Massively Parallel Problem Solving and Democracy Building: An Ongoing Response to the Threats to Democracy in the U.S. - Part 3
Newsletter 288 - October 20, 2024
This is the third installment (of 5), drawn from Guy and Heidi's paper "Massively Parallel Problem Solving and Democracy Building: An Ongoing Response to the Threats to Democracy in the U.S,." which the Toda Peace Institute published on September 16, 2024 as one of their policy briefs.1 The first installment provided an introduction to several of the key ideas of the entire paper, and the second installment looked in more depth at the threats currently facing democracy in the U.S. In this installment, we will look at the factors that make U.S. democracy resilient, and hopefully able to meet these threats and emerge stronger and better than it had been before.
Added on November 1, 2024: Since all the installments have now been posted, here are links to the entire series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 (corrected version) | Part 5
The Resilience Of U.S. Democracy
Despite the depressing litany of threats to democracy outlined in the last newsletter, there are three principal reasons for optimism. First, we do have many tools for approaching these problems, and second, many of them are already being implemented much more widely than is known. Third, Americans are extremely creative. We have come up with astonishing solutions to a vast array of challenges in the past, and we can do so again.
One of the cornerstones of the massively parallel approach to problem solving is the fact that all problems create opportunities for those who can figure out how to solve them. If we think of all the problems listed above as opportunities for creative people, then we have a good chance of building the kind of society in which we would all like to live. By combining our collective efforts and insights, we can move democracy beyond its current and past failings and emerge from this difficult and threatening period to a more peaceful, just, honest, and merciful society than the one we had before.2
A massively parallel response to the threats facing democracy
The basic idea behind the massively parallel approach is that thousands, even tens of thousands, of people and organizations work in a wide range of specialized roles, each focused on making a significant contribution to the larger democracy-strengthening effort. Since democracies are complex adaptive systems, they are self organizing. There is no central leadership that controls everything. No one is directing who does what or how; those choices are made by the individual actors.
This approach is organized in ways that are analogous to free economic markets. In the material economy, people identify needs to be met and they develop and then manufacture a product or provide a service that fills that need. Then they advertise these products and services to potential customers, and if they are good enough, and priced reasonably right, they sell well. If they are not, the effort fails, and the would-be entrepreneur tries something else.
Massively parallel democracy building works the same way. People identify problems that need fixing, most often in their local communities, but also at higher levels, and then they work together (often as nonprofits or lobbyists) to develop a process or propose a structural change to address that problem. Then they market that idea, recruit “employees” (often volunteers) and paying “clients/supporters.” If their proposal or process is good enough, it "sells well." If it doesn't work, they go back to the drawing board. This is the system through which the collective judgment of all of the potential beneficiaries of each activity decides what succeeds and what fails.
Also a part of this massively parallel process are the democracy-building equivalents of "trade associations" with which economists and business leaders are familiar. These organizations provide economies of scale to relatively small, local efforts by providing a framework in which they can work together in mutually supportive ways that involve various types of coordination, collaboration, and joint learning. So, in the business world, there are organizations such as the Computer and Communications Industry Association, and the National Coffee Association. Such trade associations provide consumer, market, and production data, which help members decide where it might be most profitable to sell what goods.
Likewise, with Massively Parallel Democracy Building, there are organizations that are helping coordinate efforts, such as the Inter-Movement Impact Project (IMIP), and the recently created Practitioner Mobilization for Democracy (PMD) program. Both meet regularly to allow members to network and explore collaborative ideas, and they provide resources for recruitment, training, marketing, and other “business efforts.” Though both efforts are growing rapidly, they still reach only a small fraction of the people and organizations involved in the larger MPDB effort. The National Civic League has, for example, been assembling a map of as many of the entities involved in this work in the United States as they can. This map has over 10,000 entries and is still growing!
Some organizations involved in this effort are working to enlist participants, not just for their projects, but for the whole massively parallel effort. PMD is trying to recruit facilitators and mediators who have been working in other domains, and get them involved in the democracy domain. The Bridge Alliance runs a website called Citizen Connect that asks visitors on its home page if they are “sick and tired of America’s broken politics” It then has links to information on ways individuals can get involved to “do something” about it. Visitors can find initiatives and organizations focused on all sorts of different things in their local communities, and that are welcoming new people. The Listen First Coalition (made up of four “bridging organizations,” Listen First, Village Square, Living Room Conversations, and the National Institute for Civil Discourse, holds an annual National Week of Conversation to draw many more Americans into the bridging movement and the work of Coalition Partners. Many other organizations are doing their own outreach, as are top-down initiatives such as the National Governors Association’s Disagree Better Campaign.
Just as businesses in the computer and communications field are doing different things, the participants in IMIP and PMD, the Listen First Coalition, and the broader massively parallel democracy building effort are also doing different things. But they are all working toward a similar set of goals: reducing political polarization; breaking political stalemates and actually reaching mutually beneficial agreements; reducing intergroup fear, distrust, hate, and profound injustice; and so on. The system (or as Adam Smith called it, “the invisible hand”) does the coordination, such that the individual efforts combine into much more than the sum of the parts.
The massively parallel approach is based on the realization that there is no one response, no magic bullet, or simple solution to the many problems listed in the first two installments of this paper. The scale and complexity of these challenges must be recognized, and any solutions proposed and implemented must be able to function at this scale and level of complexity.
This is not to say that limited, local projects are useless. In fact, that is the level where most of the work is being and needs to be done. To have a system-wide impact, these local projects need to be undertaken in many localities and need to be accompanied by other projects that address different aspects of the problem. As we have explained already, we call the multitudes of small-scale local efforts, all working simultaneously to improve some aspect of democratic governance, at the local, state, or federal level, “massively parallel problem solving” and “massively parallel democracy building.”
Rather than being a hypothetical idea that has yet to be implemented, the massively parallel approach is just our word for a natural process that is already going on in a big way, with thousands of people and hundreds of organizations working in different communities and in different ways to make things better for their citizens. As we noted before, the National Civic League has created a map which includes over 10,000 of these efforts.
But the media is so focused on bad news, on conflict, and on how bad “the other side is,” that these initiatives often have little, if any, visibility. The only people who know about them are the direct participants. If these efforts can be made much more visible, they are likely to give people hope in the knowledge that democracy is not “doomed,” and that they, too, can and, indeed, must become part of this massive democracy-strengthening effort. As many people have said, “democracy is not a spectator sport.” If we want democracy to succeed, we cannot sit on the sidelines rooting for one “team” or the other. We need to “get in the game” and start working for the issues and outcomes we care about. But we need to do that in an inclusive, not a divisive way.
It is the strategy of encouraging the natural mobilization of large numbers of independent projects, each trying to meet a need that project participants have identified in their own community, that allows the massively parallel approach to work “at scale,” even when centralized top-down approaches aren’t working. (Centralized, one-size-fits-all approaches fail to account for the fact that different communities have different problems, and often define similar problems in different ways. Thus, is it very hard to get people to agree on one definition of a problem and one response to it. They also fail to take full advantage of the differing insights that different individuals with different perspectives, skills, backgrounds, and geographical expertise bring to a problem.) Massively parallel problem solving can do that.
Massively parallel democracy building and problem solving both have at least seven goals:
Cultivating Compromise
Cultivating Respect for Society’s Many Identity Groups
Preserving Electoral Integrity and Continuity
Exposing and Delegitimizing “Bad-Faith Actors”
Promoting Reconciliation
Promoting Effective Communication and Problem-Solving
Limiting Massively Parallel Partisanship
We will discuss these in Part 4 of this set of newsletters.
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1 Our thanks go to Olivia Dreier for urging us to write the policy brief and being patient when it took us a very long time. And thanks to Olivia and Rosemary McBryde for your editing and posting on Toda. We also very much appreciate Toda's willingness to allow us to repost the paper in our Substack Newsletter, and on BI, and more broadly, We also appreciate Toda's support of our work. We have learned a great deal from our participation in the Toda Global Challenges to Democracy Program.
2The call for a more “peaceful, just, honest, and merciful society” builds off John Paul Lederach’s assertion that reconciliation is the “meeting place” of peace, truth, justice, and mercy in John Paul Lederach, Building Peace. United States Institute of Peace Press. January 1, 1998. 23-35
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