Tag: lot

2,718 words

See also: Good Book, More of the Good Book, Doors & Bolts & Bars

I recently watched the 1966 movie The Bible: In the Beginning. It was the last of the big-budget movies with a cast of thousands and a plot centered on ancient history. In the 1950s, these sorts of films — The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben Hur (1959) — were big winners. The Bible, however, didn’t capture the magic of those earlier features. The lukewarm audience reception likewise helped to make The Bible the last of such epics. (more…)

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The white ethnostate exists at present only as a metapolitical idea in the minds of radical White Nationalists. Great intellectual efforts have been made, and will no doubt continue to be made, to describe how the political utopia will come about and what form it will take once it has been achieved. In my essay “Democracy Today,” I argued that the problems associated with democracy as it is currently practiced in the West are caused at root by trying to achieve democratic representation through mass voting in elections that are inevitably corrupted by partisan interests of one stripe or the other.  (more…)

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Republican theorists of the 16th and 17th centuries recognized the merits of sortition, and included the practice when drawing up their ideal constitutions.

Niccolò Machiavelli

In 1520, Niccolò Machiavelli, in a proposal to the Medicis, published the Discourse on the Government of Florence, arguing that none of the previous governments worked for the common good and merely represented the interests of one faction at the expense of the other, be they Medici, aristocratic, or popolo. (more…)

The Monte di Pietà, Florence, established in the late 15th century by Franciscan brothers to make small, interest-free loans to give people an alternative to usurious moneylenders.

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The other major use of sortition practiced in the Italian city-states was the “scrutiny,” which to a greater or lesser extent governed Florentine political life for 300 years. Similar schemes were practiced in Orvieto, Siena, Pistoia, Perugia, and Lucca. The scrutiny was different than the brevia. Whereas the brevia used sortition to determine the composition of an electoral college, the scrutiny was an inversion of this, using voting first to create a short-list of acceptable candidates and then applying sortition in the final stage to draw at random a candidate from this pre-vetted pool.[1]

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Giovanni Bellini, Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan, 1501

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Following the Greeks’ experiment in democracy, sortition did not play any political role in the western world until the 11th century, when a relative power vacuum in Northern Italy led to the emergence of independent city-states.

At the time, the political and social conditions in Northern Italy were vastly different from the feudal system in Northern Europe. In Northern Europe, states were ruled by hereditary monarchs to whom the land-owning nobility professed allegiance and from whom they courted favors. (more…)

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Although electoral representation is a discredited system, White Nationalists should not give up on the idea or virtues of democratic representation but should seek alternative ways of achieving this through sortition—the selection of representatives through a randomized process like a national lottery.

The political potential of sortition is virtually unknown in White Nationalist circles. (more…)