Here's the real solution (or the first step toward it):
A simple description/example of "sortition" would be: put the names of every (adult) citizen in a pot, and then
randomly select one name to fill the office. Or select however many names are needed, to serve in the legislature, or city council, or senate, etc.
This is the concept we need to start from. This is the rational/logical approach, for decision-making, such as we use for choosing juries to settle the issue of guilt/innocence in court. We assume EVERY citizen is competent to decide the truth, without prejudice in advance, and then a small number are picked, at random. There is no basis for judging that certain ones are more competent than others and placed in superior positions of power to impose their authority onto the rest of us who are inferior submissive subjects.
(Of course lawyers are able to screen out certain jury candidates, but they can't pick who will serve. They just take the next random name(s) to replace the ones they're allowed to exclude.)
The election system is an arbitrary concept which presumes that those who are good promotionalists and speech-makers and manipulators of others are also good at making decisions for society. No one has ever explained how the
ability to manipulate a mob through speech-making qualifies one to be a good social decision-maker.
By contrast, the "sortition" concept assumes that everyone is equally good at decision-making and should be given an equal opportunity to participate in the process, with no one presumed to be superior to the others just because they have a talent for speech-making and mob-manipulation.
Sortition has already been used in some cases, and it has a good track record. However, it can take different forms, and one could argue that the ancient Athenians used it and got some bad results.
So what we need are experiments with it, to try it out in different forms. Any system can be lousy if it's done the wrong way. And the process followed by the decision-makers has to be one where speech-makers are prevented from dominating. It could be that even in a jury it's possible for one jury-member to dominate over the others. So a process has to be followed which gives every participant equal power to direct the dialogue toward the outcome.
And, perhaps sortition can take a form where it doesn't actually replace the party-demagogue system, but rather corrects it repeatedly, or intervenes to fix what the parties screw up. So then the voting and speech-making circus can continue, sort of as entertainment, for the small-minded, while the most important decisions are made on a higher plane, by decision-makers who must deal with the facts, like a jury does, regardless of popular stampedes of the masses driven by speech-maker manipulators.
