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by minor_nitwit
3506 days ago
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The Athenians would say that we do not have a democracy but an oligarchy. The only way that they saw to actually make the government the will of the people was to select representation by sortition, i.e. drawing by lot, like jury selections. I don't think that they were wrong in this regard. If we look at the demographics of the house of representatives, they do not come close to making a parallel of the demographics of the country. If representatives were selected at random, we'd have 51% women in the house, we'd have people from all economic backgrounds according to the current wealth disparity instead of only the wealthy. We'd need to actually focus our resources on education if we agreed that really anybody can be selected for representation. If the pool of representatives was large enough (larger than we have now, which is a limitation put in place to make party control easier), then random selection should always result in a representative body that is actually representative. |
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