How Can We Keep A Government Of, By, and For Us?

Not with elections.

An illustration from Puck Magazine titled “The Headsman” depicting an executioner labeled ‘The Senate’ winding up to behead some ‘Progressive Legislation.’

It’s sometime in the future. We the people, through incredible determination, sacrifice, and luck, have beaten the oligarchs, special interests, and giant corporations. We, the governed, have control of our own government. We’ve hammered out good consensus policies among all of us. We’ve managed to avoid poison pills and concessions to the already powerful. We are on the cusp of an unprecedented flourishing of the middle class. People everywhere are looking forward to a future of security and abundance. Suspend your disbelief! We have won.

Now how do we keep it?

Before we interrupt this beautiful moment with that question, let’s look back at what an incredible accomplishment this will be.

According to work done by Open Secrets, on average, the Congressional candidates who raise the most money win their elections more than 80% of the time.

Now, correlation is not causation. We can’t prove that money was the decisive factor. In many cases, by the time the general election rolls around, it seems like it might be a case of reverse causation: the candidate most likely to win gets the most donations. “So money doesn’t really control our elections!” the talking heads proclaim. Never mind that that money must be paying for something, and that ‘something’ is influence over the details of the presumptive winner’s policies. Influence that might be decisive for issues that don’t rise to the same level of media importance as, say, whether the 10 trans athletes in US college sports can compete as the gender of their preference.

Kind of makes you wonder if we are intentionally being baited by the media and donor class with red herrings to avoid more important issues that we might find consensus about.

Too conspiratorial?

For sake of argument, misusing the 80% figure from Open Secrets, let’s just say that the probability of a totally non-corrupt politician winning against a politician willing to sell the American people down the river on any issue that’s not constantly on national news, is about 20%.

But one candidate’s election doesn’t determine the balance of power in Congress. No, we need to find the probability of electing these non-corrupt politicians to at least a majority of the Senate seats (51) AND a majority of the House seats (218).

This analysis is totally ignoring the supermajority thresholds present in both chambers of Congress and the existence of the President and the Supreme Court.

Ask your favorite statistician the following question:

What is the probability that an event that has a 20% chance of occurring, occurs at least 218 times in 435 trials (a majority of seats in the House) and then occurs again at least 51 times in 100 trials (a majority of seats in the Senate)?

As far as I can tell, it would be about 1.3 with 68 zeroes in front of it. So, it would be a miracle.

We better hope that the probability of non-corrupt politicians winning is WAY better than 20%.

Now, I know the candidates who raise the most money are not de-facto corrupt. And no, coming from a privileged background that gives someone a viable opportunity to run for Congress does not guarantee they will make all of their decisions in favor of their own social class.

But… being dependent on all those campaign donations and spending all that time chumming around with the upper crust probably has SOME influence on politicians, right? Certainly politicians who ignore the policy preferences of their social circles and the big donors who make their campaigns possible have some reduction in their chances of getting elected, right?

Let’s say non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians have an average chance of winning their elections 49% of the time, rather than only 20%. Then, the rough probability of a majority of both houses of Congress being controlled by these non-corrupt class-traitors would be 12.88% (go ask your favorite statistician the same question above, but replace 20% with 49%).

Now back to that beautiful moment in the future. Never mind how we did it. We won. Good job us.

If there’s only about a 13% chance our non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians hold a majority of Congress at any given time, then the upshot of this is that EVERY ELECTION, there is about an 87% chance that they get replaced by a CORRUPT majority that immediately starts to reverse the policies that were going to give us that ‘unprecedented flourishing of the middle class.’

It may be true that nothing in this world lasts forever, but I think you’ll agree that we really need to do better than those odds.

Unless you believe that corruption makes essentially NO DIFFERENCE in a politician’s chances of getting elected - or you believe that our non-corrupt, class-traitor politicians will PERFECTLY eliminate any chance of corruption from elections on their first try - we need some other way to keep our government from decaying back into an oligarchy.

IF we win that beautiful future, the way we keep it is not with elections.

So… how do we keep it?

Here is my proposition to you: I think our best strategy for keeping a government of, by, and for us is to put short-term representative random samples of the governed in charge of writing the rules for our rulers. Like a jury for the constitution, we need to put sortition at the heart of the amendment process.

We need this at the federal and state levels.

If there’s ever a global government that will effectively regulate the atmosphere and oceans upon which we all depend, we will need sortition for that government too.

We the people must not base our hopes for keeping power on the odds that we outbid oligarchs and mega corporations for control of our governments every election cycle for the rest of time.

The only group that is inherently aligned with the well-being of all of us, is all of us. And since it isn’t possible to have literally every one of us deliberate at constitutional conventions every couple of years, we should use the next best thing: representative random samples. Not elite middlemen who we HOPE are non-corrupt, class traitors. Not privileged revolutionaries. Not a vanguard party. Us, using sortition.

If you want to help make that sortition-based ‘jury for the constitution’ a reality, we could use your help! Join us at sortitionUSA.org/members