Time for a new paradigm.
The survival of a democratic model of governance is under threat. Our party-based electoral system is dangerously obsolete, suffering, as all technologies do, from atrophy, entropy, and corruption, unable to respond to wholly different and escalating system demands.
Democracy as signal processing.
Democracy dysfunction can be understood as a signal-processing breakdown. The signal, the will of a sovereign electorate, has been suppressed: choices strangled and disconnected from actual government outcomes needed to meet growing national needs, aspirations, and expectations.
Our current political mechanics suffer on all three measures: signal formation, transmission, and reception.
The signal is degraded at the source
The electoral signal gets manipulated, confused, and constricted by collapsed voter participation, intentional noise, and distortion.
The channel is corrupted
Interposed, self-interested special interests overpower it with their own signals through illegitimate channels of lobbying, access, influence, and (worst) money.
The receiver serves itself
Public officials have usurped original electoral signal power with their own incentive structure, ruled by a privileged political class, empowered by a small minority of the wealthiest interests.
Mandate Democracy® instead.
- Sharpens the electoral voice with referenda votes that matter on specific governmental actions and outcomes
- Surmounts the overwhelming transmission interference with clear channels carrying information through a new generation of independent i-ballot boxes
- Binds government officials to referenda outcomes: representatives held accountable to represent, backed by "No confidence" and recall votes
Our politics today create a democracy death spiral.
- The more that governance shows itself insufficiently responsive, and intolerably dysfunctional…
- …the more that faith in democratic institutions deteriorates…
- …so the electorate becomes more susceptible to exploitation by malign forces…
- …reinforcing more disillusion…
- …which enables the appeal, rise, and encroachment of autocrats and zealots who further poison the democratic polity.
And so forth, like melting permafrost exposing more dark earth, which soaks up still more heat to melt more permafrost and soil. The very existence and survival of what we imagine as democracy itself, as a functioning paradigm, is now in question, in established democracies and in those polities which aspire to such.
An assault not seen since the Age of the Dictators.
Democracy as a governance paradigm is under global assault not seen since the Age of the Dictators gave us World War II.
The forcing function in Western democracies has for some time been electorate hostility, resentment, and disenchantment toward status quo politics, in the face of social and economic dislocation and inequality.
These same socio-political forces coalesced to shake the civilized world in the wake of World War I: the Treaty of Versailles, the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley tariff collapse of international commerce. All contributed to the emergence of the "Age of Dictators" which produced the global holocaust of World War II.
Political systems can just snap.
No different than non-linear, step-function singularities in earthquake tectonics or in metal-fatigue fracture, political systems too can just snap. Repeated stresses relieve themselves in strain. Phase change abruptly takes ice to water, water to steam, under repeated stressors. Denominator limits approach zero.
Defending our heritage.
The United States always has been a political beacon, sanctuary and bastion, linchpin and center of gravity for democracy and a governance of hopeful change: the world's technological and intellectual, not just industrial, "Arsenal of Democracy," striving for the promise of a society rooted in Liberty, Freedom, and Human Dignity with Equal Justice Under Law. These are our God-given, inalienable rights as American Citizens.
What Mandate Democracy® means.
Each citizen is a participant in an historic challenge: to shape the outcome of what de Tocqueville called an inevitable "change of epochs," now thrust upon us again. With technological innovation and reliance on the fundamental principles of a democratic Republic, we will prevail to create a still better society for our children.
Our heritage will not permit us to do otherwise, but to heed Edmund Burke's warning that we will fail only "if good men and women do nothing" to make it so.
The people behind the paradigm.
Meet the institution whose standards shaped the initiative's scientific ethos, or return to the initiative itself.