(2020-09-28) Guinn The Projection Racket Pt2

Rusty Guinn: The Projection Racket, Pt. 2. (see (2020-09-15) Guinn The Projection Racket Part1)

Our political machinery expends a great deal of energy to tell you that your vote IS your right to political expression. That your vote IS your right to political self-determination. That your vote IS your political will.

there certainly isn’t anything wrong with demanding our right to vote, celebrating when it is recognized and protesting loudly when it is denied or suppressed. Still, whether they are promoted by official party apparatchiks or their counterparts in business, media and entertainment, the mass of these exhortations inevitably fuel one of the oldest Projection Rackets in the game. In this racket, partisan campaigning in a turnout-driven election is clothed in the finery of high-minded belief in suffrage and self-expression.

Or, to put it in our parlance, “Yay, voting!”

Your vote IS NOT your right to political self-determination.

Our right to political self-determination is nothing less than the inherent right to establish what authorities we will grant to those who would govern us, and what actions we will permit them to take in our name. It speaks to a scope of sovereignty that a periodic expression of our personal preferences in a representative democracy cannot possibly contain.

But there is a lot of daylight between “my vote isn’t always a perfect expression of my political will” and “what’s the point in voting

That daylight is filled by a range of abstractions. In this context, that’s a $10 word for things which reduce the extent to which your vote has the ability to faithfully represent and advance your political will. For most of American history, those abstractions have been largely reasonable compromises.

Today, however, those compromises are no longer reasonable

The Projection Rackets will say that the solution to this, like everything else, is to vote.

I say that we should first consider together the pre-existing, long-standing features of our electoral and political systems which create abstractions between your political will and your vote: the (1) two-party system made inevitable by our first-past-the-post (“FPTP”) electoral system, and the (2) winner-take-all (“WTA”) structure embedded in our existing social contract.

I say that we should then consider the emerging catalysts which are transforming those theoretically acceptable compromises into unavoidably oppressive systems which will persistently diminish your right to political self-determination: the (1) steadily increasing federalization (unitary state) of government policy, the (2) dilution of representation and (3) the Widening Gyre.

I say we that we should then burn them the $#@! down. All of them. First-past-the-post elections. Winner-take-all elections. The Electoral College. The structural inevitability of two-party hegemony and the fuel for America’s everything-polarization.

I say we do it not through destruction or dismantling of our most cherished and important institutions, but through the reinvigoration of our commitment to them

First, I’ll suggest the WHY; then, I’ll propose the HOW.

First Past the Post and The Two-Party System

Your vote has never been a pure or complete expression of your political will. And that’s OK.

The most basic layer of abstraction between your political will and your vote is also the most obvious, namely, that our system of government is a representative democracy.

The reasons provided in defense of this system historically largely boil down to the same two, and they’re both pretty good ones: tyranny of the majority and unmanageable scale and scope. Founders who disagreed on practically everything else were convinced of the dangers and impracticality of a fully democratic form of government.

Much of the electoral system through which this representative democracy takes shape is not the direct product of our constitution; instead, it is the product of laws passed by the US Congress.

Beyond the natural abstraction native to a representative democracy, our first-past-the-post system introduces two additional abstractions.

the most important thing, the thing that would tell me most about how your vote would influence the powers granted to government and the actions permitted in your name? Your zip code.

if you vote for a candidate and your candidate loses, your vote expresses nothing in terms of the post-election reality.

Our narratives and language cause us to frame elections discretely as something to be unequivocally ‘won’ or ‘lost’ by a single candidate, not because that is an inherent feature of democratic elections, but because it is an inherent feature of our electoral system. The district as the “unit” of an election to be won by a single candidate on a discrete basis is a construction, in no way a necessary condition of democracy. Still, in the United States, that racket has been successful enough that everybody knows everybody knows that this is “just how elections work.”

some technical rebuttals against Duverger’s. Save them. Yes, there are other pluralistic jurisdictions (e.g. India) with robust multi-party constructs. Yes, something something Canada

The second abstraction is the result of FPTP’s tendency to produce two-party system outcomes.

under representative democracy, your vote will always be for an individual that doesn’t perfectly represent your political will. Under FPTP, that imperfection is magnified by the limited number of viable candidates

if you have ten viable candidates for office who each reflect some mixture of positions or a coherent political philosophy, the odds that your political will may be expressed in something approaching its true form is possible even in a representative democracy. If off-modal preferences are stamped out or become persistently sub-optimal, the odds that your political will may be expressed in anything approaching its true form are far less likely.

The two-party system under FPTP creates artificial constraints on what would otherwise be a relatively free market for political ideas.

Duverger’s Law posits that the equilibrial outcome for any pluralistic voting system like FPTP will be the concentration of party power, most often into a two-party system.

Yes, you may prefer that libertarian candidate, and you may prefer to give the libertarian party a leg up to begin building a third-party crusade, but are you really willing to let the DNC send another rep to expand the size of the federal government?

in the 2014 elections, there were 72 different congressional districts in which one of our two dominant parties decided not to field a candidate. More than 16% of the seats, accounting for some 55 million American citizens, didn’t even bother with supporting the narrative that the citizens there have a right to effective self-determination.

for most periods in American history, FPTP and the existence of a two-party system have not been untenable constraints on effective individual political self-determination. The reason: There have always been factions within parties

FPTP does obviate some features of alternative systems that are not always desirable. The hostage-taking, power-brokering potential offered to small minorities in proportional representation systems can be debilitating

The John Locke part of our social contract is the part we wrote down. Our constitution. The Jean-Jacques Rousseau part exists in the implicit vesting of authorities and duties in the state by long-term legislative mandates that cannot be (or at the least, perhaps ought not to be) unwound by a short-term change in aggregate political preferences.

It is, perhaps, an unusual framing to think of our US constitution as constraining your expression of political will, it being a document that is designed to strictly define the scope of the government’s valid activities. But that is precisely the point

To constrain state encroachment on your individual liberties, an effective constitution must necessarily establish boundaries to the power of imagination vested in your political self-determination.

To be fair, not every American agrees on the desirability of what we have or haven’t defined as rights. Roughly one in four Americans explicitly wants the repeal of the 2nd Amendment.

The other kind of social contract – in the more typical Rousseauesque meaning – is less formal than the recognition of rights in a constitution

You may not agree that Social Security is an untouchable policy – I certainly don’t – but common knowledge has long been that it is a long-term commitment of the state that politicians only meddle with at their own peril. Remember the third rail?

Many fall into the category of what we call entitlements.

while we may reasonably believe that the individual policies are broken and in need of amendment, the system through which we express that preference is not broken, at least not as a result of this abstraction.

There is another system, another part of our social contract, however, which is instituted by the system of constitutional process. And we’ve got to talk about it.

Article I, Section 2 of our constitution sets out the parameters of what we call the Electoral College.

there is zero question that it blunts the capacity of the vote to act as an expression of political will

It does so in two ways, one big and one small. The small way, which is the only way required by the constitution, effectively dilutes the influence of a vote from a state with a large population

The big way that the Electoral College blunts the capacity of the vote to act as an expression of political will isn’t required by the constitution at all. The language permits the states to determine their own mechanism for directing the electors. All but two of them have chosen – in a game theoretic competition game that converged on its present strong equilibrium long ago – to implement a winner-take-all system.

What also isn’t in question is that the same people who wrote in those protections for state sovereignty also wrote language which would have diluted the disproportionate tilt of the senate on electors into oblivion.

the guys who wrote and passed the Congressional Apportionment Amendment, which would have had the effect of reducing the ‘senatorial’ contribution to the Electoral College from 27% in 1789 to 1.5% in 2020, but for the intransigence of the Connecticut legislature in ratifying it? You mean those founders?

I don’t want to convince you that you were right or wrong. I do want to convince you that our catalysts have made both of our points of view moot

Catalyst #1: The Encroaching Federalization of Government (unitary state)

and the imperialization of the presidency. (unitary executive)

it is very difficult to disentangle the structural implications from the policy implications. And since BITFD is rarely, if ever, the right answer for policy differences, I mostly want to talk about why I think this has catalyzed the brokenness of other systems

First, that America has a larger federal government with a more expansive mandate than we enjoyed for most of our history is not very much in debate.

For the most part, this is the result of the expressed preferences of the American people

while I have a lot of these gripes with the centralization and federalization of our country, a sack of idiosyncratic policy gripes does not magically become a systemic gripe just because it would be convenient for me to call it that.

To a lesser extent, all this applies for the expansion of the power of the presidency as well. We and our representatives in congress have tacitly and explicitly permitted it.

It influences your right to self-determination under our electoral system. It does so in three ways:

#1 Stronger, Deeper Two-Party System Equilibrium

the stakes are higher, when our beloved policies are “under attack”, the willingness of parties, candidates and, in turn, the electorate to take risks is necessarily reduced.

What do we mean by risks in this context?

We mean out-group political risk-taking.

We also mean in-group political risk-taking.

As scale grows, so too does the impetus toward party unity

#2 Increased Share of Political Power Executed at a Deeper Layer of Abstraction from Your Vote

moving more issues of political import to electoral arenas at which the individual’s vote is more heavily abstracted.

Family > School District > Municipality > County > State > House > Senate > President

Let’s say, for example, that you simultaneously held education policy views....

None of these policy opinions concern rights that ought to constrain other people from exercising their right to self-determination to disagree with you.

When those issues are raised to the scope of the federal level – as they have through the tenuous auspices of federal pursestrings under both Republic and Democratic congresses and presidents over the last 25 years – your political will HAS been abstracted away

#3 Increased Political Scope Obviated by Winner-Take-All

the effect of winner-take-all is worse when more of our political sphere has been moved to the federal side of the scale, especially when more of it has been moved to the imperialized presidency that is most sensitive to winner-take-all structures

Catalyst #2: The Steady Dilution of Representation

In 1788, when the U.S. constitution was ratified, the population of the United States was probably a bit more than 4 million

probably somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 Americans were truly eligible to vote.

The original text of Article One, Section Two of the constitution provides for a congress in which each representative accounted for no more than 30,000 citizens

In 2020, each congressperson represents, on average, some 760,000 citizens and about 570,000 eligible voters.

It is a change from a system in which appointments and emails and phone calls from highly engaged constituents would be entirely feasible mechanisms for supplementing the political will expressed by a vote to a system in which the communication is almost entirely one way in nature

Second, it means that the financial means necessary to run for election are vastly higher and typically dependent on (1) pre-existing wealth or (2) party support.

Third, when the number of representatives grew along with the population, it had the ability to serve as an offset to the other features of our electoral system which supported the entrenchment of two-parties. It made the thresholds of first-past-the-post slightly less relevant because it increased the odds that a district would be capable of supporting a candidate that existed outside political norms within a party, or outside a party altogether.

Catalyst #3: The Widening Gyre

it is a still-emerging feature of American politics which serves to amplify the most liberty-reducing flaws of both the FPTP and WTA components of our electoral system.

In our parlance, a Widening Gyre is a highly stable process of progressive political polarization

In game theoretic terms, a Widening Gyre is the specific outcome of a process in which the major political parties in a two-party system have actively dismantled systems and norms which protect cooperative game play, then engage in defecting strategies in the resulting competition game

A Widening Gyre isn’t just a polarized environment. Those happen. It is an environment in which both parties in a two-party system have committed to policy-adoption, governing and electoral strategies which do not seek to appeal to the political center

Instead, they seek to win by creating more energy, internal consistency, antagonism of the political out-group and voter turnout among the in-group.

Emergence of Party as the Dominant Dimension of Identity and Group Polarization

it infects everything. Our culture. Music. Films. News. Conversations. How we see the same video. How we understand the same events

The Progressive Divergence of Out-groups on the Party Dimension

The Progressive Consolidation of In-groups on the Party Dimension

If you’re an incumbent centrist politician, somewhere to the left of your median voter if you’re a Republican and somewhere to the right of your median voter if you’re a Democrat, you have exactly two choices:

• You remain silent and just go with the party flow
• *You quit.

That’s it. Those are your options.

A Stable Equilibrium

The strategies Donald Trump perfected in American politics do not go away when Donald Trump does, whether that happens in January 2021 or 2025. The embrace on the political left of performative wokeism, deficit-doesn’t-matter MMTism and blow-it-all-up court packing proposals doesn’t go away when the other side starts playing nice. They don’t go away because in the competition game, the defector against a friendly participant wins

the combination of this catalyst with our electoral system is pure poison

The strong equilibrium of the Widening Gyre creates a stable long-term bias toward out-group divergence. In a FPTP system, this strengthens the electoral viability of extreme (on the party dimension) candidates who deviate more, on average, from the native preferences of a very large minority – perhaps even a plurality – of the electorate.

The strong equilibrium of the Widening Gyre creates a stable long-term bias toward in-group consolidation.

The consolidation of viable candidates into certain archetypes likewise makes even party members less capable of expressing mildly divergent views on any dimension

The Widening Gyre, the encroaching federalization of government and imperialization of the presidency, and the programmatic dilution of our representation in Congress conspire to transform the reasonable exchanges of our self-determination for stability, simplicity and state sovereignty into travesties.

None of this is to say that proportional representation or any of the remedies we might pursue to BITFD are without their problems.

I am sure that you have felt the pull of the Widening Gyre, especially with the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the consideration of her placement. I am sure that you felt how it was spun to you as a reason to value your vote more dearly. In truth, it should show you how rarely it is that your vote HAS the kind of power that it always should. You can choose the mess of pottage, or you can fight for the genuine article.

So how DO we fight for the genuine article?
We end first-past-the-post.
We end winner-take-all.
We fix our diluted influence of the people’s voice in government: the U.S. House of Representatives.

I recognize that we haven’t yet explained how we propose to do any of this

*We start from the outside. We start from the bottom-up.

We start with a movement focused on engaging and influencing our state legislatures, one by one, to ratify the Congressional Apportionment Amendment as proposed to the states in 1789.*

eleven states have already ratified it (New Jersey, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont and Kentucky…and depending on whom you ask, Connecticut). To blow open the doors of the U.S. Congress and begin the process of returning it to the people, we need 27 more states to ratify the amendment. Twenty-seven more state legislatures

A focused national movement, executed state-by-state. One at a time

And when we succeed – what happens? The US House of Representatives opens its doors to some 6,600 representatives, a veritable flash mob

The change in the size of the House immediately dilutes the disproportionate power of the electoral college in small states (i.e. 100 electoral votes in a sea of 6,700) in complete concord with the integrity and original intent of our constitution.

those participants demand in solidarity that the first law be a transition of our electoral model to a system for proportional representation in the House of Representatives.

It is not THE answer, but it is AN answer. A path to break the entrenched power of the GOP and DNC. To break the two-party system. And once you break that power, it becomes feasible – at some point – to consider more challenging questions that were previously outside of our reach. We can consider more challenging questions because we will have broken the forces which presuppose the permanent existence of an electoral majority of some kind in the House. Perhaps more importantly, we can consider more challenging questions because we will have remastered the paths to work through the legislatures of the several states to create change without relying on top-down solutions from the federal government.