Equality by lot

An op-ed piece in The New York Times by Hélène Landemore opens as follows. (Full text here.)

No Shy Person Left Behind

At its core, our political system is a popularity contest. Elections reward those who are comfortable performing in public and on social media, projecting confidence and dominating attention. This dynamic tends to select for so-called alpha types, the charismatic and the daring, but also the entitled, the arrogant and even the narcissistic.

This raises a basic but rarely asked question: Why are we filtering out the quiet voices? And at what cost?

Over the past two decades, my research on collective intelligence in politics, democratic theory and the design of our institutions shows that the system structurally excludes those I call, in my new book, “the shy.” By the shy I mean not just the natural introverts, but all the people who have internalized the idea that they lack power, that politics is not built for them, and who could never imagine running for office.

In what follows, Landemore promotes allotted citizen assemblies as a way to get the voice of “the shy” heard.

This way of presenting things raises two questions. First, why use the term “the shy” to refer to a group for which this label is clearly inappropriate? The category described by Landemore would be much more appropriately described as “the disenfranchised”, “the politically suppressed”, or “the politically oppressed”. The term “the shy” implies an inherent psychological property of the people being so described, while the category Landemore describe is clearly socially manipulated into a sense of political impotence – a manipulation that in all probability is primarily done by constructing society in a way where the sense of impotence is a completely realistic understanding of the political situation.

It seems that the usage of the term “the shy” is an attempt to avoid using the more subversive, more realistic terms. Terms that would be used routinely, unhesitatingly in the context of official enemies (“authoritarian regimes”) are to be studiously avoided when discussing “Western democracies”.

Second, while the proposal of giving voice to the politically suppressed via citizen assemblies may (or may not, depending on the design) be a good idea, it seems that a fairly easy and straightforward way to given such people a voice would be to invite them to write op-eds in The New York Times. Isn’t shutting them out of mass media one of the ways the politically suppressed are suppressed? Would the editors of The New York Times, who so broad-mindedly gave voice to Landemore, “a political theorist at Yale”, and her suggestions regarding citizen assemblies, be willing to live up to the democratic ideals offered by Landemore by having a daily column by a member of the politically suppressed, randomly selected among the US (or maybe the world) population?

Filed under: Academia, Books, Press, Proposals, Sortition |