Equality by lot

Back in 2017, after a minor campaign of harassment, Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighed in on sortition. At the time his verdict was that the idea was nothing short of “a formula for disaster” and instead he offered his readers the usual electoral fixes such as campaign finance reforms, voter education and proportional representation. Well, seven years later, Monbiot has had a significant change of heart:

General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice

Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation

[G]eneral elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.

Earlier societies recognised the distinction. Aristotle and Montesquieu observed that elections generated (respectively) “oligarchical” and “aristocratic” rule. After the American and French revolutions, the designers of the new political systems chose elections as a way of excluding the majority, whom they did not trust, from a meaningful involvement in power. Some of them, such as John Adams, James Madison, Antoine Barnave and Boissy D’Anglas, inveighed against the frightening concept of democracy, and insisted those elected should be a class apart, distinguished from the common people as a “natural aristocracy” of the wise, virtuous and competent. I think we can determine how well that worked out.

Much of the critique of participatory democracy is classist. The working classes cannot be trusted to think for themselves; they must be steered by enlightened guardians. This snobbery extends all the way from Edmund Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, to Karl Marx, in The Communist Manifesto.

Against Elections, written by the same David Van Reybrouck, whose article in the Guardian promoting sortition was given back in 2017 as an example of one of those proposals that are a formula for disaster, is now praised as being “an excellent book”.

Following tradition, Monbiot mentions by way of an argument the supposed successes of the various largely meaningless citizen assemblies that have been set up over the last few years (as well as offers some less than convincing arguments about the power of “deliberation” to cure the “incompetent, corrupt, reckless [and] self-interested” among the allotted), but in the end he goes beyond the timid proposals which are standard among the citizen assembly circles and proposes using sortition to select a chamber of parliament and even considers a system “largely based on sortition”:

A next step, as Van Reybrouck and others have suggested, could be to generalise this model, replacing one parliamentary chamber, such as the House of Lords or the US Senate, with a people’s assembly. This could evolve towards an entirely participatory system, largely based on sortition, in which everyone has an equal chance to make the decisions on which our lives depend. You care about democracy? Then you should hope to see an end to elections like this one.

Having an advocate for sortition with the prominence of George Monbiot could be an important development. But it would be so only if Monbiot does not limit himself to a one-off article but rather makes sortition advocacy a central theme of his activism.

Filed under: Books, Elections, History, House of Lords, Press, Sortition | Tagged: democracy, elections, george-monbiot, politics, sortition |