How We Got Here
Democracy is at risk, and something must be done.
The Decent Federalism Project started as an idea for a new political party. The thought was that if we could just find a new way for citizens to look at politics, a third party would emerge to complete the picture. It would be populist on economic issues and moderate on social issues, and would represent nearly a third of the electorate that is broadly ignored by political parties, while creating an opening for other parties to shift and evolve. In short, it would force the political system to work again. Unfortunately and not unexpectedly, the barriers to entry were too high.
So let’s rewind a bit. For too long the United States’ problems have been seen as requiring technocratic, means-tested, and consultant-approved solutions. But what has that led to? A political environment that is so toxic that even talking about working with the other side of the aisle can harm a politician’s career. The historical precedent for this behavior is a longer conversation, but it comes down to the Overton Window: what is acceptable political discourse. The Overton Window in a massive country with massive income inequality is, well, massive. What can be said about the history here is that the U.S. was not one set of settlements; the populations that settled the corners of the U.S. were very diverse, and their cohesion was never assured. And that lack of cohesion is borne out in spades today.
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So how to address this wide Overton Window in a vast and diverse country? We start by looking at democracy as a software problem; it’s the operating system of our civilization. There are broadly three types of “users” of this operating system in this country: progressives, moderates, and conservatives. There are smaller groups like the alt-right and democratic socialists that influence these broad types, but their footprint is smaller. As a whole though, these three groups of citizens are very different from one another, which is rooted in regional cultural history, geography, infrastructure, and economy. So why not give each of these groups their own territory, and democratize the borders so they can choose if they feel they belong in a neighboring region? As you will see from this site, the way citizens have congregated makes room for five regions of roughly equal population which make distributing power evenly quite easy; two of them are progressive, one of them is conservative, and two of them are moderate. Any attempt to establish borders is subjective and somewhat arbitrary, but we believe we’ve created a framework that is equitable, and maximizes representation for each of these three groups as a proportion of the nation’s population.
In addition to calling for this regional government decentralization of the U.S. federation, which we believe should retain a single currency and military, we advocate for:
restorative justice to supplant retributive justice as the primary method for addressing criminality,
a shift towards a human-centered economy that will measure economic activity with new, less corporate-focused eyes,
an anti-bigotry and anti-exploitation civil and human rights system that fights for consumer, worker, and voter rights, and
an approach to foreign policy and the international system that fights for people, planet, and progress towards a sustainable future for the environment, public health, and democracy.