Alien Democracy

An excerpt from The Anti-Partisan Manifesto

Photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash

If a delegation from a peaceful, super-intelligent, alien species were sent to earth to study modern democracies, they would be baffled. Start with the way we select our leaders. Our highly evolved visitors would expect that candidates for office would engage each other in high-minded and civil debate about how to best address societal issues and create the best overall lives for everyone. Meanwhile, voters would carefully parse between the candidates before selecting the ones whose ideas they believe will achieve those ends.

In the policymaking arena, our visitors would expect that officials would take into account the concerns of all stakeholders and would try to craft laws that produce positive results for all of them. In the process, lawmakers would carefully and respectfully weigh all proposed policy alternatives before objectively determining which ones are most likely to produce optimal outcomes. And most importantly, policy makers would at all times act in union of spirit and purpose, as they were all elected with the same mandate from voters: to help improve their constituents’ lives.

The extraterrestrials’ views would come from several underlying premises that in their enlightened wisdom would seem obvious (but are long overdue epiphanies for humans): 

1. Civilized beings from the same country should collectively reach the rational conclusion that it’s in their common interest to make the country the best possible place to live for everyone, given that they all have to share it. 

2. In democracies, elections should fundamentally be an exercise in which the nation tries to determine the candidates and policies that will make the country the best place it can be for everybody. 

3. Voters in democracies must undertake their responsibility with the gravity it demands, which entails rigorously and pragmatically examining all candidates and their positions and weighing their commitment to work with other lawmakers, not just the candidates’ agreement with voters’ own views. 

4. Governing officials should make policy with the aim of maximizing benefit to as many people as possible while mitigating harm to others. 

5. Realizing this ideal society requires policymakers to take the full measure of every potential policy solution.

Of course, once our guests arrived, their expectations would be obliterated. Modern election campaigns, they would discover, are the antithesis of high-minded, civil debates, and candidates don’t address the full range of issues that their societies face, nor do they seek to improve the lives of all their constituents. 

Instead, office-seekers pick and choose which issues they are going to tackle and which constituents they are going to focus on serving–namely, the ones whose votes they need to win elections. Meanwhile, large majorities of voters have already decided who they will vote for before general election candidates are even finalized and won’t even consider the possibility that candidates they’ve ruled out may offer effective policy solutions.

Similarly, policymakers don’t truly consider the impact of their policies on all stakeholders; rather, they simply decide whose stakes they think matter (the people who vote for them). And most officials will rule out certain policies from the get-go, refusing to assess whether they could produce positive results. 

Most fundamentally, lawmakers don’t conduct their business in any kind of concerted spirit and purpose. The only point on which they are in accord is using the issues that come before them to score political points and leveraging the issues for political advantage. 

This is because lawmakers aren’t actually in government to work with all the other representatives that voters sent there. They are there to work with some of the other representatives to push an agenda that some voters sent them there to push, voters who are likewise not operating with any concerted spirit and purpose.

Consider how surreal this would all seem to the ultra-evolved beings studying us. Conditioned to seek unity and best practices, they would now be confronted by beings that sort themselves into political factions that are guided by dogmatism rather than pragmatism and who prioritize their own vision and agenda over consensus and results. 

For these factions, the governing process is really just a vehicle to try to impose their vision of society on each other. It’s a playing field on which they are trying to advance the ball of public policy into an ideological endzone. This gets them closer to winning, at which point they will have established their ideal society–never mind that getting there will require running over their opponents.

Or perhaps a battlefield is the more accurate analogy, with political factions’ electoral and policy victories akin to seizing enemy territory. But, whether a playing field or a battlefield is the more apt metaphor, both depict the essence of our politics: its adversarial dynamic. We can’t be partners with people with whom we disagree politically. We’re opponents. We’re enemies.

We’re against each other because we sort ourselves into teams or armies that, by definition, have to try to defeat each other. We call them political parties.

The above is a lightly edited excerpt from my book, The Anti-Partisan Manifesto: How Parties and Partisanism Divide America and How to Shut Them Down. Buy the book here. For the time being, it is only available digitally. To read, download the Kindle app to your phone, your iPad or tablet, your Kindle device or your computer.

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