Michael J. Smith lives in Portland.

Everybody likes democracy — in principle. But apparently fewer and fewer people are
happy with the actual thing, if the Pew Research Center is to be believed.

My dear old mom, of blessed memory, used to sigh and say, “If only we could get the
money out of politics!” But in a social context where there are relatively few people who
have lots of money, and don’t mind spending it on politicians, to promote their interests, this is difficult.

What Mom meant by “politics” — and what we usually mean by “democracy,” too — is in fact electoral politics: the machinery of parties, nominations, polls, advertising and “messaging.” And of course campaign contributions, which is a genteel euphemism for “bribes.”

The spectacle itself is squalid enough: the mendacity of “talking points,” the non-
responsive answer to the tendentious question, the rhetorical trickery, the vulgar personal
attacks and the hollow, deceptive slogans.

But more to the point, it simply doesn’t deliver what it promises: namely, some approximation to what Rousseau called the “general will.” Our executives and legislatures consistently fail to come up with things that the public wants. Examples abound, but we have an especially glaring one before us just now. Public opinion has turned very strongly against Israel, across the partisan spectrum, but all our politicians, from president to dogcatcher, are basketballs-to-the-wall for the South Africa of the Levant.

As Mark Twain observed, we have the best government money can buy. One might add that in general, the kind of people who want to be president are exactly the kind of people you don’t want in the job.

Well, I have a solution. It’s an old one, not something I just cooked up on my own. The
fancy Latin name for it is “sortition” (the even fancier Greek is “klerosis,” in case you want to be especially pretentious). It means “choosing by lot”: in other words, selecting legislators or magistrates from the public at random, rather than electing them.

Sortition was practiced extensively in ancient Athens during that polity’s democratic phase — these are the folks who gave us the word “democracy” — and in many other places, including the city-states of medieval and Renaissance Italy (the folks who gave us Dante and Leonardo and Michelangelo and that lot). Also in Switzerland, and nowadays in Ireland.

We still use it here, in a somewhat compromised way, for the highly consequential function of selecting juries. In general, back in the day, it was considered to be distinctly more democratic than election.

We could do this in Portland. Maine, I’m happy to say, has very robust provisions for municipal home rule (my previous home state, New York, does not, and it should take a leaf from the Maine playbook). We Portlanders could change the charter and choose our city council by lot.

Not quite ready to commit to that? How about an experiment, then? Set up a second
house, parallel to the existing, elected city council. We could puckishly call it the Random
House. (Bicameral legislatures are hardly a new thing in the U.S., though our national one is not a shining example.) Choose its members at random — either by district, or at-large; I’m agnostic on this point, though I suspect most people would prefer by-district.

Give ’em a nice long term — say 5 or 10 years — so you get some institutional memory, and legislators can benefit from experience. They can resign any time, or be removed by recall ballot or supermajority vote of their colleagues. Pay ’em whatever we pay city councilors now.

Provide some staff support for research, office functions and so on. Either house can initiate legislation, and all legislation has to be approved by both. Give it a whirl for 5 or 10 years, and see how we like it.

I bet that in terms of skills and general character, the Random House would compare favorably to the elected one. And it would unquestionably be more representative; fewer lawyers, among other things.

So let’s try on the sortition hat. I think we’ll find it rather fetching.