Equality by lot

Ian Troesoyer is a nurse practitioner, epidemiologist and sortition activist living in Idaho, USA. Treosoyer has recently published a very good article on Substack with the title above. The article begins as follows:

To my comrades engaged in the struggle for a more just world, let me attempt to convince you that underneath the existential problems of capitalism is a deeper problem. A problem that has ironically been shared by all the electoral “democracies” of the West as well as all the major communist and socialist governments that have existed.

The fundamental problem isn’t capitalism, it’s aristocracy: the idea that distinguished individuals – those with supposedly greater knowledge, moral standing, legitimacy, etc. – should make the decisions on behalf of the rest of us.

Aristocracy is the underlying philosophy for both elections and vanguard parties.

Now, you might be saying, “elections aren’t intended to just let distinguished people make the decisions, we pick politicians based on their ability to represent the will of the people!”

Or you might be saying, “Lenin, Mao, Castro, etc. weren’t just doing whatever they wanted, they were acting on behalf of the people!”

Here’s the thing: pretty much all aristocracies say they’re “doing the will of the people.” Kings and dictators say they’re doing the will of the people.

Don’t watch the mouth, watch the hands.

Troesoyer’s construction of his argument is very well done (including such nice details as the well-placed scare quotes in the expression ‘the electoral “democracies”’), easily outdoing the large majority of the authors writing on this subject. (As a sample of what passes for discussion of sortition see this recent Jacobin magazine piece.)

Troesoyer starts with the essential attribute of elections – the “principle of distinction”:

The only decision elections permit common people to make is which distinguished people – in other words, aristocrats – will make decisions for them. Elections appear to be based on political equality because we all get a formally equal say about which elite campaign finalist will make decisions on our behalf, but – critically – we don’t get an equal opportunity to actually make political decisions ourselves. All other things being equal, people with greater privilege have a greater chance of winning elections, so the range of policies available for us to pick from is limited to the preferences of the most privileged members of society.

Wherever and whenever they have been used, elections have given power to the privileged, not the common people. The rarity of exceptions to this tendency proves the rule. This effect can be observed all around the world. It can be observed in US presidential elections and high school presidential elections. It was the case prior to capitalism and it has been the case since.

He then makes it clear that the policy outcomes follow from the principle of distinction in a very natural and predictable way. There is no need to appeal to supposed epistemological difficulties. The elected are not “out of touch” or poorly informed or well-meaning fools. Nor do they suffer from being hyper-partisan, from pandering to the public, from having to put on an electoral show or from a lack of deliberation. No. The elected are very well informed and well organized, and they are not less clever than the rest of us. They may very well be putting on a show, but this show is just for public consumption, it does not constrain what they do. The policies we see are the result of the elected very effectively and persistently promoting their own interests.

This is why quasi-socialist programs in electoral countries – such as social security, the NHS, etc. – all tend to erode and enshittify over time. Elections empower the privileged to make the decisions. Privileged people generally don’t need welfare programs and would rather spend the money elsewhere. Thus the hard won social programs put in place to appease mass movements are gradually rolled back by the privileged politicians who benefit the least from them.

Let’s take this analysis one step further. The reason the injustices of capitalism have not been ended by elections is because elections disproportionately elevate those who benefit the MOST from capitalism to make all the decisions.

I don’t know who still needs to hear this, but elites don’t have our best interests at heart.

(By the way, those who still need to hear this may be a small minority but if Troesoyer really does not know who they are, I can point at a few.)

Despite the great strengths of the article, I find that there are some weaker spots, and at times it even undermines its own argument. I list these weak spots below in no particular order. Beyond the significance of each of those points, the more fundamental point is the need to have a unified consistent model for how politics works and to derive the arguments used from that model. Without such a model the argumentation is inevitably fragmented and inconsistent and loses much of its force.

1. Troesoyer discusses the enclosure of “common land” in the UK which was a process in which landowners deprived peasants of their traditional rights to access and use certain plots. He writes that in the court disputes over enclosures “judges sided with the landlords because landlords were literate and had documentation indicating that their ancestors had been on the land for generations, while the illiterate peasants had no such documentation”. This presents the judicial decisions as being impartial or mechanical results of some objective situation. In fact, the judges should be seen as part of the same elite-controlled regime (“aristocracy” as Troesoyer refers to such systems in the article) and their rulings reflect that. The decision to accept the landlords’ written documentation as justifying the enclosures is wholly due to the same “self-dealing” by the elites that the article emphasizes. Invoking a supposedly objective reason for the system generating outcomes that serve the elites makes it seem like, contrary to the main thrust of the article, self-dealing is not a sufficient mechanism to explain those outcomes.
2. The article makes the claim that Marx had things backward when he said that, as Troesoyer puts it, “the economic base (i.e. capitalism) determines the character of the superstructure (i.e. the government)”, whereas in fact “[g]overnments determine the character of their economic systems”. This is far too simplistic. It is true that, as the article emphasizes, governments enforce economic systems. Marx and Marxists would never deny this. They do argue, however, that governments are structured by economic relations. For example, as Troesoyer himself notes, the U.S. electoralist system was created by an economic elite that existed before the system was created, and whose power the system was designed to maintain. In the text linked to, Marx does seem to imply that the “material forces of production” “inevitably” determine the “relations of production” and these determine the legal, political and ideological superstructure. This causal model is indeed too unidirectional (material forces of production influence but do not determine the relations of production which in turn influence but do not determine the legal, political and ideological superstructure), but so is Troesoyer’s converse (ideology, politics and law influence but do not determine the relations of production and certainly do not determine the material forces of production).
3. Troesoyer writes that “[s]truggles for power attract the corrupted”. This oft-repeated formula about how people seeking power tend to be bad people and should be kept away from power may or may not be statistically true. Even if it is, there surely are many good people who seek power to use it for good. But in any case this is at best a secondary issue and distracts from the main argument. The main argument is that elites – like any group of people – can be expected to quite naturally and quite legitimately promote their values and what they see as their interests. People do not need to be corrupt to do that and arguments about personal characteristics of people in power undermine the structural analysis. The situation is similar when the article says that the elites are “fallible” and “dehumanize those who are seen as inferior to them”. The elites, being human beings, are certainly fallible, and they may or may not dehumanize others, but those are matters of individual psychology that distract from the main argument.
4. Finally, a very important point is the lack of an explicit mechanism which explains the inevitability of the creation of an electoral elite. Why can’t we just “kick the bums out” and elect some good guys? Why do the voters keep electing “the privileged”? Could they just be stupid or uninformed or manipulated? Until this point is addressed it seems like elections can be fixed by fixing the voters. (This direction of thought is far from rare among would-be reformers.)

   Bernard Manin gives an answer to this question with his rather simple and yet truly seminal “pure theory of elections” which he lays out in his 1995 book “The principles of representative government”. Where theorists like Robert Michels with his “Iron Law of Oligarchy” resort to various contingent factors (like wealth, knowledge, education or cohesion) in order to explain the formation of electoral elites, Manin’s answer is direct and inevitable. For someone to be elected, for them to even have any chance of being elected, they must be known, either by name or by some other label such as a party association, to a non-negligible part of the voters. Because the number of people any single person can know is limited, in a large population only a very small minority of the people can ever be known to a significant proportion of the people. Being a member of this exclusive set of widely known people is thus a privilege in and of itself (whether one runs for office or not). Thus all the people who have ever been elected and who ever will be elected are privileged people.

   Manin’s pure theory of elections is easy to understand and blows the cover off of the notion that elections are democratic. People do not vote for the privileged because they want them but because they cannot do otherwise no matter how much they want to. It is this fact that must be made a central part of any attack on elections (and any piece of useful sortition advocacy must present it as a substitute, rather than a complement of elections and thus must attack elections).

To conclude, let me emphasize again that overall Troesoyer is doing in my opinion a very good job in focusing on the important points and avoiding many of the distractions and clichéd formulas that make supposedly pro-sortition texts uninteresting and unconvincing. The points I made above are offered as constructive criticism of what is a great piece of sortition advocacy.

Filed under: Elections, History, Sortition |