What type of government do we have? Since seeing the article about a man wanting to use a bomb to get attention for the ideology of Sortition. I realized from speaking to a friend that they did not know what form we had here. Here is the definition from for sortition from the aforementioned website, “random selection to populate assemblies or fill political positions.” They claim this is the purest form of democracy.
From the Merriam-Webster dictionary the definition of democracy is, “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”
What the Greeks (Athenians) had was this-
Per a website about Ancient Athenians, “Athenian democracy was separated into 3 parts: The Assembly, The Council, and The Courts. Each part was elected differently and had a different function.
The Assembly: The Assembly was made of all citizens who voted, so basically men who had completed the required military training. New laws and important decisions, such as whether or not to go to war, were decided by the Assembly.
The Council: Otherwise known as The Council of the 500, the Council did the day-to-day running of the government. Council seats were given out for one year and determined by a lottery of all citizens.
The Courts: The Court system of Athens dealt with lawsuits and trails, very much so like our Courts today. Juries of 201 people for private lawsuits and 501 people for public lawsuits made decisions in cases.”
Our government is a Democratic Republic as defined by Wikipedia, “Eugene Volokh of the UCLA School of Law notes that the United States exemplifies the varied nature of a democratic republic—a country where some decisions (often local) are made by direct democratic processes, while others (often federal) are made by democratically elected representatives.[3] As with many large systems, US governance is incompletely described by any single term. It also employs the concept, for instance, of a constitutional democracy in which a court system is involved in matters of jurisprudence.”
I personally use the following simpler definition- A democracy is where a group of citizens gather to vote on all aspects of governance. For example there are still some small towns in New England that have town meetings where only those present (and of course are citizens of that town) vote on issues. An example is whether or not the town needs a stop sign at a particular intersection or who will be employed to be the local dog catcher.
And I use the following simple definition for a democratic republic- Where the power of the people is vested in individuals who are elected directly by the people to represent them, be it locally or nationally. And yes I know that the President is a partial exception which I will not go into for sake of simplicity.
So to me Sortition is just a form of anarchy and does not truly reflect the sort of government that we the people of the United States needs or wants. Picking people at random just is too big chance to take and should never be used in our modern times.
That is my opinion- Jumpin Jersey Mike
