Is Democracy Even Possible?

The core of the democratic idea is that ordinary people can and should govern themselves and their nation. We've never tried that in America. It's not part of our culture.

Our founding fathers had little faith in ordinary people. Their idea (and Constitution) was an attempt to set up a system in which the governing would be done by wealthy, well-educated white males who could read Latin and had no use for political parties. They offered us a kind of tyranny by an elite minority. There are worse systems. 

About four years in, that experiment failed, and now we have political parties, minority rule and Spanky Trump as our looney babbler-in-chief. 

I'm going to suggest a genuinely democratic system that few will support outside of New England. I know this plan sounds strange, but it might work. 

The basic idea is that the job of running things will be done by a permanent, expert civil service (already partly the case). Policy will be set by a huge group of ordinary people serving short terms and chosen at random in a yearly lottery. There will be no campaigns and no campaign funds and no use for political parties, who can't affect a lottery. 

For example, in Healdsburg, a town reminiscent of Mark Twain's Hadleyburg, there are 6,000 voters Each year 50 of them would be selected at random and be required to serve on the city council for 12 months (meeting once a week). To provide institutional memory and know-how, the city would hire an expert manager (which it already does). 

Probably more than half the city council members would be women. A percentage would be gay. Some would be rich and some poor. Some might be in wheelchairs. The town is 30% Latino and has had no Latinos on the city council in this century, but in the new system there would be many Latino council members. 

In the current reality, the most important attribute needed for election to many city councils is a real estate broker's license. In the new system, the most important attribute would be citizenship. Ordinary people would set policy, using common sense. Everyone would have a chance to serve. We'd be governing ourselves.