1705751669 Democratize democracy

Democratize democracy

Democratize democracy

In a great novel by Bruno Arpaia entitled Il ghost dei fatti, Sir d'Arcy Osborne, British ambassador to the Vatican, wrote in 1943: “The principles and rules of democracy are alien to the nature of the Italian people.” The great mass of Italians are individualistic and politically irresponsible and only cares about their most immediate economic problems. “Mussolini was right when he said that Italians have always been poor people.”

These words are an excellent example of a certain British Suprematism, but apart from Mussolini, they are a foretaste of other, almost identical words that many luminaries would later utter in places where, such as Italy, at the end of the war Possibility to establish a democracy was considered: in the Spain of Franco's agony, in Latin America, which began to free itself from military dictatorships in the 1980s, in the countries of Eastern Europe, which shortly afterwards tried to break away from more than half a century Communism to come out, or during the Spring Arabs. It is true that some of these democratic revolutions failed or were only half successful; It is also true that in reality no one is prepared for democracy. This is not a gift or a grace; It is a daily performance that is very demanding: the proof is that taking it for granted is enough to put it in danger. To be clear: the natural is submission: being free takes enormous effort. This has always been the case, but now, far from the optimism at the beginning of the century when democracy seemed the only possible political horizon (this was Fukuyama's famous “end of history”), the evidence has become obvious. On the one hand, because the crisis of 2008 gave democracy a bitter competitor: the form of authoritarianism that we call national populism; on the other hand, because democracies show signs of fatigue, if not exhaustion. Democracy urgently needs to be renewed, and there is only one way to do that: with more democracy. This is what lotocracy proposes, a type of democracy that defends the election of our political representatives by lottery; It is not a panacea, but as I recently wrote in this column, if handled intelligently, carefully and progressively (read “Against Elections,” by David van Reybrouck), it can contribute to lasting political renewal and be an antidote to the madness provoked by power, as an incentive for all of us to take responsibility for what belongs to everyone, and perhaps in the only credible hope that the dirty word democracy will regain its original meaning: power of the people. “So we choose our prime minister by lottery?” career politicians will immediately scoff, terrified at the prospect of being unemployed; The question is reminiscent of others asked a century or a century and a half ago: “So will we allow a professor’s vote to count as much as a worker’s?”; or better: “So will we also allow women to vote?” Lotocracy does not propose that the president of the government be elected by lot (or suppress elections, nor the politicians elected in elections – who coexist with those elected by lot would – not even the political parties, the Gordian knot of contemporary democracy), but let us acknowledge that it would not be easy to elect lottery managers as stupid, uneducated and cynical as some under whom we have suffered.

A utopia, lotocracy? Until recently there was nothing more than universal suffrage. Sir d'Arcy Osborne was an understatement: All of us, not just Italians, are prone to irresponsibility; It is a suicidal tendency that is counteracted by taking on more and more responsibility. This is what lotocracy consists of: the gradual but inexorable opening of governance to the governed in order to build a more legitimate, egalitarian, just and effective system, gradually moving towards the Aristotelian ideal: that citizens are alternative rulers and governed. And that, in my opinion, should be the next revolution.

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