Sortition Q & A

Q: What is sortition?

A: Sortition (also called demarchy) is rule by lot, in which our leaders-- executive, legislative and judicial-- are selected not from one of two duopolistic political parties after heavily financed campaigns only by those who are able and bother to vote, but rather randomly, much like juries, from the pool of all citizens for short single terms.  No campaigns, no campaign finance, no career politicians.  Just citizens like you and me.

Q: You mean you really want to replace the president, congress, supreme court justices with people selected by some random process?

A: Yes.

Q: Why should we trust random schmoes off the street to run the government?  Shouldn't experts be in charge of it?   

A: Experts ARE in charge of the government. That's the problem.  Experts gave us socialism for the rich, austerity for everyone else. They gave us deregulation which gave us financialization which gave us the financial crisis, then-- though "change we can believe in" is what we elected-- they put the experts of financialism back in charge of "fixing"  the financial crisis.  They fixed it all right.  For themselves.  They gave us endless wars, the surveillance state, big tech, globalism.  They refuse to do anything about the planetary crisis that their capitalism has created. They will never give us Medicare for All.  They will never make the members of their class pay for what they have done to us and to our planet. Trust me, they will continue to make themselves heard.  It's beyond time for the victims of professional expertism to have their share of the say.  

Q: If we are changing the way we make decisions, why continue to entrust it to only a small select group of people?  Isn't that what we already have?  

A: The difference between the body produced by electoral politics and that produced by sortition is that the former is composed of a class of self-selected highly funded participants (called politicians) who tend to come from the same class, whereas the body selected by sortition is something like a representative sample of the entire population sampled for a survey or a poll.  Ideally, that body if selected truly randomly is a representation of the population it comes from. It is us, both statistically -- and literally when we ourselves are actually selected for it.  

Politicians can be bought.  The members of a body selected by sortition could also technically be bought-- there's no guarantee that attempts to buy them would not be made and sometimes succeed-- but whereas in our current system, money is what sustains the careers of politicians-- those most successful at attracting money are those who are elected year after year-- in sortition, terms are short and they are limited by chance.  Successive terms for an individual could be prohibited by legislature to make political ownership of those in office less attractive both to the selected and to would be donors.  Moreover it would be the prerogative and duty of those governing by sortition to legislate against such corruption with penalties and consequences for those who engage in it.

Q:  But why leave decisions in the hands of the few at all?  Why not go all the way and implement direct democracy, in which everybody gets a say in every decision of government?

A: Sortition has several advantages over direct democracy-- if the goal of government is to represent the desires of all of its citizens.  Sortition, designed well, creates a governing body representative of the citizenry in every particular.  To avoid building in elitism such as requiring ownership of property or possession of a driver's license for the pool of names to select individuals from, I would be in favor of the population being as broad and inclusive as possible-- e.g., from Social Security rolls or the census.  Only in this way can government begin to guarantee that it will reflect the perspectives, needs, desires and experiences of all of its citizens.  It would be the duty of the body to provide funds, statutes, infrastructure to ensure that participation of all selected citizens is not a burden.

Direct democracy, on the other hand, far from being for everybody, is once again practically speaking only for the self-selected-- those who live online, political hobbyists, trolls, to say nothing of the familiar band of elites and political operatives who would be busily funding think tanks and devising ways to make the process as exclusive as it can be.  By definition direct democracy excludes the viewpoints of the non-political, the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, or those too busy trying to survive. It would replace the tyranny of electoral politics with the tyranny of elective politics.  Far from removing the influence of money it's inconceivable that vote buying would not be rampant without some change from the venal society we live in. 

Direct democracy would not ask anything of its participants other than motivation, technology and opportunity to vote.  There would be no quality control over the process which without safeguards in place would be corrupted by the same owner class that has ruined American electoral politics as is.  

Here are just three reasons why sortition is better than so called direct democracy:

Duty - As with Jury selection, selection for office in one of our government branches (executive, legislative or judicial-- for starters) would be a privilege that would intrinsically require and I believe inspire a sense of duty from those selected for it. Duty would be thrust upon the selected, not a prerequisite for participation.  Individuals would be tasked with representing not a geographical district but their own immediate communities, families, economic class, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, occupation, education, etc.  By voting their own interests, conscience, beliefs and desires, they will tend to vote automatically on behalf of those like them who their very selection if done properly is designed to represent. 

Informed Deliberation - The purpose of assembling a body for executive, legislative and judicial decision making is to empower representative citizens with equal access to questions and answers about the issues facing us at home and around the globe.  Equally informed, the representatives can bring their own perspectives to the debate and vote according to their experience of those they represent.    Direct democracy may recommend, but it does not require informed deliberation of those who choose to participate in it.

Accountability- A singular advantage of sortition over direct democracy is that those empowered by random selection to decide will either personally (if their votes are public) or collectively (if their votes are anonymous) take credit or blame for their decisions.  Individual votes need not be publicized, but those selected to serve will share in the collective responsibility for the outcomes of their deliberations in any case.  Those who participate in direct democracy would presumably have the luxury of melting into the crowd and could use the cloak of anonymity however it suits them-- conditions ripe for bribery, mischief and corruption.

Q: How would it work?  Who would be in charge of it?  How do we get from where we are to sortition?

A: I imagine that sortition could be enacted most peacefully by public referendum.  Let's imagine that the idea of sortition catches on to the point at which there is momentum among the people of certain districts to replace the current system with it.  It could begin in some localities, spread to larger districts, perhaps eventually capturing the imagination of a state.  A successful transition within a state to selecting its legislature by sortition would likely inspire other states to give it a try. I can imagine the difference of government by truly representative bodies would set a wildfire of popular demand for it across the country.  It's almost inconceivable that a state legislature with sortition in place would not test the waters for electing representatives at the federal level by the same method.  Ultimately, the goal would be an entire legislature selected to represent not States, but states-- as in the makeup of the entire population.  Resistance to the spread of it would be fierce from those who will not yield the reins of government easily but their resistance must be overcome by the will of the people!  It could happen!

Q: Let's pretend you're not tripping balls by imagining this could ever happen.  What would keep it from devolving back into the corrupt mess we've already got?

A: Only us. 

What are you gonna do?

Inequality is the reason some people find such significance in the ceiling height of an entrance foyer or the hop content of a beer while others will never believe in anything again. 

- Listen Liberal,  Thomas Frank

Shortly after posting my last piece about the left rift over Force the Vote, I came across a Revolutionary Blackout Network video on YouTube that advertised its evisceration  of Nina Turner for a friendly interview she did with David Sirota who had apparently recently crossed swords with RBN.  The video also featured something about a recent Sabby Sabs interview with Mr Force the Vote, Jimmy Dore.  Nina Turner and David Sirota are both familiar to me as the strongest of Bernie Sanders allies.  What could they have done to inspire the wrath of Dore-bots?  Having just spent all of my venom in writing my blog post, I perversely expected to fuel up some reserve rage by rage-watching it to find out.  Something else happened.  Listening at length to the two hosts reveling in Sirota/Turner hate and Dore/Sabs love something somehow broke through to me.  Maybe it was a commenter, without a standard issue democrat or republican or billionaire in sight, urging the hosts to “keep punching up”.  It hit me… I am up.  I am the up the Revolutionary Blackout dudes were being urged to keep punching.  

While I never fully apprised myself of the details of this latest leftist sectarian outrage, I started watching with a kind of startled attitude as vapors of enlightenment found themselves suddenly permeating the boundaries of my understanding and they were telling me something contradictory to my knowledge of myself:  I am not the ally of these revolutionaries.  I am the enemy.  Could it be that my revolution is not their revolution,  their revolution is not mine?  

They are of course way ahead of me.  They recognize that my revolution is a watered down lily-livered half-assed ball of nothing.  Their revolution is for keeps.  What I didn’t realize until that little hiccup in the universe let me bust through my wall of ignorance was that their revolution is quite a bit closer to the real thing than my recovering liberal’s daydream.  What hit me was that for some people in that quadrant of things there is no redemption in the current system at all.  While I have on paper been feeling the same thing for quite a while,  it was suddenly quite clear to me (who still votes for Democrats-- the constructors of our current failing political order-- to try to prevent the architects of it, the Republicans, from irretrievable victory over everything) that the stakes aren’t the same for me as they are for the real revolutionaries.  I am still clinging to the raft built from the extra scraps thrown my way by the neoliberal capitalist order because I’m white and somewhat college educated and have a demonstrated history of at critical times, when it gets right down to it “playing by the rules.”  What I realized was my commitment is vicarious and underdeveloped and could use some shock therapy.  I am not ready (at all) to switch allegiance from my left-light heroes to the Jimmy Dore universe mind you, but I have a heightened consciousness of my lameness.

As if that is not enough self-exposure for a week, the next night I’m watching a news story about Solomon Peña, the MAGA GOP candidate in New Mexico who has been charged with organizing drive-by shootings at the homes of state Democratic officials following his unconceded loss in November's election for State Representative of NM's 14th district after receiving only 26% of the 7,712 votes cast.  I learned watching the story that the gent has a felony on his record.  Not for some political thing like industrial sabotage or drug use, but for smash and grab robbery.  And I’m thinking, hey!  Why would a convicted felon, a Mexican-American in a border state be MAGA.  The old me would say “Because he’s crazy!” and be done with it.  But the newly humbled me had a little flash of insight.  Finally.  After 7 or 8 years of being told this by people like Thomas Frank (and agreeing whole-heartedly, but apparently with a corner of my soul still reserving judgment).  Because for some people—many people, a shit ton of people—Democrats are the enemy. Indeed, Peña's democratic opponent, Miguel Garcia had actually sued to get Peña removed from the ballot on the basis of his felony conviction, which the judge (rightfully) rejected as Peña's time had been served.  Garcia's appeal of the decision was still pending by election day.  

Democrats used to be the party of the worker and the downtrodden which included ex-cons.  Now they sue to get them off the ballot.  Republicans are at least honest about their contempt for the losers of society, and Trump was the most honest of all because he was also honest about the winners. Democrats on the other hand claim to be on your side while they’re screwing you over.  We know this; I have known this forever; it’s why I stopped being a Democrat when Bill Clinton-- the king of progressive neoliberalism as Nancy Fraser calls it*--  was still president. But as miserable as my life is as a result of bipartisan commandeering and curtailing of What Is Possible, as hard as everything is for me, it’s still easy enough for me comparatively that I have had the luxury to pretend nothing’s wrong when it suits me.  So in my imagination, this Peña character has different things at stake.  He probably followed a rabbit hole of truth that got him to the opposite side of what Democrats were selling and to the default champion of the disillusioned, Trump.  And if my neat story is wrong and he didn’t, someone did.  I’ll bet a lot of people did.  They were never betrayed by Republicans because Republicans never promised them anything they didn't do, like Change you can believe in.  

It's not Donald Trump or for that matter Jimmy Dore who I think are owed a break from me.  Dore appeals to his followers the way Trump appeals to the type of MAGA person I'm imagining– i.e.,  the disaffected and  disillusioned who really have nothing to lose by siding with the enemy of their enemy.  Of course both Trump and Dore are con artists.  Trump’s dishonesty about his own class allegiances is invisible to them because they appreciate his honesty about their common foes.  Something similar is going on with Dore who reflexively, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi and similar folks, take stances against the leftist establishment that in particulars rejected them.  They’re if not reactionaries, reflexivaries.  But I have to admit that they engage my reflexes.  I reflexively have never liked Jimmy Dore and my reflexes have backed me off from former admiration for Greenwald and for Taibbi whom I once felt were on my side.  Now I see that my side is what repulses them, and I do see their repulsion, if not through their eyes, through the eyes of the legitimately aggrieved who understandably drift toward that pole and away from the soft racism of low-stakes reformed liberalism.

In all seriousness, I really don’t want to lose this insight ever. I have been reading about it for a long time.  Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders is one of the best expositions of it as I realized only on my second reading of it.   Vivek Chibber too (who the BNR hosts favorably quoted in a Michael Brooks clip on last weekends’ show).  I have had vague recognitions of it for years, but never quite as self-implicating, and to my way of thinking meaningful as what I’ve recently experienced.  I don’t know where it leads. I doubt it leads to becoming a Jimmy Dore partisan but I really hope it leads to a more informed and broad minded orientation toward what’s next.

As if to drive the point home, after thinking about all of this on my own, I came across the following passage in Nancy Fraser's Cannibal Capitalism:

We will moralize about the need for civility, bipartisanship, and respect for the truth while ignoring the deep-structural sources of the trouble. Sailing high-mindedly above the concerns of the benighted “deplorables,” we will discount the claims of those critical masses across the globe that are rejecting neoliberalism and demanding fundamental change. Failing to recognize their legitimate grievances (however wrongly interpreted and misdirected), we will render ourselves irrelevant in the present struggle to build a counter-hegemony.

If you  substitute horseshoe left, or red-green alliance or Jimmy Dore/Glenn Greenwald/RBN contingent for “deplorables” it’s my new fear about myself.  Not that I think that that's where it’s at which is where I ain’t.  I just think while that side is full of the tailing of MAGA folks and provocation of the civil left which is where I recognize myself to be—i.e., on the civil left, a left probably of my own imagination that dreams of things morphing peacefully to a better world via voluntary surrender of the neoliberal order—I don’t think there’s enough engagement with the real concerns of people who think Jimmy Dore is a better place for their allegiance than the public influencers I like who, like me, reject what Dore is selling.† I don’t care about Jimmy Dore -- and probably never will-- but I’d prefer to be part of a left that includes me and my people AND anyone who wants to replace this shit hole of a sociopolitical order with comprehensive democracy – real democracy a la sortition, and an economy that meets needs for everybody.  I know that’s pie in the sky but for starters I’d like to see a renaissance of legitimate 100% fully representational public good over profit for innovative ideas and solutions.

I guess what’s different for me is that in spite of how hard I think I have it, I can see that my stakes are not the same as the real revolutionaries.  Their revolution is a mess, and I don’t really want to be a part of it (at this juncture) but I feel for it.  I would love to see someone who could gather that side of things and mine under one flag that would get us all to the promised land without breaking anyone’s promises.  

~~~~~

* If you read one book on what's wrong with capitalism, why it has to go and what it should be replaced with, you could do no better than by reading Nancy Fraser's brilliant 2022 commentary on our present crisis and prospects for ways out of it, Cannibal Capitalism.

† Somewhere it has to be said-- as long as we have two parties that always win to the exclusion of all others, that are essentially alpha and beta flavors of the same thing, electoralism is not likely to be anything but a sideshow on the road to revolution.  Therefore electoral strategies like Force the Vote and Third Party voting are essentially performances.  As to the importance that should be placed on them, different strokes for different folks.

Force the Bucket

(Warning: If you want Medicare for all in this country, reading this article will not get you any closer.)

For my American readers, what would you do to make Medicare for All a reality? If some supervillain (we'll call him Dr  Pharm) had the power to make it happen today but refused until you, dear reader, ate a bucket of monkey shit and licked the bucket clean would you do it?  The offer expires at midnight.  We're talking about people's lives here!   If you don't do it, now who's the supervillain? 

When House Freedom caucus members denied Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House 14 times until he met their demands, I knew it was only a matter of time before the Force the Vote fiasco would come back up in our stupid online discourse.  Of course it would.  It hasn't always needed a context in the intervening years since Nancy Pelosi's re-election as Speaker of the House in January 2021 the event around which it was introduced and has ever since served as a sectarian wedge between those who want Medicare for all and those who don't want it badly enough.  The Freedom Caucus members proved that the strategy of withholding votes for Speaker of the House in exchange for demands worked-- although in McCarthy's case, the "Medicare for all" level concession was a promise not to raise the debt ceiling-- providing the typical excuse for further unpopular, drastic impositions of austerity on the few benefits from their government that average working and unemployed Americans might still receive .  Essentially the Freedom Caucus's maneuver provided cover for McCarthy to promise to push through what no Republican worth his or her salt would have to think twice about voting for. 

But what went wrong with Force the Vote and why do we not yet have Medicare for All?

The US alone among the wealthiest nations treats health care as a privilege for its citizens rather than a right. It fosters this through a system that puts the onus of paying for it on the individual rather on society, such that it is "affordable" only to those who can afford it, to those who have a job that provides insurance to cover some of it (i.e., of that which is covered by the policy after paying premiums, deductibles and co-pays), or who are named as beneficiaries of someone who meets either of the other 2 conditions-- a situation which forces countless millions of people to remain at jobs or in relationships that are not good for their health or to do without health care. This ridiculous system is yet another example of an American theocracy that is based on a reverence for the Invisible Hand of the "free market" which shoehorns everything it can touch into the narrowest parameters that still make someone a profit.  It's a fucked up way of doing anything, and health outcomes in this most expensive and highly developed system of medical delivery show it. 

In 2016 and again in 2020 as a pandemic bore down on the planet, Bernie Sanders raised America's consciousness about a simple fix that would obviously, with 2 minutes of unencumbered thought, solve so many problems: single payer healthcare.  With "Medicare for All" as it was called to reflect the proposed method of delivery through the expansion of the existing Medicare program originally designed and implemented for older Americans or those unable to work to all citizens as a right-- like 17 other nations already do*-- Americans would save money on the high premiums and deductibles they were currently paying, paying less money in taxes for universal coverage and nothing at the point of delivery of healthcare including in the pharmacy.  No more lives destroyed by accidents, unexpected hospital stays and chronic disease diagnoses.  From the perspective of all but the theocrats and their enablers in Congress, Medicare for all was a real no-brainer.  Which is why the media -- so well funded by Pharmaceuticals which stood to finally have to negotiate their prices with one payer rather having free reign over the price of prescriptions-- were so obnoxious about giving the idea a hearing.  It's also partly why even with the COVID crisis deepening, causing ultimately well over a million deaths in the US, Medicare for All's greatest articulator and champion, Bernie Sanders was defeated in the primary following the lockstep withdrawal from the race of every other candidate, by a deeply entrenched centrist democrat who had vowed loudly to veto Medicare for All if it came across his desk. Biden's win in the primary was expected, but to many Bernie supporters, his win in the general was not.† And yet he won, demonstrating yet again that opposing Medicare for All is not a fatal liability for Democrats at the polls.

Enter Force the Vote.  This was the notion raised by some on the internet in December 2020 (while storms of accusations of stolen elections were stinking up the air) that leftists should apply heavy pressure on members of the "squad" and the progressive caucus in congress to withhold their votes for Nancy Pelosi's upcoming re-election to Speaker of the House in exchange for a floor vote on Medicare for All.  No one who knows about these things believed a floor vote in the House on Medicare for all would come close to passing, but  this was still proffered as a worthy outcome since it would force opponents of it to out themselves to their constituents.  As an idea in itself, it deserved to be judged on its merits and it was.  The pressure that was applied (much of it in tweets at Squad members) was not promising in advance of the January 3 vote.  Alexandria Ocasio Cortez herself signaled her lack of enthusiasm for the idea on the basis of "So you issue threats, hold your vote, and lose. Then what?"  At this point, the notion that leftists would come together on Twitter to force progressives in congress to Force the Vote evaporated.  Camps formed.  There were intimations that machinations behind the scenes were sweetening the support of progressives for Pelosi's re-election working against the tactic.  In the end all members of the squad along with all but 6 democrats voted for Pelosi's re-election, defeating McCarthy 216 to 209.  Three days later, with left twitter already fully erupted in the aftermath of Pelosi's reelection into tweeted fisticuffs, January 6th happened.

The problem with Force the Vote is that it didn't work.  What's more it morphed from its ostensible mission which was health care for all, to essentially the go to meme for owning the shit-libs.  And it fails even at that!  The shit-libs are not owned by it!  Two years have passed since it  died on the vine and yet it hangs in the air like a bad shit. If anything it has gotten us further away from Medicare for All by creating a ridiculous admission price in far too many circles for left solidarity to the cause, distracting leftist energy in pointless counterfactual interminable internecine internet battles.  It remains an excuse for that contingent to blame tweeters who disagree with them for its failure as a tactic.  And it provides yet another distraction from actual work that needs to be done to make Medicare for All (while we wait for revolution) a reality.  

So you issued threats, withheld your vote and you don't have Medicare for All.  Now what?§

~~~~~

* Per Google: Norway, Japan, United Kingdom, Kuwait, Sweden, Bahrain, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Denmark, Finland, Slovenia, Italy, Portugal, Cyprus, Spain, and Iceland.  There is some overlap of this list with the 11 countries in Africa, 21 in Asia, 30 in Europe, 6 in North America, 6 in South America and 2 in Oceania that provide Universal Healthcare outright or in addition to Single Payer.

† I include myself who did not withhold a vote for Biden as a lonely feeble-ass punishment for his posturing on Medicare for All contrary to what was recommended by some commenters.  I find this quote from one of them on the topic at the aforementioned link stunningly self-revealing: 

Disgruntled progressives who made up a significant part of the Democratic Party base had dutifully voted Biden into office—despite warnings from people like myself that doing so without conditions would mean that he would ultimately betray most if not all of his campaign promises.

Really?  My vote is why things have fundamentally changed for Biden's donors?   Oh they haven't?

§ To those who say eat the bucket of monkey shit, I suggest that there better be some of us trying to defeat Dr Pharm in case that doesn't happen.

Think Insipid and Grow Rich

These guys are good at accumulating billions.  Saying deep valuable words, not so much.

Probably not a coincidence.