Introduction - Nature & Purpose
Something has gone terribly wrong in Congress. Every American knows it, but few can say precisely what that means. Some blame the individual men who sit in it, some blame the money that sends them there, and others blame the parties that sort them into two competing factions and march them through the same votes year after year. All are right, and all are describing the truth. But the cause of the deterioration of Congress is simpler and older. We choose our legislators by the accident of where they live, and we govern through the machinery of the political parties that organize that accident. Neither device was built to do the single thing that a modern republic most needs of its legislature, which is to bring the people who actually carry on the country’s working life into the same room, with the power to decide.
The Platform of the New Nationalists of America commits us to replace that machinery. It puts the sectors of labor and enterprise, not the districts, at the base of Congress. It gives the unions and the associations of employers, and the carpenters and doctors and lawyers of a Professional Senate, the legislative powers that the present system gives to a class of professional candidates and the donors who stand behind them. It looks to the displacement of the party system and, in time, to its disappearance.
The Popular Congress of tomorrow is of a three-fold nature. It is, first, a philosophic conception: that the nation is a working community, that its citizens are bound to one another by the labor they do for one another, and that a legislature should be the place where that community governs itself and not the place where two brands compete for its attention. It is, second, an institutional design: a sovereign bicameral Congress, one chamber elected by the crafts and professions and one composed of the federations of labor and enterprise, resting on a roll that registers every citizen by what he does. It is, third, a settlement between the classes: a standing constitutional treaty between those who work for wages and those who employ them, supervised by the public, under which neither side may rob the other of its power to bargain and neither may ruin the nation in order to win.
Three principles run through our congressional reform:
Those who know the work should speak for it.
Those who hold power must be removable by those who give it.
A nation divided into two factions of party and two factions of class cannot be governed at all.
Part One - The Case
Districting
The House of Representatives has 435 seats, and behind each seat stand roughly 760,000 people. A district of that size is a useless line drawn on a map by men with an interest in where it falls, redrawn every ten years, and containing farmers, nurses, welders, programmers and retirees who share a range of addresses and almost nothing else. The man who represents such a district can represent only an average, be it a partisan mood, a donor class, or a handful of bumper-sticker slogans. That is why our Platform calls the result team-sport politics, and indeed it is. The voter is never asked what he thinks the country’s economy ought to be. He is asked which of two brands he dislikes less.
It is no accident that the people who most need a voice in the legislature are the ones least likely to get one. The steelworker and the steel owner each hold a single vote. The steel owner also holds a lawyer, a lobbyist and a seat at the dinner where the candidate is chosen. Both are told that their interests are represented by a man who lives between them on the map. Neither truly believes it. The steelworker knows he is outweighed, and the steel owner knows he is not, and he has stopped caring who wins.
An occupational constituency will med the first part of the trouble by giving every voter a body of electors he can judge. A trade of several hundred thousand workers knows what a working year in that trade is. Its members know which of their number is competent and which is merely a talker. They have a hall, a trade paper and a common set of grievances, and they have the strongest reason a voter can have to choose well, which is that the man they send to Congress will make rules that govern their own working lives. The doctor will elect a doctor and the electrician an electrician. A man can judge a candidate from his own trade as he can judge no stranger running in a district drawn for someone else’s benefit. Here, there are no lines to draw, and so there can be no gerrymander. The code that assigns a worker to his sector assigns him to his constituency, and the sector is a fact about the world, rather than an invention of whichever party holds the pen.
From the Sawmills
Behind the political case stands an economic one. Take twelve sawmills on a single river, selling into the same market. Every owner would pay his men a better wage if he could. Every owner knows that if he does and his neighbor does not, his neighbor will undersell him and he will be ruined within a year. So, wages are held down, not by the greed of any one owner, though greed is not wanting, but by the structure of the competition. The same reason governs hours, safety and the pace of work. The worst employer in the sector sets the standard for all, and the decent employer is punished for his decency.
Now suppose the workers of those twelve mills are divided. The sawyers belong to one union, the fitters to another, the yard crews to a third, and the clerks to none. A strike by the fitters, who are few and strategic, halts the whole river. The sawyers, who are many, cross the line or are laid off. When the dispute is over, the fitters have won a premium for their craft at the expense of everyone else. Or the owners play one union against another, settling with the weakest and holding its terms over the rest. Where workers are divided, the contest between labor and capital is no contest at all.
There is only one remedy, and it is neither more regulation of the mills nor more charity for their men. The whole of the labor of the sector must be organized in a single body, and the whole of its enterprise in another, so that wages, hours and conditions are fixed once for the entire industry, by agreement between the two, and bind every mill on the river alike. The undercutting is then impossible. The craft strike is then impossible. The decent owner is no longer punished for his decency. The workers need not be persuaded by a slogan that they have a common interest, for the structure makes their interest common. This is the reason we demand one federation of labor per sector without apology. Divided labor facing united capital is not freedom of association, but a standing invitation to be beaten.
Our Offer
A Congress built on the sectors offers three things the present Congress cannot. It offers knowledge. When the legislature takes up a bill on nursing ratios, nurses vote on it. When it takes up a bill on bridge inspection, engineers do. The expertise that now reaches Congress through lobbyists with an interest to serve would instead sit in the chamber with a vote and a constituency to answer to. It offers a public bargain. Most Americans meet politics through the economy, through wages and rents and prices and jobs, and those questions are now decided in committee rooms and at fundraising dinners by men the public never sees. A legislature in which labor and enterprise sit opposite one another, on the record, with the public watching, makes explicit what is now done in the dark. It offers resistance to money. Once every productive sector sits in Congress through its own federation, the paid lobbyist loses whatever legitimate function he once claimed. Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party said as much in 1912 of the invisible government that sat behind the visible one, and every Bull Moose reform, from the direct primary to the registration of lobbyists, was an attempt to drag this into the light.
The Anti-Party
We predict that the sectors, once they become electoral bodies, will displace the party system and in time erase it. Consider the example nearest to hand. In 1934 the voters of Nebraska, urged on by Senator George Norris, abolished their state senate and took party labels off the legislative ballot. The Nebraska Legislature has been officially nonpartisan since it first met in 1937. Unfortunately, as any reporter at the capitol will tell you, Nebraska’s legislature is a place where party affiliation still shapes who sits with whom and who gets what.
In other words, taking the label off the ballot did not take the factionalism out. This lesson has taught America a simple fact: That the party survives where it controls three things: the nomination of candidates, the electorate that chooses among them, and the money that pays for the campaign. Our design will deny it all three. Candidates will come by petition of their own sector. The electorate will be the sector’s own enrolled members and no one else. The money will be public, equal and capped. We expect currents of opinion to form in the House, as they form in every body of men who must decide together, and we expect caucuses, alliances and rivalries. We do not propose to forbid them, for the First Amendment forbids it and American wisdom counsels against it. None of them should ever control a ballot line.
Part Two - The Constitutional Sketch
The country shall be divided, for purposes of representation, into 20 sectors: agriculture & fisheries; mining, forestry & extraction; energy & utilities; construction; manufacturing; transport & logistics; commerce; hospitality & personal services; health & care; education & training; civil administration; public safety & the uniformed services; the National Labor Service; information & communications; finance & insurance; the legal & business professions; science, engineering & architecture; the arts, letters & sport; independent workers & small proprietors; and household & care. Every adult citizen shall be enrolled in one of them, automatically, according to his work. The retired shall keep the sector of their working life. Those whose work in the unpaid care of others shall belong to household & care. The unemployed shall remain in the sector of their last employment. Nobody shall lose the right to vote for being idle, poor, sick or old.
In each sector there shall stand one federation of labor and, where the sector has private employers, one chamber of enterprise. The federation shall be a public body created by statute, financed by the dues of its members within limits the statute fixes, governed by its members, and supervised by an independent Registrar and by the courts. Every citizen of the sector who works for a wage or salary, from the laborer to the clerk to the technician to the manager below the rank of director, shall be enrolled in it without application and without choice, as he shall be enrolled to vote. The federation alone will bargain for the industrial sector. Its agreements, signed with the chamber of enterprise, will bind every employer and every worker in the sector, including those who did not sign, and the Labor Court shall enforce them. The federation alone shall hold the labor seats of the sector in the House. It is the vertical organization of the whole of labor in one body that the argument from the sawmills requires.
The chamber of enterprise shall be the federation’s counterpart. It shall enroll every citizen who owns or directs a business that employs others, and it too will be a public body governed by its members. In sectors where the state itself is the employer, the state’s side at the table will be held by officials appointed under statute, who hold no seat in Congress. The rule that governs the federations will govern the chambers as well: only citizens will be enrolled. To bar the foreign worker from the federation and admit the foreign owner to the chamber would be to hand the seat to transnational capital and money power, and our principles forbid it.
At the head of each sector shall sit a council of three benches: the federation’s, the chamber’s, and a public bench of citizens drawn by lot from outside the sector for a single year. Wages, hours and conditions shall be settled by the first two. Prices and output will be proposed by the chamber and may not take effect without the consent of the public bench, which may refer any proposed price to the Board of Consumption. The council may regulate entry only by the code. It may not fix prices. It may not strike its own agreements: a strike shall be lawful only in a dispute over the terms of a new agreement, after conciliation has failed and a majority of the whole membership has voted for it by secret ballot, and a dispute over the meaning of an existing agreement goes to the Labor Court.
The upper chamber of Congress shall be the Professional Senate. It shall have 120 members, 6 from each sector, elected by the single transferable vote from among those who have practiced the trades and professions of the sector for at least 5 years. Each member shall serve 6 years, the sectors voting in 3 classes two years apart, and no members serving beyond the age of 65. The Senate shall give advice and consent to judges, ministers and treaties. It will try impeachments, concur in all legislation, and deliver, within 45 days, a professional opinion on any bill that touches the work of a sector, which the House shall read into the record and may overrule by a simple majority. It shall be the chamber of the individual craftsman: every member of every federation shall vote in it directly, as a man of his trade.
The House of Representatives shall be composed of the labor federations and employers’ associations. It will have 400 seats: 340 for the federations, divided among the sectors in proportion to their enrolled membership, and 60 for the chambers of enterprise, half of them reserved for the smallest firms. The seats shall belong to the federations and chambers. The persons who fill them are to be chosen directly by the members, by secret ballot, and may be recalled by them. The unions will hold the voting power of the House. It is for that reason that membership in them is a civic status and not a private association of conscience.
Where labor and enterprise disagree on a concerted matter (labor code, the taxation of enterprise, the tariff, the rules of the national service, the framework of the sector codes) the chambers of enterprise may, by a majority of their seats, suspend a bill for 60 days of conciliation. At the end of that time the House may pass it again by 3/5ths of all its members. Enterprise shall have a voice, and it shall have the power to delay, but it will not retain the power of veto.
Congress shall keep every power the US Constitution now gives it, to tax, to spend, to regulate commerce, to declare war and to ratify treaties, and it shall keep them without delegation. Beside it will stand the citizen: the mass petition and the referendum, a Civic Jury of 300 citizens drawn by lot (which may hold any bill for 90 days and, by a 3/5ths vote, send it to the people), and the recall by his own sector of any member of either chamber.
The President shall remain the nation’s single elected executive, chosen by a national vote with no electoral college from among citizens who qualify by petition across at least 10 sectors. He shall nominate secretaries and judges, subject to the consent of the Professional Senate, and he shall be removable by impeachment in the House and trial in the Senate. The courts shall be transformed into a single national system with a Supreme Court at its head. The states shall remain, at least for now, with their governors and legislatures chosen on their own terms, and the old Senate of the States, with its equal suffrage, shall be retained for now merely as a limited chamber.
Part Three - The Road Ahead
Our movement is of a humble size, and merely one worker in ten in this country now belongs to a labor union. We are not in a position to ask for an amendment at this juncture. Yet, we are in a position to build the structures that such an amendment shall one day recognize.
First, we must organize the sectors in fact before the law makes them so: to bring the existing unions, guilds and associations of each sector into voluntary sector congresses that bargain together, publish together and elect delegates by the same direct ballot the federations shall one day use.
Second, we must win the offices that can be won, in union elections, in local and state races and, where the choice is open, in the primaries of the existing parties.
Third, we must pass what the present constitution already allows. California has created a council of workers and employers that sets wages for a sector, with a neutral chair, and 26 states allow their citizens to initiate laws, 18 of them constitutional amendments. Nebraska, which all of its electrical power into public hands and took party labels off its legislature, will be the natural place for the first advisory council of the trade associations.
Fourth, we must establish a National Economic & Social Council with the right to propose and to review, alongside a statute for sector bargaining, the Registrar, and the Labor Court.
Only after these steps are complete, may the American people bring about such a transformative amendment to the United States Constitution in such a manner.
Those first two stages are easily achievable within a decade, so long as we maintain our resolve and our commitment to hard labor. The road may be long, but it is in sight. The third stage will depend entirely on the circumstances of the state legislatures and the entrenchment of the existing political establishment. The stage will depend on the scale of a national movement that, though we may not have it yet, we are surely building towards. The fifth stage, which will require 2/3rds of both houses and 3/4ths of the states, and which must reckon with the provision of the constitution that no state may be deprived of its equal vote in the Senate without its consent, will be the work of a generation, and the chance that it succeeds in that time provides us no guarantees. Perhaps it would be best to lay the generational odds at one in ten, and it must be said plainly, for the fight ahead will not be one of ease, but one that will require a national will end consensus nearly unprecedented in American history. And still, there has seldom been any achievement of worth that was predictably within reach.
Conclusion
Our opponents will sneer that the party system cannot be replaced, and that the attempt will only expose the nation to something worse.
And yet, this objection is out of date.
The party system is being replaced already. By what? By money, by the donor and the lobbyist and the consultant. This cannot last, and so long as America’s destiny remains enshrined in the hearts and minds of its people, it most certainly will not.
No longer will a man who has worked 30 years in a trade be told that his interests are represented by a stranger who shares none of his own material and spiritual interests. No longer will the wages of the decent company be undercut by the worst. No longer will labor be divided against itself. No longer will the legislature be a place where only those with a patron can be heard. And no longer will the power to make the nation’s laws be bought, because the men who write them will be held to answer by the productive Americans who sent them. A government of the people will be one in which the people who do the nation’s work have the first voice in making its laws, in which no one who holds power cannot be removed by those who gave it, and in which the strong are bound by the same rules as the weak. That is the republic of virtue, and that is, fundamentally, the root of the American dream.
Afterword: The Work Before Us
Begin where you already are. If you are a member of a union, become more active, and if you are an employer, ask whether your association speaks for your trade or only for the largest firms in it. If you are neither, find the trade you work in and the people who do it beside you, and make such a body of your fellow working men. Run in union elections, local races, open primaries, and initiate laws where your state allows.
Our change will be the work of a generation, and we cannot say so without flattery. But that is no excuse for delay. The men who wrote the Constitution of 1787 did not know whether that sheet of paper, the living soul of the United States of America would survive its first decade. They built it to be argued with, amended, and handed on. We ask no more for this design than they asked for theirs: that it be judged by its works, and kept only so long as it serves the republic of virtue. We ask the men and women of this country to carry our nation’s values to their logical conclusion. We must once more be known as a republic that trusts its workers with its laws, and ensures that its representatives know of the hard laborious tasks required to govern it. So long as America is divided, split into two polarized camps, Democrat and Republican, we will continue to slowly forget that in truth, we are one people, bound under one history, one will, and one unified American dream.
It is the job of all Americans who share this vision to ensure that we never forget that singular, most fundamental reality.
