Do we live in an age of law or anarchy?
Is cooperation the respected best practice for solving major problems, or are we abandoned, by institutional inadequacies or by our own frailties, to seek solutions without help?
There is anarchy, criminality, and violence, and some leaders with great influence across the world engage in these deviant behaviors. Grave harm falls on real people, and our humanity demands we never forget that fact.
Our collective outrage, infused in our demand for better, is also a defining constraint on the question of what kind of world we inhabit.
Better than worst-case is always more likely than pessimists would argue. In fact, all good things are possible.
What we are living through is not the absence of law or the loss of human rights; it is the time lag between abuses and corrections.
We must: Heal by upgrading the levers of popular influence over power.
Then: Correct injustices, and set a course for better.
A note toward healing
Outdated political systems are still bringing havoc to innocent people and vulnerable communities, across the world. Even in advanced democratic societies, much of the structure used to elect high-ranking officials is critically outdated.
The United States benefits from local control of elections. This decentralization means even aggressive and sweeping abuses do not affect most votes or most vote-counting. Civil society—made up of concerned citizens—can play a corrective role, simply by showing up to manage the process in a lawful, unbiased way.
What is missing, however, is the ability to make choices that weed out extremists and saboteurs. In too many ways, political parties act as proxies for the people. Whether intentional or not, this can have the effect of sidelining human rights and citizen agency, giving leverage to those who advance factional interest over public service.
Ranked choice voting is an important innovation that allows voters to organize candidates sequentially, so that a specified 2nd best and 3rd best choice are registered. This allows for determining how a 2nd round would play out, while giving the voters the ability to pre-empt partisan gaming of the process.
While the winner might not be the person who had the most first-place votes, the winner will have support from the majority, and will have had to achieve that by appealing to shared values rather than fears and rivalries.
If people can vote universal values, instead of partisan platforms, we can remove the incentive for extremist rhetoric and heal our civic processes.
