An early modern sortition proposal

Posted on May 21, 2010 by Yoram Gat

I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.

— William F. Buckley, Jr., 1965

Filed under: Sortition |

6 Responses

peterstone, on May 27, 2010 at 9:52 pm said:

I’ve heard this quote a million times, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a source associated with it. Of course, I think he was completely full of it–it is inconceivable that as blueblooded an aristocrat as Buckley would prefer government by the unwashed masses to rule by Harvard-educated liberals, unless he simply believed the former would be easier for right-wingers like him to manipulate than the latter.

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Yoram Gat, on May 28, 2010 at 12:29 am said:

He probably believed that the unwashed masses, bad as they are, are not as bad as the liberals. Some of those liberals even support racial equality.

Of course, Buckley would much prefer elite rule to popular rule, but it would have to be the right elite.

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Alexander Guerrero: The lottocracy | Equality by lot, on February 4, 2014 at 7:57 pm said:

[…] There was the expected crop of critical comments with the standard reflexive objections or with well-worn formulas – elections are needed as a form of participation, or as an expression of the consent of the governed, people need to be more well informed, need shorter terms – within 3 years the allotted will be as corrupt as the elected, the allotted will be easily manipulated by lobbyists, not a democracy, a republic, mandatory voting. One commenter suggested adding a recall mechanism and one suggested an IQ test barrier. One commenter made a reference to William Buckley. […]

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Yoram Gat, on November 17, 2016 at 7:24 pm said:

It turns out there is even a video recording (link sent by a reader of the blog): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nf_bu-kBr4

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keithsutherland, on November 18, 2016 at 8:12 am said:

Judging by the recent US election, nearly half of voters (and a plurality of electoral colleges) might well agree with Buckley. The fact that they chose a billionaire property mogul with no political experience (who boasted that he didn’t read books or pay any income tax) over an alumna of Yale Law School would suggest a rejection of the liberal, rather than Wall Street, elite. Trump was viewed as a regular working guy who just happened to have a large bank balance.

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Yoram Gat, on September 25, 2023 at 6:02 am said:

In another recorded comment, Buckley opines that the cure to the suppression of the Black vote is having some White vote suppression as well.

I think actually what is wrong in Mississippi is not that not enough Negroes have the vote but that too many white people are voting.

The comment was made in the context of debate between Buckley and James Baldwin in the Cambridge Union Society of the Cambridge University in 1965 and was rewarded by applause and laughter. The notion that voting should be done only by a qualified minority is more legitimate among the elites than explicit racial discrimination, despite the fact that the qualified minority considered is unlikely to be racial diverse.

A transcript was printed in the New York Times, March 7, 1965.

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