The Sacred Cow

Democracy licenses state coercion through electoral aggregation — through pluralities, slim majorities, low-turnout elections, and coalition deals struck behind closed doors. The outcome is policy imposed by the full apparatus of the state on millions who did not consent to it. That imposition is not a request. It is force. What we call democratic legitimacy is organised coercion with a thin coat of procedural respectability. The coat is thinner than we like to admit.

This does not make democracy worthless. Monarchy is worse, dictatorship is worse, theocracy is worse. Democracy is the least-bad arrangement yet discovered for organising collective decisions among large numbers of people who disagree. But the trouble begins when the least-bad option is elevated into a sacred principle — when the compromise is mistaken for the ideal, and questioning the system's deep flaws is treated as an attack on civilisation itself. Democracy has become something people embrace not because they have examined it but because rejecting it feels unthinkable. The refusal to examine something because the conclusion might be uncomfortable is precisely the kind of intellectual failure that produces bad outcomes at scale.

Consider what the system actually rewards. A health minister with no medical background overrides epidemiologists. A finance minister ignores economists when their conclusions are electorally inconvenient. Democratic incentives do not merely permit this; they select for it, because the appearance of decisive knowledge wins elections while the admission of ignorance does not. The system selects for confidence over competence, for performance over understanding, for politicians who project certainty on subjects about which honest experts express doubt. Technical questions — energy infrastructure, pharmaceutical regulation, monetary policy, criminal justice — are translated into slogans and electoral theatre long before any voter encounters them. Modern democracies do delegate technical matters to agencies and expert bodies, but the delegation is routinely overridden the moment it becomes electorally inconvenient. The expertise is decorative. The incentive structure ensures it.

None of this is a slander on ordinary people. Many political questions are genuinely questions of values — how much inequality a society will tolerate, what freedoms it will protect, what risks it will accept. On those, the specialist has no privileged position. But many questions that are substantially technical get treated as if they were values questions, and the result is ignorant policy dressed in democratic legitimacy. People form views on drug policy from whether they think drugs are bad, not from the evidence on what drug policies actually produce. People form views on immigration from a single alarming story, while the data tells a different one. The most common defence — that democracy reflects the will of the people — dissolves under scrutiny. What it reflects is the aggregation of poorly informed preferences, shaped by whatever information people happened to encounter, filtered through biases they are largely unaware of, and reduced to a choice between options almost no one designed and almost no one fully understands. Calling the result sacred does not make it wise.

The standard objection is familiar: if not democracy, then what? Every alternative concentrates power, and concentrated power corrupts. That is the reason democracy remains the best available option. But "historically worse" is not "logically necessary." The fact that past alternatives failed does not mean no better arrangement is conceivable.

Sortition — the random selection of citizens to serve in deliberative bodies — addresses two of democracy's worst failures simultaneously. It produces bodies that are genuinely representative of the broader population, unlike parliaments dominated by a narrow professional political class. And it can be structured around serious expert consultation, so that citizens deliberate from a basis of actual evidence rather than campaign slogans. This is not speculation. Ireland's Citizens' Assembly, a randomly selected body given expert testimony and extended deliberation, produced workable recommendations on abortion and same-sex marriage that the elected parliament had failed to resolve for decades. The OECD has documented hundreds of such deliberative processes across member countries, and the pattern holds: ordinary citizens, given real information and real time, produce more considered outcomes than elected politicians operating under electoral pressure.

The sharpest objection to sortition is accountability. Democracy's deepest virtue, as Karl Popper argued, is not that it produces wise policy but that it allows the bloodless removal of bad rulers. A sortition body cannot be voted out. This is serious, and any sortition arrangement must answer it — through mandatory rotation, strict term limits, full transparency, and the structural fact that members return to the population they legislated for and live under the laws they made. But the accountability of elected politicians is itself largely theatrical. Voters lack the information to evaluate policy substance, so they evaluate affect, performance, and tribal loyalty. The politician who does real harm but communicates well keeps office. The one who makes difficult but correct decisions gets punished at the ballot box. If accountability means anything, it must include accountability to reality, and the current system is structurally hostile to that.

Coercion does not vanish under any arrangement. A sortition panel that decides policy still imposes it on dissenters, backed by the same state apparatus. The question was never whether coercion can be eliminated. It cannot. The question is whether the process that produces coercive decisions can be made less ignorant, less captured by perverse incentives, and less dependent on the theatrical performance of confidence. Sortition is not a utopia. It is a concrete improvement on a system whose flaws we refuse to examine because we have decided in advance that it is sacred.

Democracy is not the pinnacle of civilisation. The gap between "least-bad" and "good" is enormous, and refusing to see it is comfortable self-deception. The concrete response is to stop worshipping the process and start redesigning it: replace at least one legislative chamber with a sortition body, require citizens' assemblies for major technical policy decisions, and end the practice of elected politicians overriding expert consensus on questions they do not understand. These are not radical proposals. They are the minimum honest response to a system whose failures are visible to anyone willing to look.