S5E21: Lifeboats: David Van Reybrouck

This is Larry Lessig. And with this episode everything changes. Because if you're like 99% of the people who think they know something about quote, democracy, and until I read the book my guest today wrote, I was among that 99%, you'll believe that democracy is, is all about elections. And if you believe that democracy is all about elections and you recognize giving the corrupting influence of AI, both analog and digital AI and money and everything else, then you believe that democracy is under threat. And if you live in the United States and you know anything about the First Amendment, you would further believe that there was in fact little that could be done to protect democracy because there is little we could do to protect elections, at least from the effect of AI driven speech. Speech. I can't tell you the number of times I've had this conversation drawing people to recognize the threats to democracy because of AI driven threats to elections, where if you've listened to the whole of the season, you know, I mean both analog AI corporations and digital AI, and after they hear this and understand it, they then shut down. They see the threat, they can't see a cure. And so like a patient accepting they have terminal cancer, they struggle to think about something else. Okay, so if you're one of those people, I have a gift for you today. That gift comes in the form of the wisdom that my guest David Von Raebrook will offer us today. David's book Against Elections is not really against elections. It is against the idea of democracy. Exhausted by the idea of elections, David has been central in a movement across Europe to complement election based democracy with sortition or lottery based systems of democracy. And as you'll hear, these systems or institutions constitute representative bodies not through elections, but through random representative sampling or sortition of whatever public is relevant. This, this complementing or alternative form of representative democracy is in my view the most exciting thing happening in democratic theory and practice anywhere. David is a Belgian cultural historian and archaeologist. He got his doctorate at Leiden University. His first books were about Africa. The Plague is a mix between a travelogue and a mystery set in post apartheid South Africa. His second, Congo is based on 10 journeys through the Democratic Republic of Congo. But in 2016 he became famous in the democracy reform movement with the publication of Against Elections. As you'll hear, David was inspired to write the book after witnessing the longest government shutdown in modern democratic history. His own countries, Belgium, which after the 2010 election suffered Flight 541 days without a government that was the worst anywhere at any time and was only beaten by Belgium again in 2020, after the nation went without a government for 652 days. That original shutdown led David to think about alternative models for representative democracy. And that thinking has been extraordinarily consequential around the world and. And as you're about to experience in this podcast, too. Stay tuned. David, I'm so grateful that you would take time to talk to us about the book that came out in 2016. I remember reading it shortly after it came out and it seemed right. And I've reread it and it seems brilliant and so obviously right. And so it drives the urgency of a conversation I want to have right now about how we get to where I think we both think we have to get. But most people, alas, have not read the book, and I want to make sure that the structure of the argument is clear to people. So I'm going to walk through it a little bit with you. We'll go back and forth, sort of affirming each other's understanding here. But it starts in a place that most would agree is the place we are, which is, as you put it, something strange going on with democracy. Everyone seems to want it, but no one believes in it any longer. And I think this is absolutely right and terrifying because when you ask them why do they like it or why do they want it, there's formulas they'll give. They'll say things about how it avoids tyranny and all that sort of stuff, but it feels like there's nothing people actually feel inside, they really want this to be. So you set this up as the reason to look deeper, and I want to look at how we look at this deeper. Although it's interesting, you pick out issues which in 2016 were just beginning to be obvious. For example, you talk about the ephemeral obsessions dominate as never before. So the news media and social media constantly focused on the irrelevant or the tiny issues in a context where there are very serious issues that we should be able to address, but we just can't. The most profound and sad part, in the beginning here, as you set the problem of the book up, you say, if eagerness to promote an image wins out over governing, if election fever becomes a chronic disorder, if compromise is consistently described as treachery, if if party politics systematically evokes contempt, if participation in government is guaranteed to lead to heavy electoral defeat, why would an idealistic young person go into politics? Which is terrifying because it's true, and at least in a tradition that believed, and we're going to Talk about the source of this belief that it would attract the very best into governing. It's pretty clear that we have no reason to believe the very best are going into governing. The first question I want to ask you about this beginning is, I mean, it's so resonating with what's going on in the United States right now. And we in the United States tend to romanticize the health of European democracies relative to our own. But you wrote this really as a story directed initially in your own context. Right. So as you were writing this, was the feeling that the United States echoed what's going on in Europe or that Europe was echoing what was going on in the United States?

Great question. Well, thank you first for having me. And thank you for reading my book twice, at least. That's quite pleasant. Actually, the book was written originally in Dutch. I'm Belgian. I'm a Dutch speaking Belgian Flemish. It was written in 2003 on the basis of what had happened in Belgium between 2010 and 2011, when Belgian elected politicians had a very hard time starting a government, forming a government. We broke the world record of being a country without a government. It lasted for 541 days, and the previous record holder was Iraq. So Belgium now beat Iraq in terms of surviving without a government. I mean, all irony aside, I thought this was a pretty dire situation. And many people thought back then, like, well, this country has become too complicated. It's tiny. We have three official languages. We can't form a government because this is a Belgian problem. And very soon I started to realize, but this is more than a Belgian problem. This is a democratic problem. And Belgium is perhaps an early patient, and we're seeing some of the earliest symptoms with indeed a complicated country like my own. But my hunch was that what we were going to see, what we're seeing in Belgium, was going to replicate it, going to be replicated elsewhere as well. We are going to see other patients. And unfortunately, that hypothesis has been proven right. And I described the first quarter of the book. I described a sort of pathology which I call the democratic fatigue syndrome. Even if the democratic dream is still alive, there is a lot of fatigue. Like, it doesn't seem to, you know, deliver anymore the way it used to do. And so my idea was that this democratic fatigue syndrome was going to be observed elsewhere as well. At that time in 2010, 11, 2013, I wouldn't have thought that the United States might be one of the patients of that condition. But unfortunately, I think we have seen it, and it's not just because Donald Trump got elected. It's basically the rot which we've observed inside the democratic system. And after the book came out, I was invited to give some talks in the US and then I became a visiting professor at the Hannah Arendt center at Bard College in upstate New York, York, when Roger Berkovitz invited me to come over. And it was only at that moment when I was teaching and traveling, that I realized to what extent the pathology, the Democratic fatigue syndrome, had badly affected big parts of the United States. Of course.

Yeah. And obviously the United States suffers the first of the diagnoses that you offer. We're going to work through three of them and get to the first fourth, which is the one that is the framework for your remedies. But the first of these diagnoses is it's the fault of the politicians, which leads to the idea that we just have to find new politicians. And that's the motivation for the find the outsider or the people who are not in government, which, of course, is what made Donald Trump so compelling to so many people that we just got a bunch of corrupt and stupid and lazy politicians inside of a basically okay system. So let's just throw them all out and replace them with businessmen or people who can actually do stuff, and government will then work. That's what you must have been feeling as you were watching. As you were watching Donald Trump arise here.

Yeah, yeah, of course. I mean, there is this idea that many people still long for democracy but believe like it's no longer happening, it's no longer delivering. If only we had some different personnel. I mean, I wish that were true. I wish that the democratic ill health in which we find ourselves was entirely to be attributed to the quality of the political personnel. I don't think that's the case. Even with brilliant, new, idealistic, motivated people, you still are going to have a hard time running democracy these days. And the reason is that the procedures which we use for doing democracy have become pretty outdated. We're living in early 21st century. It's not early even anymore. We're almost the second quarter of the 21st century. And our procedures for doing democracy date back to the 18th century. And lots of things have changed, not to say almost everything. But the only thing that hasn't changed is a way of organizing democracy. And so I think changing political staff will not be enough. It might, obviously, you might get interesting people in, of course, but I talk a lot to politicians these days in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in France, Germany. But what I seem to realize Is the sense of frustration which many citizens experience is very similar to the sense of frustration that many politicians experience as well as if they don't get anything done anymore, they make very long days, they work very hard, they get sometimes well paid. But few are those who can really make a difference. And the whole idea of having a government of the people, by the people, for the people has become really complicated when you continue to use the obsolete procedures of doing democracy.

Yeah, so. So we can't just fix it by replacing the people. You talk about the diagnosis that it's the fault of democracy, we need technocracy instead. And I know that especially around the elite universities, people will say things like that, but that's actually not a very popular idea in the real world. Nobody would imagine replacing government with the academics. But they do often say what you identify as the third diagnoses. It's the fault of representative democracy that if we just had direct democracy, everything would be much better. And so you have all these apps to make it possible for everybody to vote on every bill that's in Congress. That too is not a solution to the problem as you see it.

No, I don't think direct democracy has got its advantages and its drawbacks, but the idea that things are going to be solved the moment with every policy question you see, send out a push message to people's iPhone and they can vote yes or no. I think I don't like this sort of Twitter crazy. I don't like the idea that people can vote with their guts on topics that require more attention than just a few seconds of your, you know, at the time, at the evening when you're preparing dinner for your family. I still do believe that there are forms of representative democracy that are very interesting. The electoral model has some advantages. But in my book, and that's where I come in with the fourth diagnosis is basically, or the fourth procedure that I suggest is like you can create a form of representation which is not electoral. It is possible to continue to do representative democracy, but with different forms of representation.

So this is the experience of reading, reading the book that's so dramatic because I think the average American who's thinking about this at all would read all the way up to this point and agree with everything you're saying. And then the next thing you say would startle them because it's literally something that the vast majority have never even thought about. And so the next thing you're saying here as you diagnose the fault of electoral representative democracy is the problem is that we use Elections to run democracy or exclusively use elections to run democracy. And the first reaction of an American is like, well, how could you have democracy except by elections? And of course the answer is you just don't know anything about history, Americans, because I count myself among these, because it startled me as well, because the history of democracy is not the history of elections, as you put it. The last 200 years has been the history of elections, but the history of democracy is much longer than that, thousands of years. And so the question is, how do we think about. So tell us the story of that history that then gets twisted by the French and Americans at the beginning of the 19th century.

It's true today when we say democracy, we think like, well that's the same. That's like holding elections. If you hold elections, you have democracy and if you want to have democracy, you need to hold elections. Both are almost become, have almost become synonymous. And yet it's interesting to look at etymology. The word elections has the same etymological root as elite. And this might be surprising because we use them exactly to do a non elitist form of government. And then if you go back to history, you look at what Aristotle and Montesquieu and Rousseau and Harrington have been writing. They all came down to the idea like if you want to have an aristocracy, hold elections. If you want to have a democracy, you may want to work through a different procedure which was called sortition or lottery. Elections have been around for a long time. The most typical example is perhaps papal elections when the cardinals gather together in the Sistine Chapel in Rome to indicate who is going to lead the church for the next couple of decades. And that's your typical historical use of elections. It's the elite of a community coming together and trying to find a peaceful solution of who is going to run the organization. This is a very different form of using this procedure as we have now. If you look at early ancient Athens, the 5th century, the 4th century, and I've just finished reading a manuscript of a brilliant book by an Israeli and a Dutch classical historian on the use of lottery in ancient Athens. Not just in the classical century, the 5th and the 4th, but even starting from the year 800 before contemporary era, where you see that lottery surfdition was a ubiquitous feature of all things public in ancient Athens. It was such a normal procedure with heritage matters, with military tasks, with colonization and allotment. Absolutely fascinating book. In ancient Athens, in the classical time, 5th 4th century BC we see that there were about 7,000 public functions. Of those 7,000, only 100 were elected. All the rest were drafted by lot. Curiously enough, the ones that were elected were the ones which we are not going to elect today in the US or, or in Belgium or any other country. It was the generals of the army and the central bankers, because there the idea was they need to have some technical skills and lottery will not do. But for all the other public functions, whether it meant some sort of assembly, some form of proto parliament, even the tribunals, people were drafted by lot on a daily basis, on a monthly basis, or on an annual basis. And so the very core of democracy, and that is what Aristotle was referring to, was if you want to run a democracy in your country, you better use sortition, you better use lottery. And at the same time, in the 5th century, Athens was the most democratic of all the policies, but Sparta was more aristocratic. So you had differences. And Aristotle said rather descriptively, if you want to have an aristocracy, you have to use elections. If you're inclined towards having a democracy, sortition will be your method you want to use.

Now, of course, the people who were selected from these were citizens of Athens, right? And so we don't yet have the universal entitlement to participate in government.

Big, big drawback of ancient Athenian democracy. It was only among citizens, and citizens were men of a certain age and a certain wealth. But we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. I mean, what we've seen over the past 30, 40 years has been a growing wave of returning to sortition. They call it the deliberative wave. The OECD has done some remarkable work on it. We've seen it very strongly in parts of Europe and Japan, that to a lesser extent in the United States. I think it's only in the last couple of years we've seen examples of this in the States. There's been a lot of great academic research. Professor James Fishkin in California has done important work. Some activist organizations have been doing important work. Canada has played some pioneering role. Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Denmark, these are the countries who are trailblazing these sort of innovative, complementary forms form of doing democracy, not to do away with elections altogether, but to combine what we have now, the electoral system, with a reinvigorated form of sortition, of working with random samples of everyday citizens.

So this history, which goes up until the beginning of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, is a history extends also in Italy, in Venice and in Florence, of deciding to allocate power to randomly selected citizens, whatever the qualification.

Exactly. Yes, exactly.

And the idea of that is that everybody feels that they're part of the governing process. So it's not the governed versus the governing. It's like we're all part of the governing process. And that idea, so central to the idea of democracy as it develops, gets changed fundamentally by the French Revolution and the American Revolution. We're going to talk about the American here, but in the context of the American Revolution. Obviously the framers embrace the idea of elections as fundamental to the notion of a democracy, a republic that would be, as Madison put it, quote, dependent on the people alone. And those elections they thought in a positive sense would be, in the positive sense of aristocratic. Aristocratic in the sense that they would inspire the very best to join government and that we would be picking among the very best the kind of George Washingtons or the James Madisons, and that that would be the natural output of the process that they had developed. And obviously nobody, nobody would look. I asked midjourney to, you know, the AI program to draw me a picture of Congress and it's a picture of these clowns sitting behind desks. Nobody today would look at the institutions of representative, elective, representative democracy and think that it's ident that it's attracted the very best into society. This is back to the quote that I read at the very beginning. The very best wouldn't think to go into this. So they were wrong about what their system would produce. They were wrong about its expectation that it would produce great people inside of government. That's a good reason to question whether the structure that they embraced made sense. I do want to push you though, a little bit. I felt like you underplayed the significance of the one sortition component in the American Constitution, which is practically pretty significant. When you look at both the grand jury and the Pettit jury, these are institutions that basically say, look, you can't prosecute you, the federal government can't prosecute one of us unless we give them up. That's the grand jury. And you can't convict them unless we agree they're guilty. That's the pedigree. That's a pretty important way of saying that the enforcement of laws will be handed over to a sortition like entity. Obviously not as great as Jim Fishkin's representative deliberative democracy, but still it's a sortition entity that is a pretty clear commitment to turning this part over to the people and saying, we want the people to feel that they're involved, they have a stake in this by taking responsibility. Is that a fair pushback?

I think it's absolutely fair. It's One of the great elements of the American Constitution that was, by the way, repeated also in France and in Belgium. We do have jury justice in Belgium as well, and I'm a great defender of it because I think it is some great value there. In my book against the Case for Democracy, I cite Tocqueville from the passages from his famous book where he compared what elections did to American society with what jury service did to American society. He was not entirely convinced of the overall benefits of the electoral process because he said, like, government basically grinds to a halt, political activity stops, fervor sets in, unrest is there, and the whole political class seems to be geared towards getting power or remaining power. And so already in the 1830s, he's describing some early dynamics of what would later become the democratic fatigue syndrome, the electoral fever, which was then perhaps a feature that lasted a few weeks or a few months, which has now become almost a permanent feature of our political life because information has circulated so much faster and social media is making it so much faster. But Tocqueville said, like. Well, I like the American system, but the electoral period is a funny period because rationality seems to go with all the fervor that you see. However, on other instances in his book, and it was really interesting to juxtapose. He was describing what jury service did to American citizens that were participating in it. And he was in utter admiration for the procedure where he said, it really makes for. For an incredible democratic school if you entrust that important power to individual citizens and not to state actors, but you draft people by lot. So already then he realized that procedures, the interface shapes the interaction, basically, and the elections give you leader, but it always gives lead to a moment of unrest, whereas the sortition involved citizens and very often made for very good decision making.

Yeah. So he could see it and we can see it, I think. And we're going to talk now about some of the solutions that you're offering. I want to offer one other justification or one other really urgent reason to think about this kind of reform. I just came back from Taiwan and was asked to give a speech about AI and democracy. And the basic argument of the speech was we can think about analog AIs, which, like corporations are AIs and digital AIs, social media, and the next version of AI, which will pretend like it's me talking to you. And you can see that these AIs which have their own instrumental rationality and their own purposes, and their purposes are not democratic. They're. They're not about trying to make the society better. They're about maximizing profit for Facebook, or if it's AIs run by the Chinese or the Russians, it's about interfering with the election. They're actually really good at screwing us up. They're really good at steering us away from what we would really want to do, turning us into people who are ignorant and hate each other. That's actually what they're pretty good at producing. The structures that you're talking about trying to build, we can think of as almost protective or security measures. Like, you're moving democracy into a place where it can't be so easily poisoned by these mechanisms, like they can't reach them. It's almost like you're putting it inside the house because you realize you're getting sunburn or radiation poisoning standing outside of the house. And so it feels like it's not just like this would be a good idea to change. It's like this is an essential transformation if we're going to protect it from these forces that are actually stronger than we are. I mean, the people in AI who are doing the foundational models right now are terrified that within two years we're going to have AGI that will have a capacity to control us. Well, if we're going to have the ability to resist this, that we need to begin to do democracy in a place where we're not vulnerable to that. And sortition. The methods of sortition you're describing here are powerful.

And I think democracy today needs spaces and places where people can come together and deliberate amongst each other in a way of serenity. The agora, the public function of people talking to each other and deciding which way their society should go, needs to restore it. I think the very discussion of AI as well would be a very good topic for a citizens assembly drafted by Lot. Many early examples of these citizens assemblies come from Denmark and other places where they were used, like, 10, 15 years ago for what they call technology assessments. How are we going to. Going to, you know, what are the moral yardsticks when we talk about brain science or brain surgery and even lay people? I mean, some discussions cannot just be left in the hand of the technicians who are developing them. There has to be some form of external, societal, political validation by the people who are going to, you know, benefit or be harmed by these new technologies. And so in that respect, I think it would be great to use citizens assemblies to come up with some of the boundaries. What are the moral boundaries of artificial intelligence? The democratic space is shrinking at such a dramatic space Given what is happening in terms of autocracy and new technologies, we are going to need to step up to. To keep democracy alive. Innovation has been important in every realm, in sciences, in culture, in arts and technology, and business, in sports. It seems as if there's one domain where innovation is taboo, and it would be democracy, where we're all, you know, where we have to continue to do the procedures that we've been doing since the 18th century. We have to invest in democratic innovation badly, unless we want to lose democracy altogether.

I completely agree. And then the question is the strategy. And so this is the last part I want to make sure we kind of tease apart. I was really happy to see you start the section of remedies by focusing on Jim Fishkin's work and deliberative polling as a inspirational example of this. And you also described the pushback, and the pushback is in part driven by ignorance. People just don't have the experience of seeing how ordinary people deliberating can actually be quite sensible and quite informed. But the other part I think people are anxious about is just structurally, it's a relatively heavy lift. Even the original experiment you described of like bringing people together for two weeks to talk about who the president should be seemed impossibly expensive. And though there are places you talk about Iceland, I think one of the most impressive stories is one that came after your book came out, Mongolia. I don't know if you followed what happened in Mongolia, but there a student of Fishkin who was a politician who had been thrown out of office, went to Stanford, took a couple years studying for something, and then had Fishkin as his professor, went back, got the constitution amended to say that before they could propose amendments to the Mongolian constitution, they had to run a deliberative poll. And I actually went to the first of them, went to Ulaanbaatar and saw, yeah, 750 Mongolians, perfectly representative sample, a little bit more women than the population, but that's a fine mistake to make. And watch them deliberate in small groups and in big groups over the course of weekend. And they gave extremely sensible judgments about these proposed constitutional amendments. Some seemed to me crazy. And they were rejected by the liberative poll and it substantially affected what the parliament could do. So that's an example of the Fishkin model in its very best. The resistance to it is it's both too big and too costly. It's too big in the sense that that, as you've already said, people are anxious about handing over. It's costly in that in the United States, the same thing would cost millions and millions of dollars to run. Then the question is, how do we begin? What's the strategy for beginning to introduce it? So it becomes more and more obvious to people that this is a solution.

What we've seen over the past 10 years is downsizing the samples that are used in these citizens assemblies. The first one I organized had a thousand participants. It was called the G1000. And nowadays we're working with samples between 60 and 150 citizens. President Macron in France just finished a very interesting citizens assembly on the topic of assisted dying. Very touchy, emotional, personal, intimate topic. And it was impressive to see how 150 French citizens could sit together for several. It was one weekend per month, during six or seven months, going through the material, they were not just drafted by lot. They came together, they could invite experts, exchange opinions, develop thoughts, and at the end there was a recommendation for new policy that was, that had a maturity to it that rarely comes out of, of any lobby or any parliamentary work. It was extraordinary. The Standard newspaper Le Monde praised it, like, is this still possible in our country where we're all so fed up with everything? It was really impressive. Ireland just recently finished a similar procedure with I think it was 100 participants on biodiversity. So smaller sizes help. You need to find. It's bit of a trade off. I mean, the bigger it is, the better for legitimacy, but the more cumbersome it becomes. And if it's too small, it is always a danger. People are going to say, well, I don't feel represented. I mean, it's not. This is just a bunch of people getting together. And so a good tradeoff between, you know, to too big and too small seems to turn around regardless the size of the country. Between 50, 150, 200 people, you can do a lot of work. The, the Canadians did great work with 120 participants as well. So that seems to be a good size. And that makes it more bearable. You can pay people a proper per diem when it's only 120 of them and it's a sizable working group. I mean, it's doable, it gives legitimacy because you have all the variety that you need. I mean, if you look at the group picture that is taken at the beginning, every American or every country Canadian can recognize themselves in one of the people who are standing there. And it makes for good work. And what we basically see is that it is actually possible. Yes, it may cost some money, but it goes faster, much faster than you would have in a traditional system. And I know, I mean the example that struck me most just a few months ago in Belgium, my organization, we organized one bottom up on changing party financing. The Belgian political parties, they don't get private money, unlike the situation in the us but they give themselves a lot of public money, which is a bit of a problem as well, if you realize that the amount has gone by five over a period of 30 years. And there a random sample of 60 everyday Belgians came together and in three weekends, just six days time, they came up with a solution that was without reach for the past 15 years with party politics. So yes, indeed, it cost a bit of money and we had to raise it ourselves as this was a Biltma project. But it was extraordinary to see to what extent everyday citizens had a possibility to go much faster and therefore much cheaper than traditional politics could do.

Have you seen online deliberative structures that have tried to mirror what's done in person?

It's happening, it's increasing, if only because the very notion of online has changed so much. You and I are talking through zoom now. Five years ago this would have been impossible. So the new technologies online today is very different from online in 2010. And I know James Fishkin has been defending the idea of a sort of mass deliberation one day a year in the United States so that hundreds and thousands of people can talk to small groups of 10 people each. And it has been used for the first time on a global scale. You had the Global assembly very first attempt at a global discussion on climate change. It had only had 100 people, which was too little for the global level. But it was a pilot. And it was really interesting how proportional had 17 people from India, 17 people from China, etc. And they sat together. You know, people came together in soccer clubs in somewhere in rural India. And new technology, they didn't only see each other, but simultaneous translation made it possible for people to engage with fellow earthlings on the future of the planet.

Planet.

It was absolutely extraordinary. So it is possible, but at the same time, Lawrence, I don't like zooms that much. I find it very hard to spend more than one hour or one hour and a half in a zoom talk. So it's a bit the same dilemma there. Nothing beats a meeting like an offline, like an offline meeting coming together. But a combination of both is certainly a possibility.

Yeah, but it might be a nice transition because there are there. We've run a project called Deliberations US where we've done a lot of online deliberations around. First was the electoral college and now we're doing democracy more generally. And what we find is a lot of people who would be reticent to like show up at a church basement on a Friday night to talk about something because they might be afraid, they might be anxious for their own safety or not sure who the other people are, can enter into the process more easily in this kind of post Covid zoom environment and then discover that they actually like it, that like they actually feel like they're, they're participating and then it's easier to imagine recruiting them into a in person deliberation. I think at least that was in Germany.

The Bertelsmann Stiftung Bertelmann foundation has done pioneering work on doing international citizens assemblies online in a multilingual context with different Europeans from different EU member states. And it works remarkably well. So the online wasn't an obstacle and the fact that many languages were involved wasn't an obstacle either. So we're living through some exciting times and things seem to be working.

The last bit I want to talk about though is again the strategy. I mean you described a very ambitious picture that was offered to America about the six different stages of how we can imagine supplementing or replacing. And then at the very end of your book you come back to representing or recommending that we think about bi representational systems where we have both the regular election systems and the sortation systems. But that inspired me to think about a particular example and I actually wrote about it, the New York Review of Books, which I think builds on the insight that you've offered here. And one part of that insight is recognizing that we've seen these succeed in context where the problem is the sort of problem that we know the politicians can't solve. So Ireland is the best example of that, where the Irish Catholic Church is not going to allow the parliament to address same sex marriage or abortion in a way that reflects the actual attitudes of the society. But these citizen assemblies could and they made enormous progress in that context. So big issues that we know the politicians are going to not necessarily be bad at, but structured in a way where we can begin to earn the confidence of the people. So in the United States, as you know, we've got a really difficult process for amending the Constitution. Most people think it's impossible to amend it today. The standard, the only way that's ever been amended is through amendments proposed by Congress. Then there's an alternative way of convening a convention to propose amendments. And everybody's terrified about a convention because they're like, who will these people be? They could do all sorts of crazy things. There's no way to. There's no way to save us from the invention. So they could propose amendments to even change the way amendments are adopted. And there's all sorts of fear and uncertainty and distrust that's pushed around those. But the idea that I thought about was what about marrying a deliberative assembly or a citizen assembly with the convention process in the sense that you say assembly in each state that considers the relevant amendments and we'll have a law that says that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention cannot support a proposal that hasn't been supported by, let's say 60% in the citizen assembly. The citizen assembly becomes a filter for ideas that then can be considered or proposed inside of a constitution. You know, they themselves don't do it. You have to mend their constitution and make it that. But we have established a principle that delegates in this context can be instructed. And so we can instruct them through citizen assembly and thereby use the citizen assembly to ground the amendment process, transforming it into a deeply democratic process. Where most people think about the American constitutional amending system and say this is not democratic at all because there's no democratic connection to it. So it seems to me this fits the model of by representational system that you would.

I like it, it's a great idea and I think it would work in the American context. And I think if Madison and Washington would be alive today and they would be able to go and visit some of these assemblies, they would be very much pleased and say like, well, this is actually what we meant. But this is true to the spirit of what we tried to put to paper more than two centuries ago. I think it would be really an inspiring form of involving everyday citizens, everyday Americans with the future of America, if only to beat the sense of disenchantment that has become so predominant in Europe. What we're seeing now, the combination of electoral and tradition based models takes a different course. But I think that's fine. There's not one recipe I've been involved with designing the very first permanent citizens assembly I think on earth right now, which is in a tiny little part, it's a German speaking part of Belgium, small community. But what you have now, next to the elected parliament, you have a permanent citizens council that is drafted by lots of this model has been copied by the city of Paris. Now proving that it's not only, you know, an idea that can originate in a small scale, fairly high trust setting, and it has been replicated by the city of Brussels, but then limited to the topic of climate change. But this idea of having a sort of counterweight to the strictly electoral process with, you know, you have, you have in the one parliament, in the one church chamber, you have politicians that are elected and in the second one you have citizens drafted by lot. It could make for a really interesting dynamic. That idea is now being taken up at the European level. Europe has started with Ursula von der Leyen. It has started to run a number of one off citizens assemblies and a number of professors in Florence and Paris and different places are designing them now. The idea like perhaps Europe, the European Union needs a second parliament next to the one we have now which is elected. Like any parliament these days, we might want to have a second parliament drafted by lot. So ideas are moving in that direction. But when it comes to constitutional change, I think it's a great idea what you're suggesting and it would be really a very fortunate combination of having now very much like the idea that you have, would organize the citizens assemblies at the state level in terms of identification and bottom up process. That would be highly, highly valuable.

Yeah.

So yours, it's a long shot, but it's a great thought.

Yeah, no, we're going to make it happen because it has to happen. Yours was one of the most exciting books in a very depressing field that I've come across in the last decade and I was so inspired when I first read it and, and I'm so grateful to have the chance to talk to you about it. I think if we look back when you and I are very old and are looking at what we think of as a continuation of governance by the people, it will be because your ideas have become the mainstream to the way governments work. Because I think we all can agree the path we're on right now is not one that will survive. And so I'm committed and I'm so grateful for the work you're doing to make this possible around the world. But if you do it around the world, then maybe we can do it here too in America.

I take that as a big compliment and even more as an encouragement to go on doing the work I do.

This has been the 21st episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts, produced by Equal Citizens, are made by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. Find out more about Equal Citizens at equalcitizens Us. Give us your thoughts and feedback. Share this podcast as broadly as you can and if you can, donate to support the work of equal citizens. Because though I'll be here, paycheck or not, actually never with a paycheck. But though I'll be here, even without paycheck, we have a team that needs to earn a living. Please help us keep them going. Thanks again. Stay tuned for the next episode.