Democratic backsliding | possible remedies

In our last discussion “Pitting devils, democracy, and ‘executive aggrandizement’ | 2026,” we asked what “democracy” is, what it is not, why it is desirable, and why it does not exist at the national level in most countries which use the term to describe themselves, in particular, the U.S. – and hasn’t for a long time. Please check out the description and resources for that event if you missed it.

The consequences of aggrandizement are in the headlines.

This time we focus on what, if anything, may be done about democratic decay and its proximate cause, executive aggrandizement – on the assumption something ought to be done about it. We will discuss possible remedies. There aren’t that many. To the best of my knowledge, there are only two fundamentally distinct ways to fix democracy (assuming you aren’t content with it as is).

The first is familiar. We have all heard it before: reform the system we have. We will review briefly what stands in the way and why many experts are losing faith in the possibility. Most of the reasons for this were addressed before but we review them below because it is critical to understanding the aptness of the alternative.

The other response to democratic backsliding attempts a more radical revision of democracy according to a proposal suggested by several contemporary thinkers from various disciplines, most recently and prominently by Rutgers political philosopher Alexander Guerrero. It is that law-making and law-enforcing bodies should be randomly selected, not elected. This basic idea is not new either. It is an almost forgotten observation by the ancient Greeks. It preserves the most morally defensible aspect of democracy, the participation of the governed in the making of laws that govern them, and the practical necessity of some form of representation, given the size of modern states – but abandons elections as the principle mechanism of representative democracy. Voting, at scale, it turns out, has a proven record of failure at preserving democracy. For random selection of law-makers to be convincing, there is a lot of explaining to do. We will work toward doing that.

Seventeen years in gestation, following decades of observation, analysis, and review by political scientists, political philosophers, and historians, the proposal in Guerrero’s book Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections (Oxford University Press, 2024) will likely rank among the most innovative in political philosophy in the last century. It builds on the well-documented fact that democracy does not exist at the national level in the U.S. A quick understanding of how things got this way can be derived from listening to Martin Gilens’ short landmark 2014 “democracy in name only” lecture, and can be further deepened by more recent presentations by Guerrero here or here on the applicability of a lottocratic alternative for choosing who will make and enforce the laws we live under.

Brief review of the problem with democracy as currently implemented

Economic capture

• Money and the concentration of power it fosters is nothing new, but the scale today is historic.

Problems with voting and motivation: why vote when…

• Your individual vote cannot count statistically in the real world (statisticians and historians agree); whatever you might have been taught in school, it can never be the case that your vote makes a difference in a national election. (Consider Bush/Gore.)
• Your vote as part of a bloc may count but at the price of extreme compromise. A choice between two is as close to no choice at all as one can get without actually having no choice at all. This enervates motivation, and goes a way toward explaining why voter turnout is so poor relative to the population that is supposed to be affected by the result. It undercuts the supposed gravitas we are supposed to bring to the act of voting: that is, that you are privileged in having your preferences count as an individual as opposed to having them diluted in affiliation with a group, a team, a party, a community, or some corporate body less than the full field of all those you have social and moral obligations to – but always never just the particular person you are with your proprietary intelligence and sensibility. That particular you doesn’t matter. If you matter, it is only through your sublimation or dissolution into this social medium, midway between the universal and the individual… The fact of this subsumption under a class of persons should make us wonder why anyone bothers to ask our opinion when it could be inferred from our placement in society.
• Alternatively, your vote may amount to a gesture of frustration, it may serve a therapeutic purpose, like pounding your fist against a wall, a primal scream, or ritualistically tossing a virgin into a volcano in the hope of propitiating the gods… but it can hardly be politically efficacious.
• Perhaps, most people don’t risk overthinking the act of voting. They do it from habit, from tradition, because of social pressure, etc… if that is enough to motivate you, no wonder we get the governments we get.

Problems with representation
U.S. politicians at the federal level, the political structure ensures, are not and cannot be like us:

• They are mostly lawyers or affiliated with corporate businesses,
• mostly male, and/or
• mostly multi-millionaires.

The system does not permit otherwise. Most ordinary citizens do not fit into any of these sortals, let alone some combination. The prevailing notion that we are being “represented” can only be described as “gas-lighting.”

Problems with politics itself
The supposed reason we have politicians at all is because individuals in the governed community cannot be expected to have the time, resources, and education to make weighty governmental decisions, and, therefore, we must select from among us those who can meet those requirements, and equip and entrust them to carry out governance for us. Is this “trust” necessary? The fact is that politicians chosen from among us can only be expected to be (at best) as incorruptible as we are. Are we – the demos, the electorate, ordinary people, the governed – incorruptible? Immanuel Kant answered that we must presume not:

"As hard as it may sound, the problem of setting up a state can be solved even by a nation of devils (so long as they possess understanding). It may be stated as follows: ‘In order to organise a group of rational beings who together require universal laws for their survival, but of whom each separate individual is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, the constitution must be so designed that, although the citizens are opposed to one another in their private attitudes, these opposing views may inhibit one another in such a way that the public conduct of the citizens will be the same as if they did not have such evil attitudes.’"

It is too easy to blame politicians for not being saints. We must address the conditions that make the attempt impossible for them. Saints are scarce, but is there a mechanism that better disguises this fact? Let’s be real, most humans are so-so morally. At least we must presume so. The consequences of not making this presumption, at the political level where vast numbers of lives are affected by the decisions of non-saints, requires better political engineering than electing from among non-saints can pretend to.

Possible solutions
Reform: Though it may have helped short term in the past (in the U.S. in the late 19th Century, again in the 1920s), present prospects for meaningful reform seem dim because the underlying causes of corruption have magnified beyond band aids: major surgery – difficult and careful constitutional surgery – is called for. Otherwise, we are asking the wolves to redesign the hen house. (As I write, the Democratic and Republican parties are vying with each other to see who can be the most corrupt. They are conducting an orgy of gerrymandering. Or consider the “ordinary” citizens who sat behind the current executive at his inauguration…)

Lottocracy (aka sortition): We are going to focus the discussion on a solution that preserves democracy but re-imagines representation and ditches elections, and, thereby, attempts to address the problems listed above. The lottocratic project is about creating conditions that:

• prevent capture by
• educating the demos, and
• eliminating politics as we know it.

We will describe how the project might work, according to Guerrero. Could it work? Is it hopeless? Needless to say, it will be no small task to counter the entrenched notion that elections are the only way to do democracy.

The lottocratic system is not meant to ensure government by “the best and the brightest” but to make room for the ruled to be “better and brighter” – that is, to give real democracy a semblance of a chance.

See the extended writeup for more.

More on lottocracy:

• Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections, Alexander Guerrero, Oxford University Press, 2024.
• “Alex Guerrero | Lottocracy: A New Kind of Democracy,” Wolf Humanities Center, 2020-1.
• “Reimagining Democracy as Lottocracy | Alexander Guerrero (With Travis Timmerman),” (podcast interview).
• “‘Democracy Without Elections’: Alexander Guerrero in conversation with Michael Hannon,” (podcast interview).

You are not expected to agree with anything said in the presentation; in fact, civil, honest, and thoughtful reactions, not consensus, are the most we should expect from a genuine philosophical discussion. That’s how we approach understanding. But, if you are not comfortable questioning assumptions we have all grown up with, this event may not be for you.

I have written extensively about ideas of governance. If the topic interests you, see the five part discussion, “Magical thinking about democracy,” which, along with related writings, can be accessed at here.