User:Woozle/My Left Wing/Revolution 2.0 Outline RFC/fidelity

The question is How do we prevent The Revolution from being co-opted (again)? Movements and organizations typically start out with the best of motives and principles, but soon begin to compromise those principles as they become more powerful and more able to actually carry out their plans.

It may be argued that this is just the nature of things -- but I think we can use the tools we now have available to improve on this.

The short answer is that we need to use a variety of safety mechanisms and backups. The Constitution does this, but it didn't anticipate modern media -- which is partly responsible for the failures of those safety checks, but also offers us the tools to build better ones.

Another short answer is that the problem happens when too much power is in the hands of too few. A good solution is to make sure that power is distributed in ways that inhibit improper use without preventing necessary use.

A Proposal

This is intended as a discussion-starting proposal. There will be significant problems with it, but it gets us out of the box of asking "who can we elect?" or "what law can we change?", when what we really need is a better system.

Instead of tying political representation to geography, let's allow people to choose which representation group to join. As with Obamacare, everyone would have to join some group, and pay dues (presumably income-based) to that group. If we don't like the way the group is managing itself, we join another one -- or start another one.

What I just described is the final goal -- but it doesn't have to monolithically replace the current system; instead, the new can compete with the old, and spread "virally" until it dominates. Here's how I see that happening.

The first step is to create Grassroots Org 2.0 (or is that 3.0?): an organization which thinks more like a government than like a movement. I'll call these entities "microgovernments".

Microgovernments

Unlike a grassroots org (GrOrg), a microgovernment:

• has no predetermined causes -- only the aggregate opinions of its members
• has a way of aggregating the opinions of its members so as to express a consensus
• provides negotiating services (in the present political environment, this would include lobbying) on behalf of causes decided upon by its members
• provides infrastructural (government-like) services to its members, where appropriate (possible services: tax preparation, unemployment safety net, health insurance, emergency housing)

Potential problems:

• rich people forming their own reduced-tax microgovs (in the target political environment this isn't a problem, because influence is allocated per person -- 100 billionaires would have no more vote than 100 other people; in the current political environment -- well, the billionaires and corporations have already formed their lobbying groups; we're just forming our own to fight back)
• microgovs expelling "less productive" individuals, leading to the same problem we have now (homelessness, poverty, no social net)

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