In July, a fellow from the UK somehow found the TDG. We started talking on LinkedIn and then later switched to regular email.
Peter Gregory belongs to a large co-op in the UK. He was finding similarities between the governance in his co-op and the TDG.
His co-op has divided the UK into 100 sectors. Each sector elects one representative. These 100 representatives become the “Members’ Council.” This council meets six times a year to discuss affairs of their co-op. Once a year, these 100 representatives elect, from amongst themselves, 12 members to serve in the board of the co-op. It is this board that oversees management.
This is a two-tier TDG structure. The members elect their local representative. These representatives elect their national board.
My two co-ops (banking and fuel) have a more traditional style of governance. Basically, the current board nominates itself or its successors. The current board relies on that most members are not all that interested in management of the co-op. So seldom has there been any challenge to their nominations.
At least I think that is how my two co-ops work. My discussion with Peter made me realize that my two co-ops really don’t advertise their “democracy” to its members. We like the co-op model; we get a dividend check; that’s all we want. Maybe I need to start asking some questions!
Peter’s co-op is an indirect election. The current board is not in much control of who assumes the positions in the Member’s Council. And these 100 members, not the board, decide who moves into the board. That’s a big difference! A big organic difference!
The six annual meetings of Members’ Council are important. These meetings provide the elected representatives the interaction with each other to figure out who are the more sensible people for co-op governance. If there was a direct election, a less sensible person with penchant for campaigning could find himself on the board. Then the board becomes less functional.
I doubt the developers of the co-op model read my book and took my ideas. Rather, I believe that organizing into two tiers is actually a fairly natural outcome in many new governance models. History has a few examples of indirect elections being an integral part of new movements:
1) Some sects of the early Christian church had the members elect the presbyters and the presbyters elected the bishop.
2) The founding fathers of the American constitution set up indirect elections for the Senate and the Presidency.
3) The Marxist model placed communist members in small groups, called cells. The cells elected their representative. The representative worked with other representatives in a region and elected a regional representative. This structure radiated upward, tier-by-tier, to the Politburo. The Politburo was elected by the tier directly below.
In all three of these cases, the indirect elections were eventually replaced with a top-down or a populist model. Commentators have cited these examples as reasons why tiered elections will never work. But just because they didn’t work is not reason enough to discard the whole idea. We should be learning what went wrong and make the appropriate changes. My TDG book gets into structures and attitudes necessary to make tiered democracy work.
Let me say this in another way: the reasons these indirect elections did not work is because people with more ambition for power than talent for governance could not be elected in indirect elections. And they had the bluster and stamina to “fix” these structures to make people like them more electable. We really have to learn how to cast power-hungry people aside in the TDG.
The website of Peter’s co-op didn’t provide enough details for me to understand how the co-op’s elections are conducted. And maybe there are a good PR reasons for not having too much legalese on a website. If the co-op wants me to look over their rules, I will be willing.
Peter and the TDG
Peter has read a couple of my TDG books. Peter gave me a link to his "layered democracy." (2024 note: this link no longer works).
Peter is certainly thinking out of the box. I suspect that he had these ideas in him for some time, and my TDG, at best, only inspired him to put his ideas out there.
While I have some concerns with his layered democracy, I cannot envision all the possibilities any TDG will take. There is going to be a lot of experimenting with this new democratic way. We have to try out new things, evaluate them, keep the good ones, and discard the bad ones.
And we will go through this try-and-keep-and-discard process by working together with lots of frank discussion followed by hopefully a consensual decision. If consensus is not reached, then a vote where the minority allows the majority to try the majority’s way. If the majority makes a bad decision, it will become apparent as the decision reaches its natural conclusion. Then the unity will be found to learn from the bad decision and change it.
And Just a Bit More Good News
A couple of weeks ago, my website stats program said someone from North Carolina read the main TDG book. This was the TDG’s first online reader in about 18 months.
Then I got an email from an elderly lady in North Carolina. She wants to move out of her town. She was wondering if there was a functioning TDG somewhere in the USA; she would move there. Unfortunately, I had to tell her there was no functioning TDG in the USA. I encouraged her to tell her friends about her TDG find.
Right now, Bob Dylan’s song is playing in my head: “The times are a-changing.” I sure hope so.
Published on Medium 2022
Building a Kinder, Wiser Democracy
