Democracy: no alternative

Israel under the Judges?

The Elysian website has a “writing challenge”: come up with an “alternative to democracy.”

There is no alternative. But, you know, to meet the challenge: there are variations.

There’s Swiss direct democracy. That people raise their hand in public meetings to vote is at least the popular image—no fiddling with the results of a black box secret ballot in that case: all happens right before one’s eyes. In addition, referendums, also a form of direct democracy play a major role in the Swiss system. And that direct democracy is combined with a Republican form of government interwoven with it.

So as to theory, there’s two aspects to “democracy.” We might call our system a “democracy”, denoting the aspect of rule by the people, or a “republic,” denoting the aspect of electing our rulers.

As to voting systems, also, there’s variety. There’s the traditional system of whichever candidate, among three or more candidates, gains the most votes wins. Obviously, a third candidate who has no chance of winning turns the votes for everyone into a kind of random selection. So instead, one might have a runoff. And in fact, runoffs are incorporated into democratic systems already. In America and probably other countries, one has to get a threshold number of signatures to go on the ballot. This is kind of a first run-through runoff, is it not. It is of course undermined by allowing people to write-in a candidate of their choice. These signature lists are of course collected by volunteers from the various parties, giving a modicum of control to the parties over who the candidates are. One sits in a meeting of thirty, forty people and listen to candidate speeches and choose your very-local level choice for who your local-level party endorses to be your party candidate. It goes like that. One could say the second round, then, is these intra-party selection meetings, alternating with more formal elections to choose the candidates for the two separate parties—you can only vote in a “primary election” from a list of candidates from a party you have registered under ahead of time. The result is that we are divided by party. We have runoff elections, but these are divided by party such that two opposing party-selected candidates stand off against each other in the main election. And it has the additional twist of the spoiler candidate possibility.

Fixing that is proportional representation, a system for all-party runoff elections. With the standard system, among three or more candidates, the winner of the most votes—not the majority of votes, which would likely be impossible for the case of three fairly viable candidates—just becomes the candidate. One is left guessing not who you want but who you think your neighbors want—who has the most chance and who is least bad and things like that. The advantage is one is forced to move from a black and white absolutes way of thinking to a more nuanced selection process in your mind as a voter. Proportional Representation (PR) cuts out the losing candidate, the candidate with the least votes in the runoff. If there are still more than two candidates, another runoff is conducted to cut-out the next most least popular candidate and that process continues until there is a candidate with a majority. Now of course, perhaps it’s not a one candidate selection, but a multiple set of candidates one is selecting, but you get the point. So the point is one selects after it is all dusted off and finished, a majority candidate and one can simply choose in each round ones favorite and not guess who might win. And it’s not partisan in the sense that the parties, in the traditional system, select two polar opposite candidates, with some strategic thinking of course as to who might be likely to pull centrist votes in the real election. In PR, everyone votes together. Everyone selects who they like entirely apart from partisan consideration/pre-selection. You can see that this is more democratic because Nigel Farage’s party won big on that one. A twist on that is the instant runoff proportional representation election.

In instant runoff, the same system is conducted, but all at once. One ranks the candidates in order of preference: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, like that, on one’s own ballot one submits (who knows, it might be levers in a voting machine, but say it’s ballots). First, all the first choices are counted up. Ballots that selected the winner (the largest number of first choice selections on ballots) are collected. Those ballots that selected that candidate as the first choice are not re-counted, but go for that candidate. The rest of the ballots are re-examined. The ballots that selected the last place candidate in the first round of ballot analysis as their first choice have their second place choices compared with the other ballots’ (losing in the first round) first choice selection. The ballots that selected the winner of that round go for that candidate and are put aside and not re-counted, and so on—oh never mind, I somehow left my book about it where I used to live and just the gist of the idea is all I am trying to convey. So it’s a runoff system that is conducted with all the runoffs achieved at once by means of “ranked choice” ballots. In a paper ballot version, of course, the counting wouldn’t be instantaneous, just the balloting—voters would just vote once for all permutations of what would have been subsequent runoffs. Again, the point of this is, it’s the voters own ranked choice, and not some party list.

And that brings us to the next version of PR, Party List Proportional Representation, which, as the name suggests, defeats the whole point of PR—it’s conducted in Holland, if I remember rightly. The party chooses the ranked-choice list and the voters just choose among pre-ordered lists selected by the political parties instead of choosing from one all-party list and making their own list and ordering.

All of this just to prove the point that there can be multiple forms of democracy even when considering elections.

That brings us to multiple citizenship systems.

In America, if you were born in the U.S.A., you are a citizen. If either of your parents is a citizen, you are a citizen. Not to discuss whether it is allowed to mean anything or not now in 2024.

That is different from what one might call a tribal system of citizenship. If your parents are citizens, you are a citizen. If they are not, being born there doesn’t make you one. Examples of this I suppose are Saudi Arabia and Japan. In Japan, there’s lots of Korean Japanese, whose parents, grandparents, whatever, were born in Japan. But they are still just permanent residents. Because their ancestors were Korean, not Japanese. Or so likely goes for the very large Chinese Japanese population, a large portion of Yokohama… And now, 2024: in danger of deportation, but that’s another talk.

---

Israel under the Judges

Now, to my proposal. To meet the challenge, we need something strikingly different from what we call “democracy.” It’s ancient Israel in the era of the judges, when, the Book of Judges concludes, after some appalling examples of the model: “every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

The judges of Israel were men, and there was I think one woman judge, who ruled the nation by sitting in some place and waiting for people with disputes to bring them to him, upon which he would pronounce judgement on a case-by-case basis only. As all was decided case-by-case, there was no law making, and so no parliament. The judge also served as commander-in-chief, but not of a standing army, but of the people who rallied around him in time of invasion by foreign enemies. Examples of judges whose rule predominantly consisted of this military leader function rather than the sit-in-a chair judicial branch function were Gideon and Sampson who both in each his period as judge fought against the foreign oppressors of the people. The judge was not elected, but just informally came to the role by common recognition of the people, as they came to him for his opinions, what we call today, if in a formal system, “the opinion of the court.” I really don’t advocate this, as really such a person would need to be elected to be any good whatsoever and not ultimately follow down the path of all unelected—unelected has another word for it: DICTATORSHIP. Even if the system of judges in Israel before the rise of the kings was a kind of soft power persuasion system.

As the “kingly role”¹, of a common investor in the society as a whole² is necessary to plow back in the ever accumulating portion of r that is greater than G in Piketty’s famous equation, “when r > G,” what was needed in this system of judges with no government and only an old guy sitting in a chair and a literally volunteer army called together for the occasion, was some system to solve this Pikettian equation. So every seven years, they took a year off from production, to eat up all the excess savings that was piling into stock market bubbles and M&A and inflation and the impoverishment and enslavement of the common people to the rich. Every seven years, the nation would cease production and just consume excess savings for one year. Then, every seventy years—and it was a common system in the ancient world—all debts would be forgiven and all land would return to its original owners. That was the year of Jubilees.

1. As Le Pen calls it…—I know, I know, half of you hate him above all people and half of you love him, a regular T—-p or B#%!n

2. in a system in which “every man did as he thought right in his own mind”, or as expressed today, in a system in which production was purposed purely inwards towards purely private benefit in a system of pure each-against-all race-to-the bottom competition.