Beyond Blood Ties: Breaking the Chains of Family Rule in Democracies

Nov 05, 2024

Imagine a United States of eligible voters organized by family instead of residence, a United States where blood, not streets, draws the maps of democracy. Americans hurry through the crisp November air to their ancestral voting spots, all wrapped in family flags for warmth and solidarity.

Each election day dawns with dreams of ancestral obligation. Americans journey to their family-designated polling places like pilgrims returning to ancient shrines. Family banners snap in the November wind, marking territories as surely as gang colors mark neighborhoods.

The Smiths gather in their traditional east side gymnasium, their numbers dwindling with each generation, while the Garcia-Martinez coalition dominates the downtown community center, their growing power evident in the watchful eyes of rival family observers. Children still race through the halls, but their play carries undertones of future alliances and vendettas.

The O'Briens cling to their firehouse location, where voting booths showcase not just faded family crests but carefully curated photographs of political victories, each smiling face a reminder of deals struck, promises kept, each empty frames speaking louder than the filled ones, shaming the ostracized and the divorced.

In the elementary school cafeteria, the Nguyen-Patel voting bloc negotiates their shared space with diplomatic precision, their intermarried members navigating loyalty tests with practiced ease. "I Voted" stickers become badges of allegiance, marked with subtle symbols that signal which branch of the family tree earned one's vote.

Those who marry outside their bloodlines face stark choices: maintain voting rights within their birth clan or pledge allegiance to their spouse's family, knowing either choice burns bridges that may never be rebuilt. Some polling places keep quiet lists of these "voting tourists," their names remembered when family councils distribute community resources.

But for a simple twist of fate, this scenario is plausible and could be a reality on this Election Day in America 2024.

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Of course, this is not our America. Our polling places are determined by zip codes and precinct maps, not bloodlines and birth certificates. But the tension between family loyalty and civic duty that haunts this imagined reality isn't pure fantasy; it's an echo of democracy's earliest struggles.

When we trace our electoral system back to its roots, we find ourselves in ancient Athens, where one man's radical choice to break the power of family tribes created the foundation for modern democracy. Without that pivotal decision, our November pilgrimages might look very different.

The earliest example of Western-style voting comes from ancient Athens grounded in the Cleisthenic reforms1,around 508 BCE. Note that scholars disagree on exact dates. Also, Cleisthene’s personal history is incredibly complicated, worthy of a book. The bare bones I narrate in this post are un controversial as near as I can tell.

One thing is clear. Without these reforms, the implementation of democratic governance as we know it could have been delayed indefinitely.

Cleisthenes himself symbolizes the sacrifice the wealthy must enact in order for individual votes to matter in a democracy. Born an aristocrat himself, he and his powerful, wealthy family had been exiled from Athens for political intrigue.

He emerged as a leader during a time of intense conflict among the governing elite. An aristocrat who deliberately weakened aristocratic power, he understood that democracy required breaking old family-based loyalties and essentially invented the concept that where one lives, not who one’s ancestors were, should determine one’s political identity.

Cleisthenes reorganized the Athenian citizen body into ten new tribes.2The idea was truly revolutionary in that it changed the inner grouping of nation-state populations from blood ties to political ties.

Athens had been organized in four Ionian tribes based on kinship. The reorganization relocated tribes into groups made by residence rather than varying degrees of genetic descent from aristocratic to plebeian.

Basing political thinking on where one lived as opposed to the status in life in which one was born changed the center of gravity of legislative awareness from blind allegiance to critical thinking about the world.

The reforms introduced the Council of Five Hundred, which played a crucial role in setting the agenda for the Assembly and managing daily governmental affairs. Each new geographical tribe contributed 50 members to this council, ensuring broad representation from across Athens.

The Council of 500's functions map nicely onto modern U.S. institutions.3Like the Council of 500, House and Senate committees set legislative agendas and perform preliminary work before bills reach full chamber votes. Committee assignments ensure geographic representation across states/regions and handle daily oversight of government operations

State legislatures follow similar proportional representation by geographic district4. Like the Council's tribal quotas, districts are population-based to manage regional affairs while feeding issues to higher levels.

City Councils5 mirror the geographic representation principle in that members represent distinct neighborhoods or districts to manage day-to-day municipal governance. The Electoral College, while controversial, was designed to ensure geographic representation, and state delegations reflect population like the tribal quotas did.

But there are important differences. The Council of 500 was chosen by lot, not election. Modern bodies tend to be partisan rather than tribal/geographic in loyalty. The U.S. system has more complex layers of representation, and modern bodies typically have longer terms than the Council's one year.

The transformation from biological blood ties to societal contracts binding unrelated individuals together in a nation with profound commitments to millions of unknown others made America possible. Giving each individual, regardless of familial status, an equal vote planted the seed of the idea of civil rights.

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How do scholars know these things?

Early clear archaeological evidence of voting activity in Athens comes from pottery shards6 calls ‘Ostraca’ used in ‘ostracism votes’ from around 487 BCE. These were literally broken pieces of pottery where citizens would scratch the name of someone they wanted exiled.

Thousands have been found in excavations. Many show the same names written in different handwriting, suggesting organized voting campaigns. More evidence comes from voting tokens, specially designed official courts with ballot boxes, written records on stone7.

Scholars have concluded that the Athenian system included several types of voting8. A simple show of hands sufficed for many mundane assembly decisions. Secret ballots required bronze tokens used for judicial matters, though lesser matters were resolved using black and white pebbles. Ostracism using pottery shards9—exiling untrustworthy candidates—would become impeachment mechanisms in constitutions.

Interestingly, while Athens is the earliest well-documented case, its system was quite sophisticated, suggesting there may have been earlier, simpler voting systems that scientists and scholars haven't found evidence for yet.10

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Today, as Americans stream to their neighborhood polling places to elect a president, they participate in a system that Cleisthenes would recognize where geography, not blood, determines political destiny.

But what if he had chosen differently? What if, like those ancient Ionian tribes, we still organized our democracy around family lines? Perhaps our tribal political divisions would be more honest, more visible, red and blue replaced by family crests and ancestral banners.

Or perhaps, in the mingling of married names and blended families, in the beauty of hyphenated children choosing between polling places, we'd finally see what Athens discovered centuries ago: Democracy works best when it breaks the bonds of blood, when it forces us to look beyond our family trees to the wider forest of civic life.

As the sun sets on another election day in America this evening, we might thank Cleisthenes for choosing place over parentage even as we wonder what ghosts of ancient tribalism still haunt our modern votes. No matter what happens today, the structure of American democracy rests on solid ground. Whether our next President is a blustery populist authoritarian or a well-educated peacemaker, the idea of the vote has been paid for by blood so that blood ties would not decimate democratic ties. Our votes are secret for a reason.

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