Sample Curriculum
Week One: Democracy and Common Sense
How did “democracy” come to mean what we think it means?
We begin by examining something so familiar that it is difficult to see: our inherited conception of democracy itself. Berger and Luckmann show how humanly created institutions can come to confront later generations as simply “the way things are.” Gramsci asks how historically inherited assumptions become embedded in “common sense” and shape what people experience as politically possible. Through discussion and small-group exercises, we will examine the assumptions hidden inside familiar statements about voting, representation, accountability, and self-government. The week ends with a question that will follow us through the course: Who casts the final vote that makes a law?
Central question
When we say “democracy,” what are we assuming without realizing it?
Most of us have used the word democracy for years. We associate it with elections, voting, representation, rights, accountability, participation, majority rule, and political choice. But which of these things belong to the definition of self-government, and which are historically inherited institutional arrangements that we have learned to associate with it?
This week is about learning to see that distinction.
You are not being asked to agree with Straight-Up Democracy. The purpose of the first week is more basic: to become capable of recognizing assumptions that ordinarily remain invisible because they feel like common sense.
Learning objectives
By the end of the session, you should be able to:
explain how a humanly created institution can come to be experienced as an objective and apparently natural feature of the social world;
explain what Gramsci means by common sense and why common sense is historical rather than timeless;
identify unstated assumptions inside familiar claims about democracy and political representation;
distinguish, provisionally, between the democratic ideal of self-government and particular institutional arrangements through which societies claim to realize it;
begin asking the question that will organize Week Two: Who actually possesses the legislative decision-right?
Required reading
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, pp. 69–79.
Focus especially on the progression from human action to habitualization, institutionalization, objectivation, and internalization. The central idea for our purposes is that people create institutions, institutions acquire an apparently independent reality, and later generations encounter those institutions as part of the world they simply inherit.
Antonio Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader, ed. David Forgacs, pp. 323–334, “Philosophy, Common Sense, Language and Folklore,” Introduction and “Some Preliminary Reference Points.”
Gramsci asks how inherited conceptions of the world become embedded in ordinary thought. He contrasts critically examining one's worldview with accepting a conception mechanically from one's social environment, and later describes how inherited ideas can coexist with—and even contradict—the implications of people's actual social activity.
Democracy, Straight-Up! Project, “Democracy as Common Sense”(working title; course reading to be distributed).
This short reading will apply the ideas in Berger/Luckmann and Gramsci to familiar assumptions about elections, representation, legislative authority, and self-government.
Reading question
As you read, consider:
How can an invented political arrangement become so thoroughly objectified that challenging it sounds not merely radical but unintelligible?
Do not assume that because something is socially constructed it is imaginary. Congress, elections, constitutions, political offices, and legal powers are real institutions. The question is whether their familiarity causes us to confuse what exists with what democracy necessarily requires.
What we will do in class
Define Democracy
You will begin by writing your own definition of democracy.
We will then try again—but this time without using:
election, elected, representative, representation, politician, or government.
What remains?
We will conclude the exercise with a question we will revisit throughout the course:
Who casts the final vote that makes a law?
We will not try to settle that question yet.
The Anthropologist from Mars
In small groups, imagine an anthropologist from a society with no existing political vocabulary observing the United States.
The anthropologist reports:
Citizens periodically choose several hundred people. Those people thereafter possess legal authority to enact rules binding hundreds of millions of citizens. Citizens may communicate with them, criticize them, organize against them, demonstrate, donate money, petition them, and eventually replace some of them. Between elections, however, citizens themselves do not possess the legislative vote.
Your group will consider:
What might an observer call this arrangement without already knowing our political terminology?
What additional information would be necessary before describing it as self-government?
If we already know that the arrangement is a democracy, what exactly are we claiming when we use that word?
This is not a trick question. The point is to discover how much explanatory work the familiar label democracy may be doing for us.
“That's Just How Democracy Works”
Your group will receive familiar statements such as:
“If you don't like them, vote them out.”
“Politicians have to listen to their constituents.”
“Voters hold leaders accountable.”
“You can't expect everyone to vote on everything.”
“That's why we elect people to make these decisions.”
“The people have spoken.”
For each statement, identify the unstated premise that makes the statement persuasive.
Then ask:
Is the premise logically necessary?
Is it empirical?
Is it historical?
Is it a value judgment?
Or have we simply become accustomed to treating it as obvious?
Closing discussion
We will return to the definitions of democracy written at the beginning of class.
Would you change yours?
We will then introduce one distinction without attempting to settle its implications:
Influencing the person who possesses a decision-right is not necessarily the same thing as possessing the decision-right.
That is where Week Two begins.
Homework — Find the Hidden Democracy
Find three examples from ordinary political life in which something is described as democratic, as citizen power, or as an exercise of popular control.
Possible sources include:
news coverage;
political commentary;
campaign materials;
civics textbooks;
speeches;
nonprofit websites;
conversations;
social media;
public-service materials.
For each example, write approximately 150 words answering:
What is the citizen actually empowered to do?
Who possesses the final decision-right?
What assumption allows the first thing to be described as the second?
Then write a 500-word reflection:
Before this week, what did I think democracy meant? Which parts of that definition now appear to be definitions, and which appear to be inherited assumptions?
You are not being asked whether you now agree with Straight-Up Democracy. Your task is to identify assumptions clearly enough that they can eventually be examined.
Week 5 — What Does Governing Actually Require?
Central Question
Does self-government require everyone to do the work of government—or does it require everyone to retain authority over the work done in their name?
Purpose
Modern government is extraordinarily complicated. Laws must be researched, drafted, negotiated, amended, interpreted, implemented, monitored, challenged, explained, and revised. Expertise matters. Specialization matters. Staff matters. Committees matter.
This complexity is often treated as an argument against direct self-government: ordinary citizens plainly cannot do all of this work themselves, therefore professional representatives must govern for them.
But that conclusion may contain a hidden assumption.
This week we will take government apart into its component functions and ask which of them actually require political authority, which require labor, which require expertise, and which can be delegated.
The larger question is whether we have confused doing the work of government with owning the power of government.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this week, students should be able to:
Identify several distinct functions involved in governing, including research, drafting, deliberation, negotiation, administration, communication, oversight, and final decision-making.
Distinguish authority from expertise, influence, labor, leadership, representation, and administration.
Explain why equal political authority does not necessarily require equal political workload.
Identify what we will call the labor-authority fallacy: the assumption that because someone performs necessary political work, that person must therefore possess the final authority to decide.
Examine delegation as a spectrum rather than a binary choice between “everyone does everything” and “representatives rule.”
Ask what kinds of delegation preserve the authority of the person delegating—and what kinds transfer it away.
Required Reading
The Democratic Ownership of Law, Chapter 10, selected sections on authority, labor, expertise, and delegation. [link]
This is the chapter in which we begin separating the many things normally bundled together under the word governing: researching, advising, drafting, negotiating, administering, representing, and deciding.
Jane Mansbridge, “Rethinking Representation.” Selected pages. [link]
Mansbridge broadens representation beyond the simple model in which voters issue instructions and representatives mechanically obey them. Pay particular attention to the different functions a representative can perform.
Short course reading: “Who Actually Does the Work of Government?” [link]
A brief overview of the enormous ecosystem of congressional staff, committees, legislative counsel, agencies, researchers, advocates, experts, and administrators involved in producing federal policy.
Reading Question
As you read, watch for a particular logical move:
When does an argument move from “someone has to do this work” to “therefore that person has to possess the authority to decide”?
Are those two propositions necessarily connected?
Bring one example to class.
In Class
Exercise 1: Build a Legislature from Scratch
Imagine that Congress has disappeared overnight but the country still has to govern.
We will begin with an empty board and ask:
What actually has to happen for a law to come into existence and function?
Students will generate the tasks themselves.
Research the problem. Gather evidence. Hear affected people. Develop options. Estimate costs. Draft language. Check constitutionality. Negotiate. Amend. Explain. Vote. Implement. Monitor. Enforce. Evaluate. Revise.
Then we sort the resulting tasks into categories:
Labor
Expertise
Advice
Representation
Administration
Political authority
Some tasks may belong in more than one category. That disagreement is part of the exercise.
Exercise 2: Who Gets the Button?
Suppose Congress is considering a complicated piece of legislation concerning a new medical technology.
A physician understands the medical evidence.
An economist understands the likely costs.
A lawyer understands the statutory language.
Congressional staff have spent six months investigating the issue.
A committee has held hearings.
Affected patients have firsthand experience.
Advocacy groups have organized around competing positions.
The public has preferences.
Now comes the final vote.
Who should get the button?
More importantly:
Why?
Does superior expertise confer authority?
Does greater effort confer authority?
Does election confer authority?
Does being affected confer authority?
Can someone appropriately perform almost every important function in the process without possessing the final decision-right?
Exercise 3: The Delegation Line
We will arrange forms of delegation along a continuum:
Research something for me.
Explain it to me.
Recommend what I should do.
Draft something for me.
Negotiate on my behalf.
Make a decision unless I intervene.
Make the decision, but allow me to reverse it.
Make the decision and bind me to it for two years.
Students decide where—if anywhere—delegation becomes alienation of authority.
There may not initially be agreement. Good.
The point is to make the distinction visible.
Exercise 4: “But 330 Million People Can't Govern!”
We take one of the most common objections to direct democracy literally.
Could 330 million Americans:
write every bill?
read every committee report?
master every technical subject?
attend every meeting?
negotiate every amendment?
Obviously not.
Then we ask the question differently:
Does democracy require them to?
The President does not personally perform every task of the executive branch. Members of Congress do not personally conduct every investigation, calculate every budget estimate, draft every statutory clause, or administer the laws they enact.
Complex institutions already divide labor.
So the problem becomes:
How can political labor be divided without permanently dividing the population into those who possess legislative authority and those who do not?
The Closing Distinction
By the end of the session, students should leave with one distinction firmly in mind:
Government requires specialization. Democracy does not require specialized sovereignty.
Or, even more simply:
Delegate the work. The question is whether we also have to delegate the power.
We are not yet answering that question with the Straight-Up System. That comes later in the course.
For now, students should simply recognize that it is a question.
Homework — Follow the Work
Choose one actual piece of federal legislation, recent or historical.
Identify at least five different people, offices, organizations, or institutions that contributed to producing, shaping, evaluating, implementing, or contesting it.
For each, identify what kind of work it performed:
research
expertise
drafting
advocacy
negotiation
representation
administration
oversight
formal decision-making
or something else.
Then write approximately 500 words answering:
Which of these functions actually required the person performing it to possess legislative authority?
Do not argue for Straight-Up Democracy.
Do not argue against representative government.
Just follow the work and follow the authority.
Looking Ahead
Week 6: How Do We Study a Governing System?
Once we have stopped treating “government” as one undifferentiated thing, we can begin examining it as a system: where authority, information, labor, incentives, and correction actually flow.
Week 10 — How Would We Know?
Central Question
What would count as evidence that a democratic system works—and what would count as evidence that it does not?
Purpose
For nine weeks we have questioned familiar assumptions about democracy, representation, expertise, participation, scale, delegation, and political power.
We have also examined a specific alternative: the Straight-Up System.
Now the burden shifts.
It is not enough to show that representative government has serious defects. It is not enough to devise an alternative that sounds plausible. And it is certainly not enough to become emotionally attached to a theory because we helped build it.
A serious democratic proposal must expose itself to failure.
This week asks students to treat political institutions as testable designs. What does Straight-Up predict? Which questions can be answered through reasoning? Which require empirical evidence? Which risks must be solved before implementation? Which can only be understood after people begin governing? And what observations would force us to redesign—or abandon—the model?
The Straight-Up System itself is explicitly framed as a model that should generate predictions and expose conditions of failure, rather than as a promise of perfect government.
The final lesson of the course is therefore methodological as much as political:
Democracy should not be an article of faith. It should be an institution we can examine, criticize, test, repair, and—when necessary—change.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this week, students should be able to:
Distinguish a normative claim from a structural inference and an empirical prediction.
Explain why some questions about political institutions can be answered before implementation while others cannot.
Identify meaningful failure criteria for a democratic design.
Distinguish a correctable design problem from a failure of the system's defining democratic principles.
Explain why comparison must be system against system, rather than an imagined perfect democracy against the actual defects of representative government.
Formulate observations that would strengthen or weaken the case for Straight-Up Democracy.
Explain the importance of corrigibility: who has the authority to recognize a problem and change the institution when something goes wrong.
Leave the course able to criticize Straight-Up Democracy intelligently rather than merely support or oppose it.
Required Reading
The Question-Space Test, selected sections. [link]
This paper asks how competing democratic systems might be evaluated against a common set of questions rather than allowing each system to choose the criteria on which it looks strongest. Students should pay particular attention to the proposed use of independent scoring, hidden questions, red-line failures, and continuing evaluation after implementation. The current framework explicitly calls for publishing results, revising models, and continuing the test using real-world implementation data.
The Straight-Up System, selected sections: “A Model, Not a Miracle,” “What Would Constitute Abandonment,” and “A General Implementation Sequence.” [link]
The System paper distinguishes the four defining parameters from particular implementation choices and identifies changes that would mean the design had ceased to instantiate the system at all—for example, making voter decisions merely advisory or making delegation effectively irrevocable. It also requires testing, public predictions, failure criteria, and revision as part of implementation.
All the Remaining Arguments…, Introduction and objection taxonomy. [link]
This reading treats objections not as annoyances to be defeated but as different kinds of questions requiring different kinds of answers. Constitutional objections require constitutional analysis. Security claims require technical testing. Behavioral predictions require evidence. Strategic claims require evidence about transition.
Reading Question
As you read, choose one claim about Straight-Up Democracy that you think sounds plausible but is not yet proven.
Then answer:
What evidence would make you more confident in the claim?
And, more importantly:
What evidence would make you less confident in it?
If you cannot imagine evidence that would change your mind, ask yourself whether you are evaluating a theory or defending a belief.
In Class
Exercise 1: Sort the Claims
Students receive a set of statements:
“Voters should retain final legislative authority.”
“Revocable delegation reduces the danger of a permanent representative class.”
“Most voters will participate only intermittently.”
“Human-scale groups will improve accountability.”
“A DcL can recruit enough people to fill its delegate roles.”
“People who acquire consequential political authority will become more politically efficacious.”
“Straight-Up will produce better policy.”
“Straight-Up will reduce the political influence of concentrated wealth.”
“Layered aggregation can scale human relationships across a congressional district.”
“Voters will repair institutional defects when those defects become visible.”
Students sort each into:
Normative claim
Structural claim
Empirical prediction
Unsupported claim / insufficiently specified
The important lesson is that these categories require different kinds of argument.
You cannot settle a moral proposition with a pilot study.
You cannot establish a behavioral prediction through moral reasoning.
And you cannot defend a technical mechanism merely by saying that voters ought to be sovereign.
Exercise 2: Try to Kill Straight-Up
For most of the course, students have been asked to understand the model.
Now they are asked to attack it.
Small groups receive one area of the system:
voter sovereignty
participation
Circles
delegation
layered aggregation
expertise and administration
rights and minorities
digital security
wealth and capture
transition and electoral strategy
Each group has one task:
Find the strongest reason this could fail.
Not a silly objection. Not “people are stupid.” Not “hackers!”
Specify the mechanism.
For example:
If proxy weight consistently concentrates among a tiny group of participants despite formal revocability, under what conditions might revocable delegation become oligarchic in practice?
If affluent people disproportionately occupy higher-level civic roles, can formal equality coexist with another form of political class formation?
If many voters remain permanently inactive, when does “voluntary participation” cease to provide plausible democratic authority?
The Question-Space Test already identifies questions of exactly this sort, including proxy concentration, participation burden, exclusion within Circles, expertise, platform control, and the distinction between professional administration and professional ownership.
Each group then proposes:
What should we measure?
What result would worry us?
What result would require redesign?
What result would constitute failure?
Exercise 3: Problem or Disproof?
Now students receive hypothetical results from the first operating DcL.
Thirty percent of voters never cast a direct vote.
One Sec-del becomes extraordinarily influential.
Circle membership divides strongly along ideological lines.
A software failure delays a tally.
A minority loses a major legislative vote.
Several F-dels quit because the workload is too high.
Wealthy advocacy organizations begin producing extremely sophisticated materials for voters.
Participation initially spikes and then declines.
The first Straight-Up Representative ignores a DcL instruction.
For each case:
Is this evidence that Straight-Up has failed?
A design defect?
An expected political problem?
Something that needs more evidence?
Or evidence against a prediction we actually made?
The object is not to make excuses for the system.
It is to develop disciplined standards for deciding what an observation means.
Exercise 4: The Eraser Test
Return to a problem that has appeared throughout the course.
Every political system makes mistakes.
So choose a serious hypothetical failure:
corruption
discrimination
bad legislation
capture
misinformation
administrative abuse
unfair procedure
technological failure
concentration of power
Now compare two questions.
Who can detect the problem?
and
Who possesses the authority to correct it?
Students trace the correction path under representative government and under a voter-sovereign system.
This brings us back to one of the Project's central propositions:
The question is not whether democracy will make mistakes. The question is who holds the eraser.
That principle is already built into the Project's participation research as a proposed institutional feedback loop:
Detect → diagnose → propose → decide → measure → revise.
The Final Test
At this point, students return to the question with which the course began:
What is democracy?
But they may no longer answer with a label.
Not:
America is a democracy.
Direct democracy is democracy.
Representative democracy is democracy.
Straight-Up is democracy.
Instead, they must describe the governing relationship.
Who possesses the decision?
Who may delegate it?
Who may recover it?
Who performs the work?
How does information move?
How does authority move?
How does the system operate at scale?
What happens when someone gains too much power?
What happens when the system makes a mistake?
And who gets to change it?
That is the analytical vocabulary the course was designed to produce.
Final Assignment — Put Democracy on Trial
Students write a 1,500–2,000 word final assessment.
The question is:
Has the Straight-Up System earned the right to be tried?
Notice what the question does not ask.
It does not ask whether Straight-Up has been proven to work.
It cannot yet have been.
It does not ask whether students support the Democracy, Straight-Up! Project.
And it does not ask whether Straight-Up would produce policies they personally prefer.
Instead, students should assess:
Whether the critique of representative legislative ownership is convincing.
Whether voter sovereignty is a defensible democratic principle.
Whether the four-parameter architecture plausibly addresses the problems of scale, participation, delegation, and organization.
Which important claims remain empirical.
What the strongest unresolved objection is.
What evidence from an actual implementation would most change their assessment.
Whether the model is sufficiently plausible, testable, and corrigible to justify consequential experimentation.
Students are free to answer:
Yes.
No.
or
Not yet.
But they have to show their work.
Closing the Course
Ten weeks ago, democracy looked like a familiar collection of institutions: elections, representatives, parties, legislatures, courts, participation, public opinion.
We have spent the course pulling those pieces apart.
We asked whether elections are themselves self-government.
We asked who owns a legislative decision.
We separated expertise from authority and labor from sovereignty.
We examined how institutions shape political behavior rather than merely responding to it.
We looked at competing reform traditions.
We examined how human-scale organization, delegation, and aggregation might allow political authority to remain with ordinary voters.
And finally, we subjected that alternative to the same demand we should make of every political institution:
Show us how you work. Show us where you might fail. Show us who can fix you when you do.
The goal of this course was never to teach students what to believe about democracy.
It was to make one question impossible to stop asking:
Who owns the decision?
And if the answer is not the people themselves, then we should at least have the courage to ask why.