Troesoyer: The Fundamental Problem Isn’t Capitalism, It’s Aristocracy

Posted on July 6, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Ian Troesoyer is a nurse practitioner, epidemiologist and sortition activist living in Idaho, USA. Treosoyer has recently published a very good article on Substack with the title above. The article begins as follows:

To my comrades engaged in the struggle for a more just world, let me attempt to convince you that underneath the existential problems of capitalism is a deeper problem. A problem that has ironically been shared by all the electoral “democracies” of the West as well as all the major communist and socialist governments that have existed.

The fundamental problem isn’t capitalism, it’s aristocracy: the idea that distinguished individuals – those with supposedly greater knowledge, moral standing, legitimacy, etc. – should make the decisions on behalf of the rest of us.

Aristocracy is the underlying philosophy for both elections and vanguard parties.

Now, you might be saying, “elections aren’t intended to just let distinguished people make the decisions, we pick politicians based on their ability to represent the will of the people!”

Or you might be saying, “Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc. weren’t just doing whatever they wanted, they were acting on behalf of the people!”

Here’s the thing: pretty much all aristocracies say they’re “doing the will of the people.” Kings and dictators say they’re doing the will of the people.

Don’t watch the mouth, watch the hands.

Troesoyer’s construction of his argument is very well done (including such nice details as the well-placed scare quotes in the expression ‘the electoral “democracies”’), easily outdoing the large majority of the authors writing on this subject. (As a sample of what passes for discussion of sortition see this recent Jacobin magazine piece.)

Troesoyer starts with the essential attribute of elections – the “principle of distinction”:

The only decision elections permit common people to make is which distinguished people – in other words, aristocrats – will make decisions for them. Elections appear to be based on political equality because we all get a formally equal say about which elite campaign finalist will make decisions on our behalf, but – critically – we don’t get an equal opportunity to actually make political decisions ourselves. All other things being equal, people with greater privilege have a greater chance of winning elections, so the range of policies available for us to pick from is limited to the preferences of the most privileged members of society.
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Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Jacobin rehashes the tired old clichés of the sortition debate

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The left-leaning Jacobin magazine has offered its readers the idea of sortition back in 2018 and then last December had a couple of pieces advocating for sortition – one being an interview with Alexander Guerrero and one being an article by Terry Bouricius. Jacobin now has a debate of sorts [paywalled, but full text here] in which Anand Gopal takes the ostensibly pro-sortition position and Ben Burgis plays the skeptic.

The text methodically checks off the squares on the sortition debate bingo card: “democracy is in retreat”, “big money”, “popular sovereignty”, “democracy is not just [a system that] happens to work out best but [where] the public actually has a right to manage its own affairs”, not wanting to pick your lawyer or book agent[!] at random, “technocratic objections to democracy”, “a multicameral approach, with both lotteries and elections”, “demographic similarities”, “atomized individuals”, “we want a chamber that has a place for parties”, “accountability”, “for a country of 350 million, it doesn’t really make sense to have 350 people sitting in council”, “smaller scales”, “people systematically shirk jury duty”, “[w]ith the Zohran election, there was a tremendous sense that “we did this””, “instant recall”, etc., etc.

As usual, this format of discussion provides no rational way out of the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand conundrum. Jacobin‘s readers are left to their own prejudices to decide which hand they prefer – the one with some sortition (but not without elected officials to balance things out), or the one where sortition is deemed altogether undesirable due to this or that principle (even if it may result in better outcomes).

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 13 Comments »

Upstairs and downstairs in the European Commission’s headquarters

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Politico reports:

Staff working at the Berlaymont building [The European Commission’s headquarters] received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.

Belgium and much of Europe have been sweltering for the past week, with record-breaking temperatures.

The Commission issued guidance for its staff earlier this week, which included avoiding going outside at the hottest times of day, drinking water regularly and starting work earlier.

But the advice angered some Commission staff who work in buildings without air-conditioning, including DG AGRI, according to internal communications seen by POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook.

“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont, granted anonymity to speak freely, told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”

Filed under: Elections, Press | Leave a comment »

Courant: The French want democratic innovation

Posted on June 27, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Dimitri Courant writes in The Conversation about French opinions regarding allotted decision-making bodies. The original is in French, some translated excerpts are below.

A desire for democracy, not an “electocracy”

The findings are stark from the outset: Only 13% of the respondents trust politics, 17% trust the government and 21% trust the National Assembly. But 80% support a democratic political system.

The French do not reject democracy, they reject electocracy – a form of government which is based on the election of elites with a binding mandate, where the representatives are not held to the preferences of those who elected them.

This rejection does not translate into naive support for citizen assemblies, also called citizen conventions in France. Thus, 67% of those surveyed think that it is good for citizens to participate in those conventions, and 50% trust those assemblies. But among the 35% who do not trust them, 56% percent justify their skepticism with a revealing phrase: citizen assemblies are “a scam which allows politicians to buy time and engage in public relations”.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Elections, Opinion polling, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Hugh Pope on the history sortition in Brussels

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Yoram Gat

While the fact that Italian city-states of the middle ages employed sortition in their governance structure is often mentioned in discussions of sortition, a new article by Hugh Pope on his substack page discusses the use of sortition in Brussels in the middle ages as well. Below is an excerpt.

In 1375, the city [Brussels] introduced a new system to choose the seven patrician members of its government. This government council would still be chosen from among the seven lineages, but with a strict new methodology to combat nepotism and corruption.

The pool of people in these lineages was not a particularly large minority, as in other early European variants of sortition-based decision-making. From about 30,000 people living in Brussels in 1375, only about 300 families belonged to the seven lineages. Of these, the only eligible candidates were men over the age of 28 who were married and could live without exercising any trade or profession.

These eligible members of the seven lineages would all meet once a year at a hall on the Grand Place in the centre of town. The aim was that each lineage should choose three candidates for alderman. Gilliat-Smith describes the drawing of the lots in each lineage as follows:

“A number of waxen balls, equal to the number of clansmen present, all without alike, but of which four contained within a white and one a black cipher, were placed in an urn, and, when they had been well shuffled, each member drew therefrom one of them, and presently, when the drawing was over, broke it. Whereupon the four men to whom the white-marked balls had fallen withdrew to a separate apartment to consider who was the most fitting man to represent their lineage, each man being free to propose what name he would, provided it was not his own.”

Filed under: Books, History, Sortition | 1 Comment »

International Network of Sortition Advocates presents

Posted on June 5, 2026 by richwbrown

Challenges of Non-State Supported

Sortition Selected Forums

A German study of 68 randomly selected extra-parliamentary councils (ERASCO) found that while citizens’ assemblies are gaining popularity as democratic innovations, they are largely ignored by policymakers or designed to limit meaningful participation. In March of this year, a workshop in Germany addressed these issues. Presenter Georg Rackow of Neue Generation, will highlight the full findings of the study and share the five key challenges facing these forums as well as solutions identified at the workshop.

Date: Sunday, 21 June 2026

– Monday, 22 June – Australia & Asia –

Time: 18:00 – 19:00 London

– 19:00-20:00 Europe/Copenhagen • 1:00 PM-2:00 PM US Eastern • 10:00-11:00 AM US Pacific –

Location: Online – Registration at Eventbrite

FREE – Reserve your spot now!

About the Presenter: Georg Rackow is a linguist working in the field of language education. He is the founder of the pan-european think tank Deliberative Democracy Network and member of Neue Generation since its beginning. He helped organize all Parlamente der Menschen–The People’s Parliament–and was in charge of all moderation and editorial work related to these events. He is the main author of all studies and reports published by Neue Generation. Neue Generation, among other goals, advocates for a fundamental renewal of democracy.

INSA is a volunteer organisation aimed at connecting pro-sortition academics, advocates, and activists around the world, to share resources & tactics and advance the theoretical understanding and practice of sortition.

You are invited to join our Discord server at

https://discord.gg/6sgnrphp6w

Filed under: meeting, Sortition | Leave a comment »

The ideology behind the notion of the deliberative transformation

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

In a previous post I discussed the “deliberative transformation”, a favorite trope within the theory of “deliberative democracy”. I pointed out that whereas the deliberative democrats see this hypothetical phenomenon as an ideal (maybe the central normative goal of their theory, more important than any policy outcomes), such a phenomenon, if it were really a widespread phenomenon as the deliberative democrats imagine, would be a major obstacle to an allotment-based democratic system (which, it is worth mentioning, is the only theoretically well-motivated schema of a democratic system).

This post considers the ideological structure that is associated with the idea of the deliberative transformation.

It may be claimed that the rather obvious, but of course unadmitted, starting point of the deliberative democracy theory, is that the adherents of the theory are concerned by the fact that the mass of citizens often refuse to support certain ideas that are accepted by the adherents as truth. Classically the reaction to the fact that citizens cannot be depended upon to see things as they are seen by an elite group was to assert that government should be left to those who are enlightened enough to see things as they should be seen. However, in the modern democratic age such crude elitism is unacceptable. Thus, the deliberative democrats seek a cure for the popular disorder. According to this view, deliberation is nothing more than the treatment that the deliberative democrats prescribe to the recalcitrant masses. It is the process which will lead the masses out of the Platonic cave and into the dazzling light of rational thought. If applied correctly, this treatment will inevitably, indeed, by definition of correctness, make the masses accept the objective truths, those that will lead them to support the policy choices preferred by the deliberative democrats.
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 85 Comments »

The deliberative transformation

Posted on May 16, 2026 by Yoram Gat

A favorite narrative of “deliberative democracy” is what may be called the “deliberative transformation”. According to this trope many people emerge from deliberative forums radically transformed. They become more enlightened, more tolerant, and consequently they hold “better” ideas and positions. Importantly, the change in positions is not merely that people who had been consciously uninformed and have not had a firm opinion on a certain matter have become informed and developed positions based on the newly acquired information. Such a change is unsurprising and is a natural occurrence in any process of study and consideration. Rather the phenomenon of “transformation” is that people who had held firm opinions going into the forum emerge from it newly and firmly holding contradictory opinions to those they had held.

In fact, it often appears (and may or may not be stated explicitly) that as far as deliberative democrats are concerned the deliberative transformation is the main objective of deliberative democracy. Deliberative democracy frees the unenlightened masses from their brutish shackles and allows them to adopt correct ideas whose veracity they were previously unable to perceive in their pre-deliberation situation.

There are various factual questions that may be asked with regard to the deliberative transformation phenomenon. The first is about its existence (or prevalence): do many people in fact change firmly held views as a result of participation in deliberations or is this a fairly rare phenomenon. At least as important are the questions about the nature of this transformation. Are the post-transformation ideas determined by the “deliberation” itself, as the deliberative democrats assert, rather than an artifact of certain parameters of the deliberative setup. Could different setups, different ways to arrange the discussion, different ways to present information, different ways to phrase the topic of discussion, generate different patterns of change in ideas?
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Filed under: Academia, Deliberation, Sortition | 19 Comments »

Spectacles embraces sortition

Posted on April 25, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Spectacles is a popular YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Spectacles has recently posted two videos promoting sortition – Why Lottery Elections are Actually Genius, and The Ancient Invention That Solves Corruption. The first of those is unfortunately paywalled, but the second is freely available. It is a pretty well-done video, although as is typical of the genre it is contains a hodge-podge of points with some of them being better than others. The video has amassed over 80,000 views, over 7,000 thumbs-up’s and over 1,000 comments. Many of the commenters seem supportive of the idea.

Filed under: Athens, History, Juries, Sortition, video | 1 Comment »