Landemore: Politics Without Politicians

Posted on February 16, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Hélène Landemore has a new book out, Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule. The book description is as follows:

Politicians have failed us. But democracy doesn’t have to.

Bought by special interests, detached from real life, obsessed with reelection. Politicians make big promises, deliver little to nothing, and keep the game rigged in their favor. But what can we do?

In Politics Without Politicians, acclaimed political theorist Hélène Landemore asks and answers a radical question: What if we didn’t need politicians at all? What if everyday people—under the right conditions—could govern much better?

With disarming clarity and a deep sense of urgency, Landemore argues that electoral politics is broken but democracy isn’t. We’ve just been doing it wrong. Drawing on ancient Athenian practices and contemporary citizens’ assemblies, Landemore champions an alternative approach that is alive, working, and growing around the world: civic lotteries that select everyday people to govern—not as career politicians but as temporary stewards of the common good.
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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Sortition | 4 Comments »

The solution is in plain sight

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Phil Wilson writes in Z about the horrors of electoralism and “the most enormous obstacle to sortition” – the fact that those who claim to be against the horrors cannot bring themselves to consider the democratic alternative.

A Plea for Sortition and Direct Democracy in the Wake of the Epstein Files

The Epstein Files do not warrant shock and horror. A quiet nod of the head along with maybe a lopsided, very restrained smile might suffice. I will consider my most cynical smirk – the one conveying a sort of fatalistic disgust normally employed for train delays, and added charges to my cell phone bill. These redacted millions of pages contain just enough information to let us know two things: 1) the rich pukes who run our lives with godly, bored indifference, have been raping, torturing and maybe sometimes murdering trafficked children, and 2) absolutely nothing will be done about it.

The Epstein Files are not a revelation, but a reminder. Why feign horror when the feral dog shits on the rug? Do some of us accept that capitalism performs epic acts of mass murder and torture, yet blanche in utter disbelief at the sadistic hobbies that elites enjoy in private? Did anyone imagine that Larry Summers and Peter Thiel spent their down time delivering blankets to the nearest tent city?

The Epstein Files shows the public the private face of societal suicide. When psychopaths seize control of governmental and corporate institutions, they gain the cover needed to act out the most predatory sexual fantasies, but that is nothing compared to what corporate and political policy inflicts upon countless millions of victims. If we are horrified at the private evils committed by Epstein’s clients, we ought to be far more distraught over the public crimes of these morally castrated pillars of capitalism – war, colonialism, privatized prisons, privatized hospitals, privatized armies and the unmitigated project of environmental ruin and mass extinction.

We have voted and revoted. The ballot box leads inevitably to Trump. We can’t vote our way out of this. It will take massive resistance – Minneapolis writ across the face of the country. I believe that the goal of resistance ought to be the end of electoral politics, the end of parties, the end of super-PACs, the end of politics as mass spectacle. The biggest challenge involves massive, organized, committed civil disobedience – but that will yield nothing without a vision of renewal.

The solution is in plain sight.

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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 3 Comments »

Is voting working? What if we rolled the dice instead?

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Yoram Gat

Michael J. Smith from Portland, Maine, in the United States writes in the Sun Journal:

Everybody likes democracy — in principle. But apparently fewer and fewer people are happy with the actual thing, if the Pew Research Center is to be believed.

My dear old mom, of blessed memory, used to sigh and say, “If only we could get the money out of politics!” But in a social context where there are relatively few people who have lots of money, and don’t mind spending it on politicians, to promote their interests, this is difficult.

What Mom meant by “politics” — and what we usually mean by “democracy,” too — is in fact electoral politics: the machinery of parties, nominations, polls, advertising and “messaging.” And of course campaign contributions, which is a genteel euphemism for “bribes.”

The spectacle itself is squalid enough: the mendacity of “talking points,” the non-responsive answer to the tendentious question, the rhetorical trickery, the vulgar personal attacks and the hollow, deceptive slogans.

But more to the point, it simply doesn’t deliver what it promises: namely, some approximation to what Rousseau called the “general will.” Our executives and legislatures consistently fail to come up with things that the public wants. Examples abound, but we have an especially glaring one before us just now. Public opinion has turned very strongly against Israel, across the partisan spectrum, but all our politicians, from president to dogcatcher, are basketballs-to-the-wall for the South Africa of the Levant.
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Filed under: Athens, Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Germany Update: A Party as a Vehicle for Lottocracy

Posted on February 2, 2026 by Jochen Krattenmacher

In August 2025, we founded the Losdemokratie-Partei (Lottocracy-Party). The party naturally is not the goal. It is a vehicle for achieving democratic reforms toward a Lottocracy — once a full Lottocracy is achieved, we will disband, as our program explicitly states.

Accordingly, we do not present a detailed substantive policy platform of our own. Instead, we commit ourselves to representing and defending the recommendations of citizen assemblies, and to expanding their use. These assemblies are not only meant to decide concrete policy questions, but also to determine the institutional design of a future lottocracy and the reform steps leading toward it.

Why a party? Unlike most other organisations, we do not work within the existing system without offering an alternative to it. NGOs typically depend on cooperation with parties and institutions whose legitimacy and self-descriptions they cannot fundamentally question—this constraint, sadly, often applies to universities as well. A serious critique of the political system only becomes effective and consequential when it is paired with a concrete alternative—not just in theory, but in practice. Founding a party is our way of making that alternative tangible and actionable for as many people as this system allows (if “only” by voting for us).

We are deliberately confrontational at this point: we insist that calling this system a “democracy” is misleading. It is more accurately described as an electoral aristocracy. This sharp diagnosis is not a rhetorical flourish; it is the core of our argument. It allows us to stand out clearly within the otherwise very cautious and self-referential “democracy discourse,” and it appeals across the political spectrum, even if there of course are plenty who are not yet ready for our message.

Where we are now

We are around 70 members nationwide. Early visibility came largely through Ardalan Ibrahim (our current party head), who already had a YouTube channel with 2000 followers when we launched. Since then, Ardalan has been gradually moving into larger podcast formats. Beyond that, many members contribute in parallel: through party and personal social media accounts, behind-the-scenes work, and offline presence—for example by holding up lottocracy signs at street events. Overall, our collective reach has grown slowly but steadily. There is no illusion here: a lot more media work remains to be done.

We are amateurs in the literal sense: none of us has ever been paid for political work (which can be seen as an advantage, as this way we come with less associations with existing political camps). At the same time, we are not shy about seeking funding. Getting paid for political work is fully congruent with our critique—politics should not be restricted to those who can afford to do it for free.

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Filed under: Action, Elections, Sortition | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »