Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Another black celeb was released from jail even he reportedly drugged and raped 60 victims. China also hasn't filed a lawsuit against another black American who killed a Chinese girl; she may have been raped as well.

So the two great nations now have common ground. Why don't China and America join together and create another nation called Chimerica. You can't do anything about black criminals in Chimerica.

Little wonder a black singer named Louis Armstrong sang a song called What a Wonderful World. He saw it coming.



Hello, Chimerica.

Probably the hardest thing they do all year round is beg for money - they call it “fundraising” - to enable them to stay in their cushy job and spacious office for another 2 or 6 years.

It’s a commonly shared belief by people of all stripes that political institutions should be doing more to help us address the many problems we face.

And yet, our elected officials in Washington D.C. spend their time shutting down the government, fighting over immigration, ignoring climate change, and generally doing little to make things better.

Maybe America’s problem stems not from the fact that we aren’t picking the right people, but from the fact that we aren’t picking them in the right way.

Maybe — bear with me here — we should get rid of elections. I believe that you — that each of us — has something to offer, and that we can find ways to work together.

I propose we use a new system that uses random selection, rather than elections, to select political representatives.

I call it lottocracy.

For it to work, we must agree that having an elected, generalist legislature has run its course.

We should instead have randomly-chosen citizens selected to serve on single-issue legislatures, each covering specific areas such as immigration, transportation, education, agriculture and so on. There would be no elected president. The executive functions would be covered partly by single-issue legislative bodies, partly by executive agencies made up of officials who were appointed and screened by randomly-chosen citizens. The Supreme Court would continue to protect individual constitutional rights. Much more could be said, and I say more elsewhere, but let’s focus on the details of the legislative system.

How would it work? As the name implies, it’s a civic lottery, where all adult citizens would be eligible to be chosen at random to serve. The size of each single-issue legislature could vary, but let’s say 300 randomly-chosen citizens.

Each single-issue legislature would begin with a learning phase, during which the randomly-chosen people would learn about different policy ideas in that area and hear from experts, stakeholders, and activists who work in that area. They would then have the opportunity to engage with the broader community, deliberate with each other, and come up with policy proposals.

Imagine that each randomly-chosen person serves for three years; that they are paid a substantial salary (to prevent graft and to encourage participation); that they can postpone service if needed; that protections are in place so they aren’t set back at work; and that efforts are made to accommodate personal schedules.

Why might this be better than what we currently have?

First, moving away from a generalist legislative process opens up places for us to identify issues on which we agree, moving us out of the situation where our attention is concentrated on those few issues which most deeply divide us.

Second, by randomly choosing people, it might finally become possible for us to move beyond elite capture and control of political institutions. In the United States, 140 of the 535 people serving in Congress have a net worth over $2 million, 78 percent are male, 83 percent are white, and more than 50 percent were previously lawyers or businesspeople. Clearly, this is not a true representation of what our nation looks like. People from all walks of life have something to offer. We should value the contributions and ideas of all people, not just the wealthiest people.

Third, elections result in an excessive focus on the short-term. Elected officials care about what they can get credit for in the time between elections, leading them to ignore those big problems — like climate change — that have a longer time horizon.

Our apparent division is a story of manufactured conflict, where the most powerful members of society keep us from working together by creating this sense of two teams, Democratic and Republican, and handing each team a set of policy positions and political candidates that are basically agreeable to the most powerful.

Might we actually see this kind of political reform? Probably not soon, at least not at the kind of scale I just presented. But we shouldn’t start with that scale, anyway. We should instead take small, experimental steps. And some of these have already been taken around the world. Citizens’ assemblies, consisting of randomly chosen citizens, were used in the Netherlands and Canada to reform election law.

Randomly chosen citizens were also brought into the process of constitutional reform in Iceland and Ireland in recent years. We should look for similar opportunities here — at the municipal, county, state, and (perhaps) federal levels. We should think more creatively about how we might work together.

Lottocratic selection might be a way of taking real democratic control back.

If you’re looking for an unrepresentative group of Americans, the House of Representatives isn’t a bad place to start. Its members are disproportionately old and white. More than 80 percent of them are men. They spend around four hours per day on the phone, asking people for money. Unlike most other telemarketers, they have a median net worth of almost $900,000. More than a third of them hold law degrees.

Last Tuesday, not much changed. Once again, the American people went to the polls and elected a group of people who, in aggregate, only vaguely resemble the American people.

The problem isn’t new. A representative assembly, John Adams wrote in 1776, “should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large.” (By “people,” of course, he meant “white men”). But by the 1780s, when Anti-Federalists challenged the young Constitution, a big part of their concern was that “representation as provided for in the Constitution would be skewed in favor of the most prosperous and prominent classes,” writes the political scholar Bernard Manin.

Good observation, Anti-Federalists. And here we are.

If we want a more representative Congress, there’s a relatively simple solution. It sounds strange, but it has a long history, and, just as a thought experiment, it can tell us a lot about certain tensions inherent in representative government. It’s called sortition.

Here’s how sortition works: for any given election, you take the names of every eligible citizen, and you put those names in a very, very big hat. (Note: you don’t have to use a hat, and there are many variations on this method). Then you draw a certain number of names out of the pool. Those are your legislators. It’s democracy by lottery.

For the House of Representatives, for example, we could pull 435 names out of a giant lottery of all American citizens 25 and older, and, voilà: legislators!

You may feel that this is an incredibly stupid idea, but keep two things in mind. First, sortition was the main system for choosing political officials in ancient Athens. As you’ll recall from civics class, Athens was the template, muse, and foundational bedrock for the American Republic. And, second, we already use sortition to select an important deliberative body, the trial jury. Those jury summonses that you get in the mail? Blame the Athenians.

The Athenians considered sortition to be an especially democratic way of choosing certain decision-makers. They took their political lotteries so seriously that they used a special machine, called a kleroterion, to make the process harder to corrupt.

Today, there are people who talk about using sortition more widely in our society. They aren’t just populist rabble-rousers. They include a Dublin academic, a left-leaning Yale professor often cited as a possible Supreme Court nominee, and an online activist who has given a talk to the Texas Constitutional Militia. They don’t necessarily think that we should pick Congress from a giant hat. But they suggest that, when we talk about democracy, we should at least talk about lotteries, too.

Sortition rests on two rather unique properties of random sampling. The first of these—which I’ve written about more extensively elsewhere—is that chance is essentially incorruptible, at least until someone rigs your lottery machine. No matter how much money the Koch brothers or Tom Steyer spend, they cannot convince a lottery to choose one person over another. What could be more impartial than chance?

And, second, as your random sample gets larger, you tend to get closer and closer to a sample that mirrors, in almost every respect, the qualities of the entire population. More than any other system, random sampling gives you “an exact portrait of the people at large.” It’s the Law of Large Numbers. (This doesn’t work, of course, for small samples, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who wants to elect a president by lot).

Sure, you could end up with a Congress that consists solely of libertarian veterinarians, or elderly communists, or whatever. But the probability is vanishingly small that you’d end up with anything other than a Congress that, in aggregate, is a kind of America-in-miniature.

If you think of representative democracy as a way to elevate the best citizens into positions of power, then random sampling won’t seem appealing. (Our current electoral system might not feel appealing, either). But if you think of representative democracy as a way to give all citizens equal access to power, or as a way to channel the ineffable will of the people, then it’s hard to find a more efficient system than a lottery.

As it stands, our system chooses very weird people—specifically, the kind of people who think that being in Congress sounds fun. “It is impossible by elections to choose normal people,” argues Yoram Gat, an Israeli software engineer with a PhD in statistics. Gat is one of the founders of Equality-by-lot, a popular sortition blog. “Normal people are kind of anonymous,” Gat told The Daily Beast. “In a large society, there is just no way, no theoretical way, to choose, to elect, normal people.”

Really, sortition strikes at the tension at the heart of elective representative democracy. Legislators are supposed to represent us. At some level, this means that they’re supposed to be like us. But the very process of election tends to favor unusual, extraordinary people—what Bernard Manin calls “the principle of distinction.” So we end up with professional politicians, type-A go-getters, and electoral dynasties. When they campaign, these contenders try to seem as normal as possible, and as extraordinary as possible, all at the same time. It’s an awkward balancing act. They often just sound like robots.

What would have happened, last Tuesday, if we had allowed sortition to determine the make up the 114th House of Representatives? The group would be almost evenly split between men and women, for one thing. It would be less wealthy, less educated, and less white than the gang that will show up in Washington in January. Its members would not be beholden to any special interest groups, at all, for their selection. For better or for worse, only a few of them would be lawyers. A whole lot more of them would be under the age of 40.

There are problems, here, of course—particularly regarding accountability—and it seems unlikely that we’ll be choosing Congress by lottery anytime soon. Still, there are other places where, like trial juries, sortition make sense. Two Canadian provinces have experimented with using random citizen panels to set election regulations. And randomly selected panels are well suited to political questions that we might otherwise addresses through a big referendum. (Referenda tend to be expensive, rife with misinformation, and favorable to extreme positions).

But the real value of sortition, maybe, is to remind us that our democracy is an ongoing balancing act between finding a Congress that represents the best among us, and a Congress that’s representative of, well, us.

Why won’t this work?

Koning: Be careful what you wish for. We as a country may endlessly complain about an elite ruling class and rich politicians gaming the electoral system, but moving to the completely other end of the spectrum is not necessarily the answer, either. Some individuals may not want or are simply not equipped with the right skill set to serve. Instead, we should encourage those with more diverse backgrounds – both culturally and professionally – to run for office.

Matto: Replacing elections with a "lottocracy" to address American democracy's current ills is the political version of "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". Although its application is constantly evolving, the Constitution supplies us with an effective political system. The real problem lies in the ways in which we've perverted it. Concerns with the influence of moneyed interests or media elites are best addressed by reforming our electoral system, not abolishing it. American is a representative, not a direct democracy; a "lottocracy" undermines this core tenet.

Weingart: For one thing, isolating single issues to be addressed independent of others would lead to chaos. How could a "transportation legislature" make decisions without consideration of impacts on farmland which presumably under this proposal would be handled by the "agriculture legislature?" For another, the proposer argues that "people don't know enough about the political issues or what our elected officials are doing…," but expects some of those people drawn at random to be able to tackle complex public policy issues. I agree that "we should think more creatively about how we might work together," but, at least as briefly described here, this idea seems monumentally flawed.

Why will this work?

Koning: At the heart of this proposal is the idea of participatory democracy, leaning more toward the delegate than trustee model of representation. Engaging the average citizen and amplifying their voice in the political process should always be encouraged – whether through running for office, participating in a town hall, voting, or expressing one's views on important policies in a poll. An active citizenry has a big impact on who gets elected and what gets decided.

Matto: This proposal promises to instill a sense of ownership among citizens in the processes of politics. From participatory budgeting to referenda, more states are crafting methods to engage citizens. The inclination to play a part in democracy is innate in America's psyche. As Tocqueville observed, Americans possess a natural "civic spirit," and "to take a hand in the government of society. . . is the only pleasure he knows". This proposal will help Americans recapture their propensity to be active democratic participants.

Weingart: The most readily available realization of an idea like this is the American jury system. By virtually all accounts, it is successful in requiring randomly-selected citizens to drop whatever else they are doing and spend days, weeks or occasionally months deliberating about legal matters that previously, in most cases, were totally unfamiliar to them, and to arrive at decisions objective analysts generally consider wise. Maybe something in the direction of this idea could grow from assessment and expansion of the jury system.