Politics As Power, Part III

One interesting tie-in to this view of partisan politics as an organized struggle between the powerful and the powerless is that I think this struggle would play out very differently in a direct democracy. Suppose every political issue was settled by a plebiscite, so the people could settle different issues differently. The median voter's preferences would prevail issue by issue rather than just at-large. Think what would happen to this power struggle. In every given instance the electorate is divided into the roughly-speaking powerful and the roughly-speaking powerless. And the median voter will belong to one of these two camps. And which camp the median voter will belong to will vary considerably issue-to-issue. 4% of the electorate identified as non-straight in 2008. For the pro-gay position to win a referendum would require a lot of charity by the straight "faction" (although speaking as a straight person myself I don't really see what we're giving up by being charitable in this instance, other than the right to oppress). Women, however, are a majority, albeit a narrow one, so in theory if mobilization, organization, and solidarity were equal across the sexes then women's-rights issues would tend to win. Most people in America don't own guns. The gun-owners' position would lose, then, unless lots of non-owners voted against their interests.

What I think would happen by separating these issues is that people would behave a lot more like members of a whole bunch of factions. Nate Silver recently had a great post the key point of which, I think, was that "the truth is that none of us is just one thing." And in our political system, this means that each person is a member of a bunch of dispossessed groups (I'm an atheist and a vegetarian) and a bunch of powerful groups (I'm a straight white man), and since we only get to cast one vote these competing factional interests end up resolving one way or the other, in the aggregate. But if we had the opportunity to vote on each issue line-by-line, then (if I were voting out of solidarity with my various identities) I would vote anti-religion and pro-animal rights but also against civil rights or women's rights or LGBT rights. (Of course, I wouldn't want to vote against any of those things, but never mind that for now.) Instead I have to decide whether I identify more with my straight white male self or with my atheist vegetarian self. Then I vote, either for a Democrat or a Republican, and a bunch of other people do the same thing and we get a Congress that's either holistically pro-powerful or pro-powerless.

This relates, I think, to one of the points I made about James Madison's thinking in Federalist #10 about the problem of faction. Our political system more or less forces on us two broad-based national coalition groups, and I think this is a feature that strongly, strongly undercuts the tendency toward faction. But I also think that the simple act of having to vote once for a representative government, rather than getting to vote on each issue separately, goes a long way toward this end itself, even in a system of proportional representation. After all, even in a wild PR world, you still only get to choose one faction to completely belong to, at most. When combined with what I believe to be the nearly-inevitable tendency of political systems to equilibrate in a state of competitive balance, I think representative democracy ultimately ends up being a system for organizing a gradual power transfer away from those in whose hands it has historically been concentrated. I have a feeling that's an outcome that a lot of the people who dreamed up representative democracy a few centuries ago would be very pleased with.