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OP ED - I turned 39 in November, and I have now become that Thanksgiving uncle. The uncle who brings up politics, religion, money, and makes his nieces’ eyes roll. And what do I shout with my mouth full of yams? The U.S.A. is not a democracy. It is an electocracy. Democracy is, as Aristotle told us in Politics, “selecting government officials by lot.” Los Angeles is planning to experiment with ancient democracy this winter.
In an article from The New York Times on November 23, “Democracy Is in Trouble. This Region Is Turning to Its People,” it is described how a region of Belgium uses selection by lot to form assemblies of everyday people. The article states that the leaders “acknowledge that what works in their small, relatively homogenous region may not translate everywhere.”
The L.A. City Charter Reform commission has agreed to test that. They have approved a process to randomly select from the heterogeneous pool of L.A. residents to create a series of assemblies. Each one will deliberate on an issue germane to the charter. American cities should be watching.
The method of randomly selecting members of a legislative body, known as sortition, is unfamiliar, yet deserving of serious thought. In a sortition assembly, also known as a civic or citizens’ assembly, there is facilitated deliberation. In this way, the “wisdom of crowds” may be harnessed and the “madness of crowds” tempered. As with a jury sitting in a trial, subject-matter experts come before the assembly and present information and proposals. Members may ask questions, request further information, and then engage in discussion. The assembly may accept, reject, combine, or develop their own proposals as they weigh the tradeoffs with the values of the community.
While some sortition advocates aim to replace elections with sortition, all the assemblies in the 21st century have worked alongside elected officials. There have been at least six such sortition assemblies in North America in the last 30 years. The L.A. assemblies will be an advisory body as well. This is quite a reasonable approach to a radical form of communal decision making.
The key is that, through random selection of members, a group is deeply representative of the community. Therefore, when a sortition body seeks its own interests, it is seeking something extremely close to the interests of the community. If a legislature is formed through elections alone, then it will be dominated by those who dominate elections. A successful candidate is required to have both the resources to run for office and the desire to run for office. With sortition, it is mathematically ensured to be representative of the people. The reluctant leaders are actually made leaders, from time to time.
In drafting the U.S. Constitution, American elites not only rejected monarchy, but also were skeptical of direct democracy, considering it to be mob rule. A “natural aristocracy” was their hope. They selected their tool: mass elections. The actual details of Aristotle’s notion of democracy, as described in the Times on November 23, were lost to history until the late 1800s, when Aristotle’s scroll Constitutions was rediscovered. The scroll explains the daily, random selection of 500 Athenians. Would our founding fathers have used sortition if they knew these specifics? If so, would they have restricted it to land-owning citizens as did the Athenians?
Not only will the L.A. assemblies feature the first American assemblies to address a city’s charter, but they will also be some of the most diverse assemblies in history. They will neither ignore the voices of the landless and downtrodden, nor the voices of the landlords and the prosperous. The voices will be proportional to and representative of those groaning in L.A.’s traffic.
This is why I yell with my mouth full. This is the democracy I want for my nieces. This is the democracy I want for America.
(Max Clark is a Los Angeles activist engaged in the ongoing L.A. Charter Reform process, focused on expanding civic participation and democratic innovation. Max is an activist with Rewrite LA and Public Democracy LA. He grew up in Long Beach, graduated from UC Irvine, and programs video game.)
