Terry Bouricius on multi-body sortition and redesigning democratic lawmaking

Alessandro Oppo: Selecting your

Alessandro Oppo: officials by lottery is democratic and selecting them by election

Alessandro Oppo: is oligarchic.

Alessandro Oppo: The founders of The United States did not want a democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: They were very,

Alessandro Oppo: very open that they feared democracy. I've had a lot of experience with politicians

Alessandro Oppo: where as a politician,

Alessandro Oppo: a bill would come forward

Alessandro Oppo: from the other other other parties. My first

Alessandro Oppo: instinct as a politician, my goal was to find

Alessandro Oppo: what was bad and horrible about it so I could attack them. Let's see what we can where we have common ground

here and how we can we can craft this and add other things to make it so that we all agree on

it. That was of no interest to the politicians. Welcome to another episode of the Democracy Innovator podcast.

Terry Bouricious: My name is Alessandro Popp, and, our guest of today is Terry Borishos.

Terry Bouricious: Thank you for your time and for being here. Glad to be here.

Terry Bouricious: And,

Terry Bouricious: I mean, the first question is, would you like to say something about you, your experience?

Alessandro Oppo: My work on democracy reform

Alessandro Oppo: came in a

Alessandro Oppo: nonstandard

Alessandro Oppo: way. I'm not an academic, although I've written a lot of journal articles and and books and so on. But I was

a politician.

Alessandro Oppo: For twenty years. I was a lawmaker in The United States, in Vermont.

Alessandro Oppo: In fact, I was elected along with Bernie Sanders, who some people will know of,

Alessandro Oppo: to city government in 1981,

Alessandro Oppo: served ten years in the city council, then got elected to the state legislature, served another ten years as a legislator.

Alessandro Oppo: And I

Alessandro Oppo: realized that my elected legislative bodies, they were not very representative of the population in a lot of ways. They were sort

of off the mark. And so after I left elected politics, I went to work for an organization called FairVote, the center

for voting and democracy

Alessandro Oppo: that worked on election reform, to do things like get The United States to adopt proportional representation,

Alessandro Oppo: ranked choice voting,

Alessandro Oppo: other kinds of reforms.

Alessandro Oppo: And in that role,

Alessandro Oppo: I did it internationally,

Alessandro Oppo: but mostly in The United States. In that role, I was invited

Alessandro Oppo: to give testimony to the

Alessandro Oppo: British Columbia Citizens Assembly in Canada.

Alessandro Oppo: They had been charged by the legislature to devise a new voting system for the province because they were having just ridiculous

outcomes,

Alessandro Oppo: just wild swings in party control and so on.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: I I obviously recommend they use a a proportional representation system.

Alessandro Oppo: But this

Alessandro Oppo: body, it was selected

Alessandro Oppo: by random lottery.

Alessandro Oppo: No politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: It was one man, one woman from each legislative district, a 160 people in all. And

Alessandro Oppo: they

Alessandro Oppo: a light bulb went off over my head that this

Alessandro Oppo: is what democracy looks like. They they had no hidden agendas.

Alessandro Oppo: They had no campaign donors to satisfy. They weren't trying to smear each other for the next election. They were just learning

Alessandro Oppo: and doing the work. And they became more competent than any elected legislature I know of on the issue they were dealing

with.

Alessandro Oppo: And that was in 2004.

Alessandro Oppo: And so ever since then, the focus of my political reform work has been on what's called sortition, use of random lottery

selection to form democratic bodies.

Alessandro Oppo: And so that's how I got here, and I've been working on it for a long time now. And I just recently

have also published a book.

Terry Bouricious: Yeah. Exactly. That was my

Terry Bouricious: question about the book. So

Terry Bouricious: politician without democrat

Terry Bouricious: I mean, democracy without politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: Yes.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. The the book the book,

Alessandro Oppo: the title is

Alessandro Oppo: Democracy

Alessandro Oppo: Without Politicians:

Alessandro Oppo: Government by the People.

Alessandro Oppo: And the basic theme is that

Alessandro Oppo: elections are inherently problematic and they're not very democratic. They are

Alessandro Oppo: they are oligarchic.

Alessandro Oppo: In fact, Aristotle,

Alessandro Oppo: talking about the Greek

Alessandro Oppo: systems throughout ancient Greece, said that

Alessandro Oppo: selecting your

Alessandro Oppo: officials by lottery

Alessandro Oppo: is democratic,

Alessandro Oppo: and selecting them by election

Alessandro Oppo: is oligarchic.

Alessandro Oppo: And that was understood for thousands of years that elections,

Alessandro Oppo: because of the principle of distinction and so on, it will naturally select people who are different.

Alessandro Oppo: The idea was Aristocracy,

Alessandro Oppo: they'd be better than, but looking at my raft of politicians, I I wouldn't say they're better than, but they are different

than the population. They're they're an elite. That it's an oligarchy.

Terry Bouricious: Yeah, this is very interesting. I also remember like when

Terry Bouricious: a few people have the power, they can be an aristocracy if they are the best of the people or oligarchy.

Terry Bouricious: So if they are just few people,

Terry Bouricious: but it's very interesting how the concept changed during time. Yeah. It's amazing

Alessandro Oppo: that for

Alessandro Oppo: thousands of years,

Alessandro Oppo: it was understood that democracy required the use of lottery selection

Alessandro Oppo: as a fair way of getting a diverse group of people who were representative of the of the people

Alessandro Oppo: and that elections were the natural tool of an aristocracy.

Alessandro Oppo: And so when The United States was leaving great the Great Britain empire,

Alessandro Oppo: the founders

Alessandro Oppo: nowadays, people say, well, democracy means elections, but that wasn't what they thought. They thought

Alessandro Oppo: elections were the proper tool for an aristocracy. And the stunning thing a lot of people don't realize is they the founders

of The United States did not want a democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: They were very,

Alessandro Oppo: very

Alessandro Oppo: open that they feared democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: It was a threat to property rights, and they thought that the opulent wealthy landowners and slave owners should run society,

Alessandro Oppo: and that they thought that the proper tool was elections. Now, to be fair, at that time, were limited to other property

owning white men. But but even when they expanded

Alessandro Oppo: the franchise to allow

Alessandro Oppo: women to vote and former slaves and general population to vote, still

Alessandro Oppo: the the people who got elected tended to be pretty much the same. They were the the well connected

Alessandro Oppo: celebrities

Alessandro Oppo: with great wealth or at least, attachment to great wealth.

Terry Bouricious: And,

Terry Bouricious: what what is or what was the reaction,

Terry Bouricious: among,

Terry Bouricious: like, Europe,

Terry Bouricious: former colleague politicians.

Terry Bouricious: So people that are elected.

Alessandro Oppo: It's it's interesting.

Alessandro Oppo: When I talk about sortition, the use of lottery selection of everyday random people to

Alessandro Oppo: form bodies that will then listen to expert testimony, have staff

Alessandro Oppo: draft bills. Another body might be a jury that just listens to the pro and con arguments and votes to approve or

reject the new bill, the new law. When I explained to people initially,

Alessandro Oppo: their first reaction in The United States where nobody has heard of sortition. In Europe, there's a lot of places,

Alessandro Oppo: Belgium,

Alessandro Oppo: Germany, Denmark, a lot of places where it's very well known, but in The United States, nobody

Alessandro Oppo: the initial reaction was always people would give a little chuckle, random

Alessandro Oppo: everyday people making policy. What a ridiculous and then I talk about it for two or three more minutes

Alessandro Oppo: and they start nodding their head. And the capper is, I say, it couldn't be any worse than what we have right

now with these politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: And they all say, yeah. And they recognize that they

Alessandro Oppo: only think this is proper because it's what they grew up in. It's an insane system for a democracy. It doesn't work

as a democracy. And in fact, it's worth noting

Alessandro Oppo: that

Alessandro Oppo: the system of having an elected chamber,

Alessandro Oppo: it was not designed

Alessandro Oppo: for a democracy. It was designed

Alessandro Oppo: in an, in a monarchy so that the, the elite aristocracy

Alessandro Oppo: could monitor, initially advise the king and then later control

Alessandro Oppo: the king, but it was never intended to be a democratic

Alessandro Oppo: tool. It is not inherently a democratic tool. And so when I try explaining to regular people, they generally said, yeah, that

makes a lot of sense. But when I try and explain it to politicians,

Alessandro Oppo: oh no, no, no, no. Or, or, or lobbyists.

Alessandro Oppo: No, that's, that's a horrible idea. Because the fact is you realize that

Alessandro Oppo: the only everyday normal people

Alessandro Oppo: that politicians ever come in contact with

Alessandro Oppo: around a policy matter

Alessandro Oppo: are either people who know nothing about it. You know, I'll call them idiots, people who know nothing or

Alessandro Oppo: fanatics who are on one side of an issue or another and are just and

Alessandro Oppo: so their experience of everyday people

Alessandro Oppo: is not

Alessandro Oppo: people who have gone into a deliberative body, spent weeks learning about the issues, listening to expert testimony,

Alessandro Oppo: and becoming virtual experts themselves on the issue. Politicians have never seen

Alessandro Oppo: everyday people like that. So it's not surprising that they reject the idea because they can't imagine the everyday people that they

come in contact with making policy decisions because they're either idiots or fanatics.

Terry Bouricious: And, how do you think that,

Terry Bouricious: this kind of experiments in relation to sortition could be made

Terry Bouricious: and so then introduced

Terry Bouricious: in our world? Well,

Alessandro Oppo: there are a lot of, there have now been over a thousand citizens' assemblies convened around the world,

Alessandro Oppo: and every continent except Antarctica. Maybe they've had one there too. I don't know. But the point is that,

Alessandro Oppo: use of random lottery selection to form deliberative bodies

Alessandro Oppo: that tackle really thorny issues

Alessandro Oppo: is now throughout most of the world becoming a standard,

Alessandro Oppo: tool of of of government.

Alessandro Oppo: But in The United States, it's we're not there yet. There've only been a handful of citizens' assemblies here. But almost all

of these citizens' assemblies have been advisory.

Alessandro Oppo: They come up with a policy, a list of policy recommendations

Alessandro Oppo: that they hand over to the politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: And then the politicians,

Alessandro Oppo: sometimes they just shelve them. Sometimes they cherry pick particular issues that are politically palatable for the party in control.

Alessandro Oppo: But there are very few that have been really decisive. There have been some that have been virtually decisive.

Alessandro Oppo: In Ireland,

Alessandro Oppo: the politicians there were

Alessandro Oppo: looking at the issue of same sex marriage and later looking at the issue of abortion.

Alessandro Oppo: And being a Catholic country, the politicians didn't wanna tackle those issues. They were afraid of them. So they agreed to set

up a constitutional convention of randomly selected citizens, everyday people.

Alessandro Oppo: And that body took a lot of testimony, learned a lot, did deliberation,

Alessandro Oppo: and two different two

Alessandro Oppo: different randomly selected constitutional conventions made recommendations. One, to allow for same sex marriage, and a few years later,

to remove the abortion ban that was in the Irish constitution.

Alessandro Oppo: And those went to referendum,

Alessandro Oppo: and they were approved by large, huge majorities

Alessandro Oppo: of the everyday people in the country.

Alessandro Oppo: Politicians

Alessandro Oppo: did still have

Alessandro Oppo: their their finger on it because

Alessandro Oppo: they decided whether the issue would go to the people for vote. But the politicians

Alessandro Oppo: intentionally wanted to keep hands off.

Alessandro Oppo: So it's sort of interesting. And also in places like, oh, in Melbourne, I think it was Australia,

Alessandro Oppo: they had they're looking at their capital budget, ten year capital budget, very expensive, and they realized they didn't have enough

money to do all the things that they wanted to do. And the politicians were afraid

Alessandro Oppo: to either raise taxes or cut some programs that were some some investments

Alessandro Oppo: that were were popular.

Alessandro Oppo: So they agreed to set up a a citizen assembly, 43 everyday people randomly selected.

Alessandro Oppo: They deliberated,

Alessandro Oppo: and they came to a unanimous

Alessandro Oppo: conclusion, recommendation about what should happen. So there are places

Alessandro Oppo: where

Alessandro Oppo: decisions

Alessandro Oppo: are almost

Alessandro Oppo: actual decisions by the people, but my goal

Alessandro Oppo: is to get there so that the politicians

Alessandro Oppo: are not in the mix at all.

Alessandro Oppo: And I even have a strategy.

Terry Bouricious: The strategy

Alessandro Oppo: is what I call appealing strategy.

Alessandro Oppo: I want to try and get one policy domain at a time

Alessandro Oppo: removed from politicians and given to a jury like process.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: you we'd probably start with issues where either the politicians have a clear conflict of interest,

Alessandro Oppo: like an ethics panel that oversees the ethics performance of legislators,

Alessandro Oppo: maybe you'd say, yeah, we don't want other politicians

Alessandro Oppo: controlling it. Maybe we should have everyday people decide whether they were ethical. Or issues where politicians this is to get started.

Alessandro Oppo: Issues where politicians don't mind giving that over to the people. In my city in Burlington, like, there's some talk about, well,

maybe we could move zoning decisions about changing the land use regulations

Alessandro Oppo: from the city council

Alessandro Oppo: to a jury like process. The planning department would come up with recommendations.

Alessandro Oppo: A jury would be pulled, let's say, 30 randomly selected people. They would listen to pro and con arguments about the proposed

change and then simply vote. So

Alessandro Oppo: my idea is to peel away one policy domain at a time so that we eventually

Alessandro Oppo: get to the point where maybe

Alessandro Oppo: a Congress or parliament still exists, but most of the important decisions

Alessandro Oppo: are being made by everyday people in jury like process.

Terry Bouricious: So this seems a very like a bottom up

Terry Bouricious: style process.

Terry Bouricious: They wonder how to

Alessandro Oppo: It's both. I mean,

Alessandro Oppo: right now,

Alessandro Oppo: there have been a lot of citizens assemblies that have just been spontaneously

Alessandro Oppo: organized by

Alessandro Oppo: civic organizations with no government,

Alessandro Oppo: license at all. They just organize,

Alessandro Oppo: but obviously they have budget constraints. And so sometimes

Alessandro Oppo: in a good jury process, the jurors,

Alessandro Oppo: the members of the citizens assembly, whatever would be paid for their time. There'd be childcare,

Alessandro Oppo: there'd be various benefits.

Alessandro Oppo: When it's self organized, often they don't have the budget to do that.

Alessandro Oppo: Then some have been organized a lot in parts of Europe and Australia

Alessandro Oppo: and in Japan,

Alessandro Oppo: where they have been

Alessandro Oppo: called by the government itself.

Alessandro Oppo: They've initiated

Alessandro Oppo: the creation of a citizens' assembly to deal with some thorny issue,

Alessandro Oppo: in which case they have a little bit of a better budget.

Alessandro Oppo: So

Alessandro Oppo: trying to get politicians to do it is an important first step,

Alessandro Oppo: but also having civic organizations just doing it on their own.

Alessandro Oppo: But the key problem is if you have

Alessandro Oppo: a mini public, a citizens' assembly, a sortition body,

Alessandro Oppo: and they do a lot of work and they come up with a plan

Alessandro Oppo: and the politicians say, no, we're not going to do that.

Alessandro Oppo: That's going to, that's going to be more

Alessandro Oppo: harm than good because people say, well, why bother? What's, what's the point if it doesn't have any effect? It has to

have a result

Alessandro Oppo: that people can see. But one of the goals is to have a lot of citizens' assemblies just so that people say,

you talk about it and say, oh yeah, I heard about that. They had one over in Milan recently or whatever.

Alessandro Oppo: Need to have some, even if they're only advisory,

Alessandro Oppo: so as sort of a proof of concept. So people see that everyday people

Alessandro Oppo: can become well informed and make really good quality decisions.

Alessandro Oppo: And here's another point that I often talk about.

Alessandro Oppo: Politicians

Alessandro Oppo: have a vested interest in not seeking

Alessandro Oppo: win win solutions.

Alessandro Oppo: In other words,

Alessandro Oppo: politicians want issues

Alessandro Oppo: that they can use to

Alessandro Oppo: demonize the other party or other parties.

Alessandro Oppo: They they like the conflict. The conflict, they're evil. They're bad. We have to stop them. We need to vote them out

of office.

Alessandro Oppo: Fear and hatred

Alessandro Oppo: are very effective and important campaign

Alessandro Oppo: strategies.

Alessandro Oppo: So if you say, well, here's a here's a proposal that everybody could get behind this. This makes a lot of sense

and everybody supports it. Politicians basically aren't interested in that. That doesn't help them win power in the next election.

Alessandro Oppo: So

Alessandro Oppo: I've had a lot of experience with politicians

Alessandro Oppo: where when I was a politician,

Alessandro Oppo: a bill would come forward

Alessandro Oppo: from the other other other parties.

Alessandro Oppo: And my first

Alessandro Oppo: instinct as a politician, my goal was to find

Alessandro Oppo: what was bad and horrible about it so I could attack them.

Alessandro Oppo: That's what politicians want to do.

Alessandro Oppo: It wasn't my natural instinct. It was, let's see what we can where we have common ground here and how we can

we can craft this and add other things to make it so that we all agree on it. That was of no

interest to the politicians.

Terry Bouricious: And, yeah, this,

Terry Bouricious: this issue about commitment

Terry Bouricious: I mean, in relation to the, let's say, the output

Terry Bouricious: of a citizen assembly and then the the implementation

Terry Bouricious: has been an issue.

Terry Bouricious: And, also,

Terry Bouricious: it's very interesting what you point out, like the sort of conflict of interest that can have a politician because

Terry Bouricious: polarizing people and trying to

Terry Bouricious: to attack

Terry Bouricious: another party is probably

Terry Bouricious: more effective in term of the campaign of the party or the politician. Yeah. It's not painful. Yeah.

Terry Bouricious: Now like, so I wonder, how could we change this?

Terry Bouricious: Because it seems to me that,

Terry Bouricious: probably like

Terry Bouricious: a new party or a new class of politician should emerge and

Terry Bouricious: the politician that are interested in sortition

Terry Bouricious: and are interested in implementing new

Terry Bouricious: a new methodology.

Alessandro Oppo: So Well, yeah, there's a lot of people

Alessandro Oppo: who brainstorm ways to transition

Alessandro Oppo: and

Alessandro Oppo: I've settled on the peeling strategy

Alessandro Oppo: because I'm concerned that when people get into

Alessandro Oppo: a legislative framework,

Alessandro Oppo: I don't want to say they get infected,

Alessandro Oppo: but there are there are logical

Alessandro Oppo: reasons. Whenever you have an election system in any society,

Alessandro Oppo: there is an impetus to form political parties, to work together with colleagues,

Alessandro Oppo: to to gain power.

Alessandro Oppo: When you're in an a

Alessandro Oppo: some people say, well, we'll have a political party that will just be committed

Alessandro Oppo: to this kind of reform, sortition,

Alessandro Oppo: and we'll get them into office. And then the

Alessandro Oppo: thing is once they're in office,

Alessandro Oppo: they also wanna get reelected.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: also,

Alessandro Oppo: there the other parties will try and, oh, come on. Come over to join our caucus. And because those guys are real

bad. And so there's all these dynamic. And the fact is

Alessandro Oppo: that some people say, well, we'll have citizens' assemblies outside and they'll make rec they'll make a decision. And then the legislator

elected from this special party

Alessandro Oppo: will, will do the work that the, that our citizens assembly has said they should do. This, this is the way they

should vote on this issue.

Alessandro Oppo: But that's not the way legislatures work. 90%

Alessandro Oppo: of the important work is not the roll call votes. It's not the

Alessandro Oppo: floor debate. It's not the votes that are recorded.

Alessandro Oppo: It's the behind the doors secret deals.

Alessandro Oppo: You scratch my back. I'll scratch yours.

Alessandro Oppo: This is this is bill's gonna come forward. I promise I'm not gonna raise,

Alessandro Oppo: an issue about that. It's that negotiating

Alessandro Oppo: that is invisible,

Alessandro Oppo: that voters never see.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: having people that are committed to sortition

Alessandro Oppo: in that legislative framework,

Alessandro Oppo: they're not going to be able to do much there. And

Alessandro Oppo: and

Alessandro Oppo: the fact is that

Alessandro Oppo: that within

Alessandro Oppo: the legislative body,

Alessandro Oppo: it's almost impossible for voters to know

Alessandro Oppo: what their elected legislators are actually doing. I mean, it's the the economists use the term rational ignorance.

Alessandro Oppo: If you have an election with millions of people voting,

Alessandro Oppo: and most of what politicians are doing is behind closed doors and secret,

Alessandro Oppo: The idea that the voters would be well informed to know which which way to vote,

Alessandro Oppo: it it's sort of it's it's it's

Alessandro Oppo: a showmanship. It's it's a performance art of politicians. It's not the reality. In fact, I've argued that it's basically impossible

Alessandro Oppo: for voters to use the election tool

Alessandro Oppo: to hold politicians to account.

Alessandro Oppo: There's a couple of wonderful stories that that that show this. Back in The United States, it was in early in the

twentieth century,

Alessandro Oppo: president Wilson

Alessandro Oppo: was in office.

Alessandro Oppo: And in New Jersey,

Alessandro Oppo: there was a spate of shark attacks at the coast in the ocean,

Alessandro Oppo: and the people were avoiding going to the tourist industry, which was in the coastal area of New Jersey. And the economy

of Coastal New Jersey crashed because all of the tourist industries were were suffering.

Alessandro Oppo: And so there's some a couple art political scientists, Bartels and Aachen, who looked at the vote totals

Alessandro Oppo: for president Wilson's

Alessandro Oppo: reelection

Alessandro Oppo: campaign in the next election

Alessandro Oppo: and found that in the counties right on the coast where the economy was suffering,

Alessandro Oppo: Wilson's vote total dropped precipitously

Alessandro Oppo: because the notion was we throw the bums out. If things are going bad, we throw the current politicians out.

Alessandro Oppo: In inland, away from the coast, there was no change.

Alessandro Oppo: So nobody said Wilson was responsible

Alessandro Oppo: for shark attacks.

Alessandro Oppo: The point is when things go bad, you vote the incumbents out. And you look at the great depression

Alessandro Oppo: in The United States, they voted out president Hoover and brought in Roosevelt who in The United States was considered a somewhat

pretty much on the left. He wasn't a socialist, but he was left of the other parties. And so so a lot

of Americans said, see,

Alessandro Oppo: accountability

Alessandro Oppo: works.

Alessandro Oppo: But the same great depression in other countries also caused

Alessandro Oppo: incumbent governments to be thrown out. And in Germany,

Alessandro Oppo: the center left

Alessandro Oppo: government was thrown out and eventually Hitler came in. So it's like throwing the incumbents out

Alessandro Oppo: is really

Alessandro Oppo: crude sledgehammer

Alessandro Oppo: tool that has no idea of what caused the problems, what the other parties will do to fix it. Throwing the bums

out is a stupid way of having accountability. It simply doesn't work.

Terry Bouricious: And in relation to citizen assembly,

Terry Bouricious: I was wondering how do you imagine them like also supported by technology?

Terry Bouricious: Because this is something,

Terry Bouricious: or like, I don't know.

Alessandro Oppo: Well,

Alessandro Oppo: there are a lot of experimentation with using

Alessandro Oppo: I hate to use the word AI because AI means a lot of different things. There's large language models. There's

Alessandro Oppo: things that create videos. There's

Alessandro Oppo: dozens of different kinds of large data

Alessandro Oppo: systems. And some people are using them to do things like

Alessandro Oppo: keep a record of, in a in an assembly

Alessandro Oppo: who has spoken how many minutes, so and so hasn't spoken yet to help the facilitators

Alessandro Oppo: sort of manage the thing. There's other things where they at the end of the day, they use

Alessandro Oppo: an AI

Alessandro Oppo: to draft summaries of each of the speakers and what was said, and the speakers get to review it and say, yeah,

that, that summarizes me fairly or to correct it. But there's things which are just

Alessandro Oppo: clerical tasks,

Alessandro Oppo: which can be made a lot

Alessandro Oppo: more efficient and a lot less effort to do to help citizens' assemblies function as they exist right now.

Alessandro Oppo: But but you don't really need any of those

Alessandro Oppo: to do this. It can be done completely. And in fact, in ancient Greece, in Athens,

Alessandro Oppo: after the reforms of four zero three BC,

Alessandro Oppo: they

Alessandro Oppo: first off, before 04/2003,

Alessandro Oppo: they they what we learned in school is about the assembly, the large mass assembly, and and that was the idea. That

was the the image of democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: And,

Alessandro Oppo: you know, people speakers would get up, demagogues or whoever,

Alessandro Oppo: and they would speak and people would vote. But the

Alessandro Oppo: fact is that

Alessandro Oppo: the agenda

Alessandro Oppo: was controlled by a randomly selected council of 500, the Boule.

Alessandro Oppo: Now other city states

Alessandro Oppo: also had assemblies like Sparta that were not democracies at all.

Alessandro Oppo: So the assembly was not the defining feature of Athenian democracy because

Alessandro Oppo: the aristocracy

Alessandro Oppo: controlled

Alessandro Oppo: Sparta also had the assembly, but the agenda was controlled by the aristocracy.

Alessandro Oppo: They would decide what what things they would put in front of the people. And so after the reforms of four zero

three BC, when democracy was reinstated in Athens,

Alessandro Oppo: the assembly gave all lawmaking authority

Alessandro Oppo: away from the mass assembly

Alessandro Oppo: to the nomothetai,

Alessandro Oppo: which were

Alessandro Oppo: randomly selected jury of 500 or a thousand everyday,

Alessandro Oppo: Athenian citizens,

Alessandro Oppo: they would listen to pro and con arguments on a proposed new law

Alessandro Oppo: and then vote.

Alessandro Oppo: That was the only way that laws were established

Alessandro Oppo: in the reformed democracy of Athens.

Alessandro Oppo: They didn't need any AI.

Alessandro Oppo: They just had five speakers in favor, five speakers against. They could ask clarifying questions perhaps,

Alessandro Oppo: and then they would vote. So the idea

Alessandro Oppo: of using special technology,

Alessandro Oppo: yeah, we can do that, but it's absolutely not essential.

Terry Bouricious: And something interesting from

Terry Bouricious: ancient Greek history is that also people were compensated

Terry Bouricious: when they were participating

Terry Bouricious: in their political There

Alessandro Oppo: was a point in the early days of the assembly,

Alessandro Oppo: they were not paid. And then they said, you know what?

Alessandro Oppo: At some point they actually had a difficulty getting the quorum that they required. I don't if it was 6,000 people or

whatever. There was some quorum it's very I mean, the democracy lasted for two hundred years, so policies changed. But anyway, they

started paying them for attending and also for serving on other bodies.

Alessandro Oppo: And,

Alessandro Oppo: yeah, it was recognized that this is, this is important work. Making democratic decisions is important work. They wasn't, they weren't

paid handily, but they were paid. Yeah. And in fact, some of the people, the anti Democrats, and there are people who

wrote, historians and so on, who were, who wanted

Alessandro Oppo: an oligarchy of aristocrats.

Alessandro Oppo: That's what they thought was good government,

Alessandro Oppo: who didn't like democracy. They complained that you have all these pensioners, if you will, people, elderly retired people who didn't

have work anymore,

Alessandro Oppo: filling up the, the assembly because they're being paid. You know, it's true. But if you look at the age

Alessandro Oppo: of, of, in The United States of, of the senators and congressmen, you know, the average age is up in the sixties,

seventies, eighties. I don't know. I mean, couple of people just got renominated who are who are past 80 years old. So

the gerontocracy

Alessandro Oppo: is not a cause

Alessandro Oppo: that election is overcome.

Alessandro Oppo: Even though they complained about the anti democrats complained about it in Athens.

Terry Bouricious: Oh, yeah. I I was thinking if,

Terry Bouricious: like, there is a democracy without politicians and so people participate in the political life,

Terry Bouricious: that also mean that they could receive a sort of compensation

Terry Bouricious: because maybe

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah.

Alessandro Oppo: Yeah. Maybe there there's a lot of ways you could design

Alessandro Oppo: a democratic system without having elections at all. My idea is with appealing strategy, elections would probably persist. But the

idea is I wanna have some policy domains where it's the politicians have no say about it. They have no interest in

it. It's like they don't argue with the citizen assembly because they're making all decisions about, let's say, taxation is being decided

by everyday citizens in assembly

Alessandro Oppo: and politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: What I want to avoid is politicians

Alessandro Oppo: and

Alessandro Oppo: in other words, I'm opposed to what's called a bicameral system where one chamber

Alessandro Oppo: is elected

Alessandro Oppo: like the current ones and one, another chamber is selected by lottery.

Alessandro Oppo: I think that's problematic because the chamber that's elected

Alessandro Oppo: is full of narcissistic

Alessandro Oppo: sociopaths,

Alessandro Oppo: not all of them, but a lot of them are.

Alessandro Oppo: And, and they

Alessandro Oppo: are skilled at public relations. They have power at stake. They have their careers at stake. The random group,

Alessandro Oppo: they're there for a short duration. Maybe it's, maybe it's weeks, maybe it's months, maybe it's a couple of years. It depends

on how the design is set up And then they're gone. So they have no career path there. So the the politicians,

Alessandro Oppo: if the two bodies

Alessandro Oppo: are butting heads on some policy decision,

Alessandro Oppo: the elected politicians know how to use the media. Say, you want a bunch of hairdressers and plumbers making decisions about taxes?

Alessandro Oppo: We are the spokesman for the people. We've been selected by the people. Politicians

Alessandro Oppo: know how to play the game, and they'll they'll destroy the sortition body. So I want to not have them butting heads.

I want the elected politicians to deal with their issues and the citizens to deal with their issues. That's in the transition

phase. And then eventually

Alessandro Oppo: the elected body gets smaller,

Alessandro Oppo: fewer and fewer issues until they become irrelevant and the sortition bodies, everything. My vision is that even if the elections still

exist,

Alessandro Oppo: it's sort of like the monarchies

Alessandro Oppo: of Europe that, you know, they exist, but they don't have any power. I want maybe politicians still exist, but I don't

want them to have any power.

Alessandro Oppo: And I have a whole scheme, which I've written paper about, and I talk about it in my book about multi body

sortition, because

Alessandro Oppo: quite frankly, it doesn't work to have a single chamber of randomly selected people doing the entire legislative process.

Alessandro Oppo: In fact, it doesn't work in the elected chambers either.

Alessandro Oppo: But that's just what we have because that was what was passed down from the advisory

Alessandro Oppo: bodies to the king.

Alessandro Oppo: But what you really need is

Alessandro Oppo: an agenda body that just says, these are the issues that we need to deal with. Because right now, agendas

Alessandro Oppo: set by politicians,

Alessandro Oppo: they put a lot of things on there that

Alessandro Oppo: that are good for the next campaign, issues where they can attack the other party.

Alessandro Oppo: There might be other issues that are really important that just get ignored. Like,

Alessandro Oppo: climate change was understood to be a very important issue for about

Alessandro Oppo: forty years. Forty, fifty years, it has been understood

Alessandro Oppo: that we really need to deal with this. But politicians just continued to kick the can down the road and ignore it

until it started to become a crisis. And The United States, they're still pretty much ignoring it. In some parts of Europe,

they're actually dealing with it now. But the point is that

Alessandro Oppo: because the politicians were setting the agenda,

Alessandro Oppo: they were choosing agenda items in a in a foolish way, a way that was not good for society.

Alessandro Oppo: So I think we need a randomist like a body that all they're doing is listening to a bunch of experts

Alessandro Oppo: and deciding these are the issues we need to deal with.

Alessandro Oppo: And then you'd have a maybe you'd say you put out a general call to the entire society saying, anybody have policy

ideas? You form a group of 10 of you can come together,

Alessandro Oppo: work up a a draft bill.

Alessandro Oppo: There might be dozens or a 100 of these

Alessandro Oppo: bodies that are just anybody

Alessandro Oppo: in society who wants to be involved. They can help craft a bill and they submit it. And then there would be

a randomly selected review panel that would look at all this raw material and say, this this one's nonsense. This one's stupid.

Oh, this is pretty good. Oh, this one's pretty good. Maybe we could meld these two together. We'd send it back to

them and say, can you guys work together and work out a combined version? Cause we like both of these bills. And

then you come up with a final bill. The review panel would would craft a final bill on the topic.

Alessandro Oppo: And then my idea is the problem is

Alessandro Oppo: once you've crafted something,

Alessandro Oppo: you become

Alessandro Oppo: incompetent

Alessandro Oppo: to judge your own handiwork. There's a a pride of authorship. There's there's there's a there's a group think that can set

in, or a particular member who's really articulate and leads the body astray.

Alessandro Oppo: So I don't want the body that crafts that final bill to then say this is approved.

Alessandro Oppo: I want a jury, a separate jury, randomly selected people, very large, statistically representative of the population. I want them to

come together and listen to the pro and con arguments just like the nomothetai did in ancient Athens.

Alessandro Oppo: Listen to the pro and con arguments,

Alessandro Oppo: ask clarifying questions,

Alessandro Oppo: and then vote to adopt or reject the law. So it is a relatively involved process. The point is having a single

chamber,

Alessandro Oppo: whether it's randomly selected

Alessandro Oppo: or elected,

Alessandro Oppo: is a bad design for democracy.

Terry Bouricious: And in relation to, I mean, your vision,

Terry Bouricious: how do you imagine democracy? How it could be, let's say,

Terry Bouricious: if

Terry Bouricious: sortition is adopted,

Terry Bouricious: yeah, how it could work? Like,

Terry Bouricious: like, democracy could have no

Terry Bouricious: one elected?

Alessandro Oppo: Well, I

Alessandro Oppo: I refer to this as I used to call this my two hundred year project because it's it's not gonna happen immediately.

But there have been so much progress in citizens assemblies around the world. Now it's my twenty year project. But,

Alessandro Oppo: so so I can talk about the the end point, the the my vision of how because you need sort of a

north star saying, this is the direction we wanna go. So so that's what I'm doing there is I'm saying this is

the the the kind of system that I would like.

Alessandro Oppo: There might be one of the things that I didn't mention in my my grand design with all these different bodies, one

of the bodies we would also want

Alessandro Oppo: is a randomly selected group, maybe of people who had previously served on some other citizens' assembly, some other body

Alessandro Oppo: as a rules committee, which would be constantly looking at the performance of all these bodies

Alessandro Oppo: and making recommended

Alessandro Oppo: improvements,

Alessandro Oppo: changes to the rules. Like we, the term of office is too long. People are becoming like, they're getting like politicians because

they're serving too long. We need to shorter terms or, or we need to

Alessandro Oppo: use AI this way or get rid of AI or whatever. So a rules body, which would be constantly

Alessandro Oppo: perfecting and changing the design. I'm just proposing

Alessandro Oppo: an initial design

Alessandro Oppo: that I think makes sense.

Alessandro Oppo: But one of the key things that in my design

Alessandro Oppo: is a rules body that will constantly be evaluating

Alessandro Oppo: things and making improvements. Also, would learn oversight body randomly selected that would evaluate

Alessandro Oppo: the performance of the staff for this body because there's always the danger

Alessandro Oppo: of capture by the bureaucracy.

Alessandro Oppo: You have random people come in, the bureaucracy is there permanently. They could, they could steer things. So you need an oversight

body that is randomly selected and they can fire members, the facilitators,

Alessandro Oppo: the staff, if they get too many complaints that they're behaving in a way that's manipulative, etcetera, etcetera. So there's a lot

more to the design, but,

Alessandro Oppo: Oh, I got

Alessandro Oppo: off track there. Your question was about,

Alessandro Oppo: can you rephrase the question? I because I I I I went off on a side path there. No. No. No. It

was a

Terry Bouricious: was a little like a how do you see, like,

Terry Bouricious: democracy in the future? Let's say if

Alessandro Oppo: sortition is used. There's a thing I'm really

Alessandro Oppo: sorry.

Terry Bouricious: No, you go ahead. Okay. No, I was also wanted to ask you about a possible timeline,

Terry Bouricious: but you replied with the 200.

Alessandro Oppo: One important thing that when I wrote my paper on multi body sortition

Alessandro Oppo: lessons from the

Alessandro Oppo: Athenian

Alessandro Oppo: democracy for the modern day and in my book,

Alessandro Oppo: it's mostly focused on the lawmaking side. And then people go, well, what about a president? What about a prime minister? What

about a governor?

Alessandro Oppo: You wouldn't select them by random lottery. Yes. You would not select a single individual

Alessandro Oppo: by a lottery selection. Although you actually

Alessandro Oppo: could, if you had a narrow pool of people who are all great and you could pick one of them randomly from

that pool. That that's a possible scenario, but it's not what I'm advocating.

Alessandro Oppo: But the

Alessandro Oppo: executive in my notion is the executive needs to be removed

Alessandro Oppo: from

Alessandro Oppo: policy making rule.

Alessandro Oppo: The executive needs to be an administrator.

Alessandro Oppo: They faithfully

Alessandro Oppo: execute the law that the legislative branch, the democratic branch has enacted.

Alessandro Oppo: The problem we have is that we inherited our system. It's basically passed down of the king

Alessandro Oppo: and the parliament in Britain and so on. And there's the executive who has a lot of authority and how much authority

the two have. But the

Alessandro Oppo: model has always been, whether it's the prime minister or president,

Alessandro Oppo: it's sort of like, it's, it's like a

Alessandro Oppo: slightly reduced

Alessandro Oppo: king

Alessandro Oppo: or queen.

Alessandro Oppo: And that is a really bad design because you can, I mean, I, I don't wanna get

Alessandro Oppo: partisan here, but you can see what happens when a member of parliament who's elected prime minister or a king or a

president, excuse me, in The United States

Alessandro Oppo: decides

Alessandro Oppo: that they want to exercise

Alessandro Oppo: king like power,

Alessandro Oppo: having an executive who also is engaged in policy generation

Alessandro Oppo: and

Alessandro Oppo: issuing edicts and resolutions

Alessandro Oppo: and directing things

Alessandro Oppo: is incredibly

Alessandro Oppo: dangerous to democracy?

Alessandro Oppo: So my idea,

Alessandro Oppo: you know, in my ideal democracy with sortition,

Alessandro Oppo: a multi body system for enacting laws

Alessandro Oppo: is you would probably have a randomly selected body. It's a hiring committee.

Alessandro Oppo: They would recruit

Alessandro Oppo: an executive.

Alessandro Oppo: It would ideally be somebody who was not seeking the office. Because if you're seeking power, that's almost a sure sign that

you're a narcissistic

Alessandro Oppo: psychopath and you should not be in that position. Now I don't want to

Alessandro Oppo: imply that all politicians are psychopaths and narcissists. There are some wonderful politicians, people who are honorable, great,

Alessandro Oppo: fantastic

Alessandro Oppo: human beings.

Alessandro Oppo: But as a group, politicians are far more likely

Alessandro Oppo: to be narcissists and psychopaths than the general public.

Alessandro Oppo: So

Alessandro Oppo: my idea is that this randomly selected body, they would recruit, they would seek out people and they'd find people who were

willing to do it, but had not maybe even considered it. President of a university, somebody

Alessandro Oppo: who runs a business, somebody who's the head of a union, whatever.

Alessandro Oppo: They would seek out people

Alessandro Oppo: who would be good in the job and would understand that their job was to be an administrator,

Alessandro Oppo: not a policy generator.

Alessandro Oppo: And the idea that once they hire the person, so there would be no mass election for this person. They would simply

be a hiring committee.

Alessandro Oppo: And then every,

Alessandro Oppo: every six months, every year, whatever duration

Alessandro Oppo: the rules committee thinks makes sense,

Alessandro Oppo: there would be a review panel that would be pulled together, a jury, like randomly selected people that would review the performance

of the executive,

Alessandro Oppo: listen to pro and con arguments about their performance, hear complaints from the staff, from the bureaucracy,

Alessandro Oppo: from lay people, people in the public saying, I saw them do this and they did this and they manipulated the the

assembly this way, and they could then fire the executive, opening the seat for a replacement.

Alessandro Oppo: But there again,

Alessandro Oppo: you don't want the body that fires them to also be the body that replaces them. You'd want a new body, a

recruitment body to go out and find a replacement because you don't want people,

Alessandro Oppo: who ran with sex have an incentive to be honest, Hey, no, if we get rid of this guy, we can pick

the person we want. And then that person would be beholden to us and we're gonna, you know, whatever.

Alessandro Oppo: You want to have a separation of powers. That's one of the things that is in The US constitution

Alessandro Oppo: that is important. Separation of powers.

Alessandro Oppo: It's not working in The United States because political parties

Alessandro Oppo: have merged so that when the Congress and the president and the Supreme Court are controlled by the same party in The

United States, there is no separation of powers. They all become one unified effort.

Alessandro Oppo: And other countries often that's true too, particularly in parliamentary systems where the executive

Alessandro Oppo: is in the same party that controls the legislative branch. They that's a unified thing. And that quite frankly

Alessandro Oppo: is

Alessandro Oppo: a very dangerous design. It can easily lead to authoritarianism

Alessandro Oppo: and even eventually to totalitarianism.

Alessandro Oppo: And we've seen that in several European countries that have come

Alessandro Oppo: dangerously close and are some of them are still on the precipice of becoming fully,

Alessandro Oppo: you know, authoritarian.

Terry Bouricious: Mhmm. Yeah. Separation of power is super important. And I was thinking that,

Terry Bouricious: usually we do not consider also informational power and economic power that can interfere The a

Alessandro Oppo: whole issue of economics,

Alessandro Oppo: you know, in my book now I individually,

Alessandro Oppo: I will confess that my

Alessandro Oppo: politics

Alessandro Oppo: are very much on the left, farther left than almost any politicians in The United States.

Alessandro Oppo: But in my book,

Alessandro Oppo: I studiously avoided any left, right. And so therefore I also avoided a lot of talk about

Alessandro Oppo: the other angle of oligarchy, which is the billionaires and the super wealthy. So I focused on

Alessandro Oppo: the structure of the government

Alessandro Oppo: because

Alessandro Oppo: my feeling is that to get sortition democracy,

Alessandro Oppo: we need to have people of all political stripes working together, recognizing that politicians

Alessandro Oppo: are the problem of whatever political stripe.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: I have talked to right wing

Alessandro Oppo: libertarian groups.

Alessandro Oppo: And when I start talking about the problem of politics

Alessandro Oppo: and politicians,

Alessandro Oppo: even though I'm on the left,

Alessandro Oppo: these right wingers are nodding their head. Agree. Yeah.

Alessandro Oppo: And and and the idea is here's the funny thing is

Alessandro Oppo: those of us who are deeply involved in policy matters,

Alessandro Oppo: economics,

Alessandro Oppo: social issues, whatever,

Alessandro Oppo: we tend to believe that we since we figured out our position

Alessandro Oppo: based on information around us, we tend to believe that if we could get a room full of everyday

Alessandro Oppo: ordinary people and just explain

Alessandro Oppo: all the things that we have come to understand,

Alessandro Oppo: explain to them, they'd agree with us.

Alessandro Oppo: Ordinary people, they'd agree with us if we could just explain it to them. And that is a very powerful reason

Alessandro Oppo: why

Alessandro Oppo: I think people on both the left and the right can be persuaded to push for sortition reform because they see the

politicians are problematic

Alessandro Oppo: and they have a belief or at least a hope

Alessandro Oppo: that ordinary people would agree with them. Now eventually,

Alessandro Oppo: once we get sortition democracy, we'll find out where the population actually goes, what a democracy

Alessandro Oppo: would actually decide. Quite frankly,

Alessandro Oppo: different societies,

Alessandro Oppo: the same structure of democracy will make different decisions based on the culture, the thought

Alessandro Oppo: leaders in community, etcetera. They're not gonna be a monolith where all democracies are gonna do the same policies. They're gonna

do different things based on the society they're in. But

Alessandro Oppo: I think that it is very true that

Alessandro Oppo: the the the

Alessandro Oppo: political,

Alessandro Oppo: the economic

Alessandro Oppo: aspect,

Alessandro Oppo: I don't wanna belittle it because quite frankly,

Alessandro Oppo: it in many ways may may be more

Alessandro Oppo: crucial

Alessandro Oppo: than the governmental structure.

Alessandro Oppo: But my book is about the governmental structure,

Alessandro Oppo: but I don't want to act like, oh, that's just economic sense. No. No. I agree. The the power of great wealth

and it comes right into the elections too. I mean, not all countries have as

Alessandro Oppo: corrupt a system of election refinance

Alessandro Oppo: as The United States. But in The United States, it's just monumental where one individual

Alessandro Oppo: can spend $230,000,000

Alessandro Oppo: to help get Trump. I was at 250, whatever, million dollars to help get Trump elected.

Alessandro Oppo: That is just insane

Alessandro Oppo: that that kind of wealth first off,

Alessandro Oppo: that they can do it in the electoral system. You wanna make sure that in the jury system, a sortition system, it's

more like a court jury where there's no campaign donations. There's no, there's no, outside influence. There's corruption. There's

there's bribery

Alessandro Oppo: laws, etcetera, etcetera. But the fact that the money can influence elections,

Alessandro Oppo: I mean, it it does. It simply does. In every society, people with great will

Alessandro Oppo: shape

Alessandro Oppo: the the the debate, if not the exact election outcome.

Alessandro Oppo: So

Alessandro Oppo: but my notion is that with a true democracy,

Alessandro Oppo: a sortition,

Alessandro Oppo: that they might everyday

Alessandro Oppo: people,

Alessandro Oppo: according to polls right now in The United States, say that they think

Alessandro Oppo: that this level of wealth and income inequality is unacceptable.

Alessandro Oppo: They think maybe rich people should have

Alessandro Oppo: maybe 10 times more wealth than ordinary people,

Alessandro Oppo: but not millions of times more wealth.

Alessandro Oppo: So I think my idea, again, I sense that we all tend to think that every day people would agree with us.

I think every day people would agree with my economic analysis

Alessandro Oppo: of the problem of wealth inequality.

Alessandro Oppo: But maybe I'm wrong, but it's I believe in democracy and what they say,

Alessandro Oppo: what the people believe and agree to democratically

Alessandro Oppo: through a sortation process, I I would accept.

Terry Bouricious: It's it's very interesting what you say that that,

Terry Bouricious: I mean, you can be leftist or, I mean, right wing,

Terry Bouricious: and, they both agree about,

Terry Bouricious: politicians being the problem.

Terry Bouricious: And so I wonder if this could be a sort of alliances

Terry Bouricious: between,

Terry Bouricious: who is a left and who is a right wing.

Alessandro Oppo: It's not a it's not a coincidence that I titled my book as I did,

Alessandro Oppo: Democracy

Alessandro Oppo: Without Politicians. I I could have said without elections, but then people go, what? It doesn't make any sense.

Alessandro Oppo: Democracy requires elections. They it just the title doesn't make any sense to them. I mean, it makes sense to me because

I think elections are undemocratic.

Alessandro Oppo: But but by by making my foil, if you will, my enemy

Alessandro Oppo: politicians

Alessandro Oppo: and and as I say, I'm a recovering politician myself. I was a politician for twenty years. I I helped organize political

parties. I I was involved with founding three different political parties in my time. So I was fully committed to the the

political party structure.

Alessandro Oppo: And it was an experience in British Columbia,

Alessandro Oppo: a citizens assembly and everyday people

Alessandro Oppo: that made me realize that last, you know, thirty years of my political

Alessandro Oppo: effort

Alessandro Oppo: was a mistake.

Alessandro Oppo: That, building a political party was not the path to democracy,

Alessandro Oppo: just a path to future battles with other parties.

Alessandro Oppo: So yeah, it's,

Alessandro Oppo: politicians

Alessandro Oppo: can be a

Alessandro Oppo: focus of, I believe ultimately a left right,

Alessandro Oppo: unity. I mean, I think there are, there are, there are plenty of people in The United States. A lot of my

book,

Alessandro Oppo: I use examples from The United States. Although 90% of it is is relevant to people in any country, any place that

has an election system, you don't have to although I use a lot of examples from US elections, are particularly horrible,

Alessandro Oppo: but still most of the book is relevant to anybody. But the

Alessandro Oppo: fact is that

Alessandro Oppo: the people

Alessandro Oppo: who voted for Trump,

Alessandro Oppo: people on the right,

Alessandro Oppo: a lot of them did it simply because they were disgusted at the status quo of politics.

Alessandro Oppo: And there are some people, big name people who were like one of the biggest podcasters

Alessandro Oppo: in the world, Joe Rogan.

Alessandro Oppo: He was a big Bernie Sanders supporter.

Alessandro Oppo: And when Bernie Sanders was was knocked out of the race by Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton,

Alessandro Oppo: she's an elite, corrupt, horrible person. He went for Trump to shake things up. So the point is there are big name

people who are neither left nor right. They're just anti

Alessandro Oppo: corrupt

Alessandro Oppo: politics as usual.

Terry Bouricious: And

Terry Bouricious: have you received any feedback from send from Sandy

Terry Bouricious: from Bernie Sanders?

Alessandro Oppo: Bernie

Alessandro Oppo: Sanders did

Alessandro Oppo: blurb my book. In other words,

Alessandro Oppo: on my website, I have a quote from Bernie Sanders

Alessandro Oppo: saying

Alessandro Oppo: something like,

Alessandro Oppo: the book is

Alessandro Oppo: this is a well

Alessandro Oppo: researched book on potential future of democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: Basically, saying that it's without him actually saying,

Alessandro Oppo: and I endorse its thesis. In other words, he's just saying, this is a this is an important good book about a

potential future for democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: But the truth is, I know Bernie. I I I've I've known him from

Alessandro Oppo: long before. I in fact, I first I used to live with Bernie on I stayed on his couch for two months

back in the nineteen seventies while I looked for an apartment because we were friends in, in a third party, minor, tiny

little political party. So I've known Bernie for, for a long time and we're friends.

Alessandro Oppo: But the fact is everything in his life has shown him that one politician

Alessandro Oppo: can

Alessandro Oppo: have a major influence. So

Alessandro Oppo: although in his campaign

Alessandro Oppo: for president a few years ago, he did say, it's not me, it's us.

Alessandro Oppo: Still, I'm I'm not sure if he would fully endorse the idea

Alessandro Oppo: of getting rid of elections and politicians because he's so

Alessandro Oppo: deeply immersed in that. I I I've actually

Alessandro Oppo: avoided asking him point blank.

Alessandro Oppo: He likes my book. He he he blurbed my book. He thinks that it's an important book, and I'll just leave it

at that.

Terry Bouricious: And a

Terry Bouricious: quite famous professor, Helene Landemore,

Terry Bouricious: also

Terry Bouricious: she wrote a book that has a similar title to yours. Yes.

Alessandro Oppo: Helene's book is

Alessandro Oppo: Politics Without Politicians.

Alessandro Oppo: I like mine better, Democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: But yes, in fact, she and I have had email exchanges for years and years. I've read her book, several of her

books.

Alessandro Oppo: In fact, I just saw her

Alessandro Oppo: a few days ago. I went down to Connecticut to be an observer at a citizen's assembly that she organized,

Alessandro Oppo: a statewide

Alessandro Oppo: citizen's assembly looking at an election reform issue, property tax reform issue that she organized. And so I asked her, can I

come be an observer? And so I didn't have a lot of time to chat with her because she was really busy,

but we touched base and we compared notes a little bit. So yes,

Alessandro Oppo: she and I have a very

Alessandro Oppo: similar

Alessandro Oppo: analysis.

Alessandro Oppo: My,

Alessandro Oppo: my

Alessandro Oppo: recipe for a final solution is a little bit different than hers. She she's

Alessandro Oppo: avoided saying, and this is what we need to have. She's basically said, and this is why what we have right now

doesn't work.

Alessandro Oppo: And we need to use sortition.

Alessandro Oppo: So, so I don't know if she

Alessandro Oppo: embraces my full

Alessandro Oppo: thesis about how we would reform the system,

Alessandro Oppo: but

Alessandro Oppo: she did do a lot of good work to help try and get my book published. So, so I,

Alessandro Oppo: but, yeah, she's great. I, I, I, I, I'm just really impressed with her, both her writing and her organizing.

Terry Bouricious: I was wondering if

Terry Bouricious: maybe I didn't ask you something that you wanted to talk about.

Alessandro Oppo: Gosh.

Alessandro Oppo: Well,

Alessandro Oppo: I just I'll just do a little bit more about

Alessandro Oppo: couple of things. One one one little piece of history

Alessandro Oppo: is

Alessandro Oppo: people talk about today

Alessandro Oppo: about

Alessandro Oppo: democracy,

Alessandro Oppo: and they mean elections. In fact, I think even in the UN

Alessandro Oppo: charter, the the

Alessandro Oppo: declaration of human rights, it talks about the right to elections and so on.

Alessandro Oppo: And it's

Alessandro Oppo: so ingrained.

Alessandro Oppo: And

Alessandro Oppo: so people assume

Alessandro Oppo: that the founders of The United States were supporters of democracy, which they were not. They ardently opposed it.

Alessandro Oppo: And also in France, the French Revolution, they say, oh, it's a democratic,

Alessandro Oppo: the rising of democracy. No. They did not want a democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: The French

Alessandro Oppo: revolutionaries

Alessandro Oppo: also wanted an aristocracy.

Alessandro Oppo: They even had a two tier election system. Only certain people they, they, in fact, they talked about,

Alessandro Oppo: was it active citizenship and the passive citizenship?

Alessandro Oppo: If people didn't own property,

Alessandro Oppo: then they shouldn't really be voting. And they had a system where they would have an assembly, a mass

Alessandro Oppo: community meeting,

Alessandro Oppo: and only certain people were allowed to be in that meeting. And they would elect people

Alessandro Oppo: who were not going to the legislature.

Alessandro Oppo: They were electing people who would then go to a regional meeting of other people who had been elected by these local

municipal

Alessandro Oppo: subgroup meetings

Alessandro Oppo: and that group group, which would have filtered out the rabble and would be the lawyers,

Alessandro Oppo: the merchants, the

Alessandro Oppo: articulate people,

Alessandro Oppo: they would elect from their small group people to go to the legislatures. They had a two tier election system to filter

out any

Alessandro Oppo: working class people. Now there were a handful of people who were ardently pro working class,

Alessandro Oppo: but the French

Alessandro Oppo: system was

Alessandro Oppo: carefully constructed

Alessandro Oppo: to prevent any risk of democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: And people don't know that either. They don't know about the Americans. They don't know about the French. They assume that these

no, they, these were aristocratic

Alessandro Oppo: revolutions

Alessandro Oppo: against

Alessandro Oppo: the monarchy. And even in The United States, it wasn't really even against the monarchy.

Alessandro Oppo: They used King George in The United States as their foil, as their enemy.

Alessandro Oppo: But just ten years earlier, the continental Congress

Alessandro Oppo: had sent a letter to King George

Alessandro Oppo: asking him to exert more authority over parliament because the taxes that they were objecting to were being passed by the parliament

in London.

Alessandro Oppo: And they wanted they thought they said, King George, you're being misled by your advisers. You need to stand up to parliament.

Alessandro Oppo: And then when that didn't work and King George dismissed the letter, they said, okay. Well, we'll use King George as the

enemy because a king is a better enemy than an elected parliament.

Alessandro Oppo: And so in The United States, they started using King George, but he was symbolic.

Alessandro Oppo: Basically they wanted to have a system almost

Alessandro Oppo: the exact same system that Britain had,

Alessandro Oppo: but transplanted The United States where they, the local ruling elites, aristocracy

Alessandro Oppo: would be in charge instead of the aristocrats

Alessandro Oppo: back in England. They wanted the British system.

Alessandro Oppo: They wanted a king. In fact, they

Alessandro Oppo: said, all right, we'll have an elected king. And they said, well, we shouldn't call him a king because we were attacking

King George and so on. So we'll call him a president.

Alessandro Oppo: But they still wanted an executive,

Alessandro Oppo: who could veto things and who could make appointments and so on. So they used the model of the aristocracy of Britain

to make the aristocracy,

Alessandro Oppo: the oligarchy of The United States. And it did change over time. Expanding the voting rights did

Alessandro Oppo: democratize it to some extent. But if you look at the people who get elected, yeah, there are some

Alessandro Oppo: token working class people. There's, you can probably count on one hand how many genuinely working class

Alessandro Oppo: members of Congress there are. And even in, in, in

Alessandro Oppo: countries like

Alessandro Oppo: Italy or

Alessandro Oppo: Denmark or Sweden,

Alessandro Oppo: there are a handful of working class people, but mostly

Alessandro Oppo: they're professionals

Alessandro Oppo: or business owners or wealthy.

Alessandro Oppo: I

Alessandro Oppo: don't want to dismiss

Alessandro Oppo: the fact that there are working class allies

Alessandro Oppo: on some of the, in some of the political parties, but the body as a whole is an aristocratic

Alessandro Oppo: body.

Alessandro Oppo: I don't know if that's exactly what I wanted to say, but that's something that occurred to me.

Alessandro Oppo: Have this false notion that we have a democracy, and The United States say we need to defend the democracy from Trump.

Alessandro Oppo: And I say,

Alessandro Oppo: that's not gonna work because we don't have a democracy.

Alessandro Oppo: Going back to the old way of a way it was before Trump was elected, we'll just invite another Trump because it's

not democratic and people can see that. They think it the establishment

Alessandro Oppo: bureaucracy

Alessandro Oppo: of

Alessandro Oppo: politicians

Alessandro Oppo: is so corrupt that it needs to be overthrown.

Alessandro Oppo: And so I tend to agree. I overthrown

Alessandro Oppo: nonviolent. Have to be very clear. I'd never advocate any violence.

Terry Bouricious: Yeah. It seems like we need a new design of democracy.

Terry Bouricious: Yeah. And, and do you have,

Terry Bouricious: let's say a final message for all the people that are working? Well, yes. A good thing is my book

Alessandro Oppo: is because

Alessandro Oppo: there's a

Alessandro Oppo: person

Alessandro Oppo: in The United States who thought my book was so important in terms of challenging the problems of climate change,

Alessandro Oppo: AI,

Alessandro Oppo: income and wealth inequality.

Alessandro Oppo: He thinks my book is incredibly important. So he has paid a large fee to Routledge, which is this large, the one

of the largest academic presses in the world that published my book.

Alessandro Oppo: But they priced the paper book and the hardcover sort of like a textbook. It's very expensive. So he paid a large

fee to Routledge to make the ebook version, whether it's Kindle or EPUB or a PDF

Alessandro Oppo: version of the book free.

Alessandro Oppo: So people can go to,

Alessandro Oppo: you can go to Amazon and download the book for free, or you can go to my website, terribaricius.com.

Alessandro Oppo: There's other ways you can access it too, and just download the book for free. I think it's a very important book

and our goal is not for me to make money from royalties,

Alessandro Oppo: but to get it as widely read as possible.

Alessandro Oppo: So I encourage everybody to go to, to, you can also get it at Routledge, I believe.

Alessandro Oppo: To their open access books section or

Alessandro Oppo: Amazon or something like that. Go to terribaricious.com

Alessandro Oppo: and you'll see a link there to download the book for free.

Terry Bouricious: Thank you a lot, Terry.

Alessandro Oppo: All right. It was very good to talk with you.

Alessandro Oppo: Have good day. Thank you. All right. Bye bye. Bye bye.