Britain is no longer a democracy and democracy isn’t working

Posted on August 13, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Tim Flinn from Garvald in Scotland writes to the East Lothian Courier about sortition, and demonstrates the terminological confusion in which our society finds itself by asserting within the space a few sentences both that “[i]f a democracy is defined a ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people’ then Britain is no longer one”, and that “[d]emocracy isn’t working”.

Your interview with our MP was welcome and he emerged as a sincere and decent man.

I wish him the best, but guarantee that after five years of government, the main issues we have today will have barely been touched.

There will be several reasons for this but an important one is that our democracy is not fit for purpose – for starters, far more of us didn’t vote for Mr Alexander’s winning party than did.

That means his party has the underwhelming support of a minority of the citizens.
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Filed under: Athens, History, Juries, Press, Sortition | Leave a comment »

Dharmawardana and Wilson keep up the good work

Posted on July 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat

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 cited here before. Each of those has recently written again, demonstrating the spirit of consistent dedication to the cause of democracy.

Dharmawardana wrote in the Sri Lankan The Island:

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.
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Filed under: Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Demiocracy, Chapter 21: “Wide” mass electorates attract and empower Propaganda

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Roger Knights

Already weakened by the vast impersonal forces at work in the modern world, democratic institutions are now being undermined from within by politicians and their propagandists. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as if he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever learning the truth about anything. —Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958, VI.

We vote, indeed we perceive political reality, through the people with whom we are in contact. Most of us are reached by the mass media only in a two-step process, by way of other people’s perceptions and reactions to them. —Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation, 1967, p. 223.

… it has also become evident that if one acts ruthlessly …, cleverly organized propaganda can accomplish swift and drastic changes in opinions and attitudes, especially in difficult and critical situations; it can … also instill patently false ideas about actual conditions. — Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961.

Regarding one of those Pernicious P’s, Wikipedia says the following [2024-07-01] about the influential author Edward Bernays and his book, Propaganda (1928):

[Bernays] outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them [the masses] in desired ways. Bernays later synthesized many of these ideas in his postwar book, Public Relations (1945), which outlines the science of managing information released to the public by an organization, in a manner most advantageous to the organization.

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Monbiot has a change of heart on sortition

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Back in 2017, after a minor campaign of harassment, Guardian columnist George Monbiot weighed in on sortition. At the time his verdict was that the idea was nothing short of “a formula for disaster” and instead he offered his readers the usual electoral fixes such as campaign finance reforms, voter education and proportional representation. Well, seven years later, Monbiot has had a significant change of heart:

General elections are a travesty of democracy – let’s give the people a real voice

Our system is designed for the powerful to retain control. Participatory democracy and a lottery vote are just two ways to gain real representation

[G]eneral elections such as the one we now face could be seen as the opposite of democracy. But, as with so many aspects of public life, entirely different concepts have been hopelessly confused. Elections are not democracy and democracy is not elections.
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Filed under: Sortition, House of Lords, Elections, History, Books, Press | Tagged: , , , , | 7 Comments »

Make believe participation

Posted on April 28, 2024 by Yoram Gat

The French discussion of “participative democracy” has recently produced several texts expressing suspicion of the way “participative devices” are being used by government to produce supposedly democratic outcomes.

Guillaume Gourgues writes in la vie des idées:

By setting up citizen consultations that it selects and organizes itself, the State sidesteps democratic procedures and institutions. There is the risk of a gradual drift towards a form of “participatory authoritarianism”.

On March 22, 2023, as he began his speech in the face of protests over pension reform, Emmanuel Macron defended the legitimacy of his reform by affirming that it followed a “democratic path” which began with “months of consultation”.

The claim of having followed a “democratic path” by the President, punctuated by regular reminders of “consultation” and “participation” mechanisms, is perplexing, as the political conduct of pension reform is obviously marked by the choice to reduce democratic debate to its strict minimum.

[This choice is highlighted when,] in the shadow of the pension reform, the citizens’ convention on the end of life, convened by the government, delivered its final opinion on April 2, 2023, after three months of deliberation.

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Filed under: Academia, Books, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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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Filed under: Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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.

Filed under: Elections, Fiction, Press, Proposals, Sortition | 4 Comments »

Dymond: Citizens’ assemblies, a choreographed charade

Posted on April 1, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Gillian Dymond writes in The Conservative Woman:

AN article in the online publication Civil Service World last February announced that former civil servant Sue Gray is working with Labour on plans to introduce citizens’ assemblies should the party, as is likely, win the next election. These assemblies are very much in vogue, with recent examples having allegedly helped secure ‘yes’ votes for abortion and gay marriage in the Irish Republic. The less enthusiastic amongst us, however, might conclude that they are just another charade to be played out within the parameters of permitted debate, with a view to ensuring, in the words of Nick Cohen back in 1999, that ‘the public can only want what the public gets’.

Choice of subject matter is only one of the many ways in which citizens’ assemblies may be subverted and controlled.

How, for instance, are the questions put to participants chosen, and what are the implications of the wording in which they are framed?
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 6 Comments »

Irish citizen assembly process terminates in rejection by referendum

Posted on March 23, 2024 by Yoram Gat

A referendum in Ireland on March 8 resulted in a “no” vote for constitutional changes. The rejected proposals were the product of a process involving an allotted citizen assembly. An article by Rory Carroll in the The Guardian offers an illuminating review of the aftermath of the failure of the proposed changes at the polls.

Irish referendum fiasco puts future of lauded citizens’ assemblies in doubt

Debates involving 99 randomly selected people were hailed as a model for the world, but some say faith has been eroded

When Ireland shattered its history of social conservatism by passing a 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage and a 2018 referendum on abortion, progressives credited its citizens’ assembly.

Ninety-nine randomly selected people, who are brought together to debate a specific issue, had weighed evidence from experts and issued policy recommendations that emboldened the political establishment, and voters, to make audacious leaps.

Governments and campaigners around the world hailed Ireland as a model for how to tackle divisive issues and a modern incarnation of the concept of deliberative democracy that dated back to ancient Athens.
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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 21 Comments »

Heiress is letting 50 strangers give her €25 million fortune away

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Fortune tells the story of Marlene Engelhorn who is busy dispensing with €25 million which she inherited.

Engelhorn settled on an idea: Let 50 strangers decide how to give it away.

Those strangers, all of whom live in Engelhorn’s native Austria, will meet for the first time this weekend at a hotel in Salzburg. Dubbed the Guter Rat, or Good Council, they were chosen through a statistical process run by research group Foresight and range in location, age, race, socioeconomic background and other demographic factors chosen in an effort to be representative of the overall Austrian population.

Engelhorn’s goal is not only to give away €25 million, but also to spark conversations on wealth inequality. She’s frustrated that her windfall wasn’t taxed — Austria eliminated its inheritance tax in 2008 — and doesn’t see traditional philanthropy as a good solution because it still gives her too much power.

“I’m just one brain, I’m just one person and so to me, this is a huge relief knowing that the process of redistribution is much more legitimate and thorough and democratic than I could ever do it,” she said in an interview. “Nobody needs another foundation.”

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Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

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