Chazopia

Read the full memo here: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/assets/usa-courts-secrecy-lobbyist/powell-memo.pdf

The Powell Memo Was a Map of the System’s Weak Points. Chazopia Is the Patch.

Forget grading Lewis Powell on whether business was really under siege in 1971. That question is backward-looking and, frankly, a trap — it turns into an argument about who’s right today, which is exactly the kind of fight Chazopia exists to get out of. The more useful question is this: why did Powell’s playbook work as well as it did?

The answer isn’t that business had some secret weapon. It’s that the system Powell was operating in had — and still has — a specific set of structural features that make it possible for any well-organized, well-funded interest to capture outsized influence without ever winning over most of the country. Powell just happened to be the one who wrote the instructions down.¹ His own summary of the strategy was that strength lies in organization, careful long-range planning, and “the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”² Read that as a checklist, and Chazopia’s whole reform package is basically a point-by-point response to it. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse

1. Private campaign finance is the fuel. Take away the fuel.

Every piece of Powell’s plan — the scholars, the media monitoring, the litigation strategy — required money, and lots of it, funneled continuously over decades. That’s only possible because American elections run on privately raised cash with few structural limits on how much organized interests can spend trying to shape who holds office.

Chazopia’s answer is blunt: abolish private campaign finance entirely, replace it with equal public funding and equal airtime for every candidate. Not stricter disclosure. Not lower contribution limits. Zero private money in the system. Most of Powell’s playbook has no target to aim at if there’s no campaign to buy into in the first place.

2. Primaries are the cheapest chokepoint in American politics. Get rid of them.

Here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: an organized interest doesn’t need to persuade the American public. It needs to win a primary — a contest where turnout regularly runs around 20%, compared to 55–68% in general elections.³ A small, ideologically sorted electorate is far easier and cheaper to move than the country as a whole, which is exactly why so much organized money and effort in American politics targets primaries and primary challengers rather than general electorates.

Chazopia’s model has no primaries at all. Candidates are drafted at random from the eligible population, filtered through a standardized test, and then run in a direct popular-vote general election. There’s no low-turnout gatekeeper stage to spend money influencing, because there’s no stage where a self-selected or party-approved candidate pool exists to be influenced.

3. Career incumbency is what makes long-term investment in a politician worthwhile. Make service short and compulsory instead.

Powell’s strategy depended on cultivating relationships with specific officeholders over years — funding them, informing them, occasionally employing them once they left office. That only pays off if the officeholder has a career to protect and a re-election to fund. A study found that 43% of members of Congress who left office in a six-year window went straight into registered lobbying,⁴ and separate data shows roughly 5,400 congressional staffers made the same move to K Street in a single decade⁵ — a revolving door that runs almost exactly as heavily in both directions across party lines.⁶

Compulsory service breaks this loop at both ends. A representative who didn’t choose to run, doesn’t need to fundraise for the next election, and returns to ordinary life afterward isn’t a person worth the multi-year investment Powell’s strategy required.

4. Party structures are an efficiency hack for influence. Stop recognizing parties.

Powell didn’t need to buy off 535 individual members of Congress one at a time. Party structures — leadership, committee assignments, the whip system — meant that capturing a smaller number of gatekeepers could move dozens of votes at once. That’s not a conspiracy; it’s just how aggregation works, and it’s exactly why influence campaigns of every ideological stripe route through party infrastructure rather than around it.

No government-recognized parties means no leadership chokepoints, no patronage committee chairs, no aggregation shortcut. An organized interest would have to win over each of 535 individuals separately — a dramatically less efficient and more expensive proposition than winning over a handful of party leaders.

5. Concentrated, targetable elections reward concentrated money. Make elections broad instead.

The last piece is more structural than tactical: winner-take-all, geographically drawn elections mean a small number of swing districts or states can decide outcomes, and concentrated spending is disproportionately effective against a small, identifiable target. At-large elections decided by direct popular vote remove that leverage. You can’t target the ten districts that matter if there are no districts — you have to earn broad support across the whole electorate, which is a much more expensive thing for money to fake.

None of this requires anyone to have been a villain

Powell wasn’t writing a plan to subvert Chazopia’s ideals — Chazopia didn’t exist yet, and he was responding to a real anxiety about his own industry’s declining standing. But intentionally or not, his memo is a remarkably clean list of every lever a well-resourced, well-organized interest can pull in the system as currently built. That’s true whether the interest pulling the levers is a chamber of commerce, a union, an advocacy nonprofit, or a party apparatus. The vulnerability isn’t partisan. It’s structural. And that’s exactly why the fix can’t be partisan either — you don’t patch a vulnerability by handing the exploit to the other team instead. You patch it.

---

Footnotes

¹ Powell Memorandum Archive, Washington and Lee University School of Law: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/

² “The Scheme 1: The Powell Memo,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (source of the direct memo quote): https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/speeches/the-scheme-1-the-powell-memo/

³ “Voter Turnout in American Elections Since 2000,” States United Democracy Center: https://statesunited.org/resources/voter-turnout-since-2000/

⁴ “Revolving Congress: The Revolving Door Class of 2019 Flocks to K Street,” Public Citizen: https://www.citizen.org/article/revolving-congress/

⁵ “Study shows revolving door of employment between Congress, lobbying firms,” The Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/study-shows-revolving-door-of-employment-between-congress-lobbying-firms/2011/09/12/gIQAxPYROK_story.html

⁶ “Revolving Door in Congress 2025: Hill to K Street,” Legistorm: https://info.legistorm.com/blog/revolving-door-in-congress

Chazopia has been a long time coming.

The ideas behind this site didn’t emerge from a recent news cycle or a moment of political frustration. They’ve been accumulating for years — scribbled notes, long conversations, screamed epithets listening to the radio in traffic, lists of things that are obviously broken and thoughts about how to fix them. The core conviction that American democracy can be structurally improved, not just politically nudged, has been with us for a long time.

What stopped us wasn’t a shortage of ideas. It was time, and frankly, the writing itself. Coming up with the argument is the fun part. Sitting down to turn it into something readable, well-researched, and coherent enough to put in front of strangers? That part felt like a second job neither of us had room for.

So the posts didn’t get written. The lists kept growing. Chazopia existed as a concept and a domain name and not much else.

Then AI became genuinely useful.

We use AI as our writing collaborator. The way it works is straightforward: we bring the ideas, the positions, the research directions, and the editorial judgment. AI does the drafting, finds and cites supporting research, and helps us say what we mean more clearly than we might have on our own. We review everything. We argue with it when it gets something wrong or drifts in a direction we don’t intend. We make the calls.

We’re telling you this upfront for a few reasons.

First, transparency. You’ll notice the posts here are well-sourced and consistently written. You might wonder how two people with day jobs are managing that. Now you know.

Second, accuracy. AI can be confidently wrong, and we take that seriously. Every factual claim in these posts is sourced, and we encourage you to follow the footnotes. If you find something that doesn’t hold up, tell us. The comments exist for exactly that purpose. And while Chazopia might just be just two guys right now, the whole goal is for the general public to refine and implement these ideas. So go ahead and argue with us . . . politely, intelligently, and with purpose.

Third — and this is the one we feel most strongly about — bias. We have political views. Everyone does. But Chazopia’s entire premise is that the system should serve everyone, not just people who think the way we do. So we’ve specifically instructed our AI collaborators to flag language, framing, or examples that tilt toward one political side or the other, and we watch for it ourselves. We won’t always be perfect, but the commitment is real. If you think we’ve let our own views color an argument, call it out. We mean that.

What AI doesn’t do here is think. It doesn’t have the conviction that this country’s system of government has drifted badly from its founding ideals. It doesn’t lie awake bothered by the fact that two private organizations have effectively captured the machinery of American democracy. It doesn’t believe, the way we do, that it’s actually possible to build something better.

That part is ours. Always has been.

We’re just finally writing it down.

George Washington saw it coming. In his 1796 Farewell Address — a document still read aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate every year — he warned that partisanship would open the door to “foreign influence and corruption” and enable the rise of “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” who would “usurp for themselves the reins of government.”¹ Washington wasn’t being paranoid. He was unique among the founders in never reconciling himself to political parties and never acknowledging the positive things parties could theoretically bring to republican government.²

He was right to be suspicious. He just didn’t go far enough.

The problem isn’t merely that political parties exist. People will always organize around shared ideas — that’s human nature, and it’s not inherently bad. The problem is that the United States government recognizes political parties as official governmental entities, weaves them into the machinery of elections and governance, and in doing so has handed two private organizations a legal stranglehold over American democracy.

Let’s be clear about what that actually looks like in practice.

Congressional committees are organized by majority and minority party. Questioning time during hearings — including the consequential depositions that shape legislation and accountability — is divided along party lines, not representative ones. Committee chairmanships are assigned by party. Floor debate time is allocated by party. The entire structure of Congress operates not as a collection of 535 individual representatives serving the American people, but as a battleground between two private clubs. When a senator questions a witness, they aren’t doing so as a representative of their constituents. They’re doing so as a soldier of their party. That’s not a subtle distinction. That’s the whole ballgame.

The ballot itself is a party document. In order to get on the ballot, a candidate must meet a variety of state-specific filing requirements — they can seek the nomination of a state-recognized political party, run as an independent, or run as a write-in candidate.³ In practice, that first path is paved in gold and the other two are obstacle courses. The two major political parties are committed to their self-preservation and have the power to act on that commitment. Individuals who wish to form a new political party, or simply run for political office as independent candidates, face an entrenched two-party system that has erected numerous obstacles in their paths.⁴

The parties didn’t just capture the government. The government invited them in and handed them the keys.

Here’s what almost nobody stops to notice: the Constitution doesn’t mention political parties at all. Not once. The word “party” doesn’t appear in the document. The Framers didn’t design a system of government with two dominant factions at its center — that structure evolved, calcified, and was eventually codified into law by the very people who benefited from it most.

Now consider what it would look like without it.

A nonpartisan democracy is a system of representative government where universal and periodic elections take place without reference to political parties.⁵ This isn’t a radical fantasy — it exists. Tuvalu is a constitutional parliamentary democracy without formal political parties. The legislature appoints the Prime Minister, and while the Parliament features nonpartisan candidates, informal political groups do form.⁶ The Federated States of Micronesia and Palau operate similarly. Nebraska’s state legislature is nonpartisan. Many municipal governments across the United States operate without party recognition. Judges in a significant number of states are appointed through nonpartisan processes specifically designed to insulate the judiciary from political pressure.

These aren’t failed experiments. They’re proof of concept.

Now, about the advertising.

If the problem with government-recognized parties is structural, the problem with party labels in political advertising is psychological — and the research on this is unambiguous.

If you follow football, you understand tribal loyalty. The team colors go on, the rational brain goes off. A mediocre quarterback in your team’s jersey gets cheered; a Hall of Famer in the opponent’s colors gets booed. It’s tribal, it’s emotional, and it has very little to do with the quality of the play.

That’s exactly what a “D” or an “R” next to a candidate’s name does to a voter.

Party labels can be highly influential for vote choice because they implicitly provide a summary of a candidate’s positions⁷ — a shortcut that bypasses actual evaluation entirely. And the research confirms that’s exactly how most voters use them. The election environment is complex and most voters don’t have time to research everything about the candidates and issues, so they take shortcuts — one popular shortcut is simply to vote using party affiliation.⁸ The party label isn’t informing the voter. It’s replacing the voter’s judgment with the party’s.

The natural endpoint of this is straight-ticket voting — the practice of casting a single mark to vote for every candidate of one party, up and down the entire ballot, without reading a single name. Critics argue it makes it nearly impossible for third-party candidates to gain traction, allows extremists within parties to be elected, and encourages voters to be less informed at the polls.⁹ And the data on how rarely people deviate from it is staggering. A Yale-led study published in Scientific Data analyzed actual ballot records from 42.7 million voters across 20 states in the 2020 election. Among Republican voters in battleground states who supported Republican candidates for both Congress and state legislative seats, only 1.9% split their ticket to vote for Joe Biden. Among Democrats who were solidly supportive of lower-office Democrats, only 1% split their ticket for Donald Trump.¹⁰ That’s it. Roughly 98% of committed party voters voted straight down the line — not because they evaluated every candidate and happened to agree with all of them, but because the jersey told them to. Even more damning, studies have shown that voters identify candidates, even in local and municipal races, with the party leadership — most voters aren’t looking at the lawmakers’ platforms or their voting records, but basing their vote on what they think of the president.¹¹

So a county commissioner race in rural Ohio gets decided by how people feel about whoever’s in the White House. The candidate’s actual positions on local roads, zoning, and water policy are irrelevant. The jersey determines the vote.

Political advertising accelerates and amplifies this dynamic. When an ad opens with a party logo, a party color scheme, or the words “Republican” or “Democrat,” it signals the viewer to activate tribal loyalty and disengage critical thinking. The content of the ad — the candidate’s actual record, positions, and character — becomes secondary to the jersey.

The Chazopia Position

In the Chazopia model, political parties could still exist — people have the right to organize, advocate, and associate freely — but the government would not recognize them, fund them, grant them structural advantages, or build its own procedures around them. A candidate for office would appear on the ballot as an individual, not as the designated champion of a private organization. A representative in the legislature would vote as a representative of their constituents, not as a soldier of a party apparatus. No majority party. No minority party. No committee chairmanships handed out as patronage. No institutionalized “us vs. them” baked into the rules.

And political advertising would be required to stand on its own merits. A candidate could run on any platform they chose, associate with any informal coalition, and state any position on any issue. What they could not do is invoke a party brand — because in the Chazopia model, the government doesn’t recognize party brands in the first place. This would force something radical: candidates would have to tell you what they actually believe.

Think about what that changes. Instead of “Vote for me — my opponent is a dangerous extremist,” an ad would have to say something specific. I believe the top marginal tax rate should be X. I will vote against Y. I support Z. Voters would be exposed to actual positions rather than pattern-matching to a logo.

Would voters still sort by ideology? Of course. Would informal left-leaning and right-leaning coalitions still form and campaign together? Naturally. But there’s an enormous difference between a legislature of individuals who happen to agree on a given issue and a legislature of soldiers required by party loyalty, donor expectations, and re-election calculus to vote in lockstep regardless of what they actually think is right. And there’s an enormous difference between a voter who chooses a candidate because they share specific views and a voter who chooses a candidate because the jersey matches. One is democracy. The other is a sports draft.

Eliminating party recognition from government structures and political advertising are, of course, easier said than done — particularly when virtually every person currently holding office got there through the very system we’re proposing to dismantle. We’ll address the mechanics of how that change could actually happen in a future post.

The jersey has to come off. Washington told us this was going to happen. We just stopped reading his warning and started treating it as a weather report.

---

Footnotes

¹ George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796. Full text via History.com: https://www.history.com/articles/george-washington-farewell-address-warnings

² “George Washington on Political Parties,” Teaching American History: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/blog/george-washington-on-political-parties/

³ “Ballot Access for Major and Minor Party Candidates,” Ballotpedia: https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_access_for_major_and_minor_party_candidates

⁴ “Opening Ballot Access to Political Outsiders,” Roger Williams University Law Review: https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1348&context=rwu_LR

⁵ “Non-partisan democracy,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-partisan_democracy

⁶ “Countries Without Political Parties 2026,” World Population Review: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-without-political-parties

⁷ “The Effects of Party Labels on Vote Choice,” Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-science-research-and-methods/article/effects-of-party-labels-on-vote-choice-with-realistic-candidate-differentiation/B10A29F003E60C6B205EAF7E1E4253DC

⁸ “Campaigns and Voting,” American Government 3e, OpenStax: https://openstax.org/books/american-government-3e/pages/7-4-campaigns-and-voting

⁹ “Straight-Ticket Voting,” MIT Election Lab: https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/straight-ticket-voting

¹⁰ “Newly Released Ballot Data Finds Ticket Splitting Among Republican, Democratic Voters,” Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies: https://isps.yale.edu/news/blog/2024/12/newly-released-ballot-data-finds-ticket-splitting-among-republican-democratic

¹¹ “Straight Ticket,” Political Dictionary: https://politicaldictionary.com/words/straight-ticket/

Chazopia Mission Statement

It sounds grandiose, but Chazopia has a mission:  Chazopia aims to ensure that there exists a more equitable successor to the structure of the government of the United States of America.

Who We Are

We love the foundation of this country. We don’t love all of its history, nor many of its current intricacies and deficiencies, but it’s been part and parcel of some lofty, progressive ideas which we believe can be more completely realized.

We believe it’s now possible, through careful design, to architect a government that virtually eliminates the corruption, the dynasties, and the socio-economic rut to which we’ve become dejectedly accustomed.  Our representative democracy was designed in part to overcome the technological limitations of the eighteenth century, when it could take more than a month to get a one-way communication from New York to Boston. We now have the benefit of history, technology and the examples of other nations, and we can improve on those lofty ideas and increase the progress.

We don’t intend to mold a government that enforces to our own moralistic ideals.  Rather, we intend to proffer, through discussion, debate and research, a rational reconstruction of the US government that truly is a “…government of the people, by the people, for the people…”* We do intend to engineer the mechanisms by which every citizen will be represented as an individual and by which the good of the whole will be ensured through the wisdom of the majority.

We believe that the probability of Charles Clark’s presidential candidacy (not presidency) should equal Mitt Romney’s and, for better or worse, Mama June’s, because they are all “the people.”

Who We’re Not

We don’t intend to overthrow the government (although we’ll probably talk about the precedent for that in a future post).  Times and nations change but we don’t see any imminent need to change the nation by force.

We’re not “preppers”.  We’re not right-wing nuts.  We’re not terrorists, fundies, racists, tree huggers, bunny huggers, or commies.  We’re not politicos, scientists, or one-percenters.  In many ways, actually, our goals are as left-wing as they come, but they may yield the most right-wing of governments, if that’s the will of the people.

——————–

*Ironically, Lincoln lifted that from a 14th-century Bible:  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100246622/150-years-ago-today-abraham-lincoln-praised-government-of-the-people-by-the-people-for-the-people-but-the-words-were-not-his/