By narrowing each electorate’s topical and electoral scope, and by simultaneously and necessarily multiplying the number of electorates, we enable every issue and every candidate to be thoroughly and continuously evaluated by everyday citizens. In other words, we replace P-dominated DeMockery with demos-dominated democracy.
In addition, by restricting each legislator’s topical domain, we enable ordinary citizens, who are not typically fluent in multiple political domains (unlike members of the current “political class”), to become viable political candidates, also vastly expanding the role of the demos.
Democracy should be rule by an informed public opinion acting, after deliberation, in the public interest. But, in a mass-electorate DeMockery, the average voter will NOT be adequately informed, and will engage in little deliberation—resulting in misgovernment.
The problem with letting everybody vote too is that people are really easily manipulated and they’re really undereducated. They don’t have any incentive to pay attention to the real issues, what’s at stake and what are the consequences of each vote. They just vote with whatever feels good. And they’re busy, and they’re tired … and they don’t have the time, and they don’t have the incentive to be enlightened. They don’t have the incentive to have an objective, enlightened approach to how you handle the future of our society. —“Joe Rogan’s harsh truth about American voters” —Podcast, viewed November 6, 2023.
The suspicion is bound to dawn that the minority of people who reply “Don’t know” [to a pollster] are merely more honest than the rest.” —C.N. Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought, 1964, p. 290.
… people are given tasks, like the vote, for which they are woefully unprepared; and yet to give them the necessary education is impossible. —Santayana, Dominations and Powers, 1951, p. 315.
The problem of education appears to be the most intractable. —Herbert Tingsten, The Problem of Democracy, 1965, 112
But under Demiocracy:
As recent studies have revealed, there is a huge difference between the public’s ‘quick thinking’ in relation to issues of politics and attitudes about politicians (generally aggressive, negative, volant, etc.), compared with the ‘slow thinking’ about the same issues (far more balanced, empathetic, constructive, etc.). In this sense what citizens’ assemblies really seem to offer is a new democratic space that helps nurture or facilitate ‘slow thinking.’ —Matthew Flinders et al., quoted in Brett Hennig, The End of Politicians, 2017, p. 148-49
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. —Aldous Huxley, in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, 1971, p. 332.
Changing people … often depends only on purveying information…. —Kenneth Minogue, The Liberal Mind, 1968.
The entire public almost never concentrates its thoughts on one specific issue…. Thus it is rarely possible to know whether the majority of the electorate has reached a firm judgment on a question. —J.A. Corey & H.J. Abraham, Elements of Democratic Government, 1947, 1964.
Willful ignorance—refusing to hear what the other side has to say—out of laziness or to preserve one’s own comfy but possibly incorrect POV—is easy under DeMockery. Lady Bracknell was a classic practitioner: “I dislike arguments of any kind. They are always vulgar and often convincing.” (From Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.) Such ignorance will be harder to maintain under Demiocracy, because the other side(s) arguments will reach all electors. As Lady Bracknell observed, “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.”
So what’s needed are many “Demi,” or “mini,” electorates, each focused on one topic and on one topic-focused officeholder. Then the Proxy Electors will be able and relatively willing to get the education they need.
A Proxy extract-electorate can deliberate and become adequately informed. Being “narrow” it can penetrate to a greater “depth” (= achieve quality) at the expense of having lesser “width” (quantity). Width effectively implies shallowness (and enables negative emergent properties) and hence is the enemy of depth.
A narrow electorate would:
1) give each elector a weighty vote, motivating him/her to be attentive and responsible
2) enable conversational discussion; and
3) allow electors to adequately evaluate one another for the purpose of intra-group balloting for the promotion of members to the PE at the next level up.
Democracy is primarily a qualitative, secondarily a quantitative, thing. Without the quality of an informed and conversational electorate, democracy is mostly a shabby, shallow facade, a Potemkin village. In designing a democracy, or redesigning one, depth should come first, as a necessity; width should come second, as a nicety.
An extract-electorate is sufficiently politically representative if it is large enough. For instance, a 0.5% or a 0.25% extract of a mass electorate of millions is representative enough for government work.
Probably roughly 0.25% would be needed to serve at the Local level in America. Assuming an adult citizenry of 300,000,000, that would compute to (a quarter (25%) times 3,000,000, or) 750,000 Proxy Electors.
There’d be, say, another 250,000 Proxy Electors in the three layers above the Local. Combined, they would add up to a million-man “army of Demos-Davids” as political insiders. A representative system needs this force in that place in order to be really democratic. In order, that is to say, to adequately embody the general will.
We [still] have it in our power to make the world over. — Tom Paine, Common Sense, 1776.
Width, or grossness in all its senses, is the inadvertent “evil root” of DeMockery.
“The defects of Athenian democracy [e.g., the execution of Socrates] were democratic defects, arising not from the restriction of suffrage but from its breadth.” —C.N. Parkinson, The Evolution of Political Thought, 1958, 1963, 173
Therefore: we can remake the world by replacing it with Depth as the first principle of democracy.
In other words, Nec Pluribus Impar (“not unequal to the multitude”—a “litotes,” or ironic understatement, of a claim to superiority).
To be adequately democratic, electorates must be:
SCALED (right-sized),
SCOPED (by topic), &
SKIMMED (by the citizenry, via the bal-lottery).
Then they will be able to properly SCRUTINIZE, SCRAPE, “SCHOOL,” & SCOUR the candidates and electees who come before them.
These Proxy Electors and Demi-Legislators would be members of a new, SUPPLEMENTARY legislative body, not a replacement for current legislatures—not initially, anyway.
We can thus safely experiment, initially in nongovernmental entities, as described in Chapters 6-11, in the pipeline.
There’s a desperate need for popular oversight of our blunder-prone policymakers. (See Chapter 14 for a blunder-list.) Quantitatively that can’t be done—there isn’t room on the ship’s bridge for us all to look over the captain’s shoulder—but qualitatively it’s possible, using a few of our fellow citizens as Proxies.
Quantitative democracy has had its chance, and hasn’t delivered real popular rule, which was its whole purpose. Its trial period is over. Qualitative democracy should be chosen to supplement or replace it, if you desire a state of common-sense sovereignty. And how can you not, if you care about the populace? As Mencken put it:
I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. … But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can’t make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat? —H.L. Mencken, in A Mencken Crestomathy, 1949, p. 168
Here’s more more of Mencken on democracy:
Let this be said for the Legislature just hauled to the dump [adjourned]: it might have been worse. And that, perhaps, is the highest praise that can ever be given to a General Assembly of Maryland [or to any such congress]. It is also the highest praise that can ever be given to a dead cat. —H.L. Mencken, in H.L. Mencken, Disturber of the Peace, 1950, 1962, p. 81
That deflates Churchill’s best-of-the-worst encomium on (quantitative) democracy.
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Equality by lot 
It seems to me you engaging in a futile effort to thread the mass decision-making needle. Instead of having a hundred million voters, you hope to have 1,000,000 people who are involved in day to day decision making. This is however an effort that is doomed to fail. The details of the arrangement you propose – hierarchies, rounds of elections and allotments, etc. – do not materially change the situation.
First, there is that standard return on investment argument: No sane person would spend a significant effort for a 1-in-a-million share in decision making. Thus the large majority of your 1 million would be uninformed and disengaged.
But more important than that, a group of 1,000,000 people is a mass group. It cannot meaningfully set an agenda because it cannot deliberate and coordinate. At best, if it is by some miracle fully informed and fully engaged, it can respond to an agenda set by others. Thus those who set the agenda will be an elite group and this elite group will have a decisive share of the decision making power. Unless that elite group is democratic (i.e., allotted), you will end up with a system that, just like the electoral system, is dominated by an elite, i.e., with an oligarchy.
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See here for a somewhat more formal and elaborated exposition of this argument.
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Hi Yoram, Roger here. Thanks for another “softball”🥎. Keep ‘em coming! 👍
You wrote, “you hope to have 1,000,000 people who are involved in DAY TO DAY DECISION MAKING.”
NOPE. In Chapter 2 I wrote, “These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours EVERY FEW MONTHS ….”
————-
Next you wrote, “No sane person would spend a significant effort for a 1-in-a-million share in decision making. … a group of 1,000,000 people is a mass group. It cannot meaningfully set an agenda because it cannot deliberate and coordinate.”
NO PROBLEMO! I wrote, in Chapter 1b: “My prescription is to “de-mass-ify” democracy by downsizing and dividing the electorate into MULTIPLE, issue-specific “Demi” (SMALL) ELECTORATES each responsible for a single electee.
In Chapter 3 I repeated those words: “By narrowing each electorate’s topical and electoral scope, and by simultaneously and necessarily MULTIPLYING the number of ELECTORATES….”
And: “To be adequately democratic, electorates must be:
SCALED (right-sized) [SMALL], ….”
And, in a later chapter, I wrote, “A true African liberation would put the common man—that is to say, GROUPS of ordinary-citizen Everymen—on top, in catbird seats over every government department and official.”
I concede I made a big error by not spelling out the number of members per Proxy Electorate. (Being apprised of such errors is why Replies here are so valuable.) Here are their ranges:
Local: 5-13;
County: 9-23;
State: 13-49;
Nation (congressman or senator): 23-49;
Nation (Presidential): 251 +.
————
You wrote, “those who set the agenda will be an elite group and this elite group will have a decisive share of the decision making power.”
I have four responses: 1) Proxy Electorates are not legislators, so they’re not, strictly speaking, decision makers. 2) Their agenda is largely pre-set by their topical specialty (e.g., Health, Education, Welfare, etc.). 3) The sub-topics up for discussion will be familiar to Electors from their dozen or more prior gatherings. IOW, any agenda setting will not be dealing with a naive audience that might be easily led by the nose. 4) Gatherings will be mostly free-form, not agenda-structured. The Secretariat will open with anything it has to say, like “old business,” etc., the group’s legislator will make a report, his shadow legislators will critique it, Electors will ask questions of them all, investigators will make reports, It will all be very democratic. 😇
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> These Proxy Electorates (PEs) would meet for hours EVERY FEW MONTHS
I presumed that in between meetings the PEs would be expected to invest much effort to follow and research the public policy issues which are relevant to their decision making. But if you expect an effort measured in few hours per month or less, then this makes the task you assign to them even less likely to be realistic. How would they ever be able to develop an independent understanding of the issues and their own ideas rather than be essentially dominated by the elites, much as the voters are?
But, again, I consider this line of argument (valid as it is) secondary. Let’s assume your PEs remain motivated and highly informed. The main issue is a lack of coordination and thus an inherent inability to be proactive. At best they can react to an agenda set by others.
> downsizing and dividing the electorate into MULTIPLE, issue-specific “Demi” (SMALL) ELECTORATES each responsible for a single electee
As I wrote above, the details of the slicing and dicing of issues and decision making are largely beside the point. By symmetry, each one of your 1,000,000 citizens gets a 1/1,000,000 decision making power. Whether they vote en masse on some proposals or work in small groups on different issues and then the outcomes are aggregated in one way or another is immaterial.
There is a fairly abstract principle here that remains at work and prevents a large group from sharing decision making equally. A large group has no way to coordinate on an basis of equality so as to come up with an independent agenda in a democratic way. Whatever outcomes come out of the process are going to necessarily reflect an agenda that is created in an undemocratic way in which some elite sub-group (either within the large group or outside it) dominates the process.
(In a sense, you are trying to design a perpetual motion machine by adding various levers and weights to some complicated contraption and argue that those various details of the machine are where the magic is. However, in fact, the details do not matter. The endeavor is bound to fail because the law of energy conservation remains in effect. As long the law of energy conservation is accepted, the details of the contraption are of little importance.)
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Hi Yoram, Roger here. You wrote, “But if you expect an effort measured in few hours per month or less, then this makes the task you assign to them even less likely to be realistic. How would they ever be able to develop an independent understanding of the issues …”
Proxy Electors will have only 5% as many issues to wrestle with as current voters, because of their topical specialization, making learning easier. And they will be devoting, in those few hours per month, ten times more than the average voter today is spending, making a Demi arrangement a big improvement. Their repeated gatherings over the course of their six-year (say) terms will tend to make what they learned stick. Plus their intranet will provide them with transcripts and recordings of prior gatherings, as well as access to most online writings on their topic, and the assistance of the Secretariat’s research librarians. Electors who wish to can delve deep, and then share what they’ve found with the other members. Thus Demi Electorates will be roughly 10 times more learned on their topic, and 5 times less manipulated by undemocratic forces, than current mass-electors.
“… and their own ideas …”
Proxy Electors will be able to converse among themselves in a way that all Electors can hear, unlike current voters.
“… rather than be essentially dominated by the elites, much as the voters are?”
The influence of unrepresentative ancillary entities, aka elites, via their endorsements, propaganda, and funding, will be almost eliminated within the Intranet of a Proxy Electorate. That’s because campaigns directed at a small, all-present audience will cost nearly nothing (“a mere bag of shells,” as Ralph Cramden would say). No party hack or captured “catspaw” who is exposed to the probing of his critics and constituents for years before an election will be guaranteed a win—or even a single vote.
You wrote, “Whether they vote en masse on some proposals or work in small groups on different issues and then the outcomes are aggregated in one way or another is immaterial.”
But Electors are NOT “voting on proposals,” they are evaluating candidates. The legislators that get elected do the voting on proposals. And those Demi-legislatures needn’t “aggregate” their decision making with the twenty or so other legislatures in their jurisdiction that deal with different topics—why should they?
You wrote, “Whatever outcomes come out of the process are going to necessarily reflect an agenda that is created in an undemocratic way in which some elite sub-group … dominates the process.”
I can’t deny that there will occasionally be some manipulation of “the process,” but it won’t be powerful or system the way it is now, under the influence of the Pernicious P’s. I guess it’ll be opportunistic, mostly. Further, as I explained in my Reply just above this one, there won’t be much of an “agenda” involved in gatherings of Proxy Electors. They will deal with whatever matters members and candidates freely bring up.
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the solution is election by jury.
https://www.electionbyjury.org/
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Hello Election-by-Jury. Here are my reactions to your link and your FAQ.
For important offices, there should be several rounds of debating, on successive weekends, to get a better basis for judgment. Perhaps there should be pro rata voting after each round, instead of only after the last.
Juried elections would be most easily implemented first in nongovernmental institutions, such as the elections of officials of student councils and unions.
Juries, especially for important offices, would form better judgments of candidates if (as under demiocracy) 1) they heard presentations every few months from candidates and critics over many years, and 2) if legislators had single-topic jobs that jurors could “grok in fullness.”
Sortition-selection for juried elections would require much less administrative overhead than demiocracy, lacking its preliminary balloting stage. But balloting could be added later, if thought desirable then. So juried elections could become a steppingstone to demiocracy. (I will add this thought to my base document, and include a link to your site.)
I like these paragraphs from your FAQ::
“Imagine if jurors were not required to attend court proceedings at all, spent a minimal amount of time learning about the case, and received all their information from a single media outlet that was heavily biased in favor of the defendant. Would you trust such a jury to make good decisions? This is the reality of how popular elections work today.”
“This gives us an average of 586,000 eligible voters in each congressional district. In order to accurately measure the preferred candidate among these voters, with a 95% confidence interval and 5% margin of error, we will need a mere 384 jurors.”
“Which is better? A 100% chance of casting one ballot, among 300 million voters? Or a 1% chance of casting 1 ballot, among 3 million voters? Statistically, both grant you the exact same amount of voting power.”
“Also consider the fact that if you live in a solid-blue or solid-red state, like most Americans, your vote will not change the outcome of the election. And even if you were to live in a battleground state, your single vote is vastly unlikely to change the outcome of the election.”
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Hi again Election-By-Jury; Roger Knights here. I forgot how to get my avatar to appear in my Reply just above.
I suggest that you contact the Joe Rogan show and ask to be a guest; the email is info@comedymothership.com
Here’s what Rogan said that explains why he’d be interested in your alternative:
“The problem with letting everybody vote too is that people are really easily manipulated and they’re really undereducated. They don’t have any incentive to pay attention to the real issues, what’s at stake and what are the consequences of each vote. They just vote with whatever feels good.
“And they’re busy, and they’re tired because they’re eating shitty food, and they’re not exercising, they’re working all day in a job that sucks, they come him and their wive’s bitchen’ at them and they’re on anti-depressants and pills, and the kids are all f**d up.
“And they don’t have the time, and they don’t have the incentive to be enlightened. They don’t have the incentive to have an objective, enlightened approach to how you handle the future of our society.”
“Joe Rogan’s harsh truth about American voters”—Video podcast viewed November 6, 2023:
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Hi Election-By-Juries, Roger Knights here once more. Please “mine” any material from my posts (so far and also in the future) that you might find useful, especially the quotations in Chapter 1b by Lieber, Mill, Burke, and Huxley.
They implicitly critique the hidden root of democracy’s ills: its too-big, and consequently its too-diluted, too-diffuse, and thus inattentive, electorate. Joe Rogan described its inattentiveness well.
Simply by sampling the populace, as for a jury, electoral inattentiveness and ignorance could be reduced by 80%, doubling or tripling the correctness of its judgments, and redeeming democracy.
“Simply” is a key word. You are not proposing to press-gang people into legislative roles, which would run into constitutional obstacles—and into popular reluctance too.
Right-sized electorates might in time begin to pass or pass along referendums, etc., thereby edging into legislating. But that process should be allowed to happen naturally, when and if “the minds of men are fitted to it.” (Burke) Not at the outset.
It occurs to me that features of Demiocracy could similarly be slipped in, this time to juried electorates. E.g., “neighborly nominations” could be collected and added to the lottery box in a few jurisdictions in some proportion—say 20% at the start. Its effects could be assessed and, if judged beneficial, the proportion could be enlarged and more jurisdictions included.
Other features of Demiocracy (like topical specialization, necessary to dispense with professional politicians ) could likewise be experimented with, assessed, and adopted if successful.
BTW, you should point out that campaigning before a Jury Electorate will cost only 1% of what a traditional campaign would cost, providing a more level playing field for the less-well-funded. And also aiding amateur candidates who lack expertise in the dark arts of propaganda.
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