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https://web.archive.org/web/20241102070417/https://www.themandarin.com.au/75323-nicholas-gruen-detoxing-democracy/>
"As Western democracy degrades before our eyes, (President Donald Trump wasn’t
really imaginable even a few years or so ago and is still hard to fully
comprehend) we need to remember the choices that were made as modern democracy
was founded, at the time of the American and French Revolutions. Democracy was
a dirty word! Montesquieu’s
Spirit of the Laws repeated Aristotle’s claim
that “Voting by lot is in the nature of democracy; voting by choice is in the
nature of aristocracy”.
With great anxiety about democracy degenerating into mob rule, Montesquieu’s
ideas were taken up as the best chance for the new republics of the United
States and France. There was much concern to ensure that republican government
mobilise a “natural aristocracy among men”, one of “virtue and talents” as
Jefferson put it expressing a widespread sentiment which went out rather more
slowly, though no less comprehensively than poke bonnets. Elections seemed far
more promising than selection by lot. The Roman Catholic priest Abbé Sieyès
“one of the chief political theorists of the French Revolution” was more
unequivocal insisting that “In a country that is not a democracy (and France is
not a democracy), the people can only speak and can only act through
representatives.”
However, a second method of representing the people was far more common at the
time in many cities in Europe stretching back from early modern times to
ancient Athens: Sortition or the selection of citizens at random from the
citizenry as in the Athenian boule and was far more common.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century parliaments were about establishing
checks and balances between popular electoral democracy and upper houses
intended to represent the aristocracy or some new world simulation of it via
property franchises — with different houses of the legislature representing
these two poles. Likewise, I would argue that today we should be seeking to
balance representation by election with representation by sortition as occurs,
in juries by random selection from the citizenry. I’ll elaborate more on this
in a subsequent essay.
In any event, in this essay, I itemise under subject headings firstly how
various problems with our current system of electoral democracy manifest
themselves, and secondly, how sortition based representation could help detox
our democracy."
Via Muse.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
