The 2020 protest movement that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha became one of the most sustained and consequential in modern U.S. history. Though there seems to be a somewhat bizarre effort underway by its advocates to insist that this movement accomplished nothing — why are some claiming that radical cultural and political changes are happening? — it is demonstrably true that, as intended, the movement transformed discourse and policy around multiple issues from race, to policing, to gender identity, to the teaching of history, and fostered an ongoing effort for still-greater changes.

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But one constant focus of this movement has been the need for sweeping criminal justice reform. Americans were introduced to the slogan "Defund the Police,” with some activists making clear they meant that literally, while leading progressives in Congress chanted along. Prison abolition and the evils of "the "carceral state” became mainstream progressive positions. Last May, The New Yorker heralded what it called “The Emerging Movement for Police and Prison Abolition,” noting that while some activists merely want incremental reform, for many these events "confirmed that the institution of policing should be abolished completely. In the past year or two, propositions to defund or abolish the police and prisons have travelled from incarcerated-activist networks and academic conferences and scholarship into mainstream conversations.”

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Yet a profound dilemma is visible from the momentum of this movement: a large bulk of liberal politics is driven by precisely the opposite impulses. The most loyal Democratic partisans are frequently venerating prosecutors, advocating for harsh criminal punishments, championing punitive theories of criminal law that have long been rejected by liberal jurists and, above all else, often demanding the longest and harshest punishments in "the carceral state” for a large group of people.

Why are so many Democrats simultaneously chanting radical criminal reform slogans to abolish or greatly reduce the police and the prison state while simultaneously demanding harsh prison terms for so many people under the classic law-and-order ideology they claim to oppose? The answer is clear: Democrats believe that the only real criminals, or at least the worst ones, are those who reject their political ideology and are their political adversaries. And thus, while they work with one hand to usher in radical reforms to the policing and prison state, they work with the other to concoct theories to justify the long-term imprisonment of their political opponents, even when their alleged crimes involve no violence.

This internal contradiction in Democratic politics was vividly illustrated by the fact that — though they will now deny it — the most revered and admired figure over the last five years in liberal politics was Robert Mueller, named in 2001 by George W. Bush to be FBI Director and then in 2017 by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be Special Counsel investigating Russiagate. Liberals did not even bother hiding their glee at the prospect that Mueller was coming to arrest and imprison as many of their political adversaries as possible. They sung songs in his honor and danced to their fantasies about the next convictions. Every indictment was cheered, every prosecution applauded, every punishment lamented for being insufficiently harsh, as their favorite cable channels were filled to the brim with the very life-long federal prosecutors their ideology ostensibly opposed. Throughout the Trump years, Democratic politics was driven at its core by a bloodlust to imprison Trump, his family, his aides and his supporters for as long and as harshly as possible. Cravings for punishment and prison, at its core, was what drove the arousal of Russiagate.

To accomplish this, they often championed the exact theories of criminal justice which liberal jurists had long warned were abusive and even unconstitutional. Few convictions excited them as much as the one obtained by Mueller against former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, whose grave crime was lying to the FBI by falsely denying that he had spoken to a Russian official about foreign policy during the transition, weeks before he was to assume his White House job. The most admired liberal judges, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, had long argued that lying to the FBI in the way Flynn did should not even be a crime at all, that making it one was a violation of the constitutional right against self-incrimination and bestowed the FBI with the power to turn citizens into criminals through entrapment. But no matter: Flynn was a Trump supporter, and therefore they were thrilled he was prosecuted and outraged he spent no time in prison.

Then there is Julian Assange, who has been effectively detained for a decade and confined to a harsh high-security British prison for two years on charges that he committed “espionage” by publishing authentic documents in 2010 that exposed crimes by the U.S. Government. As someone who has long reported on WikiLeaks and advocated for Assange's rights, I vividly recall how much support there was for him back then on the liberal-left. Yet virtually all of that support disappeared in 2016, when he committed the real crime that caused Democrats and liberals to hate him and want him in prison: namely, he published true and publicly relevant documents that reflected poorly on Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

We continue the story at the tundra base, as Elder Pjang-Nich explains why Maria and Lah-Shah have been called to the distant base. Chapter 4 – Pjang-Nich explains Pjang-Nich whistled, a light-screen appeared above the table. A star map lit up on the screen, tool tips showing their location and the location of their target. It was some distance across the galaxy but still easily done with the…

The New York Times earlier this week ran a guest essay by Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers, fulminating about Elon Musk’s effort to purchase Twitter. She wrote:

What exactly does [Musk] believe can’t be said on the platform right now? It certainly doesn’t take long to find discredited race science, arguments that women are intellectually inferior, antisemitism… It is easy to assume that the banned speech that Mr. Musk is standing up for is worse even than that. As the comedian Michael Che put it on “Saturday Night Live,” the $44 billion deal shows “how badly white guys want to use the N-word.”

This is the elite argument against free speech in a nutshell: “If you favor ‘all legal speech,’ you really just want to slander, threaten, and harass. Now please let me tiptoe up to libel myself, as I tell millions of New York Times readers I ‘assume’ you’re a racist itching to use the N-word.”

The hypocrisy of America’s self-appointed culture-protectors this week is breathtaking. They really seem not to realize that what they’ve been seeking for years isn’t an end to speech abuses, but a monopoly on them. They see Musk as a traitor to his class, threatening to upend what they see as a natural order that in recent years placed bluenose squads in deserved roles as vanguards and truth-arbiters. Whether or not Musk ever upends anything is a different question, but critics believe he will, and now they’re panicking, in tones of maximum sanctimony. They’re even pulling out “Who will protect the children?”-style language:

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The goal of political engineering is amplification: generating the most power from the least work. As few people as possible do as little as possible, and get the most results.

Voting in an election is a collective action. A group agrees to some collective political action. Either this is a direct action, like a California referendum, or an indirect action, like a Presidential election.

In indirect action, the collective, desiring some result, decides to achieve this result by delegating their authority to some representative. This system of government is often known as representative democracy.

As a political machine, representative democracy can function poorly in three ways. One, it can miss its threshold—losing the election. Two, it can win the election, but have low amplification—even after winning the election, the politician has little or no power. Three, it can win the election, but have low fidelity—the politician does have power, but does not act according to his promises and/or the wishes of the voters.

Where are we on this? As most people would say intuitively, representative democracy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is both low-amplification and low-fidelity. The purpose of political engineering in the present day is to rectify both these problems, while recognizing the inevitable tradeoff between them.

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The voters feel they have popular sovereignty, but they exercise this sovereignty by delegating it to the politicians. The politicians exercise only a negligible fraction of the sovereignty that the voters have delegated to them.

They are pretending to govern. So they are pretending to their supporters that the reins of government are in their hands. So they are unavoidably complicit in the theft of sovereignty from the voters. No politician can avoid this complicity and none, once complicit, has an incentive to expose it. Let us not focus on the criminal aspect; let us be positive, and try to understand how a delegation of sovereignty should work.

One way to think about collective delegation is to think about individual delegation. Whether the delegator is individual or collective, the principles do not change.

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Fidelity

There is always a tradeoff between democratic fidelity and democratic amplification.

Intuitively, if you trust your politician, you have to give him a lot of rope. If you don’t trust him, you shouldn’t elect him. If you do trust him, micromanaging him reduces his power, often trading large declines in amplification for small increases in fidelity.

Worse, the declines in amplification become declines in fidelity—as a weak politician often has no choice but to betray his voters. While fidelity is always desirable, almost all the ways of enforcing it are counterproductive.

So the most effective political-engineering designs ignore fidelity almost completely—or at least, leave fidelity to mere human trust—and focus on amplification.

Amplification

A low-amplification election is a low-fidelity election by definition. Its outcome is that some other power, not the election winner, is more in charge of the government. Ultimately, this power has no reason to obey the voters.

Indeed, inevitably, over time, the voters will come to obey this immovable power—since the organs which guide the public mind will come to serve and agree with it.

The only way for the public to free itself from such a power is to make politics more powerful. A public which disdains politics and politicians also disdains elections and democracy. Such a public will never gain any power through electoral democracy, since it does not even believe in its own collective right to rule.

And since this attitude is the deeply-instilled status quo, the public cannot restore democracy except by learning to hack democracy—not to disable it, but to renew it.

This high-amplification democracy, a democracy that actually works, will strike the oligarchy it replaces as lawless. It is anything but lawless. It is a renewal of law in a lawless and bureaucratic world that barely understands the ancient concept of law.

Indeed, its first step is just to read the actual law literally—by taking the Constitution at its literal world.

The constitutional presidency

Taking the Constitution seriously means taking it literally. Taking the Constitution literally means literally making the President the CEO of the executive branch.

A constitutional President has no reason at all to preserve anything more than small fragments of the current “executive branch,” which is actually the legislative branch (since its budget, policy and personnel are mandated by Congress). For the most part, reconstituting the executive functions of the USG, where they are actually needed, will be far easier and more efficient with a completely new executive organization.

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If this new President, now the CEO of America, fails to enforce the bills that Congress passes, or the opinions that the Supreme Court decrees, there is only one remedy. The people, at the next election, must express their disapproval by electing a different President. If they instead express continued confidence in their President, he has done his job—and Congress and the Court have not done theirs. For this is America, home of popular sovereignty, where the people reign supreme.

The Supreme Court is explicitly an undemocratic institution; the Congress, with its stratospheric incumbency rates and gerontocratic seniority system, is implicitly one. All the loss of democratic amplification in the American electoral system comes from the veto of the undemocratic branches over the democratic branches. This veto, nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, has outlived its usefulness.

To paraphrase an online micro-celebrity, “you do actually gotta hand it to him”.

That him is Viktor Orban, head of Hungary’s Fidesz Party, which stormed to its fourth successive electoral victory in that Pannonian country, defeating a coalition of everybody-but-Fidesz, which had the backing of western governments, media, and NGOs, but fatally did not translate that into domestic support to win the election. As things stand, Fidesz is going to win an outright supermajority (2/3rds of the seats in Parliament) for a second time, allowing them to make constitutional changes where they see fit.

This was not supposed to happen.

Having veered off reservation by refusing to open up Hungary to migrants from Africa and Asia, Orban violated the ever-changing “core values of Europe”, leading to a sanctions regime that denies Hungary billions of Euros by way of COVID-19 relief. This pettiness is par for the course for Brussels, with Poland being another victim of the sanctions regime for having a judiciary that reflects those in other western countries, but which also violates the “core values of Europe”.

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Even worse, it’s simply not democracy at all when the people vote to choose who governs them:

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In the wake of McAuliffe’s loss, the “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach” line was universally tabbed a “gaffe” by media. I described it in the recent “Loudoun County: A Culture War in Four Acts” series in TK as the political equivalent of using a toe to shoot your face off with a shotgun, but this was actually behind the news cycle. Yahoo! said the “gaffe precipitated the Democrat’s slide in the polls,” while the Daily Beast’s blunter headline was, “Terry McAuliffe’s White-Guy Confidence Just Fucked the Dems.”

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.

It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.

Jack Dorsey, the extend-o-bearded CEO who co-founded Twitter and whose fame grew with that of his increasingly powerful platform during the Trump years, resigned today. His departure is the latest plot point in a long-developing Internet tragicomedy, which has seen what was supposed to be a historically democratizing technological tool transformed into a dystopian force for censorship and control. The departure of Dorsey, the rare CEO who not only has a conscience but appears to consult it more than once every few years, is bad news for those who already had complaints about the company, which during his tenure came to occupy a central role in what’s left of American intellectual culture.

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Prior to 2016, elite mouthpieces bragged about acting as gatekeepers to political power. Someone like then-ABC writer Mark Halperin could write boastful pieces about how a “Gang of 500” in Washington really decided the presidency. These were “campaign consultants, strategists, pollsters, pundits, and journalists who make up the modern-day political establishment,” as the New Yorker put it. When political debates were held, a handful of analysts on television told you who won. We, reporters, told you who was “electable” and who wasn’t, and people mostly listened, even if “electability” was a crock that mostly measured levels of corporate donor approval.

Then came 2016. Trump didn’t get the big Republican donor money (it went to Jeb Bush), he didn’t get the support of his party’s bureaucracy (which at various times pulled out stops to try to “derail” his candidacy for the nomination), and even conservative media locked arms against him early in the race (the National Review published an unprecedented “Conservatives Against Trump” mega-piece featuring a slew of famed mouthpieces, who aimed to forestall the “crisis for conservatism” Trump’s presence threatened). Trump throughout his political career benefited from free corporate media coverage, but by the time of his first nomination, he had universally negative editorial treatment in mainstream media and even serious detractors on stations like Fox.

Once, that would have been fatal to a politician, which is why Nate Cohn could write with confidence in the New York Times that Trump had “just about no chance” to win the Republican nomination in 2016 — because, he said without embarrassment, it is “the party elites who traditionally decide nomination contests.” Such commentators didn’t figure on the power of the Internet, and especially Twitter.

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