Hallam: The existing political system is taking us to hell

Posted on April 25, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Roger Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, writes:

This week in the Portuguese elections, the far right surged to 18% of the vote while the two main parties collapsed to around 25% each. This is now a pattern across western democracies. The collapse in support of the centre left and centre right and the rise of the populist left and right forces. At the moment, the momentum is with the radical right.

The conventional wisdom of the liberal political class, as shown in endless opinion articles, is that the centre right and left have to, in various unspecified ways, get their act together and stop the rise of the extremes. “Will Europe ever learn?”, one Guardian article writes. What does that actually mean apart from a vague appeal for people to be nice?

It is vague because there is, in fact, no effective structural response to the rise of the political outsiders. Both the centre right and centre left are ideologically committed to an international neo-liberal regime that systematically undermines the incomes and the identities of the majority. This international regime has also shown itself incapable of fulfilling its first political duty: to protect the lives and livelihoods of the people. The elites pouring more carbon in the air will now take us over 2C.
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Demiocracy, Chapter 19: Advantages of this army-of-Davids (multiple-Demi-legislature) arrangement

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

1. There would be less susceptibility to emotional proposals too motivated by fear or hope. Proxy electorates, which are specialized (expert on some topic), seasoned (from years of semi-monthly oversight sessions), and “select” (sifted upward through multiple ballotteries) at the state and national levels, would have more information, and would have acquired greater insight through discussion and debate. So they would more realistically assess what is possible (including adventurous proposals that just might work but affront conventional wisdom) and be less likely to divert down false trails and garden paths, and to ignore possible second-order effects. Their lesser credulity would insulate them from panics and propaganda. Their greater experience would simultaneously deliver aspiring politicians from the temptation to take advantage of their immaturity—of the virtual standing invitation that big-electorate, big-arena voters present to be played for Suckers. This inbuilt temptation of mass susceptibility eternally fuels the demonic dynamic—the co-dependent tragedy and farce—of DeMockery. (Its hidden “root,” to repeat, is its seemingly righteous, too-“wide,” electorate.)

2. Demiocracy’s decentralization would make a putsch more difficult, especially if it includes decentralization of the executive branch. (I.e., substantial independence of the executive departments from the chief executive, via PE-election of their heads.) Thus making tyranny less likely, a big concern of the Founders. Also insulating the government from a potty (barmy) POTUS. (“There is, of course, no such thing as a harmlessly mad emperor.” —Gore Vidal, Julian, Ch. 19.)

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Demiocracy, Chapter 5b: Three Long-Term Cases of sortition from a nominated sample, Like Demiocracy’s “Ballottery”

Posted on April 18, 2024 by Roger Knights

Amish Religious Practices

Amish ministers and deacons are selected by lot out of a group of men nominated by the congregation. They serve for life and have no formal training. Amish bishops are similarly chosen by lot from those selected as preachers. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_religious_practices.

The Amish employ something akin to what I call a ballottery to select ministers. The congregation (= the general public) nominates (= ballots for) those it considers worthy, and a lottery selects a minister from among those worthies. A second lottery (structurally similar to what I call a “stacked” ballottery) selects a bishop from those selected ministers.

It should be obvious that if those clerics were selected at random from the congregation, they would not perform as well as those drawn from a democratically pre-approved group, and that they would have less legitimacy because of that poorer performance, and of the mechanical way they had been chosen. These considerations of competence and legitimacy apply equally to the next two cases below.

It will be objected that these cases all have to do with the the choice of executive officeholders. But the importance of elevating competence and credibility still applies to deciding on the method of choosing legislators and electors, although incapacity among them would not be as blindingly obvious. Nevertheless, that is hardly a reason to prefer mediocrity, or accept it. Indeed, its subtler manifestation is an even stronger reason to guard against it.

PS, from Wikipedia:

(Note that the Greek word for “lot” (kleros) serves as the etymological root for English words like “cleric” and “clergy” as well as for “cleromancy”.)

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Trends in Theorizing Sortition

Posted on April 17, 2024 by peterstone

Delighted to see my new review essay (co-authored with Audrey Plan, one of our department’s former Ph.D. students) appear in print. The essay deals with recent theoretical work on sortition. You can check it out here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00208345241247492.

I should add that Yanina Welp, a friend of mine, is publishing shortly a similar paper in the same journal focused more on the empirical literature on sortition. Not sure when that will appear.

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Elective offices summon demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Phil Wilson, a retired mental health worker, makes a pretty good, as well as entertaining, case for sortition on Resilience.org. Some excerpts are below, but the entire piece is pretty well written.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Can Sortition Save Us From the Zombies of Extinction?

If, like me, you live in the brain consuming fog of American culture, you might never have heard of sortition. Randomly selected citizens rather than ruling class proxies will make the important decisions in a future society that chooses to employ sortition as its fundamental political philosophy.

We need sortition to replace the poisonous, deformed contraption that we bizarrely call democracy. Let me try to explain.

Any available elective office summons demons, fiends and gargoyles from the burning sewage pits of hell – things with eyes pulsating, greedy and murderous. We want to keep these monsters calmly interred beneath the soil, and that can only occur if voting is treated like small pox.

Look at the wreckage surrounding us. We voted for it.

Most people who seek power in any political system are mentally deformed and broken – these are the people we try not to marry or even sit near at the pub, but we elect them with barely a thought.

We can’t have anarchy – we need a way to gather benign bureaucrats and harmless functionaries. We have seats in congress, seats in the senate, chairpersons and committee seats, and there has to be a method, other than voting for batshit, flaming, spirits of death – chosen by corporate goons. We need to simply match chairs with rumps. Give us body snatchers – blind ones with big nets.
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Sortition, “a beacon for billions”

Posted on April 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A few days ago, the Portland Press Herald published a bold, “completely original” plan for city government, about which “political philosophers will be writing for millennia”. Sortition is an important part of this plan.

First, competitive elections will be abolished. No more “vote for me.” No more sloganeering. No more name recognition. Instead of popularity contests, members of every representative office in our city will be elected by sortition, or through a lottery system, with officials chosen at random for a term of one year. We will have 66 districts, each containing roughly 1,000 people. This will make our city a true government of the people. The mechanics of election-by-sortition are simple: An algorithm will randomly select a name from the city’s draft rolls.

Next, we are proposing a tricameral system of government: a 66-person Popular Assembly of Legislative Supremacy (“PALS”), a House of Landlords and Yeomanry (“HOLY”) and a three-person Supreme High-most Unlimited Council of Knowledge Systems (“SHUCKS Troika”). Our nine-person City Council will be gone. So will be our city manager. All three new branches have key roles, but the PALS shall be our chief lawmaking and deliberative body.

Sortition shall select the members of the 66-person PALS branch. The idea is simple: It could be you. PALS will be a raucous parliament made up of average citizens, all chosen at random.

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Demiocracy, Chapter 18—Special-topic Demi-legislatures

Posted on March 29, 2024 by Roger Knights

Walter Lippmann wrote a haunting paragraph, which I’ll paraphrase thusly: Man’s problems are complex. Man’s capacity is limited. So how is Man to master his problems? That is the conundrum of the age.

The answer (obviously—or not so obviously) is to cut Man’s problems down to manageable sizes and designate task groups to deal with each. Divide and conquer, in other words.

In governance, this cutting down implies topical specialization of the governing entity. In other words, it implies many (say two dozen) topic-focused mini-, or Demi-, legislatures at the state and national levels, corresponding to the existing congressional committees at those levels. For example, there would be a Demi-legislature for topics such as health, education, welfare, commerce, labor, transportation, communication, the environment, justice, the interior, etc. Specialized Proxy Electorates would oversee each specialized Demi Legislator.

This topic-specialized, semi-elected, long-serving, small-sized arrangement is not open to the criticisms below of a “citizens jury,” (which many sortition fans endorse), which is unspecialized, randomly selected, new-to-the-job (inexperienced), and blob-sized.

… the differences between a jury system and government by lottery are profound. A jury consists of only 12 people. These 12 are chosen rather carefully…. The questions they must decide are rather limited —generally only a single question of right or wrong in a specific instance, and within the framework of a well articulated, body of law and precedent—and in this decision they are guided by a judge, who explains carefully what they can and cannot consider…. This is qualitatively different from throwing hundreds of people randomly chosen into a room, with huge numbers of issues …. —Malcolm Margolin, quoted in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77-78.

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Demiocracy, Chapter 17: Initial adoption & procedural details

Posted on March 23, 2024 by Roger Knights

Experiments in oversight-only IVEs (i.e., IVEs that don’t elect legislators) of governmental bodies could start small, at the local level, and work upward, to the county, state, and national levels, if justified by prior success.

Then the power of electing a portion of the legislators under their supervision could be phased in, as experience warrants, and as voters approve, and IVEs would become PEs (Proxy Electorates).

Voters might be glad to delegate the election of certain low-level officeholders, like dogcatchers, sewer commissioners, and comptrollers to Proxy Electorates. Voters know little of their qualifications and characters—and don’t want to know. Let George Do It is their unspoken attitude.

New PE members would be given a crash course on their assigned topic, and on the rules and customs of being a Proxy Elector.

PEs would gather, usually online, at regular intervals (more frequently at high levels) to hear their officeholders—and their critics—speak, and to interrogate them. They would not gather only at election time.

In the intervals between these gatherings, Proxies would have a private cyberspace forum and a Zoom site in which they could converse among themselves about what had occurred at those gatherings.

A Secretariat’s personnel would preside at meetings, take minutes, schedule speakers, maintain a library, do background checks on candidates, provide orientation sessions for newcomers, etc.

Training would include inside-look “documentaries” of the deliberations of good-outcome PEs of the past, to serve as models for how to behave. There should also be documentaries about bad-outcome PEs, as object-lessons in what not to do.

The control of important political knowledge by leaders constitutes, of course, a very basic element in perpetuating power politics. —Robert J. Pranger, The Eclipse of Citizenship, 1968, p. 46.

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Demiocracy, Chapter 15: The Rest-of-the-World Level of Corruption and Misgovernment under DeMockery is Intolerable

Posted on March 11, 2024 by Roger Knights

Democracy is the paradise of which the unscrupulous financier dreams. —Georges Sorel.

Corruption is a heartbreaking problem, because it is so enervating, insidious, invisible, and seemingly intractable. There are regions and nations where it is so pervasive that they are halfway to being “mafia states”—Russia is one example, and Ukraine is (or was) another. The parasitic top dogs siphon off wealth and prosper at the expense of the poor and of the vitality of the economy, which wouldn’t be happening under a true, all-seeing Demiocracy—i.e., if the common man, or Everyman, were really in charge.

Africa is the worst victim. Gaining independence and a one-man, one-vote democracy did not make Africa free and self-governing. That is to say, independence did not usher in true democracy, but only DeMockery. It empowered the Political class and other Pathological P’s, not the common man. Members of the political class, there as everywhere, put their personal interest first, their party’s interest second, and the people’s interest third—a distant third. The kleptocrats prospered and misgoverned, leaving most Africans poor, despite the continent’s natural wealth.

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Galloway vs. the British duopoly

Posted on March 10, 2024 by Yoram Gat

George Galloway’s recent landslide win the UK was certainly a rejection of the British duopoly by the Rochdale voters. Despite his obvious loathing of the people put into power by the UK electoral system, and the policies they pursue, Galloway seems to still adhere to Van Reybrouk’s rule – “we despise elected officials, we venerate the elections” – and avoid offering a systemic change that would be more likely to promote different people and different policies.

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