Human Assembly

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The Human Assembly is a political theory originally developed by Kim E. Lumbard in 2003. It is part of a larger plan called the Human-Scale Reformation. It is a hierarchical democracy intended to augment and reform the representative democracy of the United States.

Lumbard criticizes the United States's current system of government on several counts:

  1. The massive scale of popular elections causes voter apathy and feelings of disenfranchisement
  2. Large monetary contributions from wealthy special interest groups unfairly influence the outcomes of elections
  3. Ineffective bureaucracy with a slow turnaround time
  4. Lack of accountability of representatives to their constituents

Lumbard proposes addressing these criticisms by having U.S. citizens participate in an organizational structure called the Human Assembly. Groups of ten people, called "Citizen Assemblies", meet weekly. They elect one of their members as their personal representative. Ten Level 1 Representatives, each from a different Citizen Assembly, gather to form a Level 1 Assembly. The Level 1 Assembly elects a Level 2 Representative, and so on until all U.S. citizens are represented. The highest-level Representative would become the President, and the other high-level Representatives would become Congress.

  1. The massive scale criticism is addressed since Assemblies have a size of ten.
  2. The criticism about the influence of money is addressed by a plan for bottom-up citizen funding of the Human Assembly.
  3. The slow turnaround time criticism is addressed by the schedule of meetings for each level of Assembly. The schedule allows concerns to be propagated from the bottommost level to the top, via Assembly meetings, in two weeks.
  4. The accountability criticism is addressed by a system of checks and balances by which representatives can be ousted from office by their constituents.

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