Elitist elected politicians vs. average citizens (randomly-selected) as decision-makers
Elitist pundits giving speeches vs. ordinary citizens arguing in dialogue
So instead of a legislative assembly comprised of elected representatives, we would have a legislative assembly comprised of randomly selected people . . .
Something like that, but maybe not "a legislative assembly" per se -- rather, many small bodies, or councils, each performing a more specialized function than the current broad legislature which tries to manage all the issues.
It's not that the new system would be the same as before but with only a replacement of the previous legislator-politicians with randomly-selected persons, replacing the current elections by a random selection process to put ordinary citizens in those same positions formerly held by the elected politicians. Not necessarily a simple replacement of one kind of decision-maker with another kind who would do the same as before. There would be many differences in the system to make the new decision-making bodies perform better.
There are different possible versions of how it would work, and so there's a need to experiment with this in different forms to find what works best.
. . . comprised of randomly selected people who aren't accountable for the decisions they make, . . .
Legislators now are not accountable for their decisions, except in the sense that they must get re-elected. But this only means they must continue to serve certain special interests who pay them for special favors, and also that they please the particular political party they belong to. There is nothing to verify that their actions or decisions produced any beneficial result for society, for the voters generally. All they must do is win favor from certain partisans and financial supporters, most of whom want special benefits for their group at the expense of everyone else.
Their only connection to the voters or general public is the speeches they deliver, and performing well at delivering speeches is the only accountability, so that they score higher if they are more talented at performing their speeches. It has nothing to do with measuring their performance in decision-making, or judging the results they produced by their decisions. The voters have no way to determine if their decisions produced good or bad results for them.
. . . the decisions they make, and about half of whom are probably below average in terms of education and intelligence.
No, more than half would be above average, because participation would be voluntary, and those above average in education and intelligence would be more motivated to make the choice to participate in such an activity.
There's little evidence that current elected politicians are above average in education and intelligence, except in the sense that
• many of them have a degree in something (usually law), which doesn't mean much any more, as a college degree is becoming more and more a status symbol only (except in something like the natural sciences, engineering, etc. (which are testable)), and we're approaching the point where most graduates are just as incapable of passing a real test of their knowledge as the average non-college-grad is;
and in the sense that
• they gain knowledge of certain issues, of course, over many years of being re-elected, in the debates and speeches in the chamber, and in campaigning, but such information or knowledge would also be acquired by the randomly-selected citizen decision-makers, as those issues are put to them to deliberate on, and they would become experts on the particular subject matter, just as jurors in a criminal trial become experts on the facts of the case they are hearing;
and in the sense that
• they are good at giving speeches to win votes from the populace, or the ability to impress and dominate listeners who have to listen to them as a passive audience, but this only indicates their talent at manipulating the crowd, and is not a measure of their knowledge and intelligence, as charismatic ability is not based on education and intelligence, but in most cases on an innate ability to speak well and manipulate their listerners, or in some cases on much practice and training to develop that one skill .
These talents or assets of the elected politicians, such as they are, give no indication of their ability to think clearly and intelligently and reach thoughtful conclusions. At best, they indicate an ability to communicate effectively, but this is easily abused toward the goal of dominating and gaining approval and submission to their will, rather than that of producing net benefit for the community.
In theory, it might be OK to create a system run by those who truly can be tested and can prove they are more knowledgeable and educated. However, that's obviously not what we now have. And probably better is a system allowing everyone to participate, but one where superior knowledge and education would play a critical role, so the process would promote more learning by everyone, including some who are below average but want to learn, while those who disdain learning would choose not to participate.
But how is it that the only ones competent to perform this function have to be charismatic speech-maker demagogues? What is it you like about politicians whose main talent is to manipulate a mob of idiots with their speeches? Why do you want to make that talent to manipulate a requirement to be a decision-maker?
I like the fact that I get to vote for my representatives in parliament, and as a result, my representative is accountable . . .
That's only theory. Usually you have 2 choices (some elections maybe 3 or 4), and these are dictated to you by a system which is designed already to give you a very limited range of personality types -- they must have close ties to privileged and wealthy and powerful interests, not average persons struggling to survive. From the outset a good 70 or 80 or 90% of the population is excluded from any participation in this class of elitists, so that most of the choosing has already been done for you long before you have any chance to make any choice of your own.
Any feeling you have that any of them would be "accountable" to you is only a feel-good illusion which gives you good vibes. Even with the limited choice you're offered, you have almost no way to determine really which candidate is going to perform according to what you want. It's only their speeches which impress you, not their performance in decision-making to produce the tangible results you want to see in society.
. . . my representative is accountable to their electorate/state.
No, s/he's accountable only to a system dominated by the rich and powerful, not to average voters who have no power to choose anything other than from a limited list dictated to them, and to which they can mark their "x" by this name or that, after 99% of the selection process has been done for them by a system they have no control over.
They have something to lose if they do a bad job.
But "bad" according to whom? Not citizens in the bottom 90 or 95% who have no privilege or power or wealth. It's only the wealthiest campaign contributors who have any control over the political contenders who successfully fought tooth-and-nail to rise to the top of the heap and gained enough power to have their names publicized and put before the populace -- their wealthy contributors have some power to pull the plug by withholding future donations if a politician does a "bad job" in getting those special favors for them. They're the ones, not 99% of us, who decide what a "bad job" is, and maybe a few other power elitists who could threaten them in some way by exerting pressure on them.
And even if average citizens/voters had some way to threaten the representative, they have minimum access to the mechanics of the system to judge if the representative really produced a desirable result in the wheeling and dealing among the power-brokers. Even if they know so-and-so cast a "yea" or "nay" on a certain measure, that usually tells us nothing about tangible results later, or about many alternative measures which might have been better than the one voted on, or about other votes taken in committee which didn't get publicized and yet were even more important in changing the outcome. The average bewildered voter is only guessing when s/he thinks a politician served their interest -- their superficial method of rating the politicians individually, from the TV ads and sound bites and speeches, has little to do with seriously measuring how well they did or comparing one politician's performance to another's.
Your alternative is to randomly select those lawmakers from "a mob of idiots" who are . . .
No, the average ordinary citizens do not have to be the "mob of idiots" the present system creates with its campaign rallies and speech-making circus atmosphere.
A "mob of idiots" is a one-sided partisan audience of Blue or Red fanatics driven by slogans and impulses and symbols, cheering on their champion who manipulates them by telling them what they want to hear, or promising whatever necessary to the select interest group. The better system we need, using ordinary citizens to make decisions, would be a process of dialogue to consider all sides of each issue, with opposite sides listening to each other and questioning each other in order to find the real answers, or solutions. The "mob of idiots" is what we create in the present system of not having that kind of reasonable dialogue process, and instead having elitists manipulate the masses and herd them this way or that with their dog-whistle speeches, rather than promote thinking and truth-seeking.
When the decision-makers are doing their job through a thinking and truth-seeking process, they are no longer a "mob of idiots" even if they are the 99%, or the non-elitist ordinary citizens.
. . . who are accountable to no-one and . . .
Better to be accountable to no-one rather than to the narrow-interest campaign donors and elitist power-wielders and party bosses our current politicians are accountable to, which means the new system would be a move away from this current bad form of accountability, and a move toward a more genuine form of accountability.
There are different kinds of accountability, which could be experimented with in different forms of procedure. One approach is to increase the participation to the point where everyone who wants to participates in the decision-making, in a vast number of small decision-making bodies, in which case it's your own direct participation which ensures that your interests play a role in the process, rather than relying on someone else to "represent" you and be "accountable" to you.
But also, if the process relies on a limited number of participants, selected randomly so most citizens do not participate directly in the decisions, then the number of them still has to be large enough so that all the interests of society are found among the participants, meaning the decision-makers will pursue all the same interests as the general population. Trying to make it so they're inclusive and representative of all the interests of the society would be difficult, but they would be more representative than what we have now, where it's a guarantee that the lower 90% of society is excluded from the picture and only the top 1-10% has any influence on the decision-makers.
And, there can be different ways to reward those who perform well, assuming their performance can be measured in some way. That's another matter for experimenting, to see how there might be a system of rewards or penalties based on performance. Obviously there is no serious system now incentivizing the politicians to act in everyone's interest, but only to the benefit of an elitist few.
. . . accountable to no-one and stand to lose nothing by doing a bad job.
Obviously the current crop of elitists and speech-makers lose nothing as a result of the bad job they're doing. They're evaluated only on how well they deliver special favors to their contributors, and on how well they perform in manipulating voters and displaying their charisma in the beauty-contest electioneering spectacles, where their good or bad job (mostly bad) plays no role or is obfuscated by their good or bad performance in the speech-making contests.
Where is the evidence that these pundits are more knowledgeable in science, technology, economics, history, etc.? They're never tested. It's easy for a good speech-maker to bullshit his way, yet having his head up his ass even worse than the average citizen who lacks the talent to fake it.
The people I personally vote for are certainly more knowledgeable in those subjects than the average citizen.
You have no evidence for that. Other than knowing the number of this or that bill being voted on, and other legislation information easily learned by any participant involved in the wheeling-and-dealing, there's no evidence that the politicians have a higher level of knowledge. They are immune to having to take any test to demonstrate what they know. Occasionally, when they are asked to display their knowledge, they fall on their face and show their real level of ignorance, because they're accustomed to mostly faking their way, which the system makes easy for them.
(Although it's true that longstanding KKK-member ("Exalted Cyclops" of his local chapter) Robert Byrd, Senator of West Virginia, did have some extra knowledge of history, but that was an exception -- and even so, his foremost talent was speech-making, not higher knowledge.)
On top of that, they've also spent a long time learning how government institutions work, . . .
That's partly true, like a crafty criminal figures out how to manipulate factors of crime, the clever planning, casing the building, who to pay off, and so on. But becoming an expert on how to manipulate a rigged system, or on how to rig it even better, is not the kind of learning we need from our decision-makers.
. . . how to build a consensus with people who have conflicting agendas, . . .
No, that's not what they're good at. Their learning is on how to jam through their limited agenda in order to satisfy their narrow-interest supporters such as wealthy campaign contributors. They are far better at suppressing any opposing agendas than at building consensus. Politics is a battleground where warfare is carried on to crush the other side, not a consensus-building process. It's those who shut out the other side and are good at rallying their own troops and stomping their enemies who win the battles, not those who engage the opposition in a process of debate and truth-seeking to reach understanding.
. . . and they are willing to arrange their lifestyle around the extraordinary work commitments that come with the job.
It's true that successful power-hungry aggressive crusaders out to dominate others probably have extra talent for adapting to the demands of the job, to mobilize and marshal their forces, to maintain their power base and crush those who stand in their way. It's true that they show extraordinary commitment and perseverance and stamina in their pursuit of power. And it's this aggressiveness and ability to dominate through thick-and-thin to force their program onto others which is their main asset, not their knowledge or talent for consensus-building or conflict-resolution or problem-solving.
