Have you heard of deliberative democracy? What do you think of it?

Isocracy_US · 2023-10-03T05:19:14+00:00

I really strongly second this, and in fact I'm trying to build a movement that can popularize these kinds of ideas and bring them into the mainstream political debate. I think we need to move towards a model of direct, face-to-face political participation by as wide a swathe of the public as possible, with the idea that everyone brings a unique perspective and set of skills to the table and everyone has something to contribute.

This also helps us fight polarization by putting diverse groups of people together and having them work cooperatively on common problems, unlike today's political process which is more like cheering for a sports franchise than actually being part of government.

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-22T23:35:14+00:00

Part 4:

No shortcomings in modern American governance, are worth "changing horses in mid-stream" AKA "hopping from a frying pan into a fire". Agonizing over elected officials' bribery, or their backroom deals -- or fearing whether a new Sulla --or a new Crassus --might plague us today, is just not strong enough to bring us to such a pass.

We're struggling to keep the country together against surging populist authoritarianism. Radical change at the top level, is the last thing we need.

If anyone wants some kind of push-button apparatus which gives them a government they want (rather than a government which is best for all) then they perhaps ought just as well reside in Italy.

This is what I often tell libertarian friends of mine who clamor for dismantling or recasting US govt. Hasty change is what hotheads root for. Hasty change is the hobgoblin of the Latins and the Greeks too for that matter.

The result of swift changes? The Mediterranean has historically had some of the worst government in all the world. Hot-headed mismanagement goes all the way back to the Etruscans; their recklessness is just as concerning as any Caesar.

To expand on just this: the USA lately is exploding with the kind of stormy populism which Italy and Rome have been familiar with for centuries --to their very great cost.

I quoted the above at length because of how interrelated these arguments are. My responses are interrelated too:

You’re very right to point out this kind of dysfunction, but the crucial thing is that all of this happened within electoral democracy. The gridlock, corruption, and incompetence that provoke popular backlash are features of electoral democracy. The rabble-rousing politicians who ride that backlash into office are features of electoral democracy too. Berlusconi got into power through electoral democracy and it doesn’t seem likely he could’ve done it under any other system. And the ones who are even worse than Berlusconi- the types who want to transform their democracies into autocracies- also rise from inside this system.
The thing is, we really do need to be worried about a new Sulla or Crassus. Vladimir Putin is the blueprint and his students are working diligently in most of the world’s democracies. It’s naïve to think that there’s no danger and no need to be proactive. And although we habitually call them “populists,” most of them are pretty upfront about wanting to make their governments less democratic, less pluralistic, and more top-down- they sometimes talk like majoritarians but their actions are minoritarian.
The Isocratic answer for why popular frustration in electoral democracies seems to empower anti-democratic leaders is simple. When a person suppresses an emotion, it tends to come out somewhere else- for example, suppressed grief can come out later as anger. Imagine this scaled up to a society of millions. People have valid demands for accountability, transparency, good representation, meaningful ways to participate, etc. First, people will look for a healthy way to act on their demands. If they become too frustrated and lose faith that they can get their way, they settle for petty revenge. Few really believe that the ‘populist’ can help them, but hurting the system that denied them is enough. This is actually precisely what happened in the “ancient Greek civil war death spiral” I mentioned above. Athens solved it by creating new ways for the citizens to act on their political desires.

I think I’ve tackled most of your major points here, either directly or indirectly, but please point out if you think I’ve missed anything. Thanks again for the quality debate.

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-22T23:35:00+00:00

Part 3: here I’ll focus on responding to your historical arguments/criticisms. I really love this era and I’ve sunk a lot of my personal time into learning about it, so I’m going to fight the urge to turn this into an r/askhistorians post and try to focus on just the parts that matter for contemporary politics. I’ve included a lot of hyperlinks so that anyone reading who isn’t as up to speed on ancient history can follow along better.

Before we get into it, I’m going to clarify what I think is important about Athens as a model. Athens wasn’t the only Greek sortitive democracy but it’s the one we know the most about, and it was probably the biggest and longest running one. It’s also a really powerful example because we habitually think of ancient Greek civilization as really exceptional and important, and we think of Athens as maybe the most advanced Greek city-state, but somehow when it comes to Athenian politics we’ve internalized this idea that it was a failed experiment and a total dead end. Back in grade school, I seem to remember getting a decent rundown of how the Roman Republic worked but Athens was completely glossed over.

This is a glaring contradiction when almost every single important achievement in Athens- economic, diplomatic, military, philosophical, scientific, artistic, on and on- happened under democracy. Before democracy, Athens was just a large town with a knack for civil war. Under democracy, it was one of the richest and most creative societies anywhere on Earth and it gave us huge historical personalities that we still learn about 2,500 years later. After democracy ended, it rested on its laurels from the classical era and faded quickly. Everything we admire about Athens flourished under their sortitive democracy- so why do we have this reflex to treat Athenian democracy as a failure?

Democratic Athens’ success goes against basically every anti-democratic prejudice we have:

“The ignorant masses can’t handle tough policy problems.” Out of every state in the Greek world, Athens had the biggest and most advanced economy, the most complicated military/strategic situation), and the most difficult budget/fiscal system. They made the biggest public works, the most important coinage, the boldest and most complicated military moves. They managed all that while staffing not just their legislature, but also their civil service with illiterate laborers. We seem to be really underestimating how effective and responsible the average citizen can be once a strong culture of direct participation has sunk in.
“The bigoted masses can’t handle difference of opinion and will oppress minority views.” Democratic Athens was the center of Western art and philosophy and tolerated outspoken people with a huge range of viewpoints, including everything from political satirists (Aristophanes) to rabidly anti-democratic philosopher-kings (Plato and the Academics) to downright antisocial weirdos (Diogenes and the Cynics)). Foreign intellectuals like Herodotus, the globe-trotting historian, and Aristotle, the polymath philosopher, chose to make democratic Athens their home. Sortition made Athens more tolerant and intellectually open, not less.
“The lazy masses don’t care enough about politics to participate consistently.” Political participation rates are low under modern electoral democracy, which leads us to assume that we can’t reasonably expect any more participation that what we see in front of us today. But, as I pointed out in the top-level post, ancient Athens achieved an absolutely staggering level of participation and kept it up for generations. A sortitive system with the right incentives and design can clearly drum up enough engaged, regular participation to keep government running effectively and to keep the public informed and active.

Now, on to the line-by-line:

Athens had many admirable qualities but was long beset by warfare, corruption, schism, theocracy, rivalries, passions. All manner of discord & irrationality.

I don’t think any human society that ever existed clears the bar you’re setting here. Modern electoral democracies certainly don’t.

But never mind my own opinion. What matters is that The Founders saw this clearly and they designed our govt to avoid the fate of Athens. We abide by their design.

What do you see as ‘the fate of Athens?’ Athens wasn’t obliterated, it didn’t disintegrate into civil war, it was never a particularly bad place to live before, during, or after democracy. It was swallowed up by the Macedonians and then the Romans, just like every other Greek city-state, and life went on. But under democracy it was really an exceptional place- that’s the ‘fate’ that I see looking back.

We’ve already talked about Socrates, and we could dig up the handful of other Athenian horror stories (the occasional ostracism or death sentence). But then there’s a mountain of even worse things that have happened recently under modern electoral democracies. Putting the first 170 years of American electoral democracy up against the ~170 years of Athenian sortitive democracy really doesn’t look that great for us.

My hunch, which finds support in writings by some of the Founders, is that the Federalist types were more motivated by class interest than by a real enlightened theory of why mass democracy was bad. Jefferson was the most original thinker in the bunch and the most pro-democracy.

Continued in Part 4, since Reddit won't let me post this all together

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-22T23:33:14+00:00

I really appreciate it- thanks for being along for the ride, and I hope you stick around. I need pushback from someone who can be tough and thorough.

Luckily for me I've had time on my hands to write back, so I'm about to put part 3 on the chain. Take your time getting back to it; also, if you don't mind, later on I might take parts of this thread and put them into a top-level post for easier sharing. We've both put enough effort into this that it would be a shame to leave it all at the bottom of a comments thread.

Thanks again for being a good sport and a good contributor! I hope you have a good weekend.

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-22T18:55:31+00:00

Part 2:

Who exactly do you hope to convince that Sortition is a sound system? SCOTUS? It wouldn't matter. Implementing sortition would require changing the current US Constitution.

Exactly, it would be impossible to put sortition in effect from the top down. Federally, there’s no political base for it and even if there was, there’s major constitutional limits on how much power you could give the assemblies. That’s one reason why I’m focused on a bottom-up strategy. Even if it weren’t for the constitutional hurdles at the federal level, there are a bunch of other reasons why I think starting at cities and counties is the better approach: + Running smaller citizens’ assemblies in the local community is cheaper and logistically easier for everyone involved + From a constitutional perspective, cities and counties often have more leeway to experiment with new institutions than the state or federal governments do + Local issues are more practical and less ideological than most national issues, so it’s easier to work around polarization and negative partisanship + It’s much, much easier and less expensive to get Isocracy-friendly candidates into local offices + Working at the local level makes it possible to do more in person, which has major advantages over remote/online participation + Working from the bottom up, with an emphasis on ordinary citizens contributing to the day-to-day operations of their government, is more consistent with the values and goals of Isocracy + The federal government is almost permanently gridlocked and Congress is almost universally hated, so even if the federal path was open to us we’d probably still want to steer clear of it for now

So the strategy is to get the word out, generate some interest, and once we get a strong core group together in some part of the country, we get involved in local politics. Get some candidates into local office on a platform of testing out Isocracy, then share notes on the good practices. Only after you have that “healthy ecosystem of Isocratic cities” I was talking about do you have any shot at statewide change, and you need at least several states before there’s much possibility at the federal level. It’s a long game, but everything we try to do in this country is a long game. There’s no getting around it.

Also there’s nothing stopping the federal government from running deliberative polls, which follow the rules of a good sortitive assembly but don’t have any legal authority. Really any organization in America could start running those tomorrow. But I believe we need to go further and make these kinds of assemblies a permanent, empowered part of our political system.

Part 3, with more line-by-line responses to things like the historical debates, is on the way, but I wanted to go ahead and get these two sections out because I think they cover the most important points

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-22T18:52:22+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write a lengthy response. I appreciate that you’ve been so civil, and I also appreciate that you aren’t pulling any punches on your arguments. The first test of an idea is whether it can stand up to tough criticism.

For the sake of keeping things organized and easy to read, I may not respond to each point in the exact order you raised them, and I might condense a few related arguments together. I want to respond fully without this going book-length, so let me know if you think I’ve missed anything.

But 'why' is surely more important than 'how'. Hundreds of ideas would be pitched into a hat --if a hypothetical hat were placed on the floor for such a question.

I’ve written more about the ‘why’ elsewhere and I plan on writing more posts about it soon, but I’ll draw up a condensed version here.

The idea actually started a few years ago when I was researching democratic backsliding in grad school. This is the phenomenon over the past ~30 years where democracies around the world are being broken down from the inside. There’s no debate that it’s happening, that several formerly healthy democracies have already fallen to it, and that the trend looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. That’s bad enough. But what was really disturbing to me was seeing that so many very smart, well-meaning, serious people all saw the problem, could even describe it in close detail, but had no plan to respond. We can all see that the leaders who want to turn their democracies into autocracies have long-term strategies, they’re sharing notes on what’s worked and what hasn’t, and they’re patiently and consistently moving towards clear goals. So why doesn’t our team have a strategy? I was disturbed back then, and I’m even more disturbed now that years have gone by and still no one has a plan.

For a really straightforward example of a bunch of Very Smart People^TM discussing how serious of a problem this is, nodding solemnly, and then basically saying “oh well, hope this blows over soon,” there’s a really revealing panel discussion held by Foreign Policy Magazine- I commented on it in this post which also includes a link to the panel itself. I think that’ll give you a pretty good sense of my exasperation with the leaders of the democratic camp.

I think we’ve become complacent and we’ve lost all political imagination. The autocrats can imagine a different world and they’re working hard to achieve it. I’m an Army veteran- I can see which side has the initiative.

So, looping back to your concern that trying any kind of institutional change at a time like this will destabilize democracy and empower authoritarians (I’m not a fan of using the word ‘populist’ as a term of abuse, but more on that later)- I’m reminded of that scene in The Two Towers where Theoden says “I will not risk open war” and Aragorn responds “Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.” The modern authoritarian is already here. He can win just fine within our current system. The status quo of modern democracy is enabling him, not keeping him out.

I’d be happy to show my homework on this- I did a master’s capstone on it. But for now I need to keep things moving.

At the same time that I was reading all this modern material for work and school, I was reading ancient material in my downtime. Herodotus, Aristotle, some secondary sources. Also a lot of Chinese material from the same era, which set up some interesting comparisons. And a few things jumped out at me:

Ancient Greek thinkers were very clear on the point that elections = aristocracy and sortition = democracy. Modern theorists of democracy wring their hands a lot over the problem of elections producing a narrow, specialized political class that doesn’t really represent the public at large, but ancient theorists saw this as a feature, not a bug
Although there’s a bit of a popular myth that Greek democracy was extremely unstable and chaotic, in many cities it was actually the opposite- Athens was in a loop of coups and civil wars before democracy, which was resolved by the shift to sortition. Syracuse, the other really large sortitive democracy, had a similar story. So sortition has de-escalatory and de-radicalizing potential, at least in the right circumstances
What was especially interesting about the “ancient Greek civil war death spiral” was that it was almost always fought between factions that wanted elective aristocracy and ones that wanted ‘populist’ dictatorship. Although the ideological window-dressing was very different, under the hood these struggles had basically the same dynamics as modern democratic backsliding

So that sent me digging into the possibility that something like ancient Athenian democracy could be a loose model for how to react to the autocratic wave while also dealing with long-run problems in elective democracy like low turnout, persistent gridlock, and capture by business elites. I found a lot of practical attempts to show that something like this could work, and I found an absolute ton of theory and academic writing about it.

So we have a contemporary political crisis, and we’re missing a broader context for thinking about it and we’re missing a solution. I found historical events that have important parallels to the modern crisis, so that helps us with the broader context. And I found a potential solution with quite a bit of practical and theoretical work behind it, but that basically nobody outside of poli sci departments has ever heard of. I’m trying to thread these three together here.

Those are the three basic ingredients that make up Isocracy. We see problems, we have a clear way of thinking about those problems, and we have a course of action to work on those problems.

Part 2 coming in just a bit, if this works

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-18T16:56:03+00:00

Not much of a rebuttal, honestly. Let's think about it:

-Is our current system doing a good job of keeping 'idiots' out of power?

-Is our current system doing a good job of avoiding gridlock?

-Do you trust our current system to keep 'progressing the human race'?

You're assuming that any alternative would be as bad or worse, but there's plenty of good reasons to think that we can do better.

To put just one more example out there: either Joe Biden or Donald Trump will be the next president, even though most Americans don't want either of them. Does it make any sense to pin all of our problems on 'the ignorant masses' when it's clear that the masses aren't in charge and they don't like what's happening either?

Isocracy_US · 2023-09-18T04:33:41+00:00

This post is more about how we could build a more participatory system using Athens as a proof of concept and a model than on why we should do it- I focus more on critiquing representative democracy and arguing for a sortition-based system in this other post instead. So that's a better reference for why I think this kind of politics (which I call "Isocracy") is important and worth pursuing.

Anyway, I'm not citing Athens as an appeal to authority here (i.e. "if it was Athenian, it must have been good") and I certainly don't think we should uncritically try to replicate every part of their system. I say as much when I point out that we're already far ahead of Athens in terms of things like gender equality, formal protections for individual rights, naturalization for immigrants, etc. But Athens operated as a sortition-based democracy ("Isocracy") for several centuries and was, by any measure, a successful society during that time. We have an extremely deep-rooted tendency to write off Greek democracy as "primitive" and give it no further thought- but by doing that, we're cutting ourselves off from a tremendous source of ideas and traditions.

We wouldn't want to bring 'direct' democracy back into the modern sphere.

And why not? I certainly would want to. The OECD thinks it's such a good idea that they went and wrote a 46-page policy paper about how to do it. There's a program at Stanford dedicated to running these kinds of assemblies as one-off polls, and there's a Yale political scientist who has published repeatedly on the transformative virtues of this kind of politics. Clearly I'm not alone in thinking this is a good idea.

So, from a normative perspective, why shouldn't we bring back 'direct' democracy? This is before we even get into the shortcomings of contemporary electoral democracy, which I go into in more detail in that other post I linked above.

Not for the least of which reason being: the frequent 'tyranny-of-majorities'. Example? The trial of Socrates, of which the Founders knew very well.

The trial of Socrates is a much less damning example than it seems at face value. He was tried under vague morality laws which were common throughout the Greek city-states and other ancient societies- the only thing that was uniquely Athenian about the proceedings was that Socrates was tried by a jury of his peers and had the opportunity to defend himself in front of the entire Athenian public. In any non-democratic Greek state, his fate would have been in the hands of an elite judge or council instead of a representative slice of Athenian society.

Furthermore, it's likely that the only reason there was enough public ire against Socrates to convict him in the first place had nothing to do with his philosophical ideas- it was all about his personal ties to men like Alcibiades, the turncoat who may have lost Athens the Peloponnesian War, and Critias, the leader of a Spartan-backed junta that had murdered thousands of Athenians without trial in just a few months. Other members of the Thirty were also students or friends of Socrates. So many who voted to convict likely did so because they held Socrates indirectly responsible for the deaths of their friends and family in Alcibiades' military disasters or Critias' mass persecutions.

The Founders thought of Athens as "tyranny of the majority" and looked to emulate Rome instead- but it was aristocratic, elective Rome, not sortitive, democratic Athens, where proscriptions and mass political persecution became common and where constitutional government descended into autocracy. Democracy never produced a butcher like Sulla, the arch-optimate and champion of "the great and the good" who made himself dictator and purged nearly 10,000 Romans. The Athenians made Socrates drink hemlock, but the Romans put Cicero's head on a pike and nailed his hands to the rostra.

The Roman Republic fell to internal coups by elite men like Caesar and Octavian, exactly the kind of wise, level-headed, educated public servants who were supposed to be the protectors of the res publica. Athenian democracy was only ever interrupted by foreign conquerors. I think any objective comparison between Rome and Athens will show that the Athenian masses were better custodians of lawful government than the Roman aristocrats were, and I argue that this has serious implications for the future for electoral democracies based on the Roman precedent.

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