Writer of books on Turkey, the Middle East and Central Asia. Formerly Director of Communications & Outreach and Turkey/Cyprus Project Director for International Crisis Group. Ex-Turkey & Middle East staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal.
Citizens’ assemblies have earned a significant new seal of approval.
Alongside its successful commentary on global events, the UK’s top political podcast The Rest is Politics stands out as a running indictment of electoral representation as a system of government, implicitly at least. But the main hosts, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, had so far failed to follow the logic of their own arguments and to propose alternative methods to take important national decisions.
They have now done so with an intentional endorsement of citizens’ assemblies as their preferred way forward for democratic reform.
Citizens’ assemblies are randomly selected groups of people from a community or country – a process also called sortition – and are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They meet for a number of days, hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and adopt whatever ideas receive a supermajority vote of approval.
You can hear Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s comments about citizens’ assemblies from 34m30s on their 3 April 2025 podcast Question Time: India’s moment, Qatargate, and do young Brits want a dictator. Or watch on YouTube from here.
The UK’s current form of representative government “feels increasingly strange”, Stewart says. Campbell adds: “the system is creaking and the respect for it is not there.” (For a select transcript, see below).
Millions of people around the world listen each month to The Rest is Politics podcast, which is most influential in the UK. Campbell and Stewart’s endorsement is another step for sortition toward the British mainstream, where citizens’ assemblies are not yet widely discussed.
The unusual formality of the segment was in answer to a specially chosen question about a citizens’ assembly in Cumbria on climate change. It is part of a growing recognition that the world’s 250-year-old experiment in elections-based government has run out of steam and that we need to evolve new democratic processes.
Credibility and legitimacy
Campbell and Stewart’s comments give credibility and legitimacy to citizens’ assemblies – just two decades old in their modern form – and the greater deliberative democracy movement.
At least four national citizens’ assemblies have already been held in Britain on Brexit, on nature, on climate and on democracy. (One of the best global lists of several hundred citizens’ assemblies held around the world in recent years is here).
The UK has also seen several smaller, randomly selected citizens’ panels and juries at the local level as well, dealing with topics from the climate to traffic schemes.
The podcasters focused on the concrete step of reforming the UK’s upper house of parliament, the House of Lords. In Stewart’s mind, this could mean adding a new third chamber. They could also have mentioned a campaign started by the Sortition Foundation to replace it entirely with a House of Citizens (the petition is here).
How such a permanent assembly would work is the subject of much debate. Stewart envisions it as a body for vetting legislation by the elected assembly. However, existing new permanent randomly-selected assemblies, for instance in Paris and Belgium’s German-speaking community, don’t go into detail on individual policy challenges. Their job is to commission other temporary citizens’ assemblies to address each tough policy choice.
The podcasters also discussed the advantages of the Swiss model of direct democracy, which is actually rather different to a sortition-based system.
Details, details! What’s important is that these influential podcasters have now put real proposals on the table to talk about.
Here’s Rory Stewart (slightly edited for clarity and length):
Excited by an alternative model
“I think that our system of democracy, which is this kind of representative system where you send people … off to parliament to speak on behalf of their constituents, feels increasingly strange. You can feel this all the time when you talk to people. They’re like: ‘I voted for this person, [but] they don’t really represent me.’ What [voters] mean is that this person is often not saying anything they believe in, they find it very difficult to relate to this person. How am I supposed to represent people with a completely different identity to me? People say, you know: ‘Rory you’ve never lived on benefits’, ‘You’re not from a minority background’, ‘You’re not a woman’, and all this is completely right.
France’s Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life votes to approve a proposal in Paris, 9 January 2023. Photo: Hugh Pope
“I am increasingly excited by an alternative model, which is the model of citizens’ assemblies. I’m not sure it fixes everything, but citizens’ assemblies … are like a jury, a totally separate system. It works on sortition, so you randomly select people and then you bring them together for a period of time to discuss policy issues. It’s usually quite well-organised, so there’ll be experts that can be brought in to talk about things and they discuss together.
“The great thing about it is that it is not party political. It’s ordinary people. It’s not a question of one person representing others. It’s 300 people who are very, very democratically diverse, discussing things and in my experience it doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about climate in Cumbria or bicycle lanes in London, or talking about abortion in Ireland. Actually you end up with a much more thoughtful non-partisan discussion.
“Members of parliament hate it. They say Parliament is a citizens’ assembly. [MPs] are pretty anti-democratic, they’re pretty terrified about the idea of ordinary people having a view. They somehow think they are much more qualified and know what they’re doing … I’ve got an instinct which I can’t quite prove yet but that if Britain went down more of a sort of a Swiss citizens’ assembly devolved model, it would end up in a much, much happier place than trying to cling on to the old style of elite representation.”
Creating a new system
Stewart has talked about his enthusiasm for the idea of citizens’ assemblies in past podcasts, although he stopped short of actually calling for action. Campbell has typically been more muted, supporting the ultimate rights of elected representatives and prime ministers. Now, for the first time, both explicitly supported trying it out. Campbell put it like this:
“I’ve been disappointed that there hasn’t been more [work on citizens’ assemblies] given that this is a [new Labour] government that’s talked about … change in our politics. They are going after hereditary peers, I’m all in favour of that. More devolution, [I’m] all in favour of that … I sort of feel the system is creaking,the respect for it is not there in the same way that it was. The only way you’re going to maybe rebuild that is to create a new sort of system, [in the making] of which people feel much more directly involved.
Participant makes a point at a session of France’s Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life in Paris, 9 January 2023. Photo: Hugh Pope
“You will always have to have somebody leading the country, a Prime Minister-type figure. You will always have to have legislative, decision-making bodies who have final votes on situation. But I completely agree with you.”
Solving big social and moral issues
As an example of what’s going wrong, Campbell pointed out the fate of the UK parliament’s November 2024 unusually free debate on assisted suicide. Even though the open discussion of the bill caught the public imagination and the government declared its support, it is now unclear how the proposed changes will turn out. In contrast, he noted, a 2018 Irish citizens’ assembly did help Ireland solve the country’s decades-long impasse on abortion.
“It’s incredible what happened with … the abortion issue in Ireland. That was driven by people,” Campbell said. He suggested doing citizens’ assemblies on “these big social and moral issues, in particular. If we took them out of Westminster, and built that citizens assembly model [to deal with them], and then at some stage brought them back [to the elected parliament].”
It makes me happy to see the needle moving, and I look forward to reporting on the next milestone.
Meanwhile, if you’re interested to find out more about how these highly experienced experts in UK government have already eviscerated current ways of doing politics, I kept track here.
The crisis between the transatlantic powers used to sound like a distant thunder. Now that the storm has broken, it feels like it’s tearing apart something inside myself. That’s because even though I identify mostly as an Englishman, as a Belgian citizen and in general as a would-be European, like many others on the old continent, I’ve long also felt partly American.
I’ve worked half my life with Americans. I admire the energy, high standards and efficiency Americans often bring to the workplace. I’ve grown up with American culture, music and humour all around me. As a child in 1964, I crossed the larger-than-life continent with my parents in a car that felt as wide as a room. Since then, I’ve visited more times than I can count, sometimes for months at a time.
The US decision to publicly eject Europe from the construct that both have shared for 80 years or longer feels like being kicked out of the house.
It’s not just that I know how many Americans are funny, hospitable and generous (and several have reached out to share their shock and pain at recent developments). It’s also as if the supplier of my favoured brand of mental software just told me that support will be discontinued.
The junction ahead
This parting of the ways didn’t start with President Trump. I first realized that irreconcilable differences had arisen between Europe and the US when President George W. Bush bamboozled the transatlantic alliance into joining him on his foolish campaign into Iraq (a principal theme in my book Dining with al-Qaeda).
Whatever Donald Trump’s personal ability to manipulate his audience, the US change of heart now is clearly about more than than just him. Enough Americans voted for Trump and his America First message to win two elections, the last one after he tried to maintain power by force on 6 January 2020. They thus endorse Trumpian greed, all-out competition and selfishness – perhaps exactly because the time has come when many Americans cannot fully live the old American dream.
Such ideas are contagious – the UK in the 2010s is a case in point, culminating in the tragedy of Brexit – but I think most Europeans still want to live under a regime that stands for values that are more sharing, caring, fair and collaborative. EU countries like Belgium where I live may higher taxes, but in terms of income they are some of the world’s most egalitarian countries. The US is in the top tier of unequal countries.
Striking out more independently as Europeans will be hard and time-consuming. It’s not just because of that soft power the US has in all of our heads. The current EU architecture is built round the assumption of dependence on the US. Whether this is the result of Europe’s idealistic pacifism or lazy dependency, asking the current set of leaders to create a credible, autonomous, defensible system is like asking an invertebrate animal to grow a backbone.
Still, evolution can happen. America was a British colony for a century and a half before it decided (with initial difficulty) to fight to go its own way. Ukrainians discovered a unifying ethos even though – prior to Moscow’s intervention and then invasion – many had felt much in common with the Russian-speaking world that they knew so well.
Consciousness is growing in Europe that stronger internal solidarity will be needed survive and flourish in a multipolar world dominated by the US, China, to some extent Russia and perhaps soon India. To get anywhere, we are all going to have to upload new, primarily European mental software.
Perhaps the change will be helped by remembering that Europe’s lack of unity is as much the result of American preference as by European choice. Already twenty years ago, I remember chatting with a senior diplomat in the US embassy in Ankara who off-handedly commented that “of course we never really want the EU to add up to anything.”
Readers of of this blog will not be surprised to hear me say that that to achieve all this, we will also have to upgrade our European democracy. Perhaps a similar change in America would have avoided the transatlantic bust-up in the first place. That means broader-based ways of taking public decisions about what we want to achieve. We need to be less vulnerable to capture by special interests, fake news merchants and financial titans.
Europe and its citizens
What political system can give Europeans the required sense of active agency in their own affairs? Polls say people in most richer countries are fed up with the current way we organize our politics. At the same time, surprising numbers of people believe the best way forward is to choose strong leaders with Trump-style charismatic personalities or bold visions to sort things out with more authoritarian rule.
It might strike democrats as unwise to switch horses at a time of threats and potential crisis. But that would be to underestimate the problem. Right-wing populists have got where they are by exploiting popular dissatisfaction with the electoral system. Unlike most advocates of democracy based solely on elections, authoritarians have already evolved to make themselves more attractive. Leaving things as they are will only augment the authoritarian advantage.
From a different perspective: if democrats are to outflank the authoritarians, it also won’t work to just elect someone new. It is the whole system of elections that has got us into this mess.
To be sure, elections have been a crucial democratising force as suffrage widened over the past 250 years. But they no longer work well. The system is lost in polarised party politics, elite capture and subservience to financial powers. Shiny campaign promises are rarely possible to implement. Short-term politics usually crowd out long-term interests. Today’s elected charismatic leaders too often turn into tomorrow’s dictators.
To rebuild people’s trust in their rulers will mean going beyond the tired model of government by elected representatives. Instead, we will have to come up with a robust new system for people to rally around that offers transparency, justice and solid defences against corruption.
One promising idea to re-engage citizens that is gaining popularity is the citizens’ assembly. Here’s how it works: a randomly selected group of people from a community or country are brought together for several days to solve a tough problem by listening to experts, deliberating among themselves and finding super-majority support for their chosen course of action.
Several hundred have now been held around the world, with numbers rising sharply in recent years, especially in Europe. Just this weekend, the EU started a new round in its series of randomly selected citizens’ panels. This group of 150 citizens chosen by lot have the satisfyingly large remit of looking at the new EU budget. It’s a fundamentally new approach to building a credible, legitimate policy input representing the informed popular view.
The EU’s experienced translators are still vital for the smooth operation of these democratic innovations. But the technological breakthroughs of the last decade mean that Europe language differences may become less of an obstacle to mutual understanding than they once might have been. The spread of English as a second language among European youth may also help, even if that is a paradox, since this is another result of American soft power.
People are hungry for a new way forward, as I experienced once again this weekend in my hometown of Brussels. Within 24 hours of sending just one email, one hundred people from all over the country had signed up to discuss ideas for democracy with the Belgian non-profit G1000 – one of Europe’s first to advocate for deliberative democracy and to organise citizens’ assemblies. French- and Flemish-speaking participants worked side by side, equally alarmed by the situation.
Importantly, citizens’ assemblies are not designed to be a vehicle for any subset of a population, from language groups to liberals and left wingers. Random selection brings everyone into the room. And face-to-face deliberative democracy techniques have a track record of side-lining polarisation. The policies that they propose almost always depend on attracting the votes of at least two thirds of their participants.
Beyond rearmament
While random selection has the potential to represent European citizens one day, joint European action will never happen in the absence of a critical mass of people who feel primarily European. Re-arming, keeping up with technology and disentangling all our command-and-control systems from our American other half will be pointless unless we can forge a sense of European common identity, purpose and solidarity.
We can begin by finding European principles, values and intellectual outputs, and consciously supporting them. To be serious about this ultimately means creating ideals that we Europeans will be ready to die for. God forbid that this would ever be Europeans fighting Americans, which I neither expect nor want. It’s more about a Europe that has found a true new centre of gravity – unfortunately, without America as a full partner.
Creating a trans-national European consciousness will mean learning new European names to follow, tuning into neighbours in a language we both understand, and sharing emotions in new ways. For instance, there must be many more European personalities like Arjen Lubach in the Netherlands, someone who is quite as funny as Jon Stewart of New York’s Comedy Central. I happen to understand Dutch, but I wouldn’t be able to follow a Spanish or German equivalent. Reducing our dependency on America won’t work until we find a critical cultural mass that is as relatable and satisfying to fill its place.
Elites must also push themselves to go further than a dependence on US policy writing, however good they are. A strong lead is being given in the UK by Alastair Campbell of the The Rest is Politics podcast, in which he deliberately makes time to read and talk about European media. Such sharing and legitimizing the work of fellow-Europeans will be essential.
The tactical supremacy of the void
A nearby example of European perspectives worth spreading is an interview with Italy’s Antonio Scurat by reporter Danny Ilegems in this weekend’s Belgian daily newspaper De Morgen. Scurati makes trans-continental sense, is authentic and relevant to European experience and challenges.
A professor in Milan, Scurati is just publishing the last of five volumes of his fictionalized life of Benito Mussolini, the 20th century Italian dictator. Here are some points he makes that seem significant to me:
We call populo-fascists mad because they aim to blow up the world as we know it.
Even Germany’s Adolf Hitler called Mussolini “crazy”, but he wasn’t. Unlike Hitler, Mussolini had no ideology, feelings or principles, beyond what he called “the tactical supremacy of the void”. He cynically filled this empty vessel with lies and anger. The ultimate pragmatist, he is a more relevant fore-runner of today’s opportunistic populist right than the highly focused Hitler.
Populism crosses the line to fascism when it starts using violence, whether in reality or as a threat. This is now happening more and more. Scutari gives as examples Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu killing Palestinians and Trump’s actions on 6 January 2020, which led to the killing of five people during the assault on the US Capitol.
Don’t expect to recognise fascism by a return of blackshirts and militias; rather, expect hybrid descendants of populism and traditional fascism. Scutari sees Elon Musk as a hybrid of Mussolini and Dr Strangelove, and militias like the US Proud Boys or Oath Keepers as “folkloric” rather than true fascists bent on the violent seizure of power.
Europe needs strong army, one that is specifically designed to defend rather than attack. (I agree about the need for strong defence but couldn’t help wondering what a defensive army looks like – Albania’s old bunkers? The Maginot Line? The Great Wall of China? The Byzantine walls protecting Constantinople? Switzerland and its cupboard in every home with food reserves and a gun?).
Europeans are mentally unready for any kind of existential war in which they would have to be ready to die for their beliefs, country or alliance.
Top left: The Byzantine walls of Constantinople (photo by Arif Aşçı); Right: China’s Great Wall (Johanna Pope); Bottom left: Albanian bunkers near the border with Greece (Hugh Pope).
Divorce is a painful new beginning
We still don’t know where the unravelling of the transatlantic alliance will end, but it’s not the only shocking separation we’ve experienced in recent times. The UK’s split with the EU was a terrible wrench. It supplied yet more proof about how much the current system of political parties and elected representatives is vulnerable to manipulation and unfit for the defence of common interests.
At first, I was surprised at the public tears at the breakdown of the transatlantic relationship shed by former top German diplomat Christoph Heusgen at the Munich Security Conference this year. I remember him as a calm and efficient foreign policy aide to Chancellor Angela Merkel, when I used to visit the chancellor’s offices in Berlin in my days as an International Crisis Group project director working on Turkey and Europe.
I’m now beginning to understand Heusgen’s reaction. This transatlantic divorce – just like the real thing in our personal lives – might be a “Liberation Day” for some, but it is going to tear apart much more in us than we initially realized. The US has started a revolution, and revolutions don’t just mean a new beginning. They usually sweep aside the old way of doing things too.
A review of “The Hundred Years War on Palestine: a History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance”, by Rashid Khalidi
We talk a lot about the “news”. It’s a shame there is not a better supply of something we might call “olds”. Because when the world gets confused by a storm of what looks like new information, the best antidote is often a fair, intelligent and honest dose of history.
A case in point: the “news” of last week’s new orgy of violence in Gaza, in which Israelis killed more than 400 Palestinians in a single night. Or the way this week that Israel struck and killed yet another brave Palestinian journalist, this one in his car.
I found it deeply reassuring to see the Palestinian story laid out from the 19th century onward, calmly, expertly, authentically and accessibly. The book contains many of the facts that are missing in the news, facts that anyone who wants to try to end the assymetric Israeli/Palestinian duel will have to master and take into account.
As one might expect from the scion of a leading family of Palestinian dignitaries from Ottoman times until today, Khalidi describes many “olds” that most of us can’t remember. For instance, in the late 1930s, he shows exactly how old imperial Britain ruthlessly suppressed the emergence of Palestinian institutions, paving the way for Israel even as it (sometimes) fought the old Jewish “terrorists”.
Unlike much of what I remember reading from the Palestinian side in the past, Khalidi is succinct and avoids too much competitive victimhood. He addresses with clear-eyed honesty why Palestinians have struggled so much to form a truly coherent national representation. He criticizes the Palestinian leadership for several wrong turns, like, for instance, suicide bombing.
The book is highly contemporary too. Originally published in 2020, the quality of the argument is shown by the seamlessness with which Khalidi’s 2024 afterword is easily able to encompass and explain the current phase of the war in Gaza.
Hand-holds on history
Khalidi’s precious hand-holds on history allow us to regain our critical faculties when judging key issues right now. Some examples:
Anti-Palestinian commentators often allege there were amazing Israeli/US deals that the various old Palestinian leaderships walked away from. But were there really any viable offers?
The new Israeli state has created a new sense of nationhood for the Jewish inhabitants, most of whose families arrived from somewhere else. But is it fair to deny that a similar sense of nationhood exists for the Palestinians, whose families have been there for much longer, and who have now been fighting for Palestine for more than a century?
Does Israel’s special history mean that it can helpfully be understood as a latter-day colony as well as a nation state? Put another way, is it fair to deny the Palestinians the mantle of taking part in a liberation struggle?
Importantly, reading this book gives the lie to those spokespeople from Israel’s radical government and its supporters who frame the current round of violence as being uniquely caused by Hamas’s bloody breakout on 7 October 2023.
For instance, if the problem didn’t begin on the 7 October, when did this all really start, and why? Which side is the victim? Is it morally superior to rip a human being into pieces with a knife or by pressıng a button on a joystick? And when did the US and its Western allies become joined at the hip with the Israeli project – regardless of what the Israelis decided that project would be?
A reader of Khalidi’s account will lose any sense of surprise that the US fully backs Israel in Gaza, regardless of what Israel does there. Indeed, he shows how the trend has been towards having ever-more indistinguishable policy positions. (Even in my day, a great paradox about reporting for US media was that the Israeli press sometimes seemed freer to write about the situation than we were).
As for the rulers of the nearby Arab states who might be expected to help Palestinians, Khalidi shows time and again how “most of these dictatorial leaders are beholden to the US and are valuable clients of American defence, aerospace, oil, banking and real estate interests.”
Eliminating the Palestinians and Palestine
President Trump’s proposal to deport Palestinians from Gaza went even further than the public statements of most Israeli spokespeople. But the overall idea isn’t new. Khalidi shows how getting rid of the native population of areas inhabited by Jews was part of the original old thinking, starting with founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl. “We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border,” Herzl wrote in his diary in 1895.
Khalidi’s command of the back story also explains how Palestinians never managed to break the chain of international agreements that blocked their right to be heard on equal terms. These range from London’s 1917 Balfour Declaration through Britain’s 1922 League of Nations Mandate over Palestine to UN Security Council 242 in 1967. “In order to be recognized,” Khalidi points out, “the Palestinians were required to accept an international formula designed to negate their existence.”
Best of all, having Khalidi’s thoughtful voice in my head is a welcome counterweight to the ugly line so often repeated in the “news” by supporters of the Israeli government’s actions: that somehow Hamas and the Palestinians brought this whole volcano of destruction on their own heads.
After reading all these “olds”, I’m little closer to knowing exactly what formula can solve all the competing forces over Palestine. When I published my own book on trying to understand the Middle East in 2010 (Dining with al-Qaeda), I argued for one state of Israel/Palestine in which all inhabitants had equal rights. (As seen in the picture above, Khalidi graciously introduced Dining with al-Qaeda alongside his own book of the same year, Sowing Crisis, at an event in New York’s Strand Books.)
Universal principles
In his new book, Khalidi highlights the need base any solution on respect universal principles and human rights. That seems to point in the same general direction of a one-state solution for both Palestinians and Israelis, even if he doesn’t say so explicitly. Still, he reminds us that the one-state idea is much older than many remember and was adopted by the Palestinian leadership in the 1960s (a key change of its original radical policy, and an opportunity that outsiders ignored at the time).
Khalidi also believes that exposing the colonial side of the undeniably potent Israeli nation state is essential to “making the true nature of the conflict evident … a necessary step if Palestinians and Israelis are to transition to a post-colonial future in which one people does not use external support to oppress and supplant the other … absolute equality of human, personal, civil, political, and national rights must be enshrined in whatever future scheme is ultimately accepted by the two societies.”
Will the all-or-nothing Middle Eastern actors and their foreign supporters ever get there? Khalidi sees signs of hope in growing awareness of Israel’s real actions in parts of US society, youth and public opinion. He points out that encouraging such an enlightenment was long ignored by Palestinian leaders.
But reading his account of all the waves of war against Palestine and the Palestinians – often enabled by the US – does not give the reader much confidence that a new turning point will come anytime soon. The events and what people say about them over the past century seem to have the same blood-red threads running through them. Khalidi has done a great job in showing us how to see them for what they are.
The Keys to Democracy may not have made it to any New York Times lists (yet). But for Imprint Academic, the UK publishing house that put it out two years ago today, the book has pride of place on its home page among the four listed as “best sellers.”
Better still, publisher Keith Sutherland told me this week, Imprint Academic will put out a paperback version in September 2025.
I still find it hard to believe the book’s good fortune. It was written more than three decades ago. We in the family long thought the manuscript was lost. Then, after my father’s death in 2019, my mother found the typescript in his library.
My brother Quentin and I edited the text, and we are thrilled at the continuing endorsements, reviews and interest in hearing more.
Just the other day, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French author of insightful books like the The Death of Democracy – as well as being a University of Columbia professor, former head of UN Peacekeeping Forces and my old boss at International Crisis Group – wrote in spontaneously after ordering my late father’s book. He said that while he didn’t agree with everything, TheKeys to Democracy“truly convinced me that sortition is a way to restore the dignity of each and every human being, and is part of the answer to the ills of our societies.”
I hope such reactions mean that more and more people in the world – perhaps triggered by recent advances of authoritarian government in many countries – agree that we need to evolve a better new way forward than electing yet more politicians. This just perpetuates the system that got us into this mess.
In his book, my father proposes to replace elections with a new system of randomly selected “panels” of ordinary citizens. These panels are much the same as what has become the fast-expanding idea of citizens’ assemblies, in which a randomly selected group of ordinary people from a community or country are mandated to solve a tough policy problem. They hear from experts, deliberate among themselves and, after ranking all ideas by votes among themselves, propose whatever commands a supermajority. Choosing by lot is also known as sortition. Some call the vision of this eventually becoming the basis of all government “lottocracy.”
The Keys to Democracy is not a typical political science book, however. My father may have been an academic classicist by training, but he was a successful writer too and wanted the book to be a good read and to draw on all his learning. He mixes in lessons from ancient Greece and the subsequent history of government, the limitations of the renaissance, the efficacy of the Anglo-Saxon jury system, the mathematical breakthroughs of sampling and opinion polling, and a defence of the philosophical and scientific beauties of randomness.
Over the book’s second year, my favourite shoutouts include:
The best book I’ve read all year! – Mette Spencer, sociologist and peace activist
I am loving this posthumously published gem of a book . . . strongly recommended. – Erica Benner, political philosopher
Pope is both a utopian and a realist. This masterful balancing act between the idea and its practical incarnations is a very strong point of his concept and sets it apart from other similar books. – Joanna Podgórska-Rykała, political scientist
I want to emphasize again how much I enjoyed reading this book. Pope is an interesting mind, and even the reader that still scoffs at the idea that our political systems should be more random will find things to enjoy in the boldness and ingenuity of his arguments and the breadth of his interests. – James Kierstead, classicist and think-tanker
You can find links to all the news and reviews about The Keys to Democracyhere. Keep scrolling down to find the most recent ones! And a big thank you to everyone who has helped this book on its way up from a long-lost typescript on a bottom library shelf.
Set between Istanbul and London, dancing over more than a century, hovering between fact and fiction, Andrew Finkel’s debut novel is connoisseurs’ delight. Jewels glimmer, capes swirl and mother-of-pearl inlay glistens from every page of The Adventure of the Second Wife: the Strange Case of Sherlock Holmes and the Ottoman Sultan. A deep and easy familiarity with life in Ottoman Turkey is interleaved with Sherlock Holmes in shape-shifting exploits. The complexity of the overall story is a minor masterpiece in itself.
In the end. there is a solution to the mystery at the heart of the book. Or is there? Each time I try to fit the book’s narrative together, it seems to come out slightly differently. It’s like a truth about the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul that Finkel shares early on in the story:
I would say that to understand this story you also have to understand Istanbul, but I am not convinced such a thing is possible. I do not pretend the city is Eastern and inscrutable. In many ways it is friendly and familiar. But it is devious, like the pub raconteur who, while you work out if he is spinning a tale, has you buy him another round. On each visit I made, I felt I had come to a different place. It was like watching a time-lapse kaleidoscope of urban sprawl. Istanbul is a city where things change with a whir, and where standing still feels like falling through air.
When I finished The Adventure of the Second Wife, I went through some passages again so I could appreciate the text with new knowledge. I wasn’t sure that I’d understood the role of all the characters, even if all the loose ends seemed tied up. A tricky trompe-l’oeil is that the story feels so authentic: one could read it thinking that it was all historical fact. But I felt a certain bewilderment since – when I thought it through – some twists in the plot simply could not be real. It’s actually impossible to see the joints between fact and fiction, like the immaculate marquetry Finkel has us believe that the last great Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II conjured up for his private office.
Forced into the harem
Indeed, history books say that Abdulhamid was a skilled carpenter – but was he that good? I’m almost ready to believe it, because Finkel’s account of Abdulhamid’s inner brooding, off-the-cuff kindnesses and occasional cunning cruelties are so compellingly imagined. He describes a man happiest with his Belgian mistress as a young prince, but who finds himself as sultan “forced to to reject bourgeois monogamy for an oriental harem.” Abdulhamid is always a target of assassination and obsessed with his network of spies. But he is taken aback when his private voicing of approval to one woman for her particular “amatory skill” spreads to all the palace women, who assume he wants the same. This surprise came even though he “knew full well that his nocturnal wanderings had to be recorded for dynastic purposes.”
Sultan Abdulhamid II is only the most memorable of the many characters who lingered in my mind after I closed the book. I can’t remember when I last read an original story about Sherlock Holmes, the great 19th century fictional detective, and the original Dr Watson, his loyal sidekick and chronicler. So it was a surprise to get to know a key collective character that is a mainspring of the novel’s action: a global network of fans of the two sleuths, constantly hungry for new insights into their heros, and their creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Finkel also gives us a modern Dr. Watson who leads us through much of the narrative, whose flaws, erudition and ancestry eventually make him fully part of it. And of course there is a train of Ottoman princesses who blend into one another at the heart of the story, damaged, melodramatic, yet each putting their own stamp on a role they had not sought.
Sifting the evidence
The format of the novel is refreshing, too. The story unfolds through the eyes of multiple characters giving testimony, writing short stories, translating articles and voicing parts of the narrative. They are interleaved with beguiling photographs of remnants of Ottoman Istanbul, illustrations from 1890s London magazines and picture postcards of the era, which all serve to confuse and confirm the factual and quasi-factual foundations of the novel. The hardback is lovingly designed and produced by publishers Cornucopia/Even Keel, adding to the pleasure of the read.
Indeed, the multifaceted timeline and people with more than one name make it hard at times to remember all the characters, as when you open a new puzzle and are overwhelmed by a sea of look-alike pieces. Concentration and a readiness to sift evidence – of course – can be needed to understand completely who’s who on first encounters. But as with looking into the movement of a grand watch, one can pause, work out where the action is going and pick up momentum again, while still admiring the clever complication.
Another pleasure that kept me moving forward is that Finkel’s writing is splendid, especially the take-no-prisoners wit of the dialogue. Innumerable insights into life and people range from an angry outburst by a Turkish professor “unused to being contradicted” to an English housewife happy that her husband studies the minutiae of Sherlock Holmes, since it’s “the sort of pastime that men are meant to have to stop them getting underfoot.”
Three of the photographs from the text, two on the left by Jürgen Frank, on right by Fritz von der Schulenberg
The power of complexity
Finkel is a long-time follower of Turkish politics (and, full disclosure, an old friend from my days on the Istanbul journalistic beat) and he likes to juggle with what he calls the “power of complexity and the complexity of power.” In one memorable passage, a soldier is posted in an Ottoman palace to guard Abdulhamid after the sultan’s dethronement in 1909, but goes off limits, finds himself in a dark room and is offered a light for his cigarette – and discovers he is alone with the ex-ruler.
The soldier nearly choked on his own smoke. What was he to do? By rights he should have summoned the officers outside, but then he would have to explain his own presence in the room. He had become a partner in the Sultan’s crime. ‘To own the man, give him something to steal’ is the proverb and a roundabout way of saying that leading a man into temptation is a surer means of securing his loyalty than having him swear a flowery oath of allegiance.
I admired too the connections that Finkel weaves through the book: the links between Ottoman Turks, British Victorians and the Indian part of their empire; the strands of continuity in Turkey, from the universal Islamic caliphate to the secular national republic that formed on its core after 1923; Ottoman Constantinople morphing into modern Istanbul; and more universally, the conjecture that the world’s whole population can be divided into either more active Sherlocks or more passive Watsons.
By the end of the tale, a new world had opened up for me in which “the Game” of a Holmesian investigation is always afoot, ready to dart in a new direction. The dark-bearded Abdulhamid II of many a stiff black and white photograph had come to satisfyingly to life. I even felt at home with the likes of a “professional courtier” who is “like an executive happy to serve Coca-Cola today or Pepsi tomorrow … equally at home in Buckingham Palace as … in Yıldız Palace or on a mission to the Emir of Afghanistan.”
What a remarkably original book!
Receiving a copy of The Adventures of the Second Wife in London not that far from Baker Street – R-L: Caroline Finkel, wife of the author, Ottoman expert and author of Osman’s Dream; my wife Jessica Lutz, holding the book; the author Andrew Finkel; and myself Hugh Pope in appropriately Holmesian cape.
“An election that only one party wins, with a simple plurality, operates as a kind of factory setting for American democracy, one that we have neglected to update, despite radically changed circumstances.”
This week’s New York Times opinion piece on How to Fix America’s Two-Party System is a fine read, and not just because of clever metaphors (as above) and some gorgeous scrolly graphics. Authors Jesse Wegman and Lee Drutman also clearly lay out how “two parties competing in winner-take-all elections cannot reflect the diversity of 335 million Americans.”
A graphic tellingly portrays six main groups of US political sentiment that might form the basis for future parties (one slide can be seen below). The advocacy for more members of the House of Representatives is spot-on (a congressperson now represents on average 760,000+ people). And the case against single-seat, gerrymandered constituencies is well put. After all, the authors point out that 90% of seats are “not competitive”, that is, they are won by a landslide. Voters therefore almost never chose the winning candidate, but one of the two current parties does.
The last slide from a superbly designed New York Times overview of political opinion in America – and the new political party groupings they might define.
No doubt, proportional representation is better than winner-take-all elections, just like an aristocracy is usually better than one-person rule, or a law-abiding king may be better than an oppressive tyrant. Wegman and Drutman are right to point out that in many other states, notably in Europe, this way of allowing many and more varied parties to win seats in parliaments produces more representative government.
“An exact portrait”
To define the ideal representation that democratic reformers are aiming for, the New York Times authors do well to cite John Adams. The US founding father wrote in 1776 that the US Congress “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should feel, reason and act like them.”
My late father Maurice Pope had the same ideal for representation when he considered the pros and cons of proportional representation in his posthumous 2023 book The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model of Citizen Power. He shows how proponents of this system go back to mid-19th century figures like English philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill and Charles Dodgson, an Oxford mathematics don who enjoyed thinking up new systems of electoral representation (when not writing children’s stories like Alice in Wonderland under the pen name Lewis Caroll).
Maurice Pope’s conclusion is that proportional representation can never get far toward to this “exact portrait” of society, even if it is an improvement on winner-takes-all elections. The book’s central argument, after all, is that systems based only on voting favour the wealthy and well-connected, concentrating power in the hands of factions and the few. This line of thinking also goes back a long way, from the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to writers in the 20th century like Italian-German political sociologist Roberto Michels. Here’s an excerpt from The Keys to Democracy:
Proportional representation is not a recipe for introducing democracy, but for improving oligarchy. Its tendency is to make government more responsive to the will of the broad majority and to dampen the mad swings of two-party politics. These are both desirable ends. It also encourages an increase in the number of effective political parties. From the liberal point of view, this is a good thing too. If the ideal is for as wide a range of serious opinions as possible to be represented in political debate, then four or five parties are as much an improvement on two parties as two parties are an improvement on one.
But from the democratic point of view, it is a red herring. Proportional representation still works through political parties. Indeed, it gives them and their organisations even greater importance. The main parties will play a steadier part in government than with a system of alternating periods of office and the small parties will also be able to exercise a genuine influence on events. If parties become more powerful, so do the party-organisers.
The consequence is inevitable. The individual voter’s effectiveness will be strengthened and so will the grip of Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy”. This would be a paradox if voting were a democratic device. As soon as one realises that it is not, the paradox vanishes and becomes a truism. What strengthens an electoral system must also strengthen an oligarchic one, for they are two sides of the same coin. (pp. 22-23).
A lottery winner
Since elections deliver such poor results, Maurice Pope and many in the new movement for deliberative democracy argue, a better way to achieve best-in-class representation is by using sortition, that is, the random selection of regular citizens to decision-making bodies. The world now has a version of this, citizens’ assemblies, of which more than 1,000 have been held in the past decade. Groups of 20-200 citizens are chosen by lot to meet on a tough policy question, inform themselves from experts, deliberate as a group and build up a new policy based on what most participants agree on.
Six philosophers discuss moral perspectives on assisted suicide with France’s randomly-selected Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life (Paris, 2022-23). Photo: Hugh Pope
Such representation is still far from perfect. This new method of taking decisions is still little known, so typically only 5% of randomly issued invitations get a positive answer. That means that there is a second lottery (known as stratification) to choose from among those who say “yes”. This makes sure the profile of participants in the assembly matches the make-up of their community. To get closer to the “exact picture” would need a legal requirement to attend, as happens with jury service.
So much for representation. Another issue beyond the scope of this article is Wegman’s and Drutman’s idealistic hope that several new parties would be able to easily make compromises on policies and form governments. Chronic difficulties right now around exactly this issue in the proportional systems of Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium point to grave potential obstacles here.
Back to utopias
It’s wonderful, though, that The New York Times is debating such constitutional questions on its opinion page. My late father always regretted the absence of constitutions and utopias from political debates over the past 200 years.
Such constitutional speculation was common in the Renaissance, becoming highly influential in government design during the American and French Revolutions. One sign of the un-fashionability of such talk today is that – amid the glowing reviews of The Keys to Democracy – there’s some disapproval of the chapter in which Pope develops his own political utopia. More encouragingly, however, I’ve heard that one Ivy League university has assigned students precisely this chapter from the book as part of a politics course on new ideas.
My eyes rolled too when I first read the manuscript in the 1980s. I am ashamed to remember my exasperated comments like: “Dad, what planet are you living on?” But I now love the story of his utopia, a community of scientists that organises itself when marooned on Antarctica after a nuclear war lays waste to the rest of the world. The scientists experiment and gradually build a completely new political system in which executive, legislature and judiciary take decisions entirely in randomly selected assemblies.
My late father admits that in normal circumstances, no society starts from scratch, so in reality such structures can only evolve. But ideals serve a motivational purpose, even if they take time to materialise and rarely in exactly the form we expected. It is at the very least refreshing to read about “a community that had discovered how to live at peace with itself and that had cured itself of the fatal human disease whose first symptom is group loyalty and which ends in blindness and mutual destruction” (p. 164).
“I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them.”
I had not heard of Luc Bertrand before my weekly dip into the Flemish newspaper De Morgen. But he made me think this weekend when I looked at the Saturday edition’s in-depth interviews, a window onto what my neighbours in and around Brussels are thinking as well as life beyond the world of English-speaking media.
Bertrand, 73, seems to have it all. He stands atop a Belgian family conglomerate (Ackermans & van Haren) with roots in shipping, banking and the late 19th century, when Belgium was one of the most technologically advanced and richest countries in Europe. But he is full of gloom about bad governance and the bottomless fiscal swamp that Belgium and Europe now find themselves in.
De Morgen’s headline trumpets him saying that “European industry is being swept off the map.” Bertrand lists the elements of his argument with clarity: a fragmented and over-regulated continent unable to foster innovative companies, especially in technology; a Europe that gives advantages to fatal Chinese competition, but can’t get the same rights to grow in China; a Europe that equalled the US a generation ago, but now only produces 70% of what Americans manage; and in Belgium, out-of-control budgetary deficits, under-investment and over-consumption, leading to the plight of young couples who pay 60% tax and can’t afford to buy a house to live in.
“Europe has allowed itself to fall asleep,” Bertrand said. “We have the best engineers in the world, but none of the best seven high tech companies are European.”
A dead end
What struck me most were this captain of European industry’s concerns about the dead end of politics in both his country and also Europe more broadly. Right now, Belgium is off the end of the scale of political dysfunction, still unable to form a new federal government after elections in June that (once again) left several parties squabbling over how they might cooperate to form a cabinet. Neighbouring France, Germany and the Netherlands are doing little better, and the UK is barely out of the post-Brexit woods.
Bertrand points out that it’s not just the way so much time is lost first campaigning for votes and then forming governments (in Belgium this has already taken more than a year twice in the past 15 years). The quality of government dialogue with business has suffered too. Fifteen years ago, Bertrand said, a minister might gather a half-dozen relevant industrialists, invite them in and listen to the conversation. Now, he says, industrial bosses get invited to events by the score and then only get lectured at.
“Today … we live in a vacuum,” Bertrand said. “Politics itself is less powerful. We only hear about obstacles and compromises, from morning to night. We hold elections, and six weeks later we still don’t know who won. Then all the parties behave as if they are the ones who are victorious. I ask myself a lot of questions over democracy in this land. I didn’t vote for five or six party chiefs to run the country between them. This is not just a problem in Belgium. In one [European] country they are tending towards authoritarianism, another is just a democracy in name.”
The paradox
When describing the policymaking that he wants, Bertrand gives the example of his conglomerate. He says family interests mean that investments come first and they can take long-term decisions, avoid deficits and smooth the peaks and troughs between good and bad times. He would also like a “moderate Elon Musk” to cut out Belgium’s unfunded government spending.
But here’s the paradox: for him the way to get there is to go backward to cosy two-party electoral politics. The family seems invested in this old route. His daughter Alexia Bertrand is Budget Minister in the outgoing government and a high-ranking member of one of the centre-right parties in talks to form a new government.
It’s ironic that someone so observant and keen on innovation can find no better response to the current failure in governance than a repeat of the party-based electoral formula. That is what got us into this mess in the first place.
After all, Belgium has seen some of the exciting experiments in deliberative democracy. Brussels is home to the best-selling author of Against Elections, the pioneering David van Reybrouck. Concerned Belgians convened one of the earliest citizens’ assemblies, chosen by lot during a government breakdown already 15 years ago. Five years ago, eastern Belgium’s German-speaking community set up the world’s first permanent citizens’ assembly. There are several other examples of new ideas to use randomly selected groups of citizens to make policymaking work more efficiently – and take the long-term view that Bertrand and many others want to see.
In late December, Belgium passed its latest 200-days-without-a-government mark. To judge by Luc Bertrand’s comments about where his conglomerate’s investment is going – places far from Europe that are actually growing – we haven’t hit the bottom of the cycle yet.
Still, Belgium’s past success, the individualism of its people, the diversity of Brussels and a relative lack of inequality do still give me grounds for hope in the country. And perhaps Belgium is so original and good at evolving new tools of deliberative democracy precisely because the country is well ahead of others in Europe in the cycle of stagnation of a once-rich industrial state.
Anger, despair and a sense of impotence at new death and destruction in the Middle East were among the reasons I got out of the business of writing about the region. Indeed, up to now, I’ve had no idea what I could usefully add to all that’s being said about still-expanding consequences of the war in and around Gaza since 7 October 2023.
Which you might find odd, since I was a Middle East correspondent for three decades, including in all the places still consumed by conflict.
Iranian offensive into Iraq’s Faw peninsula, January 1986 (Photo: Hugh Pope)
The reasons for my reticence go deep. I believe in context as well as details. I worry about empathising one side’s story rather than the other/s. I’m fearful of consequences for friendships and, to be honest, perhaps comfort zones too.
My caution is also informed by professional experience. University studies of Persian and Arabic make me look naturally partisan. Life as a reporter makes me reluctant to comment on matters I haven’t researched myself. Many years as an analyst seeking ways to defuse and end conflict at International Crisis Group taught me there’s little point in saying anything if it doesn’t offer at least a potential, long-term route out of the crisis in question.
It is also dispiriting that nothing has changed or seems about to change in the blanket US, British and European official backing of Israel. And I still have that censorious voice in my head, drummed in by years of far-away editors and in-my-face spokespeople, warning me that just writing that last sentence means that, for balance, I now have to say something cautionary about one or more of Israel’s or the US’s enemies.
But I still listen to the news every day, to brave reporters and indispensable aid workers like those from the UN Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA). I observe my daughter’s TikTok feed overflowing with desperate Palestinians begging for attention. I hear out the Israelis, both the my-way-or-the-highway types and those who don’t think that everything their government does is right.
Apart from the scale of the violence, I’m still not sure how much has really changed. Everything I read or hear seem to be reruns of qualitatively similar stories we used to report on more than 40 years ago. And just as it did so many times in the past, the escalation is spreading out from the Middle East in all kinds of ways, including to my new home in Europe.
The juggernaut will find us everywhere, even if we try to escape it. The sheer quantity of deadly developments seems to have reached a new critical mass. Events now proceed faster, and are more flagrantly naked in their ambition or blood raw in their desperation.
My first botcast
So I decided to ask NotebookLM what about my many experiences I could usefully share with a neutral onlooker. For those who have not used this miraculous new Google machine, it’s like having a second brain. You upload content and NotebookLM analyses that content (and no other source) in the light of everything that Google knows. Which is a lot.
To see what real people say about my book, please go to hughpope.com/mideast
In this case, I simply uploaded one piece of work on the Middle East of which I am particularly proud, my book, Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East. It was first published in 2010, and I put out a paperback in 2022 with some minor updates and better photos. It lays out everything that I saw, heard and what I thought about the pattern of events. I didn’t give Google any of the reviews, old articles or supplementary material.
I then asked NotebookLM to explain what my three decades of experiences, findings and arguments said about the Middle East that could usefully be applied to analyse or resolve the current, post-7 October situation. I also asked it to phrase its response in such a way that would not offend any friends (that little voice never goes away).
Tilting the balance toward peace
To be specific, I asked: What seven policies can you extrapolate from the book that could strengthen any outside powers who actually wanted to tilt the balance toward peace in today’s Middle East?
Here, it replied, are the seven things your book suggests such powers should do:
Embrace a one-state, democratic solution in Israel/Palestine in which Israelis would “fully share the country they have conquered with its native Palestinian inhabitants,” including equal rights and representation
Adopt even-handed policies, especially in the case of the US
Engage with Iran diplomatically and acknowledge its legitimate interests and concerns
Reassess restrictive visa policies, promote people-to-people connections and foster a more positive image of the West in the Middle East
Counter authoritarianism in the region by promoting good governance, provide assistance to civil society organizations, advocate for greater political freedoms, and hold authoritarian leaders accountable for human rights abuses
Promote cultural understanding by moving beyond simplistic stereotypes, engaging with a diverse range of voices, fostering cultural exchanges and encouraging media coverage that goes beyond sensationalized headlines
Address economic disparities by supporting economic development initiatives, promoting fair trade practices, and investing in education and job creation programs in the region.
In 2004, it was heartening to see some US-Iraqi cooperation over the rebuilding of Mosul University after the US take-over of Iraq. But all the damage was done by the US invasion in 2003. (Photo: Hugh Pope)
Well, these mostly mild suggestions don’t have the blistering clarity of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese cataloguing the Israeli attacks on the Palestinian presence in Gaza and the occupied territories. But it does sound like the kind of thing I would say, in that I believe policy recommendations should usually only include what a state has the power to do and would make some difference if sustained over time.
“Surprisingly relevant”
But, I asked NotebookLM, why should anyone listen to me? What contemporary usefulness could there be in an account of experiences from the 1980s-2000s?
The “valuable insights” in Dining with al-Qaeda “remain surprisingly relevant to the situation today,” the machine replied. This “valuable historical lens through which to view current events” highlighted “the persistence of certain patterns and the challenges of achieving lasting peace and stability in the region.”
Specifically, it said, the book:
Highlights a recurring pattern of pro-reform uprisings followed by state failures in the Middle East, noting the brutal survival tactics of regional regimes
Critiques the United States’ continuous entanglement in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and argues that the US failure to break free from a cycle of intervention often exacerbates conflicts and creates unintended consequences
Explores the enduring power of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, highlights their reliance on corruption, control of information, and suppression of dissent to maintain power … all this resonates with the challenges faced by pro-democracy movements across the region today
Reveals through personal experiences and journalistic observations a deep-seated criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians … challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding the conflict, highlights the suffering of Palestinians living under Israeli rule and notes the power of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States
Argues that oil wealth allows regimes to maintain their power structures and resist calls for change
Provides insights into various cultural and societal dynamics in the Middle East, such as the role of Islam, the challenges faced by women, and the influence of tribalism … these observations offer valuable context for understanding the complex social fabric of the region
So there you have it: a set of policy recommendations for me to say and the reasons why I can plausibly say them. I’ve smoothed some of the phrasing but the content is neither more nor less than what NotebookLM suggested. And of course it is what I suggested too, in the form of my book, the only input I gave it.
Mourner in Syria after the death in 2000 of its long-serving strongman, President Hafez al-Assad. (Photo: Hugh Pope)
NotebookLM also gave me a recording of its two robot podcasters discussing the book. That alone is a technological marvel. If you haven’t heard one of these “pure” botcasts before – NotebookLM calls them “audio overviews” – you must listen to at least a bit of it. Yes, there are a couple of slips, there is something synthetic about it and I had to cut out some repetitions. But it’s true to say that the underlying patterns of Middle East crisis haven’t changed much, and so it sounds like what I might say. It even inspired me to dig up a selection of photos from my reporting days. They fit, mostly.
Double checking
Just to check, I then uploaded the relevant reporting about the Middle East situation from Crisis Group, which does a good non-partisan job of rounding up all the latest information all sides agree to. I then asked NotebookLM if that added anything to change its mind. No, it said, the report “underscores the ongoing relevance of Dining with al-Qaeda in several ways”. (It did however note that the book did not specifically focus on Iranian influence in the region as the “axis of resistance”, a term that has become popular in the past decade).
I loaded up three Israeli perspectives – from a right-wing US group lobbying for Israel, a retired Israeli colonel opposed to his country’s strategy, a liberal explainer article in the US magazine Jewish Currents and a centrist commentator. NotebookLM retained its general endorsement for relevance, especially in giving the broader context and complexities. However, it noted that Dining with al-Qaeda was originally published before social media and so missed that dimension, made no detailed argument on a one-state policy for Israel and would benefit from re-evaluation of some time-sensitive recommendations.
Finally, I also uploaded Francesca Albanese’s UN report on Gaza, and asked the same question. “The UN report adds a layer of urgency and gravity to the issues explored in Dining with al-Qaeda. It reinforces the book’s relevance,” NotebookLM replied.
Perhaps it is just telling me what I want to hear, or rather playing a new version of my old words back to me. All the same, what an extraordinary machine!
For good measure, this is what WordPress’s AI-generated image made of this whole article …
“PEOPLE HATE politicians. What has the worst approval ratings in America, continuously? Congress … [That’s why] Donald Trump, in not sounding like a politician … actually manages … to win over a certain number of people.”
This kind of throwaway insight is typical of what has made me — and millions of others — an addict of The Rest is Politics podcast. I have learned so much from the presenters and guests. In the UK, they include communications guru Alastair Campbell and writer-politician Rory Stewart. The US branch is led by financier Anthony Scaramucci, a former pro-Trump political activist, and reporter Katty Kay (who said the above in episode #33).
But after two years, hundreds of episodes and more than two thousand kilometers — I listen while I run — I keep wondering about an inherent ambivalence in the shows.
In short, I feel that these cutting-edge experts and their world leader guests are not teaching me about what makes the political world go round. They are talking about what’s blocking it from getting anywhere at all.
Put another way, the heart of the shows is an insiders’ account of high politics. But at best, the elected governments of the world’s richer countries come across as lost in transition. The deeper the podcasts dive, the more these electoral systems seem to be in trouble. Fundamental reform seems urgently needed. Or maybe a transplant.
In the article below, I’ve put together examples of how The Rest is Politics describes this collapse of national and even global governance.
I do so in the hope these leading lights of our age will draw more conclusions when their analysis shows how broken the current system of electoral representation is, as well as to share with other listeners a new way of learning from these excellent podcasts too.
Crying out for change
To my ears, the drumbeat of the presenters’ critique sounds compelling. Political parties are selfish and dysfunctional. Most lawmakers have little or no knowledge of the laws they vote on. Some leaders may begin their careers with good intentions, but the system empowers charismatic me-first types and then puts impossible strain on people who make it to the top. Few if any politicians have enough time, authority or energy to fulfil their tasks effectively.
The presenters are aware of the irony that the kings in their parade of global events may be wearing no clothes.
“I do think there is something fundamentally wrong with our politics,” Campbell put it once (episode #163). “It’s partly what gave us Brexit. It’s partly what gave us this succession of pretty useless prime ministers. And it’s partly what’s making people frustrated that the Labour Party is not coming in with that sense of real … radical change that the country is crying out for.”
Yet the podcasters’ chorus line remains traditional: if only we try harder, if only we tweak things here or there, if only we find somebody better, we can make the existing system work.
And so I go on listening, hour after hour, to the apparently doomed political intrigues of people who are struggling — and failing — to do just that.
Since there is so much wisdom and so many good intentions in these podcasts — even among the politicians who appear on it — it is fair to ask: what is their conclusion, the essential core of their message about what can change?
Flirting with reform
Campbell and Stewart occasionally flirt with reforms or alternative ways of getting the right decision makers into power.
King Charles III and Queen Camilla arrive for the state opening of the UK parliament, July 2024 (Photo: House of Lords press office)
Both agree on doing something about the UK’s upper chamber of parliament, the House of Lords. Both talk much about using more proportional representation and transferring more power to the lower House of Commons. Both also like the sound of randomly selected citizens’ assemblies, if only in a sort of opinion-polling capacity.
Campbell recognizes the problem. ”There is a paradox,” he says (episode #299). “We are having more and more elections, more and more people voting, but we are not necessarily a more democratic world.”
But they do not seriously discuss options for going ahead with any of these, let alone back any firm, specific plan.
There’s been a noticeable drop in discussion of alternatives, for instance, since July when Sir Keir Starmer and his Labour Party were elected in the UK. It’s not the first time. Campbell remembers (episode #180) a plan to introduce proportional representation being much discussed by his Labour Party before their 1997 election victory. “Once we got into power,” he said, “that sort of went on to the back burner.”
The podcasters’ unwillingness to take their rich experience of political dysfunction to a logical conclusion also applies to their books published this year.
Campbell’s But What Can I Do? recognizes a population discouraged by their elected leaders’ poor performance. He talks much about the frustrated potential energy he feels in his contacts with the public, especially the young. He wants to channel this willingness to engage into political activity.
But — judging by what he says on the podcast — this is simply asking them to throw themselves into the same system of pointless political trench warfare that he says demotivated them in the first place.
Stewart’s Politics on the Edge powerfully describes the toxicity of his decade in the UK parliament and government. To improve the situation, he suggests more checks and balances, more transparency, better lobbying regulations, civic education, more judicial independence and new ways for parties to select parliamentary candidates.
But these praiseworthy ideaswould treat the symptoms rather than the cause that is now hard baked into the system: the demands made on parties and politicians doomed to fight eternal elections. The damaging results include short-term policies that fail, rising unpopularity and their current crisis of lost authority.
In the US, with its more optimistic streak, Kay and Scaramucci go less far down this road. As they roll their eyes at politicians’ behaviour and detail public disappointment, they occasionally look back into history for insights and explanations, even re-reading texts by the US founding fathers. But I can’t remember them questioning the system itself or suggesting fundamental changes.
Really hollow
One of the gravest problems that emerges from my take on the podcasts is the role of political parties in the existing parliament.
“Something about the way that party politics works in the House of Commons has really meant that debates and scrutiny of legislation is almost meaningless today,” Stewart says (episode #206). “The Commons feels really hollow,”
A year before, Stewart had gone ever further (episode #140), citing a civil servant telling him that “the House of Commons was a complete waste of time, never bothered to look at the detail, never scrutinised anything.”
Stewart’s account of his own career in politics makes clear why those elected don’t bother to engage. A minister is simply not allowed to oppose a law backed by their party, and if they do, they are dismissed from office; any ordinary MP that does the same will never leave the backbenches.
A weird sect
One of their guests went further (episode #86 of Leading, a companion podcast to The Rest is Politics). Nick Clegg describes the three “bubbles” of his career: Brussels, where he was a member of the European Parliament, the UK parliament, where he was Liberal Party leader and deputy prime minister, and his current Silicon Valley job working for Meta (Facebook).
“Of those three bubbles, the worst by a long shot is [the UK Houses of Parliament in] Westminster,” he says. It’s “stuck in the 19th century … architecturally designed for conflict not conversation … like a weird sect … a pastiche of a Harry Potter boarding school.”
This prompts Stewart to slam “the incredible poor quality of so much of it … I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee and chaired the Defence Committee … we knew almost nothing about the world … we didn’t really hold ministers to account … speeches in parliament were of such pathetically low quality … nobody [was] paying the slightest attention … [the government was free to act] like an elected dictatorship.”
In other episodes Stewart points out how members of parliament have no job description (episode #224). He often notes how impossible it was to balance of his work as a constituency MP and that of representing the national interest as a foreign office minister by, say, travelling to the places affected by any policies. His book excoriates politicians as “grotesquely unqualified”.
For his part, Campbell points out there is no external audit of parliament, like, for instance, the never-ending inspections endured by Britain’s schools. Before the 2024 UK elections, Campbell (episode #180) goes as far as to say that “radical fundamental change” is needed, that he is “on a journey” on this topic and that the Labour Party manifesto should be offering what he called an “electoral review”.
Yet none of the podcasters ever stop to imagine a future that simply does away with the political parties that both rule and corrupt the system.
Sleepless in London, penniless in Paris
Two leaders who join the program describe an environment that gives little hope that an impeccable new leader will somehow get elected and miraculously sweep the problem away.
“It is widely underrated that politicians need to be made of very stern [stuff],” Clegg underlined (episode #87, Leading). “You’re taking most decisions, highly consequential decisions, often at very great speed, based on imperfect information, with very great consequences, in a sleepless state … We create a whole cast (and caste) of decision makers who are in a state which is the worst state in which to take decisions. They’re knackered.”
Former President François Hollande of France tells listeners (episode #69, Leading) that the new generation is simply not interested in coming to the rescue.
“Nobody in the elite wants to make politics. When I was a student, the main [idea of] success was to be a member of parliament, perhaps minister and if possible president. Now in the elite, politics is considered the wrong way. Now people want to be on boards, economic circles. Not in politics,” Hollande says. “It is hard in politics. You [face intrusions] on your private life, you do not have any revenues and wages in comparison with business. You can be defeated in elections. You have no holidays, no weekends, never. Why be committed? … Social media is harsh, cruel… in France, the political system is broken.”
Exposing the rottenness
So what is the alternative, and who will come together to find it? Probably not the politicians, or at least not yet.
Film star and ex-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger cites Albert Einstein to the podcasters (episode #43): ”The same mind that created the problem is not able to solve it.” Another problem is what historian Dominic Sandbrook observes on a sister podcast (episode #35, The Rest is History): “To be a politician is to be divisive.”
Stewart and Campbell spend more time discussing the problem than the causes, and even worry that they are being too critical.
Campbell (episode #168) says he agrees with a lot of the negativity in Stewart book, but adds that “I worry that your basic message is that “politics is all terrible”.”
Stewart retorts that “I do believe that in order to change you’ve got to begin by really delving into the problems, we’ve got to expose where the rottenness is … we have had a mafia code of silence around parliament for a long time.”
An unshakeable faith in elections is the clear motor driving the dysfunctional system of parties, politicians and polarisation that they describe. But none of the podcasters question the idea — which only evolved in the 19th century — that voting is where democracy begins and ends.
CItizens’ assemblies
Despite their faith in the legitimacy of elections, however, Campbell and Stewart have at times been ready to toy with fundamentally different approaches. This was especially evident at the peak of their frustration in the final months of the Conservative Party’s time in power in the UK from 2010–2024.
Stewart in particular finds much to like in one potentially radical alternative: citizens’ assemblies. These are groups of citizens from a community or country, randomly selected by lot, a process also called sortition. Participants meet over several days to learn from experts, deliberate and propose solutions to a common policy problem.
“I am very attracted by sortition, the basis of how juries are selected, and it’s how ancient Athens worked,” Stewart said (episode #173). “I am very interested in what happens if you do it from the whole public … a genuinely representative sample of people … This would take power away from parties, which I like.”
Campbell is the more reserved of the pair — saying only “we both think they are a good idea” (episode #224) — but Stewart is enthusiastic. At one point (episode #199) he said citizens’ assemblies are “the most exciting thing that’s facing democracies around the world.”
Stewart praises random selection as a way of getting a wide range of points of view working on an idea (episode #173). Later he points out (episode #269) that: “Real truth emerges quite slowly through giving people space and time to debate and explore ideas. Maybe change their opinion a little bit.”
Even so, for both Campbell and Stewart, such assemblies can only work in an advisory capacity, or, in Stewart’s case, possibly as a third British House of Citizens alongside the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Taking the people into account
One notable guest, economist Kate Raworth, firmly advocated the use of citizens’ assemblies as the way forward. She did so in answer to Campbell’s lament that China’s dictatorial capitalism is getting ahead of “democracies with very, very short timeframes” (Leading episode #22).
Group discussion at the Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life, Paris, December 2022 (Photo: Hugh Pope)
“Many politicians will say: “I know what I need to do, I just don’t know how to get reelected when I’ve done it”,” Raworth responded. “That’s why you’re seeing some of the most progressive places say: “Let’s hold a citizens assembly, use sortition. Let’s bring together a randomly selected group of around 100 citizens, residents of our place. Let’s introduce them to experts who can introduce them to the scale of the topic and see what they come up with. Time and again, what’s coming out of these citizens’ assemblies is that these people — who are not trying to get reelected, because they are citizens thinking of the long view — have come up with far more ambitious policies than politicians feel they are able to.”
When Campbell worries that these policies might not be implemented, Raworth rises to the challenge, pointing out that what’s needed is for governments to commit to “taking into account what the people of this nation are saying they want to happen.”
That would be a wonderful development indeed. But the podcasters changed the subject back to economic growth. As usual, they fail to take their analysis to the logical conclusion that a new democratic system is needed.
Reflecting later in the episode on their conversation with Raworth, Campbell recognized that “our current politics” made him feel impotent to make any of her “idealistic” suggestions come about. He added: “The only way to you’re actually going to do this is if you live in a dictatorship.”
Shaken to the core
The Raworth interview is not the only time that The Rest is Politics podcasters note that the conclusion that some people are drawing from the mess they describe is not a desire to see bottom-up democracy like citizens’ assemblies, but more top-down, authoritarian rule.
So which is it to be? How much time do the richer world’s governments have to find an alternative to their current dead end? Who will lead the way?
Former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg opined (episode #87, Leading) that: ”I find myself more of an anti-establishment politician after five years in government than before … There’s so much that needs to be shaken to the core.”
Yet, as so many top establishment politicians before him, Clegg has been rewarded at Meta with a lucrative job at the pinnacle of the existing system. Normally, this is one way that rich companies control parties and politicians, who need money and support to win elections.
Unusually, though, Meta is both part of the problem, as its algorithms tear down the old order — whether empowering individual access to information or feeding polarisation–and offering possible solutions, as it experiments in sortition-based online deliberation within its global community of billions. But again, we hear nothing about that.
Back in the UK, “it could not be clearer that people don’t just think that the country’s stuck. They think politics is part of the problem,” Campbell proclaims (episode #154). “If it’s a part of the problem, you have to change it.”
But what should that change be? Perhaps only a new podcast series called The Rest is Democracy could fully answer the question. My running shoes are ready.
Such words are rarely applied to a policy-making process. But praise for citizens’ assemblies was on many people’s lips during a recent week of trainings, workshops and events in British Columbia on the progress of deliberative & participatory democracy. Held in the Canadian province in September, they celebrated the 20th anniversary of the modern world’s first randomly selected citizens’ assembly, held in Vancouver in 2004.
Since that little-heralded event, perhaps 1,000 citizens’ assemblies have now been held all over the world. Most have been held in the past few years and the number is rising fast, particularly in local politics. The deliberative movement’s main network, Democracy R&D, which started out with a conference of 30 people in Madrid in 2018, attracted 200 practitioners and experts to Vancouver for its conference this year. Symbolising the enthusiasm, Leonora Camner (pictured below), chief executive of Democracy Beyond Elections, boasted a new tattoo in the form of a kleroterion, a machine used in ancient Athens to assign citizens to policy-making committees.
Today, citizens’ assemblies are an evolving technique for taking hard decisions in the public common interest. Also known as civic assemblies or citizens’ juries, they bring together between 30 and 200 participants chosen by lot from the relevant community or country. Usually meeting for several days over a number of weeks, the citizens first get to know each other, learn from experts about the challenge at hand, deliberate among themselves and then propose solutions. They are thus much more heterogenous than, say, elected parliaments, which are dominated by charismatic, relatively wealthy people like party politicians or lawyers. Yet citizens’ assemblies routinely adopt suggestions that achieve consensus, which usually means over 80% approval.
“People who profess to be helping are not. [This electoral system,] it’s a European construct and it’s falling apart,” said Shane Pointe (pictured above), a Canadian Indigenous leader who came to bless the opening of the Democracy R&D conference in the name of his ancestors. “We need to take action, my friends from round the world! We need to spread the word that we need to participate. We are the sacred medicine that is going to help us heal democracy.”
Changing the world
The recommendations of that first 2004 British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly on voting reform won 57% support in a province-wide referendum – a notable success, even if it fell short of the 60% needed to change the law that day. “It was a global first,” Peter MacLeod, the doyen of Canadian deliberative democracy activists, told an anniversary reunion of participants. “It may not have succeeded [in B.C.], but it still changed the world.”
MacLeod remembered how Irish academic David Farrell attended the 2004 assembly to brief participants on Ireland’s voting system, but went home convinced that actually random selection might be the future. This led directly to the Irish citizens’ assemblies that in the 2010s broke the country’s political logjams on same-sex marriage and abortion.
The week of democracy meetings in British Columbia showcased more evidence of deliberative democracy’s potential to act as an antidote to public frustrations: alienation from partisan politicians, domineering parties, bad decision-making and anger about the poor performance of electoral systems in delivering efficient government.
“Polarisation was the first thing to fall,” remembered Shoni Field (pictured on the right of the second row above), addressing fellow alumni of that first Vancouver assembly in the same downtown building where they met in 2004. She remembered how at first she and other members didn’t believe they would be able to achieve consensus. But “finding things in common was much easier than expected. We got to feel confident and connected … like magic.”
Politicians have not yet handed decision-making powers to such assemblies, but they have become readier to commit to serious discussion of their recommendations. In Canada, some 50 citizens’ assemblies have taken place since 2004, many of them local, like one that began in September on B.C.’s Vancouver Island. The mayors of Vancouver Island’s two main municipalities, Victoria and Saanich, welcomed 48 randomly selected citizens who will deliberate on a long-stalled plan to merge or not to merge (pictured below).
“Few people get the chance to do what you’re doing. Design something new!” the mayor of Victoria, Marianne Alto, told participants at the opening meeting. Her counterpart from Saanich, Dean Murdock, was equally encouraging. “You are bringing your lived experience and representing the community. Our commitment is to put your recommendations in front of the voters,” he pledged.
How far can deliberative democracy go?
It is still early days for deliberative democracy. A week of discussions among these new democrats revealed several lines of debate and innovation, from techniques of random selection to formulating an overall theory of change.
For instance, few of the advocates for deliberative democracy gathered in British Columbia publicly advocate that random selection should completely replace elections in selecting most decision-making bodies, as was the case during the glory days of ancient Athens. But there is no clear end point, either.
“I want evolution, not revolution! Trying to change everything at once would lead to chaos. At a time when our democracies are already under extreme pressure, nobody wants that,” saidEmily Jenke, joint chief of Australian assembly organizers democracyco. Zakia Elvang, managing partner at Danish advisory group We Do Democracy, pointed out that the goal should be to find out where elected politicians are feeling pain and to do something about it. “Inviting citizens in should help politicians, not be a threat to them,” she said.
The few people who do envisage a world run by random selected bodies – a process also called sortition or lottocracy – generally acknowledge that it could take a century or more to achieve. As my late father Maurice Pope pointed out in his The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a Model for Citizen Power, elections themselves took centuries to emerge. Universal suffrage was a long-unexpected result of the gradual displacement the discredited rule of kings, popes and nobles.
Still, advocates of deliberative democracy have become more ambitious in recent years. For instance, discussion of citizens’ assemblies has now eclipsed the attention once given to the early innovation of participatory budgeting, which emerged in the 1990s to give citizens a role in advising government entities on spending a small part of their annual outlays.
How can sortition work better?
Even in today’s all-digital age, a surprising first hurdle to random selection is getting access to complete lists of citizens to choose from. Some countries allow access to at least rolls of voters; in others, organisers of civic assemblies have to contract the job out to public opinion researchers or pollsters, which can be expensive.
Typically, only about 2%-5% of the citizens who are randomly selected respond positively to their invitation to serve in assemblies. A second round of random selection from this pool (known as stratification) makes sure that the final choice of assembly members reflects the demographics of the community, for instance balancing gender, age, location, language, education, and economic status.
However, assemblies are therefore biased towards the kind of people willing to say “yes” to such invitations. Also, these selection criteria lower the individual chances of acceptance to personality types who say “yes” most often. In European-populated countries, for instance, this means a low personal chance of attending for older, educated, better-off white men.
The only real solution to full representativity – as proposed by some, including my late father in his book – is to make attendance mandatory, as with service in court juries. This is unlikely for now, at least until sortition becomes far better known and widely accepted.
In the meantime, participants in Democracy R&D suggested a number of steps:
Do more research on what makes people opt in to join assemblies, and then act to persuade people who are randomly selected to decide to accept. Facilitators from Germany’s Es Geht Los, for instance, go door to door to persuade those chosen by the computer to join assemblies and have raised acceptance rates to as high as 25%.
Avoid putting too many criteria into the stratification (for instance relating to education or wealth), since motivated citizens may try to manipulate the system with false answers to get into the assembly. A sensible maximum is about six criteria.
Create a large number of possible, stratified assemblies from the pool of acceptances by candidates, then choose one of them from a hat. This makes the final selection of any single individual fairer. The German parliament did something like this with the final selection of its new Citizens’ Assemblies. MIT professor Bailey Finnigan (speaking to audience above) also designed a scientific algorithm to even out an individual’s chances of selection – which she charmingly called the “Goldilocks” method.
Absent mandatory service on citizens’ assemblies, build up as comprehensive a list as possible of all people in a community who in principle agree to join a future assembly that can then be used by all citizens’ assembly or jury organisers.
Can AI help deliberative democracy?
According to some participants, AI could plausibly open to multitudes of people the deliberative democracy that today is only available to smaller groups. Enthusiasts imagined that highly trained bots could do facilitation, allow participants to interrogate in-house databases of expert briefings more easily, transcribe conversations or synthesize conclusions from hundreds of transcripts at once. Indeed, a first fully tech-enhanced experiment is already under way in Oregon in the Deschutes Civic Assembly on Youth Homelessness.
Sceptics about the role of AI worried that the essence of the magic of citizens’ assemblies is in the human contact, trust and civic love that is so much more easily built up face-to-face.
Can citizens’ assemblies be institutionalised?
For some deliberative democracy non-profits, institutionalisation is the way forward. A start has been made, with some success, in Belgium’s German-community parliament, the municipality of Paris, a climate assembly for the Brussels region and a new Europe-wide body on the future of the EU. Each experiment is different, but a basic principle so far is that one randomly selected group chooses topics for other ad hoc, time-limited citizens’ assemblies to address.
Sceptics worry that institutionalisation could bring hierarchies, import a mentality of doing a paid jobs and lose the deep feeling of public service currently felt in shorter citizens’ assemblies. “I worry that permanent citizens’ assemblies could lead to over-bureaucratisation,” said the leader of one pan-European non-profit.
How can the advantages of democratic deliberation become more widely known?
One of participants’ frustrations is how little-known sortition still is. Despite a constant drumbeat of dissatisfaction with the performance of elected governments, mainstream news stories about alternative methods of decision-making is sparse. “The lowest-read articles [I write] are the ones about citizens’ assemblies,” syndicated California democracy columnist Joe Mathews told the Democracy R&D conference.
Yet it is remarkable how very few, if any, citizens drop out of an assembly, despite the intense work, usually over weekends. In fact, it’s frequent to hear them say that the experience was a highlight of their lives. Such alumni often become ardent advocates of the process. More could be done to mobilise them to spread the word, even if such alumni are still a small group in the world.
Such interest in sortition as there is in mainstream media seems to occur at moments of peak anger with and unpopular governments and then to disappear in the wave of hope when a new party takes power. For instance, before the last elections in the United Kingdom, a Labour Party adviser suggested citizens’ assemblies might be part of a victorious Labour Party program, but the party later backtracked. “As soon as they won, citizens’ assemblies suddenly became the last priority,” noted the chief of an international democracy non-profit.
Another suggestion to broaden experience of citizens’ assembly would be to do more with the randomly selected first pool of those who do say yes, often numbering a few hundred people, who are not chosen in the final stratification. For instance, they could be invited to a special outreach session of the assembly in which they could discuss the issue at hand with those who were selected.
Improving terminology, or awareness of it, could also help. The word sortition is little known or understood. Some say citizens’ assemblies should be known as civic assemblies (to include, for instance, unregistered refugees). Some worry the word democracy itself may be off-putting and means different things to different people. One issue is that people now associate democracy entirely with voting, even though until the 18th century democracy (“rule by the people”) was mostly used to describe direct popular authority, channelled through the random selection of classical times. Another difficulty is that because people now think democracy means voting, and because elected governments are in such disrepute, the word democracy can now trigger hostile feelings.
Ways Democracy R&D conference participants suggested to popularise the process included ideas to: build up better data and stories on citizens’ assemblies and their impact, and use these to craft a compelling theory of change; mobilise assembly alumni as spokespeople; win over politicians – critically, before they take power – to understand that citizens’ assemblies can bring support and legitimacy and not threaten their elected roles; stress that citizens’ assemblies are more representative of diversity than elected bodies and are better at blocking special-interest groups; and better link deliberative democracy to what the wider public cares about.
How can work on deliberative democracy get funded?
Non-profit types often wring their hands about finding funding for their work. The world of deliberative democracy has a particularly difficult time raising money, with some organizations reporting close calls with fate.
Small donations on a large scale are unknown for democracy NGOs, perhaps since deliberative democracy is not (yet) a cause with an emotional punch that can attract the attention of the general public or a passing donor in the street. At the other end, big national funders to organisations doing democratic improvement are often linked to elected politicians, who can worry that supporting alternatives to elections might cut off the branch on which they sit.
Additionally, the field is new and untested, with very few organizations older than a decade. “The funders are sometimes out of touch,” the chief of one international democracy NGO told me. “Look at what happened with the Brexit referendum. Tens of millions of pounds were spent to swing the campaign against Europe. And with sortition, donors give us $100,000-$150,000 and then ask us, why haven’t you changed democracy?”
One encouraging difference is that deliberative democracy does attract rich individuals frustrated with the electoral system, a number of whom have set up their own non-profits and take an active interest in deliberative projects. Time will tell if they can coordinate to build up a broader movement.
How fast will change happen?
Although the Democracy R&D network has grown rapidly to more than 100 organisations and 100 individual members since its founding in 2018, involving perhaps 400 people in total, few members expect a rapid global conversion to sortition. “The revolution will be a slow one, and it will happen in local administrations first,” predicted a founding member from Brussels, where next year’s conference takes place.
Still, the number of citizens’ assemblies being held round the world is rising in a logarithmic curve. I came away from my week in British Columbia sure that all the energy, new ideas, focused organizations, and idealism mean that the deliberative wave will not subside soon. The challenge for these new democrats is how to connect the solutions they offer – like citizens’ assemblies – with the now widespread recognition that public trust has been lost in electoral processes and the governments they produce. Or at least, how to make that connection before the argument is won by the forces who are currently far ahead in this race: the one-third of the population in richer countries with electoral systems who suggesting that authoritarian rule is the answer.
Canada’s Peter MacLeod (above right) urged the new democrats in Vancouver not to flag in their efforts, noting the ultimate success of the last big democratic wave in 1790-1830. In that period, the American and French revolutions spurred the replacement of monarchs, archbishops and aristocrats by then more effective elected governments. “Don’t underestimate the the ability of a small group of people to change the world [even if] it took another 120 years to full enfranchisement,” he said. “We have to keep delivering assemblies. Democracy’s second act has started.”
Hugh Pope 