The organizational technologies of democratic politics — parties, platforms, elections — compress citizens' high-dimensional policy preferences into a low-dimensional menu, destroying most of the information in transit. The result is a system that cannot represent what anyone actually thinks, cannot communicate the necessity of compromise, and cannot process warnings that do not arrive in partisan packaging. This is not a failure of voters or politicians. It is a failure of architecture.
What If We Actually Tried? quantifies this dimensional compression, traces its consequences through the political system — from the manufactured homelessness of the "centrist" to the comfort trap that blinds the affluent to the conditions of the poor — and proposes a specific architectural alternative. The deliberation layer replaces the party platform with self-organizing interest groups that produce structured policy analysis, evaluated by other groups and by citizens along multiple independent dimensions. Critic groups, whose authority may derive from lived experience rather than credentials, stress-test every proposal. A cryptographic identity system — personal certificates, unlinkable shards, zero-knowledge attestation — ensures that every participant is a verified unique human being while revealing nothing about who they are, making honest participation possible without professional or social risk.
The book engages directly with the Abundance discourse (Klein, Thompson, Dunkelman), arguing that their unsolved question — who decides what gets built, and how? — has an answer: citizens decide, through structured deliberation, with results bridged into existing politics. It engages with the far left, the far right, and the anarchist critique through the lens of Jason Pargin's diagnosis of why mainstream America fears the left, showing that the "dealbreaker idea" — the perceived denial of human agency — is a communication failure that the dimensional model resolves by allowing agency and structural analysis to coexist on separate dimensions rather than being collapsed into a false binary.
The book is honest about its limitations: the bootstrap problem, class capture, agenda-setting power. Its closing argument is that dissatisfaction with the current system has converged across communities that see themselves as enemies — progressive, conservative, libertarian, apolitical — and that this convergence, arising from perspectives that share almost no surface-level overlap, is itself evidence that the dimensional diagnosis is correct. The conditions for structural reform exist. The work is not finished. Neither are we at liberty to neglect it.
