If

What if the election were held today?  I know it was already held more than a week ago, but what if that result were nullified and the election were held again?  Would we get the same result?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  Maybe some of those who showed up the first time would give it a pass on round 2.  Maybe some who skipped it would take advantage of the do-over. What percentage of the repeaters would remember let alone stick with their original choice?  How many of the voters who reportedly learned in the voting booth that Joe Biden had dropped out of the race would have educated themselves a bit more on who this Kamala person who replaced him was?  Would the November 5 result inspire a pile-on against the incumbent party or a groundswell for the opposite result? In terms of the electoral college, the usual suspects would probably turn out the same-- it's the swing states where I suspect there might be some differences.  I could be wrong, but listening to the reasoning behind the last minute decisions of the sizeable group of stubbornly undecideds, I have come to the conclusion that any conclusion about the outcome of the election that attempts to explain the result is probably incorrect.  This goes for those that explain why Trump won-- which in my readings tend to be focused on the mood of the electorate regardless of the success or intention of Trump's campaign-- and those that explain why Harris lost -- almost universally faulting the campaign for failing to excite the will of voters.  Given the disastrous conduct of both campaigns, it's not hard to see why blame is the word that we want to apply to the loser whereas credit can hardly be given to the winner.

Until Joe Biden was booted from his own re-election campaign, the rematch between two geezers reeked of staleness and produce beyond its expiration date.  As unprecedented as the switch was, it made for an exciting change-up while the novelty lasted.  While the campaigns were equally rancid in their approaches, the same could not be said for the candidates.  Kamala Harris is actually younger, smarter, saner, healthier, more attractive, more normal than Donald Trump by any measure.  The fresh blood should have-- and in the opening days of her truncated time at the top of the ticket frequently did-- stir things up in unanticipated ways.  It seems to me it would only have paid for her to remind us of her youth and vitality -- and to assure us of the difference she represented from both Trump and Biden-- as frequently as she could.  When she did show up especially in contexts that contrasted her with her opponent, it tended to work for her.  There should have been more.  The counsel she received was apparently the opposite.

If there is one area in particular that is emblematic of the blame the Harris campaign can take for its loss, it is immigration.  Polls since the beginning demonstrated that on the issue of immigration, voters to whom it mattered trusted the xenophobic pandering of the Republicans on the issue more by a long shot.  When Democrats introduced tough anti-immigration legislation last year designed to fail solely as a demonstration of the hypocrisy of Republicans who dutifully cooperated in begging off, they had already ceded the issue.  Similarly, inviting the unpopular with both parties Liz Cheney along on campaign stops sent the conflicting message that you just needed to ask the Republican supporting Kamala Harris and standing there right next to her whether Republicans could be trusted.  Meanwhile, actual concerns of voters were purposefully ignored.

If only there could be a do-over, would Harris have learned that she needed to assert herself more strongly as a representative of a different more hoped for future than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump have demonstrated they are capable of leading us to?  Could she have flipped the coin of those who went with the evil they knew over the lesser evil they didn't?

My thought experiment aside, the rules of the game do not allow for a tie and are not best of 3 but that whoever wins on election day wins and takes all.  Given the increasingly dire circumstances we find ourselves in, I'm not a fan of the game.

Before it Implodes

In the context of the strangest presidential race of my lifetime, I've constructed a bit of a narrative for myself about this moment.  I'm not a political scientist so don't expect conventional wisdom.  I think it all started with the financial crash of 2008, 4 cycles ago  (the second strangest presidential race of my lifetime).  By weird coincidence, the victor of a tight race between Democrats was a relative unknown who chose as his slogan Change You Can Believe In.  After 9/11 and 5 years of a catastrophic and criminal war in Iraq undertaken by the republican nepo baby president, and in the midst of a cratering economy, Hope and Change were in short supply, and the candidate who physically embodied both won (in spite of, if not aided by, his selection of the most entrenched Democrat-- a chronic unilateral bipartisan, performative punisher, and entitlement tinkerer with a Senate career stretching back to the days of Nixon-- as his running mate.)   His solid victory over a media darling phony "Maverick" careerist whose ratfucking campaign cynically threatened to put an obtuse nutjob who happened to be a woman a frail elderly heartbeat away from the presidency just to fuck over the dems who had voted for the African American over the former first lady in the primary, was the closest I had ever been to elation about the outcome of a presidential election. 

When Obama failed to deliver on either Hope or Change, opting instead to stay the course in affairs domestic and international and bail out the scoundrels whose profligacy with risk had engendered the financial crisis that he had been mandated to address while letting their underwater victims sink, it set in motion a discontent that set the stage for the populist shock of 2016 in which neoliberalism's anointed heir Hillary Clinton had to beat back a more serious left populist challenge from Bernie Sanders than anyone had anticipated in the primary only to go down in defeat (thanks in part to party defections on the part of disgruntled Sanders supporters, but more importantly to a surge in non-voters fed up with the process) to the right faux-populist juggernaut of Donald Trump in November.  The Democratic response was to blame Russia.  When that didn't work as expected, impeachment was tried. But as historically has happened whenever Democrats get their ass kicked by history, the ultimate effect of Trump's win was both an unhinged Trump derangement and the typical rightward lurch in an effort to court wayward suburbanites (something that seems guaranteed to happen when Republicans win, not Democrats, belying the theory of third party purity voting on the left).  

The result in 2020 was Joe Biden, whom Obama strongarmed into the winner slot of the democratic nomination when the unimpeded progress of actual primary voters was strongly favoring a Bernie Sanders victory after several of the early primaries and caucuses.  An early clue to how things might go could have been discerned from the trajectory of a number of candidates, several of whom, after beginnings more reflective of the desires of younger Democratically leaning voters were shepherded rightward by mysterious forces over the pre-primary debate season.  Among them was Kamala Harris -- a rookie Senator with a problematic history as a California DA-- who had made her name by tough challenging of Brett Kavanaugh in his beer and tear soaked Senate hearings as Supreme Court nominee (he went on to be confirmed anyway) who had started her 2020 campaign in favor of Medicare for All, even through a first debate that many thought she won by making points at the expense of Joe Biden.  With the faint whiff of the possibility of front runner status, she immediately started equivocating on how universal her universal healthcare would be, an indication of a readiness to sacrifice principles for ambition that probably contributed to the disintegration of her campaign before the first primary vote was cast-- and that likewise recommended her to be selected as Biden's running mate at the convention.   Although conventional wisdom insisted the increasingly doddering Biden was the best Democrat to challenge Trump, the truth was he was the most acceptable to forces in the Democratic party that did not want to test polls that consistently showed Bernie beating Trump in the General.  Having secured the nomination with the coordinated cooperation of the field of 2020 also-rans, the Biden campaign's strategy was heavily oriented toward suburban centrist voters, but Trump's mishandling of the COVID crisis may have destined him for a single term no matter who was at the top of the Democratic ticket.  In 2020, more came to the polls to cancel the Trump show than to renew it for another season.

In spite of the recycled feeling of a Biden presidency and an insistence on the part of the old guard that it was Biden's neoliberal staleness that voters wanted, all signs seem to indicate that the order that Biden represents is done.  In spite of a plenitude of the expected and promised deafness to those outside of the Beltway establishment (his role in encouraging Ukraine to scuttle peace talks early on and instead pursue a military victory over Putin's invasion in the spring of 2022 and his support of Israel's genocide in Gaza being prime cases-in-point) his own presidency especially in terms of domestic policy reflected the change in the air in a stealth under the radar quasi Rooseveltian agenda that his lifetime in politics could hardly have predicted.  But while neoliberalism is experiencing death rattles that make Biden appear practically sprightly by comparison, its tentacles on the order of things refuse to let go.  This is how we got here,  with party and media elites turning a blind eye to Biden visibly "missing a step" (to be charitable) in order to prolong the farce of his re-election bid until it could no longer be ignored.  And this is why, it could no longer be taken for granted that the defeat of the threat of Trump with his demonstrated knack for gaming the anti-neoliberal tide required a steady course into a second Biden term.  And lastly this is why we can look for signs to indicate whether Biden's chosen replacement, his VP Kamala Harris, would be a last gasp of a dying order, the midwife of a new age or just an incompetent flop and we are not likely to get an answer in the 100 days we have left before the General Election. Especially if she has upped her campaigning game since 2019.  We can dread.  We can hope.  We can wait and see.

You can't expect electoral democracy to fix itself.  It won't happen.  So while we await the sortition revolution, you have to take what you can get and make the best of it.  

Wild Times

When pigs fly out of a monkey's butt playing the Hallelujah chorus on harmonicas, I think that counts as news.  When the New York Times publishes an opinion piece suggesting sortition-- selecting our legislators, judges and executives randomly from among ourselves-- as a replacement for the American system of elections, that's the equivalent.  Such a piece by Adam Grant of the Wharton School (Trump's alma mater if I'm not mistaken) appeared recently.  And it was a good piece, making a strong case for this most democratic alternative to politics as usual starting with the provocative title ("The Worst People Run for Office.  It's Time for a Better Way"), giving a good definition, offering plenty of examples of sortition already in practice around the globe, and citing studies demonstrating both the built in flaws of letting psychopaths run government and evidence for the superiority of randomly selected leaders. 

While Grant, like me proposes sortition as a method of selecting not just a citizens council of advisors to the legislature as is commonly proposed but the legislature itself and even the executive and judicial offices, our flavors of sortition are not identical. While Grant seems to gently suggest that perhaps a civics exam might be given to those who want to volunteer to be in the pool of candidates for selection by lot, I would advocate for sortition as the basis of a new civics. I am for mandatory inclusion of every adult living in the US (including those in prison and the undocumented) and perhaps even a certain number of adolescents. Certainly there could be exceptions but in order make the selection as scientifically representative as possible, the qualifications should be broad.   (and an effort should be made to represent the demographic of those who choose not to serve.)    

But before we bicker over the finer points of the logistics of the process, don't get ready for sortition just yet.  If you set your foot into the comment section of Grant's essay, those disposed or convinced to the idea can be found in the weeds, but the vast preponderance of responses to this provocative think piece, this introduction to a notion of an answer to the complaints about the widely agreed upon disaster of American politics is "don't even start to go there".   Other themes emerge. Discussion is closed on the article but, setting aside the alarmingly common ad hominem approach as merely fallacious (to say nothing of the ostrich-like "What's wrong with what we've got?"), let us examine some other categories of objection and try to respond to each. 

Sortition is not serious. It's impossible.  It will never happen so why waste space with words about it. -  Nothing pushes my buttons quite like the impulse on hearing or reading about a well-thought out well expressed novel or ambitious idea for government than that it should be rejected on the basis that it falls short of some undefined given standard of "seriousness".  "Not serious" is never about intellectual rigor or impassioned belief.  It is always shorthand for "deviant from conventional wisdom and therefore not allowed."  It's a conversation ender.  Grant's article is a conversation starter so although flight is almost always the most common type of reaction to new ideas, terminators must be rejected out of hand in actually serious discussions such as the one Grant is raising.  These are not arguments; these are, as one reader suggests, symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.  Speaking of which...

Let's fix the system we have -  get rid of the Electoral college, put an end to gerrymandering, get money out of politics, abolish Citizens United, implement rank choice voting across the country. - The system we have was designed broken, and there really is no fixing it.  Every time over the past 200 years it has been tweaked in some way-- the implementation of universal suffrage, voting rights, the elimination of poll taxes, successful challenges to gerrymandered districts-- it has continuously been broken in a million other ways.  People talked about campaign finance reform for decades, and then the supreme court ruled in favor of unlimited influence of money in the Citizens United decision.  Nancy McLean's Democracy in Chains makes a very strong case that all it takes is the money of some very determined anti-democratic billionaires-- and their think tanks and political action committees and university chairs and purchase of the judiciary--  to rig the system against the will of the people. Money is why we don’t have healthcare for all and why we can pass legislation to suppress pro Palestinian speech but we can do nothing about climate change.  At best, voting is one person one vote, as if this alone will guarantee a good outcome.  In practice, those in power of both parties will manipulate the system by every means at their disposal to keep real changemakers from winning primaries and thwart the participation of as many as they can in the general election and in the national discussion.  Even at best, plurality voting means that all but the candidate with the largest number of votes lose.   Rank choice voting by definition means that when a winner is not selected by the majority, the winner is likely to be merely the second or third choice (among the self-selected slate of candidates) of a plurality.  In all cases, those who are alienated from voting or disenfranchised are unrepresented.  Sortition removes the very vulnerable process of voting from the equation to ensure actual fair representation-- which is the point!

It won't work -  Presidents need constituencies and coalitions;  The selected will become corrupt; the pool to select from are already brainwashed by q.  You need to get rid of Republicans (or Democrats) before it would work.  - This category of objection betrays a misunderstanding of what sortition accomplishes and a lack of imagination about what a world without voting could be like. Random selection of our leaders obviates the maneuvers, training, dealing, lying, ambition that come with the turf in a party system. In a world in which our leaders are chosen from ourselves rather than from a slate of self-selected careerists, there are no elections, no parties, no party apparatuses, no campaigns, no campaign finances, no campaign ads, positive or negative, no disinformation or dirty tricks.  Winning elections is not merely less important, it has no relevance at all.  If our leadership reflects us in every demographic, attribute, belief, taste, our leaders are selected from natural constituencies. Without having to be elected,  all that is left for our leaders to do is to lead as we ourselves would lead.

Yes our current system is awful but Churchill was right -- it's better than everything else.  This is obfuscation by wit.  It's also false. What has our current system done for you lately other than steer the conversation away from issues that make a difference to anyone but the psychopathic class of empty headed meritocrats?  It is a nihilistic dead-end view.  Sortition is a way forward.

Why would anyone accept someone they didn't vote for as a leader?  Yes, why do we accept those we don't vote for as leaders? Why do we accept them as party nominees?  It's a question that's not relevant to sortition, because sortition is not about voting. Sortition is not about winning, it's about representation.

What we need is competence not representation.  This is a dangerous world with a complex international situation.  Presidents have their hands on the nuclear controls.   Presidents need expertise in a wide variety of subjects -- we've seen what happens when they don't.  There is every reason to believe the world is as dangerous and complex as it is precisely because of the partisan, sectarian, stunted, stilted, unimaginative and undemocratic nature of how it is nearly universally governed by an entrenched out of touch elite across the globe.  Several months ago I listened to economist Jeffrey Sachs, a Ukraine war skeptic, giving a frank and cautionary talk about the strong correlation between the pressures of our electoral system and the pursuit of war.  The talk is no longer on YouTube  (this one from May covers similar ground), but Sachs' point was that elections force candidates to take belligerent stands and presidents to opt for military solutions over diplomatic ones as a means of appearing strong.  Diplomacy is rarely given primary consideration.  The connection was obvious as was the solution-- remove politics from leadership.  Remove the ability and the incentive for leaders to posture with the lives of American soldiers. Another strong case for sortition.  This was not Sachs' conclusion but mine.   Grant's New York Times essay actually makes a good case for not trusting those who prepare themselves to be president.  

How would the executive office work with sortition?  I would suggest that rather than selecting  a single president, an executive council of a good sized number be selected.  As with all offices, staggered short, non-consecutive terms for the members would ensure continuity in leadership and in the projects and preoccupations of government  while avoiding entrenchment.  One function of the executive council would be the building of a pool of expertise from which to be informed about the concerns of the presidency.  The mechanics would be for the council to decide-- my purpose is to demonstrate how the selection of executives from among ourselves could with very little imagination improve upon the highly politicized and constrained possibilities of an elected executive.

Thanks are due to Adam Grant and the New York Times for a provocative introduction to an alternative politics.  Let's hope this is not the end of the discussion.

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.