Ordinary People Rule (finding a path to true democracy with James Bacchus)

In my view, ordinary people are capable of making hard and difficult decisions. If we don't believe that, then I'm sorry, we're not really Democrats. Simply voting once every few years for choice between the two people you don't really like is not really Democratic self-rule.

What we're facing in the world now is not only a crisis in democracy, it's a crisis in governance overall.

Hey, Vass.

Hey, Paul.

It is, and it starts from a simple but radical idea, that global sustainability and global democracy are not actually separate goals, they're inherently the same project. James tells us that we can't save the planet without reshaping how humanity governs itself.

Yeah. I like how he weaves those two together and he talks about the multiple crises across different borders, pandemics, wars, climate change, loss of biodiversity, and that there's a growing sense that our systems are just unequal to the task and the scale of the challenge. And yet the innovation of democratic government, a transformative technology in itself, offers a solution, in his view.

Excellent. Yeah. And the book argues that our response has to be just as global as the problems themselves. What he's really honing in on is, is the nation state itself just no match for these global problems? How do we do more together? But he points to not a top-down technocracy, but through participatory democracy, citizens everywhere directly engaged in shaping the path to sustainability.

It's not lacking in ambition, that's for sure. He revives that spirit of the ancient Greek, Athens, and the birthplace of democracy. But the vision now he has is for millions to participate, even billions connected through technology across continents.

And he suggests that this is possible by linking the countless local and regional sustainability experiments that are already underway, scaling them up, weaving them together into a global architecture of democratic governance.

Yeah. And there'll be obstacles, and he acknowledges those that representation, legitimacy, the huge scale of it all is quite daunting. But he sees a mix of direct participation, randomized selection, like jury duty works, and the power of the digital network to connect people across process and continents.

Today we're going to explore how this ancient idea of democracy can meet the modern imperative of sustainability, and how re-imagining governance could be key to human flourishing in the century ahead.

We're joined by James Bacchus, former US Congressman, a senior official at the World Trade Organization, the author of several books on trade. And now, recently, a leading voice on international governance and sustainability. He joins us today very appropriately from the Greek countryside on a laptop.

James, welcome to Policy Prompt. Yasas.

James, you describe this book, your sixth, as the culmination of a life lived in and through law, governance, and reflection. What is the main question that you think's driven that lifetime of work? And what made you turn from a Congressman, Congressperson, and trade specialist, to somebody who was so squarely focused on the future of democracy?

It's certainly true that I wander the world with the letters WTO tattooed on my forehead. Having been a founder of the WTO appellate body and twice the chairman of the appellate body, it's hard for me to escape my identity in world trade. But the truth of the matter is that I've always had other interests in addition to trade. I was involved in working, for example, for sustainable development, even some years before I became involved in working for freer trade. And I've been working the lower barriers to trade since I was in my 20s, in the late 70s when I was a young trade negotiator at UCSTR in the Carter administration.

But even before that, in Florida, I was involved in efforts to achieve what we called at the time growth management, but what was actually sustainable development. This was following on the accession in 1972 in Stockholm and the beginnings of the sustainable development effort worldwide. And I've always believed that there is an inextricable interrelationship between democracy and sustainable development. I've worked for both, even as I've worked for each of them. And trade, to my mind, is, when done rightly, an action taken, an affirmation of sustainable development. Trade is simply a part of the broader effort to achieve democracy and sustainable development as I see the world.

Thank you for that overview. I think a lot of the time the trade conversations we're in right now, at least here in Canada, it's treated as something that is somewhat divorced from those systems, and add on another layer instead of something that's at the heart.

Well, I've always seen trade as something that must be seen in context. I am a follower of the philosopher, Karl Popper, who believed in open societies. And if you read his book from the 1940s, The Open Society and Its Enemies, he goes all the way back to ancient Athens and speaks about how, despite their reluctance to be open to the wider world, the Athenians open up to the wider world through trade. And that helped them become a more open society. And open societies, or societies in which human freedom can be generated and can flourish. When I advocate free trade, I'm not making solely a point about commerce, I'm making a point about civilization. Because with the flow of commerce comes also the flow of ideas, it comes also innovation. Also, the freedom of thought, which is the first freedom.

You also said that democracy is not possible without sustainable development, and sustainable development is not possible without democracy. Maybe I can just ask, why are they so inseparable, and what could that mean in a global context where we see less liberal democracies? We see major democratic shifts or shifting.

As I explain in the book, the connection between democracy and sustainable development is this. It is the human development that is a consequence of the achievement of the social, economic, and environmental goals of sustainable development that gives us the enhanced ability to engage in true self-rule. That gives us the capability to govern ourselves democratically. Likewise, in turn, it is the practice of democracy that alone can provide us with the will and the way to achieve all the goals of sustainable development. This is very important.

Because you will hear some people say that, well, we can develop through autocratic regimes, through rulers who dictate what is to happen, and have the right kinds of environmental and other sustainable aims. But this overlooks, even if we conceded it, which I don't, this overlooks the fact that sustainable development is about much more than the environment. It's also about people. It's about social goals, economic goals, and human justice. And there is no way that there can be individual human flourishing in a context of authoritarianism. People have to have individual self-respect. There must be basic human dignity. These things can only exist where people rule themselves, where they govern themselves, where they are not coerced, even supposedly for ostensibly good reasons.

This is why I cringe when people say, "Well, we should just look at all the good things the Chinese are doing in terms of advancing environmentally." Well, I would point out that there are a lot of things they're also doing that are taking them in the wrong direction environmentally, coal plant after coal plant after coal plant. But more than that, individual Chinese people do not have freedom. They do not have the self-respect of human dignity that comes from knowing that they can make their own decisions about how they choose to live freely. And that is a part of sustainable development. It's an indispensable part. And that can only be achieved through true self-rule, which is another name for democracy.

Let's unpack two other things that I think are fundamental to the book that I think merit it. And the first one... We'll go through each of them separately. The first one is democracy, and the second one is global governance. And you've, of course, put those two together, the notion of participatory democratic global governance.

Well, I'm crazy enough to think that democratic global governance is possible at every level of governance.

Well, that is the vision that you've put on the table here, but let's take each one of these. And starting with democracy, there are very many different types of democracy, right? You can look at the economist democracy index and see all the different variations. We've got parliamentary democracies, presidential democracies, India is a democracy. How much room do you see for variation? I know you're focused on participatory democracy, but how much room do you see in the spectrum of democracy? A little bit to the point you just made on authoritarianism, is there really only one form of democracy that can work here? And then let's go to global governance after that, but what's your frame on democracy?

Any supposed democracy in which people are not free to make their own decisions about how they wish to be governed is not a democracy. And as I say in the book, most of what we designate as democracies today are really only half democracies.

Half democracies?

In the democracies we have, the people really govern themselves. They may have the right to vote once in a while, but even where that right to vote exists, it's very often manipulated. It's very often distorted. In my country right now, we're engaging in a competitive gerrymandering.

Right.

And both parties are rationalizing doing this, but it's simply wrong. Because what does it do? It moves away from democratic representation. It rigs the elections to produce certain results.

Right. Gerrymandering's not new though. You're saying it's hit a new peak, or this has been going on for 100 plus years in the US, right, gerrymandering?

It's been going on in my country since Elbridge Gerry back near the time of the revolution. No, it's certainly not new. Unfortunately, our Supreme Court has missed many opportunities to end it, and now it's truly out of hand. No, it's much worse now than it's ever been. And at this point, it's being done by both Republicans and Democrats. I'm an equal opportunity critic. I happen to be a Democrat, but I do not support what my party is doing in terms of rigging elections in states they control just because Republicans are rigging elections in states they control. There's a Latin phrase in law, two wrongs don't make a right. And I think two wrongs don't make a right.

Right. And I think a lot of the indices that track democracy would agree with what you said, that there's an erosion, there's an ineffectiveness in the democracies. Even those that are well established liberal democracies are weakening. But what you're zooming in on is the participation side very much in this book. Is that the trigger is that motivates people, they want to get involved, they have ways to get involved?

Well, first of all, I think the only true democracy is participatory democracy. It's one in which people have true self-rule. And I propose specific ways in which that can be established drawing from the experience of the ancient Athenian democracy. But what we're facing in the world now is not only a crisis in democracy, it's a crisis in governance overall. If we look at the problems we face in the world, climate change, biodiversity loss, the threat now of renewed nuclear proliferation, deforestation, you name it. Why are we not succeeding in addressing any of these issues as we should? It's because we have ineffective governance, and these are all failures of governance.

Why is governance failing? Well, in those countries that purport to be democracies, governance is failing because there is an absence of trust. Ordinary people do not trust their governments. They don't trust their leaders, elected or not. They do not trust elites. They do not trust experts. They do not trust the wealthy. They do not trust institutions of any kind. And least of all do they trust international institutions. Why don't they? Because they don't have a say in what any of their governmental institutions do. Simply voting once every few years for choice between two people you don't really like is not really democratic self-rule. And I think the only way we can begin to have effective governance is to restore trust. And I think we can restore trust only through democratic participation in the form of true self-rule, which is why I propose that we add the element of sortition to our governance at every level worldwide.

I'm going to go there right now on global governance, because I think you link the two. My take on global governance is that it's a trigger word, for sure, right? Because it sounds like to what you just said, Jim, that there's some little group that decides or that imposes something. I prefer the term international governance, which is in the name of CIGI, because that's about states interacting to find the right global framework as opposed to something that is global governance by the World Trade Organization, for example, or what.

I think that's accurate in a description of the current world, but that's precisely what I'm proposing to change.

Yeah. Tell us why it's necessary and what it means to have global governance. Then you've got some consensus that has so far been elusive between states.

Part of the problem we have in the world is that the only governments we have globally is international governance. And this is nothing new, it goes back to the treaty of Westphalia in 1648. All of international law is founded on the notion of law being between nations international. The only political actors are the nation states. This is part of the problem. What I'm proposing is not that we abolish nation states, I think they serve a great deal of value. I'm opposed to having some world government superimposed on the planet, but I do believe we need to begin going around nation states in governing ourselves. The problems that we confront and are not addressing are problems that in many cases transcend the artificial lines on the map that delineate national borders. Climate change knows no national border. Biodiversity loss knows no national border. Habitat loss, same.

These are global problems. These are planetary problems, if you will. And I think we need to begin addressing them on a global and planetary basis. Much of this involves looking at our relationship with nature in an entirely different way, but it also involves seeing ourselves in a different way. I don't propose that we discard our national identities. I think there's great value in the diversity we have among nearly 200 countries, and the diversity we have within these countries. That's the source of much human creativity. But we need to start seeing humanity as one, and we need to start acting accordingly. We're not doing that. It's only if we begin to do that, that we can come together and truly cooperate to address these challenges that know national borders.

Yeah. We'll come back to that more, because you may be aware I wrote a book on the biosphere over 25 years ago, so I'm with you on some of these global framing issues. But we'll come back to that in a little bit.

I know you are, Paul.

Yeah. I was like, that's a deep cut. That's a deep cut.

Policy Prompt is produced by the Center for International Governance Innovation. CIGI is a nonpartisan think tank based in Waterloo, Canada, with an international network of fellows, experts, and contributors. CIGI tackles the governance challenges and opportunities of data and digital technologies, including AI and their impact on the economy, security, democracy, and ultimately our societies. Learn more at CIGIonline.org.

James, as you talk about the current failures of democracy and why it's wanting, and low trust and how we can find ways to maybe go around it or supersede the governance systems-

Well, I'm not proposing going around democracy. I'm proposing going around nation states.

Okay.

With the sortition circles I propose that we establish in every international institution, I propose that pools there from which we randomly select the people who will serve on these circles and be decision-makers have nothing whatsoever to do with their national identities.

Right.

The people in these pools would be in the pools solely as people, as members of the human race. They would be from one country or another. And if you did it randomly, they would reflect a percentage that would mirror the percentage of the overall global population in a particular country. But if you were selected in one of these pools and you happened to be a Canadian, you would not be acting as a Canadian in that role. You would be acting as a member of the human race, as humanity. We all have to be from somewhere.

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. We do.

And when I was a judge in Geneva, when we stepped across the threshold of the door of the appellate body, we shed our nationality. And that's what I'm proposing we do with all of these randomly selected circles of participation, circles for the future, circles for nature, that I would create building on the whole wealth of experiments ongoing now in tens of thousands of endeavors worldwide in democratic participation.

Let me drill a little bit into that idea of like, so you're this jury duty-like selection happens and you've got sometimes great candidates. Like you do with juries, right? Would there be some ability to throw people out of the jury? Because obviously some people are just not able to weigh-in on some of these issues, right? And I know that can sound... Yeah?

I have a whole chapter in the book answering this question.

Yeah. What is the answer?

First of all, I would have all of these people be volunteers. They would number into the millions, even at the outset. And into the many millions as the sample pools grew over time with the success of these endeavors, but they would be volunteers. This is also, by the way, how it was in ancient Athens. Now, one could argue that this would diminish the randomness by some iota, and maybe that would be the case. Yet, I don't think anyone should be coerced into doing anything. I agree with Pericles on this, and Cleisthenes, who invented democracy. And so I would have volunteers.

I would also establish a process in which there would be training. The individuals who were chosen, would be chosen to serve on these decision making circles of participation would be decision makers for a period of a year, but they would serve for a period of two years. The first nine months would be a period of training in which they would have an opportunity to educate themselves, and opportunities would be given to them to do so. And I go on a great length about how information would be requested, information would be provided, how transparent everything would be. How we would have ethical rules of conduct that would bar lobbying of any kind that would keep this process from being corrupted in any way, unlike our current political process democratically. And then, after nine months of training they would serve for a year, and then there would be a three-month period of accountability in which it would be confirmed that they had in fact complied with the rules.

Right. Complex system. Complex. There's some oversight. Can you say something about that? Who are the overseers, the trainers, who's ensuring?

Well, you would have experts involved, but we would not have rule by experts. The important thing is that the people in the circles themselves would make decisions. I would not even allow experts to make specific recommendations. I would simply have them provide information. And who the experts would be who would provide these services would depend on the nature of the endeavor itself. Is this a circle of participation for the World Trade Organization? Is it one for the IMF? Is it one for the United Nations Environment Program? Is it one for the climate? And there, the process of selecting the experts could be very similar to that, which has been used for some time in selecting the members of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. There's an entire procedure there to make certain that the people who are chosen really do have expertise, that there's a variety of expertise. They don't act in ways they should not in trying to influence the process. This can all be done.

But the key is to have the decision-makers make the decisions themselves. And in my view, ordinary people are capable of making hard and difficult decisions. If we don't believe that, then I'm sorry, we're not really Democrats. We're half Democrats. If you don't believe that ordinary people are capable of governing themselves, then you may be a fine person, but you're not a Democrat. You don't believe in democracy.

It's empowered decision-making.

You might believe in some quasi democracy and some variation of democracy, but you do not believe in self-rule, which is the true core of genuine democracy.

Is that self-rule the core lesson you want a reader to pull forward from ancient Athens?

Yes.

You've been mentioning that and some philosophers and thinkers. You're saying yes. Yeah. Are there other lessons from Athenian direct democracy that should be reclaimed or revisited now? Are there any elements that should be left behind?

First of all, it must be said at the outset, and I say this every time I talk about the book, and I say it at length in the book. The original democracy in ancient Athens was considerably less than perfect. First of all, half of the people of Attica were women and they were not allowed to participate as citizens in the democracy.

Next, especially because of Athens engagement in trade, there were many foreign immigrants, called metics, who lived and worked in Athens. They were not allowed to become citizens. Aristotle was not a citizen, he could not participate as a citizen. And then, of course, far from least, there were tens of thousands of enslaved people. All of that must be said, but it's always important. I was taught by a great historian named Sivan Woodward when I was in graduate school at Yale to look not at where people were in the past, but at the direction in which they were going. And the Athenians, unlike hundreds of other city states in Greece, somehow started going in the right way. I call this The Path from the Pnyx, the hillside where democracy was born near the Acropolis and Athens. Still there. This was the path of democratic participation.

And for the minority of people who lived in Attica, who were citizens, the male freemen who were 18 years or older, there was a direct democracy that was in many ways the truest democracy the world has yet see. And this is the part of the Athenian experience that I think we can draw from in reforming our own democratic governance today, because it was genuine self-rule. In the assembly, all the citizens had an equal right to speak, an equal right to vote. Not every one of them, by any means, showed up every time the assembly met, but they allowed the right to be there and to make their view heard. They were equal before the law. This is a commonplace phrase now, but the Athenians invented it 2,500 years ago.

And then, in implementing the decisions they made in the assembly and in resolving disputes that arose about their decisions in the Athenian courts, these Athenians citizens relied exclusively on sortition, on random selection. So much so, that classicists tell us that during a lifetime about one-third of all Athenian citizens served at least once in one of the governing bodies that administered the Athenian city state. Think about that. If that were the United States of America, I would be saying that more than 100 million Americans during their lifetime served in an executive position of some kind in the government of the United States of America.

There's another link there that I have to jump in on, and that is that many countries grapple with this idea of national service, whether it's a national military service or some civilian service, coast guard and things. North America has always rejected that idea, because that can help build what you're describing, the idea that there's something you should do for the country. Right?

In 1984, my mentor, the former governor of Florida, Reubin Askew, who was also United States trade representative, ran for President of the United States. He did not win. But many of the ideas he advanced in the 1980s became the Clinton-Gore ideas of the 1990s. One of them did not, and that was the idea of national service. Askew proposed mandatory national service. And he proposed that young people, young Americans, be given the option of either military or non-military service in fulfilling that mandate. I have always supported that. I still do. We have not yet done that in the United States. I should add that this is a part of the notion of strong democracy, which I discuss at some length in the book. And it's part of what John Dewey called a living democracy.

The idea is that in a living democracy, democracy becomes a form of action. And naturally, the action tends towards service. That doesn't necessarily mean working for the government in some capacity. It may mean my late grandmother serving 60 years in the nursery of the Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, the point where generations of children remembered her and she played a role in helping raise them. This is service.

My life is devoted not to politics, but service. And there are many ways to serve. I served by serving in politics for a while. I served by being a jurist for a while. I've served in many other ways. And it's that type of human action. Hannah Arendt called it that is much needed.

Now, what we need to do in reclaiming a democracy is to act. I'm certainly supportive of a lot of the protests that are occurring in my country. But we have to do more than protest, we have to take action. For example, in my hometown of Orlando, many people are suffering right now because of the governmental shutdown that we've had, and the shutdown of some of our food programs and food subsidies. Many citizens are coming together to gather food to fill that gap, working outside the government. This to me is democracy. It's part of a living democracy. Democracy is not just voting once in a while.

Let me go in a different direction here on new technologies, which are an important part of this working, of your vision working. On the one hand, AI, digital platforms, and other things are in a way eating democracy for lunch right now. They're undermining the clarity of decision-making, of false information. On the other hand, they're empowering certain things. Is there a way that you see the harnessing of some of these new technologies as being something that could boost up your idea and the likelihood of it catching on and working? Do you see a technology track there?

The basic question about AI, Paul, is whether it enhances us or replaces us. This is true in the workforce, it's true in all kinds of other ways. We're talking here about the democratic process. There are ways we can use AI to facilitate a more effective democratic process. For example, we were talking earlier about marshaling information for citizens who are randomly selected to serve on circles of participation in making decisions about what democracies are going to do, what international institutions are going to do. Rightly used, AI can help facilitate the provision of that information. Right now, of course, you cannot rely on AI to give you correct information. That's a bit of a wrinkle in the current technology.

But I am not one of those who believes that we can simply allow AI to conduct democracy. I've heard some people argue that we should simply cede governance to artificial intelligence and then we could go on our merry way to enjoy our lives. I don't think so.

Who are they? Who are those people?

I don't think so. Nor am I someone who believes that we should make decisions on Zoom calls. I'm speaking right now online with friends talking about shared thoughts and ideas. I have a great deal of confidence that there is a place for this, but I don't believe that democratic deliberations should be conducted online. I believe that democratic deliberations should only be conducted face-to-face.

Interesting. Interesting.

And that's why I've structured my participatory circles in the way that I have. Because once you've been through the process of selection, you end up with about 150 people sitting down together in the same room at the same time, face to face, to deliberate. Participation is essential, but so too is deliberation. Participation without deliberation can end up being mob rule. Deliberation without participation can end up being elitist rule of democracy.

Well, that's really my previous book, Trade Links.

Okay. Okay.

And I am the last person on the planet that you're going to find who is going to tell you that we don't need rules. Think about traffic lights. We have traffic lights in the United States, we have them in Canada. Generally speaking, when the lights turn red, people stop. When the lights turn green, people go. Why do they do that? Well, they do that in part because that's the only way for the system to work, and most people want the system to work. There's also ultimately the threat that they'll get a ticket and pay a fine. Or worse, be thrown in jail if they do not. There are rules and they are enforceable.

Our goal is human freedom. Freedom is only possible within a framework of rules. Freedom is only possible within the rule of law. This is not an original thought with me, this is John Locke. But I think he was right. What you end up with if you do not have the rule of law is not freedom, but license. And what you end up with if you do not have the rule of law is might makes right. I don't think we're approaching the limits of a rule-based system. If we are, we're in real trouble. I think we're approaching the limits of what we can tolerate as damage to a rule-based system. We must have a rule-based system. This is true of traffic lights, it's true of world trade. It's true of human rights.

Right. I think that in terms of a last discussion here, or question, I think it's appropriate to cite something from the last chapter of your book. Which, I think it's a perennial issue or statement, but I think it's fitting here and I've got a question attached to it. I'm going to quote you here by saying, "Sometimes we must see something many times before we can see it for the first time. We are living as though we are looking for a path we cannot see, yet the path we seek is right there before us if only we will allow ourselves to see it." Now, that is a perennial thing that relates to many issues. But in this case, what is it that's going to open our eyes? Is there still some prod or trigger? Is it that-

In the context of The Path from the Pnyx, the book I've just written and published, what we need to see is the path itself. And the path is democratic participation. But that particular passage in the book is also a foreshadowing of what I plan to write about next, which is how we actually create a sustainable world. And there, I don't think we can engage in the act of creation unless until we first see that it can be done, that the world can be different from what it is. And that's what I'm thinking about and reading about and writing about.

It's an evolution. It's a different... It's a new phase, in a way.

I have some friends who say that my most recent book is actually the third book in a trilogy. The trilogy being my books, The Willing World, Trade Links, and Democracy for a Sustainable World: The Path from the Pnyx. But there may be a fourth book in which I will further elaborate on my thinking about how we can begin to see a different world and how we can begin to make that world.

We'll stay tuned. Thanks so much for your time.

Well, thank you. And again, I'm very proud to be a global fellow of CIGI, and thankful for this opportunity and for the chance to be prodded into answering these questions.

With our democracy, Vass, what are your thoughts about where this might be going? What are you thinking about?

I think that we are so focused. You and I are in Canada. You have the international lens. I think certain economies are so focused on themselves right now and this defensive approach that it's the perfect and almost a subversive time to think about how we work together as a global economy towards these goals, and what else is possible from a democratic standpoint. That's where James blows my mind a little bit. I think he's daring to say something that's really, really big at a time that's really noisy and really quite scary. How about you?

Yeah, it's a great way to put it. I think I totally credit the book as well for being provocative about the really, really big questions, taking us back to Ancient Greece. I like to think that there is a model going forward where participatory democracy is now possible in a digital square in the way that it was done. Now we've seen the downsides of the digital square as well, right? This is not a given.

I think there's a broader question about, and it almost goes back to the Fukuyama discourse around the end of history and things. And it's like, is democracy inevitable? I don't think that it is. I think that's been proven that it's not the case. But I think that democracy, when it works, is the best system. The problem is when democracy doesn't deliver equality in economic and social terms enough, it starts to deteriorate. And we're seeing a lot of that right now. Democracy's on the ropes.

But when it's delivering as it should, that system's working. And if you can bring in the participatory part through this digital town square, then maybe we're in a new good space. Which is, I think, the bottom line of what he's trying to say. There's a possible way forward of doing this and we should make it happen. I agree with that, but it's a tough road. Democracy is under threat right now, there's no question about it.

And eroding. And the number, as he points out, the number of democracies that we have right now in the world, that number is going down on the graph, which is also concerning. And maybe also a reason why we have to be thinking bigger about it all.

Yeah. The number's going down on the graph. And the numbers on the graph of just, how did you score on your democracy, are also going down in a relative sense to this pure democracy model. That even the democracies themselves are going down on the scoreboards, even if they're not dropping off. Yeah, it's an important time to pivot towards some new energy in the democracy space.

Well, I'm glad we got to speak with him.

Yeah.