I hope that this weekend, you were able to contemplate the American experience. There is nothing guaranteed about it. Honor our freedoms by protecting them for everyone.
I ran for local office twice. Lost both times. But I learned more than I ever would have known, including how things actually work.
You sit through enough city commission meetings and you start to see the choreography. Citizens shuffle to a podium, get their three minutes, say their piece into a microphone that points at no one in particular (most of the time; sometimes the more pointed ones are the most entertaining).
A commissioner nods. Another scrolls a phone. The agenda moves on. A vote happens. The room empties. And somewhere, hours or days earlier, in a coffee shop or a country club or a phone call between people who already know each other's grandchildren, the real decision was made.
The public meeting has become much more a performance of democracy, while the decision is private business.
I don't say that with anger. I say it with the flat tone of someone who has watched it from the podium and from a candidate's chair and from the audience. The procedural choreography is real. The rules are real. Robert's Rules of Order, drafted by a Union Army officer in 1876, still governs most of these rooms, and it sucks the life out of these meetings, perhaps purposely.
Research shows that Henry Martyn Robert wrote his manual because church meetings kept devolving into shouting matches. He wanted order, and that’s what we got, but it’s also a process built before a world with telephones, laptops, smartphones, and the ability to count a thousand votes in five seconds.
The technology we use to run democratic meetings is a hundred and fifty years old, while the technology we use to work and order lunch is not.
I think that is nuts.
Public comment is structured to be heard but not necessarily to count. Lobbyists are structured to count without being publicly heard. The professional ear-whisperers, the modern-day Wormtongues, are the ones who are really getting results from our current democratic process. They get paid to know which commissioner takes which call. They’ve spent the week before the meeting doing the kind of “work” that actually moves a vote. The retiree who drove down to speak about a stop sign at her grandson's school gets three minutes until the red light goes off and a polite thank you and “next”. Both are inputs into the system but the reality is that only one has weight.
That is not democracy. That is theatre.
We have the tools to change this. We have had them for years. We just haven't had the will or courage to change them.
Imagine a county commission meeting where every registered voter in the district can log into a verified civic app on their phone. The agenda goes live a couple days ahead with plain understandable language. Citizens can submit written comments that get aggregated and tagged by topic before the meeting even starts. During the meeting, the commission opens a live vote on a contested item. Doesn’t have to be a binding vote, but within ninety seconds, the chair has a tally of how thousands of residents feel about the proposed zoning change, a new cellphone tower, traffic cameras, or data centers.
That is not science fiction. That is Decidim, running in Barcelona since 2016, with forty thousand residents participating in a public process in a single two-month window. That is Polis, used in Taiwan to structure mass deliberation on contentious tech regulation. There’s even a similar process in New York City, where since 2011 residents have directly allocated millions in council discretionary funds.
I already know the objections. The technology won't be secure. The participation won't be representative. The mob will rule!
None of these are serious.
Think about everything you do on your phone now. We pay bills, deposit checks, and even file taxes on our phones. The Estonians, eager to practice a democracy they didn’t have, have voted online since 2005.
As for representativeness, the current system is not that representative either. The current system is whoever shows up on a Tuesday at six to compete with the private interests who have already had their say. The filter for Tuesday at 6 typically in a downtown location means mostly retirees, gadflies, and people paid to be there.
A digital layer doesn't replace in-person comment. It supplements it. It allows more people into the room.
The deeper objection, the one nobody says out loud, is that this would force a recalibration of power. Right now, the lobbyist's value is access. They’ve made millions off of that as the skill. He has the commissioner's cell number. She knows which staffer drafts the resolution. If three thousand constituents can register a real-time preference and have it visible on the dais, that greatly weakens this power dynamic. The lobbyist has to make a public case, not a private one. The elected official has to explain a vote, not just cast it.
That is uncomfortable. It is also the entire point.
Robert's Rules will not go away, nor should it entirely. There is a reason we have motions and seconds and a process for amendment. Order matters. But the rules can and must include a digital layer if democracy is to grow stronger with the times. A motion can include a sixty-second window to assess citizen support. A public comment period can include a structured online submission ranked by upvotes from verified residents. A budget vote can be preceded by a participatory allocation round where citizens spend a portion of the discretionary line themselves, the way Chicago's 48th Ward has done for sixteen years. Durham, North Carolina, engaged twelve thousand residents in its budgeting process and matched the racial composition of the city. Imagine that across the South.
The models exist. Cities are running it. We would not be inventing anything new. We are simply choosing not to adopt and modernize.
I lost both elections, and I am fine with that. I learned more from losing than I would have from winning, and one of the things I learned is that the people who write the rules are the people who win under them. The lobbyist class and attorneys at law did not seize power. We handed it to them by keeping a process in place that only they have the time to attend and only they understood how to work the system.
The fix is not to ban lobbyists or attorneys but to even the odds. Make every citizen a low-cost participant. Make every vote a contested one. Make the smartphone promissory whisper compete with thousands of citizens.
Robert’s rules were designed for a slower country. We are not that country anymore. I drove home from my last meeting as a candidate past a strip mall, a school, and a county park. All of them shaped by decisions made in rooms I had watched; allowing gas stations next to neighborhoods, cutting back a canopy, allowing more digital signage, closing access to public property.
Some were good decisions. Some were not. None of them, not one, was made by the people who would live the most with the outcomes.
We can do better than that. We have the tools. What we need is the will to use technology for real, purposeful democracy.
Pope Leo XIV used his first encyclical to warn that treating people as things to be optimized makes it easier to write off some lives as less worthy. This is the modus operandi of the current regime. He called instead for shared responsibility in the age of AI. It is the kind of moral clarity a lot of people and institutions have been too timid to say. Pope Leo XIV publishes AI encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (CNET)
Mexico's president Claudia Sheinbaum is forgiving the unpayable farm debts of roughly sixty thousand small producers, with full cancellation for the women who were pushed into loans in their own names. Keep an eye on her, because she is governing like someone who remembers who the state is actually for. Sheinbaum forgives debts for tens of thousands of small farmers (People's Dispatch)
The happiest states turn out not to be the richest or the sunniest but the ones where people still trust the stranger next to them, and the piece is honest enough to let the winner surprise you. Happiness, trust, and the state that comes out on top (NYT)
Wow, did I enjoy watching this and remembering what that time felt like as a kid. In 1976, Bill Moyers sat down with a peanut farmer running for president. Jimmy Carter talked about stripping away the secrecy that had piled up at the highest levels of government, the backroom habits that let power operate without anyone watching. He won that year running against exactly the kind of closed-door governance this essay is about. Half a century later, sit through a commission meeting and you will see the same choreography Carter promised to dismantle: three minutes at a podium while the actual decision gets made somewhere else. We did not solve the problem he named. We just got better phones and used almost none of that power to open the room. The road not taken is still sitting there, unused, sixty years of technology later.
I have written many times that future power production will be much more distributed than centralized. There is more power sitting idle in American driveways and basements than most people realize. Home batteries, electric cars, smart thermostats, all of it capable of feeding the grid when demand spikes. Virtual power plants stitch those scattered resources together, and now the data center boom is finally making utilities and the public demand some changes.
We need a worldwide Marshall Plan for sustainable energy, and it begins with arrangements like this, where a corporation and a community actually need each other and say so out loud. People will give up a little to get something real, and that willingness is the part that spreadsheets always miss. A buy-in like this is not only good economics. It is a rehearsal for the kind of shared responsibility the next century is going to demand of all of us.
We Know
There is an undercurrent in the collective,
that is like, we know what you are doing,
when this government tries to pretend that
their crimes do not exist or that redacting files
will protect their cronies, when their slight of
hand and double talk no longer fool us, we know
that we are the masters of our own minds, and
reject their talking heads no matter how they
spin, we know what they are doing in a way that
is undeniable, like the way a seed emerges toward
the light, the seeds of truth have germinated in the
darkness they were buried in, growing exponentially
from all of their shit.
Remember to teach your kids about history and America. Don’t leave it up to schools alone or political pundits. Keep plenty of books around and invite questions. There is nothing guaranteed about our system. “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Always strive to be a good human.