Jacobin rehashes the tired old clichés of the sortition debate

Jacobin rehashes the tired old clichés of the sortition debate

Posted on July 4, 2026 by Yoram Gat

The left-leaning Jacobin magazine has offered its readers the idea of sortition back in 2018 and then last December had a couple of pieces advocating for sortition – one being an interview with Alexander Guerrero and one being an article by Terry Bouricius. Jacobin now has a debate of sorts [paywalled, but full text here] in which Anand Gopal takes the ostensibly pro-sortition position and Ben Burgis plays the skeptic.

The text methodically checks off the squares on the sortition debate bingo card: “democracy is in retreat”, “big money”, “popular sovereignty”, “democracy is not just [a system that] happens to work out best but [where] the public actually has a right to manage its own affairs”, not wanting to pick your lawyer or book agent[!] at random, “technocratic objections to democracy”, “a multicameral approach, with both lotteries and elections”, “demographic similarities”, “atomized individuals”, “we want a chamber that has a place for parties”, “accountability”, “for a country of 350 million, it doesn’t really make sense to have 350 people sitting in council”, “smaller scales”, “people systematically shirk jury duty”, “[w]ith the Zohran election, there was a tremendous sense that “we did this””, “instant recall”, etc., etc.

As usual, this format of discussion provides no rational way out of the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand conundrum. Jacobin‘s readers are left to their own prejudices to decide which hand they prefer – the one with some sortition (but not without elected officials to balance things out), or the one where sortition is deemed altogether undesirable due to this or that principle (even if it may result in better outcomes).

Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition |

3 Responses

keithsutherland, on July 4, 2026 at 11:40 am said:

I guess one man’s “tired old cliches” is another man’s reasoned debate.

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Yoram Gat, on July 4, 2026 at 12:19 pm said:

It’s a shame such “reasoned debate” is not used to settle questions of arithmetic, engineering and other sciences. Imagine how wonderfully those sciences would have developed if we applied such effective methods to them.

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Jordan Rose, on July 4, 2026 at 1:07 pm said:

It’s a shame such “reasoned debate” is not used to settle questions of arithmetic, engineering and other sciences. Imagine how wonderfully those sciences would have developed if we applied such effective methods to them.

Reasoned debate is actually used significantly in all of those fields. Having come from a physics background, for which I used to frequently attend group discussions in the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, a hub of various experts, reasoned debate represents a significant aspect for how sciences progresses. In The Structure of a Scientific Revolution, by Kuhn, he describes the process in which a scientific community moves from one paradigm to another is based largely on reasons given, rather than direct empirical evidence. In fact, empirical evidence frequently favours the previous paradigm, as more work was put into justifying that previous model.

When Copernicus first presented the heliocentric model, he had very little in the way of empirical evidence to back this up. Predictive power rested, overwhelmingly, in favour of the geocentric model. What Copernicus had to offer was not empirical evidence, but a good reason to question the empirical evidence. The lack of a free and fair public debate at the time (before the days of peer-review), resulted in a unfortunate lack of deliberation, in which the geocentric model would need to justify complexity of their model, despite the powerful predictive power it provides.

Today, many questions in physics lack a definitive answer, as the question on how to unify gravity with quantum mechanics remains open. Deliberation in the scientific community is how scientists decide which paradigms are more likely and worthy to pursue.

It’s also well known that our current paradigm is *wrong*, though useful. Emprical evidence is frequently a strong reason to support a pradigm, but not the only one, and the balancing of reasons is done deliberatively.

While I can speak most directly about physics, I can speak confidently, those less directly, about the importance of deliberation in both engineering, as well as other scientific research.

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