"The principal difficulty lies, and the greatest care should be employed in constituting this representative assembly. It should be in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason and act like them. That it may be the interest of the assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or, in other words, equal interests among the people should have equal interests in it. Great care should be taken to effect this, and to prevent unfair, partial and corrupt elections."

-- John Adams, Thoughts of Government, 1776

What matters most about how we’re represented politically? That politicians make and keep promises? That voters get to judge their actions in the next election? That leaders follow their own moral compass regardless of what their constituents think?¹

Or does it matter more that a representative assembly be, in John Adams’ words, “an exact portrait of the people at large?” That notion of representation aligns with how scientists use the term. When a forest ecologist takes a representative sample of trees, the sample should have the same balance of oaks, maples, pines, and firs as the forest at large. The same ratio of mature trees and saplings. The same proportions of healthy and sick trees, etc. The sample should be in miniature an exact portrait of the forest.

Thinking of “representation” this way – as what scholars call descriptive representation – it’s clear that our “representative” bodies aren’t representative at all. Throughout the world, elected politicians are richer, older, slicker, and more narcissistic than the rest of us. They’re more likely to be male. They’re way more likely to be lawyers. By almost every metric they fail to live up to John Adams’ vision. To quote Kendrick Lamar: they not like us.

More and more of us are embracing John Adams’ idea that representative assemblies should be like us. We doubt that groups dominated by rich, old, lawyers can ever really represent America. We doubt that bodies with little to no working class members will credibly represent working class perspectives. We ask why modest, soft-spoken folks who would never think of launching a campaign to promote themselves can’t have a voice in political deliberation. We question Thomas Jefferson’s dubious notion that elections would elevate a natural aristocracy: a class of wise, virtuous, talented leaders. All of us should question – and then toss out – that idea. We have centuries of evidence now, and no unbiased observer could possibly conclude that elections reward the wise and virtuous; they reward ambitious fundraisers skilled at fanning partisan fear and anger for personal gain. We all know what a politician is.

What if, instead of professional politicians, our deliberative bodies were made up of ordinary citizens? What if representatives were representative? What if we actually tried government by the people?

To do so would be to embrace a solution that sounds a little crazy at first: choosing representatives by lottery. Democratic lotteries are both old and new. Old because Ancient Athens, which gave us the term democracy, almost exclusively assigned government roles by lot; Aristotle himself argued that votes were aristocratic and lots were democratic. That notion of democracy still held sway at the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when a group of aristocrats explicitly opted against democracy in favor of an electoral system meant to cultivate natural aristocrats. Over time, we perverted the term democracy so it described not the system our framers rejected but the one they adopted. Some blame Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican party or Andrew Jackson’s Democrats or Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. In any event, democracy and elections, long seen as incompatible, became nearly synonymous. And we slowly lost the idea of genuine rule by the demos, the people.

So today the idea of genuinely representative bodies feels new again. And, of course, a new wrinkle or two in democratic lotteries has emerged since Aristotle’s day. New statistical sampling methods, for example. Or, for that matter, the entire field of statistics. We have new ways to inform deliberators, new group facilitation methods, new communication tools, etc. And citizen assemblies (also known as civic assemblies, mini-publics, jury councils, and by many other names) have tackled decidedly contemporary subjects: COVID-19, artificial intelligence, climate change, genome editing, biodiversity, assisted suicide, nutrition, fake news, and many more.

Perhaps the most surprising – and hopeful – element of these assemblies is the quality of deliberation. Almost without fail, witnesses remark at the seriousness with which citizens approach the learning material, the pointedness with which they question experts, and the earnestness with which they weigh their options. Anyone who has watched both ordinary citizens and the U.S. Senate debate has to laugh when the latter calls itself The World’s Greatest Deliberative Body. It’s nowhere near the greatest deliberative body. It’s not a good deliberative body. Given all the grandstanding and speechmaking to empty rooms, you have to bend the definition of “deliberation” to call it a deliberative body at all.² In fairness, how could the Senate be expected to deliberate well when its members spend millions publicly committing to thwart the opposition? Elections don’t set the table for healthy deliberation; they effectively poison it. Campaigns coerce politicians – and the rest of us – into warring teams. Into parties. Into tribes. They cleave us.

Lot-selected citizens bring in far less baggage and in facilitated assemblies they tend to do things generally considered foreign to American political discourse: listen, learn, contemplate, integrate, share... A recent participant at a civic assembly in Deschutes, Oregon described how he initially wondered about the other folks’ political affiliations. He soon realized it was trickier than expected to figure out, because their perspectives didn’t seem to map neatly to established partisan battle lines. By the end of the first day, he decided he didn’t care about figuring out anyone’s party any more. It didn’t help anything. They were well beyond politicking; they were doing something far more rewarding: deliberating.

Instead of partisan promises, civic assemblies bring diverse perspectives and openness to finding wisdom from others. They are far more diverse than elected assemblies. When you already have a hundred rich old lawyers, you’re not going to add a ton of new viewpoints to the group by adding two hundred more (see the U.S. House of “Representatives”). Civic assemblies invite teachers, farmers, drivers, students, retirees, engineers, homemakers, scholars, cooks, pastors, athletes… each bringing a unique lens to the table. Few if any of them bring experience writing law, but of course, neither do most politicians. Nor do congresspeople even read most of the laws they pass. Most law is written and reviewed by lobbyists – who definitely shouldn’t be writing law – or by staff and consultants, who can be made available to ordinary citizens, too. This is not mere theory; in 2024 a hundred lot-selected Parisiens wrote a Citizens Bill on homelessness that was passed directly into law.

The list of benefits of democratic lotteries goes on. It’s easier to fight corruption; there’s no campaign fundraising, nor even a need for one-on-one meetings with lobbyists. For that matter, there’s no gerrymandering, no voter suppression, no attack ads, no pandering, no back-room deals, no opposition research, no junkets, no $10,000-a-plate dinners, no partisan jockeying, no games of political chicken, no longstanding political beefs, no political pork… The rotten meat of conventional politics isn’t even on the plate.

For me, one promise of democratic revival stands above all these: the possibility that we, as humans, might deliberately choose our way forward. As a species, we are no doubt shaping this world. You can see from a plane window how we’re shaping the land. We’re shaping animal populations, plant populations, the air, the water, the temperature, the sky. We’re creating buildings, bombs, barriers, and vast networks of fuel, energy, transportation, and information. We’re creating new intelligences with very little sense of how they will relate to the old ones. In an electoral system, we forfeit any hope of genuine deliberation about how to navigate this world we’re creating together. Instead we just wage political wars and hope they don't escalate to military ones. If our only option is to look backwards to what we’ve done before, whether our slogan is to Make America Great Again or to Restore American Democracy, then there is little hope that we will, as a whole, grow wiser.

We need policy to emerge from earnest deliberation, not just battles for power. We need public judgement, not just public opinion. And there is the leap that must be made for our country to believe deeply in democracy again: that dumb voters can be wise deliberators. They can. We can. As voters, we don’t study and ponder every issue under consideration, because we believe – correctly – that one vote is extremely unlikely to make a difference. It’s called rational ignorance – time spent learning yields little reward. We vote without deep study because deep study wouldn’t matter. Voting invites ignorance.

Deliberation, by contrast, invites wisdom. Civic assemblies give citizens the time and resources to think deeply about issues in a context where their attention actually matters. They learn from experts, they learn from each other, and they use far more of their minds than they do when voting or answering an opinion poll. And the shocking result is a form of political discourse that can actually generate wisdom.

We desperately need that wisdom, and democratic lotteries can help us seek it. By producing, as faithfully as possible, “in miniature an exact portrait of the people at large” and creating the conditions for rich learning and profound deliberation, we can begin to ask and answer the question of how we want to move forward together in our cities, in our states, in our countries, in our world.