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Can We Save Democracy?

Hélène Landemore’s case for an alternative system of popular government

Can We Save Democracy?

Hélène Landemore’s case for an alternative system of popular government.

In 1965, The American Scholar published an essay on morality by Joan Didion. As a matter of substance, what she turned in was not compelling—at least not to those of us who believe, contra Didion, that it is possible to discern good and evil in the world with reference to principles that lie beyond “the social code” of the societies we happen to live in. But as a matter of craft, it proved to be a fine and memorable piece of writing. “At least some of the time,” Didion wrote, “the world appears to me as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch,” and in those instances, the dictates of her conscience directed her to a vantage point somewhere near Los Alamos, New Mexico, looking out at the mushroom clouds of atom-bomb tests, “praying,” as Norman Mailer’s character Marion Faye does in The Deer Park, “as if for rain… ‘let it come and clear the rot and the stench and the stink.’”

We cannot know for certain what Didion would have made of the current state of American politics. But the spirit of that passage is present in the kinds of cynical remarks one hears all the time now—for instance, the line that, with this administration’s having established that a long-suffering people may be unilaterally liberated by a well-targeted airstrike, we should hope that the United States is next in line for regime change. Because morality is real, we’re better off not indulging this kind of thinking. But what if we really could—peaceably—start afresh? What kinds of democratic institutions would we build, and what would we expect of them? Whether one believes that working our way to a full national reset is plausible or not, revisiting our democratic intuitions and aspirations—and what “democracy” is to begin with—can help us understand the present sources of our political dysfunction and inform the development of practical solutions for the future.

Over the course of the past decade, few people in the world of democratic theory have worked harder to challenge those intuitions than Yale University’s Hélène Landemore. Her latest work, Politics Without Politicians, is a précis of the arguments she has developed in a series of texts for academic presses and a variety of more public engagements, including a 2020 profile in The New Yorker that gives this book its name. “Landemore,” Nathan Heller wrote at the time, “has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy. In recent years, she has been part of a group of academics, many of them young, trying to solve the problem of elected democratic representation—addressing flaws in a system that is widely believed to be no problem at all.”

The solution to the flaws of electoral representation that Landemore presents in Politics Without Politicians is simple and bold: The bums in Washington should be thrown out of office—not just those from one party, but all of them. And not just in the next election, but forever. “Electoral democracy is beyond repair,” she declares. “A system based on electoral representation is no longer—if it ever was—capable of delivering either democratic or good governance.” Instead, she argues, we the people should finally take it upon ourselves to rule directly.

That message has drawn the praise of luminaries from Lawrence Lessig to Thomas Piketty. “This thought-provoking book,” Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu has declared, “argues that the solution to dwindling support for our political institutions is more democracy, not less.” It is truly unfortunate that the book does no such thing. Read carefully and within the context of Landemore’s other work, Politics Without Politicians instead makes the case that we must rescue the democratic idea by wringing the democracy out of it. Landemore’s proposals really would disempower the politicians. But they would also, just as surely, disempower you.

****Few who pick up Landemore’s book will disagree with its opening premise: that liberal democracy, by the lights of perhaps most in the West, isn’t going very well at the moment. “Consider,” she writes, “that in three of the world’s so-called most advanced democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—over two thirds of the population think their governing elites are corrupt…. In both the United States and France, large majorities think their political system needs drastic changes. Sixty-three percent of Americans express little confidence in the future of the political system, and 56 percent of the French want a Sixth Republic.” Their frustrations are legitimate, Landemore adds: “When political scientists crunch the numbers, they find that the preferences of rich people shape policy outcomes and law substantially more than those of the majority do.” And that reality is largely overshadowed by the rubbish and refuse heaped upon us by the political media, which is given to covering “the horse race, the scandals, the strategizing, the posturing, and rarely—at best superficially—the substance of issues.”

These criticisms aren’t novel, and most books on the state of democracy tend to offer an equally familiar set of diagnoses and prescriptions to address them. But Landemore names and dismisses them immediately. “We could blame these problems on external factors and forces, such as globalization, capitalism, the fast-paced changes brought by new technologies, foreign threats, or immigration—all of which undeniably make the job of governing at the scale of a nation-state quite difficult,” she writes. “But excuses can only go so far. Chronic underperformance and widespread dissatisfaction with the system—along with a growing retreat from it—should make one thing clear: There’s a fundamental problem with the system itself.”

As she tells it, that’s a conclusion that she reached only fitfully and painfully. “Like many people, I initially blamed empirical, external factors for the increasingly glaring inefficiencies and injustices of the system. My thinking was remedial: How can we improve the system without fundamentally changing it?” So she cycled her way through the standard remedies of most democratic-reform agendas—fixing campaign financing, elevating women and minorities, improving civic education, and all the rest—before landing on an idea that many voters have arrived at without the benefit of advanced degrees in political science. It was the damned politicians, Landemore realized, who were actually the problem. The clowns in Congress—indeed, in any elected office anywhere—really are wealthier and worse than the rest of us. And they govern us poorly in the service of their own interests rather than the interests of their voters or the common good. “Not only do politicians not generate optimal laws and policies,” Landemore writes, “they often do not even give us what we want, which—whether good or bad—one might expect in a democracy.”

Research also suggests that politicians are most likely to give voters what they want when their desires happen to align with those of the wealthy. Even in countries to the economic left of the United States, such as Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, Landemore observes, “policies and laws are more responsive to the preferences of rich voters and economic groups.” Electoral politics, she concludes, is oligarchic by design—not just because inequality is rising, and not just because the wealthy have more resources to throw into politics, but also because elections select for the kind of people likeliest to be rich. “Elections thrive on the ability of individuals to stand out and compete,” Landemore writes. “They oversample and empower the extroverted, the confident, and the downright arrogant and entitled.” In fact, she says, extrapolating from the work of the political scientist Brian Klaas, they oversample psychopaths, who “are characterized, among other things, by an overconfidence in their own judgment, which, if anything, seems a job requirement in electoral politics.”

As persuasive as all this might sound to readers fed up with the noise and nonsense of our politics, many will come to Politics Without Politicians with a fair question in mind: What democratic alternatives to politicians and elections do we realistically have? For Landemore, our best option remains a form of governance used most famously in the ancient world—sortition. Like the city-state of Athens well over 2,000 years ago, which had a legislative assembly open to all adult male citizens and appointed them to public office by lottery, we should be represented and governed by ordinary people, chosen at random:

Imagine hundreds of everyday people from all around the country, from every age and walk of life, all selected by a national lottery. They come together for extended periods of time in a parliament-like institution to deliberate and decide ways to address the housing crisis or the opioid crisis, or how to do something about gun regulation. They are paid for their time and all their expenses are covered. Their deliberations are enriched by input from the larger population and by the support of experts and civil servants. Their recommendations either feed into the........

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