this is the new sortition thread
August 21, 2023 8:21 AM Subscribe
Me, I'm all for the Chaos Supreme Court.
posted by potrzebie at 8:26 AM on August 21, 2023 [12 favorites]
posted by potrzebie at 8:26 AM on August 21, 2023 [12 favorites]
from the article:
In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.
okay, I'm in.
posted by philip-random at 8:30 AM on August 21, 2023 [28 favorites]
In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.
okay, I'm in.
posted by philip-random at 8:30 AM on August 21, 2023 [28 favorites]
More female and minority representation. Check.
Could phase this in, starting with one chamber of Congress. See how it goes.
posted by 3.2.3 at 8:34 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Could phase this in, starting with one chamber of Congress. See how it goes.
posted by 3.2.3 at 8:34 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
"Literacy tests" have often been used as a way to deny the vote to people you don't want to vote. For example, there's this one, which is literally impossible to answer correctly. It seems very likely that the civics test would be used as a tool to systematically ensure that only certain people became government representatives.
posted by rednikki at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [64 favorites]
posted by rednikki at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [64 favorites]
The article shows a few examples of a very specific kind of sortition: selection of leadership from among interested/qualified participants.
But that leads to the next question: for making actual law and policy (rather than the consultative models in the example), who decides who is qualified to participate in the sortition/jury pool?
Interestingly enough my opinion of reform within at least US democracy that could make a huge impact is to require candidates to pass the citizenship exam. It would weed out a lot of MTG/Trump/Sarah Palin types. But there's a downside of that as well because we'd end up with more Ted Cruzes and Josh Hawleys.
posted by tclark at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
But that leads to the next question: for making actual law and policy (rather than the consultative models in the example), who decides who is qualified to participate in the sortition/jury pool?
Interestingly enough my opinion of reform within at least US democracy that could make a huge impact is to require candidates to pass the citizenship exam. It would weed out a lot of MTG/Trump/Sarah Palin types. But there's a downside of that as well because we'd end up with more Ted Cruzes and Josh Hawleys.
posted by tclark at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
> They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.
could anyone who's read constitution of the athenians more recently than i have confirm this? seems counter to the "if you're a citizen who doesn't participate in the governance of the polis you are in major trubs" vibe of the rest of the system. was this some kinda adulthood competency exam?
also fwiw strategoi (high military leaders) were generally elected rather than selected, as expertise was deemed more important than democracy in that particular case.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023
could anyone who's read constitution of the athenians more recently than i have confirm this? seems counter to the "if you're a citizen who doesn't participate in the governance of the polis you are in major trubs" vibe of the rest of the system. was this some kinda adulthood competency exam?
also fwiw strategoi (high military leaders) were generally elected rather than selected, as expertise was deemed more important than democracy in that particular case.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:35 AM on August 21, 2023
Let it trigger an IRS audit beforehand and allow the grifters to gracefully exclude themselves.
posted by Brian B. at 8:37 AM on August 21, 2023 [17 favorites]
posted by Brian B. at 8:37 AM on August 21, 2023 [17 favorites]
They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties.
Not 100% sure what he's referring to here. Certainly not anything like a modern-day civics test. If he's talking about the dokimasia, that was a question of parentage (and physical capacity to fight), not competence, and I am casting a stern side-eye on anyone who would confound the two. Either he believes they're the same thing, which is eugenicist, or he didn't read past the first sentence of the Wikipedia article, which means he is too dumb to be published in the NYT.
posted by praemunire at 8:37 AM on August 21, 2023 [21 favorites]
Not 100% sure what he's referring to here. Certainly not anything like a modern-day civics test. If he's talking about the dokimasia, that was a question of parentage (and physical capacity to fight), not competence, and I am casting a stern side-eye on anyone who would confound the two. Either he believes they're the same thing, which is eugenicist, or he didn't read past the first sentence of the Wikipedia article, which means he is too dumb to be published in the NYT.
posted by praemunire at 8:37 AM on August 21, 2023 [21 favorites]
oh good, i was in fact justified being all "*eyebrow*?" when it got to that part.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
People would have to serve incognito, though, otherwise there would instantly be fountains of money / promises of money / threats against self or family going to these people in order to sway their votes. (Yes that happens now but if getting in the people's polity is possibly a lottery win then i suspect things will be even more fucked up than they are now.)
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
my immediate impression on some of the push back here is not that it's incorrect but that in pointing out imperfections, it's stumbling past the elephant in the room which is just how imperfect the status quo is, in particular how it seems play toward (and quoting the article now) ...
The most dangerous traits in a leader are what psychologists call the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. What these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain. People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious — they’re attracted to authority for its own sake
posted by philip-random at 8:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [11 favorites]
The most dangerous traits in a leader are what psychologists call the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. What these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain. People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious — they’re attracted to authority for its own sake
posted by philip-random at 8:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [11 favorites]
I do think the Chaos President would immediately be swarmed with people trying to influence their decisions through money and other things. That's the case today, for sure, but the selection process for President generally sorts for people who will be in line with the Party and its goals (even Trump was a party man in the end). If I was Chaos President and Elon Musk offered me unlimited riches to do X? I'd like to think I'd tell him to get fucked, but then again, I am but a weak and fallen human.
posted by dis_integration at 8:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by dis_integration at 8:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
I've been following @openbookshelf on TikTok (she also has a gorgeously put together Instagram account) and she's been talking a lot about how elections /= democracy and can (and are by many regimes) used to prop up authoritarian systems by giving them a veneer of integrity.
I really really like the idea of sortition. Is there a form of it that could work in our times? I have no idea how one would even start to move in that direction. But our current democratic systems are sliding into authoritarianism despite the "checks and balances" we were promised being there.
posted by eekernohan at 8:45 AM on August 21, 2023
I really really like the idea of sortition. Is there a form of it that could work in our times? I have no idea how one would even start to move in that direction. But our current democratic systems are sliding into authoritarianism despite the "checks and balances" we were promised being there.
posted by eekernohan at 8:45 AM on August 21, 2023
and I am casting a stern side-eye on anyone who would confound the two
Adam Grant is big into pop psychology... so not to be taken as an expert on anything other than getting attention. Am I still a sucker for pop psychology? Yes. But all to be taken with a grain of salt.
posted by eekernohan at 8:48 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
Adam Grant is big into pop psychology... so not to be taken as an expert on anything other than getting attention. Am I still a sucker for pop psychology? Yes. But all to be taken with a grain of salt.
posted by eekernohan at 8:48 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
I really really like the idea of sortition. Is there a form of it that could work in our times? I have no idea how one would even start to move in that direction.
I imagine it would start very small.
I recently spent some years in and around a strata that, in theory, had an elected board whose responsibility was to make sure bylaws were adhered to etc. Except in practice, it was an ordeal just getting people to run for election, so what generally ended up happening was people took turns, a year or two on the board, a few years off, with new members almost immediately being on the board. So what you pretty much didn't get was anyone with an agenda beyond just keeping things on the rails. It was a "democracy" that tended to work quite well.
posted by philip-random at 8:54 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
I imagine it would start very small.
I recently spent some years in and around a strata that, in theory, had an elected board whose responsibility was to make sure bylaws were adhered to etc. Except in practice, it was an ordeal just getting people to run for election, so what generally ended up happening was people took turns, a year or two on the board, a few years off, with new members almost immediately being on the board. So what you pretty much didn't get was anyone with an agenda beyond just keeping things on the rails. It was a "democracy" that tended to work quite well.
posted by philip-random at 8:54 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
The idea of randomly-selected representatives is a stupid person's idea of a smart policy wonkery.
> When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
Ye gods, this is so naive that I don't believe it's made in good faith for one second. As if it was any individual wouldn't be open to corruption when given this power. The real solution is transparency, auditing, and flat denials when there's a conflict of interest. But those are systemic fixes, which the ruling class hates. They'd much rather float (once again using NYT as a platform) a Nazi-friendly suggestion like "how about we get rid of elections?"
We already know what the problems with U.S. elections are: undocumented and unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires, and massive voter suppression of minorities and the working class who vote liberal. And yet instead of tackling those issues, we get these pretend fascists floating the idea of abandoning democracy.
Spoiler alert: Whether 4chan or Trump-supporters, it always turns out they aren't pretending.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:55 AM on August 21, 2023 [42 favorites]
> When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
Ye gods, this is so naive that I don't believe it's made in good faith for one second. As if it was any individual wouldn't be open to corruption when given this power. The real solution is transparency, auditing, and flat denials when there's a conflict of interest. But those are systemic fixes, which the ruling class hates. They'd much rather float (once again using NYT as a platform) a Nazi-friendly suggestion like "how about we get rid of elections?"
We already know what the problems with U.S. elections are: undocumented and unlimited spending by corporations and billionaires, and massive voter suppression of minorities and the working class who vote liberal. And yet instead of tackling those issues, we get these pretend fascists floating the idea of abandoning democracy.
Spoiler alert: Whether 4chan or Trump-supporters, it always turns out they aren't pretending.
posted by AlSweigart at 8:55 AM on August 21, 2023 [42 favorites]
You know, for once it would be nice if defenders of sortition would acknowledge that the Athenian polity by its definition excluded 90 percent of the Attic population. Or that the red rope was A Thing, showing that even with the whole "a proper citizen is expected to engage in public service" ideal, the reality was that they still had to resort to the stick.
Beyond that, a lot of the "points" in the piece show a lack of understanding of what's happening with American politics. American elections are ridiculously expensive because an illegitimate Supreme Court ruling in violation of basic judicial ethics held that we're not allowed to put constraints on campaign finance, as we're having the First Amendment turned into a suicide pact. Trust in government is at an all time low because we have had a decades long propaganda campaign telling people that they shouldn't trust the government. Of course William Buckley had contempt for Congress, because he he didn't believe he should be ruled. Jury duty is incredibly problematic for people to serve, as few people can put their lives on hold for the duration of a trial, especially when employers aren't held accountable for letting them serve.
Not to mention that sortition would have its own issues as well, like the shifting of the locus of institutional knowledge out of the institution (something that is incredibly problematic as we saw in California), as well as the impact on people selected to serve (are you going to allow people to decline? What will rules for divestment be? Will you make sure selectees have jobs to go back to?)
If it sounds like I'm repeating myself, it's because none of this shit ever gets answered by sortition proponents, which illustrates a lack of seriousness on their part.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:58 AM on August 21, 2023 [16 favorites]
Beyond that, a lot of the "points" in the piece show a lack of understanding of what's happening with American politics. American elections are ridiculously expensive because an illegitimate Supreme Court ruling in violation of basic judicial ethics held that we're not allowed to put constraints on campaign finance, as we're having the First Amendment turned into a suicide pact. Trust in government is at an all time low because we have had a decades long propaganda campaign telling people that they shouldn't trust the government. Of course William Buckley had contempt for Congress, because he he didn't believe he should be ruled. Jury duty is incredibly problematic for people to serve, as few people can put their lives on hold for the duration of a trial, especially when employers aren't held accountable for letting them serve.
Not to mention that sortition would have its own issues as well, like the shifting of the locus of institutional knowledge out of the institution (something that is incredibly problematic as we saw in California), as well as the impact on people selected to serve (are you going to allow people to decline? What will rules for divestment be? Will you make sure selectees have jobs to go back to?)
If it sounds like I'm repeating myself, it's because none of this shit ever gets answered by sortition proponents, which illustrates a lack of seriousness on their part.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:58 AM on August 21, 2023 [16 favorites]
oh good, i was in fact justified being all "*eyebrow*?" when it got to that part.
Yep. I'd like to think any reasonably critically-minded person would look at a high-level claim like "They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties," note the failure to connect that with any specifics that might connect to competence for the modern equivalent of political service, and raise their brow a little. But apparently that is too much to ask of someone publishing an editorial in the New York Times.
posted by praemunire at 9:01 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Yep. I'd like to think any reasonably critically-minded person would look at a high-level claim like "They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties," note the failure to connect that with any specifics that might connect to competence for the modern equivalent of political service, and raise their brow a little. But apparently that is too much to ask of someone publishing an editorial in the New York Times.
posted by praemunire at 9:01 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Step 1. Deliberately make the current system as unproductive, unreasonable, and as shitty as possible.
Step 2. Wait for political tastemakers to declare that democracy "doesn't work". Invite open discussion about replacing it with something else.
Step 3. ??????
Step 4. Profit!
Congratulations NYT for doing your part to advance step 2.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [20 favorites]
Step 2. Wait for political tastemakers to declare that democracy "doesn't work". Invite open discussion about replacing it with something else.
Step 3. ??????
Step 4. Profit!
Congratulations NYT for doing your part to advance step 2.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [20 favorites]
So what you pretty much didn't get was anyone with an agenda beyond just keeping things on the rails.
So, in short you got a system that selected for proponents of the status quo. This is not a good thing.
can (and are by many regimes) used to prop up authoritarian systems by giving them a veneer of integrity.
Authoritarians using elections as a fig leaf says nothing about the legitimacy of elections, as authoritarians will corrupt anything to legitimize their rule.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
So, in short you got a system that selected for proponents of the status quo. This is not a good thing.
can (and are by many regimes) used to prop up authoritarian systems by giving them a veneer of integrity.
Authoritarians using elections as a fig leaf says nothing about the legitimacy of elections, as authoritarians will corrupt anything to legitimize their rule.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
As for literacy tests, let me tell you a story...
In college, my roommate was lamenting how all these stupid unwashed proles were voting all wrong, and that there should be some sort of test or qualification to vote. "Like having a college degree, or something like that."
I wasn't quick witted enough at the time to point out that HE WAS IN COLLEGE. He didn't have his college degree yet. He was of voting age and likely had voted in elections, but arguing that he himself wasn't "smart enough" to vote.
And the reason he was oblivious to his error was because, naturally, he thought of himself as the type of person who should be allowed to vote. (Like how all eugenicists naturally think that, no matter the measure, the ideal cutoff should be somewhere below them, of course.) The actual qualification or exam is unimportant, only that it results in the "right people" voting and the "wrong people" not having a vote.
You get bonus points if you predicted that he was an engineering major who was ignorant about the racist history of literacy tests, whose sole purpose was to keep Blacks and immigrants from voting. (White people were exempt from these tests due to grandfathering or some other contrived reason. It doesn't matter.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:05 AM on August 21, 2023 [20 favorites]
In college, my roommate was lamenting how all these stupid unwashed proles were voting all wrong, and that there should be some sort of test or qualification to vote. "Like having a college degree, or something like that."
I wasn't quick witted enough at the time to point out that HE WAS IN COLLEGE. He didn't have his college degree yet. He was of voting age and likely had voted in elections, but arguing that he himself wasn't "smart enough" to vote.
And the reason he was oblivious to his error was because, naturally, he thought of himself as the type of person who should be allowed to vote. (Like how all eugenicists naturally think that, no matter the measure, the ideal cutoff should be somewhere below them, of course.) The actual qualification or exam is unimportant, only that it results in the "right people" voting and the "wrong people" not having a vote.
You get bonus points if you predicted that he was an engineering major who was ignorant about the racist history of literacy tests, whose sole purpose was to keep Blacks and immigrants from voting. (White people were exempt from these tests due to grandfathering or some other contrived reason. It doesn't matter.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:05 AM on August 21, 2023 [20 favorites]
I have no idea how one would even start to move in that direction.
It could begin by filling existing committees by choosing qualified people from a pool of candidates, especially civil servants or academics who meet the criteria. From there, they could elect reps to act as an executive board that doesn't disband itself each time. The problem with this is that it doesn't sound like public participation, but in fact it is, just not instantly so, because the careerists are public assets with declared interest and competency that rose up, not some golf buddy appointee. Otherwise it will devolve to become a factional strife based on baggage people bring with them. We don't need to copy the mistake to get the idea right.
posted by Brian B. at 9:07 AM on August 21, 2023
It could begin by filling existing committees by choosing qualified people from a pool of candidates, especially civil servants or academics who meet the criteria. From there, they could elect reps to act as an executive board that doesn't disband itself each time. The problem with this is that it doesn't sound like public participation, but in fact it is, just not instantly so, because the careerists are public assets with declared interest and competency that rose up, not some golf buddy appointee. Otherwise it will devolve to become a factional strife based on baggage people bring with them. We don't need to copy the mistake to get the idea right.
posted by Brian B. at 9:07 AM on August 21, 2023
the Chaos Congress where everyone is selected by lottery every 2 years would pretty funI always thought this would be an improvement for the Canadian Senate. It's intended to be a check on the power of the house of commons, as the senate has the power to block legislation, but not to introduce it.
Forcing the house to produce decisions understandable by a pool of randomly selected Canadians might have some benefits.
posted by TheHuntForBlueMonday at 9:08 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
like the shifting of the locus of institutional knowledge out of the institution (something that is incredibly problematic as we saw in California),
I'm not clear on what happened in California but in general, my understanding of most functional democracies is that the popularly elected individuals work with un-elected professional public servants who have that institutional expertise, who effectively represent "the system" (not always a bad word -- we just don't notice it when it's functioning okay).
So, in short you got a system that selected for proponents of the status quo. This is not a good thing.
sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. As I just pointed out, we tend not to notice when the status quo is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
In the case of that particular strata, the previous status quo (ie: previous to my involvement) was more or less the developer's vision, which was full of flaws. For a while, he'd fixed things so that he always managed to have at least a veto for anything that may have threatened his interests. But then he got a little old, forgot to do some coaxing and cajoling and eventually, he lost his "unfair advantage" ... which basically meant a number of his pet bylaws got voted out and things fell back to mostly running on the boiler plate of the strata act.
Last I looked (I'm not at all involved anymore) nobody was one hundred percent happy but neither was anyone threatening legal action or otherwise declaring war. Democracy in action ...
posted by philip-random at 9:12 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm not clear on what happened in California but in general, my understanding of most functional democracies is that the popularly elected individuals work with un-elected professional public servants who have that institutional expertise, who effectively represent "the system" (not always a bad word -- we just don't notice it when it's functioning okay).
So, in short you got a system that selected for proponents of the status quo. This is not a good thing.
sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. As I just pointed out, we tend not to notice when the status quo is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
In the case of that particular strata, the previous status quo (ie: previous to my involvement) was more or less the developer's vision, which was full of flaws. For a while, he'd fixed things so that he always managed to have at least a veto for anything that may have threatened his interests. But then he got a little old, forgot to do some coaxing and cajoling and eventually, he lost his "unfair advantage" ... which basically meant a number of his pet bylaws got voted out and things fell back to mostly running on the boiler plate of the strata act.
Last I looked (I'm not at all involved anymore) nobody was one hundred percent happy but neither was anyone threatening legal action or otherwise declaring war. Democracy in action ...
posted by philip-random at 9:12 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
I am not reading TFA, after seeing that bit about "how about if we used literacy tests to see if people are smart enough to vote?" I mean, FFS, the historical literacy of that suggestion is all the evidence I need to see that TFA would be a waste of a few of the remaining minutes of my life.
I mean yes, in classical political analysis, elections are a tool of oligarchy, not of democracy. And the trick of just assigning people to office by lot is the most democratic method of all. But it runs into problems of scale and prerequisite knowledge in an industrialized society with millions of citizens. Amateur government does not actually work when things get that big and complicated.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:13 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
I mean yes, in classical political analysis, elections are a tool of oligarchy, not of democracy. And the trick of just assigning people to office by lot is the most democratic method of all. But it runs into problems of scale and prerequisite knowledge in an industrialized society with millions of citizens. Amateur government does not actually work when things get that big and complicated.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:13 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
It could begin by filling existing committees by choosing qualified people from a pool of candidates, especially civil servants or academics who meet the criteria.
Somehow, excluding the public doesn't strike me as public participation. Also, if you think academics and experts are immune to "factional strife" (which is itself a bullshit term given that factions (and their conflicts) exist for reasons), then you've never looked hard at academia.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Somehow, excluding the public doesn't strike me as public participation. Also, if you think academics and experts are immune to "factional strife" (which is itself a bullshit term given that factions (and their conflicts) exist for reasons), then you've never looked hard at academia.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Cool. A psychologist who didn’t dare to read any actual research on a topic outside his narrow fields. There’s a wealth of evidence from actual political research on the comparative effect of democracy and elections (yes elections are a part of democracy). Why bother to read that tho when you’re just into generating clicks.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
Also, if you think academics and experts are immune to "factional strife"
Strife over a policy is better, even welcome, than strife over church dogma. Random helps here, not hurts.
posted by Brian B. at 9:16 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Strife over a policy is better, even welcome, than strife over church dogma. Random helps here, not hurts.
posted by Brian B. at 9:16 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm not clear on what happened in California
The institution of restrictive term limits caused the locus of institutional knowledge for the California Legislature to shift to lobbyists, as "senior leadership" ceased to exist.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
The institution of restrictive term limits caused the locus of institutional knowledge for the California Legislature to shift to lobbyists, as "senior leadership" ceased to exist.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
I am not reading TFA, after seeing that bit about "how about if we used literacy tests to see if people are smart enough to vote?" I mean, FFS, the historical literacy of that suggestion is all the evidence I need to see that TFA would be a waste of a few of the remaining minutes of my life.
but what if, as stated in the article, it was a civics test -- effectively the existing citizenship test?
posted by philip-random at 9:18 AM on August 21, 2023
but what if, as stated in the article, it was a civics test -- effectively the existing citizenship test?
Which were also used to deny minorities sufferage.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:20 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
Which were also used to deny minorities sufferage.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:20 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
The appeal of sortition is that people generally imagine it will pick people like them, who will use common sense and act in good faith. Imagine it's people like 500 random Twitter accounts and it gets less appealing. In any event, the problem with the country is 40% is at least fascist curious and don't accept other Americans as members of the same polity. People get frustrated with this and seek to change the form of government, but the problem will remain.
This particular article has some added bonus of arguments that read like a great parody of historical reasoning, in addition to implying the Greeks did standardized testing:
I'm assuming the other non-historical references are deployed in a similarly sloppy way. Certainly all the examples he gave of existing sortition seem to be advisory councils, not decision makers and leaders.
posted by mark k at 9:24 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
This particular article has some added bonus of arguments that read like a great parody of historical reasoning, in addition to implying the Greeks did standardized testing:
If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortitionNote this would work well as justification for "keeping slaves" or "denying women the vote" or "highly restrictive citizenship."
Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring. In a world filled with divisiveness and derisionAs if the period Lincoln actually ran in lacked "divisiveness" and "derision." A period of comity and goodwill!
I'm assuming the other non-historical references are deployed in a similarly sloppy way. Certainly all the examples he gave of existing sortition seem to be advisory councils, not decision makers and leaders.
posted by mark k at 9:24 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
The guy who said, "I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director." was clearly a huge narcissist, yet I think President Obama did a pretty good job.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:39 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
Imagine being tenured at Wharton before you’re 30 and then spending your life writing this stuff.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:46 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 9:46 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
We are doing sortition already, in one area, which is choosing juries. We trust juries to pay attention, be impartial, and make good decisions. By and large, they do, in a system that has worked pretty well for hundreds of years. (With exceptions, like all-white juries in the segregated South, which prove the rule, as they were not juries of one's peers.) Based on the performance of the jury system, I'd be willing to try something similar for my town council, which is called the Selectboard here in New England. Then we could work our way up to the state legislature, etc.
posted by beagle at 9:56 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by beagle at 9:56 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
As if the period Lincoln actually ran in lacked "divisiveness" and "derision." A period of comity and goodwill!
That part actually made me gasp. As if we didn't all know how things ended for Lincoln.
This whole thing read to me like a high school essay, and not even a good one.
posted by vacapinta at 10:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
That part actually made me gasp. As if we didn't all know how things ended for Lincoln.
This whole thing read to me like a high school essay, and not even a good one.
posted by vacapinta at 10:03 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Making a binary decision (guilty/not guilty) that is enriched in the constitution is worlds away from governing.
All this sounds like popular support for term limits: an idea that’s appealing when you think about it for 5 minutes, but any scrutiny reveals how dumb it is.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:06 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
All this sounds like popular support for term limits: an idea that’s appealing when you think about it for 5 minutes, but any scrutiny reveals how dumb it is.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:06 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
Men would rather [throw away democracy] than [get rid of dark money groups and voter suppression].
posted by AlSweigart at 10:10 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by AlSweigart at 10:10 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
If you are wishing for things, why not just cut to the chase and wish that all public officials be wise and just and incorruptible morally upright people who would never oppress their fellow citizens, or use the power of the State to exploit them?I am not reading TFA, after seeing that bit about "how about if we used literacy tests to see if people are smart enough to vote?" I mean, FFS, the historical literacy of that suggestion is all the evidence I need to see that TFA would be a waste of a few of the remaining minutes of my life.but what if, as stated in the article, it was a civics test -- effectively the existing citizenship test?
Because in America, that "civics test" would be designed and administered in such a way as to function as a Jim Crow voter suppression tool. I mean consider capital punishment. You might agree in the abstract that there might be situations where it's morally defensible and justifiable for the State to kill its citizens, but if you are a person of good faith who is reasonable acquainted with reality, you cannot argue that America is wise enough or good enough to use capital punishment that way, and will in fact always use it to oppress out-groups while letting white people skate (in comparison) with prison terms.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 10:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think sortition, like anarchy, is most useful as a foil against the idea that there simply is no alternative to our current form of electoral democracy and that therefore we should accept the status quo (and all its corruption and inequality) as the best of all possible worlds.
posted by Pyry at 10:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Pyry at 10:14 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Every month or whatever I get an email from some activist group that I like, urging me to contact my representatives to vote for or against (almost always against) some bill. I usually do so. This is hilariously inefficient: they email me, I email my representative, their staffer counts up the emails for and against, then they ignore them because they are Democrats in Brooklyn. My house member, Yvette Clarke, doesn't even let me fill in her form, despite my years of complaining, because my zip code is only partly in her district and she knows she will get reelected no matter what. I have to call every time.
Anyway, what I want to do is cut out a bunch of steps. Just let me delegate the ACLU to vote for me on free speech issues, and the EFF on tech policy, and NARAL on abortion and so forth. Yes, you need some conflict management protocol, and yes you need some way to do the actual drafting. And of course if I want to, I ought to be able to override or change my delegation at any time. But this would be better than what we have because it would allow for more people to weigh in without having to spend the time to become experts and track every bill. And it would be better than sortition because it would allow people who know that they are not qualified to make decisions to not feel forced to serve in order to see their policy preferences enacted.
It's called liquid democracy, and I would like to see it more broadly adopted.
posted by novalis_dt at 10:16 AM on August 21, 2023 [11 favorites]
Anyway, what I want to do is cut out a bunch of steps. Just let me delegate the ACLU to vote for me on free speech issues, and the EFF on tech policy, and NARAL on abortion and so forth. Yes, you need some conflict management protocol, and yes you need some way to do the actual drafting. And of course if I want to, I ought to be able to override or change my delegation at any time. But this would be better than what we have because it would allow for more people to weigh in without having to spend the time to become experts and track every bill. And it would be better than sortition because it would allow people who know that they are not qualified to make decisions to not feel forced to serve in order to see their policy preferences enacted.
It's called liquid democracy, and I would like to see it more broadly adopted.
posted by novalis_dt at 10:16 AM on August 21, 2023 [11 favorites]
philip-random: we tend not to notice when the status quo is actually doing what it's supposed to do.
I can't find f_cking tickets or even a guide where they're f_cking playing, so I'd hope Sortition can put together a commission to prove that Status Quo are doing what they're f_cking supposed to do: rocking all over the world.
Daft jokes aside, I'd offer my services as an advisor grifting the willing sortitioners, sure, unless they were on the hook for the losses they cause and then I'd think that the cost of taking responsibility might be paid up.
posted by k3ninho at 10:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I can't find f_cking tickets or even a guide where they're f_cking playing, so I'd hope Sortition can put together a commission to prove that Status Quo are doing what they're f_cking supposed to do: rocking all over the world.
Daft jokes aside, I'd offer my services as an advisor grifting the willing sortitioners, sure, unless they were on the hook for the losses they cause and then I'd think that the cost of taking responsibility might be paid up.
posted by k3ninho at 10:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
> Because in America, that "civics test" would be designed and administered in such a way as to function as a Jim Crow voter suppression tool.
Exactly. Earnestly proposing literacy tests is as naive as saying "What if we did eugenics and forced sterilization, but the right way? Not like, you know, the way the Nazis did."
posted by AlSweigart at 10:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
Exactly. Earnestly proposing literacy tests is as naive as saying "What if we did eugenics and forced sterilization, but the right way? Not like, you know, the way the Nazis did."
posted by AlSweigart at 10:17 AM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
I'm immediately suspicious of anyone who identifies themselves as "Dr." so-and-so outside of a medical or academic setting. I've known and worked with lots of people with PhDs in business settings and the only ones who insisted on being called "Dr." were insufferable windbags high on their own supply. No one exemplifies this more than "Dr. Jordan Peterson" or "Dr. Oz"
posted by treepour at 10:18 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by treepour at 10:18 AM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
We are doing sortition already, in one area, which is choosing juries.
And jury duty illustrates the issues with sortition. For one, it turns out that that jury duty is, for many Americans, a significant burden that they cannot undertake - for some, it's the financial burden as jury stipends are often meager and employers often will not pay for hourly workers to serve, for others the issue is being unable to work around their duties as caretakers. The result is what should be random choice ceases to be as the pool selects for those who can serve which winds up being biased towards wealthy, older, and male. There's also they reality (as we just got to see recently) that jury duty can wind up placing jurors in the spotlight, potentially endangering them. There's also the fact that selected juries can also be swung by the media, as we saw with the Depp/Heard trial. For these reasons and more, there is a growing argument for professional juries.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
And jury duty illustrates the issues with sortition. For one, it turns out that that jury duty is, for many Americans, a significant burden that they cannot undertake - for some, it's the financial burden as jury stipends are often meager and employers often will not pay for hourly workers to serve, for others the issue is being unable to work around their duties as caretakers. The result is what should be random choice ceases to be as the pool selects for those who can serve which winds up being biased towards wealthy, older, and male. There's also they reality (as we just got to see recently) that jury duty can wind up placing jurors in the spotlight, potentially endangering them. There's also the fact that selected juries can also be swung by the media, as we saw with the Depp/Heard trial. For these reasons and more, there is a growing argument for professional juries.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:20 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
Yeah this feels direly under-thought and under-researched, but it's also giving me a lot of scattered thoughts, so...
I feel like there could be a place for sortition at local levels. School boards, HOAs, and other places that tend to attract tin-pot dictators with axes to grind... I think this system could work wonders in that kind of setting. As has been mentioned numerous times above, it's the sort of system that, for all of its seeming chaos, would tend towards maintaining the status quo, which isn't ideal of course, but diluting the power of the axe-grinders could be worthwhile there.
In theory, of course, one can imagine a Civil Service Exam that could be administered without prejudice for higher levels of office, but in practice that's a profoundly corruptible element of the system. The closest thing I can picture would be the Bar Exam, and I'd be interested in seeing demographic statistics about how non-discriminatory that is (both the Multistate portion and the state-by-state portions), but the ABA's interest is in having qualified members all over American Society. Any group of people designing a new sortition system for public office would have a clearer interest in maintaining some degree of their own power, so expecting a truly "fair" system there would be naïve. But it is, I guess, theoretically possible. Just super-suspect and problematic.
These discussions always seem to me to ignore the realities of the administrative state, in which the majority of DC professionals are working lifelong departmental jobs. As leadership changes, the top-level positions at these departments are changed around for political purposes, but institutional memory continues regardless (for good and for ill.) This is being broken down of course with "drain the swamp" rhetoric and general Trump-style treatment of folks who know how to send out the social security checks as being dangerously capable of continuing the work of government, but the administrative state is still a juggernaut, and where the real institutional memory resides. I truly believe that under our system, being a legislator takes legitimate skills that make term limits (for legislators) a bad idea, but those skills are pretty specific to the system at hand, and largely revolve around leveraging and working with the other people in the chamber. In the hypothetical where Representatives and Senators were chosen by lottery, those skills would matter less, and I don't know that we'd lose much in the "institutional memory" of how things work in the coat rooms.
I can see a way, in this hypothetical, where Parties wouldn't cease to exist per se, but could potentially be a bit more bottom-up. If even Oklahoma had a 1-in-3 chance of sending a leftist to Congress, or Maryland a right-winger, etc., we'd for sure see a different kind of party politics being practiced. But the big money influence would also get a lot more blatant, and it would take some water-tight methods to keep that corruption from infecting things just everywhere.
bombastic lowercase pronouncements mentioned the strategoi up above, which I think are an interesting case here. Strategoi were the military leaders of Greek antiquity (the word survives in modern Greek as just meaning "Generals") and were elected from each of the ten tribes, and they formed a council of co-equals who each took daily shifts as chief military leader or Polemarchos (during the Battle of Marathon, at least.) This system seems to have lasted for all of about 50 years before starting to break down, but is at least interesting food for thought. I.e.: If the Presidency had much shorter terms but was determined by lottery from the pool of congress-members, what would that look like? (And the answer is probably that it would tend much more towards preserving the status quo, and give more power to the administrative state. Leaders would have less of a reason to axe-grind, because they're not seeking election, and less time in which to do too much damage, but the institution would lumber on largely unchecked.)
I respect discussions that recognize that our current system is pretty flawed, and given how long it's been going with minimal changes (a very long time by the standards of modern states) I don't think it's crazy to consider what a system redesign could accomplish. But then there's also the question of how a system redesign would come about. Revolution? That would inevitably leave out whoever "loses" in the Revolution. A new Constitutional Convention? That would inevitably leave out those who are currently "losing." The Founding Fathers were able to afford the measure of idealistic enlightenment that led to the current system's design only because their revolution was an independence movement and they were to a large degree starting fresh, but even then and there it was "starting fresh" with an understanding that only landholding white men mattered, that Native Americans super-didn't count, and in response to specific things that pissed them off about having lived under British rule. AND that it coincided with Enlightenment-era political philosophy. If we were doing it today, could we truly expect to have the wherewithal to address corporatism and globalism and technology in a forward-thinking, sustainable way? Or would we more likely ignore them both (and other massive issues) in favor of looking back to 1776 Philadelphia or 450 BCE Athens with rose-colored hindsight?
Damn but this was really long and probably incoherent. Like I said, it gave me a lot of thoughts.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:32 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
I feel like there could be a place for sortition at local levels. School boards, HOAs, and other places that tend to attract tin-pot dictators with axes to grind... I think this system could work wonders in that kind of setting. As has been mentioned numerous times above, it's the sort of system that, for all of its seeming chaos, would tend towards maintaining the status quo, which isn't ideal of course, but diluting the power of the axe-grinders could be worthwhile there.
In theory, of course, one can imagine a Civil Service Exam that could be administered without prejudice for higher levels of office, but in practice that's a profoundly corruptible element of the system. The closest thing I can picture would be the Bar Exam, and I'd be interested in seeing demographic statistics about how non-discriminatory that is (both the Multistate portion and the state-by-state portions), but the ABA's interest is in having qualified members all over American Society. Any group of people designing a new sortition system for public office would have a clearer interest in maintaining some degree of their own power, so expecting a truly "fair" system there would be naïve. But it is, I guess, theoretically possible. Just super-suspect and problematic.
These discussions always seem to me to ignore the realities of the administrative state, in which the majority of DC professionals are working lifelong departmental jobs. As leadership changes, the top-level positions at these departments are changed around for political purposes, but institutional memory continues regardless (for good and for ill.) This is being broken down of course with "drain the swamp" rhetoric and general Trump-style treatment of folks who know how to send out the social security checks as being dangerously capable of continuing the work of government, but the administrative state is still a juggernaut, and where the real institutional memory resides. I truly believe that under our system, being a legislator takes legitimate skills that make term limits (for legislators) a bad idea, but those skills are pretty specific to the system at hand, and largely revolve around leveraging and working with the other people in the chamber. In the hypothetical where Representatives and Senators were chosen by lottery, those skills would matter less, and I don't know that we'd lose much in the "institutional memory" of how things work in the coat rooms.
I can see a way, in this hypothetical, where Parties wouldn't cease to exist per se, but could potentially be a bit more bottom-up. If even Oklahoma had a 1-in-3 chance of sending a leftist to Congress, or Maryland a right-winger, etc., we'd for sure see a different kind of party politics being practiced. But the big money influence would also get a lot more blatant, and it would take some water-tight methods to keep that corruption from infecting things just everywhere.
bombastic lowercase pronouncements mentioned the strategoi up above, which I think are an interesting case here. Strategoi were the military leaders of Greek antiquity (the word survives in modern Greek as just meaning "Generals") and were elected from each of the ten tribes, and they formed a council of co-equals who each took daily shifts as chief military leader or Polemarchos (during the Battle of Marathon, at least.) This system seems to have lasted for all of about 50 years before starting to break down, but is at least interesting food for thought. I.e.: If the Presidency had much shorter terms but was determined by lottery from the pool of congress-members, what would that look like? (And the answer is probably that it would tend much more towards preserving the status quo, and give more power to the administrative state. Leaders would have less of a reason to axe-grind, because they're not seeking election, and less time in which to do too much damage, but the institution would lumber on largely unchecked.)
I respect discussions that recognize that our current system is pretty flawed, and given how long it's been going with minimal changes (a very long time by the standards of modern states) I don't think it's crazy to consider what a system redesign could accomplish. But then there's also the question of how a system redesign would come about. Revolution? That would inevitably leave out whoever "loses" in the Revolution. A new Constitutional Convention? That would inevitably leave out those who are currently "losing." The Founding Fathers were able to afford the measure of idealistic enlightenment that led to the current system's design only because their revolution was an independence movement and they were to a large degree starting fresh, but even then and there it was "starting fresh" with an understanding that only landholding white men mattered, that Native Americans super-didn't count, and in response to specific things that pissed them off about having lived under British rule. AND that it coincided with Enlightenment-era political philosophy. If we were doing it today, could we truly expect to have the wherewithal to address corporatism and globalism and technology in a forward-thinking, sustainable way? Or would we more likely ignore them both (and other massive issues) in favor of looking back to 1776 Philadelphia or 450 BCE Athens with rose-colored hindsight?
Damn but this was really long and probably incoherent. Like I said, it gave me a lot of thoughts.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:32 AM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
Imagine it's people like 500 random Twitter accounts and it gets less appealing
Doesn’t believing in any form of democracy entail believing that the limitations of individuals can be averaged out to produce reasonable governance, though?
My issue is just that I don’t see how sortition really solves all the problems it’s claimed to solve. Fully direct democracy illustrates why professionalizing governance makes sense - institutional knowledge is important, there’s a huge range in individuals’ interest in participating and (avail)ability to participate, and the process of decision-making can bog down with a large number of people involved. Representative democracy addresses those issues while introducing issues of concentration of power and perverse incentives, and diverting a bunch of energy towards elections rather than governance. Randomly selecting representatives could in theory diffuse the concentration of power, minimize some of the bad incentives, and avoid the election circus, but it takes you back to many of the same logistical issues of a direct system and introduces a whole new procedural mess.
I think any of these approaches might be workable in some context but none is a quick fix - it’s just a bunch of tradeoffs.
posted by atoxyl at 10:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Doesn’t believing in any form of democracy entail believing that the limitations of individuals can be averaged out to produce reasonable governance, though?
My issue is just that I don’t see how sortition really solves all the problems it’s claimed to solve. Fully direct democracy illustrates why professionalizing governance makes sense - institutional knowledge is important, there’s a huge range in individuals’ interest in participating and (avail)ability to participate, and the process of decision-making can bog down with a large number of people involved. Representative democracy addresses those issues while introducing issues of concentration of power and perverse incentives, and diverting a bunch of energy towards elections rather than governance. Randomly selecting representatives could in theory diffuse the concentration of power, minimize some of the bad incentives, and avoid the election circus, but it takes you back to many of the same logistical issues of a direct system and introduces a whole new procedural mess.
I think any of these approaches might be workable in some context but none is a quick fix - it’s just a bunch of tradeoffs.
posted by atoxyl at 10:35 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
OH RIGHT! And TFA says that Sortition would negate the need for Gerrymandering, which is laughably bullshit. Presuming you still need districts in order to determine pools of qualified lottery-members for representatives, and presuming people still have partisan/ideological leanings, whomever is in power at any time districts are being drawn would have a huge vested interest in gerrymandering the fuck out of the areas within their control under a sortition system.
posted by Navelgazer at 10:36 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by Navelgazer at 10:36 AM on August 21, 2023 [4 favorites]
In the hypothetical where Representatives and Senators were chosen by lottery, those skills would matter less
Why would they matter less? I'd think that they would actually matter a great deal more, as Alcibiades demonstrated back in ancient Athens.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:43 AM on August 21, 2023
Why would they matter less? I'd think that they would actually matter a great deal more, as Alcibiades demonstrated back in ancient Athens.
posted by NoxAeternum at 10:43 AM on August 21, 2023
We trust juries to pay attention, be impartial, and make good decisions.
Anyone who would make this argument without recognizing the huge role judges play in our jury system in terms of even identifying the evidence the jury is allowed to see and the kinds of arguments the parties are allowed to make--right up to making judgments in place of the (seated) jury in civil cases--would not pass any U.S. civics test I would administer.
posted by praemunire at 10:59 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
Anyone who would make this argument without recognizing the huge role judges play in our jury system in terms of even identifying the evidence the jury is allowed to see and the kinds of arguments the parties are allowed to make--right up to making judgments in place of the (seated) jury in civil cases--would not pass any U.S. civics test I would administer.
posted by praemunire at 10:59 AM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
One problem with sortition that I haven't seen mentioned yet is the vileness of our current political climate, e.g. on certain corners of social media and the right-wing outrage machine. I have heard, anecdotally, that this is already leading to problems in our current system, in that smart and caring individuals decide they don't want to run for office because they don't want to put themselves in the spotlight and become targets for hate. But I think it would be even worse if people are thrust into the spotlight without having a choice in the matter. If I were randomly selected as a senator or congresswoman tomorrow, I just know that a bunch of vile misogynists would suddenly be attacking my clothes, my appearance, my status as a single childless woman, the silly things I've written online under my own name for the past 15+ years, etc. And I don't kid myself that it would be any easier if I were a married mom—then I would be worried about the safety of my children after the family was thrust into the spotlight!
Okay, the article says that people would need to pass a civics test first, and other commenters in this thread have already pointed out how that's uncomfortably reminiscent of Jim Crow literacy tests. So, I think to pass any kind of legal muster, the civics test would have to be opt-out, not mandatory for all citizens. (And, can you imagine the Fox News outrage if the U.S. started requiring all adults, without exception, to take a civics test?) Which means, then, that only a subset of people would be putting themselves into the Sortition Candidate Pool. Which then puts us right back to where we started. Adam Grant advocates for sortition because he thinks that the only people who serve as politicians are the power-hungry people who volunteer to become politicians—but I don't think you can ask people to take on this burden without any choice in the matter, and then if you give people a choice in the matter, it's not really sortition.
posted by clair-de-lune at 11:04 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
Okay, the article says that people would need to pass a civics test first, and other commenters in this thread have already pointed out how that's uncomfortably reminiscent of Jim Crow literacy tests. So, I think to pass any kind of legal muster, the civics test would have to be opt-out, not mandatory for all citizens. (And, can you imagine the Fox News outrage if the U.S. started requiring all adults, without exception, to take a civics test?) Which means, then, that only a subset of people would be putting themselves into the Sortition Candidate Pool. Which then puts us right back to where we started. Adam Grant advocates for sortition because he thinks that the only people who serve as politicians are the power-hungry people who volunteer to become politicians—but I don't think you can ask people to take on this burden without any choice in the matter, and then if you give people a choice in the matter, it's not really sortition.
posted by clair-de-lune at 11:04 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
METAFILTER: this feels direly under-thought and under-researched, but it's also giving me a lot of scattered thoughts, so...
posted by philip-random at 11:04 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 11:04 AM on August 21, 2023 [7 favorites]
There's also random ballot elections: rather than directly picking people to serve at random (as in sortition), everyone casts ballots as normal, but then the winner(s) are picked not by tally but by randomly picking ballots.
posted by Pyry at 11:09 AM on August 21, 2023
posted by Pyry at 11:09 AM on August 21, 2023
Adam Grant advocates for sortition because he thinks that the only people who serve as politicians are the power-hungry people who volunteer to become politicians—but I don't think you can ask people to take on this burden without any choice in the matter, and then if you give people a choice in the matter, it's not really sortition.
You'd have to pay enough to make it like winning a small lottery. I like the idea upthread of tying a mandatory tax audit to it. So basically, we're going to give you a million dollars for 2 years of service, but you will get audited and you'll have a risk of danger to your person and your family. Security is provided.
No fitness tests, but some possibility of recall for poor performance. If you're recalled you lose some of the money, so you have an incentive to represent your community well.
posted by condour75 at 11:18 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
You'd have to pay enough to make it like winning a small lottery. I like the idea upthread of tying a mandatory tax audit to it. So basically, we're going to give you a million dollars for 2 years of service, but you will get audited and you'll have a risk of danger to your person and your family. Security is provided.
No fitness tests, but some possibility of recall for poor performance. If you're recalled you lose some of the money, so you have an incentive to represent your community well.
posted by condour75 at 11:18 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
I feel like the mandatory audit is a laudable idea in theory but in practice holy hell would that further marginalize folks from already marginalized communities.
posted by Navelgazer at 11:25 AM on August 21, 2023
posted by Navelgazer at 11:25 AM on August 21, 2023
I feel like the mandatory audit is a laudable idea in theory but in practice holy hell would that further marginalize folks from already marginalized communities.
Easy fixes for that. No audits unless your income is 4x poverty line or something.
posted by condour75 at 11:30 AM on August 21, 2023
Easy fixes for that. No audits unless your income is 4x poverty line or something.
posted by condour75 at 11:30 AM on August 21, 2023
but in practice holy hell would that further marginalize folks from already marginalized communities.
They don't audit most people because the IRS would owe them money if they did. Lest we forget, they know what we owe, we don't, they allow us to guess for a reason.
posted by Brian B. at 11:32 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
They don't audit most people because the IRS would owe them money if they did. Lest we forget, they know what we owe, we don't, they allow us to guess for a reason.
posted by Brian B. at 11:32 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
would that be declared income? Asking for a friend.
posted by philip-random at 11:33 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by philip-random at 11:33 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Fair point. But it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, imho. Yes, you're submitting yourself to increased scrutiny, but it's opt out, and there's a huge financial incentive for the non-already-rich to participate.
posted by condour75 at 11:35 AM on August 21, 2023
posted by condour75 at 11:35 AM on August 21, 2023
> then the winner(s) are picked not by tally but by randomly picking ballots.
Ah, a probabilistic selection process. I wonder how much the ruling class could abuse that without being detected? *Imitation Game intensifies*
Anyway, I hardly think the answer to democracy's problems is democracy-but-even-less-accurate.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:40 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
Ah, a probabilistic selection process. I wonder how much the ruling class could abuse that without being detected? *Imitation Game intensifies*
Anyway, I hardly think the answer to democracy's problems is democracy-but-even-less-accurate.
posted by AlSweigart at 11:40 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
The institution of restrictive term limits caused the locus of institutional knowledge for the California Legislature to shift to lobbyists, as "senior leadership" ceased to exist.
The usual poster boy for this is Michigan, where term limits destroyed a deep well of policy and institutional knowledge to the point that in the 2000s/2010s legislators commonly didn't know how to run meetings. Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson from Wayne State has a bunch of stuff on this.
We are doing sortition already, in one area, which is choosing juries. We trust juries to pay attention, be impartial, and make good decisions.
I'm also part of that "we" and I sure as hell do not trust them.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
The usual poster boy for this is Michigan, where term limits destroyed a deep well of policy and institutional knowledge to the point that in the 2000s/2010s legislators commonly didn't know how to run meetings. Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson from Wayne State has a bunch of stuff on this.
We are doing sortition already, in one area, which is choosing juries. We trust juries to pay attention, be impartial, and make good decisions.
I'm also part of that "we" and I sure as hell do not trust them.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 11:44 AM on August 21, 2023 [2 favorites]
I think another interesting thing that sortition makes you think about is the core question of what it means for an elected body to be "representative". Suppose there's some nation where 80% of people are in demographic Z and 20% are in demographic W, then both of these congressional compositions could claim to be representative, for a congress of 100 members:
a) 80 Zs, 20 Ws: composition is proportional to demographics
b) 100 Zs, 0 Ws: composition reflects median person (median person is a Z)
Now (a) seems intuitively what I would call a representative congress, but the difficulty then is that electoral systems based on tallies (whether they're first past the post or more complicated ranked choice or whatever) will produce outcomes more like (b), whereas methods based on chance (sortition, random ballots) will produce outcomes more like (a).
If you want to both get a demographically proportional congress and also reject random sampling methods, then the problem is how to reconcile those goals.
posted by Pyry at 11:49 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
a) 80 Zs, 20 Ws: composition is proportional to demographics
b) 100 Zs, 0 Ws: composition reflects median person (median person is a Z)
Now (a) seems intuitively what I would call a representative congress, but the difficulty then is that electoral systems based on tallies (whether they're first past the post or more complicated ranked choice or whatever) will produce outcomes more like (b), whereas methods based on chance (sortition, random ballots) will produce outcomes more like (a).
If you want to both get a demographically proportional congress and also reject random sampling methods, then the problem is how to reconcile those goals.
posted by Pyry at 11:49 AM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Eh, since virtually all of this is a practical non-starter, let's at least try more ranked-choice voting, a thing that actually exists in the 21st century. If reasonable, non-narcissistic people who aren't beholden to their party establishment could run without the huge risk of acting as a spoiler, maybe we could actually elect a few more decent politicians.
Right now you can't win a nomination without lots of strong connections to existing power and money. This requirement breeds (and selects for) dark triad characteristics. It's probably not so much that "being chosen" makes you an asshole, but that you can't even get anyone to talk to you if you aren't one.
posted by anhedonic at 12:29 PM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
Right now you can't win a nomination without lots of strong connections to existing power and money. This requirement breeds (and selects for) dark triad characteristics. It's probably not so much that "being chosen" makes you an asshole, but that you can't even get anyone to talk to you if you aren't one.
posted by anhedonic at 12:29 PM on August 21, 2023 [5 favorites]
The article on citizens' assemblies linked at the end of the article may be less objectionable than the NYT opinion piece. Here's a direct link to a PDF version.
The NYT article also alludes to the citizens' assembly that recommended electoral reforms in BC about 20 years ago. Members were randomly selected and the process is generally considered to have worked very well. (We didn't get the reforms, though, because the government arbitrarily decided to require a supermajority instead of a simple majority in the subsequent referendum.)
I don't know how I feel about sortition, but I think Metafilter can sometimes be a bit dismissive of changes to the status quo outside of a fairly narrow liberal policy framework.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:33 PM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
The NYT article also alludes to the citizens' assembly that recommended electoral reforms in BC about 20 years ago. Members were randomly selected and the process is generally considered to have worked very well. (We didn't get the reforms, though, because the government arbitrarily decided to require a supermajority instead of a simple majority in the subsequent referendum.)
I don't know how I feel about sortition, but I think Metafilter can sometimes be a bit dismissive of changes to the status quo outside of a fairly narrow liberal policy framework.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 12:33 PM on August 21, 2023 [8 favorites]
Imagine being tenured at Wharton before you’re 30 and then spending your life writing this stuff.
I legit cannot imagine what else an under-30 person employed to teach at Wharton would ever write.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:47 PM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
I legit cannot imagine what else an under-30 person employed to teach at Wharton would ever write.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 2:47 PM on August 21, 2023 [3 favorites]
We are doing sortition already, in one area, which is choosing juries. We trust juries to pay attention, be impartial, and make good decisions. By and large, they do, in a system that has worked pretty well for hundreds of years.
I served on a grand jury a few years ago in Massachusetts. I was basically the only one skeptical of the police. The only one who understood that the absence of evidence is itself evidence. Who dared ask why body cam footage was available and well-documented sometimes, and not proffered other times.
Juries are absolutely lead by the nose by prosecutors and defenders, and the only thing you can count on is that they do, in fact, want to "do a good job," but some of them are going to think their job is "helping the cops" or "putting away a bad guy" instead of "making an impartial decision."
posted by explosion at 3:07 PM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
I served on a grand jury a few years ago in Massachusetts. I was basically the only one skeptical of the police. The only one who understood that the absence of evidence is itself evidence. Who dared ask why body cam footage was available and well-documented sometimes, and not proffered other times.
Juries are absolutely lead by the nose by prosecutors and defenders, and the only thing you can count on is that they do, in fact, want to "do a good job," but some of them are going to think their job is "helping the cops" or "putting away a bad guy" instead of "making an impartial decision."
posted by explosion at 3:07 PM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
The NYT article also alludes to the citizens' assembly that recommended electoral reforms in BC about 20 years ago. Members were randomly selected and the process is generally considered to have worked very well. (We didn't get the reforms, though, because the government arbitrarily decided to require a supermajority instead of a simple majority in the subsequent referendum.)
Well, what was the point then?
I'm surprised that the NYT would suggest a model other than elections as if elections were abolished, it would affect the NYT reporter much more than anyone else--what would they do without the election hoopla? Dining reports? Modern Love? Do we really need humans for Modern Love at this point? I think ChatGPT must know love by now, or at least that kind of love. They still have Trump to talk about but the man's not immortal, and everything else is a complete bummer that nobody can do anything about.
Maybe it's a death drive sort of thing.
posted by kingdead at 3:10 PM on August 21, 2023
Well, what was the point then?
I'm surprised that the NYT would suggest a model other than elections as if elections were abolished, it would affect the NYT reporter much more than anyone else--what would they do without the election hoopla? Dining reports? Modern Love? Do we really need humans for Modern Love at this point? I think ChatGPT must know love by now, or at least that kind of love. They still have Trump to talk about but the man's not immortal, and everything else is a complete bummer that nobody can do anything about.
Maybe it's a death drive sort of thing.
posted by kingdead at 3:10 PM on August 21, 2023
Apparently Mark Twain never said: "Politicians and diapers must be changed often and for the same reason."
Nevertheless, "Beheading the Heads" by Italo Calvino more or less captures the sentiment well.
posted by nikoniko at 3:41 PM on August 21, 2023
Nevertheless, "Beheading the Heads" by Italo Calvino more or less captures the sentiment well.
posted by nikoniko at 3:41 PM on August 21, 2023
This kind of thing is why I (overall, in general) hate leaders and leadership. Having power tends to turn a lot of people into awful people.
I don't know how to solve that, though. Like, I'd be terrible if I got forced into a leadership role, as would many others, plus I don't want to turn into a complete asshole once I get a yummy taste of power either. But the people who WANT to do it, well... a lot of them are problematic.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:14 PM on August 21, 2023
I don't know how to solve that, though. Like, I'd be terrible if I got forced into a leadership role, as would many others, plus I don't want to turn into a complete asshole once I get a yummy taste of power either. But the people who WANT to do it, well... a lot of them are problematic.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:14 PM on August 21, 2023
power corrupts but responsibility not so much. I suspect if you dug into the details of people who had been in positions of power and not become rotten, you'd find that they had a healthy attitude toward responsibility.
Not all judges are corrupt, are they?
posted by philip-random at 4:42 PM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Not all judges are corrupt, are they?
posted by philip-random at 4:42 PM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
Random selection of two-year terms is a de-facto term limit system. Like all term limit systems, institutional power and knowledge continues to exist in private hands, with the advantage that they now get a new crop of legislators do deal with who don't remember what they tried to do the last time around. This is a huge boon for corporations and dark money groups.
posted by StarkRoads at 7:29 PM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by StarkRoads at 7:29 PM on August 21, 2023 [6 favorites]
again, this isn't taking the existing infrastructure of public servants into consideration (ie: the professional bureaucrats who understand how the complex beast known as govt actually works, and doesn't). Some years ago, I happened to be camera operator for an interview with a former provincial premier*, a notorious conservative populist. He'd long been out of office but he was still railing (almost apoplectic) at the damned bureaucrats who hadn't let him do whatever the fuck he wanted to.
Thank the gods of chaos for the right bureaucrats.
* Canada here, so think Governor.
posted by philip-random at 8:45 PM on August 21, 2023
Thank the gods of chaos for the right bureaucrats.
* Canada here, so think Governor.
posted by philip-random at 8:45 PM on August 21, 2023
I can't see how sortition ends up being statistically a good choice.
On one hand, modern governance requires a huge amount of expertise, even for something as local as a school board. Yes, you have the civil servants who embody that expertise, but they aren't magically pouring knowledge into representatives' heads. So either we condemn people to a job they did not choose for long periods, which we call enslavement, or we give up on the idea of expertise.
On the other, do we really think we can't produce a system that does better on average than average? There's so much research on effectively aggregating preferences and decisions, even on eliciting them. The field is still young and already what we know how to do makes what our government elections use look like the stone age.
posted by madhadron at 10:46 PM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
On one hand, modern governance requires a huge amount of expertise, even for something as local as a school board. Yes, you have the civil servants who embody that expertise, but they aren't magically pouring knowledge into representatives' heads. So either we condemn people to a job they did not choose for long periods, which we call enslavement, or we give up on the idea of expertise.
On the other, do we really think we can't produce a system that does better on average than average? There's so much research on effectively aggregating preferences and decisions, even on eliciting them. The field is still young and already what we know how to do makes what our government elections use look like the stone age.
posted by madhadron at 10:46 PM on August 21, 2023 [1 favorite]
power corrupts
Power does not corrupt - it reveals the nature of the wielder.
Not all judges are corrupt, are they?
It doesn't matter because the judiciary is corrupt, as we see over and over.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:45 AM on August 22, 2023
Power does not corrupt - it reveals the nature of the wielder.
Not all judges are corrupt, are they?
It doesn't matter because the judiciary is corrupt, as we see over and over.
posted by NoxAeternum at 3:45 AM on August 22, 2023
If you want to both get a demographically proportional congress and also reject random sampling methods, then the problem is how to reconcile those goals.
Yeah, this is mathematically a complicated and interesting problem, because geographic elements mean that just the overall numbers can be misleading. We're used to looking at "overall population and representation out of proportion" and thinking there's chicanery afoot, but there was a really revealing paper by Moon Duchin (who is a specialist in this stuff), investigating the congressional representation of Massachusetts. Now, somewhere between 30% and 40% of the state's residents are Republicans, but even though Massachusetts has historically had 9 or 10 congresscritters, not a single one has been Republican. Looks shady, but consider the demographic geography of Massachusetts. That 30-40% is very diffusely spread mostly over the western end of the state; any given geographic area of Massachusetts is somewhere between bright blue (Boston) and an extremely pale pink (small areas in Western Massachusetts). Even those pinkish areas are pretty sparse, and if you group geographic areas up into Congressional-district-sized chunks, the likelihood of including enough Democratic-majority areas into each district is pretty high. Massachusetts comes self-gerrymandered; the "cracking" half of the "pack-and-crack" method is basically just established demographics.
But having established that geographic districting intrinsically disfavors Republicans in Massachusetts, what if anything does that mean from an electoral justice viewpoint? Given that geographic single-member districts are the accepted standard, Massachusetts has a good argument that their representation is "fair". Duchin's method uses an interesting randomized approach; they simulated a large number of arbitrary geographic conglomerations of sensibly indivisible units (townships) into Congressional districts, assumed continued partisan voting in each, and found that the actual Congressional results in Massachusetts were confirmed by these randomized simulations.
I dunno. Sortition is dumb, but random ballot, mentioned above, is pretty cool (it's statistically representational, if not necessarily representational in any given election, and it's completely immune to strategic voting, unlike every deterministic ballot system). Maybe "random district" is what we need: before every election, randomly assemble geographically contiguous groups of precincts into all new districts. That'll keep the candidates on their toes!
posted by jackbishop at 5:36 AM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
Yeah, this is mathematically a complicated and interesting problem, because geographic elements mean that just the overall numbers can be misleading. We're used to looking at "overall population and representation out of proportion" and thinking there's chicanery afoot, but there was a really revealing paper by Moon Duchin (who is a specialist in this stuff), investigating the congressional representation of Massachusetts. Now, somewhere between 30% and 40% of the state's residents are Republicans, but even though Massachusetts has historically had 9 or 10 congresscritters, not a single one has been Republican. Looks shady, but consider the demographic geography of Massachusetts. That 30-40% is very diffusely spread mostly over the western end of the state; any given geographic area of Massachusetts is somewhere between bright blue (Boston) and an extremely pale pink (small areas in Western Massachusetts). Even those pinkish areas are pretty sparse, and if you group geographic areas up into Congressional-district-sized chunks, the likelihood of including enough Democratic-majority areas into each district is pretty high. Massachusetts comes self-gerrymandered; the "cracking" half of the "pack-and-crack" method is basically just established demographics.
But having established that geographic districting intrinsically disfavors Republicans in Massachusetts, what if anything does that mean from an electoral justice viewpoint? Given that geographic single-member districts are the accepted standard, Massachusetts has a good argument that their representation is "fair". Duchin's method uses an interesting randomized approach; they simulated a large number of arbitrary geographic conglomerations of sensibly indivisible units (townships) into Congressional districts, assumed continued partisan voting in each, and found that the actual Congressional results in Massachusetts were confirmed by these randomized simulations.
I dunno. Sortition is dumb, but random ballot, mentioned above, is pretty cool (it's statistically representational, if not necessarily representational in any given election, and it's completely immune to strategic voting, unlike every deterministic ballot system). Maybe "random district" is what we need: before every election, randomly assemble geographically contiguous groups of precincts into all new districts. That'll keep the candidates on their toes!
posted by jackbishop at 5:36 AM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
On one hand, modern governance requires a huge amount of expertise, even for something as local as a school board. Yes, you have the civil servants who embody that expertise, but they aren't magically pouring knowledge into representatives' heads. So either we condemn people to a job they did not choose for long periods, which we call enslavement, or we give up on the idea of expertise.
Agreed, and there's nothing wrong with picking qualified careerists to govern. They distinguished themselves and know who to call, and it probably should be a scandal that government functions to keep them in the background and the elites in control. If one wonders how a random pile of careerists can represent those most vulnerable, consider that any congressional committees would have welfare agencies represented directly, allowing social workers to become lawmakers and cabinet deciders.
posted by Brian B. at 7:32 AM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
Agreed, and there's nothing wrong with picking qualified careerists to govern. They distinguished themselves and know who to call, and it probably should be a scandal that government functions to keep them in the background and the elites in control. If one wonders how a random pile of careerists can represent those most vulnerable, consider that any congressional committees would have welfare agencies represented directly, allowing social workers to become lawmakers and cabinet deciders.
posted by Brian B. at 7:32 AM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
Of course bureaucrats are more powerful if you create a weaker legislature. Knocking off one corner of institutional power will empower all the others. One-off instances where a particular bureaucrat blunted a particular legislator does not mean that a strong bureaucrat is automatically good. For example, no elected official can touch industry shill serving as postmaster general in the US. He has both the subject matter expertise and the legal authority to express the preferences of his associated corporations.
What has not been demonstrated is that the average person is better off in any way under a randomly selected assembly. There is simply a smaller core of elites, which the average person cannot express any preference over. Even most dictatorships hold theatrical plebiscites, because elections are a source of state legitimacy in themselves.
Randomly selected legislators would be under truly intense pressure to cash out while cashing's good. Everyone else has the clock on their side.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:35 AM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
What has not been demonstrated is that the average person is better off in any way under a randomly selected assembly. There is simply a smaller core of elites, which the average person cannot express any preference over. Even most dictatorships hold theatrical plebiscites, because elections are a source of state legitimacy in themselves.
Randomly selected legislators would be under truly intense pressure to cash out while cashing's good. Everyone else has the clock on their side.
posted by StarkRoads at 8:35 AM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think sortition for the legislature is silly for all the many reasons described here already, but there is one place in US government I believe it's badly needed: the Supreme Court. "Supreme Court Justice" should be a function, not a lifelong appointment, and the members of the court should be selected at random every year from the circuit courts. There is no plausible reason for keeping single individuals on the court for decades. I shouldn't have to know the minutia of each member's judicial philosophy, because they should stick around long enough for it to matter. A rotating supreme court would eliminate (or at least greatly reduce) opportunities for corruption and end the weird gamesmanship in the senate every time there's a vacancy.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 9:08 AM on August 22, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 9:08 AM on August 22, 2023 [5 favorites]
Randomly selected legislators would be under truly intense pressure to cash out while cashing's good.
Especially true if they had no stake in preserving the integrity of their expertise, by lacking any expertise at all.
posted by Brian B. at 9:09 AM on August 22, 2023
Especially true if they had no stake in preserving the integrity of their expertise, by lacking any expertise at all.
posted by Brian B. at 9:09 AM on August 22, 2023
I have a friend who constantly sends me articles about how much better the Chinese system is. While it's mostly leftist propaganda, we have talked about continuity as a strength. What's not working in the US is 2-year periods where each side attempts to undo the prior 2 years: investigate the investigators, taxes up and down, regulations, social policy, etc. And I don't think sortition solves that problem at all - plus it's never going to happen.
Some of the things that would work are things we already know about:
* Money out of politics whether that's repealing Citizens United, stricter campaign rules, or publicly funded elections.
* Reimplement the Fair Use doctrine and apply it to online media. Create a "news site" label that has to be applied for and maintained.
* Strong antitrust for social media and strong personal data protections.
* Reduce wealth inequality (chicken/egg problem here).
* Find other ways to make elections less of a circus and a time sink on officeholders (they should be writing laws and collaborating).
Personally, I think the US as structured is not governable; 300 million people with thousands of cultural value sets, heavily religious, capitalist state, end to growth coming, climate change accelerating ... it's a Kobiyashi Maru sort of scenario. We can do better than what we have, but we are limited by those factors and the Constitution. Any change outside the Constitution (revolution for example) is not going to favor the good guys. It's just not.
Also, a society at scale has to be structured of well-run communities with coherent values, and we don't really have those either. Instead, with the best intent we're trying to make every community and locale pass ALL THA VALUE TESTZ. Religious groups are splintering, many traditions are now considered anti-democratic/racist/ableist/other-ist (and they are!), and we have a ton of languages and national backgrounds with capitalism as the only real glue. As I told my lefty friend, it's a far cry from "dictatorship with thousands of years of cultural lineage manages to keep 1.4 billion 91% Confucianism-influenced Han Chinese people kind of aligned by outlawing political parties, adopting capitalism on the sly, and repressing the shit out of diversity." I just don't see Americans rallying around any shared values whatsoever, and we can't back into a more homogenous and strict system like the Chinese have.
posted by caviar2d2 at 1:18 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
Some of the things that would work are things we already know about:
* Money out of politics whether that's repealing Citizens United, stricter campaign rules, or publicly funded elections.
* Reimplement the Fair Use doctrine and apply it to online media. Create a "news site" label that has to be applied for and maintained.
* Strong antitrust for social media and strong personal data protections.
* Reduce wealth inequality (chicken/egg problem here).
* Find other ways to make elections less of a circus and a time sink on officeholders (they should be writing laws and collaborating).
Personally, I think the US as structured is not governable; 300 million people with thousands of cultural value sets, heavily religious, capitalist state, end to growth coming, climate change accelerating ... it's a Kobiyashi Maru sort of scenario. We can do better than what we have, but we are limited by those factors and the Constitution. Any change outside the Constitution (revolution for example) is not going to favor the good guys. It's just not.
Also, a society at scale has to be structured of well-run communities with coherent values, and we don't really have those either. Instead, with the best intent we're trying to make every community and locale pass ALL THA VALUE TESTZ. Religious groups are splintering, many traditions are now considered anti-democratic/racist/ableist/other-ist (and they are!), and we have a ton of languages and national backgrounds with capitalism as the only real glue. As I told my lefty friend, it's a far cry from "dictatorship with thousands of years of cultural lineage manages to keep 1.4 billion 91% Confucianism-influenced Han Chinese people kind of aligned by outlawing political parties, adopting capitalism on the sly, and repressing the shit out of diversity." I just don't see Americans rallying around any shared values whatsoever, and we can't back into a more homogenous and strict system like the Chinese have.
posted by caviar2d2 at 1:18 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
If this is the thread where we ride our electoral reform hobbyhorses, lemme chime in with mine: more at-large representation. We've all internalized geographic districts as a logical voting unit since I think it's assumed that the people who live in geographic proximity have some shared voting interests (e.g.: the construction of infrastructure like a bridge or sewage treatment facility, shared history/culture/values, etc...). However, it's pretty obvious that not all voting interests are encoded in geography. The US doesn't seem to do at-large representation at higher levels of government though I think some lower levels of government have them (e.g.: Seattle city council has 7 seats allocated by district and 2 at-large seats).
posted by mhum at 3:05 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by mhum at 3:05 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
...or he didn't read past the first sentence of the Wikipedia article, which means he is too dumb to be published in the NYT.
I think that bar is far lower than you seem to believe.
posted by Uncle Ira at 3:16 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
I think that bar is far lower than you seem to believe.
posted by Uncle Ira at 3:16 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]
For me the single clearest problem with elections, and specifically with elected officials in general is that they are by the very nature of the electoral process, and the process of campaign funding, forced to adopt a mindset of begging for money and accepting bribes as the fundamental first step of running for office.
The entrance exam for politicians in an electoral system starts off with demanding the willingness to accept bribe. An enforced necessity of being corrupt as the most fundamental requirement of running for office. This is part of why Trump could run against the "swamp" to such public fan-fare. He had a rare degree of self funding. We all know this is true, even if its not explicitly acknowledged. No amount of campaign finance reform can solve this. Even if we remove that issue, begging for votes has a similar psychological effect.
Compare this with Sortition, its clear that just in terms of psychological alignment, all things being equal we are working in an entirely different system of social dynamics. I've looked a bit into it, and there's a process called Stratified Sampling used with Sortition that ensures that 'random' actually exactly means Demographically Representative. I immediately imagine the kinds of dialogues and debates a congress full of people who genuinely represent the whole body public of everyday people would look like.
I'd for sure want to watch those debates. I don't see it as a cesspool like twitter trolls, that a self selection process for people who can stand/enjoy that environment. A proper Sortition with Stratified Sampling would include people from all walks of life, all perspectives and experiences on a problem. A huge opportunity for a genuinely representative, uncorrupt body public to discuss the political problems we face in depth to find solutions they can all agree to and live with. They actually represent all of us in a mathematically meaningful way, which makes me far more confident their policies represent the public good, and public interest. Unlike politicians, who at best represent us only to the extent of a popularity contest.
That sounds to me like a way better system that two openly corrupt political parties, made up of inherently corrupt politicians turning to trivially manipulated polls and popularity contests for critical public policy decision, with no meaningful discussion or debate, where to the extent there are public forming conversations involved, those conversations are the exclusive domain of activists who have developed and outlined the rhetorical flow chart for their arguments via repetition and trolling.
Our system now looks fucking broken. Actual people who walk down the street every day would be meaningfully different from the entire political charade, and the fact they are kinda random has a lot of baked in advantages. Demographic representation would be a massively powerful tool to address the full picture of a policy issue, much more effectively exploring how society at large reacts and would be impacted by those issues.
If nothing else, I think having a publicly funded Sortition body of the public who's sole job is to pick hot button issues and have at length dialogues about them would be a huge boon to public discourse. A lobbying institution directly representing WE THE PEOPLE.
posted by qastokes at 3:55 PM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
The entrance exam for politicians in an electoral system starts off with demanding the willingness to accept bribe. An enforced necessity of being corrupt as the most fundamental requirement of running for office. This is part of why Trump could run against the "swamp" to such public fan-fare. He had a rare degree of self funding. We all know this is true, even if its not explicitly acknowledged. No amount of campaign finance reform can solve this. Even if we remove that issue, begging for votes has a similar psychological effect.
Compare this with Sortition, its clear that just in terms of psychological alignment, all things being equal we are working in an entirely different system of social dynamics. I've looked a bit into it, and there's a process called Stratified Sampling used with Sortition that ensures that 'random' actually exactly means Demographically Representative. I immediately imagine the kinds of dialogues and debates a congress full of people who genuinely represent the whole body public of everyday people would look like.
I'd for sure want to watch those debates. I don't see it as a cesspool like twitter trolls, that a self selection process for people who can stand/enjoy that environment. A proper Sortition with Stratified Sampling would include people from all walks of life, all perspectives and experiences on a problem. A huge opportunity for a genuinely representative, uncorrupt body public to discuss the political problems we face in depth to find solutions they can all agree to and live with. They actually represent all of us in a mathematically meaningful way, which makes me far more confident their policies represent the public good, and public interest. Unlike politicians, who at best represent us only to the extent of a popularity contest.
That sounds to me like a way better system that two openly corrupt political parties, made up of inherently corrupt politicians turning to trivially manipulated polls and popularity contests for critical public policy decision, with no meaningful discussion or debate, where to the extent there are public forming conversations involved, those conversations are the exclusive domain of activists who have developed and outlined the rhetorical flow chart for their arguments via repetition and trolling.
Our system now looks fucking broken. Actual people who walk down the street every day would be meaningfully different from the entire political charade, and the fact they are kinda random has a lot of baked in advantages. Demographic representation would be a massively powerful tool to address the full picture of a policy issue, much more effectively exploring how society at large reacts and would be impacted by those issues.
If nothing else, I think having a publicly funded Sortition body of the public who's sole job is to pick hot button issues and have at length dialogues about them would be a huge boon to public discourse. A lobbying institution directly representing WE THE PEOPLE.
posted by qastokes at 3:55 PM on August 22, 2023 [3 favorites]
This is part of why Trump could run against the "swamp" to such public fan-fare. He had a rare degree of self funding. We all know this is true, even if its not explicitly acknowledged.
No, "we" don't, especially given a) his long and storied history of spending Other People's Money and b) all the specific abuses his team did with getting donations from individual contributors, like signing them up for reoccurring donations without informing them. In fact, historically self-funded candidates tend to not do well, as there is in fact a connection between donation funding and support, and disconnecting that removes a key feedback loop from a campaign.
So why was TFG able to campaign on "draining the swamp"? To be blunt, it's because of the idea expressed in your comment - that the idea of soliciting support is somehow inherently corrupting (but only in this specific instance - I don't see you arguing that it's corrupting for a non-profit soliciting donations, for example), and thus politicians are "inherently corrupt". As I've said before, the idea of politicians being "inherently corrupt" - which has little evidence backing it - made us vulnerable to TFG, as he was able to argue his actual corruption as normal, and not the outlier it is.
I immediately imagine the kinds of dialogues and debates a congress full of people who genuinely represent the whole body public of everyday people would look like.
There's a reason that "when you elect amateurs to government, you get amateur government" is a saying. The reality is that we've seen a partial demonstration of this with the Teaper wave, and it turns out that what you get isn't dialogue, but the rise in power of behind the scenes power brokers like ALEC, as they're the ones who would know how to write laws that can pass muster. Again, this is an attitude based in societal myths about how small town meetings are a noble system of debate, and not an easily gameable system that allowed ideological actors to slash one locality's education budget.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:01 PM on August 22, 2023 [4 favorites]
No, "we" don't, especially given a) his long and storied history of spending Other People's Money and b) all the specific abuses his team did with getting donations from individual contributors, like signing them up for reoccurring donations without informing them. In fact, historically self-funded candidates tend to not do well, as there is in fact a connection between donation funding and support, and disconnecting that removes a key feedback loop from a campaign.
So why was TFG able to campaign on "draining the swamp"? To be blunt, it's because of the idea expressed in your comment - that the idea of soliciting support is somehow inherently corrupting (but only in this specific instance - I don't see you arguing that it's corrupting for a non-profit soliciting donations, for example), and thus politicians are "inherently corrupt". As I've said before, the idea of politicians being "inherently corrupt" - which has little evidence backing it - made us vulnerable to TFG, as he was able to argue his actual corruption as normal, and not the outlier it is.
I immediately imagine the kinds of dialogues and debates a congress full of people who genuinely represent the whole body public of everyday people would look like.
There's a reason that "when you elect amateurs to government, you get amateur government" is a saying. The reality is that we've seen a partial demonstration of this with the Teaper wave, and it turns out that what you get isn't dialogue, but the rise in power of behind the scenes power brokers like ALEC, as they're the ones who would know how to write laws that can pass muster. Again, this is an attitude based in societal myths about how small town meetings are a noble system of debate, and not an easily gameable system that allowed ideological actors to slash one locality's education budget.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:01 PM on August 22, 2023 [4 favorites]
So why was TFG able to campaign on "draining the swamp"? To be blunt, it's because of the idea expressed in your comment - that the idea of soliciting support is somehow inherently corrupting (but only in this specific instance - I don't see you arguing that it's corrupting for a non-profit soliciting donations, for example), and thus politicians are "inherently corrupt". As I've said before, the idea of politicians being "inherently corrupt" - which has little evidence backing it - made us vulnerable to TFG, as he was able to argue his actual corruption as normal, and not the outlier it is.
You're agreeing with the point I was making. Trump had a rare degree of self funding *available to him.* (given review i'd add this edit to clarify my intended meaning) I'm not arguing he was actually, literally self funding. Ftr, self-funding politicians having a history of failure makes perfect sense to me and emphasizes my point.
the idea of politicians being "inherently corrupt" - which has little evidence backing it -
This just seems so clearly wrong as a statement?
The big picture of politicians being corrupt is pretty straight forward and rather odd to argue against as though its a point that can be trivially dismissed. Politicians are obviously corrupt. The number of examples is absolutely staggering, especially given how rarely there are meaningful reprimands. The prevalence of insider trading while in public office is insane to me, for example.
What I heard was roughly, pardon the entertaining touch of sarcasm "Well ackshually, politicians aren't corrupt, and even saying they might be corrupt is such a misguided perspective it literally lead to TFG." ...This is not a strong and compelling argument.
Soliciting donations ritually as part of the campaign process is more or less Pavlovian conditioning for susceptibility towards corruption and bribes. There is a logically explicable and inherent mechanism of psychological conditioning towards corruption built into the electoral process itself. (we could quibble about the exact definition of "inherently corrupt," but my overall meaning here is clear, now, I hope.)
Trump also being a slimebag does nothing revoke this case or argument, his effective use of it rhetorically just demonstrates how widely intuited this problem has become.
that the idea of soliciting support is somehow inherently corrupting (but only in this specific instance...)
Its not really specific to the instance of politicians, this is absolutely a problem we can generalize. Soliciting support has a good number of technical problems as a behavioral Modus Operandi, especially when you're dealing with it as a confluence of both self-advertising and accepting money - when it becomes a key or primary metric of success. This applies to non-profits too - a major failure mode for non-profits is that whatever the mechanism of income is, becomes what the non-profit is. Its a serious incentive alignment problem.
Regardless, my actual point is that the selection process for success as a politician has filter points that help to ensure someone is susceptible to bribery and corruption.
Electoral politics are broken, we need to seek out better methods of Democracy, because the various forms of Oligarchy et al are definitely worse. This is why Sortition is so interesting as part of the solution to improve Democracy as a reliable mechanism of high quality collective decision making.
"when you elect amateurs to government, you get amateur government"
Given the root meaning of Amateur is "For the love of the thing" I for one would support an Amateur government. Not one made of career popularity contest winners, lobbyist funding, and almost continual partisan funded propaganda campaigns manipulating - a disenfranchised, meaningfully voiceless and befuddled pubic with no real access - all end-capped by political zealots manning the debates and directing the public conversation.
That's a bit of word play, so... To directly reply to your point, experts, for lack of a better word, (as opposed to Amateurs, or plebs) reach the top by out-competing each other at the games of incentive conformity, etc. People who do this without moral compunctions become more successful over time, because they do not apply handicaps such as doing the right thing, to themselves. This is why we evolved morality and law, as a means of punishing exclusive self interest to allow social coordination. This is an almost intractable problem, with Democracy as the only really viable solution, *collective agreement on the shape of acceptable behavior.*
Expert as a category is too susceptible to corruption. The scientific method, especially experimental replication did a lot to improve expert bodies of knowledge. But that doesn't magically apply to expert hierarchies, which don't mean/select for technical competence and honesty in the way many people seem to think they do. Without going too much into detail, winning in a competitive system is harder when you adopt moral handicaps, such as doing the right thing. Amateurs (as I use the term) are the ones with the honesty and technical competence, they are often professionals in the field, but they share that field with Experts (as I use the term here). Conflating 'Amateurs' and 'Experts' is a very dangerous misunderstanding of how our, well, entire society works, for lack of a better word.
So to extend my first point, having an wide reaching public institution of civic culture, aka "amateur government" does sound both like a good thing, and something we dearly need. Politics is way too distant. We agree that town hall meetings are far from robust enough as a technical process to actually be load bearing. But, again, this is why Sortition is so compelling as part of the solution.
Most systems are easily gameable. A randomly selected individual person with a two year tenure isn't going to understand the political system and the intricacies of policy writing or decision making in say a governorship or school district than someone who spend a life time building up the qualifications and knowledge necessary to function in that role. But that's not really the point I find interesting here. That a very narrow use case example for using Sortition to try and solve issues of governance.
What I find interesting is a manageable sized body of demographically representative individuals selected by Sortition to have a facilitated, informed and at length dialogue on a key issue of public interest.
335,286,927 Americans cannot have a serious discussion about any topic political or otherwise. 150 people who in broad demographic strokes - as provided by proper Sortition, - represent those 335,286,927 people in a meaningfully holistic way, can have that serious and meaningful discussion. Give them subject matter experts to interview so they are informed, conflict resolution facilitators so they aren't stuck in broken social dynamics and arguments with each other, and the time, resources, and access to stakeholders necessary to ensure an effective and holistic deliberation. That discussion would be exceptionally clarifying as to the true, and competent, Will of the People.
Therefore, if nothing else, I think having a publicly funded Sortition body of the public who's sole job is to pick hot button issues and have at length dialogues about them, resulting in policy recommendations would be a huge boon to public discourse and problem solving. A lobbying institution directly representing WE THE PEOPLE.
P.s. Sorry for the length.
posted by qastokes at 9:06 PM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]
You're agreeing with the point I was making. Trump had a rare degree of self funding *available to him.* (given review i'd add this edit to clarify my intended meaning) I'm not arguing he was actually, literally self funding. Ftr, self-funding politicians having a history of failure makes perfect sense to me and emphasizes my point.
the idea of politicians being "inherently corrupt" - which has little evidence backing it -
This just seems so clearly wrong as a statement?
The big picture of politicians being corrupt is pretty straight forward and rather odd to argue against as though its a point that can be trivially dismissed. Politicians are obviously corrupt. The number of examples is absolutely staggering, especially given how rarely there are meaningful reprimands. The prevalence of insider trading while in public office is insane to me, for example.
What I heard was roughly, pardon the entertaining touch of sarcasm "Well ackshually, politicians aren't corrupt, and even saying they might be corrupt is such a misguided perspective it literally lead to TFG." ...This is not a strong and compelling argument.
Soliciting donations ritually as part of the campaign process is more or less Pavlovian conditioning for susceptibility towards corruption and bribes. There is a logically explicable and inherent mechanism of psychological conditioning towards corruption built into the electoral process itself. (we could quibble about the exact definition of "inherently corrupt," but my overall meaning here is clear, now, I hope.)
Trump also being a slimebag does nothing revoke this case or argument, his effective use of it rhetorically just demonstrates how widely intuited this problem has become.
that the idea of soliciting support is somehow inherently corrupting (but only in this specific instance...)
Its not really specific to the instance of politicians, this is absolutely a problem we can generalize. Soliciting support has a good number of technical problems as a behavioral Modus Operandi, especially when you're dealing with it as a confluence of both self-advertising and accepting money - when it becomes a key or primary metric of success. This applies to non-profits too - a major failure mode for non-profits is that whatever the mechanism of income is, becomes what the non-profit is. Its a serious incentive alignment problem.
Regardless, my actual point is that the selection process for success as a politician has filter points that help to ensure someone is susceptible to bribery and corruption.
Electoral politics are broken, we need to seek out better methods of Democracy, because the various forms of Oligarchy et al are definitely worse. This is why Sortition is so interesting as part of the solution to improve Democracy as a reliable mechanism of high quality collective decision making.
"when you elect amateurs to government, you get amateur government"
Given the root meaning of Amateur is "For the love of the thing" I for one would support an Amateur government. Not one made of career popularity contest winners, lobbyist funding, and almost continual partisan funded propaganda campaigns manipulating - a disenfranchised, meaningfully voiceless and befuddled pubic with no real access - all end-capped by political zealots manning the debates and directing the public conversation.
That's a bit of word play, so... To directly reply to your point, experts, for lack of a better word, (as opposed to Amateurs, or plebs) reach the top by out-competing each other at the games of incentive conformity, etc. People who do this without moral compunctions become more successful over time, because they do not apply handicaps such as doing the right thing, to themselves. This is why we evolved morality and law, as a means of punishing exclusive self interest to allow social coordination. This is an almost intractable problem, with Democracy as the only really viable solution, *collective agreement on the shape of acceptable behavior.*
Expert as a category is too susceptible to corruption. The scientific method, especially experimental replication did a lot to improve expert bodies of knowledge. But that doesn't magically apply to expert hierarchies, which don't mean/select for technical competence and honesty in the way many people seem to think they do. Without going too much into detail, winning in a competitive system is harder when you adopt moral handicaps, such as doing the right thing. Amateurs (as I use the term) are the ones with the honesty and technical competence, they are often professionals in the field, but they share that field with Experts (as I use the term here). Conflating 'Amateurs' and 'Experts' is a very dangerous misunderstanding of how our, well, entire society works, for lack of a better word.
So to extend my first point, having an wide reaching public institution of civic culture, aka "amateur government" does sound both like a good thing, and something we dearly need. Politics is way too distant. We agree that town hall meetings are far from robust enough as a technical process to actually be load bearing. But, again, this is why Sortition is so compelling as part of the solution.
Most systems are easily gameable. A randomly selected individual person with a two year tenure isn't going to understand the political system and the intricacies of policy writing or decision making in say a governorship or school district than someone who spend a life time building up the qualifications and knowledge necessary to function in that role. But that's not really the point I find interesting here. That a very narrow use case example for using Sortition to try and solve issues of governance.
What I find interesting is a manageable sized body of demographically representative individuals selected by Sortition to have a facilitated, informed and at length dialogue on a key issue of public interest.
335,286,927 Americans cannot have a serious discussion about any topic political or otherwise. 150 people who in broad demographic strokes - as provided by proper Sortition, - represent those 335,286,927 people in a meaningfully holistic way, can have that serious and meaningful discussion. Give them subject matter experts to interview so they are informed, conflict resolution facilitators so they aren't stuck in broken social dynamics and arguments with each other, and the time, resources, and access to stakeholders necessary to ensure an effective and holistic deliberation. That discussion would be exceptionally clarifying as to the true, and competent, Will of the People.
Therefore, if nothing else, I think having a publicly funded Sortition body of the public who's sole job is to pick hot button issues and have at length dialogues about them, resulting in policy recommendations would be a huge boon to public discourse and problem solving. A lobbying institution directly representing WE THE PEOPLE.
P.s. Sorry for the length.
posted by qastokes at 9:06 PM on August 22, 2023 [2 favorites]
"Literacy tests" have often been used as a way to deny the vote to people you don't want to vote. For example, there's this one, which is literally impossible to answer correctly. It seems very likely that the civics test would be used as a tool to systematically ensure that only certain people became government representatives.
I have a neighbor friend who is a black man and a retired Chicago bus driver. He had a poli-sci degree from Marquette but was initially told he had failed the test to be a bus driver which according to him mostly involved being able to tell the time and do time math.
The reason he eventually got his job was very Chicago: his mom had volunteered with her local ward caption for several elections. So aldermanic clout got him past the obvious false test result.
posted by srboisvert at 5:48 PM on August 27, 2023
I have a neighbor friend who is a black man and a retired Chicago bus driver. He had a poli-sci degree from Marquette but was initially told he had failed the test to be a bus driver which according to him mostly involved being able to tell the time and do time math.
The reason he eventually got his job was very Chicago: his mom had volunteered with her local ward caption for several elections. So aldermanic clout got him past the obvious false test result.
posted by srboisvert at 5:48 PM on August 27, 2023
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