The Problem: Top-Down Power
Governments monopolize police power; the state, through its agents, legitimately enforces the law and arrests and confines people. Governments also regulate the economy, provide public services, and protect rights and freedoms.
Autocracies exercise power arbitrarily. Democracies constrain power through law, accountability, and popular consent, organize competitive political parties, hold free and fair elections, and maintain a separation of powers among different branches of government.
The popular election of officials who enact laws and monitor their implementation is one form of democratic control. Voters can replace officials who allow abuse. Protecting every citizen’s right and ability to vote are essential to a healthy democracy.
Some jurisdictions also enhance democratic control through citizens’ initiatives and referendums: citizens can draft a law or policy change and put it on the ballot for a vote. Another tool is filing lawsuits in federal or state courts.
In the United States, a winner-take-all electoral system erodes democracy by discouraging compromise, rewarding domination and submission, and pushing the two major parties to try to crush one another. The ongoing increase in the President's power reinforces anti-democratic centralization.
The Top-Down Machine — our dominant social system — organizes society around domination and submission by encouraging everyone to seek ever more power, wealth, and status, and to go along with top-down decisions.
Paying a worker to obey illustrates soft domination; mass incarceration illustrates hard domination. Seducing consumers to buy expensive goods illustrates voluntary submission; forcing homeless people into shelters illustrates involuntary submission.
Many people have resisted this system and cultivated alternative bottom-up communities. Many of these have challenged top-down power, but domination and submission still prevails.
This dynamic drives the Democratic and Republican parties to maneuver to elect their candidates rather than represent the full range of voter preferences, negotiate durable solutions, and help build grassroots, popular power.
The Top-Down Machine inflames the willingness to submit to Leaders. And it inflames the desire to dominate by attracting power-hungry politicians, most of whom seek higher office, while rewarding them financially. Lawmakers, for instance, can trade stocks, benefiting from insider information to boost their returns. On average, when they leave office, legislators are wealthier than comparable citizens, and they use their position to move on to high-paying jobs.
Politicians win enough victories to keep activists engaged with the hope of ultimate total victory if they gain sustained control of all three branches of government. But this goal functions like a mirage on the horizon: endlessly pursued, never reached. Political junkies chase power until they burn out, are disillusioned, or are exhausted.
Commercial media reinforces this political theater. Outrage, fear, moral certainty, and us-versus-them storytelling are profitable. Cable news, talk radio, and algorithm-driven social media reward polarization by amplifying content that triggers tribal loyalty and emotional reactions. They frame politics as a sporting contest with winners and losers — and many people experience it that way.
These tribal frames reduce the need to think. They turn governance into morality plays. Policy disagreements become threats to personal identity. Meanwhile, countless people suffer needlessly — and many die prematurely — as real problems go unresolved.
This is not accidental. It’s a stable business model — one that protects concentrated power, obscures the identities of specific decision-makers, blurs responsibility, and shields institutions and donors from accountability. One result is increased top-down power and less bottom-up power throughout society.
The so-called “left-right” political spectrum reinforces this polarized paralysis. These labels assume each side is in a hopeless conflict and must crush the other. But most people affirm both “liberal” and “conservative” positions. So this alleged either/or framework is not only meaningless; it’s dangerous because it polarizes.
The following map illustrates a more accurate and constructive way to label political actors and their opinions. The issue is not left or right; it’s top or bottom.
This map shows political viewpoints by the structure of power (the top-down ↔ bottom-up vertical axis) and the pace of change the preservation ↔ rapid change horizontal axis). The center circle represents integration: a both/and balance across both axes.
Even on the Supreme Court, the most revealing divide runs between justices who reinforce top-down power — executive, corporate, and institutional — and those who protect bottom-up democratic participation, accountability, and access to power. This distinction is more accurate than describing a false conflict between “left” and “right”, or “liberal” versus “conservative.”
American foreign policy also reflects the drive to dominate and the cultivation of submission. The seizure of Native American land, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and the brutal treatment of the occupants of those lands illustrate brutal American imperialism. The enslavement of captured Africans perpetuated the violation of American democratic ideals. Following Reconstruction, Jim Crow Laws in the South and racist laws in the North that legalized housing discrimination carried this racist domination forward. Some recent reforms have reduced racist discrimination, but racism persists as a major problem.
In the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt paused this pattern with his Good Neighbor Policy, which fostered better relations with Latin American countries by replacing U.S. military intervention with non-interference and cooperation, emphasizing respect for national sovereignty, increased trade, and diplomatic solutions, notably seen in the U.S. response to Mexico's oil nationalization.
After World War Two, however, the United States returned to efforts to dominate as many countries as possible, facilitated by a new world order of laws and norms that relied more on cooperation and less on coercion. “Soft imperialism” minimized direct control and instead established alliances that involved some collaboration, which gave countries some degree of self-determination.
The United States and most of its allies told the world they wanted to promote democracy, and at times, it did. But at other times, it overthrew democracies to gain regimes that cooperated more fully with the United States. Generally, American “leadership” involved quiet domination and submission.
As President from 2025 on, however, Donald Trump has discarded the pretense of cooperation, avoided advocating for democracy, praised dictators, neglected human rights, withdrew from treaties and other multilateral agreements, and openly declared he seeks to dominate other countries. Nevertheless, most corporate leaders and much of the media supported him and still do. How other nations will respond to this disruption remains to be seen. Many are trying to establish new rules and relationships that leave them less dependent on the United States.
The Solution: Bottom-Up Community
These realities call for a new. unified, lasting grassroots movement similar to but broader and more lasting than the labor, civil rights, and women’s movements — a movement of movements. This Movement could unify the countless compassion-minded people in every social sphere who are engaged in valuable work to reduce suffering, promote fairness, spread joy, and improve personal and collective lives.
If these people developed bottom-up power in every sector — Social, Personal, Cultural, Economic, and Political — these changes could reinforce each other in a positive upward spiral that would move toward reforming the Top-Down Machine into a Bottom-Up Community that holds top-down power managers accountable to our highest ideals.
A united political movement could regularly demand that Congress enact compassionate laws that reflect the will of the people. By focusing on a pressing top priority, compassion-minded activists could briefly support one another while continuing their regular efforts. In this way, they could achieve much more together than they can alone, using nonviolent action, including boycotts, when needed.
They could also insist that America revive Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy and help reform the United Nations to make it more effective and powerful. Expanding the Security Council to make it more representative would be a reasonable first step.
Random Selection
One method for democratizing power is random selection, which gives every member of a given population an equal chance of having a voice. Grand juries determine if prosecutors have enough evidence to go to trial. Juries of peers decide if defendants broke the law. And some states authorize "civil grand juries", "investigating grand juries", or similar bodies, to oversee and investigate local civil issues. All of these juries are chosen from a random pool of voters. These examples illustrate the value of random selection, which activists can use in other ways.
Ancient Athenian democracy is also instructive. These Greeks randomly selected most state officials for some 200 years, until the Macedonians conquered them and imposed an oligarchy. They considered random selection more democratic than elections. Choosing officials by lot ensured widespread citizen participation, prevented the formation of a governing class, and helped to minimize corruption.
A “citizens' assembly” is a group of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public questions so as to exert an influence.
Countries like Ireland and Belgium have successfully integrated citizens’ assemblies into their policymaking. Also. France's Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat addressed climate policy, Climate Assembly UK focused on net-zero goals, and Canada's Assembly on Democratic Expression used randomly selected citizens to deliberate, often leading to policy recommendations or direct votes. Other examples have worked on electoral reform (British Columbia, 2004), biodiversity, and drug use. Compassion-minded movements can promote bottom-up power by using such assemblies.
Collaborative governance — or “co-governance” — offers another model for shifting power to ordinary people and rebuilding trust in government. Co-governance models break down the boundaries between people inside and outside government, allowing community residents and elected officials to work together to design policy and share decision-making power.
“Deliberative Polling” invites randomly selected participants to review carefully balanced briefing materials on an issue, discuss them for a weekend, and then report on their opinions.
Activists could also use random selection to make town hall meetings with elected representatives more orderly than is often the case when issues are heated. If participants trusted that the event was fairly structured, they’d be less likely to be disruptive. Random selection of speakers could help. When time did not allow everyone to speak, selecting speakers randomly would enhance fairness. When there was time for everyone to speak, random selection of the order of speakers would help prevent disruption and stop the most aggressive from getting the floor first. Together with clear, enforced speaking time limits, random selection would help maintain respectful input.
In fact, the Movement could push every elected official to hold such Community Dialogues on the same day each month, which would enable individuals to place it on their calendars and give activist organizations an organizing tool, for they could mobilize their members to express their opinions at these events.
As envisioned here, this Movement would support liberal democracy, 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 didn’t identify with the movement. However, when they discussed their actions as ways to support this movement, they would expand awareness of how issues are interconnected.
This movement would build a Bottom-up Community that would reform the Top-Down Machine and balance power. This long-term worldview could unify diverse populations and help sustain the movement over time (after victories and defeats).
In these and other ways, we could build egalitarian structures that would empower ordinary people and help strengthen a bottom-up democracy.To move in this direction, compassion-minded people need to unite as never before.
The first step recommended here is to build agreement on a simple set of core principles that could unite a broad alliance.
Next, small circles of three or more close friends and relatives who enforce those principles could meet regularly to support one another, address community needs, and engage in political action together. As proposed here, this mutual support would include a commitment to help each other unlearn or manage the social conditioning that teaches everyone to dominate and submit, which inflames self-centered power trips that fracture organizations. Most, if not all, social and political activists need to acknowledge “I am a recovering authoritarian” — and work on dealing with it.
This 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 that no victory or defeat is final.
Then, representatives from these small circles could meet in regional gatherings, share notes, inspire one another, brainstorm, and select representatives to higher-level networks, eventually leading to a national network that would incorporate a member-run organization to coordinate national actions.
In these ways, this movement of movements could reform the Top-Down Machine into a Bottom-Up Community rooted in democratic hierarchies.