Sortition: Activism for Activists

In the movie Fight Club, the unnamed protagonist and Marla attend all the support groups that they can find. Neither of the characters has any of the life-threatening illnesses, such as testicular cancer, blood parasites, or tuberculosis, that these groups are for, but that’s beside the point.

Or maybe it isn’t, we’ll come back to that.

When Marla discovers the unnamed protagonist has stopped attending his groups, she confronts him. The unnamed protagonist says, “I've found a new one.”

The viewer knows this is Fight Club.

Let’s pretend you’re an uncomfortably attractive, drug-addicted woman who just overdosed on Xanax and you asked me why I’m not clamoring for transit-oriented development, or land value taxation, or ranked-choice voting as much as I used to. I would tell you, “I’ve found a new one.”

Let the reader know this is sortition. As an activist, I advocate for sortition.

Sortition is the forming of legislative bodies through random selection. It is an alternative to elections.

It’s a weird idea, but it is an old idea. In Politics, Aristotle wrote, “It is regarded as democratic when the officers are assigned by lot and as oligarchic when they are elected.” In opposition to this, the founders of the United States chose to form a republic and expressly opted for elections as a tool to select the best among us. Thus, they decreed a political elite. They called it a “natural aristocracy”. The nation became known as a democracy only as suffrage was extended, not because it gave up its electoral system. It is a system that overwhelmingly favors wealthy, well-connected people. While voter rights have become democratic, to a sortitionist, it’s not clear how democratic the U.S.A. has ever really been.

The randomization in sortition, especially as the size of a sortition body is made large, bakes in representativeness. Instead of relying on voter turnout, sortition delivers democracy by creating a microcosm of the people. Allowing the sortition body time, resources, and access to experts, as you would a jury, it could deliberate and make a just decision on a significant issue. Subsequent sortition bodies could address other issues or evaluate the results from a prior decision.

In this way, sortition is a tool to disentangle issues from being bundled in the form of one candidate or party platform. Simultaneously, it is a mechanism to scale the direct democracy of a small community to the modern polis.

There are many different proposed implementations of sortition and there are many concerns. So, before we jump ship from our sinking “democracy” and embrace sortition—and to be clear, it is an extreme proposal and a full adoption would abolish political careers, political parties, and the president (as we know it)—a survey of the status quo is due.

In 1954, the U.S. Government legally defined a 501(c)(3). Commonly known as nonprofits, these organizations are (mostly) tax exempt. They are prohibited from endorsing any political candidates or being involved with campaigns. They are also required to have a stated purpose in one of the following categories.

• religious

• charitable

• scientific

• literary

• educational purposes

• testing for public safety

• foster national or international amateur sports competition

• prevention of cruelty to children or animals.

For Americans who want to change the world or be the change they want to see in the world, nonprofits have been the primary channel. The 501(c)(3) is one of 29 variations of a 501(c) tax classification. But relax, the remaining 28 variations will not be discussed here today. While tax code reform is greatly needed, do not be tempted to start a tax reform nonprofit! (If you want to join one, may I suggest advocating for Henry George’s land value tax with Common Ground USA?) (Actually, real quick, do you think it’s more likely that the 4,000,000+ words in the U.S. tax code will be trimmed down by (A) lobbying members of Congress, mostly tax evaders, who’ve had 119 sessions to refine our tax code, or (B) forming a sortition body made up of mostly tax payers and asking them to look it over?) (Am I revealing my biases?)

“Activists” is an umbrella term for many of the people working in nonprofits. They are the ones trying to save the wolves, save the Earth, legalize gay marriage, protect children, protect parents’ rights, own guns, not own guns, supply mosquito nets, crack down on sex trafficking, feed the poor, end racism, and a thousand thousand more efforts. Is it working? Yes and no. One thing I’ll vouch for: activism is a rough gig.

For one, it’s quite hard to make an activist. Have you ever proposed a better way to structure society and heard the response, “Yeah, but it’ll never change”? While just about any person walking down the street, if you lock them in some eye contact, and slide a clipboard into their hands, will quickly express a desire to help save the world, how many will write down their email legibly and respond to a notice about a city council hearing? How many people under the age of 60 have gone to their city hall on a Tuesday night, waited 2 hours, spoken for 5 minutes, just so that some people with power might be made aware of how they feel?

It’s also not easy to keep the activists you’ve got. Burnout is common. At a recent housing event, an organizer encouraged us to be okay with the fluctuations in our commitment, so long as we just always come back. Perhaps some activists do simply stop caring, it seems many drop out as a reaction to perceived impotence.

Not only do the typical methods to both recruit members and influence legislators require a great amount of effort, but also the typical outreach message is highly emotional and unreflective. While, in some sense, it is sentiment that informs our values, a balanced and reasoned discussion must guide our activity.

Here it is important to acknowledge that my evidence is anecdotal and reflects my personal opinion. If you are an activist, maybe you are bubbling with optimism. Indeed, there is a lot of momentum in the progressive sphere as a reaction to the current administration and change seems possible or rather some kind of change seems inevitable. Although activists seldom consider themselves extreme, it’s common for everyone else to complain of it. And for activists of Cause A to be frustrated by those of Cause B for stepping in their spotlight.

I will go ahead and tip my hand and tell you that the call-to-action at the end of all this typing is to get you to be a sortition advocate as part of a nonprofit. In place of nonprofits struggling to weasel into a political agenda, sortition would create fair forums for most of activists’ goals. Through deliberation, without the politics of politics, reasonable policies would be adopted for climate, for homelessness, for x, y, or z.

Activists, friends of activists, and neighbors of activists would be randomly yet consistently cycled through sortition bodies. Their causes could be elevated and evaluated without requiring the blessing of an elected official.

The urge for you to join sortition advocacy is clearly not because nonprofits are a perfect vessel, but because they’re a vessel. Maybe the last boat in the harbor.

The aim of sortition is to provide an avenue for cooperative reasoning and is anchored in a belief in the sanctity and general capability of humans. Its advocacy, however, is still subject to the pitfalls of nonprofits, which I will whine about a little longer, and not the least of which is the question of how to get funding.

The pipeline of grant applications and donor supplications is, perhaps, the primary activity of nonprofits. Then to ensure these funds are not embezzled, or some might say to enable embezzlement, many layers of bureaucracy are established. Nonprofits often struggle to find members to fill their obligatory board roles. Alternatively, in the rare event of a contested election, suddenly the repugnant machinations of elections are brought to bear on your once harmonious, intimate social group (yes, complaining here about elections is a technical begging of the question, your objection is sustained, I will move on).

Suppose that all this has been managed. Plenteous funding secured, the most charming people enlisted, all to what end? To play political games. Nonprofits go head-to-head with mega corporations and established voter blocs. They sponsor booths, they design merchandise, they solicit for signatures on petitions any way they can. They pay for lobbyists. That there is a regulated industry termed “lobbying”…is that not a clear signal of a foundational crack in the system?

If, at this time, you care more about some cause other than sortition, let me share a secret with you. No sortition advocate, or just about none, woke up one day with a passion for gathering a bunch of strangers together and talking for hours. We advocate for sortition because we want something else really badly. We’re like little kids volunteering to go along with mom to run her errands, because we know that there’s an ice cream shop on the way home. For me, that scoop of ice cream is the Land Value Tax.

What is your scoop of ice cream? Sortition might be the chore you need to finish first, before you get your treat. Yes, all the difficulties with activism just laid out are not magically bypassed in sortition advocacy. The hope is that in mounting one large-scale sortition campaign, the way will be cleared for other efforts.

With a doubt, there is precedent. Activism can and has worked. The greatest social change I claim witness to is the widespread acceptance of gay rights. Within my life, the increased love and justice in attitudes and behavior towards gay people is remarkable. Was this the result of activism? Yes. However, sadly, most people would agree the heaviest lifting was done by the tragic suffering of millions of people in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Then activists and artists brought this to the world’s attention.

In the same way, the concept of sortition, during what may be a crisis of government, has a chance to puncture the rolls of bureaucratic fat and gain the attention of society.

Testicular cancer, blood parasites, and tuberculosis are terrible afflictions. While no one should seek to stop those who provide support, there must be a focus on the root cause of a disease. So too with all classes of social ills. No one should seek to stop those who provide support, but we must seek the root cause. Sortition is the activism for activists.

“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, Chapter 1: “Economy”

In this piece, the process of sortition has only been lightly discussed. A more thorough investigation would look into whether or not elections can ever overcome the rational ignorance of voters, the influence of wealth, and the superficiality of popularity contests. Then, analyze whether or not a group of randomly selected people will bring about mob rule, be inept, or just be filled with malaise. If we are not sure, (and we aren’t!), then developing methods of experimentation or working out of these questions is vital.

The proposal of Assemble America, the nonprofit whose Substack you’re now reading, is but one of many proposals for sortition. Assemble America may not be as violent as Project Mayhem (and it never should be!), but it is no less revolutionary.

A source of deep discussion of sortition is this set of posts by Terry Bouricius.

If sortition can fulfill its promises, it is the activism to end all activism. Or rather, activism to empower all further activist efforts. Sortition would be a path of self repair, rather than the long, slow disembowelment of our institutions at the hands of party machines. Its achievement would shatter the dam of bureaucratic hell in Washington, D.C. and release the hundreds of millions of hours spent by multitudes of volunteers every year trying to create a more just and a more loving world.

Consider joining Assemble America or Democracy Without Elections. If you’re international, there’s INSA. If you’re near me in LA, there’s PDLA, where we’re working with Culver City officials to realize our goal of running a Civic Assembly in Los Angeles in 2026.

Or donating. These are all nonprofits and there is still a war in front of us.