The Most-Recently Revised Version of this Paper can be Found Here

Abstract

Straight-Up Democracy encounters a barrier that cannot be explained away by the familiar objections to direct voter control, such as competence, scale, misinformation, polarization, and majoritarian abuse. Those objections matter. But the prospect of voter sovereignty is often felt before it is evaluated. This paper develops a theory of that emotional barrier. It argues that long adaptation to representative political powerlessness can teach citizens to experience power as danger, responsibility as burden, other citizens as unmanageable threats, and helplessness as the only condition in which innocence can be preserved. These adaptations reinforce one another and may help explain a political paradox: people can condemn government as corrupt, captured, unresponsive, or broken while defending the institutional separation that leaves them powerless to do anything about it. With explicit limits, the paper asks whether the legacy governing relationship can be understood as an abuse-producing system—not a system without wrongdoers, but one without a single final abuser whose removal would end the relation. It then takes seriously the strongest available version of a “love-first” account, especially Hélène Landemore’s claim that the epistemic benefits of deliberation depend on triggering the relational bond first, and DemocracyNext’s account of trust, vulnerability, group building, and deliberative muscles. Much of the empirical and moral case for empathy, connection, and high-quality deliberation is persuasive. The disagreement is about sequence. Love may enrich self-government; it cannot be made an entrance requirement for sovereignty. What must come first is institutional capacity: power made safe enough to exercise, responsibility made divisible and retrievable, conflict made manageable without permanent subordination, and error made continuously correctable. The resulting thesis is reciprocal rather than developmental in one direction. Citizens need not be healed before receiving sovereignty. Exercising bounded, rights-respecting, correctable sovereignty may itself be part of how they cease to experience one another—and themselves—as unfit to rule.

Keywords: voter sovereignty; political agency; abuse; coercive control; deliberative democracy; citizens’ assemblies; sortition; political efficacy; system justification; learned helplessness; affective polarization; self-government

Epistemic status and scope

This is a political-theoretical argument informed by empirical research, not a clinical diagnosis of a population. The distinction matters. Concepts developed to understand intimate partner abuse, learned helplessness, reactance, and system justification are used here as bounded analogies and candidate mechanisms: ways of noticing patterns that might otherwise remain invisible. They do not establish that representative government is psychologically identical to an abusive relationship, that citizens respond to political powerlessness in one uniform way, or that every objection to direct democracy is an emotional evasion. Likewise, “love first” is an analytical label for a family of relational-precondition arguments. It should not be read as a phrase attributed indiscriminately to deliberative democrats, citizens’ assembly advocates, or bridge-building organizations.

Contents

1. The Wall

2. Emotional Adaptation to Political Powerlessness

3. The Four Emotional Barriers

4. Is This a System of Abuse?

5. An Abuse-Producing System Without a Final Abuser

6. Blame, Delegation, and the Shelter of Innocence

7. The Strongest Case for Love First

8. Sortition and Voter Sovereignty

9. Evaluating Love First Through the Four Barriers

10. The Stopping-Rule Problem

11. Love Is Not on the Critical Path

12. The Emotional Transition to Sovereignty

13. Speaking Through the Wall

14. Forgiving Ourselves Without Absolving Ourselves

Conclusion: The Courage to Be Sovereign

References

1. The Wall

The argument for voter sovereignty repeatedly encounters what feels like a wall. Straight-Up Democracy begins with a proposition that is almost embarrassingly simple: the people who are subject to coercive law should own the legislative authority through which that law is made. Yet the response often arrives before the architecture has even been described, and it arrives with striking emotional force. Voters are ignorant. Voters are irrational. Voters are polarized. They will be manipulated, attack minorities, refuse to participate, misunderstand complex legislation, wreck the economy, elect demagogues, behave like a mob. The list is familiar because the fear beneath it is familiar.

Some of these objections point to genuine dangers. A serious democratic architecture has to contend with misinformation, unequal participation, coercive majorities, expertise, administrative competence, security, rights, and error correction. Naming an emotional barrier is not a clever way to wave criticism aside. Quite the opposite: an objection should be treated as both informational and affective until we understand both. Its informational content asks, What could fail? Its affective content asks, What does the speaker fear losing—or fear being unable to protect?

The difficulty is that the institutional answer is often never allowed to arrive. A proposal built around revocable delegation, human-scale association, constitutional restraint, transparent voting, distributed authority, and continuous correction is heard as though it simply said, “Trust the crowd.” By then the listener is already defending against catastrophe. Evidence enters a hostile emotional field in which disagreement easily becomes self-protection. Experimental research suggests that uncongenial evidence can move partisan attitudes in relatively nonhostile settings, while an adversarial emotional frame makes people more dismissive of the same evidence (Kim, 2025). Research on psychological reactance points in the same direction: communication experienced as controlling or authoritative can provoke resistance, especially when it threatens a person’s sense of autonomy (Rains, 2013; Beutler, Edwards, & Someah, 2018).

So this paper begins one step before institutional mechanics. It asks what emotional work the legacy arrangement may already be doing for us. Why would people defend the separation of the public from legislative authority while describing the government produced by that separation as corrupt, captured, incompetent, unresponsive, or simply broken? Why can the possibility of owning political power feel more frightening than the demonstrated consequences of not owning it?

What if the greatest obstacle to self-government is not that people do not want power, but that generations of political powerlessness have taught them to experience power as something from which they need protection?

The claim is not that people secretly enjoy subordination. It is more ordinary, and therefore more troubling: human beings adapt to the political relationships available to them. An adaptation that reduces anxiety inside an arrangement we cannot individually escape can later become a reason to defend the arrangement itself. Familiar powerlessness may feel safer than unfamiliar agency. Delegated responsibility may feel lighter than ownership. Other citizens may come to seem too dangerous to govern with. And spectatorship offers a morally comfortable place from which every public failure can remain, finally, someone else’s fault.

2. Emotional Adaptation to Political Powerlessness

Political institutions do more than allocate offices, incentives, and formal decision rights. They teach us what to expect. Citizens learn which actions matter, how quickly institutions respond, which forms of participation carry consequences, and whether effort is likely to alter an outcome. A person can vote, petition, protest, contact representatives, join campaigns, and watch widely recognized problems survive decade after decade. No one has to announce the lesson. The relationship itself teaches something about political efficacy.

Political efficacy is usually divided into two dimensions: internal efficacy, the belief that one can understand and participate in politics, and external efficacy, the belief that public authorities are responsive to citizen action. Neither is simply a personality trait carried intact into public life. Institutional experience can shape both. Longitudinal evidence has found that some forms of active political participation increase efficacy, and DemocracyNext’s work on citizens’ assemblies similarly treats consequential participation as a means through which people develop agency, responsibility, and democratic skill (Finkel, 1987; Česnulaitytė, 2024). That matters because it unsettles a very common sequence. Capacity does not necessarily have to precede power. Power can help produce capacity.

Two psychological traditions make this possibility easier to see. System justification theory proposes that people may defend existing social arrangements partly because those arrangements reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord. The claim is not that everyone loves the status quo, nor that resistance is somehow psychologically impossible. It is that an existing order can provide epistemic and emotional stability even to people it disadvantages, and that this stabilizing function can coexist with self-interest and group interest (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Jost, 2019). Familiarity has political force precisely because it does not have to feel good to feel safer than the unknown.

The learned-helplessness literature requires more care. The original theory has been substantially revised. Maier and Seligman argue that passivity in the face of prolonged uncontrollable adversity may be closer to a default response, while the expectation of future control is what must be learned. Nothing here warrants diagnosing voters with a clinical syndrome. The politically relevant point is narrower and more useful: repeated noncontingency between action and outcome can weaken attempts to act, while experiences of effective control can inoculate against passivity and restore agency (Maier & Seligman, 2016). If political action rarely appears to own its outcome, lowered expectations are not mysterious.

Put these traditions together and a possibility comes into view. People may become attached not to the harms of a political system but to the predictability of the role it gives them. Representative government tells citizens what citizenship consists of: choose officeholders, express preferences, monitor performance, complain, organize, mobilize, and try again at the next election. It can be maddening, but it is familiar. Voter sovereignty changes the assignment. The public is no longer merely audience, petitioner, selector, or retrospective judge. It becomes the continuing author of legislative decisions.

That is not merely an institutional rearrangement. It unsettles an emotional settlement. I think that settlement has four interlocking parts.

3. The Four Emotional Barriers

The Four Emotional Barriers

Power is experienced as danger.

Responsibility is experienced as burden.

Other citizens are experienced as unmanageable threats.

Helplessness is experienced as the only condition in which we can remain innocent.

The Emotional Transition

Power can be made safe enough to exercise.

Responsibility can be divided, delegated, and retrieved.

Threats can be managed without permanent subordination.

Innocence is less valuable than agency.

3.1 Power is experienced as danger

We are taught to associate political power with its ugliest possibilities: demagoguery, corruption, mob action, ignorance, faction, prejudice, propaganda, coercion. None of those dangers is imaginary. The emotional inference, however, is often peculiar: power becomes safer when ordinary citizens possess less of it. The dangers of concentrated representative power are treated as the ordinary hazards of governing. The dangers of voter power are treated as reasons voters should not govern at all.

The asymmetry is easiest to see when the same human defects are handled differently depending on who possesses authority. Ignorance, prejudice, susceptibility to manipulation, self-interest, vanity, faction, and error among politicians, parties, donors, officials, and experts become problems to manage within their continued possession of power. The same defects among voters become reasons to deny power. The rulers are trusted with authority despite being human. The people are denied authority because they are human.

3.2 Responsibility is experienced as burden

Legislation is difficult work. Governing requires time, judgment, expertise, moral choice, and responsibility for consequences that fall on strangers. Most people quite reasonably do not want public administration to become a second full-time occupation. But notice the move the legacy system makes: a sensible desire to distribute political labor is translated into surrender of the final decision-right. We are offered relief from workload at the price of ownership.

Responsibility also carries psychological costs of its own. Experimental research finds that people sometimes delegate unattractive decisions partly because delegation shifts blame, and that responsibility for choosing on behalf of others can increase delegation or avoidance (Bartling & Fischbacher, 2012). A laboratory allocation game is not a national political system, and the evidence does not tell us why electorates accept representative government. It does show something important about human motivation: avoiding ownership of a difficult outcome can be valuable in itself.

3.3 Other citizens are experienced as unmanageable threats

Political opponents are rarely imagined as people who might simply defeat us on Tuesday and lose to us on Thursday. They become existential figures: ignorant masses, fascists, communists, racists, groomers, globalists, religious fanatics, anti-religious fanatics, urban elites, rural reactionaries, dangerous mobs. Identity-protective cognition can lead people to credit or dismiss evidence in ways that defend a preferred social order and group standing (Kahan et al., 2007). Affective polarization adds another layer. Citizens may disagree less about specific policies than their mutual hostility suggests, yet still experience the opposing camp as morally contaminated and socially threatening.

The critical word here is not “threat.” It is “unmanageable.” Other citizens sometimes do threaten rights, interests, security, dignity, and equality. Any democratic theory that asks us to pretend otherwise is useless. The emotional barrier appears when the only imaginable protection from those citizens is their widespread and permanent exclusion from legislative sovereignty.

3.4 Helplessness is experienced as the only condition in which we can remain innocent

Spectatorship provides moral shelter. We can say: I opposed the war. I voted against the party. I warned them. I signed the petition. I marched. I called my representative. The failure belongs to the politicians, the corporations, the experts, the bureaucracy, the opposing voters, the media, the donors, the system. Much of that attribution may be entirely accurate. And still a deeper political fact remains:

A political order in which the public never owns the decision allows indignation to become a permanent substitute for agency.

The four barriers close into a remarkably stable loop. If power is dangerous, responsibility should be handed to specialists. If specialists own responsibility, threatening citizens can be kept away from consequential authority. When the specialists fail, the public can preserve its innocence because the decision was never truly ours. And that resulting helplessness becomes fresh evidence that only specialists are capable of governing. The emotional settlement reproduces the institution that reproduces the settlement.

4. Is This a System of Abuse?

The abuse analogy arises here because law is not merely persuasive or culturally influential. It can authorize imprisonment, confiscation, taxation, surveillance, exclusion, compulsion, and force. Citizens live in dependence on institutions whose decisions can place liberty, property, livelihood, family life, and bodily security at risk, while remaining separated from the final legislative decision-right. The governing relationship is coercive in the literal political sense even when it is constitutional, procedurally regular, and far less oppressive than plausible alternatives.

Coercive-control theory helped shift the study of intimate partner violence away from isolated incidents alone and toward patterned deprivation of autonomy. The injury is not only what happens in a particular episode; it is also the progressive narrowing of practical freedom and the ability to direct one’s own life. Research on abusive relationships similarly emphasizes entrapment, dependence, self-doubt, normalization, and the difficulty of leaving a familiar relationship whose dangers are known for an alternative whose dangers are not (Stark, 2009; Anderson & Saunders, 2003; Arriaga et al., 2026). Those ideas are emotionally resonant here, but resonance is not identity.

Several features of the political relationship invite a bounded comparison. The public is subject to consequential decisions it does not directly own. The arrangement is extraordinarily difficult to exit as an individual. Alternatives are routinely described as chaotic, irresponsible, or unsafe. Repeated efforts at influence may fail to produce control. Under those conditions people can narrow expectations, idealize protectors, blame themselves or one another, and accept the familiar arrangement as the only realistic one. A system does not have to persuade people that it treats them well. Sometimes it is enough to persuade them that the alternative would be worse.

That brings us to one of the most powerful words in democratic mythology: consent.

Representative government is routinely legitimated through the “consent of the governed.” Citizens vote. They obey the law. They return to the polls. Most do not rebel. Many will affirm, sincerely, that they live in a democracy. All of this is treated as evidence that the governing relationship is consensual.

But the abuse analogy should make us much more suspicious of that inference.

One of the oldest defenses of an abusive relationship is that the victim stays. She does not complain, or does not complain consistently. She defends her partner. She returns after leaving. She could leave if she really wanted to. Her continued presence is then offered as evidence that the relationship cannot really be abusive.

Modern understandings of coercive control turn that reasoning inside out. Abuse can alter the very conditions under which choice is made. Dependence, fear, diminished self-trust, normalization, material constraint, and the narrowing of imaginable alternatives can make accommodation a rational response to an intolerable situation. When the relationship circumscribes the available choices, choosing within those constraints cannot automatically validate the relationship that created them.

The structure of an abusive relationship can coerce the appearance of consent from people whose choices have already been circumscribed by the abuse.

The political analogy is uncomfortable because it reaches straight into one of representative democracy's foundational claims. The legacy system tells the citizen: you may choose which candidate will possess legislative authority over you. What it does not ordinarily offer is the option to participate in the election while retaining that legislative authority yourself. Every viable choice reproduces the same underlying relationship. The names change. The parties change. The policies change. The location of the legislative decision-right does not.

The citizen is therefore invited to choose who will exercise power over her, and that choice is then treated as evidence that she consented to having the power taken out of her hands.

That is too easy.

Adaptation is not consent. Compliance is not consent. Choosing among the available rulers is not consent to being ruled.

This does not mean that no citizen genuinely prefers representative government. Some plainly do, and an argument about coercive structure must leave room for genuine human agency. The narrower claim is devastating enough: voting, compliance, political participation, and continued residence cannot by themselves establish consent to the governing relationship. A system cannot restrict the available choices and then point to the choices people make as proof that the restriction was freely chosen.

Consent worthy of the name requires a meaningful possibility of saying no.

And under the legacy system, the voter may say no to this candidate, no to that party, no to this administration, no to this policy. What she cannot ordinarily say through the ballot is:

No. I will keep my legislative authority.

The comparison to interpersonal abuse has its limits, but these limitations can actually be inducted as  part of the argument. A national political system is not an intimate relationship. “The public” is not one victim. Political actors move among roles, and responsibility and power are distributed with enormous inequality. Citizens may, at least apparently, consent to representative institutions; they may benefit from them, resist them, administer them, and use them to protect rights. The language of abuse must not erase agency, flatten culpability, or turn people who had little capacity to prevent an injury into its moral authors.

The useful question is therefore narrower than “Is representative government abuse?” It is this: does the legacy arrangement reproduce some of the emotional adaptations associated with coercive dependence? And if it does, what helps people move toward agency without reproducing domination in the process? Survivor-centered guidance offers a suggestive principle. The World Health Organization’s first-line LIVES approach emphasizes listening, validation, practical support, safety, and assistance that responds to a survivor’s own concerns without intruding on autonomy. Citizens are not patients, and politics is not therapy. The transferable lesson is simply that powerlessness cannot be cured by one more act of overpowering (World Health Organization, 2014, 2021).

You cannot free people from powerlessness by overpowering them.

That principle creates an unusual discipline for political communication. The case for voter sovereignty can be forceful—indeed, it sometimes should be—but the listener cannot be ordered into autonomy. The Democracy, Straight-Up! Project can say plainly that the public and many experts are wrong to defend political subordination. It can be uncompromising about the right at stake. But its method must leave the listener more capable of examining, choosing, and acting, not merely more pressured to trust a new set of people who claim to know what is best.

5. An Abuse-Producing System Without a Final Abuser

One of the Democracy, Straight-Up! Project’s slogans is, “There is no them.” I do not mean this as a sweet injunction to stop blaming people who deserve blame. I mean it as a challenge to one of the legacy system’s most seductive habits: the endlessly satisfying, endlessly incomplete search for the group outside ourselves that will finally explain why our common life has gone wrong.

To say there is no final abuser is emphatically not to say there are no abusers. Public life contains liars, exploiters, corrupt officials, negligent administrators, predatory institutions, discriminatory majorities, and people who knowingly profit from suffering. They remain responsible for what they do. Moral clarity does not require structural simplicity.

The claim is structural. The legacy system can be abuse-producing without containing one final perpetrator whose removal would end the governing relationship. Replace a politician, punish a corporation, defeat a party, expose an expert, remove an administrator—the institutional separation between citizens and legislative authority remains. Domination can reproduce itself without a conspiracy because authority, compliance, dependence, benefit, injury, and blame are distributed across people occupying different positions.

And those positions are not fixed. The same person may be harmed by a rule in one part of life and benefit from another rule elsewhere; administer a policy at work and oppose it at home; repeat misleading information online and later help a neighbor navigate the consequences; vote for the least intolerable candidate, condemn an out-group, withdraw from politics in despair, or organize against an injustice. Across a lifetime a citizen may move among injured party, beneficiary, enforcer, bystander, advocate, accuser, and spectator. That moral complexity is not an excuse. It is the terrain.

The roles are not morally equivalent, and we should resist any formulation that makes them sound so. A voter choosing among bundled candidates is not as responsible as an executive who deliberately conceals lethal evidence. A low-level administrator carrying out a statute under threat of dismissal does not possess the authority of the legislators who enacted it. “There is no them” must never collapse into “everyone is equally guilty.” It means something different: no external class can permanently assume responsibility for making our common world ours.

There are people to blame for particular wrongs. There is no “them” who can take responsibility for governing our common life in our place.

Once that distinction is made, wrongdoing acquires a different political meaning. In the legacy system, finding the culprit often feels like the end of the public task: expose, condemn, punish, replace, and hope for better behavior next time. Under self-government, identifying wrongdoing is where governing begins. What rule permitted it? What authority sustained it? Which warning failed? What institutional arrangement made the harm profitable or durable? What can we change—and how do we know whether the correction worked?

6. Blame, Delegation, and the Shelter of Innocence

The legacy system gives citizens endless opportunities to be right and comparatively few opportunities to make things right. Liberal politics points to corporations, disinformation, irresponsible politicians, prejudice, or voter complacency. Conservative politics points to bureaucrats, cultural elites, immigrants, criminals, globalists, universities, or the left. Officials blame voters, donors, courts, procedures, other branches, and the opposition. Corporations blame consumers, markets, competition, regulation, and fiduciary duties. Experts blame misinformation and political cowardice. Many of these accusations identify real causes. The problem is not that blame is always false. It is that a political culture can become exquisitely skilled at locating culpable actors while leaving the decision itself ownerless.

We are organized to accuse, not to decide.

Delegation can make that separation psychologically easier. Laboratory evidence shows that people can shift perceived responsibility for unattractive decisions by delegating the decision-right, and may delegate partly for that reason (Bartling & Fischbacher, 2012). National politics is obviously more complicated than an allocation experiment. Still, the mechanism illuminates something familiar about representative ownership: we can choose the decision-maker while keeping a certain moral distance from the decisions she makes.

A self-governing system would not abolish blame. Nor should it. It would change what blame is for.

6.1 An advocate lied

The advocate remains responsible for the lie. But the public is not condemned to stop at denunciation. Citizens can withdraw the advocate’s influence, expose the deception, reconsider decisions made under its sway, and design procedures that test competing claims before they harden into law. A liar may deserve blame. The existence of liars does not justify public helplessness.

6.2 An expert gave bad advice

The expert may have been negligent, conflicted, overconfident, or simply wrong under conditions of genuine uncertainty. The public still chose to rely on the advice, selected among competing expertise, and accepted rules for disclosure, scrutiny, and review. Sometimes the most mature democratic sentence may be brutally simple: we trusted them; we were wrong. That does not absolve the expert. It refuses the comforting fiction that consulting expertise can transfer ultimate ownership of the public decision.

6.3 A delegate misrepresented herself

The delegate betrayed trust. In a system of revocable delegation, however, betrayal need not become a two- or four-year condition of citizenship. The authority remains the voters’. They retrieve it, replace her, and ask what they failed to see. Misrepresentation becomes a correctable event rather than a term of office, and institutional memory can make the next mistake less likely.

6.4 An administrator failed

The administrator may deserve removal, investigation, or punishment. But the inquiry cannot end with the person. The public must also examine the office, appointment process, chain of command, incentives, reporting rules, resources, and review procedures that allowed failure to persist. Administration is specialized political labor. It does not descend from somewhere outside the constitutional order, already innocent of the rules that shaped it.

6.5 A corporation concealed evidence

The people and institution responsible remain culpable. But indignation is not a regulatory system. Were independent tests required? Were whistleblowers protected? Was enforcement adequately funded? Were penalties larger than the expected profits from concealment? Human beings sometimes behave badly; that observation is neither surprising nor sufficient. Public rules exist so that wrongdoing can be detected, constrained, punished, and made less profitable the next time.

6.6 Fellow citizens voted badly

Perhaps fellow citizens believed falsehoods, followed a demagogue, or chose cruelly. Perhaps they understood the choice differently. Perhaps we failed to understand what they feared, answer their argument, offer a genuine alternative, or persuade. Democratic responsibility does not require pretending every vote is equally wise or humane. It requires us to ask both how the decision happened and whether rights and institutional safeguards are strong enough to survive a bad decision while preserving the possibility of deciding again.

We can punish the guilty without pretending that punishment is the same thing as governing.

Self-government does not eliminate wrongdoing. It means that we are no longer helpless in the face of wrongdoing.

7. The Strongest Case for Love First

If “love first” is going to be criticized, it deserves to be criticized in its strongest form. I use the phrase narrowly, not as a sneer at deliberative democrats, citizens’ assembly advocates, bridge-builders, or anyone who believes empathy matters. The target is a relational-precondition thesis: trust, vulnerability, empathy, connection, group bonding, or civic love must be activated before citizens can realize the epistemic and cooperative benefits of democratic deliberation.

The clearest explicit formulation comes from Hélène Landemore. Reflecting on citizens’ assemblies, she describes participants forming bonds and speaking in the language of love, then argues that collective intelligence depends on triggering “the love part first.” DemocracyNext develops a closely related idea in its account of the vulnerability muscle: the ability to share feelings, tolerate conflict, experience love, feel the weight of other people’s experiences, build trust, and become open to compromise and shared judgment (Chwalisz & Landemore, 2026; Chwalisz, McKinney, Theuns, & Yi, 2026).

This is not a sentimental claim dressed up as democratic theory. It is an account of the affective conditions under which cognition works well. People reason differently when they feel attacked, humiliated, unheard, or socially threatened. Relational safety can make it easier to admit uncertainty, revise a belief, absorb testimony, and experience disagreement without immediately translating it into disrespect. There is real empirical support for important pieces of this case.

In three preregistered field experiments involving 6,869 voters, nonjudgmental exchanges of personal narratives produced small but durable reductions in exclusionary attitudes, while otherwise similar argument-only conversations did not (Kalla & Broockman, 2020). Deliberation experiments have found reduced affective polarization and warmer evaluations of opponents even where substantive disagreement remained (Shen & Yu, 2021). America in One Room produced large depolarizing changes in both policy attitudes and affective polarization among participants relative to a control group (Fishkin et al., 2021). Intergroup contact theory likewise identifies common goals, cooperation, equal status in the encounter, and supportive norms as conditions that can improve intergroup relations, while newer syntheses caution that average experimental effects may be modest and may generalize poorly beyond the people actually encountered (Pettigrew, 1998; Lowe, 2025). The evidence is encouraging, but it does not justify romanticism.

Nor is it fair to describe DemocracyNext as offering love instead of power. It explicitly seeks to broaden who has power, institutionalize empowered citizens’ assemblies, strengthen political efficacy, and cultivate responsibility through practice. Its “deliberative muscles” framework includes reasoning, dialogue, vulnerability, collaboration, imagination, facilitation, and self-reflection; crucially, it emphasizes productive friction rather than painless consensus (Česnulaitytė, 2024; Chwalisz et al., 2026; McKinney & Chwalisz, 2025). The disagreement here is not with the aspiration to make democratic relationships better.

The strongest case for “love first,” then, is genuinely strong. Relational connection can reduce caricature, make vulnerability possible, improve information processing, strengthen trust, and help groups reach judgments more intelligent and legitimate than the mere aggregation of isolated preferences. Straight-Up Democracy should want those benefits. In fact, the System is designed to give them somewhere to grow. Human-scale Circles allow people to become known to one another instead of encountering one another chiefly as hostile abstractions. Affinity-based association lowers the chance that every political exchange begins as an attack. Back & Forth communication and repeated cooperation create room for clarification, correction, reciprocal recognition, and earned trust. The important difference is temporal and institutional: the System does not require love before power is shared. It creates conditions in which affection, solidarity, or simply workable mutual regard may develop through the experience of sharing power.

So the disagreement is narrower—and sharper—than it may first appear. It is not whether love, trust, empathy, and vulnerability matter. They do. It is whether they must be achieved first, and whether institutions may continue withholding general voter sovereignty while they wait.

8. Sortition and Voter Sovereignty

This disagreement with DemocracyNext and related traditions should also be separated cleanly from any general objection to sortition. Straight-Up Democracy is not opposed to citizens’ assemblies, randomly selected committees, deliberative panels, or bodies whose decisions have direct legal effect. Nor does voter sovereignty require that every decision made by such a body be sent back to the entire electorate for case-by-case ratification. That would confuse ownership of authority with personal performance of every political task.

A voter-sovereign legislature could—and I expect eventually would—create sortition bodies with advisory, agenda-setting, supervisory, investigative, drafting, appropriations, regulatory, or directly lawmaking authority. It could specify that some decisions take legal effect without a general referendum. It could create permanent assemblies that share power with elected or administrative institutions. Whether any particular arrangement is wise would depend on jurisdiction, safeguards, scope, accountability, evidence, and performance. Voter sovereignty does not prohibit institutional imagination; it supplies the source from which legitimate institutional experimentation can proceed.

The nonnegotiable condition is constitutive sovereignty. The legislature that creates, defines, limits, amends, or abolishes the sortition pathway must be open to all voters—a Directly-connected Legislature or something materially equivalent. Sortition may exercise authority conferred by the people. What it cannot do is explain why the people themselves should be excluded from the legislature that confers that authority.

This distinction matters emotionally as well as constitutionally. A successful mini-public can demonstrate something valuable: ordinary citizens can learn, deliberate, compromise, and assume responsibility. That evidence should reduce fear of citizens. But the success of selected citizens cannot become a readiness examination that the rest of the public must pass before it may possess sovereignty. Political labor can be distributed. Sovereignty need not be.

9. Evaluating Love First Through the Four Barriers

We can now return to the four emotional barriers and ask the question that actually matters. Not, Is love good? Of course it can be. The question is whether relational transformation is the indispensable bridge between political helplessness and voter sovereignty.

9.1 Does love first make power safe enough to exercise?

Relational connection can plainly make shared power feel less frightening. People who have met, listened to, and worked with one another are less likely to imagine one another only as abstractions, and they may find joint authority easier to accept. DemocracyNext’s emphasis on group building, vulnerability, and trust speaks directly to this fear. That is one reason I take the argument seriously.

But power does not become safe because everyone finally becomes trustworthy. It becomes safe enough when the architecture limits what untrustworthy people can do. Constitutional rights, transparent procedures, distributed authority, revocable delegation, independent verification, replaceability, repeated decisions, and correction all lower the stakes of a betrayal or mistake. The answer to dangerous power is not powerlessness. It is a better architecture of power.

Trust can improve democratic performance, but it is too fragile to serve as the foundation of sovereignty. It can be absent, misplaced, withdrawn, or betrayed. A democratic system has to remain legitimate and operable on the bad days too—when citizens dislike one another, suspect one another’s motives, refuse reconciliation, and continue to disagree about matters they regard as morally fundamental.

9.2 Does love first make responsibility bearable?

Deliberative practice can strengthen both the willingness and the capacity to assume responsibility. DemocracyNext is explicit that democratic abilities develop through repeated exercise, discomfort, reflection, and collaboration. On this point the two projects are surprisingly close. Straight-Up likewise rejects the idea that citizens must arrive fully trained. Political development occurs through consequential agency, not through prior certification of readiness.

The trouble begins when relational intensity quietly becomes a universal civic job description. Citizens may be expected to listen deeply, examine bias, become vulnerable, absorb extensive evidence, understand every perspective, find common ground, and cultivate deliberative competence before a decision can count as democratically legitimate. These are admirable practices. I would like more of them, not fewer. But made into prerequisites for sovereignty, they become another species of homework democracy: self-government available after everyone has completed the course.

Straight-Up Democracy separates sovereignty from workload. Responsibility can be divided, delegated, specialized, and retrieved. A citizen may vote directly on one issue, rely on a trusted delegate on another, serve on a committee for a season, consult experts, or step back when life demands it. Unequal political labor does not have to become unequal ownership of the legislative decision-right. If responsibility is burdensome, the institutional answer is to distribute the work—not to reserve sovereignty for the people able to sustain the heaviest form of democratic participation.

9.3 Does ‘love first’ make other citizens manageable?

Here the love-first case is at its strongest. Nonjudgmental listening, personal narrative, and sustained contact can reduce exaggerated perceptions of threat. People may discover that opponents are not identical to their parties’ most inflammatory spokespeople. Deliberation can improve evaluations of people across a divide even where issue positions remain stubbornly different (Kalla & Broockman, 2020; Shen & Yu, 2021). That is not a small achievement in a political culture trained to encounter the other side as a caricature.

Still, love is not necessary for a good-enough settlement. Opposing forces negotiate every day because neither side can get everything it wants, continued conflict is costly, and an enforceable compromise leaves both better off than the available alternatives. Thompson’s experiments found that negotiation with an out-group member improved attitudes toward the out-group when a mutually beneficial agreement was possible; the improvement disappeared when no such possibility existed (Thompson, 1993). The sequence matters. Sometimes cooperation grows from relationship. Sometimes relationship improves because people discover that they can cooperate.

That points to the emotional transition we actually need. We do not have to move from threat to harmlessness. We have to move from unmanageable threat to manageable conflict. Citizens need not believe that everyone is kind, reasonable, or safe. They need credible reason to believe that no faction lies beyond their collective capacity to constrain, oppose, outvote, bargain with, expose, accommodate, and correct.

The opposite of seeing other citizens as threats is not loving them. It is knowing that their threat can be handled.

9.4 Does ‘love first’ end helplessness as innocence?

Love-first practices can improve the morality and emotional quality of spectatorship without ending spectatorship itself. A citizen may listen carefully, empathize, humanize an opponent, refuse hatred, and still remain outside the final decision. That achievement is real. The governing relationship, however, has not changed.

This is where the Straight-Up question becomes unavoidably institutional. It is not only how citizens should feel about one another; it is what they are empowered to decide together. Empathy can reopen communication. Trust can improve cooperation. Neither can cast the legislative vote. If final authority still rests with elected officials, institutional sponsors, or a selected mini-public whose mandate the general public cannot alter, the ordinary voter remains a petitioner to power—perhaps a kinder, wiser petitioner, but a petitioner nonetheless.

And the shelter of innocence remains intact. Citizens can say that they listened, understood, resisted demonization, and behaved with admirable civic grace, while the law that emerges still belongs to someone else. Love can soften blame. It cannot, by itself, supply ownership. The emotional transition to sovereignty requires us to give up that shelter.

10. The Stopping-Rule Problem

To say that love must come first is not merely to praise love; it is to make a sequencing claim. First come trust, vulnerability, empathy, relational connection, civic friendship, or love. Then come collective intelligence, legitimate decision-making, and power. Once political authority is conditioned on a prior emotional state, a practical question becomes unavoidable: what is the stopping rule?

When would there be enough love among the voters that you would trust them to become sovereign?

The question sounds almost impolite until we try to administer the theory. How much love is enough? Among how many voters? Must hostility fall below a measurable threshold? Must a majority demonstrate empathy? Must every politically salient group feel recognized? Who measures any of this? Who decides that the threshold has been met? And what happens to the sovereignty of citizens who remain hateful, distrustful, frightened, isolated, exhausted, or simply unwilling to deliberate in the preferred way?

Most importantly: who governs while the public is being prepared for sovereignty?

DemocracyNext’s institutional destination is not general voter sovereignty in the Straight-Up sense. It seeks empowered and permanent citizens’ assemblies and aims to broaden who possesses power through sortition, deliberation, and rotation. Its European Citizens’ Assembly proposal would share real authority with existing EU institutions, and its recent work seeks to move assemblies from temporary projects to permanent features of decision-making (Berg, Chwalisz, Nicolaidis, & Sintomer, 2023; DemocracyNext, 2026). The absence of a threshold for transferring legislative sovereignty to all voters may therefore reflect a different theory of democracy rather than an oversight. That distinction should be stated fairly.

But the stopping-rule problem is larger than DemocracyNext. Wherever institutions, funders, and reform organizations that could be transferring legislative authority instead make citizen development a prerequisite, preparation can acquire a life of its own. A program intended to prepare people for power can become an institution whose continued purpose depends on the people never quite being ready.

1. The public is described as too polarized, uninformed, distrustful, or emotionally immature to possess power.

2. Citizens are therefore invited into carefully facilitated settings to develop empathy, trust, knowledge, and deliberative skill.

3. A small number of participants demonstrate that ordinary people can perform well under those conditions.

4. The demonstration is then read as evidence that more citizens require the same preparation.

5. More assemblies, dialogue programs, civic education, bridge-building, and training are funded.

6. The general public remains outside the legislature because readiness, conveniently and sincerely, is never quite complete.

Every step in that sequence may be useful. Every person involved may be acting in good faith. And taken together, the steps can still produce an infinite developmental regress. Citizens must acquire democratic capacities before they acquire democratic power, while one of the strongest ways human beings acquire political capacity is by exercising consequential power. The cure is postponed until after the condition the cure itself may help create.

That is the danger in “love first” when it occupies institutions capable of implementing sovereignty. Preparation displaces transfer. The public is continually trained for the room where power is exercised and never quite admitted to it. There is always more mistrust to reduce, more misinformation to correct, more civic muscle to build, more trauma to heal, more bias to examine, more mutual understanding to cultivate. The work is worthy. The waiting room can still become permanent.

Love belongs on democracy’s enhancement path. It does not belong at the gate to sovereignty.

11. Love Is Not on the Critical Path

Voter sovereignty requires no fantasy of universal affection. Some citizens will lie. Some will manipulate. Some will choose badly. Some will support laws that threaten the liberty, equality, security, livelihood, or dignity of others. Some conflicts will not produce a mutually beneficial compromise no matter how well everyone listens. The institutional question is not whether these dangers exist. It is whether their existence justifies a permanent class of independently empowered legislative decision-makers.

Straight-Up Democracy answers no. The public does not have to stop fearing other citizens before it can become sovereign. It needs an architecture in which fear no longer entails helplessness. Rights can constrain decisions. Authority can be distributed. Delegation can be retrieved. Claims can be challenged. Officials can be replaced. Decisions can be reversed. Political defeat can remain temporary rather than becoming permanent exclusion from the decision-right. The promise is not safety through goodness. It is safety through reciprocal capacity and correction.

The minimum relational requirement is therefore thinner than love, but it is not empty. Citizens must accept opponents as legitimate participants in a shared procedure, reject coercive violence as the ordinary means of decision, tolerate temporary loss, respect constitutional rights and limits, and remain willing to negotiate where interests conflict. These are demanding civic norms. They do not require affection, complete trust, ideological convergence, friendship, or reconciliation. Democracy must be able to work among people who do not wish to become one another’s friends.

The causal order may also run in both directions. The strong love-first sequence can be stated as:

relational bond → openness → collective intelligence → good deliberation → legitimate power

Straight-Up adds a second possible sequence:

distributed and correctable power → manageable risk → bounded cooperation → workable decisions → evidence of collective capacity → reduced fear and possibly greater trust

Research on negotiation, deliberation, and contact makes this reciprocal model plausible. Successful cooperation can improve attitudes toward out-groups; structured deliberation can reduce hostility even when disagreement survives; and participation can increase political efficacy (Thompson, 1993; Finkel, 1987; Shen & Yu, 2021). We should not romanticize the effects. Recent reviews find that intergroup-contact effects are often modest and poorly generalized, and no institutional design guarantees warmth (Lowe, 2025). The empirical claim is deliberately conditional: under fair, noncoercive, mutually consequential conditions, cooperation may generate some of the trust that love-first theories place before cooperation. Sometimes we learn that we can live together by actually doing the work of living together.

We do not necessarily have to heal our political relationships before sharing power. Sharing power under conditions that make conflict bounded, consequential, and correctable may be part of how those relationships heal.

The opposite of fear is not love. It is capacity.

12. The Emotional Transition to Sovereignty

The four emotional barriers cannot be answered by exhortation. Telling citizens to be braver, more responsible, more trusting, or more mature simply adds another demand to a relationship already defined by powerlessness. The transition has to be institutional as well as emotional. People become willing to undertake frightening forms of agency when the undertaking has been made survivable.

12.1 Power can be made safe enough to exercise

No political power is safe in an absolute sense. Representative legislatures, courts, executives, agencies, parties, donors, experts, and publics are all capable of causing harm. The relevant comparison is therefore not power versus safety; it is one architecture of danger versus another. Straight-Up Democracy seeks to reduce the consequences of capture and betrayal by distributing authority, keeping delegation revocable, anchoring participation in human-scale voluntary association, maintaining constitutional rights, enabling independent verification, and preserving continuous correction (Hart & Engels, 2026a, 2026b).

The emotional achievement is not a serene belief that every decision-maker can be trusted. It is confidence that no decision-maker can permanently appropriate the authority of the public. Power becomes safe enough when the people who own it can retrieve it, redirect it, and revise what has been done in their name.

12.2 Responsibility can be divided, delegated, and retrieved

Sovereignty is not compulsory micromanagement. Owning a decision-right does not require personally exercising it on every bill. Political labor can be divided among committees, advocates, experts, administrators, delegates, and sortition bodies. Participation can rise and fall across time, subject, capacity, and interest. A democracy that demands maximum participation from everyone is not more democratic for exhausting them.

The decisive institutional question is whether delegated authority remains retrievable. Legacy representation transfers a large bundle of decisions for a fixed term and offers only distant, retrospective correction. Revocable delegation allows citizens to rely on other people without turning reliance into subordination. Responsibility becomes bearable because it can be shared, scaled, and taken back—not because it has been surrendered.

12.3 Threats can be managed without permanent subordination

Citizens will continue to threaten one another’s interests and, at times, one another’s rights. A democratic constitution must limit what transient majorities can do, preserve due process, and protect the conditions under which future participation remains possible. Political organization must also leave room for groups to mobilize, challenge, persuade, negotiate, vote, lose, recover, and try again. Conflict is not a design failure. Unbounded conflict is.

The legacy system offers protection from other voters by placing everyone beneath institutions that possess independent governing authority. Straight-Up seeks a different kind of protection: reciprocal capacity. No citizen is guaranteed victory, but no citizen is permanently excluded from the structure through which victory, resistance, and correction are pursued. We remain vulnerable to one another, but not politically helpless before one another.

12.4 Innocence is less valuable than agency

This is the hardest transition because it asks us to surrender something emotionally precious. Sovereignty means that the resulting world becomes ours even when we opposed the decision that produced it. We may trust the wrong advocate, follow bad expert advice, choose an unworthy delegate, accept a weak compromise, or fail to protect people we should have protected. Self-government takes away the perfect innocence of the spectator.

But innocence purchased through helplessness is politically sterile. It cannot repair the harm, rewrite the rule, retrieve the delegation, compensate the injured, or decide again. Agency is morally riskier precisely because it exposes us to ownership of failure. It is also the only condition in which learning can become correction rather than another report addressed to somebody else.

Political spectatorship offers innocence. Self-government requires ownership.

13. Speaking Through the Wall

If this emotional theory is right, it changes how Straight-Up Democracy should be communicated. The Democracy, Straight-Up! Project can remain utterly decisive about the proposition while refusing to create the very adversarial context that makes listeners stop hearing it. Anger may tell us where the wall is. It should not be allowed to drive the car.

The practical discipline is simple to state and difficult to practice: translate emotion into design.

A useful conversation begins by locating the value under threat, stating the concern in its strongest form, separating the fear from the institutional conclusion, answering with architecture rather than reassurance, and then returning judgment to the listener. This resembles the autonomy-supportive communication found in motivational interviewing and research on reactance: people are more open when they retain ownership of judgment and are not humiliated or coerced into agreement (Burke, Arkowitz, & Menchola, 2003; Magill et al., 2018; Beutler et al., 2018). The point is not to manipulate resistance away. It is to make the actual disagreement visible.

A conversation might sound like this: What worries you most about voters possessing the legislative vote? A temporary majority could violate rights? Yes. That is a real danger. But it does not follow that a separate class should own the decision-right. Here are the constitutional and institutional protections. Which protection is missing? What would you need to see before voter sovereignty became safer, in your judgment, than permanent representative ownership? Now the fear has become a design question rather than a verdict.

This is not the “love first” strategy criticized above. Listening is not an indefinite prerequisite to power. It is a method for discovering what the listener is actually protecting and translating a diffuse fear into a falsifiable institutional demand. Empathy functions here as reconnaissance, not surrender—and certainly not as a substitute for argument.

Use anger as an alarm, not as the steering wheel.

The Project can also name the emotional problem directly, but it should do so without pretending to diagnose strangers from across the room. “You are afraid” is an accusation and usually closes the conversation. “This proposal raises a fear we have all been taught to feel” makes the fear something we can inspect together. The first sentence puts the listener on trial. The second invites her into the inquiry.

14. Forgiving Ourselves Without Absolving Ourselves

The movement from innocence to agency also requires a kind of political self-forgiveness. We inherited institutions we did not design. No individual citizen could escape the governing relationship by being morally pure enough. So people adapted: by blaming, withdrawing, idealizing leaders, distrusting one another, lowering expectations, identifying with parties, and mistaking the periodic choice of rulers for self-rule. Those adaptations deserve understanding because they made life inside the available system bearable. Understanding them does not require preserving them.

Self-forgiveness, however, must not become one more route back to innocence. Research distinguishes a hedonic form that mainly relieves painful self-regard from a more demanding process in which responsibility is accepted and violated values are reaffirmed. Genuine self-forgiveness can reduce defensiveness while increasing concern, reconciliation, and amends (Wenzel, Woodyatt, & Hedrick, 2012; Woodyatt et al., 2017). That distinction is especially useful politically: forgiveness matters only if it releases us into responsibility rather than excusing us from it.

The political sequence, then, is:

recognition → responsibility → forgiveness → agency

not:

forgiveness → innocence → continuation

We can forgive ourselves for adapting to a system we did not create and could not individually escape. We can forgive ourselves for mistaking spectatorship for citizenship, indignation for action, and the choice of rulers for self-rule. We can forgive ourselves for fearing responsibility, searching for protectors, and seeing opponents as larger and more dangerous than our collective capacity to handle them. That forgiveness is not a declaration that nothing was our responsibility. It is permission to stop wasting political energy on the fantasy that shame will govern better than we can.

Forgiveness does not oblige us to keep reproducing an arrangement once we can see it clearly. Shame is merely another form of paralysis if it leaves the structure untouched. The purpose of self-forgiveness is to release energy trapped in self-condemnation and convert it into responsibility for what happens next. We do not need to despise our former political selves in order to outgrow the role they were given.

We did not create our helplessness. But we do not have to continue organizing our political lives around it.

Conclusion: The Courage to Be Sovereign

The legacy system persists through law, institutional interest, habit, ideology, and unequal power. I have argued that it may persist through something quieter as well: emotional adaptations that make political subordination bearable. Power comes to feel dangerous. Responsibility feels burdensome. Other citizens appear as threats beyond our capacity to manage. Helplessness becomes the safest place from which to remain innocent. None of these feelings is foolish. Each makes sense inside the arrangement that taught it.

The abuse analogy helps explain why departure can feel more frightening than continuation. A coercive relationship can narrow the range of alternatives a person experiences as imaginable and teach dependence to feel like safety. But the legacy system is not an intimate abuser writ large. It distributes roles, harms, benefits, and responsibility across millions of people and many institutions. It contains wrongdoers without containing one final perpetrator whose removal would suddenly make the public sovereign. There is no “them” who can govern our common life for us.

A public's adaptation to political powerlessness should no more be mistaken for consent than a survivor's adaptation to coercive dependence. The fact that people learn to live inside a relationship tells us something about human adaptability. It does not, by itself, legitimate the relationship. 

The love-first tradition identifies something real about human beings: people often reason and cooperate better when they feel heard, connected, and safe enough to become vulnerable. But Straight-Up Democracy does not need to bolt those insights onto the System as a preliminary intervention. They are already living in its architecture. Build political life around voluntary human-scale association, repeated interaction, Back & Forth communication, revocable delegation, and consequential shared power, and—voilà—you have created precisely the kinds of places in which trust, empathy, responsibility, mutual recognition, and collective intelligence can grow. The System does not guarantee that people will love one another, deliberate beautifully, or behave well. It does something more important: it automatically creates places where better political relationships can develop without making those relationships a prerequisite for sovereignty. The relational goals of love-first democracy belong inside Straight-Up not because we must achieve them before the people can govern, but because a human-centered architecture of self-government gives them somewhere to grow.

Love itself–as much as we all love love!--cannot be allowed to block the gate to sovereignty. There is no credible population-wide stopping rule by which an authority outside the public can decide that voters are now sufficiently trusting, empathetic, informed, reconciled, or deliberatively mature to possess the authority exercised in their name. When relational preparation occupies institutions capable of transferring power, it can become an eternal waiting room outside the legislature. The chairs may be comfortable. The door is still closed.

The transition has to be institutional and emotional at once. Power must be made safe enough to exercise. Responsibility must be divisible, delegable, and retrievable. Threats must be manageable without everyone’s permanent subordination. And citizens must decide that agency is worth what it costs us: the loss of perfect political innocence.

We do not become sovereign on the day we finally stop fearing power, responsibility, or one another. That day is unlikely to come. We become sovereign when we build institutions through which those fears no longer require permanent helplessness. Love can help. Empathy can reopen communication. Trust can improve deliberation. Forgiveness can release us from shame. Each belongs inside a healthy democracy. None is an entrance examination for the equal legislative standing of the people.

The courage to be sovereign is the courage to surrender innocence for agency—and to believe that, together, we are capable of deciding what happens next.

Self-government does not eliminate wrongdoing. It means that we are no longer helpless in the face of wrongdoing.

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