Demiocracy, Chapter 19: Advantages of this army-of-Davids (multiple-Demi-legislature) arrangement

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

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

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

Amish Religious Practices

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

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

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

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

PS, from Wikipedia:

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

Sortition in the New Testament

A notable example [of cleromancy] in the New Testament occurs in the Acts of the Apostles 1:23-26 where the eleven remaining apostles cast lots to determine whether to select Matthias, or Barsabbas (surnamed Justus) to replace Judas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleromancy

Demiocracy, Chapter 18—Special-topic Demi-legislatures

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

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

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

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

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

Demiocracy, Chapter 17: Initial adoption & procedural details

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Demiocracy, Chapter 16: Sortition, i.e., a purely lottery-chosen, randomized Proxy electorate, isn’t sufficiently legitimate; Democracy requires mass electoral input, ideally of a “sifting” sort

Drawing a statistical microcosm out of the mass population, regardless of its abstract attractiveness, isn’t enough to make a Proxy Electorate seem legitimate in the eyes of the populace. Democracy, the populace generally and strongly believes, allows it to express itself by balloting, the outcome of which will never be a microcosm.

The most severe drawback to government lottery … is that it cuts people off from the opportunity to vote for their congressional representatives.… It is this specific citizen endorsement—and not any abstract idea of democratic representation—that gives the government is legitimacy and insures citizen, acceptance of the government decisions. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 74.

Advocates of sortition should therefore somehow incorporate balloting.

If you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant [their intuitional “priors”] first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. —Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 2012.

Ordinary people don’t want randomly chosen noxious and/or numbskull neighbors making decisions for them. Instead, they wish to elevate persons whom they respect.

It is at least worth considering whether people in electing the kinds of congressional candidates they do have deliberately chosen not to be governed by their barber, their accountant, the unemployed derelict who hangs aound the neighborhood liquor store, or the nice lady who runs the cosmetic counter at Woolworth’s … but because they want to be ruled by people whom they perceive (however, mistakenly) as successful, powerful and capable … often with a background in law. —Malcolm Margolin, in Ernest Callenbach & Michael Phillips, A Citizen Legislature, 1985, p. 77.

Demiocracy will satisfy this yearning to elect “the best man.”

If balloting were finagled away somehow, sortition might not be robust enough to weather political storms. A non-negligible minority might not accept the new system as legitimate in a crisis, leading to disorder and collapse. Only if there is regular “buy-in” to the system—by balloting—will it have strong enough legitimacy.

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

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

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

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

Nonpartisan Democracy: Extract from a Wikipedia Entry

This variant of democracy should be of interest to persons wanting a less “political” (adversarial) system of government. (A few paragraphs might be quoted in support of demiocracy.) The Wikipedia link is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-partisan_democracy

Nonpartisan democracy (also no-party democracy) is a system of representative government or organization such that universal and periodic elections take place without reference to political parties. Sometimes electioneering and even speaking about candidates may be discouraged, so as not to prejudice others’ decisions or create a contentious atmosphere.

De facto nonpartisan systems are mostly situated in states and regions with small populations, such as in Micronesia, Tuvalu, and Palau, where organizing political parties is seen as unnecessary or impractical.

A direct democracy can be considered nonpartisan since citizens vote on laws themselves rather than electing representatives. Direct democracy can be partisan, however, if factions are given rights or prerogatives that non-members do not have.

Demiocracy, Chapter 14b, Postscript: Reasons for Britain & France to Abhor DeMockery

WWI: Even if the analysis below can be disputed or disproved, it illustrates the common sort of situation where, when “the ruler’s imperative”—political survival—is threatened, it will take precedence over the common good.

I reminded my friends of the formidable domestic difficulties which the British regime was facing in 1914, and how [they] made it politically impracticable for it to declare its intentions until after the first gun had been fired.

[“Its intentions”—i.e., to declare war if Germany invaded Belgium; the Germans believed that Britain’s pre-war statements in support of Belgian neutrality were merely pro forma waffle. The Germans were amazed and felt betrayed when Britain entered the war. They thought they should have been clearly warned if Britain had really intended to do this.]

These difficulties were: the impending consolidation of labour into One Big Union; the pressure for home rule in Scotland and Wales, as well as for Ireland; and the pressure for land-value taxation. All these matters were due to come to a head simultaneously in the summer of 1914.

If in July 1914 Sir Edward Grey had served Prince Lichnowsky with a firm notice of the regime’s intentions, it is a hundred to one that the war would have been considerably deferred; but England would have been split up by convulsions far worse than those of the eighteen-forties, and the Liberal regime would be tossed to the dogs. —A.J. Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943, p. 248.

Demiocracy, Chapter 12: Common-man (Demos) Overseers of, and Electorates for, governmental officials

A bal-lottery procedure would, by the use of the public’s self-selected Proxy Electors, put the common man (a.k.a. Everyman) in the catbird seat, where he/she belongs, overseeing, critiquing, recalling, and even electing congresscritters.

This arrangement would resemble the previously described IVE-Proxy oversight of student council representatives in Chapter 9. (IVE = Inner Voice Entity.) Such a commanding-heights IVE could also, like its collegiate counterpart (see Chapter 10), elect some portion of the body it oversees (e.g., a city council or legislature)—say a quarter, as a start.

How would it have the legitimacy to do that? Answer: By referendums and (where necessary) constitutional amendments.

And why should it have such power? Because:

1. Its alternative, DeMockery, has lost much of its legitimacy. It is no longer a popular incarnation of democracy. (For example, see the next Chapter 13 [previously posted on Equality-by-Lot as Is Greece ripe for sortition?], on the Greeks’ disaffection with DeMockery, and the growing menace there of authoritarianism and extremism.) As a result, democracy is being supplanted or threatened by authoritarian or totalitarian regimes and forces. It would be, to put it mildly, “A Bad Thing” if democracy were to shrivel and die. This is the main reason for empowering Demiocracy.