In the wake of yet another seemingly endless political season awash in dark money, Ralph welcomes self-described “recovering politician” and political theorist, Terry Bouricius, to explain how we can replace America’s fatally flawed democracy with a genuine one through the use of citizen councils. The concept is “sortition” and his book is “Democracy Without Politicians: Government by the People.”
Terry Bouricius is a political theorist and self-described “recovering politician”. From 1981 to 2001, he served as a City Councilor and then as a member of the Vermont House of Representatives. After a decade working on election reform with the organization FairVote his focus shifted to sortition. He has written influential journal articles on sortition, and helped found the international democracy reform organization, Democracy R&D. He is the author of Democracy without Politicians: Government by the People.]
I was a politician. And I thought we just needed to fix the voting system, so I worked on election reform, ranked choice voting, and so on. And then I found sortition… And many people, when I first talk about replacing politicians with everyday people, they assume that, “Well, the politicians are experts in lawmaking, aren’t they?” And the fact is—no, they’re not. They are experts at winning elections. Their staff do 95% of the legislative work (with the lobbyists, of course). Lawmakers are not lawmakers. They’re public relations experts.
Terry Bouricius
If you let politicians pick the issues, they pick ones that are sexy that they can use to mobilize voters, also that foment fear and hatred. That’s what politicians want on the agenda. But that’s not the kind of issues that we need to deal with. We need to deal with climate change, AI. There’s a variety of issues that politicians keep kicking the can down the road…And with sortition, we can set an agenda that is meaningful. You could have a body that reviews proposals from anywhere in society, and then a large jury listening to the pro and con arguments on the draft bill and voting to adopt or reject the proposed bill.
Terry Bouricius
Ralph wants to hear from you! When was the last time you bought anything— a product or a service, based directly on the ad that you read or listened to or saw? We will read and discuss your responses on a future program.
