Governments establish laws and regulations, enforce them with police power, and incarcerate people who seriously violate the rights of others.
Liberal democracies organize competitive political parties, free and fair elections, and a separation of powers with different branches of government, and require everyone to obey the law. They balance the private and public sectors, regulate the economy, provide public services, and ensure human rights, civil rights, and political freedoms.
As envisioned here, a holistic democracy movement would support liberal democracy. It would also make voting easier, push for lifetime economic security, and ensure that society meets everyone’s basic needs.
Everyone who promotes justice and compassion would nurture this movement, even if they don’t see their work this way. However, when they discuss their actions as ways to support this movement, they would expand awareness of how issues are interconnected.
As discussed in Chapter One, this holistic democracy movement would build a Bottom-up Community that would reform the Top-Down Machine and balance it. This long-term worldview could unify diverse populations and help sustain the movement over time (after victories and defeats).
A network of small teams could build bottom-up hierarchies with lower-level groups selecting representatives to higher-level bodies that would help guide the movement. The network could focus on winnable short-term demands, realizing no victory or defeat is final.
The movement could utilize deliberative democracy, using randomly selected participants with equal power to recommend new legislation on particular issues.
“Deliberative Polling” could invite randomly selected participants to review carefully balanced briefing materials on an issue, discuss them for a weekend, and then report on their opinions.
Other countries could adopt the Irish Citizens' Assembly model, wich regularly considers controversial, pressing questions, releases reports and the government responds.
In these and other ways, we could build egalitarian structures that would empower ordinary people and help strengthen a bottom-up democracy.