When it comes to how to make the important common decisions, are you a "vertical" or a "horizontal"?

[Ken Burch]

These are terms that emerged from the Occupy movement

"horizontals" are those who favor decentralized decision-making, power wielded from below, and broad-based egalitarian forms of direct democracy and as much openness and transparency as possible.

"verticals" favor centralization, hierarchy, "representative" forms of democracy", and are willing to use more confidential and secrecy-based structures of power, out of the belief that nothing else "gets things done". Also tend to believe that "horizontal" structures lack sufficient "leadership" and are too cumbersome.

Which do you identify more strongly with?

And what do you see as the strong and weak points of each?

2 votes, 0 passes | Time left: Unlimited
	Vertical
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	Horizontal
	2 (100%)
	Neither
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	Other
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	0 DU members did not wish to select any of the options provided.
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[jeff47]

1. I think if you tried really hard

you could bias that question just a little more.

[Honeycombe8]

2. Gee, I can't tell at all which you prefer. nt

[cherokeeprogressive]

3. "When it comes to how to... run life," Man I wouldn't touch that with a pole.

What does that even mean?

[Ken Burch]

16. I was trying to express the general concept of who has the say in the things that really affect us.

The things we share in common on many levels. Was having trouble fitting that in in the space available for the thread title. Will delete it. Sorry for the bad phraseology.

[cherokeeprogressive]

22. Either way, horizontal gets down twinkles from me.

I don't think it's possible to make that work for over three hundred ten million people.

[Ken Burch]

23. Thanks for contributing your view.

Perhaps we need to look at breaking down the country into regional blocs, ultimately.

[cherokeeprogressive]

25. Those would be called "states". n/t

[Ken Burch]

27. Not in the sense that the states are currently run.

They would involve a change in the power structure, so that "good old boy" types wouldn't monopolize power within them.

[hfojvt]

26. I am not sure what kind of decisions you are talking about

nor how the various methods are decided.

Consider a recent decision about the Bush tax cuts. How would that be decided horizontally? Would you have some kind of national election about various proposals? That seems pretty cumbersome., and fraught with difficulties.

The other question is - if you have a vertical, representative system, it certainly makes a difference if you have people who actually will look after the interests of the majority of people or if you have "representatives" who will be purchased by special interests.

Isn't something like "the state of Kansas voting on a marriage amendment" an example of a "horizontal decision". Kansas voted to keep marriage heterosexual only. Are we all cool with that? Or would we rather have a liberal scotus come in with some sort of Roe v. Wade that trumps them? And THAT would NOT even be representative.

So I would kinda like to see some practical examples of what you mean by "common decisions".

[Ken Burch]

33. OK, here's a few

1)How the wealth we all create is distributed.
2)How sacrifice is distributed when sacrifice is necessary.
3)On natural resources and the environment What balance is to be struck between creating employment and preserving a sustainable world.
4)The kinds of education that are to be made available to people, and how easy or difficult it should be to get access to education.
5)When(if ever) to put massive numbers of human lives in danger by starting a war-and how easy or difficult it should be to make that decision.

[hfojvt]

34. well I am not even sure how those decisions are made now

those seem fairly large systemic and general rather than common decisions.

1. In what sense to "we all" create wealth?

2. seems to go back to the first one

3. as far as horizontal vs. vertical, I am not sure how you would enforce any conservation measures horizontally. If people have the power to make their own decisions then many will decide not to conserve. You sorta NEED an authority to say from the top "everybody has to drive no faster than 55 mph in order to conserve fuel." An order from the Carter administration (or Congress at that time) which stayed in effect through two terms of Reagan, a term of Bush and part of Clinton's terms.

4. Again this is kinda tough. For one thing because it already IS horizontal, or it was. I mean, myself and my four siblings were taught to read, not by a school or a day care, but by my stay-at-home mom. That looks horizontal to me, whereas using pre-schools or day care is more vertical, it is done no by yourself or your family, but by a representative.

5. Wars, at least big wars, seem to be fairly rare - a mere 3 or 4 per century. But I am not sure how the Iraqi people made their decision to be a victim of war. It would seem to have been made neither vertically nor horizontally by Iraqis, but rather thrust upon them by a foreign decider.

But again, those seem live very big decisions rather than common ones. In fact, having inherited systems which we did not design, our choices are somewhat limited. In the sense that there would be huge amounts of resistance to any radical changes.

[Ken Burch]

35. Interesting responses. But to clarify(since the term "common decisions" caused confusion)

I meant decisions affecting and involving us all, in common...not day-to-day private decisions, such as what kind of fat-free vanilla ice cream someone might by or what hairstyle to adopt.

[former9thward]

4. I favor horizontal.

Admittedly the main weakness of horizontal is lack of leadership. Which is why Occupy disappeared even though some continue to insist "it is stronger than ever".

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

5. I've never been fond of bosses or following orders.

[dawg]

6. Vertical.

Our system is already too horizontal. Nothing gets done. There is no accountability. Each side blames the other for the stalemate, and most voters don't know who to blame.

If our system were more like a parliamentary democracy, and the majority was forced to form a government, pass a budget, and be solely responsible for the consequences - the people would be able to make much better decisions come election time.

[LuvNewcastle]

13. I'd like us to have a parliamentary system.

I'm really sick of nothing getting done. A lot of conservatives think that is the purpose of our form of government -- to create so many checks and balances that the branches of government cancel out each other. The thing is, our constitution wasn't written with political parties in mind. The checks and balances are there to keep people honest and prevent overreaches of authority.

Our political reality involves political parties and parliamentary systems are better structured to handle parties and coalitions to govern and carry on the business of the state. America needs a new constitution. We can still enumerate our rights as in the Bill of Rights, but the structure of our government is all wrong for the political system that we have. We need a constitutional convention. Nothing less will fix our systemic problems and help us move united into the future.

[CJCRANE]

7. We live in a world of nation states with advanced technology

so there needs to be some "vertical" power, otherwise other countries come and take your stuff if you're not organized enough to stop them.

But obviously on an individual level the "horizontal" structure is more appealing.

[Egalitarian Thug]

8. Well the first replies are pretty indicative of the difficulties encountered when dealing

with authoritarians. Of course it is easier when one can simply tell another, "do this or I will hit/jail/kill/deprive you". Coercion is easy as long as you're the one with the stick and authoritarians always prefer the easy way. They don't really care that the results they achieve are less than optimal at best and they are consistently surprised when those that they coerce sabotage/betray them.

Horizontal requires cooperation and so is much more difficult.

[Capt. Obvious]

9. I'm an indigo

[Codeine]

10. I'm pretty sure that no matter how hard one tried

one could never develop a more facile and superficial philosophy of power and governance than that.

[Ken Burch]

15. UH...than which?

Actually, I can see good and bad in both models, so I'm not sure which you meant.

[GeorgeGist]

11. forward

[0rganism]

12. Orthogonal

[bemildred]

14. Weaknesses:

1.) Vertical: brittle, single points of failure, bottlenecks, subject to decapitation, if the boss is an idiot you are all screwed. The decline of the USA over the last 60 years is largely due to authoritarian rule and the decay of the notion of civic duty, breakdown of the social compact, as it is described.

2.) Horizontal: less "efficient", can get stuck on disagreements, members must be tolerant or each other, educated to their duties, etc. It only works well if everybody is on board, vulnerable to internal sabotage, hence not a good structure for class-based societies, divided societies, unable to create and sustain great wealth and power for a few ( ).

[lumberjack_jeff]

17. Push poll is pushy.

Direct democracy is best exemplified by the initiative process in Washington State, which has produced the stupidest pile of illegitimate special-interest driven gibberish imaginable.

In every "broad-based egalitarian form of direct democracy" in which I've ever been involved, someone always holds the magic marker which writes and defines what everyone is voting on. The people who define what the hoi polloi are voting for are the representative leaders.

[Ken Burch]

18. Not a push poll.

I see good things in both models, but haven't made my mind up yet.

Can we look at the last thirty years, though, and NOT see that the representative democracy model has produced almost totally right-wing results and turned out to be almost impervious to progressive change?

The LGBTQ gains are pretty much the sole exception to that-and even then, the gains didn't really start happening until referendum victories were achieved.

But I see the problems with the horizontal model as well- I've been to meetings run by "consensus", and they often turn into "all power to the passive-aggressive".

The biggest advantage I can see for the horizontal model is that it would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to get this country into a war. Given that it's virtually impossible that there will ever be any progressive, humanist reasons to have a war from now on, that all future wars are going to be solely wars of national interest(the kind Smedley Butler admitted to fighting in in his "Gangster for Capitalism" testimony to Congress), this is a big thing.

Some intermediary model is needed, but not sure what it would be.

[Bluenorthwest]

28. Ok, what is the model? Saying it's 'horizontal' means nothing. What is the decision making model?

Why do you think any system simply called 'horizontal' would make war impossible or be based on humanist progressive thought?
As it is, this OP basically says 'do you like good government or bad, detached government' because the terms 'horizontal' and 'vertical' are just terms of art without real meaning. I like the one that means I'm hip! Which one comes with fries?

[reformist2]

20. LOL!

[Donald Ian Rankin]

19. Representative democracy works, government by referendum would be an absolute catastrophe.

:-The rights of minorities can only be effectively protected in a representative democracy, not a direct one.
:-Diplomacy and foreign policy can only be effectively conducted by representatives.
:-Economies can only be run by a consistent policy. Referenda would give you tax cuts, spending rises, and complete collapse.

The idea that the will of the people is the wisest arbiter is laughable. Government by the people is a necessary evil, because it's the only way to ensure government for the people.

[Ken Burch]

21. There are other possibilities besides referendum.

"Town meeting" government is an option, at least on some issues.

The community councils created in Venezuela are another.

And protections for minority rights could be included even in direct democratic models.

[Bluenorthwest]

29. How do you hire an engineer to buil a bridge? A town hall meeting?

I don't think you understand what you are talking about. In a 'direct democracy' where is the authority for these 'protections' derived? You are saying that the will of the people would be subverted if that will was to discriminate against a minority, but how would that be carried out? Who enforces protections, what authority makes such protections law, why can't your 'horizontals' law makers make a law that says anything they want, and if they can not, then how is it direct, how is it different than what we do now?

[Spider Jerusalem]

24. Direct democracy is generally a bad and totally unworkable idea.

See for instance the experience of California:

CALIFORNIA is once again nearing the end of its fiscal year with a huge budget hole and no hope of a deal to plug it, as its constitution requires. Other American states also have problems, thanks to the struggling economy. But California cannot pass timely budgets even in good years, which is one reason why its credit rating has, in one generation, fallen from one of the best to the absolute worst among the 50 states. How can a place which has so much going for it—from its diversity and natural beauty to its unsurpassed talent clusters in Silicon Valley and Hollywood—be so poorly governed?

It is tempting to accuse those doing the governing. The legislators, hyperpartisan and usually deadlocked, are a pretty rum bunch. The governor, Jerry Brown, who also led the state between 1975 and 1983, has (like his predecessors) struggled to make the executive branch work. But as our special report this week argues, the main culprit has been direct democracy: recalls, in which Californians fire elected officials in mid-term; referendums, in which they can reject acts of their legislature; and especially initiatives, in which the voters write their own rules. Since 1978, when Proposition 13 lowered property-tax rates, hundreds of initiatives have been approved on subjects from education to the regulation of chicken coops.

This citizen legislature has caused chaos. Many initiatives have either limited taxes or mandated spending, making it even harder to balance the budget. Some are so ill-thought-out that they achieve the opposite of their intent: for all its small-government pretensions, Proposition 13 ended up centralising California's finances, shifting them from local to state government. Rather than being the curb on elites that they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives have become a tool of special interests, with lobbyists and extremists bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in their complexity and obscure in their ramifications. And they have impoverished the state's representative government. Who would want to sit in a legislature where 70-90% of the budget has already been allocated?

(snip)

Proper democracy is far more than a perpetual ballot process. It must include deliberation, mature institutions and checks and balances such as those in the American constitution. Ironically, California imported direct democracy almost a century ago as a “safety valve” in case government should become corrupt. The process began to malfunction only relatively recently. With Proposition 13, it stopped being a valve and instead became almost the entire engine.

http://www.economist.com/node/18586520

[Bluenorthwest]

30. CA is running a surplus of several billion this year. The article you cite is dated.

Prop13 stinks, stank and stunk. But CA is not facing a budget crisis. Article is from 2011, just two years after the end of Terminator rule.....

[Spider Jerusalem]

31. Not really

all the problems introduced by direct democracy remain. Term limits (which result in a legislature with little institutional memory and no experienced members); the requirement of a two-thirds vote in both chambers for new taxes; the mandated allocation of something like 90% of the state budget on different things; the three strikes law for felons (which is why California has such a large prison population and why prisons take so much of the state budget).

[hfojvt]

32. another interesting thing

is how this blue state has voted for some very conservative proposals.