Neal Rechtman is an American writer, a devotee of Justice Louis Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court (1916-1938), and creator of the American Majority Party conceptual website at www.american-majority.org.
The “Future No Vote” (FNV) Campaign, the core innovation of the American Majority Party, was first detailed in Rechtman’s 2009 essay Open Source Democracy 2.0 (rev. 2024). He credits author Doug Rushkoff for posing the question: why has the Internet not had the same transformative effect on democracy as it has had on everything else? (Open Source Democracy, 2003); and credits Louis Brandeis for leading him to the answer.
In the early 1900s, as a public interest lawyer, Brandeis pursued the insurance industry for its door-to-door sales of term-life policies to urban industrial workers. The policies were of little value and insurance company executives were lining their personal pockets with the huge profits being reaped. Just months after being exposed, however, the insurance companies resumed their corrupt practices, and Brandeis countered by inventing (from scratch) what is still known today as Savings Bank Life Insurance.
In the modern lingo, Brandeis invented a new “app” that gave the working poor a different way to buy life insurance, a channel that completely bypassed the established industry. The FNV Campaign was conceived as a new democracy “app” that gives citizens an alternative channel for communicating with their elected representatives, bypassing completely the established political parties and monied special interests.