Sabine Hossenfelder is a physicist and fairly prominent YouTube figure with over 1.5 million followers. Her clips are about the physical sciences, but she occasionally strays outside this area. Her most recent video is titled “Is the USA a Democracy or a Republic?”. The analysis she offers is not too perceptive in my mind, but it does have the advantage of mentioning the idea of selecting political decision making bodies using a lottery. This idea gets a brief teaser in the introduction and a bit more detail toward the end of the video.
Naturally, most of the thousands of comments to the video focus on the democracy vs. republic matter, but at least one comment does pick up on the sortition idea:
Problem with representative democracy is that strangers, who do not know you, cannot represent you. The premise is simply false.
Voting is entering a contract, asking to be ruled by a handful of strangers. Extending them Power Of Attorney, four years into the future … If you sign that, whatever happens, you have no right to complain, because you accepted the deal.
Here is what we should do instead : Government by lottery
1000 citizens randomly selected. 200 replacements selected every year, giving five years in government for each. Then perhaps a quarterly online voting session for the rest of us; Yes/No to the bill with slimmest decisive vote, in the 1000-man parlament during that quarter. Continue reading →
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t have chosen an election year for my American book tour. It’s not that I dislike elections generally. And — praise be — a population of 300 million Americans has managed to raise one presidential candidate who is not a convicted felon awaiting sentence.
No, my problem with American elections — and it viscerally distresses me every four years — is the affront to democracy called the Electoral College. I’ve done the math. The Electoral College can hand you the presidency even if your opponent receives three-quarters of the popular vote. Of course that’s a hypothetical extreme. The familiar reality is that campaigns ignore all but a handful of “swing” states.
A genuine electoral college, however, could work rather well. Voters in every state would elect respected citizens to meet in conclave to find a president — like a university search committee or the College of Cardinals. They’d headhunt the best in the land, interview them, study their publications and speeches, exhaustively vet them — and finally after a secret ballot announce the verdict in a puff of white smoke. Continue reading →
By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz off #unifyUSA
The Imperial Presidency
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, it’s time for some straight talk. Our presidential system, once the envy of the world, now struggles to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century. The concentration of power in a single president has led to executive orders on steroids, whiplash between administrations, and a growing disconnect between the American people and their leadership. And with the Supreme Court recently declaring the president above the law, the threat of tyranny looms larger than ever.
But what if there was a way to reinvigorate our democracy, tapping into the collective wisdom of everyday Americans while preserving the efficiency needed for effective governance? What if—just like the legislature and judiciary—we could create an executive branch that truly embodies the spirit of “We the People?”
Today, we propose just that: a bold reimagining of the executive, one that draws on our deepest American values of freedom, community, and service to create a more responsive, accountable, and effective government. Once again, our vision hinges on one bold idea: empowering everyday Americans through democratic lotteries.
As of July 2024, only 16% of Americans approve of Congress. Think about what that means – more than 4 in 5 US citizens disapprove of the main institution of our democracy – a legislature of their own representatives. Many aspects of our elections are transparently broken. Through the machinations of entrenched partisanship, gerrymandering, and dark money, only 30 (~7%) of the 435 seats in the House remain competitive in 2024. It’s no wonder so many of us feel deprived of a voice in government. But it doesn’t need to be this way. Effective reforms are well-studied, and there’s a bold, practical toolkit available to help defeat our democratic demons. In many cases we can scrap electoral politics entirely while still advancing our sacred democratic experiment.
Moral, Legal, and Practical Imperatives to Restore the American Republic
By Nick Coccoma, Max Goodman, and Dr. Paul Zeitz of #unifyUSA.
American democracy is falling apart, a slow-motion car wreck we’ve been watching for years. But this crash wasn’t caused by an outside force. We’ve been run off the road by our own founding document: the U.S. Constitution. We know—sacrilege! Yet it must be said. And as legal scholar Rosa Brooks puts it, it’s our collective worship of the document that’s tying us down:
How did it happen that the United States, which was born in a moment of bloody revolution out of a conviction that every generation had the right to change its form of government, developed a culture that so many years later is weirdly hidebound when it comes to its form of government, reveres this piece of paper as if it had been handed by God out of a burning bush, and treats the Constitution as more or less sacred? Is it really such a good thing to have a document written almost 250 years ago still be viewed as binding us in some way? How would we feel if our neurosurgeon used the world’s oldest neurosurgery guide, or if NASA used the world’s oldest astronomical chart to plan space-shuttle flights?
She’s right. The Constitution’s like a Macintosh computer from 1984. Innovative when it first came out; painfully inadequate for the tasks of today. We’ve tried to keep it running with patches and workarounds, but there’s only so much you can do with outdated hardware.
Many people know this, yet they despair of making updates. Along with being the oldest on earth, the Constitution’s also the most difficult to change. Article V presents an absurdly high bar to clear. Since 1791, we’ve revised it only 17 times.
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.
Democracy and Its Discontents
The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?
Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Continue reading →
Reddit user “totalialogika” wrote the text below in the Reddit r/PoliticalScience forum. The commenters on that forum dismissed the text with various versions of “Sir, this is a political science sub. Please go rant somewhere else”. This raises the question of what makes a certain text a piece of “political science” as opposed to “a rant”. Is it merely that the style needs to conform to certain customs, or is there more to it than that?
Sortition might be the only way
We need to rely on Jury Duty rule to eliminate corrupt and sociopathic politicians, especially those who make a career out of their rhetoric.
And for those who claim “expertise” and “experts” are the only thing that can rule. It is expertise to pervert the rule of law and to promote special interests and experts versed in hollow promises and empty talk meant to address emotional and not rational responses from the denizens.
The degeneration of today’s political system in America is the symptom of how inadequate is an archaic system setup by a few million settlers at the 18th Century for the interests of a patriarchal racist and male dominated country, and now inadequate to serve the need of a 350 million people strong superpower. There were of course attempts at putting lipstick on the pig i.e Civil Rights reforms and more access for minorities and women, but those are as ineffectual and “for show”. Continue reading →
David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In a recent column he writes about sortition.
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing [a system with an element of sortition]. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
I think advocates of sortition should be pointing out the many ways it might be adapted to various different circumstances of our political life. This elides the more fundamental discussion of a preferred constitution, but rather naturalises the idea of sortition as part of the political repertoire. It shows its promise and versatility in helping to detox the current system.
Accordingly here’s something tweeted today —with the full text reproduced below the tweet.
People say an open convention would tear the Democrats apart.Yet again, the Dems are letting powerplays within their party determine their candidate. But Kamala is the Claudine Gay candidate. High DEI score, low on accomplishment, talent and charisma. Dems could get the right answer and unite their party — and the country using a variant of the way Venetians chose their officeholders and became the most stable polity in Europe for 500 years. An elective constitutional monarchy no less (like the US). I’d pick 50 Democrats and 50 American voters by lottery, have them meet, deliberate and each vote SECRETLY (like Venetian electors did). If you remove all the incentives to get the answer wrong, people usually get it RIGHT. Who knew?
The first step toward the application of sortition for the democratization of society is not to convince elites that sortition would be a good tool for them to use, as many academics seem to believe, but to disseminate the idea widely among the population, so that it becomes a live political possibility. For this to happen, the few who are aware of this idea need to tirelessly take advantage of every opportunity to advocate for sortition.
Chandre Dharmawardana and Phil Wilson are advocates for sortition (each in their own country and situation), whose writings have been citedhere before. Each of those has recently written again, demonstrating the spirit of consistent dedication to the cause of democracy.
In my opinion, a way around [the practical and theoretical problems with elections] is to abandon electoral methods and return to the method of SORTITION advocated by Aristotle and used in several Hellenic cities during the time of Pericles. Continue reading →
Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In 
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Equality by lot 