Food for thought…
There’s a lot of non-productive whining and misdirected finger pointing by defeated Dems still going on, considering that an arrogant HRC campaign simply dropped the ball, as well as non-justified chest thumping by certain knuckle-dragging GOP members, considering Trump had almost 3 million fewer votes than HRC. Both sides were ready to use the Electoral College to their advantage. Now one side abhors it and the other lauds the wisdom of the Founding Fathers for creating it. Those old colonists weren’t stupid, but many fixtures of U.S. representative democracy, like representative democracy everywhere, are flawed or out-of-date or just plain wrong.
That said, I thought I’d have fun reminding readers of this blog about a famous sci-fi master’s take on “democratic institutions.” Unlike John Galt’s overbearing and over-verbose multipage oration in Atlas Shrugged (parodied in The Midas Bomb), the old revolutionary Bernardo de la Paz’s speech in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress mixes a lot of keen observation about human nature and plain common sense to express in a few pages some interesting ideas. Heinlein, like a few sci-fi writers (but not yours truly), has been considered a Libertarian (Hogan, Niven, and Pournelle are others). The ideas expressed in these pages would never be in that third party’s platform, though.
Recently I reread Heinlein’s masterpiece. Sci-fi writers today should study it as a model of how to take a brilliant plot and add in great action, fantastic dialogue, and expert word building, keeping everything in balance to produce the perfect novel. If you haven’t read it, do so—it can be considered Shawshank Redemption plus Great Escape on steroids, and it’s a lot more fun while still being profound. (It would probably make a more interesting movie too.) A lunar penal colony has existed so long that many in current generations there aren’t even convicts anymore. When the Earth-based authority that runs the colony turns the loonies into captive slaves who get paid squat, they revolt. Because all their raw materials are catapulted to Earth in wheat shipments, they see they have nothing to lose—the colony will be dead in eight years, according to the sentient AI.
Bernardo, sent to the moon years earlier because he was a revolutionary (Earth is now run by the Federated Nations, a tyrannical UN successor to which countries have ceded most of their sovereignty), is one main character. Let me quote a few of his ideas when addressing a constitutional convention (my comments will be in square brackets):
“Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional…for in the past mankind has not done well in saddling itself with governments. [An understatement.] For example, I note in one draft report a proposal for setting up a commission to divide Luna into congressional districts and to reapportion them from time to time according to population. [Guess Heinlein was too polite to call this gerrymandering.]”
“This is the traditional way, so it should be considered suspect, considered guilty until proven innocent. Perhaps you feel it is the only way. May I suggest others? Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him. [Truer today than ever before!] Constituencies might be formed by dividing people by occupation [like a union]…or by age [boomers v. millennials, for example]…or even alphabetically [the Moores and Smiths would be a huge constituency]….”
“You might even consider installing the candidates who receive the least number of votes; unpopular men might be just the thing to save you from a new tyranny [and people who don’t really want an office might be better too]…. In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies. [Is he also counting elected governments that become tyrannical?]”
“But if representative government turns out to be your intention [it always sounds good, but debatable that it’s necessary with the internet—Pohl had a story where NYC was run via old style Greek democracy and the internet] …suppose instead of an election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them…. [This would be an extreme evolution of the multi-party parliamentary governments in Europe that I admire—consensus becomes mandatory.]”
“I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent—the more impediments to legislation the better. But…I suggest one house of legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let the legislators pass laws with only two-thirds majority…while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one-third minority…. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third, is it not likely you would be better off without it? [Wow! That’s deep!]”
Heinlein does throw in more Libertarian-like standard fare too. On taxes: “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” Or, is that Libertarian? Current Libertarians and many others often just want a flat tax—sort of equates taxes with church tithings. Could work, though, if all the regressive taxes were removed—bridge and highway tolls, for example, and most property taxes.
I kept my eyes open for anything on the Electoral College, but that was probably too specific an issue, yet old Bernardo’s two-house comment could apply in this case too, considering that the U.S. seems tethered to a suffocating two-party system (the “two houses”). We could apportion electors the following way: if a candidate gets more than two-thirds of the vote, and no opponent gets all the remaining 1/3, that candidate gets all the electors. Otherwise, they split according to the number of votes. I’ve analyzed other possibilities in previous posts. The conundrum always is to achieve a representative democracy reflecting majority will but ensuring that the majority doesn’t tyrannize the minority…and vice versa! Hard to do. Heinlein’s 2/3-1/3 idea is a pretty good one to achieve that, though.
A lot of food for thought here. Should that be in a sci-fi novel? Why not?
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More than Human: The Mensa Contagion. A trilogy in one book: ETs send a “gift” to humanity, a virus contained in a probe that crashes in South Africa and modifies human genetics. But is it a gift or a prelude to invasion? Colonizing Mars speeds up as a way to have an outpost farther out in the solar system and increase our chances for survival. When humans discover the ET ship in the far reaches of the solar system, one woman fights to have the ETs’ offspring accepted as our partners for the exploration of the galaxy. “I found the characters well developed and the plot fresh. I was reminded at times of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.”—Debra Miller, in her Amazon review. (Also available in all ebook formats via Smashwords and its distributors.)
And so it goes…
