Folks who support democratic lotteries often tell stories about their light-bulb moment. They fondly recall the first time they heard about deliberative bodies selected by lots instead of votes. They remember how they quickly began to imagine the possibility of authentic democracy. We could have real representation! Genuine rule by the people! All at once we can get rid of gerrymandering and campaign money and partisan polarization and those annoying attack ads with the ominous music! Suddenly they saw the light.

My bulb and I were initially dimmer. I first encountered civic assemblies about twenty years ago in Eugene, Oregon. During dinner at the Walnut Street Co-op I met someone promoting Citizen Initiative Reviews, in which citizens are invited to assess ballot measures. Oregon eventually implemented the idea; it was the first state to do so. Lot-selected citizen juries gathered, studied the issues, heard testimony for and against, deliberated, and then collaboratively wrote summaries and recommendations to be published in voter pamphlets. The book Hope for Democracy tells the compelling story of how these clever rabbles came to influence Oregon voters’ choices. It even features before-my-time gatherings at the Walnut Street Co-op where the democratic pioneer Ned Crosby inspired local Oregonians to action.

I loved the innovation of initiative reviews as an accessory to electoral systems and wondered about other applications, but I was skeptical about the extent to which citizen assemblies could usher in a new era of democracy. I didn’t like, for example, the idea of keeping overpowered legislative chambers (a staple in nearly all electoral systems) and simply replacing elected folks one-for-one with randomly selected folks. I still don’t. No matter how they’re chosen, when a few people decide everything, that’s not democracy; it’s oligarchy.

Years later I read Terry Bouricius’ white paper on multi-body sortition describing how Ancient Athens used systems of assemblies (multi-body) selected by democratic lotteries (sortition). I was surprised to learn that the Greek system had almost no elections but offered more robust checks and balances than those of the US Constitution. Every citizen got a chance to weigh in, not merely by voting, but by deliberating. Bouricius proposed the basic mechanics for a similar system that could be implemented today, in which one lot-selected assembly sets rules, another sets agendas, others propose policies, still others approve them, etc. The rabbles vary in size, duration, obligation, process, etc, but together assure deeply considered policy and broad participation.

After reading Bouricius’s paper my bulb finally brightened. We could involve a lot more people in much deeper learning and far more earnest deliberation. This was no incremental tweak. This was the way to trade away an engine of division and artifice and plutocracy and disillusionment and fear and domination and gain in its stead a source of connection, integration, profundity, creativity, and wisdom. I began to believe, more deeply than ever before, in democracy.

This year, Bouricius is releasing Democracy Without Politicians, a book that richly expands upon and deepens his early writing. It features a profound analysis of the flaws of electoral systems and the traps they set for voters. He talks about how and why we, as rational people, think quickly as voters and think deeply as deliberators. He duly considers potential pitfalls for sortition systems and offers clever design solutions. If I had the power to entice the world to wrestle with a set of ideas, it would be this book, this year. I hope it proves to be the switch that flicks a thousand bulbs.

But of course, not everyone who hears about democratic lotteries, even from the lovely Terry Bouricius, has a light-bulb moment. Many hesitate to embrace anything that feels so new (even if it’s actually ancient), but even among early-adopter personalities who love new things the idea doesn’t always land. There are lots of possible reasons:

• Many can’t believe ordinary citizens can produce policy as capably as elected politicians.
• Not everyone immediately accepts that lotteries guarantee representativeness.
• In fact, many hear “randomly selected” and picture the biggest idiots they’ve ever known.
• Many suspect there will always be someone powerful behind the curtain pulling strings.
• Others like the idea but doubt it’s possible to implement at scale.

Those are all understandable, addressable concerns, and we as advocates need to get great at showing just how easy they are to understand and address. We need to get good at explaining the counterintuitive dynamics that make ordinary citizens – free from electoral contamination – better learners, deliberators, and ultimately lawmakers than politicians. We need approachable ways to convey the statistical principles (no abstruse formulae!) and sampling methodologies that ensure democratic lotteries deliver far greater descriptive representation than anything elections could conceivably muster. We need to spread the idea that while electoral politics makes idiots seem omnipresent, deliberative assemblies reliably leave people feeling like their peers are surprisingly thoughtful and earnest. We need to explain the powers of agenda-setting and process oversight that can help ensure that citizens are not under anyone else’s thumb.

And we need to get very clear about what can and can’t succeed at scale. Elections are proving completely incapable of producing durable, thriving, large-scale governments without succumbing to ever greater centralization of power and teetering on the edge of, if not plummeting into, autocracy. Democratic lotteries (and multi-body sortition in particular) provide dramatically more capacity to scale wise, autocracy-resistant governance.

But a bigger barrier to the spread of lit lightbulbs than all of the above, I suspect, is this: the whole thing is a bit too abstract. It’s about process, while most folks care about outcomes. To get excited about democratic lotteries, they need to believe rabbles are the best route to their desired results.

The situation presents a predicament for us rabblers, because, if we’re honest, we can’t predict the results. We have no idea what any given assembly will produce. We’ve seen enough evidence from citizens’ assemblies across the globe to predict with confidence that participants will engage in earnest with learning material, will listen to each other and work to understand different perspectives, and will weigh their learnings thoughtfully in their decisions. But that doesn’t mean we know what decisions the process will yield.

How might we guess what a thoughtful assembly will conclude? We can trust neither pols nor polls, because neither embraces learning, listening, and weighing. Politicians are trying to win games, not seek wisdom. Polls might tell us what folks going into an assembly believe, but the experience of healthy deliberation is transformative. It transforms. So we don’t know what folks coming out of it will think.

How can we convince others of the value of a system whose outputs we can’t guess?

A bulb lighting, I’m realizing, requires a leap of faith. It requires faith in each other, at a time when we’ve all declared each other idiots. It requires believing in legislative assemblies at a time when all of us have learned it’s foolish to do so. (Indeed, to believe in elected assemblies does require a certain immunity to evidence.) It requires the capacity to imagine political conversation NOT centered around two teams trying to destroy each other but around genuine learning, listening, and weighing.

And it requires a degree of humility. I, like most of us, am arrogant enough to believe that I know a thing or two. I also believe that pretty much everyone knows and understands something that I don’t. I’m lucky enough to have had the experience many times of collaborating in a group that came up with solutions to problems far better than anything I had come up with on my own. That is to say, I believe an informed, facilitated, lot-selected assembly can have more wisdom than its individual members – or than I.

I wouldn’t say that about an elected body. Collective stupidity is real; Congress epitomizes it. The specter of elections ensures that, as a whole, they act dumber than their parts.

But collective wisdom is also real. Civic assemblies seek it earnestly. The results, in this sense, of rabbles are at least somewhat predictable. Not the exact policy decisions, but the broader impacts. Partisanship wanes. Solutions emerge. Many experience authentic representation in power for the first time. Light bulbs flick on. And more and more of us get to know what genuine democracy feels like.

When you really respect and trust the people you live with, you believe they’re capable of making wise choices together. If you don’t believe that, you may well oppose authoritarianism and monarchy and other nasty things, but you don’t believe in democracy yet.