Finale: American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html October 2005)

Part X. Can A Citizen’s Revolt Stand A Chance of Working?

We have been discussing a "modest proposal." One that probably has about as much chance of implementation as the one Swift offered, centuries ago. Certainly the politicians who guide our destiny will find it about as palatable.

A final reprise:

If districts have been scornfully reworked in order to make the November general elections worthless, then everyone in a district should join the party of that district. Make the primary election the locus of real argument, real campaigning over issues, real voter participation. Real politics.

Oh, if this is ever tried on a big scale... if a movement like this really started to take off... you can well imagine how the desperate fanatics and old-style politicos will fight back.

They’ll call it "cheating" - with far more venom than they ever used against real fraud at the polls. Cross-registrants will be called "carpetbaggers" and reviled for cynically betraying their beliefs. Or they will be called "spoilers,"who have crossed party lines in order to do harm, pull dirty tricks, or stack the majority party with bad candidates.

There may even be attempts to restrict party-switching. Will fanatics in each party try to stop it by requiring that party members pay dues and carry membership cards? Don’t underestimate the "villains" in this play, who get to write and pass laws.

And then, every even-numbered year, the inevitable Quixotic, lesser party candidate will urge you all to "come on home...."

Which you are free to do, in November! Re-registering as a Democrat (or Republican), even though you were always a Republican (or Democrat) before, will not keep you from voting the old way come autumn.

What it will let you do is vote for the lesser of two evils in the primary that is the true locus of decision making in your district. You may be a conservative in a hippie-college town, fine. But just because a liberal will represent you, does that mean you cannot have a say when it’s decided which liberal that will be?

Or if you are a progressive in a deep red county, okay, you are going to be represented by a conservative. Live with it. But maybe help support one who acts like a mensch, shows a smidgen of conscience, knows the meaning of compromise, and might even make Barry Goldwater proud, instead of shrieking hysterically like Rush Limbaugh? That’s quite a range. It may be worth fighting over.

*

To moderates and modernists, whatever their official party or persuasion, there is one enemy here -- gerrymandered political radicalization. That enemy has an ally, the insipid "team spirit" of identifying ourselves and our votes with the name, tokens and emblems of a simplistic political party, even when registering with that party makes no practical sense. Even when serves no purpose other than robbing us of our franchise.

Stand up. See labels for what they are, conveniences that can bind and enslave us, when we let them. If another label will let you do more with your citizenship, don’t be shy. Take it!

Call this a Voters' Revolt against calculated manipulation of the electoral process by professional politicians.

Call it a movement to transform the disenfranchised minority in every gerrymandered district into an important swing bloc.

Call it a way to help pick nicer conservatives instead of haters, in each red-county primary. And for decent conservatives in blue-urban America to hold accountable some lefty flakes.

If the politicians have arranges, manipulated, and effectively declared one party to be the party of your district, then join the official party of the district... and make it better.

It seems so logical, like an immune reaction by an inflamed body politic, responding against a cancer spread by self-interested politicos. Only now the rub. In this day and age, without help from billionaires or journalists or politicians, would something like this have even a the chance of an arctic glacier in global warming?

As for me? I plan to fight however I can to help one of the parties prevail over the other, because (in my judgement) it has better policies overall and shows greater overall sanity. And because lately, things have started to get very scary for a civilization based on accountability and the Enlightenment.

Still, there is another level. One where I know that political parties are busy turning themselves into dinosaurs. The Age of Amateurs is coming, and with it, a rising age of the New Citizen, smarter, savvier, more agile and empowered by both education and technologies that gather information faster than the speed of thought. It won’t be easy and the transition needs our help. We’re going to have to innovate, act swiftly, take the initiative. Prove that citizens are worthy of respect.

Lift your head, now and then, from the daily battles. Look at the horizon.

In a reversal of the "yellow dog" philosophy, I don't really care if it's a Democrat or a Republican, so long as it's reasonable, moderate, broadminded, forward-looking, honest, accountable... and human.

==Return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html October 2005)

IX. Citizens Revolt:
....Answer Gerrymandering by moving your vote where it will count.

Reprise: Thwarted at having anything meaningful to do with their votes, might people find a way to evade this trick of the political pros? The precedent is clear. We have only to follow the wisdom of our ancestors. If we have the guts to rebel against ‘party identity’ and instead maximize our personal access to political power.

Last time we concluded, after a long and complex path, that there will be no immediate solution to the Gerrymandering Plot from the ones who engineered it. The Professional Political Caste.

Elsewhere, I have examined how this might be seen as just a small part of a major phenomenon, perhaps the biggest -- and most under-reported -- conflict in America and the West today. A conflict that runs completely orthogonally to the standard, hoary left-right-political axis. One that seems to arise as an immune response by nearly all professional castes, against what I have called a rising "Age of Amateurs." I won’t go into detail about that here, except to say that this conflict should be unnecessary. The Age of Amateurs is coming, empowered by rising education and technology, no matter what anybody tries to do about it. This should also result in a shining new age of empowered citizenship. And if the professional castes decide to help fostering the trend, instead of resisting, they will be honored, as never before.

But let us focus once again upon a particular battle in that war. How can citizens fight back against a tactic that has eviscerated our sovereign franchise, turning the right to vote into little more than a mockery?

Last time, logic and history seemed to lead to one possibility. Just one slender chance.

If districts have been scornfully reworked in order to make the November general elections worthless, then everyone in a district should join the party of that district. Make the primary election the locus of real argument, real campaigning over issues, real voter participation. Real politics.

Clearly, this is the minority's best tactic, when gerrymandered "solid" districts and national division have rendered competitive politics a thing of the past.

*

All right, it’s a bold plan. Disturbing, too. So let’s ponder some implications, in detail. How would this work?

Take a hypothetical gerrymandered congressional district in which only a quarter or so of the voters are Democrats, while more than half are Republicans (and the rest independents, many of them conservative-leaning). Under such extreme conditions, it sure doesn’t sound like there is very much that a liberal can do. Surely the representative from such a district will be -- and ought to be -- some kind of conservative.

Still, should those Democrats be just written off, forever? They amount to more than a hundred thousand citizens. Voters who hold a useless franchise, because they won't ever make a difference in choosing their legislative representatives, either next November or the next... or any other for the foreseeable future.

Only now suppose the hundred thousand Democrats switch to become registered Republicans. They have that right! And, suddenly, that number becomes significant, easily as large as any particular faction within the district’s Republican party. Large and potentially influential. Perhaps even enough to help an insurgent moderate -- someone who is conservative in the old-fashioned and decent sense of the word -- to depose one of the recent wave of outrageous neoconservative crazies.

At minimum, it could tighten quite a number of primary races. Force a few incumbents to spend more time and money visiting the home district. Perhaps even win some moderating concessions.

Now add in this factor. At least another quarter of the electorate may call themselves "independent." This trend, toward abandoning all party affiliation, had its roots in good old, irascible American contrariness. But it has turned out to be one of the most foolish and counterproductive in generations. Might it now give way to a much more savvy rebellion? One with vastly greater potency? All those "independents" have to do is follow the power... and grab some when it matters.

And yes, it goes both ways. There are also millions of Republicans who live in gerrymandered Democratic districts, where their vote doesn't seem to matter, either. Might they try the same tactic, in reverse?

Is that a problem?

Either way, the trend toward ever-narrowing electorates, ordained outcomes and increasing power for fringe fanatics may turn around. Whether those fanatics happen to be romantics of the loony left or the klepto-apocalyptic right, they have already done more than enough damage and had far too much power to disrupt the true American tradition of negotiation and pragmatic problem-solving. It’s time to say to all of them, enough.

==Continue to Part 10z  or return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html)

Part VIII. The Problem of Gerrymandering:
....Solutions" that just may work.

Reprise: If there is to be any hope, we must be the ones to take responsibility.
This is one problem we are going to have to solve ourselves.

I mean it. There is no political party that will help us to slay the dragon of gerrymandering. No billionaire is going to come to the rescue with a foundation grant. And do not expect Bigtime Journalism to raise this as a cause celebre.

The parties may not be equal -- morally or in policy -- but they do share blame for this problem. A billionaire will invest where the chances of success are better than nil.

And the press? Their contempt for the public has no bottom. (I come from a long line of journalists.) They will look at the sheer complexity of this issue and despair of ever explaining it to all those dolts out there.

So, is there any hope, short of believing that science will someday come to the rescue with brain pills?

Putting utopian dreams aside, what can we do right now, pragmatically, to change the balance of power, even in districts that twist and writhe like serpents, so that the same party may contrive to dominate utterly, and apparently forever?

Sometimes you must seek inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

Go back in time -- sixty years, seventy, eighty -- to the old post-bellum South, that time of "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou," when segregation reigned and the Klan ruled the night. Certainly the land of Faulkner wasn’t all dismal stereotypes. A lot of good and noble things were also going on. But politically it was not the most open and enlightened era. For one thing, a majority of white voters would vote for a "yellow dog" if it were the Democratic nominee.

If Republicans dominated the Union, from the Civil War until FDR, their monopoly on power was nothing compared to the Democratic Party’s lock in the old "Solid South," from Reconstruction until Richard Nixon. In those days, the November election was generally a sham, a mere formality. A coronation of the Democratic nominee, whoever that might be.

A few black citizens who managed to get registered to vote would join some urban intellectuals in casting a smatter of futile dissenting ballots in the fall. Most did not even bother.

Real political fights were reserved for the primaries, when there were sometimes knock down, drag-out battles among candidates for the democratic nomination -- from governor all the way down to mayor or dog catcher. Often local blacks or liberals would seek (when allowed) to re-register as Democrats, so they could vote in the spring, when and where it really counted. When political power was actually apportioned.

Can you see where I am heading with this? Gradually, almost unnoticed, we have been manipulated into becoming a nation of ten thousand little Solid Souths, in almost every state assembly and US Congressional district across the land. Gerrymandering has done to nearly all of America what Jim Crow achieved much earlier, from Texas to the Carolinas. The problem has been seen before. But the past may also tell us what to do.

Thwarted at having anything meaningful to do with their votes, might people find a way to evade this trick of the political pros? The precedent is clear. We have only to follow the wisdom of our ancestors. If we have the guts to rebel against ‘party identity’ and instead maximize our personal access to political power.

Think of it this way. Gerrymandering has given each district a de facto -- if not official -- party of that district. There is no sense whining about it.

If districts have been scornfully reworked in order to make the November general elections worthless, then by all means, everyone in a district should join the party of that district.

Make the primary election the locus of real argument, real campaigning over issues, real voter participation. Real politics.

Clearly, this is the minority's best tactic, when gerrymandered "solid" districts and national division have rendered competitive politics a thing of the past.

==Continue to Part 9

or return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin

Part VII. The Problem of Gerrymandering:
...."Solutions" that just won’t work.

Reprise: The deeper, most-cancerous effects of gerrymandering do not cancel out. They leverage and multiply against each other. Taken together, they show how one part of our democracy -- the election of representatives to Congress and other legislatures -- has become warped beyond almost all recognition, justice, or usefulness.

So? What can be done about it?

Well, for starters, don’t come to me for pat answers, prescriptions or painless solutions. Citizenship was never easy, as the Athenians found, as soon as the guidance of Pericles began to falter.

In fact, I do know that some of the more obvious "solutions" just won’t work.

How about those proposals, bills and ballot propositions -- that we see raised occasionally, aimed at eliminating the gerrymandering curse by law? These offer to reform the system by handing over the job of drawing district boundaries to "impartial commissions."

"Efforts to end partisan mapmaking are under way in 14 states, pushed largely by those who contend that new technology allows the party in power to carefully tailor districts to favor as many of its candidates as possible," according to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. Ohio and California are two of these states.

"The result: Competition occurs only in primaries, not general elections, leading to polarized legislatures and frustrated voters. While such arcane issues don’t always resonate with voters, the frustration over politics-as-usual can tip the balance in their favor, said political scientist Caroline Tolbert."

Isn’t that hopeful? Can’t we solve this problem one state at a time?
Don’t bet on it.

Look closer and you’ll see that each of these efforts has been pushed by the minority party within the state in question, campaigning to eliminate the majority’s unfair advantage. That’s fine, but few comment on the utter hypocrisy of, say, California Republicans decrying their state’s gerrymandering sins, while their Texas GOP brethren refine the practice to a high art.

Moreover, because this is always a gambit raised by the state’s minority party (sometimes assisted by a minority party governor), how often is it really going to work?

In sum, doing it one state at a time is utter hypocrisy.

In fact, as a citizen of a state that’s controlled by a party I (marginally) prefer, I sure plan to vote against a coming "fairness" referendum! It will churn my guts to do so. But... dang if I’ll drop my guns b’fore they drop thurs!

All right then, what about doing it in a fair and equitable manner?

One might, for example, envision arranging deals that would trade reciprocal reforms among several states at once. Suppose California were to hand over the drawing of district boundaries to an impartial commission... in exchange for an equal number of impartially redrawn districts in, say, Texas and Florida combined?

Boy, I would flat-out love to see that. I am all in favor. Somebody start a campaign and I’ll sign on.


If apolitical redistricting ever did take hold in a big way, there would ensue no end of bickering over how to constitute the "nonpartisan commissions" and what criteria they should use. Certainly some states will draw up rules that preserve the effects of gerrymandering as much as possible. My own favorite approach would help to prevent this in a simple way. One rule should be that the State Senate, Assembly and Congress districts should never overlap each other by more than, say, seventy percent. Make this the prime criterion, so that, no matter how one house is jiggered, it will mess up gerrymandering in the other two. This would also ensure that both voters and delegates are forced to look to different groups of neighbors, negotiating and (maybe) even listening to a broader set of voices.

Alas, while it may be fun to run mental experiments about how the law could be changed, to fix the gerrymandering mess, there comes a time to admit that it just won’t happen. Not soon, that is, and not in this republic.

Because in order to make such a deal, you will have to get it signed off first by the very people who set up gerrymandering in the first place! The Professional Political Caste. And even if it can be shown that a tradeoff will leave the NET number of Congressional seats per party alone... if you can show that no party will lose... even so, these professionals will be terrified, adamant and unwilling. Because this is not just about two parties jockeying for a little advantage. It never has been.

Think. An end to gerrymandering will:

* make most re-election campaigns competitive

* spread more vigorous accountability

* reduce opportunities for guaranteed patronage (and/or graft)

* empower the "enemy" ... or at least the "customers" (fickle voters)... to exercise their will, or whim, responding to any shift in the political winds.

Do you honestly expect the political caste to put up with something like that?

(There is one more reason for the right wing to support gerrymandering at all costs. The biggest reason - possibly - of all. At present, more than a hundred super-radical GOP congressmen exercise their traditional privilege of appointing one candidate from their district to each of the US Military Academies (e.g. West Point). There is strong anecdotal evidence that these new cadets are being appointed according to social, political and cultural litmus tests, including religious zealotry. This bottom-stocking of the US Officer Corps is symmetric with the ongoing purge of the apolitical and superbly professional flag officer ranks, either forcing retirements, re-assigning, or viciously harrassing any general or admiral who will not toe the line. Of these two trends, the bottom-stocking of zealots has received the least attention, and may do our constitutional civilization the most long-lasting harm.)

Once again, please, do not misconstrue what I am saying. Not all politicians are betraying monsters who do these things with deliberate malice. Many -- perhaps even most -- of them are deeply sincere public servants, who feel that they must use the tools at hand - including gerrymandering - in order to limit ideological foes who are much worse than they are.

(In many cases, actually, I quite agree.)

But this focus on foreground political knife fighting can distract even sincere public servants from ever facing the insidious effects of what they have wrought, year after year, decade after decade. Over time, they have done grievous damage to a system that was supposed to about citizen empowerment and the sovereignty of every individual American.

Again, we are human. Hence, we (including politicians) are all supreme rationalizers. Unless criticism and light and accountability shine, any of us is likely to drift toward the kind of behaviors that have been seen throughout history. For example, coming up with reasons to support our trade or guild against interference from the crass customers or ignorant public.

Or are you claiming that you never came up with a convoluted reason to take advantage, where it could be gotten, later explaining to yourself and others that was all for the common good?

No, we are defending the Enlightenment, boys and girls, during what we hope will be the last generation or two before it takes hold for good. Rationalization is the old way and accountability is the new.

If there is to be any hope, we must be the ones to take responsibility. There will be no help from the politicians. Not in this matter, where their utter self interest is at stake, independent of ideology or party.

This is one problem we are going to have to solve ourselves.

==Continue to Part 8

or return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html October 2005)

VI. The Dismal Big Picture:
... just how hopeless is it to reclaim constituency democracy?

Reprise from last time: We have come by a long path in order to see that gerrymandering is far more than just a simple game of tit-for-tat, in which a little cheating by Texas Republicans cancels out a similar gambit by California Democrats. 

The deeper, most-cancerous effects certainly do not cancel out. They add together. They build and leverage and multiply against each other. Taken together, they show how one part of our democracy -- the election of representatives to Congress and other legislatures -- has become warped beyond almost all recognition, justice, or usefulness.

So? Is it hopeless? Or are we ready to take on a real challenge... one that all of the prestigious "electoral reform commissions" have timidly avoided? Shalll we start coming up with suggested ways and means for citizens of the United States to start to fighting back?

Not against a foreign power or the hated "other party," across the aisle of an artificial left-right political axis... but against a professional political caste that contains many well-meaning and sincere public servants. Servants who have nevertheless done what no enemy could previously achieve!

Using subtle tricks to rob us of the electoral choice that is our sovereign right and duty.

Before talking about solutions -- starting with those that won’t work -- let me first clarify one important point.

The disenfranchisement process is uneven.

One of the weirdest things about of gerrymandering is how specific it has been. It applies to the politically unscrupulous re-drawing of district boundaries for the election of legislators, especially US Representatives and delegates to state assemblies. This specialized application may be one reason why the decay went so far and for so long, before attracting serious notice.

There are many flaws in other portions of American democracy. We’ve talked about the rise in corruption and vote-fraud, during some recent campaigns. Another worrisome trend is the decline of the Fourth Estate, as journalism increasingly becomes a whore-profession, beholden to a narrow range of special interests. And who can deny that Presidential elections are bizarrely warped by the archaic and deliberately abused Electoral College? (See: http://www.davidbrin.com/electoral.html) All of these problems merit the scrutiny of citizens, and soon, lest our citizenship simply cease to matter anymore.

And yet, there is good news. Depending on the office and the type of constituency, your vote still counts for something, here and there. For example, in most municipal and local elections are dynamic and a citizen’s franchise can be fractionally pretty potent.

And there is another bright spot, when it comes to offices that are elected statewide. In fact, governorships and US Senate seats may be among the few places where American democracy still truly shines.

Yes, the arrangement of 50 states is, in itself, an absurd hodge-podge, allocating vastly more political power to residents of Wyoming and the Dakotas than to, say New Yorkers. You might even call it "the original gerrymandering." Still, we can play that hand, as we have for generations. And at least nobody can sneakily change the boundaries without notice or discussion.

Indeed, a comparison of two chambers of the US Congress may illustrate how much difference gerrymandering has made. Just observe how radicalized the House of Representatives has become, compared to the Senate, which remains to some extent what it was always meant to be -- a quirky chamber filled with "characters" who often feel free to break with party discipline and vote as individuals.

(Senators do not have to face re-election as often; has that contributed to this sense of collegial calm? Or is part of it the fact that states are large enough to focus the attention of at least a few real journalists and investigators, who aim truth at the worst slime molds who come in with millions to buy themselves some status? Oh, who knows? Let’s get back on-topic.)

We’ve seen how one major effect of gerrymandering has been to empower radical elements in both parties. Within safe districts, even the very worst indignation junky can start with a militant power base, leverage it with cash, seize a Congressional seat and then do whatever he likes (short of blatant scandal) until Judgement Day. No amount of pork, graft, incompetence, or outright maniacal looniness will ever suffice to budge him.

==Next time: "solutions" that just won’t work.

Or return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin

                   (or return to Part 1 on Gerrymandering)

V … Five more ways that gerrymandering feeds a vicious cycle of radicalization.

Last time we covered five ways that this dismal, cynical and calculated betrayal of franchise has undermined the American peoples’ ability to exercise their right, power and duty to vote meaningfully for representatives to their state and national legislatures.

Here are five more!

==Sixth. As part of a trend going back decades, millions of Americans have taken to registering "independent." This has a flavor of declaring neutral openmindedness, but on a practical level, millions of voters have simply opted-out of voting in primaries. Hence, even if a district was gerrymandered to include a clear majority who will lean conservative-GOP in the general election, it is a much smaller group that will vote in the election that really matters -- the primary -- to choose the dominant party’s candidate.

Yes, many of those "independents" are conservative is a very general sense. Still their opinions would serve democracy well in a gerrymandered Republican district and they might help to choose a very different style of conservative to represent them. Likewise in a district that has been rigged to have a single party OF that district, that happens to be the Democrats.

==Seventh. Americans are proud of the ways in which their approach differs from the "parliamentary system" that prevails in most other democratic countries, around the world. Parliaments emphasize a jockeying for power among doctrinally-determined parties, which expect strict discipline among their delegates or deputies, in hewing to the party agenda. For much of our history, in contrast, Americans have felt that truly representative democracy should put higher priority on the individual talents and personalities – and even eccentricities – of individual delegates who are accountable first and foremost to their constituents and only secondarily to party affiliation.

This tradition still seems to hold true in the US Senate. Even in the supposedly solid-Republican south, there are many Remocratic senators, because many extraordinary individual candidates have stepped forward and persuaded millions of Republican voters to cross over, making an exception to party loyalty.

Ironically, this is no longer true in the House of Repressentatives, which demographically should bring delegates much closer to the people. True, the worst aspect of representative (vs. Parliamentary) democracy is still with us. Pork barrel graft has - if anything - grown far worse. But that is an exception. In all other ways, gerrymandering has made our Congress far more European in style and structure. It essentially ensures that the party, not the voter, chooses each district’s representative.

==Eighth. Gerrymandering also (naturally) eliminates any chance for the mounting of effective campaigns by any third party candidate, since those candidates will have to attract a lot more votes to defeat the incumbent than in a truly competitive district. This may seem a minor point, since third parties are already perceived at hopeless to most Americans. But isn’t this a self-fulfilling situation and yet another reason for the big parties to gerrymander?

Think. If a third party were ever to begin its rise to challenge the Big Two, would it not be in the very offices that have been gerrymandered away? State Assembly or US Congress seats? Shall we call it a good thing that this can NEVER happen? I am not one to call the Democrats and Republicans "Tweedledee and Tweedledum". They are very different. But would not even more difference be refreshing, sometimes?

==Ninth. It might be argued that gerrymandering reduces the reaction of our system to mercurial public mood swings. Some would even call this a good thing. And it’s true, the Founders worried about mob-like surges of passion – one reason for the life tenure of judges and the long terms of senators, so they might calmly ride out flashes of passion and respond to the peoples’ more considered will.

On the other hand, the House of Representatives was designed to be mercurial and responsive! Hence to short re-election cycle of just two years. Shouldn’t at least one of the houses of Congress reflect the public’s sovereign right to rapidly change their mind? With the Senate and Court there to damp out bad passion, does this mean we have NO rapid recourse, if the public suddenly wakes up to a pack of scoundrels in charge?

As things stand, the House has become the very opposite of its purpose... a stodgy bastion of party conformity, unresponsive to changes in public will. This is not what the founders intended. It is not what the people want.

==Tenth. Finally, the attraction of almost perfect job security has lured a new kind of candidate into politics, during recent years. Look around at the US Congressional Representatives in districts near you. Some are surely skilled politicians of the old school. Whatever their party, they can be relied on to press the flesh, answer mail, address local concerns and be there when major events occur. They may even rise above partisanship, if shown a blatant need and national will. Because it’s their job. Some even do it well, with professional skill and pride.

But I’ll wager you also know one who is -- well -- how else to describe it? A rich punk who literally bought the position, either for diversion or as a launching pad for a try at higher office. Yes, this has always happened. Only now, it’s easier and more convenient than ever! You have only to sweep into the primary of a safe district -- one with a retiring, or suddenly vulnerable, incumbent -- bearing heaps of cash and a pile of radical promises for local activists. Then it’s done.

The general election? A shoe-in? Re-election? No sweat. Opportunities for endless continuing graft? Well, we needn’t go there right now. But worries about the Constitutionally-mandated rhythm of bi-annual accountability? Ha.

Suffice it to say that I hope you don’t have a nearby example of one of these guys, "representing" your district or one next door. But alas, I fear many of you know exactly what I’m talking about.

What does it add up to?

All ten of these trends feed into the radicalization effect that Robert Hormats referred to. And not just in Republican districts. I perceive less radicalization among Democrats, true. But it’s a very real phenomenon on that side, as well. Certainly all of the unreasonable shots taken in our "culture war" have not been fired by just one side. (See: http://www.davidbrin.com/realculturewar1.html)

The upshot? Richard Nixon once said "to win the party's nomination, you have to run to the right (left if you're a Democrat), but to win the presidency, you have to run (or govern) toward the middle." Only now this political truth no longer applies for legislators (who provide most of the feed stock of candidates who run, later, for higher office.) The "run-radical/govern-centrist" contradiction has finally been settled…

…in favor of permanent, year-round radicalism. And it is the majority of Americans who must watch in helpless dismay as indignant zealots uncompromisingly pose and rant – self-righteous "representatives" who seem congenitally unable to apply the basic American genius at pragmatic compromise, in order to solve the nation’s myriad problems.

We have come by a long path in order to see that gerrymandering is far more than just a simple game of tit-for-tat, in which a little cheating by Texas Republicans cancels out a similar gambit by California Democrats. We are assured that the overall effects roughly balance. But that is a flat-out lie. The effects most certainly do not cancel out.

They add together. They build, leverage and multiply against each other. Taken together, they show a dismal picture of one major section of our democracy -- the election of representatives to Congress and other legislatures -- portion that has become warped beyond recognition, justice, or usefulness.

As citizens, we simply have to do something about it.

==Continue to Part 6

or return to the beginning of the series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin (October 2005)

(This series is now posted on my website: http://www.davidbrin.com/gerrymandering1.html )

IV.-a Five ways that gerrymandering feeds a vicious cycle of radicalization.

We have seen two ways that gerrymandering -- a 19th Century sin that expanded unmercifully into the 21st -- has had dismal effects upon representative democracy.

==First, it allows one party in a state to rig elections so that it can grab extra seats, not only in Congress but every legislature in sight, from the State Assembly down to cities and counties. While this is done by both the Democrats and Republicans, somewhat canceling each other out in raw numbers of US Representatives, this partial cancellation only masks the deeper sickness.

==Second, gerrymandering can be viewed as a process that best serves the interests of an informal guild of professional politicians, by offering incumbents a near guarantee of easy re-election without the muss and fuss of serious opposition, or having to explain themselves to the voters every even numbered year.

So far, so bad. Only it gets worse. Much worse.

We shall see that - among other horrific ill-effects - gerrymandering has almost certainly contributed to the rising sense of rancor and "culture war" that infests America these days, a country that should have many reasons to be feeling good, instead of falling into a vicious cycle of relentless indignation.

Consider what this practice does in any given district, say one that has been gerrymandered to have a safe Republican majority of more than 60%. True, a majority of the voters in that district will at least be represented by their preferred party. Isn’t that representation? Doesn’t that mean their votes matter?

(An occasional reminder: almost all of my examples will apply if you replace "Republican" with "Democrat" and vice versa.)

Let’s continue listing the effects of gerrymandering:

==Third, even if a contented 60% are guaranteed perpetual victory, that leaves a 40% minority (in our example, Democrats) who will never, ever feel that they have a chance for Congressional representation. Not only will there never be a Democrat elected from their district... but they can’t even influence an election at the margins. As Robert Hormats was quoted saying, last time, their Congressional representative can safely ignore them all. It’s as if they do not even live there.

For too long we have seen politics expressed in a sense of winners and losers, as if it’s all a sporting match, like football. (At least in football, there’s a draft to try and shift advantage around a bit.) But if you read the Federalist Papers, you will see that partisan winner-takes-all dominance was deeply feared by the Founders. They worried, and hoped that things would not perpetually go that way.

But nowadays it is considered unseemly and whiney to bemoan the fate of losers. So let’s go on to other hidden implications of gerrymandering. For you see, it just keeps getting worse, because --

==Fourth, Members of the majority party are almost as disenfranchised in a heavily gerrymandered district as the losing minority!

In our example district, Republicans are present in such numbers that the incumbent representative or assemblyman can count on getting enough support just from those who will vote GOP as a reflex. Except in the case of a major scandal, the incumbent needn’t worry about national policy trends having much effect locally. So his or her support drops by a few percent? So a few Republicans desert to the hopeless opposing candidate? Big deal.

He or she barely needs any of the more thoughtful Republicans -- those who picture themselves as somewhat independent-minded. He can take their reflexive support for granted.

==Fifth. That is, local moderate Republicans can be taken for granted. Not activists, the passionately committed ones. Or those with lots of money. If any of these get angry, an incumbent can face real trouble. Party activists have a myriad ways to get revenge if they feel neglected., e.g. they can drum up a fresh opponent in the party primary. They might withdraw funds or support for higher office. They can even agitate in the state capital to have districts redrawn, favoring some other, more accommodating representative, and throwing the local guy to the wolves. (All of these things happen, more often than you’d think.)

This would -- all by itself -- have the effect of making your local representative increasingly beholden to those with the most passion and/or money in each district... or even to outsiders who might come at any time with both cash and foot soldiers, changing the local balance of power. The result is summarized by renowned Goldman-Sachs investment expert, Robert Hormats:

"One of the reasons (for the horrific polarization of politics in America) is that as a result of gerrymandering in the Congress, you don't have to look for the center. All you have do is - if you're a Republican, you appeal to the Republican right; if you're a Democrat, you appeal to the Democratic left. There's very little incentive to appeal to the middle, because of the way Congressional districts are now allocated. If your district is 80% Republican and 20% Democrat, you don't have to worry about the 20% Democrats; all you have to do is appeal to the hard core Republicans and you will win. And the same thing with the Democratic districts. So it reduces the incentive of members, in the House at least, to appeal to the middle."

I’m going to end on that note... next time I’ll finish part IV with effects numbered 6-10.

or return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html October 2005)

III. Hidden Goals of Gerrymandering:
...protect politicians from fickle voters.

Reprising from last time: There are other effects of gerrymandering that go far beyond a slight left-or-right shift among the jostling parties on Capitol Hill. Effects that add up to both a disenfranchisement of the average American voter and a steady rise in uncompromising radicalism, not only in Washington but all across America.

I have put forward a proposition that gerrymandering is not only about one party trying to squeeze a few more representatives for its party’s congressional delegation, to compensate for the other party’s similar grab in a state next door. There are other purposes and goals that go much farther and have more debilitating effects upon democracy.

One of these has been the aim of creating as many safe districts as possible. Not only for the majority party in a state, but also for members of the minority party! In effect, the practice creates job security for professional politicians, at the expense of competitive elections all across the United States.

How does this work? Suppose you are a Democratic assemblyman in Florida, or a Republican in California. You may rail against twisted district boundaries that the hated majority drew in your state. Boundaries that reduce your party’s share of the Congressional delegation below what would be fair, if delegates were divided proportional to votes statewide.

Still, despite your protests, there’s a palpable silver lining. You are also likely to benefit from those boundaries!

Take, for example, Florida. In order to craft a maximum number of safe districts for their party, members of the state assembly’s Republican Caucus had to cull out lots of neighborhoods that are loyal to the opposition, bunching them together wherever possible, into a few districts where they will make up Democratic Party super majorities. The essence of gerrymandering is to ensure a lot of districts where the empowered party will get a reliable 55% majority. The best way to do this is by arranging for 70% or greater majorities in the few districts that were left to the other side!

(Illustration: no incumbent Republican congressman is safer than one from a gerrymandered GOP district in California.)

View this from the point of view of an incumbent Representative of a state’s minority or disempowered party. You may feel a bit peeved at gerrymandering -- at one level -- knowing that your party was cheated out of a seat or two. But then, you also benefit from the practice! You get to run for re-election in a district that has been sculpted to ensure that it will be safe for you, forever. So long as you aren’t caught in a toweringly stupid scandal, your re-election is assured.*

(* It can happen, of course, when that arrogant sense of invulnerability breeds towering foolishness. This year, in my own “safe” GOP district, scandal-plagued Representative, Randy “Duke” Cunningham just withdrew from a re-election campaign that had been an easy ‘given’. In such a loyal district, this only shows that his scandal was really, really stupid.)

In order to get a clearer picture of what has happened, step back from partisanship for a minute. Abandon the insipid left-right-political-axis, and try to look at this whole arrangement from a completely different perspective. Let’s view gerrymandering as the natural behavior of a professional guild. Like those old-time trade guilds in history... or what we still see in many modern professions, from doctors and lawyers to teachers, cops and CEOs. Yes, members of a profession compete with each other. But how often have we also seen them close ranks, protecting the common interests of all brothers and sisters in their craft? All members of the profession.

Sound far-fetched? Look, we’re human beings. History shows that this temptation will always arise. I’m not saying this always happens callously, conspiratorially, or even consciously! (Most of the time.) But it clearly does happen, and then rationalizations follow, justifying why the guild-protection is best for everybody.

(This fits into a larger theme - the coming of an “Age of Amateurs” - that I talk about elsewhere.)

As for gerrymandering, try to see all this from the viewpoint of a politician -- a state senator or assemblywoman, or US Congressperson.

You and your comrades - of either party - share many concerns that run much deeper than conflicts over policy and ideology. You know each other well, not only from debates and committees but also countless social occasions, and so do your families.

Your common experiences matter. For example, all of you have faced the capricious voters - those fickle folks back home - who must constantly be appeased and soothed and bribed with heaps of pork. Especially for US Representatives, the bi-annual rhythm of perpetually running for re-election can be both wearing and wearying, a grind of fund-raisers, baby kissing, flattery and heartburn on a campaign trail that seems to resume allmost as soon as it ends.

Is it any wonder if - at some deeper level - you and your colleagues may gravitate toward an easier path? A consensus approach to making life smoother for all of you?

What if nearly all of the districts in a state, from Assembly to US Congress, could be made “safe” for the incumbents? Protecting most guild members from their true worst enemies... the infinitely mercurial and unpredictable voters, who might kick them out at any time, over anything from war to whim?

Anyway, once the districts are safe, all those campaign contributions can be used for “other things.”

------

Let me close this portion with two items that support the notion of a tacit (perhaps subconscious) agreement among members of the professional political guild.

1) Take a recent example where the genteel arrangement failed. Some of you may recall in August 2003 when Democratic state senators in Texas made a public stink over an attempted coup-by-gerrymandering. Republicans in the Texas Senate voted to fine 11 fugitive Democrats up to $5,000 a day each, forcing them to return from New Mexico to make a quorum, so the Senate could redraw the state's congressional districts from 17 Democrat vs 15 Republican seats to likely 22 Republican vs 10 Democrat, in the next election.

This boundary re-drawing took gerrymandering to wholly new levels of contorted absurdity, in such a sudden and dramatic shift that some of the protestors expressed a sense of personal betrayal, because their GOP colleagues had broken unwritten agreements. The sheer scale of the attempted seat-grab would ruin many of their own safe districts and threaten them with personal political extinction. Dirty pool and a double-cross that broke tacit professional and guild courtesy!

2) Out of 435 seats in the US House of Representatives, only a couple of dozen are considered “open” or truly competitive in Campaign 2006, with both Democrat and Republican starting even, ready to be judged primarily on the basis of policies, politics and personality.

What more proof is needed than that single fact.

(Next time... but wait! It only gets worse.)

==or Return to Part 1 of this series---

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin
(http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html October 2005)

II. Gerrymandering at the surface:
...the “harmless” way it’s generally portrayed.

Reprising from last time: “Quietly, without much comment or notice, the practice of gerrymandering has transformed from a somewhat dismal but bearable act of occasional opportunism into a cancer at the heart of democracy itself, rendering our votes nearly meaningless in countless constituencies across the land.”

You won’t see the problem expressed that way very often, as a relentless - and perhaps deliberate - scheme to deny Americans a meaningful vote. Certainly, whenever a writer uses that kind of tumid language, he or she bears a burden to build a solid case!

This I intend to do, peeling back layers, exposing what decades of gradually worsening abuse have done to American constituent democracy - the portion of our electoral process that specifically involves the legislative branch.

In the popular press -- even prestigious journals like the New York Times -- you will see gerrymandering portrayed as a dirty but relatively minor tactic in the war between Republicans and Democrats. A traditional -- even venerable -- trick that is used wherever one party gains an advantage, in order to tweak one or two more seats out of a state congressional delegation. Heck, it was done in Cromwell’s time, predating America itself.

Nobody openly admits that they approve of gerrymandering. Even chief perpetrators claim they are only struggling to stay even with the real culprits -- those connivers in the opposing party. Both press and public deem it unscrupulous. Still, amid war and spiralling deficits, corruption and terrorism, gerrymandering hardly gets ranked up there as a threat to the republic.

I hope - in this essay - to persuade you otherwise... and to suggest it’s time for the people to take a stand.

How does gerrymandering work?

Let’s take, for example, my home state of California. Periodically, the Democratic controlled legislature in Sacremento commissions professional consultants to draw the borders of congressional districts (and those for state assembly and senate), based upon recent census data. Using specialized computer programs, these consultants draw boundaries that veer and shift, paying little heed to city limits, geography or even rules of geometry. The shapes are planned with one goal in mind, to maximize the number of districts will have a reliable majority of Democratic voters. By resconfiguring boundaries to exclude some neighborhoods and include others, these hired-gun consultants promise an optimum size for the Democratic Party’s Congressional delegation, each even-numbered year.

It works both ways, of course. In Texas, Florida and thirty other states, Republican dominated legislatures do the same thing (with a vengeance), drawing boundaries that twist and contort like tormented snakes, always with the sole aim of maximizing the number of Republicans likely to win seats in the next election.

And not only to win, but win with ease.

Yes, the trick is mentioned by pundits and dissected in some press reports that tsk tsk about gerrymandering as an unfair trick. But then, since both California and Texas do it, should we really be concerned? All told, the practice seems to benefit the Republican Party more than Democrats. (Notably, the GOP controls more states and thus gets to engage in this practice to a significantly greater degree.) Still, when you cancel everything out, the final difference should only add up to a few dozen seats, out of 435 in the House of Representatives. Right?

That seems hardly enough reason to put it at the top of our political Worries List.

But this superficial numbers game - balancing seven extra seats for the Texas GOP vs six for California democrats - only serves to conceal and distract from a core fact ... that nearly all U.S, Congressional districts -- along with state assembly and senate seats -- have been gerrymandered in one direction or another.

Indeed, there are other effects of gerrymandering that go far beyond the total numbers game or a slight left-or-right shift among the jostling parties on Capitol Hill. These far-worse side effects add up to both a disenfranchisement of the average American voter and a steady rise in uncompromising radicalism, not only in Washington but all across America.

The worst effects of gerrymandering do not cancel out. They multiply. They exponentiate. Indeed, these trends may be among the most deeply pernicious and dangerous to threaten the Republic in recent memory.

(Next time: gerrymandering as a job security measure for the Guild of Professional Politicians.)

==or Return to Part 1 of this series

American Democracy ... more fragile than we think

A ten-parter by David Brin

Part I. The worst insult to 21st century liberty:
... the Gerrymander Gambit.

Let’s begin part one with a reprise from last time:

By quietly and gradually cranking up a process called gerrymandering members of the Political Caste - of both parties - have managed to effectively seal most of us away from the franchise that we all consider to be one of our most basic American birthrights.

I’ll explain. But first, some context and background.

As we slowly recover, still quivering, from the traumas of Election 2004 -- further punched, pummeled and punctuated by war and nature’s devastation -- here comes a tidal wave of punditry, telling us to begin girding for the next political season. Prepare for Election 2006... another gut-wrenching, nation-dividing descent into the “Culture Wars.”

(Who could have predicted that we would someday look back with nostalgia on the Clinton-Dole campaign, as a time when politicians sometimes disagreed congenially over policy, while sharing a fundamental belief that government can be made to work?)

In one way, the 2006 campaign will be easier, emotionally. For one thing, it won’t directly involve the Presidency, much to the relief of George W. Bush, given his slide in popularity.

Instead, attention will focus on Congress. Will one party continue to control all three branches of government? Or will voters choose to stir in some fresh faces and, perhaps, a little accountability?

This could be of special importance right now. If either house of Congress passes into Democratic control next year, one immediate effect will be to suddenly invigorate a dozen oversight and investigation committees, which have lain mostly dormant for six years. Just picture the ferment when those torpid committees are abruptly staffed with scores of newly-assertive investigators, empowered with stacks of subpoenas, summoning scores of administration officials - and whistleblowers - in a veritable festival of accountability, unlike anything since 1994, when Newt Gingrich & Co. swept into control over the House, carried by the reform rhetoric of his “Contract with America.” (See *note below.)

Of course, all of this assumes that political issues -- or even voter opinion -- will make a difference in outcome, during the campaign for who controls Congress.

But that assumption may be dead wrong. One trend, that has built momentum across several decades, may insure that the average voter will have very little influence over the outcome of the US Congressional elections, come November 2006.

No, I am not talking about outright cheating, though we certainly have seen a disturbing and outrageous burst of truly despicable behavior, ranging from fraudulently rigged voting machinery to manipulation of voter rolls, from corruption of sworn officials to dirty trickery, all of which contribute to a decline of faith in democracy, perhaps even debasing the word “freedom” itself. (See recommendations of the Carter-Baker Commission at: http://www.american.edu/ia/cfer/)

But I am not writing about any of that today, because even vote-fraud is small potatoes. After all, cheating of the kind we saw in Florida in 2000, and Ohio in 2004, can only work when the polls are already very close. At worst it can nibble at the edges of a system that is rotting from the inside.

No, I want to draw attention to a different kind of manipulation. One that has ensured that close elections for US Congress almost never happen.

It is the same shameless manipulation that prevents all but a few Americans from having any real voting power over who will represent them on Capitol Hill.

Quietly, without much comment or notice, the practice of gerrymandering has transformed from a dismal-but-bearable tradition of occasional opportunism into a cancer eating at the heart of democracy itself, rendering our votes nearly meaningless in countless constituencies across the land.

------------------------------------------

* An aside about the prospect (if Democrats win control over House or Senate) of sudden assertiveness by Congressional oversight committees:

Should even a sincere conservative call this prospect of divided government a bad thing? Certainly not an honest conservative who watched with concern the unambiguous and overwhelming increase in secrecy that has spread like a shroud, since the Bush administration took office. Can any student of human nature feel comfortable, knowing that so many cronies (even your side’s cronies) are making so many deals in the dark?

Even if many of these deals are legal, should they not also be visible? Or have we become so entrenched in Culture War partisanship that each of us thinks light should only shine one-way? A war of competing searchbeams or light sabers, stabbing left or right, but never illuminating us all?

Those in power rationalize this surge-tide of cryptic concealment in the name of national security. But honestly, ask yourselves this question. Does the threat posed by Al Qaeda justify more secrecy than our society endured during the Cold War, when our opponent was the vast, sophisticated and evil Soviet Empire?

Over the long run, secrecy must become a core social and political issue. No matter where you stand along the spectra of belief about large or small government, about the role of market forces or taxation or the proper use of military power, don’t we all know that shadows tempt the honest and lure the corrupt?

Looking back on the rhetorical success of Gingrich in ‘94, here’s one trick the Democrats might try, if they wanted a startling jiu jitsu move. What if they stunned the nation by publicly adopting half of the planks in Gingrich’s “Contract With America”?

Not the partisan half, those ‘planks’ that justified a loony/selfish - and disproved - theory that looting the treasury will help balance budgets. But the other half. The planks that made sense, offering more air and light. Greater openness and accountability.

Those were the parts that citizens voted for in 1994.

And people are still waiting for those portions of the Contract to be fulfilled.

-----------------------------------

(Next time - the detailed skinny on gerrymandering...)

Suspicion of Authority -- a prevalent meme

I am on an elite advisory board having to do with nanotechnology. In that discussion I engaged in a review of some topics many of you have heard before, summarizing a lot of ideas more compactly. Anyway, it should be archived and available - so I'll post it here before returning to the essay on gerrymandering. 
                                                       ---    ----   ---

One question rose: "Are nation-states really the right object of focus? Or is it is more likely to be a multi-national mega-company or a small group of hyper-rich individuals?"

Sometimes it makes sense to generalize a little, before getting back to specifics.

What are we talking about here? Will you bear with me through a riff that may seem a bit lectury. It really will become relevant to the topic at hand.

Each of us in this group was raised in a culture that’s featured a weird propaganda program Nearly every novel and Hollywood film has promoted Suspicion of Authority (SOA). Often two subsidiary messages accompany SOA. These are:

   -- Tolerance of Diversity (TOD) and

   -- Personal Harmless Eccentricity (PHE).

Often, in a movie, the protagonist will bond with the audience in the 1st five minutes by:

   (1) exhibiting some quirky eccentricity to establish individualism, and

   (2) having a run-in with some dislikable authority figure (often over the eccentricity.)

And if you want to establish viewer dislike of an authority figure, by all means let him perform some act of intolerance commensurate with the comeuppance you plan him to receive later on. If the intolerance was verbal, he may “learn a lesson.” If he kicks a dog, sucka gonna die. (See my essay: Our Favorite Cliche: The Idiot Plot.)

I raise this here because it is important for us to recognize the cultural roots of our worry. Not only do these three themes -- Suspicion of Authority, Tolerance of Diversity, and Personal Harmless Eccentricity -- express Western/Enlightenment/American/Frontier/Californian value sets. They are also rooted in the Scientific Pragmatism that has been a successful guiding principle for a century -- also called “modernism.”

Suspicion of Authority is not, in itself, completely wise. Many people in our society take the SOA message and use it as an excuse to dive into cycles of addictive self-righteous indignation, often focusing extreme “suspicion of authority” toward on one side of an insipid, ill-defined and fundamentally unhelpful metaphor... the 300 year old French “left-right political axis.”

For more on Indignation addiction, see my article: Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology.

This simple-minded version of Suspicion of Authority tends to be blinkered and myopic. Such people tend to minimize or ignore the dangers posed by the authority figures on THEIR side.

That’s the immature version of SOA -- which is fueling the so-called “Culture War.”

At its more mature end, Suspicion of Authority is simply an expression of the fundamental lesson of the Liberal Enlightenment -- that we are master self-deceivers. We fool ourselves - as Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said - all-too easily. Therefore, truth and decency cannot be delivered by hierarchically-empowered kings or priests, who have proved they can rationalize doing anything they want and calling it the Greater Good.

Instead, the Liberal Enlightenment says that both truth and good behavior can only come from markets of interaction, in which free players are empowered to hold each other accountable through criticism --  CITOKATE .

Forgive me. CITOKATE is my acronym for  Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.

Elsewhere I talk about the four biggest “accountability arenas” -- Markets, Democracy, Science and Courts -- each of which handle the process of reciprocal accountability very differently.... but with similar underlying processes. (See: Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit.)

In fact, the SOA is a very important part of how these four arenas work. It empowers players to resent established centers of orthodoxy, giving many of them the balls to jump in the arena as challengers.

Can you see that this supplies a contextual framework for what we’ve been discussing?

What the previous discussion shows is that, in general, each of us fears seeing technological breakthroughs monopolized by some set of elites. The difference between a liberal and a conservative is often over WHICH elites you fear trying to become Big Brother. The irony is that both sides are often right!

Naturally, we feel less threatened by “the United States” developing such powers first, in part because it is home to most of us and partly because of Pax Americana’s (until recently) above average record as a fairly benign imperium, by historical standards.

Also (until recently), the principal modus for error-prevention (or palliation) in the US was open criticism. How many of those other elites instead base their methodology on secretive central control?

The prospect of others taking a leap in this massively empowering technological area naturally seems worrisome. Not only other nation states, but other elites, such as unaccountable multinationals, criminal gangs, terror groups, mad billionaires, mad scientists.... etc.

Having laid that out, let me ask this; is our fear best expressed in specific terms, e,g, about China, India or Rupert Murdoch getting disruptive technologies and taking over? Or might it be better to look at it the other way.

* What fundamental cultural tools should be in place, in order to assure that is DOES NOT MATTER who gets a disruptive technology first?

Implicit throughout our discussion has been some degree of fealty toward the basic assumptions of the liberal enlightenment. That competition, reciprocal accountability, openness, skepticism, criticism (error detection) and flattened access hierarchies, are all good things.

We can see from history that the rate of grievous ERROR in a society is inversely proportional to the presence of these traits... even though every one of them runs counter to human nature and the self-interests of leaders.

The question is this. Can openness and reciprocal accountability prevent terrible mistakes and abuse of nanotechnology? Ray Kurzweil thinks so. I agree, provisionally. In contrast, many thinkers, ranging from Francis Fukuyama and Bill Joy to the Unabomber and Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood believe our only hope is to reject and repress whole areas of endeavor.

The Fermi Paradox seems to be saying that SOME kind of worrisome mistake may wipe away  intelligent life forms. Is this it? Nano stuff? Is Crichton right?

Hell, I am loyal to the Enlightenment.