For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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the further left we go the better
revolution is coming
shut down the country until the mods of hexbear are made leaders
they will save the world
i don’t want to endorse this as i don’t want to get banned or arrested but the further left we go we are headed to a utopia
i see it now
You're right that if we just replaced Congress with representatives picked by sortition than it would basically just turn into a corruption lottery where corporations could buy votes for probably a cheaper price then they do right now. But thats the obviously stupid bourgeois way to do sortition; As long as the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie exists, what the bourgeoisie accept as "democracy" will only exist to meditate and eventually suppress class conflict.
However, I think it's a good idea once we have a dictatorship of the proletariat. In a DotP think about sortition as more like a legislative jury. I like the idea of associative democracy personally, so for example labor laws could be drafted by worker's unions and environmental laws by scientist committees and if approved by these lower-level voluntary bodies, they get sent to the general people's assembly that is regularly re-sorted and refreshed with new random citizens for final approval.
There the vibe is basically like "okay nerd, you say we need to do this, explain it to this room of random people why it's a good idea and if they agree it will become law" which also dodges the problem of expecting clueless randos to draft policy on their own without it turning into some sort of shadow bureaucracy running the state. And hopefully with improvements in education and communication under a DotP the average rando's capacity to govern like that would improve as well.
I don't think this issue of specialist committees is especially relevant here, since it could be applied to a normal democracy just as well.
The main issues as I see it are that a) political theory is a real field that takes dedicated study to be competent in, and so are the current circumstances of the government, so expecting everyone to have that level of knowledge isn't feasible, and b) this is just circumventing actual democracy, because it's a system that is quite capable of installing people with agendas totally at odds with what the median citizen wants. If you tell me that there's recall elections, great, then why are we even doing sortition in the first place? Because an adequately robust recall system just becomes election Via Negativa here.
Our current jury system is only feasible because most trials require less than a week of participation from jury members, (not multiple years, potentially completely derailing someone's career), have a comparatively focused subject matter the jury needs to be educated on (relevant parts of the law, and sometimes relevant forensic science and such), the active roles are taken on by dedicated experts (the lawyers), and are administered by judges, who are occupied with administering trials full-time. The absence of any of these or some equivalent would on its own seriously harm relative the viability of sortition. Taken altogether, I just don't think they are comparable at all in terms of establishing that sortition is feasible.
but representative/indirect democracy offers no guarantees either of either knowledge or alignment with the "median citizen" either. Depending on how the actual representative elections are set up, it will be biased to favor towards a type of person who can win those elections. Right now it's basically the best fundraisers and servants of capitalism, but theoretically without all that capital influence, elections may be most easily won by demagogues who gain popularity in ways that are not societally beneficial in other ways (lying, scapegoating, sophistry, etc). And depending on what constituency they represent, in the long term there could opportunity to extract their own personal or group benefits from their representative role at the expense of society at large.
If I understand you right, you believe "actual democracy" should produce results that align with the median citizen. But as I see it, the "median citizen" does not exist as an individual, only in the aggregate, so I think you would actually hit a closer alignment to that ideal by just picking a sufficiently large number of random people than trying to create electorial conditions that allow a smaller number of professionalized representatives to respond popular opinion more exactly. And logistically, since you don't need to run hundreds/thousands of elections to fill the seats, you can also easily scale up legislative bodies too for a smaller delegate to citizen ratio. Of course this assumes the selection process is truly random too.
To continue my example, there wouldn't be much need for recalls because the length of the sortition term would be very short- like 1 year or a single legislative session. It would dispense with the idea of professional politicians entirely- being sorted wouldn't be a job but a temporary civic duty (that you could also refuse if you wanted). You wouldn't lose your job as it's relatively short time and everyone knows what is going on. There would still be professional bureaucrats and advisors to help them out through their short term, but they wouldn't have any formal power of their own. This sort of set up is why I compared it to juries. Also, I think such a system would naturally lead to more civic engagement.
of course, there are trade offs for all political systems like this and you aren't wrong to point out the shortcomings of sortition. It's just my opinion that representative democracy has had enough time in the sun to make it's own flaws glaringly obvious that I don't favor it anymore.
It is beneficial to making the case for your election if you know what you're talking about more than the other guy (yes this is still something people care about, see Tucker Carlson of all people clowning on Ted Cruz for knowing nothing about Iran), and having as a real structural possibility people having a lot of experience as politicians is conducive for building expertise rather than spending more resources continuously trying to re-educate the revolving door of random selections on the same things.
Election + recall. That's why I said that if there was still recall then it would just be elections via negativa, but that's not to say they are equivalent. I think we can probably agree that people who would otherwise be flagrantly working against the popular will would have at least some reason thereby not run in an electoral system (or have liabilities based on any available record of their attitudes to tank their chances), while sortition would not have this effect in the slightest because it removes self-selection as a factor, and again if there are recall elections then this is just an extremely inefficient electoral system rather than something really new.
That's not just the bias, that's the system itself, yes.
Those things can be useful, but they (especially overt lying) have their own hazards, and you shouldn't discount that being correct can also be helpful.
I gave very few specifications, but measures to prevent personal benefit are something that I already strongly emphasized, so I don't see why you bring this up as though I hadn't. Benefiting others is a tougher issue, but I don't think we should just throw our hands up in that respect. I think in general we should have legislation to penalize trying to benefit small groups of private citizens for its own sake, and I think there's a limit to the extent that you can transfer benefits in a system that has socialized ownership of the means of production.
Overall, yes.
I did say median, which is not the same as mean (the main difference being that, in an odd-numbered set of items, the median is always an actual member of the set), but depending on how you want to define it, neither exist, sure. However, I don't see why this particularly matters since I never said that the median citizen is who would get elected, nor do I think that that's a desirable outcome. I am saying that a politician should be made to follow majority opinion, even when it does not reflect their opinion on what would be best if they could dictate what popular opinion is.
What it does is make the most likely outcome that on an 80:20 issue, 20 will be working toward the minority opinion and can use other issues as a means to extract concessions disproportionate to their position, rather than having a >80% number of representatives following the 80% line because it's the majority stance.
This is one of those places where I think the "depoliticizing politics" issue is more egregious, because the populace being involved in elections is a good thing, even if the current election circus is terrible (and Americans especially have a distorted view on this because of how particularly horrible our election cycle is). I'm curious about what scale you want representation to operate at when you say "scale up" though, because having a huge political class seems like its own productivity sink.
Yeah, that's a bit of an issue but I don't think it's interesting to talk about, so I'll worry about it when someone outside of a forum takes sortition seriously and granular procedural questions like that matter.
We should have recalls even if the session is a month long, because it's not like it's going to be too short to matter unless it's so short that it's not functional to start with. Moreover, the effort involved in training people for that level of churn seems awful.
People being able to refuse presents its own issues (also further breaks down the jury comparison).
I wasn't saying that you'd get fired for missing work for a year, come on. What I mean is that if you have an ongoing project of some kind, from engineering to therapy, and then "oops, you're on a municipal council for a year, sorry". It would potentially really mess stuff up for you or make things much harder for others.
Are they elected? How many are there in proportion to representatives? Do you see how this might undercut the supposed integrity of this system compared to democracy?
Would you like to elaborate? Personally I think that having elections that actually represent popular opinion would probably do a better job of directly eliciting civic engagement.
Your main frame of reference, if you're anything like 98% of users on this board, is a bourgeois pressure valve that was explicitly designed to not be able to do what it claims to do. Countries like Cuba have done a good job of showing how a better democracy -- not a perfect one, merely a better one -- has the potential to make society capable of radically better policy than we see elsewhere.
In the Soviet Union the Red Book consisted of a list of endangered species and was compiled by the Academy of Sciences, and inclusion in this book immediately granted those species protected status, so it can be considered an example.