Interview with Terry Bouricius, former politician and author of Democracy Without Politicians: Government By the People

I had the pleasure of meeting Terry briefly in Philadelphia last month in mid-June at the TED Founding Futures conference. He spoke there and also the next day at the Philadelphia Ethical Society about sortition and his new book, Democracy Without Politicians: Government By The People. I really appreciate Terry’s openness, authenticity, and frankness when he diagnosis the problem with elections. He also has a lot of credibility many of us don’t have seeing that he was an elected politician for two decades in Vermont.

You can download a FREE copy of Terry’s book here (or purchase it!). I think it’s awesome that a supporter of Terry’s helped make the epub/pdf version of this important work free!

In this episode we discuss:

• Why elections produce oligarchy, not democracy — elections tend to select for for wealth, ego, and fundraising skill rather than wisdom or representativeness

• The ancient Greek roots of sortition — how Athenian democracy relied on lottery for nearly all governing bodies, with election reserved as “the oligarchic method”

• Terry’s “aha” moment — how an invitation to a British Columbia citizens assembly gave Terry the sense of witnessing true democracy

• The diversity argument — why a representative, randomly selected group consistently outperforms homogeneous groups of experts or politicians

• Deliberation vs. negotiation — and why what happens on the floor of Congress is neither

• “Multi-body sortition” — Terry’s proposed architecture for a lottery-based legislature, including how proposal-drafting and final-vote bodies should be kept separate

• The “peeling strategy” — Terry’s strategy for a gradual, domain-by-domain path from our current system toward one where sortition bodies handle real governance
  

I really enjoyed this conversation and hope you do as well. Feel free to leave comments below!