I need to organize my hat closet. My posts so far have combined – conflated, really – at least three different hats, which I’ll call the evangelist hat, the theorist hat, and the strategist hat.

The evangelist's core argument – that we should call more mini-publics – is frankly a bit of a lay up. Of course we should keep exploring this domain! Mini-publics have shown too much promise in too many contexts not to experiment further. There’s abundant evident of benefit and almost none of harm. We're learning more and more about how to hold efficient, productive, impactful citizen assemblies. If all that’s on the table is “more experimentation,” the onus is on the naysayers.

The theorist, on the other hand, imagines extensive, dramatic structural change. Here the yeasayers bear the burden. We haven't yet seen mini-publics used as the core building block of modern government. Particularly when we argue that mini-publics can and should supplant, not just supplement elections, we move beyond direct evidence into speculation. We have lots of data about electoral problems and sortition solutions, but jumping to full-on lottocracy is a leap we’ve not seen leapt.

Between these two lies the strategist, who asks how we might move beyond the evangelist's experimentation towards the theorist's blueprints. This hat goes beyond imagining the new systems and proposes steps to get there. It's pitched the beginnings of a plan, specifically one organized around constitutional conventions.

All this hat shifting demands a lot of readers. It mixes established findings with speculative inquiries and advocacy, and it may not always be clear where one stops and the other starts. This is not to say we should stop taking any of those three perspectives – they’re all pretty important. But I’m going to try to delineate them more clearly.

Let's draw, for example, the obvious line between the evangelist and the other two hats. You can believe we should try more mini-publics without feeling ready for citizens' constitutional conventions, much less an election-free lottocracy. That would be a fairly conventional take, in fact. Most folks with exposure to mini-publics are impressed and enthusiastic but not necessarily up for revolution.

A less intuitive line matters more: you can disagree deeply with the theorist and yet agree with the strategist.

You can support the idea of citizens' constitutional conventions without supporting the specific constitutional changes espoused here. You can be highly skeptical of my disdain for elections, of lottocracy, of New Camelot, of citizen appointment boards, etc, and yet share my enthusiasm for earning the "republic" label by choosing a government with a deliberative body genuinely representative of the people.

In fact, you could support the convention idea for reasons completely unrelated to mini-publics. Calling citizens' constitutional conventions could prove critical to vastly different strategic ends.

Most politically engaged Americans can name at least one change they'd like to see that would involve amending the Constitution. For some it's getting rid of the electoral college. Others want to address gerrymandering or term limits or balanced budgets or limits to executive power. I have a slew of mini-public-related ideas. Perhaps you have a wishlist of your own. Naturally, the ideas range from lustrous to lousy. Whom should we trust to decide which is which?

If our answer is Congress, we're effectively giving up on constitutional change and reconciling ourselves to a fate where the document is at best stagnant and at worst ignored. Proposing a constitutional amendment requires a 2/3 vote in both houses. Today, nothing of substance can escape the mire.

If our answer is elected conventioneers, then heaven help us. State convention elections are run much like state legislature elections: same districts, same plurality voting, etc. But both the elections and the candidates are more obscure, so the parties are freer to hand-pick nominees, potentially leading to conventions even more partisan than the legislature. The most hopeful outcome of a partisan convention would be a stalemate. Far worse, a convention with a clear majority party and simple-majority-friendly rules could propose highly one-sided amendments. Were such amendments ratified, massive numbers of US citizens would come to view their Constitution as the other party's power grab. Anyone hoping for a healthy way out of this era of division should tremble.

That leaves one and only one serious option for anyone supporting any change to any aspect of the Constitution any time soon: a constitutional convention of randomly selected citizens. You don't have to agree with anything else proposed for the broader use of mini-publics in government to acknowledge this is true.

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What would a citizens' constitutional convention choose to do? None of us knows. But just as I fear the worst of an elected convention, I genuinely trust that a well-designed citizen's convention would deliberate wisely and reach conclusions deeply representative of the will of the broader public. Or, better still, of what the public would want if we all had time and resources to dig into deep deliberation together.

I do NOT trust, however, that this wisdom will look like anything pulled from my theorist hat. Even if the convention strategies proposed here were followed to astonishing success, there’s no reason to think conventioneers would resonate with my scribbles or even have heard of them. A successful campaign to call a citizens' constitutional convention would not and should not grant its champions any sway over deliberators, who would be chosen at random. Facilitators would be selected according to rules specified by the design congress. Similar rules would govern the selection of experts and the terms of agreement. The most the successful campaigners could do is cheer from the sidelines.

The wisdom of a citizens' convention may not be exactly conventional, because conventional wisdom today is heavily shaped by electoral politics. But randomly selected conventioneers, pretty much by definition, would themselves be conventional folk. They’d be genuinely representative of us, and therefore they’d infuse conventions with conventional American ideas. They'd hear testimony that critiques old ideas and introduces newer ones and might be willing to edge beyond conventional political thinking – conventional Americans don't think like conventional politicians. But the US as a whole is not eager today to adopt a radically different governmental structure. The US public isn't ready to toss elections aside, for example, and therefore a representative convention wouldn't be either. They would make decisions that broadly reflect how we, as a country, think. You cannot confidently make the same claim of an elected convention subject to partisan capture.

All of this might read as an argument to bury the theorist hat deep in the closet. Even the most successful implementation of the strategists' plans doesn't earn the theorist an audience. But that's the magic of a theorist hat; theorists don't sweat such things. When the theorist hat is on, the implementation is someone else's problem.

I will likely never present at a constitutional convention. But in these essays, an imagined convention audience will often provide a useful frame. I might try to sell the pretend convention, for example, on the idea of rewriting Article V, which governs amending the constitution. Or on using citizen appointment boards to nominate Supreme Court Justices. Or on constitutionally partitioning the executive branch to shield research-oriented agencies from undue influence. Or on actually editing the Constitution (not just appending to it) to expunge, for example, the overridden-but-still-textually-present distinction between "free Persons" and "other Persons".

And I trust that you, wise reader, will separate these theorist hat arguments – many of which you will choose to dismiss – from the strategist-hat imperative to hold citizens' constitutional conventions that hear and weigh all manner of ideas for how to form a more perfect union.

It might still get mind-bendy on occasion, but if you've made it this far, you're capable of suspending disbelief. I mean, you entertained the idea that I have a hat closet...