Stephen Erickson

In the 1990s, while working on a PhD in American History, I discovered an obsession that would follow me for the rest of my life.

I realized that our political system was malfunctioning in exactly the way “Father of the US Constitution” James Madison warned us about. Madison was consumed with the idea that government should serve the broad and long-term needs of the people, not narrow and selfish interests.

Isn’t that exactly what has happened? Isn’t our government today all about powerful interests? Have not the common and long-term needs of the American people become an afterthought, at best?

To me it was apparent in 1993, but its only gotten worse since then.

At the time, I published an article, later read into the Congressional Record, in which I pointed out that James Madison called for term limits as a means of discouraging political careerism and its consequences, including government capture by special interests.

I believe I was the first person to ever notice Madison’s support for term limits and write about it.

At that point, James Madison’s obsession became my obsession. All I wanted to do with my life was to help fix our political system so that it would serve “We the People,” as intended, instead of the selfish interests of politicians and the political class, corporations, labor unions, or radical ideologies (You can read my most recent take on Madison and our current situation HERE).

I quit work on the doctorate and took a position at US Term Limits as Resident Scholar.

Soon, our case, US Term Limits v. Thornton, went before the US Supreme Court. At stake were 24 state laws that would have limited the number of terms for which an elected Members of Congress could hold office. Unfortunately, we lost that case, and the professional political class won.

After that, there’s wasn’t much work for someone who genuinely wanted to fix the system in a non-partisan way. I left DC for New Hampshire, where, incidentally, normal citizens, and not professional politicians, control the state’s 400-member lower House and almost all the local government.

During the next fifteen years I got married, started a family, worked and invested in real estate, and did some teaching and writing. But our dysfunctional political system was always on my mind.

In 2010, I embarked on a one-man, six-year campaign to save American democracy. I thought somebody had to do it. To my wife’s chagrin, I volunteered for the job.

I decided I would recruit reform-minded leaders, balanced on the Left and Right, to restructure our political system. My idea was that we would agree to put the favorite reforms of the Left and Right – a clean elections system and term limits – into a single omnibus constitutional amendment. We’d throw in a ban on gerrymandering for good measure. Delegations led by leaders on the Left and Right would come to the table to negotiate the specifics.

It was highly frustrating because partisanship continually got in the way. I learned that reform groups are as captured by money and partisanship as the system is itself. You can read about my quixotic political enterprise in my book, What Would Madison Do? The Journey Progressives and Conservatives Must Make Together. It’s fair to say that I got close enough to make it interesting.

No public catastrophe had a greater impact on me, as well as untold other human beings, than Covid19 and the response to it, which I see as a particularly horrific example of government malfeasance. On an earlier blog, I posted about the crisis as it was unfolding. Increasingly, I feel a sense of tragic vindication.

But I’m afraid that Covid is most likely the first in a related string of unhappy global events rooted in the corruption of our political system. The United States currently has a national debt of an unfathomable $35 trillion and that debt’s rate of increase is accelerating. The long-awaited debt crisis finally seems imminent. Other horrendous public policy choices are too numerous to mention. Meanwhile, the specter of World War III looms on the horizon.

I’m not a naturally pessimistic person, but I think the near future looks very bad to catastrophic.

We in the West, and in the United States in particular, need to rethink our political systems so that the kind of government that emerges from the wreckage is far better than the one that caused it.

For me, one question comes before all others:

How do we reform our political system so that it produces leadership that is less selfish and more responsible?

In November of 2021, my old boss from US Term Limits, Paul Jacob, called a meeting in the DC area to discuss the one reform guaranteed to break the grip that the professional political class and special interests have on our political system: much smaller electoral districts.

The idea is as simple as it is undiscussed.

Where electoral districts are small, then little money is needed to run for office and get elected. If electoral districts were radically reduced across the board, professional politicians would lose their advantages at election time and special interests would lose their leverage over government.

If electoral districts were small enough, we’d replace a political system that is today essentially based on bribery, extortion and marketing with one based on reputations and relationships.

Government would no longer be led by the hopelessly selfish and shortsighted.

Instead, we’d have government of, by and for, the people.

Again, the key is to make all electoral districts sufficiently small, or community-sized, and use those small districts as the building blocks of a new system. It would be a system more consistent with the founding vision of the United States, and therefore “radical,” in the sense of “from the root.”

I was tapped to launch Citizens Rising, a new non-profit 501c4 organization dedicated to breaking the stranglehold that professional politicians and special interests have on our political system. I feel blessed, humbled, and it a bit overwhelmed, to lead such a potentially game-changing project. But it’s what I’ve always wanted to do.

We quickly realized that such an ambitious goal, backed by modest resources, required a realistic approach. We would have to begin at the local level.

We decided to start with America’s cities, where the best democratic practices, particularly small-district democratic representation, could be modelled. I have since founded Cities Rising, a 501c3 nonprofit educational organization.

As you can see on the Cities Rising website, some successful cities in other parts of the world are already models of robust municipal democracy, where large assemblies of everyday citizens, serving part time, are actually in charge, instead of professional politicians. Nothing we advocate for at the city level can be considered extreme, because it’s all proven to work elsewhere.

Once our best democratic practices for citizen government are demonstrated at the municipal level, we can scale up to the state and federal levels, using those same practices.

With two different and legally separate organizations, I’ve decided to put all of my writing in one place, on this blog.

Regular writings will focus on political systems, starting with an emphasis on municipal government.

I have also published some history and written a stage play, which you can find on this site.

Thank you for your interest in my work and mission.

Gratefully,

Stephen Erickson

P.S. Please support our work at Citizens Rising. We must do this together.