[aerostable_slug]

> “This kind of blind prejudice can happen on both sides.”

Cancel that man, immediately! /s

The truth of it is most people are too dull and/or ignorant to vote, but we have to let them because the alternative ends up being even worse.

[burnt-resistor]

So that nixes an intelligence test like the Jim Crow South.

The ugly truth is that too much democracy always leads to populist dictators. And social media makes manufacturing consent way too easy.

One way around political parties, career corrupt politicians, and charismatic mass murderers is sortition. Directly elect a common legislative body who then set a minimal standard of qualifications for a very large pool of potentual upper echelon public administrators. From these, every X years, say 2 to 4, some people are chosen by lottery to run things. Divide up power a great deal more and never let the rich be in-charge of everything. It's purposefully not anarchistically "democratic" to avoid entire categories of problems that waste energy, treasure, lives, and effort on unmoored, fantastical political factionism will never solve, nor will any temporarily apparently balanced countervailing political status quo. It is utopian and naive to give everyone direct or semi-direct control because people will vote for what is cruel or popular rather than fairest or long-term essential. I'd rather have some semi-disinterested random person like a recently retired airline pilot or an accountant without bought alliances dig into big decisions with data, stakeholder input, and structured decision support.

[xg15]

That's a lot of political opinions there, in the service of "avoiding political factionism".

Another thing: People who propose theoretical systems for governance seem to have a weird fondness of lotteries. I can't really understand it.

Yes, it may be "just" in a mathematical or statistical sense, but it's also maximally intransparent (it's literally impossible to predict who will be chosen, that's the entire idea), so people may view the outcomes as unfair or arbitrary.

It's also easy to manipulate: The people who operate the lottery would be in the best position to become the new power brokers.

Has there ever been any real-life political system that uses lotteries?

[aerostable_slug]

Sortition was famously used in classical Athens (~5th C. BC) and a couple other Greek city-states. There were other examples, but I think the big issue with the historical examples is the fact that the eligible parties weren't as broadly defined as we tend to allow these days in our thought experiments.

IOW, nobody was actually selecting purely random members of the populace: there were some pretty significant qualifications needed to become eligible (much like the United States once required of voters).

[burnt-resistor]

Make civic duty a component of belonging to various professional classes: professional engineers, doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, architects, and so on.

Without commonwealth reinvestment and respect for shared burdens, society has no future with a bunch of amoral, anonymous, transient, hyperindividualistic people all trying to climb out of the crab bucket striving to become billionaires and the few actual billionaires believing they can "hide" in their New Zealand doomsday prepper bunkers* and not feel the effects of the bullshit they caused. America has slid since the Vietnam War into becoming much like a "Russia Lite" at the present time. Chalmers Johnson expounds on the sorrows, blowback, and decay of empire in print and in video at length.

* What I do hope is these become Winchester Mystery House-like tourist attractions in 200 years.