Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy.

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Yoram Gat

Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy. is a documentary film being produced and directed by Adam Cronkright and expected to be released in 2024.

Goodbye Elections. Hello Democracy. tells the true story of 30 everyday Americans, selected by lottery, trying to find common ground on the most charged issue in the most divided state—while a bitter election rages around them.

The text on website seems to indicate, as does the title, that the film is taking a fairly radical attitude:

Why have I never heard of this?

Democratic lotteries have typically been pigeonholed in modern times as merely a way to inject public input into our current dysfunctional and distrusted political system, instead of being framed as a way to transform it.

For the first time ever, this film stands to change that.

Filed under: Action, Elections, Sortition |

5 Responses

paulnollen, on February 18, 2023 at 1:42 pm said:

That is a new one, “democratic lotteries”. I would say, highly manipulated (so called scientific) selection of volunteers with an element of sortition.

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Ahmed R. Teleb, on February 19, 2023 at 2:26 pm said:

I think this film is going about a 30 member COVID response panel that happened in Michigan. But the organizers of this film & the group behind it have been, to say the least, not transparent about what this thing was, how it was run, or what it did.

Yoram, I disagree that this is radical. Radical would be to acknowledge that so-called representative government was NEVER INTENDED to be democratic and for VERY SPECIFIC REASONS: 1) to protect the wealthy from economic/land reform 2) to protect the institution of slavery 3) to further the empirical project & 4) out of a visceral demopbobia / political agoraphobia.

Truly radical reform would also include economic democracy: worker ownership and control of individual enterprises, nationalization of energy & minerals rights.

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Yoram Gat, on February 19, 2023 at 7:52 pm said:

> Yoram, I disagree that this is radical

Well, maybe I am over-optimistic. It does seem much more ambitious than most programs involving sortition.

> Truly radical reform would also include economic democracy: worker ownership and control of individual enterprises, nationalization of energy & minerals rights.

While personally I am sympathetic toward these goals, I think political reform could be radically democratic without this being part of the agenda. It seems to me that in principle at least a society could democratically decide to maintain a capitalist system. (In fact, it seems that this was the situation in Athens.)

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Ahmed R. Teleb, on February 19, 2023 at 10:15 pm said:

Athens was not capitalist. It was based on slavery and old style empire: plunder, tribute, colonization.
The vast majority were excluded from participation bc they were enslaved, foreigners, or women.
Whether the poor would “democratically” chose to remain poor, even after major brainwashing–which happens to be what the education system seems to be best at—is only a theoretical question.

What I am referring to is how alternatives are PREDETERMINED and narrowed down by existing structures. The way Minipublics and Assemblies have worked so far has always restricted the choices of participants or framed issues in such a way that their work would not be threatening to the entity that commissioned the engagement event in the first place.
The obscene levels of inequality, the threat of starvation, actual or threatened homelessness are the conditions under which these supposedly “free” citizens are going to deliberate—leaving aside for the moment the orwellian nightmare which is the corporate media—digital censorship surveillance landscape.

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Yoram Gat, on February 21, 2023 at 7:19 pm said:

> Athens was not capitalist. It was based on slavery and old style empire: plunder, tribute, colonization.

These are not mutually exclusive. Athens was capitalist because it had immensely rich people who built their fortune on manufacturing and trade (and maybe finance as well?) and employed their capital to create more capital.

> The vast majority were excluded from participation bc they were enslaved, foreigners, or women.

This is true, but beside the point. The class structure persisted among the fully enfranchised citizens. Various laws were passed taxing the rich and controlling them in various ways, but apparently the question of eliminating private capital altogether was never seriously considered.

> The obscene levels of inequality, the threat of starvation, actual or threatened homelessness are the conditions under which these supposedly “free” citizens are going to deliberate

Yes, but the argument in the move is (I believe) for empowering those citizen to take decisions that could change this situation. Whether, given the opportunity, they would actually do so is a separate question. The very argument for empowering citizens to make the fundamental decisions in society is in itself a radically democratic position.

(As an aside, I can tell you that am probably just as outraged about the issues you raise as you are. I am simply making the point – both analytical and practical – that those outrages should be seen as (very likely) a consequence of the oligarchical structure of government, not as identical with that structure.)

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