Tony

I finally had got around to reading your book.

I have been working on my Tiered Democratic Governance (TDG) for 22 years. In that time, I figure I have encountered at least 500 people in discussion on how to “improve democracy”. But I didn’t really keep count: that number might be 2000 or more.

Until last week, I have only found only one true innovative thinker about democracy. This thinker was definitely outside the box. Most of the others were espousing platitudes and/or giving their version of popular improvements (like the electoral college of the USA).

Now there are two great thinkers! Your book was fantastic! I read it in a day. Very well structured with a well crafted path to your system. As a reader, I got a little frustrated because you were repeating things often, but I could see you were really trying to teach people, which often requires repeating the same message in different ways.

And I should say that you understand the internal forces within western democracy better than most Ph.D’s in political science.

In Chapter 8 of my book, I give a couple of paragraphs to similar features in your Governed Democracy. I didn’t go into a lot of detail, because I believe the TDG builders need to design their TDG in their own way. And we need different kinds of TDGs to really experiment with democracy and figure what works well and doesn’t. So my “panel of experts” just got a brief passing as a possible new feature in democracy. You have taken this concept a lot further.

I can see many features of your Governed Democracy being implemented and made to work as the TDG matures. Rather than expand on my few paragraphs, I would just like to refer my readers to your book.

One serious drawback I found with Governed Democracy is how do we get from HERE to THERE. I don’t think your suggestion of somehow convincing a busy, disinterested, and misinformed citizenry is somehow going to translate into some kind of voting bloc to force western democracy to change in your suggested direction. I’ve been at this “change politics” for 22 years, I can safely that significant changes to the system are just not in people’s mindset. Getting some kind of majority is not possible from what I can see.

I think the TDG can start with just 1% of the population. And I’m having difficulties finding that 1%. But once it starts, it will be able to add many of your features and fine-tune them to work well.

Great job Tony. I’ll put a five-star review on Amazon.