A prototype of a decentralized political party

Voluntary voting effectively gives people with a single-issue obsession more power than everyone else, because they show up to vote. In compulsory voting systems, the outliers are moderated by the median, whose concerns are typically less emotional (abortion, guns) and more economic (price of milk, mortgage rates).

Political parties are a concentrated form of voluntary voting. One of the reasons the USA's primaries system is such a caricature factory is because it's a concentrated form of a concentrated form of voluntary voting.

There are many people who propose models like these and don't think through the end game. The end game is that any party where elected representatives have their votes directly controlled by party members is a party that will be instantly stacked by well-organised single-issue whackjobs.

You like crypto? Too bad, the terrorists use it, vote it down. You're OK with gay marriage? Too bad, Jesus is agin it, vote it down.

Techno-utopianism doesn't solve for the fundamental constraint, which is that people will always disagree. No system can create smooth consensus. What is left is to design a safe, functioning system. Direct democracy's historical performance in this respect is abysmal, which is why we have representative democracy instead.

M5S is trying to do that in Italy.[1] Though they don't use any crypto technologies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Star_Movement#Ideology

Trying to end corruption in the US, I'm starting to think, is what has brought American politics to its current low state. I think the worst political decision of the past few decades was the move to ban earmarks. Whatever negative things you can say about them, earmarks gave congresspeople a way to please their constituency without reference to some particular ideological test. They could always say: "Well sure, I didn't vote to ban abortion, but we did get a new agricultural research center." Without the ability to drive federal dollars to their districts in return for 'selling out' their parties ideology, a lot of congressmen have lost the ability to vote for anything at all. It's wrecked the committee systems, the budget process, everything.

Same deal with banning unlimited donations to candidates while allowing it to superpacs that technically aren't allowed to coordinate with the candidates. You haven't made candidates less beholden to big donors, you've just put the big donors totally in charge of the campaign, because their spending dwarfs the spending of the candidates themselves.

This is an interesting thought but it does not get into the motivations for why a real political party might make the choice to operate this way -- there likely needs to be some perceived comparative advantage to the potential users of such a model for them to use it, or else why take the risk and venture into the unknown?

I think it's possible that a DAO could be part of a system that does provide such an advantage -- it may even be the case that it alone confers one! But I don't know what it is and want to see one articulated.

This topic is of current interest to me, as I've been reading summaries of the history of political and philosophical trends lately[1]. The interplay of different power groups with economic, technological, and other factors to form novel systems for controlling their environment is very complex, and fun to speculate about, especially the internet's role in possibly allowing new power structures to exist that may lead to new systems.

1. In particular, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, which has been a surprising lot of fun.

Representative forms of democracy can be implemented on top of direct democracy, no?