As someone who works directly with elected officials (not in a party system), I've seen very little interest from them in any sophisticated public input processes. They will give lip service to public consultation, but really, it's their own political calculations based on power struggles, media coverage, influencers and supporters, etc. that drive what they say and how they vote. Add on a party system, and there is almost no consideration of local diverse community perspectives.
But elected officials, given they are elected with a reasonably good voting method, already have an incentive to do public opinion sampling. Why do the policymakers themselves need to be local when you can just have people go locally and interview citizens?
I don't think any amount of opinion sampling can really capture the depth and breadth of people's local knowledge as well as direct participation. Even deliberative polling seems to underperform the kind of deep deliberation that citizens' assemblies do. Officials can interview citizens, but how do they know which citizens to interview? I believe a random sample of citizens would be better at finding targets to mine for relevant information.
That said, it's impractical for citizens assemblies to make all policy on their own. Right now, policymaking is done primarily by legislative aids hired by elected legislators. Often these aids are not paid particularly well, and therefore it can be hard to retain talent. Imo, we should instead have legislative experts appointed and overseen by juries. These would work with citizens' assemblies when crafting legislation. This would serve as an information gathering process to replace the current status quo of public comment periods, which are slower and provide lower quality information.
There may be some framework by which randomly selected citizens could serve as policy advisers, but I suspect having the tenure last multiple years would probably turn off most people as it would be too disruptive to their careers. Though I think small advisory boards that work part time could indeed be useful.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
All that or similar could just be restored, especially in the event of a *true* economic crises that the System can just "print" its way out of. In fact, beneath the radar there are signals that it might just happen organically.
On the contrary, what these assemblies sound like is stage-managed simalcrums of democracy, where real public power is replaced by curated participation. ITS ONLY 2000 PEOPLE , 0.00000588062% of the population meeting in a powerless forum thats overseen by advisory groups from gov, academia, and NGOs! Calling this democratic is an insult to the democratic traditions we once had.
Politics have always been dominated by the wealthy and well connected.
Although we have been conditioned to believe otherwise, elections are not democratic. They are for elites. They always have been.
Random selection seems crazy, but it works. We use random sampling in science to understand phenomenon that would otherwise be too immense.
The same principle should be applied to democracy.
If we want the people to rule themselves but there are too many of us and too many decisions to include all of us all the time, we can scale democracy with random selection.
with all due respect, your assertion that “the parties have always been exclusive” is factually wrong, and there’s vast evidence that disproves it. From the Jacksonian era through the mid 20th c, both major parties functioned as mass-member institutions that were publicly accessible and broadly participatory. In many areas, local party committees were open to any voter willing to engage, and precinct-level activism directly influenced not just platform positions, but nominations, patronage, and resource allocation. And it wasnt a fake symbolic exercises, they were real vectors through which people manipulated governance. That structure, however imperfect, was intentionally dismantled over time by Very Big Biz, the post war centralized Academe, private foundations, legal reforms, and technocratic reengineering designed to remove the public from decision-making and replace local accountability with professionalized, centralized management. To claim exclusivity was always the norm is dead wrong and ignores a democratic history that verifiably occurred.
Immigrants used to come to America for democracy, and they really found it. There local party chapters they set up, in a system that had policy variability, allowed them to actually manipulate governance and effect public policy in their area.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
They were able to do what the people of the Congo have not been able to do, through deliberative and reasoned debate and peaceful and legal action, because they had democratic governance structures.
Also, it’s not elections that are inherently elitist, its the design of the electoral and party system that determines how democratic they are. When parties were decentralized and member-driven and, crucially, operating within a decentralized system that had policy variability and a diffusion of both access to resources ad decision making related to its deployment, they acted as vehicles of democratic expression and action.
I can appreciate that suffrage was expanded over time, but I don't think that there was good historical evidence that regular people truly controlled the process at any point in our history.
Rich interests controlled the process.
Rich men had the social status and passive income to run for office.
George Washington was one of the wealthiest people in the country.
The time period you identified was dominated by political machines like Tammany Hall, corporate/wealthy control of the Senate, and gilded age corruption from people like Gould, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.
All across the country we had patchwork implementation of poll taxes, literacy tests, and varying degrees of sexual and racial discrimination.
But the critical thing is this: in general only people with passive income streams and a lot of name recognition have ever been able to run for office and expect to win. People with working responsibilities or caregiving responsibilities cannot generally take the risk of putting those things on hold to run or serve. This is why elections serve elites. Those words share an etymological root for a reason. If all of our political decisions are managed by rich middlemen who are themselves the beneficiaries of unearned passive income, we are unlikely to change the system that rewards gambling and speculating over working.
I appreciate your reply, but your comment collapses a long, very heterogeneous history into an waaay oversimplified and static picture. You conflate the existence of elite influence, which nobody denies, with the idea that ordinary people never exercised any power at all. That’s historically indefensible. From the 1830s through the mid 20th c, America had a deeply decentralized, pluralistic system where regular people, through mass-member parties and things like local conventions, cooperative ventures, public credit systems, independent school boards, multi modal localized banking, and other things shaped policy across economics, education, labor, science, and infrastructure and more. These weren’t acts of elite puppetry, they were genuine bottom-up governance initiatives.
The Grange movement, state-level free banking experiments, anti-monopoly railroad regulation in the Midwest, municipal ownership of utilities, and even large-scale scientific projects like state agricultural colleges were often driven by farmers, laborers, and local citizens organizing themselves without elite patronage.
Tammany Hall was a powerful machine, but it was one node in one city during a specific timeframe. Even within it, working-class immigrants organized, negotiated, and gained tangible benefits in exchange for their political loyalty, hardly passive subjects of aristocracy. And to portray the Senate’s pre 17th amend structure or Gilded Age robber barons as representative of all governance between 1830 and 1950 is to ignore the counterforces: anti-corporate populism, the proliferation of local parties, and strong regulatory moves made under pressure from engaged citizens. And very importantly its also in significant error due to the fact that the federal government was far less of an actor in public policy back then.
You raise valid concerns about structural barriers to running for office—but again, these were less severe during the era I’m referencing than they are now. Local party systems often provided pathways to candidacy and support structures for people without independent wealth. Let me repeat that: the democratic governance structures I'm referring to enabled people to run for office and engage in other ways when the didnt have the means!
That’s a far cry from today’s donor-dependent, professionally curated campaigns. Elections today do serve elites, because the participatory infrastructures that made them accessible were dismantled. But that wasn’t always the case. History shows that distributed power, democratic access, and citizen governance weren’t myths, they were realities!!!!!!!!!!!
You are making a point that democratic participation is less impactful today than it was in the past. I think that's a reasonably defensible position as long as we mostly constrain our consideration to white men. Is that a fair representation of your point?
I am not arguing that the people have never held political power. I am making the point that at no point in our history did each person hold equal political power consistent with equal treatment under the law and the objective of democracy. What do you think of that assertion?
If we agree that people have never held equal, proportional political power, I am offering a theory as to why: elections. They are a mechanism that elevates elites. Aristotle, Rousseau and Montesquieu agreed on this point: selection by lot is democratic.
respectfully, I think you’re equivocating again by shifting the standard from whether democratic governance existed to whether it was ever perfectly equal. Im not saying the past was utopia or that every group always had equal power under the law but it was betting better over time and much, much better just before those structures were destroyed during the advent of the Neoliberal Era. The point is that, despite systemic exclusions, the decentralized and participatory structures that defined the usa from the 1830s through the mid 20th c enabled genuine political action from below, and they were expanding over time. Women’s suffrage wasnt won through lot based assemblies but through organizing within the existing participatory party structures: public meetings, local committees, coordinated messaging, and political alliances. African Americans, even in the face of brutal repression, used localized governance structures, especially in Reconstruction-era govs, independent Black towns, and early 20th-century civic networks, to build schools, businesses, and political footholds; and in northern cities such as Baltimore they had actually made great progres with thriving economic, cultral, and and technical communities that had started to bloom. These weren’t illusions of influence. In many cases, they were real victories that in many cases had their progress sadly reversed through the post-1970s removal of precisely those democratic governance structures .
You assert that elections inherently elevate elites and reference classical thinkers like Aristotle, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, but let’s not pretend their ideas were contextually unqualified endorsements of sortition. Aristotle, for example, emphasized that sortition was only democratic under conditions of relative economic equality, something neither ancient Athens nor the modern usa possesses. And Rousseau's own conception of the general will was incompatible with fragmented, pluralistic societies like ours. Montesquieu, meanwhile, believed different systems were suited to different scales and types of societies. In the usa's context, mass elections and participatory party mechanisms once functioned in tandem with geographically distributed power and policy variability to create widespread access, not perfect equality, but far more meaningful influence than today’s curated “deliberative” assemblies can offer. And either way, why should we look to old writers from long ago on a different continent when this very country, which is the country in question, has its own rich practical and philosophical tradition that we can draw from.
Ultimately, you’re playing a shell game: every time I show that regular people did shape outcomes using elections and party structures, you move the goalposts to absolute equality or theoretical purity. But real democracy has always been about expanding access, contesting elites, and distributing decision-making, not abstract perfection. The system we once had allowed for that in ways your proposed sortition model, especially as implemented in elite-designed pilot projects today, conspicuously does not.
As someone who works directly with elected officials (not in a party system), I've seen very little interest from them in any sophisticated public input processes. They will give lip service to public consultation, but really, it's their own political calculations based on power struggles, media coverage, influencers and supporters, etc. that drive what they say and how they vote. Add on a party system, and there is almost no consideration of local diverse community perspectives.
But elected officials, given they are elected with a reasonably good voting method, already have an incentive to do public opinion sampling. Why do the policymakers themselves need to be local when you can just have people go locally and interview citizens?
I don't think any amount of opinion sampling can really capture the depth and breadth of people's local knowledge as well as direct participation. Even deliberative polling seems to underperform the kind of deep deliberation that citizens' assemblies do. Officials can interview citizens, but how do they know which citizens to interview? I believe a random sample of citizens would be better at finding targets to mine for relevant information.
That said, it's impractical for citizens assemblies to make all policy on their own. Right now, policymaking is done primarily by legislative aids hired by elected legislators. Often these aids are not paid particularly well, and therefore it can be hard to retain talent. Imo, we should instead have legislative experts appointed and overseen by juries. These would work with citizens' assemblies when crafting legislation. This would serve as an information gathering process to replace the current status quo of public comment periods, which are slower and provide lower quality information.
What if the people who are "sortitioned" just go serve in the policy-making position for a few years?
There may be some framework by which randomly selected citizens could serve as policy advisers, but I suspect having the tenure last multiple years would probably turn off most people as it would be too disruptive to their careers. Though I think small advisory boards that work part time could indeed be useful.
The United States once had genuinely democratic governance structures, however imperfect and limited, fundamentally based around decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. The Democratic Party, as a small "d" democratic institution, and the Republican Party, as a small "r" republican institution, were honest in their naming and functioned within a politically, economically, governmentally, financially, and scientifically decentralized system. These parties, while far from flawless, allowed for real representation, meaningful participation, and a level of public accountability in political, economic, governmental, financial, and scientific decision making.
However, due to the dirty deeds of an assortment of powerful special interest groups, our parties have transformed into centralized, exclusionary membership organizations. The so called Democratic Party has become a technocracy party, and the so called Republican Party became a conservative party. Neither really represents their original principles of democracy or republicanism, and they dont offer meaningful access or representation to the public. This transformation of the parties has been accompanied by a broader centralization of political, economic, and scientific decision making, which has caused the effective loss of most democratic governance structures.
All that or similar could just be restored, especially in the event of a *true* economic crises that the System can just "print" its way out of. In fact, beneath the radar there are signals that it might just happen organically.
On the contrary, what these assemblies sound like is stage-managed simalcrums of democracy, where real public power is replaced by curated participation. ITS ONLY 2000 PEOPLE , 0.00000588062% of the population meeting in a powerless forum thats overseen by advisory groups from gov, academia, and NGOs! Calling this democratic is an insult to the democratic traditions we once had.
The parties have always been exclusive.
Politics have always been dominated by the wealthy and well connected.
Although we have been conditioned to believe otherwise, elections are not democratic. They are for elites. They always have been.
Random selection seems crazy, but it works. We use random sampling in science to understand phenomenon that would otherwise be too immense.
The same principle should be applied to democracy.
If we want the people to rule themselves but there are too many of us and too many decisions to include all of us all the time, we can scale democracy with random selection.
with all due respect, your assertion that “the parties have always been exclusive” is factually wrong, and there’s vast evidence that disproves it. From the Jacksonian era through the mid 20th c, both major parties functioned as mass-member institutions that were publicly accessible and broadly participatory. In many areas, local party committees were open to any voter willing to engage, and precinct-level activism directly influenced not just platform positions, but nominations, patronage, and resource allocation. And it wasnt a fake symbolic exercises, they were real vectors through which people manipulated governance. That structure, however imperfect, was intentionally dismantled over time by Very Big Biz, the post war centralized Academe, private foundations, legal reforms, and technocratic reengineering designed to remove the public from decision-making and replace local accountability with professionalized, centralized management. To claim exclusivity was always the norm is dead wrong and ignores a democratic history that verifiably occurred.
Immigrants used to come to America for democracy, and they really found it. There local party chapters they set up, in a system that had policy variability, allowed them to actually manipulate governance and effect public policy in their area.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
They were able to do what the people of the Congo have not been able to do, through deliberative and reasoned debate and peaceful and legal action, because they had democratic governance structures.
Also, it’s not elections that are inherently elitist, its the design of the electoral and party system that determines how democratic they are. When parties were decentralized and member-driven and, crucially, operating within a decentralized system that had policy variability and a diffusion of both access to resources ad decision making related to its deployment, they acted as vehicles of democratic expression and action.
Thanks for engaging with me.
I can appreciate that suffrage was expanded over time, but I don't think that there was good historical evidence that regular people truly controlled the process at any point in our history.
Rich interests controlled the process.
Rich men had the social status and passive income to run for office.
George Washington was one of the wealthiest people in the country.
The time period you identified was dominated by political machines like Tammany Hall, corporate/wealthy control of the Senate, and gilded age corruption from people like Gould, Carnegie, and Rockefeller.
All across the country we had patchwork implementation of poll taxes, literacy tests, and varying degrees of sexual and racial discrimination.
But the critical thing is this: in general only people with passive income streams and a lot of name recognition have ever been able to run for office and expect to win. People with working responsibilities or caregiving responsibilities cannot generally take the risk of putting those things on hold to run or serve. This is why elections serve elites. Those words share an etymological root for a reason. If all of our political decisions are managed by rich middlemen who are themselves the beneficiaries of unearned passive income, we are unlikely to change the system that rewards gambling and speculating over working.
I appreciate your reply, but your comment collapses a long, very heterogeneous history into an waaay oversimplified and static picture. You conflate the existence of elite influence, which nobody denies, with the idea that ordinary people never exercised any power at all. That’s historically indefensible. From the 1830s through the mid 20th c, America had a deeply decentralized, pluralistic system where regular people, through mass-member parties and things like local conventions, cooperative ventures, public credit systems, independent school boards, multi modal localized banking, and other things shaped policy across economics, education, labor, science, and infrastructure and more. These weren’t acts of elite puppetry, they were genuine bottom-up governance initiatives.
The Grange movement, state-level free banking experiments, anti-monopoly railroad regulation in the Midwest, municipal ownership of utilities, and even large-scale scientific projects like state agricultural colleges were often driven by farmers, laborers, and local citizens organizing themselves without elite patronage.
Tammany Hall was a powerful machine, but it was one node in one city during a specific timeframe. Even within it, working-class immigrants organized, negotiated, and gained tangible benefits in exchange for their political loyalty, hardly passive subjects of aristocracy. And to portray the Senate’s pre 17th amend structure or Gilded Age robber barons as representative of all governance between 1830 and 1950 is to ignore the counterforces: anti-corporate populism, the proliferation of local parties, and strong regulatory moves made under pressure from engaged citizens. And very importantly its also in significant error due to the fact that the federal government was far less of an actor in public policy back then.
You raise valid concerns about structural barriers to running for office—but again, these were less severe during the era I’m referencing than they are now. Local party systems often provided pathways to candidacy and support structures for people without independent wealth. Let me repeat that: the democratic governance structures I'm referring to enabled people to run for office and engage in other ways when the didnt have the means!
That’s a far cry from today’s donor-dependent, professionally curated campaigns. Elections today do serve elites, because the participatory infrastructures that made them accessible were dismantled. But that wasn’t always the case. History shows that distributed power, democratic access, and citizen governance weren’t myths, they were realities!!!!!!!!!!!
Im not sure how much we disagree.
Let's explore that.
You are making a point that democratic participation is less impactful today than it was in the past. I think that's a reasonably defensible position as long as we mostly constrain our consideration to white men. Is that a fair representation of your point?
I am not arguing that the people have never held political power. I am making the point that at no point in our history did each person hold equal political power consistent with equal treatment under the law and the objective of democracy. What do you think of that assertion?
If we agree that people have never held equal, proportional political power, I am offering a theory as to why: elections. They are a mechanism that elevates elites. Aristotle, Rousseau and Montesquieu agreed on this point: selection by lot is democratic.
respectfully, I think you’re equivocating again by shifting the standard from whether democratic governance existed to whether it was ever perfectly equal. Im not saying the past was utopia or that every group always had equal power under the law but it was betting better over time and much, much better just before those structures were destroyed during the advent of the Neoliberal Era. The point is that, despite systemic exclusions, the decentralized and participatory structures that defined the usa from the 1830s through the mid 20th c enabled genuine political action from below, and they were expanding over time. Women’s suffrage wasnt won through lot based assemblies but through organizing within the existing participatory party structures: public meetings, local committees, coordinated messaging, and political alliances. African Americans, even in the face of brutal repression, used localized governance structures, especially in Reconstruction-era govs, independent Black towns, and early 20th-century civic networks, to build schools, businesses, and political footholds; and in northern cities such as Baltimore they had actually made great progres with thriving economic, cultral, and and technical communities that had started to bloom. These weren’t illusions of influence. In many cases, they were real victories that in many cases had their progress sadly reversed through the post-1970s removal of precisely those democratic governance structures .
You assert that elections inherently elevate elites and reference classical thinkers like Aristotle, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, but let’s not pretend their ideas were contextually unqualified endorsements of sortition. Aristotle, for example, emphasized that sortition was only democratic under conditions of relative economic equality, something neither ancient Athens nor the modern usa possesses. And Rousseau's own conception of the general will was incompatible with fragmented, pluralistic societies like ours. Montesquieu, meanwhile, believed different systems were suited to different scales and types of societies. In the usa's context, mass elections and participatory party mechanisms once functioned in tandem with geographically distributed power and policy variability to create widespread access, not perfect equality, but far more meaningful influence than today’s curated “deliberative” assemblies can offer. And either way, why should we look to old writers from long ago on a different continent when this very country, which is the country in question, has its own rich practical and philosophical tradition that we can draw from.
Ultimately, you’re playing a shell game: every time I show that regular people did shape outcomes using elections and party structures, you move the goalposts to absolute equality or theoretical purity. But real democracy has always been about expanding access, contesting elites, and distributing decision-making, not abstract perfection. The system we once had allowed for that in ways your proposed sortition model, especially as implemented in elite-designed pilot projects today, conspicuously does not.