30 September

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me. Elections only began in the early 20th century. Democracy is not elections. They were designed to be a tiny part of democracy, a way for people to have a say in who their representive would be. But they’re like the fossil fuel of democracy, they’ve now taken over everything. That’s what populism means, all of democracy has now become a popularity contest. You couldn’t do any job including raising your kids using popularity as the mechanism. It’d be a disaster. But we now run our countries using it, which is why they’re falling to bits. Society has become a giant high school, where ‘likes’ are the currency. This is literally true, adult life is now adolescent life, and social media is how we bring high school culture into the adult world. Get rid of elections. There are all sorts of ways to do politics without them. Sortition, for example, how we select juries. Draw leaders by random lot. Let them have very short terms, then replace them with more random leaders. Let officials do the actual work of running the country and keeping the continuity, which is their job.