This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. 

Democracy’s most radical, yet purist premise is people’s power as exercise of power, not simply consent to power. As I detail in my new book Politics Without Politicians, in classical Athens, governing was not the domain of a political class but a shared civic practice and a duty distributed in part on the basis of random selection (with frequent rotation). Additionally, whatever its profound exclusions in the definition of who counted as a citizen, the Athenian system was built on the idea that no citizen was too poor, too uneducated, or too timid to be deprived of a voice about common affairs. Democracy meant, in those days, ruling and being ruled in turn, as opposed to what it means today: regularly consenting, via elections, to never ruling and always being ruled by career politicians. At a moment when many Americans feel alienated from politics as something done by and for others, it seemed important to revisit a model that treated self-government as a lived, everyday responsibility.

The below excerpt also addresses a common objection head-on: the assumption that modern problems are too complex for ordinary citizens to handle. Climate change, AI, reproductive rights, economic inequality, democratic backsliding — surely these require technocratic management? The Athenian experience suggests that expertise mattered, but it was subordinated to collective judgment. Political capacity was not assumed in advance; it was cultivated through participation. The more citizens were entrusted with real power, the more capable they became. That lesson feels especially urgent today, as distrust of institutions deepens and many democracies slide toward either technocracy or demagoguery.

This passage helps reframe contemporary experiments with citizens’ assemblies not as utopian novelties but as part of a long democratic lineage. When randomly selected bodies proved less manipulable than large open assemblies, the Athenians adjusted their institutions accordingly. They were pragmatic about protecting equality from capture. In our own era of polarization and elite gridlock, citizens’ assemblies represent a similarly pragmatic effort: to create spaces where everyday people can deliberate across difference without the distortions of partisan incentives and campaign finance. The point is not to romanticize Athens, but to recover its most enduring insight — that democracy must constantly evolve its institutions in order to preserve political equality.

Classical Athens (508–­ 322 BCE) is the first democracy we know of to have introduced a crucial innovation: the use of lot to assign political offices combined with a rotation of offices. These combined practices ensured that politics remained, for all intents and purposes, an amateur’s sport. Politics was for everyone who counted as a citizen in Athens, not just social elites and gifted orators.

What was truly unique in Athens is the way that the poor and the rich were actual political equals. This was unheard of at the city-state level in the ancient world. Another unique feature of the Athenian system is that education and technical expertise were not prerequisites for participating in the assembly, nor, perhaps more surprisingly, were they required for exercising political functions. Citizen involvement was achieved through a combination of open public assemblies, where the masses directly made decisions, and a system of lotteries and rapid rotation for political offices. This approach ensured, as Aristotle famously defined ancient democracy, that everyone had the opportunity “to rule and be ruled in turn.”

Ordinary Citizens as Legislators

Ancient Athenians delegated agenda-setting power to a group of five hundred randomly selected citizens chaired each day by a different, also randomly selected, citizen. The Council of 500, as this assembly was called, was appointed by lot annually and deliberated over policy recommendations and law proposals. These recommendations and proposals were then passed on to a much larger body, the People’s Assembly, which any citizen could join, up to the physical capacity of the venue.

The meetings of the assembly took place initially at the marketplace, the Agora, but were later........

© Talking Points Memo