Not to Harsh Your Mellow But

Here's a topic that I'd be willing to bet was not on your radar: What do the recent midterm results mean for the prospects of sortition?  It was not on my radar either but once I came across the question floating around out there on the web, I found it an irresistible puzzle to ponder.  "What does it even mean?" you might be asking, but then you'd be revealing your n00b status at unspeakable (as heck).  As the proprietor of a blog obsessed with the beauty of sortition as a solution to the problem of governance, let me help.  Specifically the question is at base, when the results of a general election seem to indicate a sea change in the makeup of Congress and the Senate as Tuesday's seems to have done, does that have any detrimental effect on the goal of replacing the American system of electoral politics with the system of sortition, or the scientifically random selection of our leaders, legislators and judges for short non-consecutive terms not from a pool of partisan professional politicians but from among the entire population of ordinary (or variably even extraordinary as the case may be) American citizens*?   The originator of the question -- a volunteer in what has been (at least until now) the growing Sortition Movement -- the answer was: probably so.

One objection to the question is that the framing makes an assumption about the likeness of Tuesday's results to a democratic ideal.  Is it a given that because Trump, the fascist, was not the winner that the election heralded progress toward politics as the expression of the public's will?  Is it not equally likely that the incredibly powerful opponents of the public having its say whose capture of Trump caused the backlash that turned Congress and the Senate over will not have thrown up their hands and conceded victory to the victors at the polls but will rather now double down in their efforts to subvert democracy once and for all?  As much as they nurture their image as supervillains, the billionaires and tech bros will now-- in shaa' Allah and if Congress makes good--- have to face something that has been missing for far too long: government oversight with teeth.   Moreover, imagine if this Congress were able to generate enough of a whirlwind of change-- Medicare for All, abolishment of ICE, the end of war with Iran, the end of funding of Israel's assaults on Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, accountability to the perpetrators of DOGE and those, including the president's family, that have profited illegally from the purposeful chaos of the past 2 years-- that Trump would be forced to be swept up with it.  Would electoral politics that delivers what voters were promised pose a threat to the momentum required to muster enough of a clamor to set the wheels of a change to Sortition in motion? 

It’s easy for me to say because, aside from frequent mentions on this blog, I haven’t been working for Sortition at all; but I don’t see this as a setback. It’s more excitement than we have become accustomed to with the electoral system, but nothing has changed really.  There’s still too much money in politics.  There are still democrats spinning the stunning outcome of the midterms as anything but what it was.  There’s a Senate that has some new ridiculously cool members and that has gotten rid of some dead weight.  But there’s still a Senate.  That Senate just became a better tool for maintaining the body of the Supreme Court than what we've gotten too used to from my perspective but there’s still a Supreme Court.  Maybe the challenge for sortition is that more people will be happier than usual with electoral politics because the outcomes were better.  But they were better because of the disaster that electoral politics had wrought two years ago.  I honestly think this changes nothing about the superiority of sortition. The electoral results are exciting for once, and that should be celebrated in my book.  It doesn’t mean sortition is not better.

I also think that if electoral politics make things better for a while (like Roosevelt did after the crisis that brought him to office nearly 100 years ago) it doesn’t mean we can’t elect politicians sympathetic to sortition and willing to openly promote it –making good electoral politics and sortition sort of sympathetic cousins makes a weird kind of sense.

I still say the best electoral politics can only aspire (and should) (and sometimes does) to actual democracy via sortition.  But if the goal of both is more democracy – only one of those two is closer to it.  We just need to get closer to it ourselves.

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* Yes, there's much more to it than risking that your jackass neighbor is selected as your representative without your say.  For initiates, much more information on sortition is here.