Across the world, in cities and regions, a method is emerging that incorporates the original intent of the framers of democracy. This article explains how democracy started, what went wrong, and how we can move to better a better body politic in the future.
—Sarah Walz
Excerpts from an essay by Jeremy Lent:
“Democracy” Was Never Designed to Work — But Something Better Is Emerging
The crisis of democratic legitimacy is a design problem—and better alternatives already exist
Something is breaking apart in the democratic world beyond the usual scandals of corruption or periodic rise of demagogues. We are witnessing a legitimacy crisis that goes all the way down to the foundations. Across Europe and North America, citizens no longer believe their governments represent them. Poll after poll shows collapsing trust in democratic institutions. We are taught that modern democracy traces its lineage to ancient Athens. This may be true—but not in the way we’re led to believe.
For male citizens, Athenian democracy was real, but it functioned nothing like what we practice today. The center of Athenian power was the Boule, a council of 500 men who prepared legislation for the Assembly to vote on — chosen not by election, but by public lottery, known as sortition. Magistrates and juries were selected the same way.
. . . In Politics, [Aristotle] contrasted sortition, which he viewed as democratic, with elections, which he saw as oligarchic. His reasoning was compelling: sortition ensured that legislative bodies were truly representative of the citizenry; it resisted corruption and the concentration of power; and it spread the opportunity to govern broadly throughout the population.
When the architects of the U.S. Constitution met in Philadelphia in 1787, they were fully aware of Aristotle’s distinction—and deliberately chose the oligarchic option. What the Founders built was explicitly designed to protect property from popular interference — a system where, as Madison explained, the “rights of property” constituted the “first object of government.”
Today, roughly half the members of Congress are millionaires. The current U.S. administration includes 13 billionaires. Europe’s electoral democracies, while differing in specifics, followed a similar trajectory: landed gentry wresting power from monarchs while maintaining control of the levers of governance, yielding to broader suffrage only incrementally — what one historian called vaccination against insurrection.”
Deliberative democracy rests on the recognition that laws and policies gain their legitimacy not merely from a vote, but from a process of careful deliberation among citizen peers leading up to that vote. Its principal instrument is the citizens’ assembly: a group of ordinary people — usually a hundred or more — chosen by sortition to be genuinely representative of the broader population, who engage in sustained facilitated discussion on a particular topic until they arrive at a considered recommendation.
The Canadian province of British Columbia established its first modern citizens’ assembly in 2004 to review its electoral system. In Ireland, 99 randomly chosen citizens deliberated for eighteen months on the fraught question of abortion. Belgium’s German-speaking region, Ostbelgien, has gone further: in 2019 it established the world’s first permanent Citizens’ Council, which has since inspired cities like Lisbon and Paris to form their own standing assemblies. Similar efforts are taking place in Columbia, Lisbon, Barcelona, Taiwan, Rojova in Syria, and Kerala in India. But the US is lagging behind.
Democracy’s legitimacy crisis cannot be solved by tinkering at the margins. Campaign finance reform, ethics rules, and better candidates all matter, but they do not address the structural design of a system built, from its foundations, to protect the wealthy and powerful.
The deeper task is to recover an older, more radical promise of genuine self-governance: not choosing one group of elites over another every few years, but taking on the shared responsibility of governing together.
The tools already exist. The experiments are already underway. Ordinary people, given sufficient time, good information, skilled facilitation, and the knowledge that their conclusions will matter, are demonstrating that they can arrive at thoughtful, nuanced, and widely supported decisions on society’s most difficult questions.
If democracy is to survive the 21st century, it may need to become, for the first time, actually democratic.
Read more . . .
Image from the essay
Jeremy Lent is an author and speaker whose work investigates the underlying causes of our civilization’s existential crisis, and explores pathways toward a life-affirming future. He is founder of the Deep Transformation Network and co-founder of the Ecocivilization Coalition. His previous two books were The Web of Meaning and The Patterning Instinct.