Nearly 9 months ago, I announced a project with a unique imperative — rethinking the United States Constitution and enacting it through a Second Constitutional Convention. In the subsequent months, I have worked with an incredibly curious, bright, creative, compassionate, nuanced, humble, respectful, and courageous group of intellectuals with impeccable integrity and unique integral and metamodern perspectives. (Yes, they deserve all of those adjectives, and I am eternally grateful for their taking a time-and-energy-consuming leap of faith into the unknown with me.)
Together, we have been working on The Reconstitution Project, in which we have spent multiple weeks at a time wrestling with each of our Ten Framing Questions, and for each of which we eventually adopt all-encompassing Amendments to address each fundamental topic from civics and society to politics, economics, and governance.
Political innovation is our goal. In tackling our Second Framing Question, the bounds of our inventiveness have been put to the test with a truly original and interesting proposal.
In this topic, we have examined the following salient question:
“Why is political representation rarely reflective of the values and preferences of The People that are being represented?”
While there are many aspects of this question to respond to, two themes have emerged:
- re-examining the early compromises inherent in our representative model of governance; and
- exploring a new presentative model of civic participation — deliberative democracy in the form of Citizens’ Assemblies.
Theme 1 considers emphasizing demography (demographic-awareness) as an approach to improving representative democratic principles.
Theme 2 considers deemphasizing demography (demographic-blindness) as an approach to improving direct democratic principles (e.g., initiatives, referendums, and recalls).
Importantly, the themes are not mutually exclusive and may provide a new check-and-balance worth considering as an integrated whole.
For purposes of this article however, it is our response to Theme 1 that I intend to unpack and share for comment and feedback here on Medium. We have termed our proposal: Noncontiguous Representation of Shared Interests.
🤯 Hold tight, it’s not as complicated as it sounds — but it’s certainly not something I can find significantly pondered anywhere (which is quite rare in this age of near-boundless information).
This proposal acknowledges that our current system of representation is based upon centuries-old compromises that are less relevant (to put it lightly) than they were at the time they were made. Namely, the Great Compromise that enabled the passage of the United States Constitution — the establishment of a bicameral legislature made up of a proportionally representative “lower house” or House of Representatives and an “upper house” or Senate that would be equally weighted amongst the states. While on the surface, this compromise addressed concerns of large and small states, on a deeper level it would be remiss to not note that it also allowed a union of slave and non-slave states to form a Union (ultimately leading to the more shameful and egregious Three-Fifths Compromise, which would later be superseded by the 14th Amendment).
Indeed, for better and for worse, the history of our democratic form of governance has been built upon a series of compromises. Undoubtedly a Second Constitutional Convention would need to include a Second Great Compromise. This is where the proposal for a tricameral legislature emerges.
Sure enough, new patterns of concern have emerged within our increasingly polarized politics that now supersedes our primitive membership in small- or large-states. In an increasingly interdependent and interconnected world, most of these shared interests are not even location- or territory-based. Two dimensions become most “self-evident” — they are also the most quantifiable by criteria that everyone could clearly locate themselves within.
Look at any recent election map — what do you see? Buried within an amalgamation of red and blue states, there is a clear and noncontiguous pattern that emerges, and we all know it well. Urban centers nearly universally vote for liberal (or even democratic-socialist) candidates, sprawling rural areas lean toward conservative (or often libertarian) candidates, and suburban sprawls tend to vary and fall somewhere in between (often representing moderate, independent, and swing districts).
A rural-urban-suburban compromise seems like an obvious dimension missing from our current model of representation. There have been attempts to consider rural-urban proportional representation but they have been mostly unsuccessful. We will turn back to this dimension of population density in a moment.
The other missing dimension also seems clear — socioeconomic status. Not only is this parameter of social stratification quantifiable, impactful, and increasingly unequal — but it also serves as a potentially useful proxy for the causes and outcomes of the most problematic disparities inherent in other aspects of identity and complex-to-parse intersectionality.
Combining these two dimensions allows a new possibility to emerge. There are probably many ways to approach a model of representation for these dimensions, but the model I propose here echoes the compromises of the past — a new chamber of the legislative branch of government: The Assembly of Shared Interests.
Let’s now unpack what I called this at the outset: Noncontiguous Representation of Shared Interests. What this suggests is that both the candidates and the voters of these representative seats would be members of a noncontiguous group of shared interests (i.e., not necessarily bound by geography).
To make this really concrete, the working proposal looks something like this: there would be 27 members of the Assembly of Shared Interests. Since socioeconomic status can be broken into two dimensions (net worth and active income), this creates three dimensions (when added to population density). One can create three classifications within each of these dimensions (low-, medium-, high-). For example, one can imagine a wealthy rural oil tycoon who has retired with a passive income has some quite different interests than a middle-class suburban working person.
The breakdown of the 27 members of the Assembly would consist of 1 representative for each classification formed along each of the three dimensions (3³ = 27):
- Rural, Suburban, Urban
- Low-, Mid-, High-Income
- Low-, Mid-, High-Net-Worth
While I know this all sounds a bit… crazy(?)… many of the original compromises that enabled our current system to emerge were perhaps crazier, and some were completely atrocious and nonsensical (3/5 of a person!?).
This compromise would, of course, come with additional compromises — for example, in defining the criteria (e.g., defining “high income”). I’d argue (on another day, in another post) that we should ensure proportionality here too so that the 1% don’t end up with 33% of the representative power. Perhaps there is room for yet another compromise there as well… but I digress.
Yes, this “Assembly of Shared Interests” is simply a thought experiment (for now), but all concrete paradigm shifts must begin that way. This exercise is intended to get the ball rolling, the gears turning, and the juices flowing.
Some additional fine points that have been notably discussed: this body could be elevated to the stature of “upper house” (since it would be the smallest of the three chambers), and the Senate would be demoted to a co-equal “lower house” alongside the House of Representatives. This could give the Assembly of Shared Interests the powers to approve Supreme Court nominees, convict impeached Presidents, etc. For otherwise normal legislative processes, one could imagine a system that requires at least 2 of the 3 chambers to agree upon a bill in order for it to reach the desk of the President. Of course, the devil is in the details, but you need to start somewhere!
There is much more to unpack here, there is much refining that can be done — perhaps there is an entirely different approach that could better solve the same tensions this proposal is attempting to resolve. My hope by sharing this thought experiment is that it opens minds to what is possible, and inspires people to not simply “think outside the box” but to also demonstrate how wide the box can be broken open. Political innovation is possible.
We are no less creative, intelligent, or informed than the Founders — but time has consecrated their work and convinced us that we are relatively incapable of such leaps. However, we have found ourselves in an era of unlearning. Healthy skepticism is re-emerging, and getting to the other side will require creative boldness that has abandoned civics, politics, economics, and governance for far too long.
If you’ve reached the end, I am so grateful for sharing the most precious gift — your time.
I eagerly await any and all of your constructive feedback. If you’d like to join The Reconstitution Project to get more actively involved, please sign up at TheReconstitution.com!
