What are your thoughts on a combined system of direct democracy and sortition for governance?

I wrote this as a proposal for both capitalism and socialism so excuse me talking about taxes in the example; I consider myself a big supporter of direct democracy, however there is a problem that people point out that everyone can't be educated on all issues and someone has to write the laws as a full time job. I usually advocate a system of delegates to do this somewhat similar to 'liquid democracy', but I just had the thought that we could use sortition as the highest body. Every year, or two, or something like that, we would select people via sortition to sit in parliament (or whatever you want to call it). They would have the job of setting the votes for the public to decide on. This would not be in the subject of full laws initially but in the sense of simple questions like "do we want to impose a tax increase of 1% on corporate profits to go towards education". Then the public will vote, let's say they say yes, then the sortees will draw up a law to that effect with the help of public servants/legal experts to give them guidance on how to actually do this and any potential problems with implementation. Then once that law is drafted, it will be passed and put into effect - however there is a time period of say a month where the public can object to the final wording of the law, if some number of the public vote that they don't believe the final wording matches the original intent, they can ask for a review of the law (let's say 5% of the citizens for sake of argument). Then there will be a public consultation process where the law is discussed with the public, and hopefully changes are made, then the new law will be voted on by the public who can accept or reject the final version. Since this process is a pain, hopefully simple laws like "we will build a new sewer pipeline" will not have to go through this process unless there's some glaring issue with them and public debate will focus on genuinely contentious issues. Anyway, I think this could be a good method to allow true democracy while also respecting the fact that average people don't have time for legal minutiae. The biggest problem I can see is that the sortees will be reliant on the public servants/legal experts to interpret things for them to some extent and if those people tried to actively insert a bias into the process it could lead to issues. I think that this could be partly solved by ensuring these people represent a range of political views and are supervised by an anti corruption force to make sure they aren't trying to rig the process. What does everyone think? The benefit over regular sortition for me is that the public still get to decide, if one year we get an absolutely terrible set of sortees through random chance, the public can just vote against all of the laws they try to interpret and wait for next year.

Whoever has the power makes the rules, philosophy & systems of rule mean nothing. Who watches the watchmen, who interprets the rules? It always reaches a crown somewhere. Don't say ai could solve it, who controls the ai and shapes its results? Democracy is fundamentally a fiction, a lie for the sake of a "polite society".

>>101255 >Since this process is a pain, hopefully simple laws like "we will build a new sewer pipeline" will not have to go through this process unless there's some glaring issue with them and public debate will focus on genuinely contentious issues. Well if you're proposing absolute centralization that's very impractical. You'll have people in danzig and berlin voting on whether or not to fix a sewer in munich. In any case its not the rule of legislature to decide to fix this or that sewer so much as to decide the rules by governing the fixing of sewers etc, by the administration, and in general the rules of the administration. And most likely, you let the local soviets handle local affairs. in any case this is yet another possibly interesting attempt at a republican government. As in most cases I think it still hinges on having a 'good' population. If for instance in your outline you have at least a certain threshold size say 5% who want to, they can throw a big wrench in the works of the government and make any new actions happen extremely slowly. And they already happen slowly, I presume. Several questions remain to be resolved; what is the nature of the administration ? You've only outlined the legislature. What does law enforcement look like, is there a judiciary ? How does it work ? What happens if the country is attacked, does defense and all military action go through the legislature? By posting this I do not wish to imply that I agree with your premises, but I'm entertaining them for the sake of interest.

>"Do you really mean," asked the President, incredulously, "that you choose any ordinary man that comes to hand and make him despot--that you trust to the chance of some alphabetical list...." >"And why not?" cried Barker. "Did not half the historical nations trust to the chance of the eldest sons of eldest sons, and did not half of them get on tolerably well? To have a perfect system is impossible; to have a system is indispensable. All hereditary monarchies were a matter of luck: so are alphabetical monarchies. Can you find a deep philosophical meaning in the difference between the Stuarts and the Hanoverians? Believe me, I will undertake to find a deep philosophical meaning in the contrast between the dark tragedy of the A's, and the solid success of the B's." >"And you risk it?" asked the other. "Though the man may be a tyrant or a cynic or a criminal." >"We risk it," answered Barker, with a perfect placidity. "Suppose he is a tyrant--he is still a check on a hundred tyrants. Suppose he is a cynic, it is to his interest to govern well. Suppose he is a criminal--by removing poverty and substituting power, we put a check on his criminality. In short, by substituting despotism we have put a total check on one criminal and a partial check on all the rest." - GK Chesterton, "The Napoleon of Notting Hill"

>>101258 nta but it seems obvious to me that there would be multiple levels of government (neighborhood/department, city, state/province, federal). he didn't talk about "absolute centralization" anywhere. and that's not what centralization means, a government can be strongly centralized while still having local level decision making bodies >they can throw a big wrench in the works of the government and make any new actions happen extremely slowly. not just that, they could render the entire thing completely inoperable. imo OP should have gone all the way with sortition and skip the referendum and month-long moratorium stuff. just have the randos pass laws >nature of the administration idk if we should assume a separation of powers. regardless, jury trials already work through sortition, so I guess the only significant change would be how judges are appointed and removed. in most countries it is just an administrative career path because they can't create laws through precedent, that's only a thing in english law countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law#Adjudication_and_legal_reasoning >does defense and all military action go through the legislature? in most countries it doesn't, even though the legislature can and does appoint and remove the top brass and allocate funding >I'm entertaining them for the sake of interest. you're not, or you wouldn't have felt compelled to preemptively declare that you disagree in pretentious and ridiculously out of place language, as if your opinion, posted on an anonymous imageboard, carried weight if you don't care, and are just fishing for gotchas (rather than actually trying to understand what the other side is saying), you don't have to do this fake bullshit. you can be against and disagree, but you have to make an honest effort and understand what the other side is saying >>101255 >sortees will be reliant on the public servants/legal experts to interpret things for them 1. why are you limiting them to public servants and legal experts? if you want to build a sewage pipe, the first person you would ask is an engineer. I assume you mean that they are going to have to rely on experts in general, but that's the case for high-level decision makers in any organization but here is the real problem with your utopia: it is too abstract. you probably read something like >>101256 and think they're being philistine or narrow minded, but your theory is too disconnected from things. under what circumstances would your system be implemented? by whom? for what purpose? for example, if the objective of this was to have a small government, then those experts would necessarily have to come from the private sector, and have a corporate bias, because the state wouldn't be supposed to have it's own experts, and the bias would be seen as a feature rather than a defect I disagree with their assertion that democracy is a fiction, the democracy of the greeks was pretty real, and the "crown" can be a group of people rather than a single individual unfortunately there isn't a verilog for government systems, so there is a limit on how productive these discussions about imaginary governments can be. I do agree with the idea that sortition would be better for the common people than elections as they exist in most countries right now, and while it was a niche idea 10 years ago, it has become more widespread. but by itself it is not an actionable idea

>>101255 Feeding an Ai algorithm all the stuff that it gets feed anyway but making it vote for candidates that represent what you actually believe and parties being derezzed would no joke be a better system. The people not just stop strategizing about who to vote for based on party lines, but stop thinking about matters of politics at all. Do you know how much wasted energy is put into prolelitics by worker drones? Way too much! If they stop thinking and just don't worry and learn to love the Ai they could live in their own little utopia and spend more time with more important things like the football or something. >>101263 >Greeks Best I can give you is voting rights for 25% of the population. What, do you think slaves, foreigners or god forbid women should vote? Take your meds, seriously it's important.

>>101263 an outline should at least gesture at these other elements of the govenrment if they're meant to be present. He acknowledged legal experts and public servants, did not acknowledge many other important things. The only problem he seems to be trying to solve is something resembling direct democracy but without consuming everyone's time. There are things that matter in governing a country, but not these.

>>101265 >greek democracy >voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kleroterion they didn't consider voting to be truly democratic, they used sortition like OP wants

>>101263 >I disagree with their assertion that democracy is a fiction, the democracy of the greeks was pretty real, and the "crown" can be a group of people rather than a single individual This is pretty far away from what 'democracy' means in the current age. If only a select group of people can vote, is that really so different from feudalism where the upper class formed alliances & factions to work together towards a common goal? Really then at that point, any kind of consensus leading to power and action is a 'democracy'.

>>101270 The Greeks democracy was far from feudalism. Feudalism is much more controlled by a much more closed group of nobles than the Athenian citizenry controlled their democracy. The closest thing in the modern world to the ancient Greeks is apartheid. >>101268 Then the right to participate in politics.

>>101255 I like sortition as a concept, but you need to put some limits on who's eligible to be selected as a senator. I want minimum IQ or test score requirements before I'd consider implementing that, and a maximum age of 50. I'm sure a lot of guys these days will also say women should be ineligible as a matter of course.

>>101279 if you have a max age also have a min age. FWIW this is also like super jury duty. I live kinda out in the boonies in my country, if I had to go to the capital for even a small amount of time letalone perhaps two years it would be a major disruption for my family and business et cetera. People who have personal and familial responsibilities, and do not have the wealth and luxury to put all their work on hold to go serve government will try to get out of this duty, and so the selection likely will generally favor getting old/retired/wealthy people anyway.

>>101279 >>101281 At minimum the voting age should be raised to 25, and the maximum voting age should be set at 65.

If you leave capitalist cartels to run your whole society, when times get tough they might start more or less gearing society only in their interests and think less about their responsibility to society at large. They have been told their whole lives that everything in "a society" should be organized around profit..... So.....