Supporting democracy: Citizen's assemblies

 

Context

Decades of polarizing and often anti-democratic rhetoric have contributed to declining trust in democratic institutions and processes, especially among Republicans. The radical right MAGA wealth and power movement that is dominated by elites envisions some form of corrupt authoritarianism to replace democracy and the rule of law as they exist now. Government infrastructure to enable that is being built now by MAGA elites in power in the federal executive branch, the courts and congress. The goal is to have in place enduring authoritarian government and law in place once Trump is gone. To attain power, decades of radicalizing demagoguery was necessary for the rise of MAGA to its current position of federal government power.

Upgrading democracy

A Scientific American article, Citizens’ Assemblies Are Upgrading Democracy: Fair Algorithms Are Part of the Program, points to a way that can augment trust in democracy. The article describes a case of a group of 99 Irish citizens who were chosen to be representative of all of the Irish people in terms of age, gender, and where they lived. This citizen's assembly heard from experts, learned about the topic, extensively discussed and debated among themselves, and then made recommendations about legalizing abortion in Ireland. Its recommendation to allow abortions in all circumstances, subject to limits on the length of pregnancy, was supported by a significant majority of the 99. That paved the way to a national referendum that resulted on voters adopting the assembly's recommendations.

The episode was remarkable. Irish politicians would not touch the subject, fearing they would get voted out of office. Since the 99 citizens were not worried about getting voted out of office, they dealt with the issue rationally and reflected that most Irish people, 66%, wanted abortion legalized. The assembly was trusted because the people on it were chosen to represent or be like the Irish people generally.

Citizens’ assemblies bring together ordinary people, selected by lot, to learn about an issue, deliberate, and recommend policies. They often work complex or contentious topics such as climate policy or major reforms. Because participants are not professional politicians, they are insulated from reelection and other pressures such as such as party discipline, campaign incentives, donor blowback, special interests lobbyists, etc. They are free to simply focus on relevant evidence, learning the complexities and deliberation among themselves.

What makes citizen assemblies at least somewhat trusted by the public is selection to make them representative of the rest of the country, state or locality. Some of the people in the assemblies are like many other people in multiple ways. That tends to foster trust to some extent.

Why descriptive representation matters: The article points out that descriptive representation for assemblies should roughly match the population in gender, age, geography, and other characteristics. That boosts public perception that decisions are made by “people like us”. This contrasts with elected legislatures that remain skewed, for example, underrepresentation of women, which undermines perceived legitimacy compared to well-balanced assemblies.

Naive random sampling rarely yields a group that closely resembles the broader population, especially when many demographic and attitudinal criteria are tracked, so practitioners face a trade-off between randomness and representativeness. The piece frames this as an optimization problem: choosing a subset of volunteers that best matches target quotas across multiple dimensions while retaining the core idea of random selection.

The article discusses an algorithm (developed with collaborators and now used by organizations like the Sortition Foundation) that first defines target distributions for demographic categories, then uses computational search to randomly select a panel that satisfies these constraints as closely as possible. This approach allows the “dice” to be loaded in a transparent, rule‑based way to correct for practical biases—such as some groups being less likely to respond to invitations—without letting organizers handpick participants.

By combining sortition with fairness-focused algorithms, citizens’ assemblies can better uncover the will of the people and help build consensus on divisive issues. Assemblies offer a complement to electoral democracy, not a replacement. The article suggests that as citizen assemblies and how they are created become better known, and the underlying algorithms remain open and auditable, they can help counter distrust in institutions and democracy itself. All of this can also show how carefully designed procedures can make democratic representation both more inclusive and more representative, e.g., by eliminating anti-democratic influence by special interests and political parties.

Points for consideration

Would you at least consider recommendations from a citizen assembly if it's makeup and means of selecting people for it are transparent and reasonably representative of "people like you"?

Does this article at least somewhat change the way you view the working of American democracy, which is seriously undermined by corrosive, and often irrational, special interest money, propaganda and influence?

The epitome of moral rot

Context

Cognitive biology: Although some people are uncomfortable with linking subjective, personal morality to politics, social science makes clear that moral reasoning cannot be completely avoided. Humans are inherently moral thinkers and actors. Humans perceive the world and think about it through a human lens. For better or worse, our perceptions and reasoning are usually heavily influenced by personal moral values. That influence tends to arise mostly or completely unconsciously before conscious reasoning is brought to bear. To a large extent, we are basically unaware of much of our moral reasoning and attendant behavior.

News reporting: Various sources report about Trump's pardon of the drug kingpin and Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández. Hernández was involved in the trafficking of hundreds of tons of illegal drugs into the US. US Senator Tim Kaine asserted that Hernández was aggressive and arrogant in his attitude, allegedly commenting that Hernández said he wanted to ‘shove the drugs right up the noses of the gringos by flooding the United States with cocaine’.

When asked why he pardoned Hernández, Trump gave these reasons:

“I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras. The people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing. They basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country. And they said it was a Biden administration set-up. And I looked at the facts and I agreed with them.” 

Trump provided no evidence of a setup. In his US trial, Hernández was convicted by a jury who carefully considered the evidence of criminal culpability. Hernández told the jury he was innocent and was set up. But based on available reporting, Hernández provided no verifiable evidence to the court that he was framed or set up. Despite his unsupported claims of innocence, the jury convicted him and then Trump pardoned him. The jury vindicated the rule of law in a fair trial based on evidence. But Trump reversed that and in doing so he denigrated the law and disrespected the jury on the basis of no tangible evidence.

Moral rot

As explained here before, when there is sufficient evidence of dishonesty and bad faith dealings by players and interests doing politics, it is rational for people who support democracy and the rule of law to distrust those players and interests.

Years ago, Trump reached a point where significant numbers of reasonable, fair-minded people could conclude that Trump cannot be trusted. He is not just an aggressive chronic liar[1], which is beyond rational dispute. His authoritarian behavior over the years made clear that his character is grounded in moral rot. Whatever his morality is, it does not include respect for either facts and honest rhetoric, or democracy and the rule of law.

Pro-democracy, pro-rule of law people acting and thinking in good will can rationally argue that Donald Trump is a profoundly morally rotted person. His moral rot manifests in various ways, e.g., inciting insurrection on 1/6/21, fornication with Stormy Daniels (and lying about it), running a fraudulent charity, defaming people, and being convicted of business fraud felonies.

Points to consider

Morality is almost always assessed from different points of view. It depends on who is doing the assessing. From his own point of view, is it more likely that Trump sees himself as a mostly honest player who is at least as moral and good as other politicians? Or does he understand who and what he really is, e.g., mendacious, corrupt, authoritarian, etc., but that's acceptable in his moral world?

Is Trump's pardon of Hernandez an example of moral rot regardless of what point of view it is assessed?

Footnote:

1. PolitiFact's assessment of Trump's lies was blunt: "American fact-checkers have never encountered a politician who shares Trump's disregard for factual accuracy". PolitiFact's assessment noted that Trump's fast-and-loose style with facts persisted from his 2011 promotion of crackpot birther conspiracy theories through his presidency and into his political activities as of Feb. 2024 when PolitiFact published its 1000th fact check of Trump.

Evidence of moral rot

Fact checking technology update

A paper submitted to Arxiv, FlashCheck: Exploration of Efficient Evidence Retrieval for Fast Fact-Checking, considers the obvious idea of using AI (artificial intelligence) to try to counter some of the power of demagoguery and its effectiveness in deceiving and manipulating people. 

The FlashCheck concept addresses a critical bottleneck in automated fact-checking: the high computational cost and time lag in retrieving evidence from massive knowledge bases like Wikipedia. Current systems rely on "dense retrieval" (vector search), which is accurate but resource-heavy, making real-time verification difficult. 

To reduce the problem, the researchers propose a two-pronged optimization strategy, Corpus Pruning, which is indexing only factual statements instead of full text, and Index Compression using joint product quantization (JPQ)[1], a data compression technique. To move closer to real time fact checking, the researchers reduced Wikipedia size by ~93% from 9.70 GB to ~673 MB using JPQ. That resulted in​ a shorter latency time with up to a 10-fold speedup on CPUs and 20-fold speedup on GPUs compared to reference standards. The researchers used their AI model to fact-check the 2024 US Presidential Debate in real-time. The result was a 3.4-fold fact checking speed increase over existing fact check methods. Despite aggressive data compression, negligible performance loss was observed.

As time passes, continued fast fact checking will very likely further improve. A big question is whether it will make much difference. At present, a significant minority of the American public has been conditioned to treat MAGA's blatant lies and flawed reasoning as acceptable and reasonable. As long as that remains the case, it is unclear what effects might flow from improved fact checking.

Footnote for wonks:

1. JPQ employs (1) Joint Optimization to align the query encoder and the compressed index codewords using a shared ranking-oriented loss function, ensuring they work perfectly together, and (2) Hard Negative Sampling during training, where the program retrieves "hard negatives" (incorrect but similar answers) directly from the quantized index, teaching the model to distinguish subtle differences even in compressed data. The result was a massive compression effect that reduced the data size by ~93%, but with faster retrieval speeds without the same level of accuracy drop usually associated with compressing data.

From the human condition files: Fused minds and the slow-rising tide of American awareness

Democracy isn't edible, but food is

Some wonder why it has taken Americans so long to see the threats of both authoritarianism and profound corruption in Trump and allied Republican Party leadership. Some of those who do see the threats wonder why far more people and most of the mainstream media still do not see it. Early on, researchers dissecting the 2024 election of Trump found three main sources of votes for him. They were immigration, inflation and woke/DEI, all three of which were expertly exaggerated and weaponized against Democrats and liberalism. If nothing else, MAGA demagoguery is superb. By contrast, Democratic messaging isn't.

More recent research indicates a different major source of support for Trump, namely identity fusion with attendant cult/social loyalty. Apparently most researchers now see identity fusion—a powerful, visceral sense of oneness with their leader—as among the top reasons people voted for Trump, with some arguing it is the single most important reason. People fused with Trump tend to be more likely to take extreme positions, which includes a tendency to abandon past values, e.g., support for democracy, when doing so supports the identity-fused leader. 

When a voter fuses their identity with that of a politician like Trump, inexplicable reasoning and behavior become understandable. People will knowingly vote against their interests if doing so aligns with the needs of the fused identity. Attacks on and criticisms of Trump become personal attacks on and criticisms of the fused identity. For voters who exhibited strong identity fusion traits, Trump's policy positions were essentially irrelevant to their support for him.

So, when Trump is criticized for attacking democracy and the rule of law, and for demagoguing inflation as being 100% the fault of Biden and Democrats, voters supported Trump in defense of their own attacked and criticized identity. Inflation makes food too expensive, and you can't eat democracy. So in a sense, it was rational for fused minds to vote for Trump despite him (1) openly advancing authoritarianism and corruption at the expense of democracy, and (2) openly not caring about voters everyday concerns or their democracy. Fused minds simply did not, and could not, see their leader that way. Many or most of those minds still cannot see it.

The slow awakening continues

Early on, a few observers saw major threats of autocracy and kleptocracy in Trump. The warnings were dismissed out of hand as crackpottery, lies, idiocy, brainwashed Democrat stupidity, etc. A Russian reporter who chronicled the fall of Russian democracy to Putin's kleptocratic dictatorship, Masha Gessen, wrote this in Nov. of 2016:

“Thank you, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. We have lost. We have lost, and this is the last day of my political career, so I will say what must be said. We are standing at the edge of the abyss. Our political system, our society, our country itself are in greater danger than at any time in the last century and a half. The president-elect has made his intentions clear, and it would be immoral to pretend otherwise. We must band together right now to defend the laws, the institutions, and the ideals on which our country is based.” 

That, or something like that, is what Hillary Clinton should have said on Wednesday [in her concession speech to Trump].

These days, people like Gessen aren't criticized so harshly by so many people. There has been and continues to be a slow awakening to the authoritarian, kleptocratic MAGA threat to our inedible democracy, rule of law and civil liberties. Regarding Trump and his threats, unfused minds, just like enquiring minds, want to know about what's going on. Fused minds, not so much.

Over at the r/law subreddit, more evidence of the awakening has bubbled up in the cauldron of public opinion. The title reflects both the concern and the frustrating, irrational restraints that still poisons so many minds to unvarnished truth:

Early in Trump's term we asked, “Is it a constitutional crisis?” Yeah, it was. But it’s over. We lost. Trial Courts fought valiantly, but the Supreme Court keeps abdicating & giving Trump more power. They won’t save us. And for reasons I can’t fathom, they seem to want authoritarianism - LegalEagle

Yes, those minds see the constitutional crisis. No, those minds still cannot see the pure authoritarianism and corruption that drives Trump and MAGA elites. Specifically, USSC judges do not merely seem to want authoritarianism, they openly show they are authoritarian by deciding lawsuits as authoritarians. Project 2025, an American manifesto of authoritarianism is explicit about supporting a form of authoritarianism called the unitary executive.

At pages 19-20, Project 2025, MAGA elites explain why they believe, and the USSC has acted in accordance with, an all powerful unitary executive who is and must be above the law and all meaningful restraints:

Highlighting this need, former director of the Office of Management and Budget Russ Vought writes in Chapter 2, “The modern conservative President’s task is to limit, control, and direct the executive branch on behalf of the American people.” At the core of this goal is the work of the White House and the central personnel agencies. Article II of the Constitution vests all federal executive power in a President, made accountable to the citizenry through regular elections. Our Founders wrote, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” Accordingly, Vought writes, “it is the President’s agenda that should matter to the departments and agencies,” not their own.

Therein lies the legal basis and reasoning that supports a president that now has almost unlimited power to subvert and weaponize federal agencies in support of the president's own agenda. The agenda and needs of the American people and the US Constitution are subordinate to what the unitary executive personally wants.

Discussion

Despite being explicit, core MAGA legal dogma, many or most fused minds cannot see significant authoritarianism in a corrupt dictator called the unitary executive or anything else. That is understandable in human psychology and social behavior. People simply do not or cannot see themselves as supporting corrupt dictator. So to them Trump is not a corrupt dictator, whether he is called a unitary executive or something else.

But why can't nearly all unfused minds clearly see the threat? Presumably most people working in the mainstream news media see the threat. But they rarely call it out in direct terms. The MSM almost always uses softening euphemisms like "conservative" and "libertarian" that normalize, justify and frame MAGA as being something it clearly is not.

Is that harsh assessment of the MSM's failure to inform fair and reasonable or not? Is the MSM engaged in a large-scale disinformation campaign, presumably driven mostly by corporate ownership and Trump's explicit threats (his personal agenda) to profits and revenues?