In the last chapter I looked at several more or less reasonable – as well as several more or less outlandish – attempts to make representative democracy work. From the “suppositional” designs of ballot boxes to the intricacies of Hare’s machinery to the representational aspirations of the realist novel, the things I considered were variously committed to the idea that, given the right system, one could accurately represent the will of a single individual and then somehow aggregate the accurate representations of many individuals into yet another, accurate second-order representation of the will-of-all. As the figures I looked at understood, this isn’t easy – first, because any effort to represent the will of an individual relies on a complicated and maybe impossible set of assumptions about what an individual is and, second, because, even if one could settle on a way to represent an individual, arriving at a meaningful second-order representation of the aggregation of other representations is itself wickedly difficult. Before one could settle on an electoral design for parliamentary and other elections, one had to decide whether political representation was supposed to represent what individuals thought, what different types of individuals thought, what the state thought, what a party thought, what a strategic coalition of parties thought, what different places thought, what simple majorities thought, or what the people as le Peuple thought. These were and still are hard problems. Despite that, the figures I looked at believed in parliamentary democracy; they believed in its power, its potential, and its seemingly limitless capacity for expansion and reform.

In 1983, two junior members of Congress, John E. Porter (R-IL) and Tom Lantos (D-CA), established the Congressional Human Rights Caucus (CHRC) to mobilize bipartisan congressional action on human rights issues worldwide. Chapter 3 examines the origins, nature, and activities of the hitherto neglected CHRC, including its initiation of several spin-off initiatives and its collaboration with human rights NGOs. The chapter demonstrates how the CHRC systematized and significantly expanded congressional human rights activism during the 1980s. It successfully united a large and diverse group of members of Congress to shine the spotlight on a broad range of human rights issues. The chapter also assesses the limitations of the CHRC. Its goal of bipartisanship meant it often adopted a cautious approach and largely avoided controversial issues that could divide its members. Focusing predominantly on the civil and political rights of individuals and minorities, the CHRC paid only minimal attention to economic, social, and cultural rights. Its preferred tactic of naming and shaming human rights violators, while effective at times, sometimes proved impotent. Due to its cautious approach, the CHRC generated remarkably few critics, which helped secure its longevity and its elevation to the status of a permanent commission in 2008.