differences more important than the many things we have in common. 

We are not divided because half of us are completely left-wing and half of us are completely right-wing. We are divided because we are forced to choose.

TYRANNY OF THE EXTREMES

Our system makes single-issue voters much more powerful than ordinary voters. It is not that there are more of them, or that their votes are worth more than other citizens. The reason these groups end up with more power than the rest of us is because the political parties chase them. Both parties have shown time and again that they are willing to change their ideologies and even compromise their principles, in pursuit of a few key votes. 

The closer we are to a tie, the more influence smaller groups have. That is not an opinion, it is written across our history, and it is in math. A game theorist would explain that power concentrates “to the margins” and offer a simple example:

You and four friends are voting on where to go to lunch. Two people want to go to the sandwich shop, and two people want to go to the taco stand. Everyone gets one vote, but as the tiebreaker, you are the one with all the power. The choice of where to go to lunch is entirely yours. The taco and sandwich party will chase you down and try to make a deal, trading the power you have today for a favor in the future. 

Every citizen can get the same number of votes, those votes can be counted fairly, and you still end up with some individuals that have more influence than others. It is just math.  

Let’s briefly return to Pizza Town to see how this effect manifests itself in our political system:

Imagine 10% of the townspeople care more about pepperoni than any other topping. These are single issue eaters who will choose whichever pizza has pepperoni. 

After discovering this, one pizza shop adds pepperoni to create an advantage. We know that political parties and pizza shops like targeting predictable groups. Single topping eaters are the most predictable of all — add what they want to your pizza, and you will get their support every time. 

It works! The pizza shop gets the support of the 10% they targeted. 

But the pepperoni eaters also got something from the deal: all the other customers are forced to eat pepperoni too. This shop already had about half the people in the town as patrons before pepperoni was added: 

• Some of them are ok with pepperoni but it’s not their main issue. They become the Impartial Allies.

• Some of them actively dislike pepperoni but they won’t leave because there is another topping on the pizza that keeps them there. They become Unwilling Allies.

• A few of them leave because they are strongly against pepperoni and cannot believe it’s on their pizza now. These Rebels rush to the other side.

The pizza shop got something, but the pepperoni voters arguably got more. They started with a dedicated group totaling 10% of the population, but now pepperoni has an entire political party fighting for it. The will of the people is distorted.

America’s brief experiment with Prohibition is a great example of how a minority view can become the law. Most Americans did not support the ban on alcohol. Daniel Okrent, the author of Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition explained in an interview ⁷:

I think the major misconception more than anything else is that prohibition is something the majority of Americans wanted. 

In fact, it was primarily the work of one pressure group — the first such group that called itself a pressure group. The Anti-Saloon League knew that if you controlled the margins, you could win legislative majorities and even supermajorities. In any given district, they'd say, Look, 45 percent of the people are for the Democrat, and 45 percent of the people are for the Republican. Who controls the 10 percent of the middle? And that's what they fought for — those 10 percent who would vote for whomever the ASL told them to vote for. By picking only one issue and not caring what legislative candidates — state or federal — cared about in terms of other issues, they were able to have an enormous effect. 

In a representative Democracy an issue’s popular support rarely equals that cause’s political power. A policy 80% of the country supports will get no attention, while an issue championed by a small-committed group of 15% gets the spotlight. Today’s most divisive social issues are characterized by one side wielding disproportionate influence over the national conversation and policy. 

Sometimes this helps your side get something you care about faster. And sometimes it helps a small group of people on the other side pass national policies you do not like. You should reject minority rule in both cases, even when it helps you, because it is not democratic. 

We do not have majority rule today, and we never have. The way we vote keeps the game tied, and gives special interest groups, usually located on the extreme ends of both parties, the power. 

Forced Conformity is what makes our political parties as a whole far more extreme than the average person who votes for them. 

BAD POLICY IS GOOD STRATEGY

The health of a democracy is best measured by how its politicians win elections. Can they only win by working for the people, or are there other roads to being elected? 

The way we do democracy today creates alternative roads to power. Politicians and political parties have learned how to gain and sustain power through keen political strategy. Forced conformity makes each voter remarkably predictable, especially in the era of big data and artificial intelligence. Political parties know most of us are picking our pizza based on one or two of its toppings. If they figure out what our favorite toppings are and which ones we will eat even if we do not like them, they can craft a pizza that appeals to as many of us as possible. It may not taste good, but they know we will eat it anyway. 

Parties can win because of what their candidates say to voters, not what they do in office. Words have become more important than actions. The policies they campaign on target specific segments of the population i.e. farmers, recent graduates, blue-collar workers, religious groups, or people on one side of a social issue. The goal is to get a few influential voters on the margin to decide the next election in their favor. They are willing to promise whatever it takes to lock-in the support of these swing voters. 

Demographically targeted policies are not designed to solve problems, they are designed to win elections. Forgiving student debt sounds good to the people that policy is precision targeted at, but it is unlikely to curb the steady rise of tuition costs. It cures the symptom (high debts) without curing the cause (rapidly rising costs). Party platforms are made up of these short term, precision targeted policies that just move costs and benefits around society, without really fixing whatever was broken in the first place. 

And that is assuming your elected leaders actually keep their promises and put their plans into actions. When one side controls all three branches of government, they only sometimes solve the issues that motivated you and their other supporters to elect them. Sometimes they fail to enact policies that address even the wedge issues on their side. Wedge issues are valuable assets, but only if they are forever issues — never fully solved, or under the constant threat of being repealed. Solving a wedge issue is good for voters, but bad for politicians and parties. They now have to find new ways to keep their voters motivated and engaged. That is why during times of high polarization wedge issues are always talked about, but when given the levers of power our politicians do very little to change the status quo.

To his great credit, George Washington saw all this coming. He warned a young America about the danger of political parties as one of his last acts as President ⁸:

Political parties serve to organize faction; to give it an artificial and extraordinary force […] to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests.

Washington was making the same argument: voting as “factions” inevitably leads to bad government. It does not matter which side wins, they both craft policy that helps their faction at the expense of society. These policies may work in the short-term, but they do not fix underlying problems. 

If our representatives really had a choice, perhaps they would do things differently. Perhaps with better rules of the game they would work for the people. But they are like the chefs in Pizza Town, trapped in the kitchen and kept in-line by the incentives of the larger political machine. If they do not give in and play the politics someone else who will easily beat them. It is dangerous to be a virtuous politician. That is why there are so few.

WHY IT IS DIFFICULT TO HEAR EACH OTHER

Forced conformity makes it difficult to change each other’s minds. If you tell someone the politician they elected is corrupt they must cross some dangerous territory to believe you. Are they the kind of person who supports corrupt politicians? The kind of person who can be duped, tricked, or even used by a politician? They are not rejecting your data. They are rejecting the implications of agreeing with you on their identity. You are fighting against the most powerful of psychological forces.

Take a different tack. Instead of going after the politician you focus on a policy. Imagine that you were actually able to convince someone that your party has a better education policy. What is this person supposed to do next? 

Forced conformity makes it impossible for him to politically support just that one idea from your side even if he wanted to. He could wait for a pollster to call him or write a letter to his representative, but there’s no way for him to vote with you on only this issue.

So you have put him in a position where he must contemplate changing parties. He now has to compare where the two sides stand on the issues that matter to him. Eventually he will come across a conflict “Is this education policy thing more important to me than protecting my job?”

Wow. How he answers that one says a lot about who he is as a person. This is no longer a technical conversation about education policy — you are now in a conversation about this person’s identity and values. 

Why does this man have to choose between protecting his job (trade policy) and helping kids in his state (education policy)? Those two issues could not be further apart from each other. Why must he even decide if he is going to be the kind of person who puts his financial security above the future of his neighbor’s children? 

If he chooses to vote for his job security, he will be called “self-interested.” But who is to say he would not choose both if he could? The problem is the choice itself, the arbitrary and unfair situation forced conformity has put him in. 

Maybe people on the other side are not as self-interested as you imagine them to be. They appear selfish only because we live in a system where we are often forced to choose between helping others and helping ourselves – even when doing both could be possible.

Maybe the other side is not as irrational as you imagine them to be either. They may agree with your argument, but if other issues are keeping them on-side they are not looking to change their mind. More facts will not move them, they just hurt, more reminders that they are stuck where they are. 

When you engage with someone on the other side you are never just debating one issue. Forced conformity means you are always debating all of them, and the identity of both people having the conversation. Everything is on the line. That is what makes it so hard to talk about politics. 

HOW POLITICS BECOMES PART OF OUR IDENTITY

Each of us wants to be respected, and yet we re-elect politicians who have broken their promises and lied to our faces. We say everyone should play by the same rules, but we re-elect politicians we know are corrupt cheats just because they are on our side. We think of ourselves as informed voters, but we vote for down-ballot candidates from our party we never heard of before stepping into the booth. 

We are driven to rationalize contradictions in our identity and behavior. Reducing this form of cognitive dissonance is one of our strongest and most fundamental psychological drives.

We eat a pizza covered in toppings we do not like, baked by people we do not respect, because it is the only option we feel like we have. Participating in today’s political system is creating psychological conflict in all of us. You and I are not immune even if we know it is happening. All of us are driven to find a way to feel good about eating bad pizza year after year because it takes real effort to smile when the food you are eating tastes bad.

The easiest road is to conform. Join the tribe. Just change your beliefs to fit in with the other people on our side. Many of the other ingredients on the pizza were secondary to you anyway, why not learn to like them, or at least be indifferent? This reduces the conflict by eliminating the gap between what you believe and the party line. Many of us choose, consciously or subconsciously, to change ourselves instead of standing apart from our group. This is where the demand for biased news comes from. It is not like the viewers of programming on MSNBC or Fox News are unaware the reporting is biased. There is demand for private propaganda because it helps us fit into our group and rationalize the nonsensical parts of the political system. 

Another road is to frame politics as a good versus evil battle, a fight for the very soul of the country. Demonize the other side and their candidates. Sure there are some real differences between you and your side, sure the leaders are corrupt, but this is war damnit! A good soldier would put all that aside, get out there, and vote. This reduces the weight of the conflict on your psyche by giving it meaning. It makes winning feel like survival. Ignoring the differences between your beliefs and your party’s platform is no longer a denial of self, but the preservation of it. 

Others will frame our current political divide as part of an eons old debate. They weave grand narratives about the fundamental conflict: Authoritarianism versus freedom, the rich versus the workers, oppressors versus the oppressed, central planning versus free markets, etc. The real-world data never fits neatly into any of these narratives, but that does not matter. Saying we are fighting for something other than power makes us feel like we are fighting a good fight. This is the same as claiming the conflict is good versus evil, but with an ideological bent rather than a moral one. It is just another way of giving the conflict more meaning.

When our brains are trying to reduce cognitive dissonance, they are never seeking truth. We are only ever trying to explain our past behavior and protect aspects of our identity. We knew the pizza tasted bad, but we ate it anyway. Now we must explain why we keep doing that to ourselves.

Filling the two-party conflict with meaning can make us feel better. But once we find our meaning participating in politics, it becomes its own identity. I think we would understand each other much better if we learned to see partisan behavior for what it really is: a painkiller for our helplessness. Joining the tribe makes us feel better about voting for our side, despite how little progress our politicians actually deliver. Standing together, calling the other team the same names, writing folklore, and wearing the same colorful outfits gives meaning to the bad choices we are given each election. 

FORCED CONFORMITY REMOVES ACCOUNTABILITY

The founders made it our job to hold politicians accountable. If a politician stops working for the people, we are supposed to fire them. The founders thought they left us the tools to do this. By forcing politicians to stand for reelection frequently the founders made sure an opportunity to fire bad politicians was never far away.

Today, we know representatives who break their promises are consistently reelected. In the 2022 midterms 94% of House members and 100% of the Senators up for reelection won⁹, despite Congress’s 22% approval rating¹⁰. That should not be possible. Progress stalls for decades without consequences for those in office. 

Without realizing it, we lost the ability to fire the bad representatives. The system of accountability our founders gave to us has clearly broken down. 

So what did they miss? 

Many public intellectuals blame the voters: citizens are not informed enough or are too easily manipulated to do the job of holding politicians accountable. Others blame the strategic expansion and limiting of voting rights, gerrymandering, and other forms of cheating.

So our democracy can only work with really informed citizens and honorable politicians who refuse to play the power game? These do not sound like solid foundations to build any system upon. 

Believing that we broke our democracy is a fundamentally flawed and helpless position to take. Human nature is. It is not good or bad. It just is. The rules of the game determine whether our best selves or our worst selves come out. That is what we can change. Claiming we are the problem makes it all seem so big that it can never be solved. When we let fixing democracy mean “fixing” people, it slices away at our hope and conditions us to look for solutions in the wrong places.

So let’s look in the right place. Let’s zoom in to the individual. Instead of thinking about other citizens, just think about yourself. 

What can you do when a politician you elected last time has not done a good job? You are standing there in the voting booth, your hand is hovering over their name. 

You could vote them out of office, but that usually means voting for a candidate on the other side that you agree with even less. To get this politician out of office, you have to support the other side’s platform. Since most incumbents win their primaries, it is rarely possible to vote for the platform you believe in, without re-electing that bad politician. You feel pressure to re-elect them even though you know this person does not deserve your vote. It is an impossible choice: firing someone you know is bad or giving the other party power. 

There is more than one option on that ballot, but that does not mean that you actually have a choice. Most of the time we just re-elect the bad politicians. 

That’s it. That is why our leaders can remain in power without making good pizza. Most of the time we will not fire them for bad performance, and they know it. 

Are you seeing the larger consequences of being forced into conformity? 

Here we reach the central point of our conversation together—the part that brings together everything we have discussed so far:

We live in a Pizza Town. We still have the right to vote, but we do not have a real choice. A real choice was the tool our founders gave us to hold those in power accountable. That tool has been all but destroyed. Without it, the system of accountability our founders envisioned short-circuits.

If you are never willing to vote for the other side, then there is almost nothing in a representative democracy that holds politicians accountable.

So are you willing to vote for the other side?

Or do we need to figure out another option? A new way of voting that encourages politicians to work for the people, without dividing us in two.

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III. Power Without Responsibility

We are taught that a government by the people always works for the people. When citizens hire and fire their leaders, the government those leaders create works for their benefit. Spreading freedom and prosperity to any people is just a matter of spreading the right to vote. That’s the founding myth of representative democracy. 

We know reality is a bit more complicated. America has “spread” free elections to many countries, but only sometimes has a thriving democracy taken hold. At home we still get to vote, but that has not been enough to make our leaders work for us.

By the people does not always mean for the people. Something important is missing from the stories we tell about representation. At first I thought that the missing thing was choices. More choices on the ballot should end forced conformity by breaking the two-party duopoly. I started to explore alternative methods of voting that allow for multiple parties and better represent each voter. 

Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) was the obvious place to start. It has been gaining traction in cities and for certain state elections so I went to those places to learn more. On an RCV ballot you rank your top five candidates instead of choosing one. If your first choice does not win, your vote goes to your second choice, then the third, etc. The big idea behind RCV is that no vote is ever wasted. RCV is a clever solution that lets voters support a third-party candidate they really like without the risk of handing victory to the major party they do not like. 

Supporters of RCV promise it will end the two-party duopoly by allowing candidates from smaller parties to compete. People I met on the street mostly liked the idea, but few had used the ballots to vote for a third-party. This is backed up by the data. It is still exceedingly rare for a third-party candidate to win even an RCV election. A study found that 93% of RCV elections were won by the candidate who got the most first round votes — making the result no different than a regular election¹¹. It is encouraging to see something this new being tried in the real world, but the results are early and mixed. The cities that use RCV have not become thriving multi-party cities that show us what America could be at its best. 

Maybe it just takes time or national adoption for RCV’s promise of more parties to come to fruition. Luckily I did not need to wait. I traveled across the Atlantic to experience Europe’s multi-party parliamentary democracies. These countries have been around for a long time. If having more than two parties reduced forced conformity to an acceptable level, the evidence would be here. In each of the countries I visited it is common for four or more different parties to win seats in the parliament (their Congress) each election. Sometimes one party wins a majority of the seats and can form a government (executive branch) on their own. When there is no clear majority a few parties must form a coalition government and rule together. 

What struck me spending time in these places was just how familiar it all felt. People on the street seem frustrated with their leaders and talk about other-siders the same way we do. Pick up a newspaper and you see polarization here too, a bit weaker perhaps, but still omnipresent. Multi-party systems can polarize too and the quality of governance can be just as bad. After spending time with the French, Dutch and British I am less convinced that having more than two parties is a magical cure to whatever is weakening American democracy. There is no silver bullet here.

As I was getting ready to leave someone in the UK explained it to me: 

This is essentially a two-party system: Labour and the Conservatives. Even in parliamentary systems, you end up with a centre-left and a centre-right party. It is better to think of the smaller parties as the factions within the American parties like the evangelicals, greens, free-market conservatives, and classic liberals. They focus on a few issues and know they won't govern alone. When a major party doesn't win a clear majority, the smaller parties form a coalition government with whichever side offers them the best deal. In your system, the factions align before the election, not after. That’s the main difference. You should read Karl Popper (one of the greatest political philosophers). He explains why your two-party system is better than the one we have.

Great. Right back where I started. 

Making the government work for the people and healing our divisions will require more than a few new parties. I decided to put this project aside for a while. For a while, I had truly given up. 

Until one day I saw something on a plane that showed me the path out of Pizza Town. I thought our democracy was missing choices, but the whole time it was something else. 

On this morning, I was seated near the front of a plane waiting to take off. To pass the time I started counting how many passengers looked into the cockpit before turning to find their seats. Eighty-four people boarded the plane after me. Only two of them peered into the cockpit. For the entire flight I could not get that out of my head.

We will spend hours poring over reviews of restaurants and hotels before making a reservation, but we step onto a plane without reading a review of our pilot. We have become so comfortable putting our lives into the hands of pilots that most of us do not take the time to size them up before strapping in for the ride. When else do you put your life entirely in somebody else’s hands without even making eye contact with them?

Eventually I figured out why this was keeping my attention: our relationship with pilots is the opposite of our relationship with politicians. We know without looking that pilots can be trusted, and we know without looking that our politicians cannot. Like pilots, the choices politicians make have a large effect on our lives. Once they have been elected, they close themselves off behind the doors of power to work the complex machinery of government — just like a pilot in the cockpit flying the plane.

There is something each of us intuitively understands about our relationship with the pilots that leads us to trust them. Nobody protests. Nobody suggests that flying would be safer if the airlines held elections to decide which two passengers would fly the plane. We are happy to give the captain absolute power from the moment the plane door closes to the moment it opens again. Time after time the pilots prove themselves worthy of that trust. In this little slice of the world power seems to work for the people without any of the usual democratic mechanisms. Sure, pilots are skilled and licensed, but the reason we trust these particular experts is that they literally have skin in the game. They are all-in, they will not walk away from a screw-up.

In American civics classes children are taught about the different forms of ‘-archy’ and ‘-cracy’ — democracy, autocracy, monarchy, oligarchy. These words are based on the Greek words for “power.” From an early age we are taught about the separation of powers and the powers of the different kinds of representatives.

We understand politicians can abuse their power, but what is it called when they fail to work for the people? We don’t really have a word for this kind of abuse.

When we only talk about power, we see the world in black and white. Thinking about the differences between pilots and politicians made me realize there are other colors most of us have not been seeing.

Think about the best boss you ever had — a true leader, someone who inspired you. No matter how wonderful they were, they were still your boss and still wielded power over you. Now think about the worst boss you ever had — they wielded power over you as well. So the thing that separates good bosses from bad bosses cannot be power. It has to be something else: their willingness to take on responsibility for the growth, success, and health of their team. Titles and power do not make anyone a good leader. Leadership is not about what powers you have, it is about the responsibility you take. 

We cannot assume that just because someone is our boss, they will be a good leader. We cannot assume that just because a politician has power, they will take responsibility for the people who gave it to them. When we say that politicians are corrupt, what we are really pointing out is that they have taken responsibility for interests other than those of the people who elected them. A corrupt politician has taken on responsibility to a select group of influential citizens or corporate interests, not their constituents. 

This understanding lives strong in our collective unconscious. In our political lore, the heroic politicians are the ones who take responsibility. These characters have integrity. They do what is good for their communities even when it is not popular with the insiders or the influential. The fact we actively celebrate politicians who take responsibility for the people reveals a profound truth: in the current system, taking responsibility for your constituents is optional. Politicians are not required to work for the people. If taking responsibility for their constituents was the norm, there would be no reason to celebrate it.

What a society celebrates can show what is broken.

It is responsibility, not power, that allows us to live in cooperation with one another. A group of humans taking responsibility for each other is as good a definition as any for society.

So what if the cure for the sickness that weakens our democracies has been right in front of us this whole time? It is found in the difference between a bad boss and a true leader. It is practiced by the friends who always have your back, while lacking in those who let you down. It can be seen and felt in the best of our relationships and is practiced by the teachers who inspired us, the religious leaders who get through to us, and in the people we most trust. 

Responsibility. That is why we trust the pilots. Not because of their power, but because at the same time they received that power they took on a genuine responsibility for our well-being. We trust pilots to see our safety as their most important duty because we all like to think we would do the same. That could well be enough, but we also have systems to further align our interests with those of pilots. There is real accountability at every point of contact. Pilots are not allowed to have emergency parachutes on commercial flights. If the worst happens, the pilot’s fate will always be the same as ours.

This arrangement has provisions addressing the full spectrum of human nature. A moral pilot will see protecting passengers as a duty. An innately self-serving pilot (if such a person existed) will only care about their own safety. This works too. Since there is no parachute in the cockpit, their safety is conveniently coupled with our safety. Serving our interests has been made equivalent to serving their own. 

Our social instincts are extremely well-tuned. We evolved to live in groups and parse the motivations of those around us. We intuitively trust people in power when we know they have taken genuine responsibility for our interests, and that commitment is backed up by an effective system of accountability. 

We trust pilots because their power over us comes with responsibility and real accountability. We do not trust our politicians because the power we give them is divorced from responsibility and true accountability. 

We do not need more choices on the ballot. What we need is a ballot that creates more responsible politicians. 

To build a stronger democracy we need to place responsibility at the center of our political system. That is how we turn our politicians into pilots. That is how we escape Pizza Town.

THE PROBLEM WITH VOTING FOR PEOPLE

Running for office turns ordinary people into politicians. They begin speaking the strange language of distraction and evasion, where much can be said without saying anything. They play hot-potato with responsibility, passing it around so it rarely falls on any one of them. Instead of listening to the people they serve, they spend their time telling those same people what to believe. Somehow their job shifted from “representing” to “persuading”. Campaigning strips them of authenticity, replacing a genuine attempt at representation with something more calculated. Instead of being our voice they try to shape the public’s opinion.

The way people order the pizza changed how the chefs in Pizza Town behaved; the way we tell the government what we want changes how our politicians behave. 

In school we learn a lot about the jobs the founders left for representatives, senators and the president. We spend much less time thinking about the jobs they gave to us, the citizens. In representative democracies, the people have three of the most important jobs: 

• The people define the government’s responsibilities. We decide what “for the people” means. We set the agenda, the values, and the priorities of our government. 

• The people choose the leaders. We decide who can be trusted with the powers required to pursue our agenda.

• The people hold the leaders accountable. If those leaders fail to do what they promised, or abuse their powers, we have a duty to fire them. 

Every time you cast a vote you are doing all three of these jobs at once. Voting for a name on the ballot is how we say what the government should do; it is how you decide who gets power; and it is how you hold your leaders accountable. 

Voting for people combines our three jobs into a single political act and that makes it difficult to do any of the three jobs well. 

You answer the question “what should the government work on?” by picking a name. The overwhelming majority of citizens support a mix of positions from both sides, but that nuance is lost when we reduce everything to a binary choice. Because the ballot is a list of names it is impossible to build your own ideology and tell the government what you actually value. The ballot is what forces us into conformity. 

Voting for people puts the job of defining the government’s responsibility in conflict with the job of choosing our leaders and holding them accountable.

The ballot also asks you to answer the question “did your representative do a good job?” by picking a name. You can’t just say “no, get rid of them”, you have to choose a different name, a candidate from the other side. To remove this bad politician you have to give power to a different party. Most of us are unwilling to do that so once again this bad politician gets our vote. 

The job of holding politicians accountable is in conflict with the other two. That is why when you are standing in the voting booth you feel forced to choose between bad and worse. That is why, as we explored in the last section, accountability has vanished. Combining these jobs is the reason bad politicians can get elected over and over again. 

Voting for people turns our leaders into these half-human, half-ideological minotaurs; a person possessed by whatever ideology they talk about the most: a politician. We vote for them because of the ideology they support, not what they achieve in office, and not because of who they are. They can win elections without making good pizza and they know it.

That’s it, right there, that’s the whole thing. Combining these three jobs into one messy political act was the birth of politics as we know it. It is why governments by the people do not always work for the people.

Voting for people makes it impossible to express our nuanced political beliefs and values. We are forced to pick a person who represents a bundle of political beliefs. It does not matter if there are two, three or six options. Asking citizens what they want from their government with a multiple-choice question is what forces us into conformity. 

Voting for people gives politicians power, without assigning them responsibilities or holding them accountable. Because politicians represent an ideology the right strategy in the voting booth is almost always to re-elect them. If they are doing a good job we are re-electing the person. If they are doing a bad job we are re-electing the ideology, securing that “one more vote in congress”.

Voting for people is what traps us in Pizza Town.

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IV. Building a Responsible Democracy

If combining the three jobs of citizens into one messy political act is what forced us into conformity and removed accountability from our leaders; then perhaps breaking apart the vote is the obvious solution. We could separate the jobs our founders gave us into their own distinct political acts: one process to define the government’s responsibilities, a process to choose our leaders and give them power, and an independent process to hold those leaders accountable. 

That is how we build a stronger, more responsible democracy. Not by changing our nature, by changing the system. It will not be easy. We have been voting for people for so long that it is difficult to even imagine doing democracy any other way. But as Einstein rightly noted “The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

This tradition of voting for people and giving those people power is a lot newer than most of us realize. In Athens, the first Western democracy in recorded history, the three jobs were separated. Citizens did not vote for representatives, instead they came together in an Assembly and voted directly on government policies. Athens did not have an elected legislative branch, whoever showed up for each meeting acted as the legislature.

The policies passed by the Assembly were implemented by an executive branch called the Boule. Five-hundred officials served one year terms. Almost all of these officials were chosen at random. The Athenians had a tradition in their democracy of “leaving the final choice to the gods” so they used a device called a Kleroterion to select most of their leaders randomly. A few positions (mostly in the military) were elected, but the overwhelming majority were random appointments. 

The Athenians were able to randomly select their leaders because their responsibilities were defined separately from their powers. The Assembly decided the policies and the leaders were responsible for putting those policies into practice. Each official was just an official. They did not become “politicians” because they did not represent ideologies. They were just a person, asked to do a difficult job for their fellow citizens. It did not matter if that person believed in the assembly’s decisions. Their job was to use the power they were temporarily given to perform a job their community gave them.  

At the end of each term, members of the Boule were subject to a hearing called a Euthyna to review their performance. Each member had to make the case that they used their powers for the good of the community and had made progress on their mandate. Any citizen could bring a complaint and if subsequent investigations turned up misconduct or corruption real consequences followed (i.e. fines, exile, disqualification). Euthyna made officials in Athens accountable, even though they were randomly selected, and even though they never stood for re-election. 

The Athenians separated the setting of policy, the choosing of its officials, and the review of those official’s performance. Each job had its own political act, avoiding the conflicts caused by combining them.

Athens was a dense city with a population around 250,000 with only the 30,000 male citizens eligible to take part in the Assembly. Small size and close proximity are essential to making a direct democracy work. In the modern world, the few remaining direct democracies are in small cities and towns. Even at medium scales direct democracy breaks down. You cannot fit every citizen in the country into one room. You certainly cannot structure a productive conversation between millions of people.

In a direct democracy, logistical constraints like the size of a room, who arrives first, and the start time of a meeting shape the fairness of the system. Citizens with lots of free time have an outsized influence. They had all day to prepare their arguments while everyone else was out making a living. Requiring every citizen to remain informed enough to make good technical decisions on a wide range of issues is not very practical, especially in the complex world of today. If we did direct democracy in the United States none of us would have much time to do anything else.

Standing in a circle, making decisions together, and giving each other jobs works, but it does not scale. Civilizations have been trying to figure out how to scale what Madison called “pure” democracy for millennia.  

The Romans made the next innovation. They were the first to delegate the hard job of knowing how things work to representatives, some appointed, some elected. There was a limited number of these representatives at any given time which made a productive discourse in the governing body possible. Citizens voted for their representatives and went about their lives. The people did not need to educate themselves about the nuances of government to participate. They just had to hire and fire their representatives. The Founding Fathers chose this kind of representation as the starting point for our political system. 

In Rome and in our Republic, it did not take long for these representatives to realize they were no longer just people. They were people who represented political positions. Because ordinary citizens were not part of the legislative process the only way for them to affect the government’s policy was by choosing leaders who talked about the positions they supported. Politicians soon learned that they could win because of what they said on campaign, not because of their character, or the progress they delivered. 

Representative democracy has proven it can scale to hundreds of millions of people, many more than direct democracy ever has. It has decidedly made our world a better place. But that does not mean it is beyond improvement. There must be other ways of scaling democracy that do not turn our leaders into politicians. 

RESPONSIBLE DEMOCRACY

Imagine a democracy where leaders are rewarded for their results, not their rhetoric; where you can vote exactly for what you value; and where removing ineffective leaders does not mean giving power to the opposing side. This is a Responsible Democracy. 

In a Responsible Democracy the people set the government’s agenda directly by voting for what they value. The government’s leaders and their responsibilities are independently voted on removing the conflict that forces us into conformity. You can say that you want the government to solve “these problems” and that you trust “this person” to go do it. 

On inauguration day every leader receives a clear set of goals outlining what they are expected to use their power for. No leader is given power without clear responsibilities. 

At the end of the term every leader’s performance is reviewed. Leaders who have achieved the goals we gave them are rewarded, but not with reelection. They get a bonus and some honors before being sent home. The only way to win is by solving real problems. Serving in the government is made into a true civic duty, it stops being a career. 

These are the principles of Responsible Democracy: Ask citizens what they value, hand qualified leaders the reigns; then hold leaders accountable for making progress towards our collective goals. 

We do not know how to build a system like that. Nobody, not even the Founding Fathers, has ever designed a political system on paper that worked in the real world exactly as they expected. We need to start experimenting — that is all I am calling for. Interesting proposals are not solutions, they are hypotheses. They become solutions only when they are paired with evidence. The only thing to do is admit our limitations, point ourselves in a promising direction, and experiment with the details. That is how we learn.

The Founders left us one of the only countries in the world with a truly federal system. Towns, cities, even states are free to experiment with how their local government works. Right now there are communities experimenting with democratic reforms like Ranked Choice Voting, Single Transferable Vote, Citizen Assemblies, Participatory Budgeting, and Open Primaries. 

In America, new ideas can be tested and refined locally and scaled up if they work.

We can and we must start small, with school boards — there are 13,000 of them. That is an enormous opportunity. Can we build more responsible school boards, that better serve students, without dividing their communities? Only one way to find out. Starting on a scale this small lets us iterate and learn faster, with much lower stakes. 

There are 5,000 towns with 50,000 people living in them. If we learn to build better school boards, take what works and start building more responsible local governments. 

There are 91 cities with more than 250,000 citizens - go there next. Show that real change is possible in the places many of us live.

There are 50 states. Get a few and learn, then get a lot. 

There is 1 federal government. If the evidence from the states shows promise, this final step will come naturally.

That progression, from local to national, is the only plausible way to make a lasting positive change to the status quo. It would be intellectually dishonest and reckless to go about reforming a system this important and complex any other way. Follow the process, stay humble, and remain curious. Do not skip steps. There must be better ways of voting, ones that end forced conformity and make our leaders work for the people. Starting small allows us to refine our approach and learn from our triumphs and setbacks.

With that important context set, I will outline my blueprint for a Responsible Democracy. This is a starting-point, a first-draft, an example of just how big we need to be thinking. Copy it, tear it down, remix it with your own ideas. If after a lot of experimentation the reforms we arrive at look nothing like what I've proposed, that is a success — it means a lot was learned. I do not have the answers, but I have some hypothesis and the founders gave us a way to test them.

So let’s start at the beginning, with the first and most important thing we need to rethink: the ballot.  

VOTING FOR VALUES

How could we bring a build-your-own pizza option to our democracy?

We have tried putting people on the ballot (voting for who). This creates politicians, forces us into conformity, and removes accountability. 

We have tried voting for policies directly (voting for how). This has never scaled to a country as large as ours.

So what if instead of voting for how or who, we voted for what we valued?

On the ballot you would see questions like:

• Should everyone have access to healthcare they can afford? Who is included in your definition of “everyone” [check the boxes]?

• Should individuals who make poor health decisions (e.g., smoking, overweight) pay more for their care or the same as healthy people?

• The US spends more on health care than any other country (17% of our GDP compared to 9–11% of GDP in most European countries). Should reducing the overall costs of the health care system be a priority?

We would never ask voters “how” each problem should be solved — almost none of us are qualified to answer that question. Instead, we just ask voters what they value. That distinction may be subtle, but it is what makes this idea fundamentally different from direct democracy. The ballots ask us what "good government" looks like, not how to get there. 

Direct democracy asks confusing policy questions only experts can answer. Voting for values asks important questions that anyone can answer.

Voting values lets the people set clear goals for the government while leaving experts plenty of space to figure out how to get there. The people pick the goals and our leaders figure out the best way to achieve them. 

Since nothing is free these value ballots will have to ask about trade-offs we are willing to make in pursuit of what we value. Instead of obscuring the trade-offs (which is common in the discourse today) we should ask about them up-front so leaders know what levers they can pull and how far:

• You said healthcare for everyone was important to you, would you pay higher taxes to achieve this goal (estimated at $85/month, based on your tax return last year)?

If not, how much would you pay?

• Would you support a radical restructuring of the healthcare system to bring costs in line with the rest of the developed world (America spends 40% more than most of Europe)?

  • I understand that private health insurance companies may go out of business, leading to the loss of many administrative jobs in the insurance industry.

  • I understand doctors and healthcare workers may make less money if the total cost of healthcare decreases.

  • I understand that quality of care across the healthcare system may be impacted during the transition.

The same kinds of questions about values and tradeoffs would be asked for foreign policy, education, economic policy, criminal justice, etc.

These values elections could be held every 2-3 years. Filling out a ballot would take an hour and elections would probably have to run for several weeks. But at the end of the election enough information will have been collected to create a comprehensive rubric defining what "good governance" means for the next few years. 

The goals outlined on this rubric would be specific enough that each leader’s performance could be objectively measured. When leaders receive clear goals alongside their power, it is possible to review their performance objectively at the end of their term. 

It has always been the job of citizens to define the government’s responsibilities. Voting for values would let the people do that directly, not by voting for a person who stands-in for a set of ideological positions. Voting for values frees us from Pizza Town by replacing political conformity with political diversity. 

When I discuss voting for values with strangers the first questions people ask are: Where do these values ballots come from? How do we make sure they are fair, unbiased, and ask the right questions? 

REFEREE, NOT REPRESENT

Putting responsibility at the center of democracy requires a new kind of representative, one with responsibility, not power: a referee. 

These referees make sure the government is working for the people. They create the ballot for the values election and they hold government officials accountable for meeting goals set by the people. They do not do the actual work of governing.

On Election Day, citizens choose someone from their district to serve as their Referee and they fill out their values ballot. 

Building the Rubric: Once sworn in, the new Referees spend their first four months reviewing the results of the values election and working together to create a single rubric for the government. This rubric spells out which problems the people want prioritized, what a “good” solution to those problems look like, and what tradeoffs the public is willing to make in pursuit of these goals. Referees translate the people’s values into concrete goals, but they have no say in “how” each goal is reached. 

Many of the results from the values election will easily translate onto the rubric. There will be cases when things are more complicated. For example, what happens when there is a disagreement about the amount of additional taxes citizens are willing to pay to increase access to the healthcare system? What is the right way to split the difference? Do you take the minimum increase so everyone is happy? The average? Do you split the difference with the healthcare industry?   

The Referees get to decide the terms of any such compromises. They debate and vote amongst themselves to get to a final rubric. Not everyone will be happy, but if the new government is not provided with a clear set of goals, they cannot be held accountable at the end of their terms. Unclear mandates cause gridlock and bad policy. It is the job of Referees to align goals across the entire government before the leaders are sworn in. The Referees make sure all our leaders are working together and aiming at the same things. 

The finalized rubric outlines clear and measurable goals for each part of the government. After the rubric is completed, the next batch of elected Leaders (more on them soon) are sworn-in and each is given responsibility for one of the goals. 

Holding the leaders accountable: Now that a new government with clear goals has taken office it is time to review the performance of the outgoing government. The Referees hold public hearings to evaluate the performance of the last batch of leaders.

If leaders reach their goals, the Referees can issue cash bonuses, honors, and other forms of public appreciation. When goals are not met they can withhold bonuses up and down the department. If corrupt behavior is uncovered (accepting bribes, or lying in the data) jail time and large personal fines can be issued. 

If our leaders do a good job solving problems, should they not be rewarded with more than just reelection? If our leaders fail or make things worse should there not be a larger consequence than not being reelected?

An explicit review of our leaders' performance, like the Athenian euthyna, is missing from our democratic system today. With clearly defined goals we can objectively measure and reward the performance of our leaders. 

Everyone who has worked in a large bureaucracy knows it is possible to meet your official goal by exploiting a loophole or creating another huge problem somewhere. Referees are encouraged to consider the big picture and hold leaders accountable for meeting their goal without compromising the spirit of the goal. 

At the end of these hearings our Referees vote on whether or not a leader reached their goal and faithfully served. They have the final say. In many ways, Referees are like a jury who deliberates on the question of government responsibility. 

Just like a juror, each Referee is expected to be impartial. Procedures will need to be put in place so that Referees who violate their oaths or act in bad faith can be dismissed, just like in a courtroom. It is impossible to outline exactly what those procedures need to be without experimenting. The incentives of the Referees is one of the most critical parts of this proposal to refine through testing and iteration. 

Creating the values ballot: Since coming into office the Referees have seen how the values ballot becomes a rubric, and how that rubric is used to hold leaders accountable. Now, with greater appreciation for how these ballots are used, they work together to create the ballot for the next values election.  

The Referees break into committees organized around the main departments of the government and begin working together to draft a ballot for the upcoming values election. They make sure the issues that matter to their communities appear on the ballot. They consult with the current government to present their citizens with realistic options and tradeoffs. They collaborate with experts in survey design to reduce bias and leading questions. 

Once we start experimenting with value ballots at a small scale the best practices and things to avoid will make themselves obvious. Values ballots could be a flat list of multiple choice questions, or a responsive digital ballot that asks different clarifying questions depending on how you answer. It is hard to predict what will work best before we test, but I think we will know “good” when we see it.

When the values ballots are finalized it marks the end of a Referee’s three year term and their careers in government. Being a Referee is not meant to be a career, it is a duty. You can be a Referee one time and then are permanently banned from holding the position again. We do not need a class of long-serving professional Referees. 

Referees translate the people’s values into specific, measurable goals for our government. They hold every leader accountable for making real progress on that mandate. Creating a body of Referees reimagines how citizens do two of their three jobs. 

Now let’s discuss how we might do the final job: who are these “leaders” and how they are chosen. 

LEADERS

Long ago the best chefs stopped applying to jobs in Pizza Town and the most talented Americans started to avoid public service. Leaving your career behind and subjecting your family to the scrutiny of public life is a huge sacrifice. Even if you win, political gridlock and the influence of special interests will make it difficult to make real changes. 

So here is a proposition for you: Could we solve some of our biggest challenges if we just hired the best people for the job and made it easy for them to try out new ideas? How do we get the most best of us into public service?

The leaders in a Responsible Democracy are given responsibility for some goals on the rubric and become the head of a government department. At the national level that maps to becoming secretary of x; in a town a department head, and on a school board an assistant superintendent.

Referees spell out the scope and limitations of each leader’s power and how their initiatives are funded. Each of the leaders is granted narrow executive power and legislative powers that let them change policy and law related to their goals. Referees pick the target, the leaders draw the line. No political bullshit, no lobbyist, no pork. New ideas can be tried faster, free from the influence of special interests.

The best chefs will apply to a job like that. 

Choosing leaders in Responsible Democracy can look very different than how we choose leaders today. Electability, likability, ideology...these all stop mattering when citizens choose the government’s goals and its leaders separately. 

Character, integrity and the ability to affect change in the direction of the nation's goals become the most important qualifications. Each candidate’s personal beliefs stop mattering. We stop asking candidates “what would you do in office” because we are the ones who tell our leaders what to do when they get into office — that is what values elections are all about. Choosing our leaders and defining the government’s agenda separately, fundamentally changes the nature of public service and who can win an election. 

The best way to choose leaders in a town, a mid-sized and at the federal level might look different. Let’s discuss some of the options we have in front of us and experiment to see what works best at each level: 

Elect them: After the values election and finalization of the rubric a second election would be held to choose the leaders. Members of our communities run short campaigns (~2 months) where they make the case that they have the best experience or plan for executing on the goals in the rubric. They do not speak about their own political beliefs, because that is not relevant to achieving the goal the values election has assigned for this position. We’re hiring them for a very specific job, so it does not matter where they stand on any of the other issues. 

There are still risks to giving power to people who seek it. Those risks can never be fully removed. We could mitigate this risk by having a single term limit, short campaigns, and strict campaign finance rules. 

Referees hire them: For small towns, cities, and school boards, it could make sense for Referees to hire the leaders for various parts of the government after they’ve created the rubric. 

Similar to a corporate board, the Referees recruit qualified leaders to act as executives in the government and do the people’s work. They hold them accountable to the goals in the rubric and can fire/replace them if they are not performing. 

The people get to choose the Referees and set the government’s agenda. The Referees choose the actual executives who work on those goals. This puts qualified individuals into power, constrains them with clear goals, and keeps them insulated from the pressures of special interests and election cycles. Those leaders just focus on cooking good pizza and never have to leave the kitchen to ask us to re-elect them. 

Civic Draft (opt-in): If we make individuals compete against one another in elections, we open them up to outside influence. To raise money they may have to make promises that compromise them. 

Instead of making them compete, what if we drafted them? At various points in our history, we have made it the duty of young men to travel across the world and risk their lives for our country. 

Is it not reasonable to draft qualified individuals with a proven track record to work on our most pressing domestic problems? The best way to make people in government treat their job as a duty is by literally making it a duty. We can motivate them with rewards and honors for a job well done and the social consequences of walking away a failure.

Referees could spend some of their time recruiting qualified citizens to sign on to a civic draft pool. Imagine a draft pool of 20 of the most-qualified private citizens to lead every part of the government e.g. agriculture, energy, public health, education. 

From there we follow the Athenian tradition of “leaving the final choice to the gods”. After the values elections, a random name is drawn from each draft pool and that person is given responsibility for goals on the rubric and the powers needed to achieve them. 

At the end of the term, the Referees evaluate the performance of this randomly selected leader and issue honors, rewards, or penalties. 

Civic Draft (automatic): At the federal level the stakes are higher. There is more opportunity for corruption and greater public consequences for failing to make progress on our goals. 

We might experiment with giving Referees the power to add qualified citizens to a civic draft pool without their consent (a real draft). 

This would open the door to bringing some of the nation’s best talent into public service for a few years of their lives. If your name is chosen, you have to serve. 

Imagine if we never gave power to people who wanted it. Instead we give responsibility for a clear goal, to a qualified person, who does not want the job. That feels like a transformative idea if we can make it work. No one who seeks power would ever be given it. Most of the people who “win” the draft will probably think of it as an extremely inconvenient but necessary duty. Once their term is up, they leave with honor or as the subject of national disapproval.

* * *

Today the way we choose our leaders turns them into “politicians''. The ones who rise the highest are masters of telling us what we want to hear, feigning authenticity, and avoiding real responsibility. Our politicians will not change until we change their incentives. 

Responsible Democracy puts the best problem solvers into office, not the people who are best at running for office. It aims to give a single leader responsibility for each of the goals on the rubric. It sets these leaders up for success by letting them try bigger ideas and make progress quicker than our current politics allows. At every step of the way they are being held accountable. Every leader knows their performance will be reviewed as they leave office. 

CHIEF EXECUTIVE

There is still a need for a chief executive (presidents, governors and mayors). Many goals can be set up-front, assigned to the leaders and their agencies, and worked on in the background. But you cannot plan diplomacy, how you respond to an unknown crisis, or (at the national level) military actions in advance. The chief executive would be responsible for conducting foreign affairs and organizing responses to unforeseen challenges that arise throughout their terms. 

In times of war or serious natural disasters, the nation’s priorities might need change incredibly fast to meet the challenge. If the worst happens, we do not want the government’s leaders to continue working towards goals that no longer make sense. Imagine if the leaders of Health and Human Services had been trying to reduce healthcare costs when Covid-19 started, and were disincentivized to spend resources combating the disease. This is not working for the people. A goal needs to change. 

It is the job of the chief executive together with one or more leaders to propose amendments to the rubric when the necessity arises. Within forty-eight hours the Referees can either approve or deny these proposals. This is a necessary function to ensure governments can be responsive and flexible to changing circumstances, but it is also an area that can be abused. A set of checks and balances will need to be established to constrain the behavior of both Referees and the Executive.    

These chief executives will be elected with a strict one-term limit. Like the other kinds of leaders discussed, they do not campaign on policy positions — it is not their job to decide on these. They will look like the politicians we have today. They are elected based on their character, private sector experience, and ability to lead and unify. 

Just like anyone else given power, their performance is reviewed at the end of their terms. The Referees evaluate their performance against parts of the rubric that apply to them, and how they dealt with the unforeseen circumstances that arose throughout their terms. The chief executives leave office a success or a failure, returning to private life with no chance to run again. 

By making this job apolitical we can bring great candidates into the arena and put them in a mindset of true public service.

ROADMAP

Building a Responsible Democracy requires us to think big and start small. 

If you have stuck with me this far you understand how voting for people creates politicians, forces us into political conformity, and removes accountability from those in office. Small changes like term limits and outlawing political gerrymandering are not going to end forced conformity and make our politicians take responsibility. We need to be experimenting with bigger ideas. I believe it is our generation’s task to find a better way of doing democracy that is more fit to the modern world. 

The reforms I proposed are big and unproven. The first experiment can be much smaller and does not require Referees, accountability hearings, or civic drafts. We can test the most important hypothesis behind Responsible Democracy on school boards and town councils and find out if it works. 

Hypothesis: Separating the job of defining the government’s agenda from choosing our leaders results in less divisive politics and more effective governance. 

Experiment: Add a two-page values ballot to a local school board election. Allow allowing citizens to choose their school board members and express what they want their leaders to focus on separately. Then we watch what happens. Do candidates stop discussing policy and ideology? Does focus shift from wedge issues to common causes? Once elected, do leaders work towards the values of their citizens?

This is a simple experiment, that could be run many times across the country.

If we find that adding value ballots has a positive impact on local governance, we can explore scaling it up to counties and medium-sized cities. At this scale we probably will need to experiment with new ways of holding politicians directly accountable for their performance in office (not just indirectly through re-election). We will also need to figure out the best way to create fair values ballots and measure each politician’s performance. That might look like Referees and rubrics, or it might look like something else entirely. We all need to be open to learning. We should trust what works, not what is written. 

If we find ideas that work in cities, the citizens of a few States may vote to experiment with them. This might not be as hard as it seems. State legislatures could become the branch of Referees. These bodies already have the power to direct the policy of government departments and set their budgets. Much of this existing machinery could be repurposed to assign responsibilities and hold different parts of the government accountable. We just have to be careful not to leave the current career politicians operating that machinery.  

Will it be easy? No. Is it possible to run these experiments? Yes. The first draft is never right, but since we cannot know what the answers are until we start testing and refining in the real world, we have to start trying.

In my research for this book I have come across many reasons to hold our Founding Fathers in the highest of esteem. But in my opinion the most remarkable thing about them is that they came back to finish the job. The group that returned to Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 were no longer misfits and rebels. They entered the city as statesmen who had defeated the world’s great power and established the first democracy in millennia. 

Eleven years had passed since declaring their independence and four since the British surrender. They could have stayed at home, but they came back because the new government was not working. They tore up their work and designed a better system. That summer they delivered our Constitution. Then they spent the following year fighting a different war — one of words — to get it ratified. 

To me this is the moment our Founders proved they were different from other revolutionaries. Their goal was not independence. They won that and then they kept going. It was not power. Washington could have been King of America, but he refused the job on multiple occasions. This group of mavericks were genuinely trying to build a government by the people that worked for the people. When the system they built was not working, of course they came back to fix it. These men knew what they were aiming at and had the humility to change anything along the way, except the direction they were heading. 

They would expect us to keep chasing their goal. I am. Are you?

Join us at todayscommonsense.org. We could use your fresh ideas, passion, and help running the first experiments. 

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V. Your Fellow Americans

In Common Sense, Thomas Paine wrote that “the cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind”. This is as true today as it was in 1776. 

Humanity’s greatest challenges lie ahead of us. It is up to this generation of Americans to prove open societies and the values of the West can guide us through this period of rapid change to our bright future. When the next challenges arrive, we want to be standing together, freed from our unhelpful ideologies and arbitrary divisions. Building a stronger democracy today is how we make ourselves ready for the challenges ahead and set a positive example for all free societies. 

I have hope for America because I believe in us; in what we could be at our very best. Our best selves are with us, right now. We just need to create an environment that lets them come out. 

WORKING TOGETHER

If we can end forced conformity it will make what we share as Americans more important than our differences. 

A few years ago I saw something like this happen in front of me, and ever since I have been a believer. It was at a dinner with a mixed roster of Republicans, Democrats and independents. People were disagreeing and lightly debating one another, but there had not been moments of real tension. Then one of our friends began talking about why she thought our city needed to raise the minimum wage. The conservative woman sitting next to me quickly jumped in “I’ll support raising the minimum wage as long as we stop giving welfare to people with jobs”. The whole table went quiet, everyone could tell the pleasant part of the evening had ended.

My friend went right for her jugular. “So you don’t care about the poor? So you want those people’s kids to go hungry?” That is less than she said and nicer than she said it, but you get the point. Tension had built.

“No, I care about those people. But I think if we are going to raise the minimum wage we should raise it enough to be a true living wage. Everyone working a full-time job should be making enough to support their family. Welfare for full-time employees is welfare for the executives at Walmart, Amazon, McDonalds. It makes them richer. Billions of dollars they don’t have to pay their employees because the taxpayers do.”

My friend started to respond, then stuttered, then stopped. Then asked, “is that true?” Someone whipped out their phone and found the statistics. There are indeed many full-time employees at major companies receiving various forms of welfare.

“I’m sorry I went after you like that, I just assumed…I assumed. I thought someone like you couldn’t care about the poor, but you do.” They spent the rest of the night talking. I hear they remain friends to this day.

Both of these women cared about the poor. They both agreed that anyone who works a full-time job should be able to afford the cost of living in their city. They both are repulsed that big corporations would fatten their profits by underpaying their employees and then hand the bag to the taxpayers. On this issue, they share the same values. The only thing they disagreed on was how to move society towards their shared vision. They could not see that they were on the same side because they were talking about “how” to fix the problem instead of what they valued.

Not every issue is like that. I’m not going to stand here and claim we all secretly agree with one another on the important stuff — we do not. But I bet you are a whole lot closer to your neighbors on the other side than you realize. He wants his kid to get a good, safe, education. He probably wishes his family’s healthcare was not so expensive. He worries about his professional future in a world of artificial intelligence. 

When we start political conversations with our values, we can solve problems together. When we start with "how" or “who”, we get lost in the weeds, arguing unproductively, and digging in our heels. 

We do not need more informed citizens to have a healthier political discourse, we just need to talk about the right things. The one thing each of us is qualified to talk about is what we value.

Many pundits say we need more than two political parties. I disagree. What we really need are more than two types of voters. We need there to be thousands of different voting personas. Voting for Values does this. Two people on the same side of the political spectrum today will struggle to fill out their value ballots in the exact same way even if they conspire to do so. We need to let voters express their true beliefs by bringing a “build your own option” to our democracy. 

It would not take long for political parties to disappear in a system where we vote for values, not because they are outlawed, but because they cannot exist without forced conformity. With thousands of different types of voters it would be impossible to continue identifying ourselves as only left or only right. When each citizen is allowed to vote for a mix of positions from the left and right, we will quickly discover common ground with nearly everyone we meet. We will find it difficult to make assumptions about what people believe. We will actually have to listen to them to find out where they stand. We will have to treat everyone we meet as an individual; assuming nothing about them based on their groups; and nothing about their groups based on them. 

Pundits also call for a more engaged citizenry. Again, I disagree. We do not need citizens to engage more with politics. What we really need is for the political system to engage more with its citizens. That means listening to us and understanding the nuance of what we each believe. The vocabulary of a ballot should be more than just “red” and “blue” — we should be able to say what we value, in all its detail. We do not need more informed citizens; we just need to ask each other the right questions. 

FINDING OUR WAY

One morning I agreed to join a group of friends on a day trip to the beach. Each of us wanted to spend as little time driving and as much time on the beach as possible. That is because we value time in the sun. As we began loading up the car two of my friends — we’ll call them Bob and Anne — got into an argument.

Bob thought the group should take the highway because it is usually clear, and his GPS said it was 20 minutes faster than any of the alternate routes. Anne disagreed; she thought the backroads made more sense. If there is an accident on the highway, we could sit for hours — better to take the 20-minute hit than chance it. Both of their arguments make sense. So who is right?

What makes problems like this so different from the kinds we solve in school is that the answer is not knowable at the time of the debate. Bob can win the debate and still lose the game. Everyone in the group can agree with him — there probably will not be an accident today — and an accident can still happen. The universe does not care one bit that our little committee estimated the probability of accidents today was low. 

Whether Bob’s highway plan works best depends more on the precise moment we leave and the behavior of other drivers on the road than anything he said while making his case. Anne can be wrong too. Maybe the backroads avoid the traffic, but a loose nail on the road causes a flat tire. That possibility had not even entered our discussion.

Every problem the government takes on is a driving to the beach problem. Politicians can always weave a reasonable narrative about why their solution will work the best, just like Bob and Anne did. But we can never really know how well each idea will work in the real world until we try it — full stop.

So, what is the best way to get to the beach? How do you solve these kinds of problems?

You just start driving. You do not waste time arguing before you start, you just go. You just get on the highway and keep your eyes on the road and the GPS. If you see an accident up ahead, you get off the highway at the next exit. You do that even if you are in the pro-highway camp. Your job is to get your friends to the beach safely and as quickly as possible. Even if you thought the highway would be faster you know it would be foolish to keep driving right into a traffic jam. Pulling off and admitting defeat does not mean you were wrong; it means you are doing what is right.

That is how you get to the beach: By following what you value like a compass. You do not care if that means taking the highway or the backroads. That is dogmatic, ideological, unhelpful. This was never about proving the merits of highways over backroads; it was about getting a lot of sun. That is how you get to the beach, that is how you cook a good pizza.

Scientists and experts will come in after and compute the stats. Their studies will reveal that 73% of the time the highway is faster. But this calculation is just a story about the past. It is not a shield. Reciting it like a prayer as you drive will not stop an accident from appearing ahead of you today. The people who read this study and decide to always drive the highway are not following the optimal strategy either.

Just drive. In our hearts we know that is what we need to do. We need to get clear on what we value and start moving towards it together. If we keep our eyes on the road and adjust as necessary, we get where we need to go. It is not about the person driving and it is not about the plan. Values are the compass, the light, the only thing that can cut through the fog of politics and get us where we are going.

I want that for you. I want that for our country. I want that for humans in every corner of our world. 

We can build a stronger democracy, one that works for the people without dividing us.

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Footnotes

1. (1984, July 8th). Strikers Shot by Troops. New York Times

2. (1913, February 4th). Provision for Tax on Income is Part of Constitution. The Omaha Daily Bee

3. (1920, January 3rd). Connecticut Radicals Caught in Nation-Wide Government Roundup. The Hartford Courant

4. (1862, September 25th). Important Proclamation by the President. The Alleghanian

5. (1957, September 5th). 8 Negros Blocked by Troops. The Dallas Morning News

6. (1964). Political parties: their organization and activity in the modern state. Duverger, Maurice

7. (2015 October 19th). What people get wrong about Prohibition. Vox Politics. German Lopez (feat. Daniel Okrent)

8. (1796 September 19th). Washington’s Farewell Address. Senate.gov. https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewell_Address.pdf

9.  (2022). Reelection Rates Over the Years. Open Secrets. https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/reelection-rates

10. (2024, July 5th). U.S. Congress monthly public approval rating 2022-2024. Statista Research Department. https://www.statista.com/statistics/207579/public-approval-rating-of-the-us-congress/

11. (2024, April 4th). Research and data on RCV in Practice. FairVote. https://fairvote.org/resources/data-on-rcv