On Jan. 20, 2009, the United States of America inaugurated its first Black president, Barack Obama. In November, the U.S. may elect its second. Does this mean anything?

One reason to think so, as New York City mayor Eric Adams reminds us: “Representation matters.” This election year we are confronted with the question of whether or not to support the possible election of Kamala Harris — as good a time as any to return to the question of what representation means and what it’s good for.

We of course needn’t focus on the highest political office in the country to revisit the perennial question of what “Black faces in high places” means politically. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, the emergence of a Black political class has slowly developed over the past 50 years, which she describes as “the most significant transformation in all of black life.” In that book, she discusses the Baltimore protests over the police murder of Freddie Gray: “When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle.”

Since then, the “Black Misleadership Class” has not turned over much of a new leaf. When Adams said, “Representation matters,” in 2021, he had just been elected the second Black mayor of New York City and was announcing the appointment of a historic all-women team of five deputy mayors. If it sounds less inspirational now, maybe you’ve been following the news: his administration has been mired in a scandal of dizzying complexity that produced the top man’s federal indictment alongside arrests of senior officials. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta essentially doxxed its own citizens — printing the names and addresses of signatories to “Stop Cop City” petitions — rather than engage in the barest pretense of democracy and allow public challenge to its attempts to divert yet more land and funding to policing.

Perhaps in response to these episodes and countless others has come yet another resurgence: reminders of the deep conservatism at the heart of the Democratic Party in particular, the fact that elections cannot save us from capitalism or its consequences, and also that voting may even be an irresponsible symbolic concession to a system that refuses to change. Some have responded to this malaise by trying to play defense in response to electoral politics, insisting to leftists that participation in electoral politics allows you to “choose your opponent” or, at the very least, to reduce the harm that one’s worse opponents might commit.

One way to move beyond the basic set of assumptions is asking how we could get better representatives: if we had a genuine working-class party, say, or even just a viable third party that could break the Democratic-Republican stranglehold over the shape of U.S. politics. We could try for new rules to shape the contest between political parties: ranked-choice voting to change how candidates craft their appeal to voters or proportional representation to change how parties share power after elections from a winner-take-all system to one that splits seats between parties. But while we ask those questions, it’s worth adding another, parallel set: What if elections were different? What if we could vote directly for plans rather than representatives of any party? What if we could represent ourselves?

This is not some thought experiment or conceptual exercise (though, as a philosopher, I’m not above those!). Direct democracy already exists, albeit in limited forms, but those forms could in principle scale up. Here in the United States, abortion rights have already been under attack and hang in the balance in elections. Ten states have adopted a direct democratic strategy for their defense this election season: holding referenda on abortion laws that would allow their voters to join California, Michigan, Ohio, and Vermont in enshrining reproductive rights guarantees into law, including amending state constitutions. “Leaving it to the states” doesn’t have to be only a dangerous and irresponsible failure to defend reproductive justice.

In Ireland structures facilitating direct democracy won a constitutional amendment to defend reproductive autonomy, first through a Citizens’ Assembly and then a referendum. Citizens’ Assemblies convene a group of citizens chosen by sortition to discuss and decide matters of public importance, bringing in panels of experts to inform the process. When given a chance to decide together — not as atomized individuals at a polling booth but as an organized body with responsibility to the public good — a randomly selected group of Irish people did something that surprised the world. After a year and a half of informed and careful deliberation, the group came out in support for reproductive rights and called for a national referendum on legalizing abortion. Shortly thereafter, in May 2018, an overwhelming majority of the Irish public voted their agreement, enshrining reproductive rights into law.

Another form of public direct democracy is participatory budgeting, which allows residents of an area to exercise direct democratic input over how city funds get used. The process was developed by the Brazilian Workers’ Party as part of an effort to strengthen substantive democracy in the wake of a brutal, U.S.-backed, anti-communist military dictatorship.

This model has already taken hold in some places in the United States. In the aftermath of the protests against police violence in the summer of 2020, a coalition of organizing and activist groups proposed a “Solidarity Budget” for Seattle that aimed to “transform our city budget away from one that invests heavily in policing, prosecuting, and jailing BIPOC communities, toward one that invests in building self-determined, dignified, productive and ecologically sustainable livelihoods, democratic governance, and ecological resilience.” After foot dragging and stonewalling, Seattle’s mayor finally announced over $27 million in funding for initiatives chosen through the participatory budgeting process. The selected projects include funding to establish mental health specialists as first responders, potentially displacing police, and emergency youth shelters. Seattle was not just one of the few cities to move toward de facto cuts to police budgets but one of the even fewer cities to do so by direct democratic means.

Eric Adams was right about one thing: representation does matter. Elections and electoral politics are ultimately a form of deciding together, and much of what’s wrong with how elections function in our political system can be traced to whom elections empower and how. From national figures like Harris to local ones like the Atlanta City Council members, representatives have to run for office, which means they have to court big campaign donors and avoid confrontation with a well-resourced opposition. We have seen what that kind of confrontation can look like: AIPAC and its allies spent $14 million and $8 million to oust Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush for the crime of being insufficiently deferential to Israel.

The job of any elected official in a nominally democratic society involves the attempt to unify in one person the various interests of a diverse constituency with needs and goals that often conflict. It’s no surprise, then, that the usual strategies for walking this tightrope often and perhaps necessarily involve some measure of waffling or duplicity. What the specific job of the presidency adds to this predicament — beyond operating at a national scale where social conflicts are even more hopelessly irreconcilable — is the weight of the additional stakes presented by the country’s unilateral control over the world’s reserve currency, a global intelligence and espionage network of coup-mongering proportions, and launch codes for an arsenal encompassing nearly half of the world’s available nuclear weapons. It’s no wonder that corruption, influence peddling, and elite capture result from a political decision-making process that is so heavily reliant on the whims, idiosyncrasies, and personal incentives that our representatives must negotiate.

But skepticism about how elections function and whom they empower is compatible with recognizing the potential promise of direct democratic votes and decision-making. Unlike city council members, participants in citizens’ assemblies or participatory budgeting processes are not running for office. People who own homes or businesses or worship in an area might well have outsize economic interests on some questions relative to others. Under the present system, these people often organize against causes like renewable energy, harm-reduction programs, and affordable housing (especially for working-class Black folks) and are sometimes suspiciously well funded for their efforts. In a participatory budgeting system, their interests wouldn’t grant them any more votes. The shop owner, homeowner, or landlord has the same means of influencing the outcome of a participatory budgeting process that a low-wage employee or renter does: convincing other people. One reason to have confidence that we can do better than elected representatives in making sure that democratic processes run this way will safeguard the common good is that our neighbors — unlike AIPAC and other lobbies — will have to live with the decisions made.

We should understand the scale of what direct democratic procedures have so far accomplished against the sobering backdrop of the status quo. Referenda can be used as a permission structure for the powerful to legitimize their control, especially when done in the absence of genuine public deliberation and consideration of proposals. Even when such consideration happens, as in Ireland, the question of power is paramount; Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly officially had only an advisory role, meaning that elected representatives could have simply ignored their proposals (and the Irish are able to amend their constitution via referendum, something we in the U.S. cannot do). Even where directly democratic processes ensure that people have power over funding, the scale of that power often is dwarfed by the power the system keeps for itself. While Seattle’s participatory budgeting processes distributed some $27 million, the government of King County, which includes Seattle, operates on a two-year budget of more than $15 billion. While direct democratic control over tens of millions of dollars is not quite a rounding error, neither is it, in its current form, as significant an existential challenge to an entrenched political structure that was perhaps hoped for during the height of the 2020 protests.

Yet we should also recognize the potential promise of direct democracy, especially working in tandem with other dimensions of struggle rather than as a substitute for them. At least some of this promise is visible in Seattle. While many cities ignored defund demands entirely, and defund measures were rolled back in cities like Austin and Los Angeles, Seattle’s progress remains. King County is now slated for a second round of participatory budgeting to decide on the use of some $11.8 million. Anyone who “lives, works, owns a business, receives services, goes to school, or worships” in one of the five areas of the county targeted in this round can enter the selection process. The range of organizations that had supported the Solidarity Budget — from the activist groups Black Collective Voices and Decriminalize Seattle to labor union locals SEIU 925 and UAW 4121 — most likely has something to do with this success. And the stronger these groups are, the greater the possibility that future iterations of struggle could deliver more serious and weighty direct democratic results.

Making political decisions by choosing which Democrat, Republican, or third party will make those decisions for us deserves just as much reconsideration as the two-party system itself. We could make decisions by direct vote or by jury, or we could decide who occupies public office by lottery rather than elections. Any of these can be run better or worse, and some may fit the political and cultural circumstances better than others. But in this time of nationalized politics where spectacles and celebrities reign, it’s helpful to remember that representation matters. Maybe we should have more opportunities to represent ourselves.