Equality by lot

Nicholas Coccoma writes about sortition in the Boston Review. While some of the narrative is standard, Coccoma makes some crucial points that are often avoided by the prominent members of the sortition milieu.

The Case for Abolishing Elections

They may seem the cornerstone of democracy, but in reality they do little to promote it. There’s a far better way to empower ordinary citizens: democracy by lottery.

In response to [popular] discontent, reformers have proposed a slew of solutions. Some want to expand the House of Representatives, abolish the Electoral College, or eliminate the Senate. Others demand enhanced voting rights, the end of gerrymandering, stricter campaign finance laws, more political parties, or multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting. The Athenians would take a different view. The problem, they would point out, lies in elections themselves. We can make all the tweaks we want, but as long as we employ voting to choose representatives, we will continue to wind up with a political economy controlled by wealthy elites. Modern liberal governments are not democracies; they are oligarchies in disguise, overwhelmingly following the policy preferences of the rich. (The middle class happens to agree with them on most issues.)

Yet the myth of popular control persists. That is partly due to a political culture that venerates the Framers as unerring geniuses touched by the hand of God. Almost twenty years after historian H. W. Brands warned of “Founders chic,” our worship of these men has only grown. This reverence gets in the way of acknowledging how deeply the Founders of the U.S. republic distrusted democracy and strove to insulate the government from influence by the common man. Hailing from the gentry, jealous of their prerogatives—like the well-born of every age—they doubted the people’s ability to exercise sound judgment. They viewed Athens as a “chronically unstable, often hellish, society controlled by violent and erratic mobs,” as historian Carl Richard relates, denigrating it as an ochlocracy—government by rule of the mob or “tyranny of the majority.” They imagined Athens wracked by volatility, swayed by demagogues and unruly passions, collapsing from want of a powerful executive. When it came to drafting a new Constitution to replace the Articles of Confederation, the delegates in 1787 looked to aristocratic Rome rather than democratic Athens.
Lotteries go straight to everyday people and bring them into power; they circumvent the designs of elites and don’t favor one group of citizens over another.

Esteemed authors of antiquity supplied plenty of anti-democratic ammunition. Plato’s disparaging portrait of the Athenian assembly confirmed every prejudice the Founders nursed against self-government. “Behind the closed doors of the Philadelphia convention,” Michael Klarman explains in The Framers’ Coup (2016), “the delegates outdid one another in the contempt they expressed for democracy.” George Mason compared direct election of the president to entrusting “a trial of colors to a blind man,” as the people could not be trusted to “have the requisite capacity” to assess the candidates. Elbridge Gerry derided democracy as “the worst . . . of all political evils.” Alexander Hamilton wanted the president and senators to serve for life, and James Madison lamented what he saw as an excess of democracy in state legislatures (which passed debtor relief laws and issued paper currency), not to mention in Shays’s Rebellion. Thomas Paine proposed a role for lotteries in Common Sense, but his egalitarian radicalism on behalf of democracy made him an outlier among the Founders; by the end of his life he was widely despised and ostracized from circles of influence. As in France, the ascendant American bourgeoisie instituted voting, not lotteries, upon overthrowing the monarchy. Historians today point out the many anti-democratic mechanisms the Framers built into the Constitution—long terms of office, tiny numbers of representatives, a minoritarian Senate. Yet few note that, in practice, elections themselves make for the chief oligarchic feature.

The question is not whether American democracy will die, but whether it will be instituted for the first time.

Filed under: Athens, History, Press, Sortition |