I learned from Hendrik Hertzberg's lead item in the Talk of the Town of this week's New Yorker, The States We’re In, that a movement is gaining steam in California, Repair California, that would repair that state's ungovernable political system by calling a new constitutional convention to draw up a new constitution for the state.
What is unusual about the proposal is that the delegates to the convention would be average citizens, chosen by lot:
The genius of Repair California’s approach is twofold. First, it steers clear of "social issues": no gay marriage, no abortion, no affirmative action. Second, the delegates would be chosen randomly from the adult population. (Appointed delegates, Repair California reasons, would be beholden to whoever appointed them; and if the delegates were elected, the elections would inevitably be low-turnout affairs dominated by money and the organized clout of special interests.) The convention itself would be an exercise in what is called "deliberative democracy." The delegates would spend months studying the issues, consulting experts, debating among themselves, and forging a consensus. The result would be put to a vote of the people, yes or no, in November of 2012.
To have faith in such a process requires a faith in the good sense and sincerity of ordinary people—a faith that just about everybody professes. The beauty part is that no one can know what the delegates would come up with—which is why the idea has won such broad support. Besides the capitalists of the Bay Area Council, the center-left New America Foundation loves it. So does the left-left Courage Campaign, a partner of MoveOn.org. And so does the lame-duck governor. It’s "brilliant," Arnold Schwarzenegger says.
The governmental institutions of Ancient Athens pretty much all either consisted of the whole citizen body, like the popular assembly (the lower house of their legislative branch), or were made up of average citizens chosen by lot, like for our juries. The only real exceptions were the 10 generals (the highest executive officers) and various financial officials that needed to have expertise. This system is well described in Mogens Hansen's The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes.
From the reforms of Cleisthenes in 507 B.C. to Sulla's abolition of Athenian democracy in 86 B.C., this system lasted, except for a few brief interludes of oligarchy, for over 400 years. There were some significant military defeats, and, after Athens's defeat by Philip of Macedon in 338, Athens became an only semi-independent satellite state of first Macedon and then the Hellenistic monarchies that succeeded it. But the system lasted.
Our system of checks and balances has failed over time, because our different branches of government, made up as they are of elected politicians and their appointees, have too many interests in common that most of the rest of us do not share, so that for the most part they cooperate with one another against the rest of us. Seldom do they really check one another as the Founding Fathers intended.
I have therefore long favored appointing the members of the lower houses of our legislatures in the Athenian way, by lot. This would combine the best of the systems of Athens and the Founding Fathers, providing real checks and balances and a limited version of the Athenian system of government by average citizens, by giving veto power over governmental actions to a body made up of average citizens that, by the laws of statistics, would proportionately represent all parts of our society. The average citizens could check the abuses of the politicians and their appointees, and the politicians and appointees, in their branches of government, could provide a check on the mistakes of the average citizens.
If we are willing to give such power over life and death to juries that are appointed in this way, why should we fear to give average citizens greater power?
Now, it looks as though this idea may provide a way out of the political impasse in California. Let us hope that this idea succeeds there.