To achieve democracy, we must have no elections.

6 April 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On April 5th, Reuters headlined “Anti-Trump protesters gather in Washington, other US cities” and reported: “Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., and across the U.S. on Saturday, part of some 1,200 demonstrations that were expected to form the largest single day of protest against President Donald Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk since they launched a rapid-fire effort to overhaul government and expand presidential authority.”

Scientific studies have, by now, proven conclusively that America is ruled only by its billionaires, NOT at all by its voters. (Click onto that link to find the evidence.) In addition, a major international polling that compared in each of the individual countries the percentage of respondents who answered “Yes” to the question “Does your Government represent you, or not?” showed that in the U.S.-and-allied countries, the percentages who answered “Yes” were far lower than for the average country, and that all 11 of the lowest-scoring (or most dictatorial) countries on that list were in the U.S.-and-allied group. Furthermore, a “NATO-Affiliated Poll in 53 Countries Finds Chinese the Most Think Their Country Is a Democracy”. That NATO poll found 83% of the residents in China said “Yes” to “My country is democratic.” It scored #1 of the 53 nations on this. U.S. was worse than average, and was tied at #s 40&41, out of the 53 nations, with Colombia, at 49%. Right above them was Saudi Arabia, at 50%. That’s what the NATO-affiliated poll found. (For some reason, they didn’t publicize it.)

If the richest are the ACTUAL rulers of a country, then one should expect that wealth-inequality in that country will rise over time. A study by Caixa bank, “Inequality: an analysis over time” used income (instead of the more important measure, wealth) to measure “inequality” and found that

in the case of developed economies, … income inequality measured by the Gini index has increased over the past three decades in countries such as the US, Germany and even France (see second chart).[1] In the case of Spain, this has not been the case: inequality in 2022 was lower than it was three decades ago, although it has suffered marked increases in times of crisis and remains higher than in France and Germany. A similar pattern emerges from alternative measures that focus on the extremes of the income distribution. The percentage of total income that is received by the top 1% of earners increased in the US from 14.7% in 1990 to 20.9% in 2022, and in France it rose from 9.3% to 12.7% (see third chart). Once again, the situation in Spain has been different, as the percentage of total income received by the top 1% in 2022 stood at 10.0%, 1.7 pps lower than the level of 1990.

The U.S. is the most-studied country of all — and the ONLY country which has been virtually PROVEN to be an actual dictatorship (by its extremely wealthiest) — and it has, indeed, experienced RISING income-inequality. But what about America’s WEALTH-inequality (which is even MORE important)? On February 8th, Visual Capitalist, using figures from the Federal Reserve, headlined “Visualized: The 1%’s Share of U.S. Wealth Over Time (1989-2024)”, and presented a graph showing its rise from 22.8% in 1989 to 30.8% in 2024 — a 35% increase during those 35 years.

Corruptness in Government, caused by politicians’ corruption by their billionaire mega-donors, has (according to all of the scientific studies, which have covered the time-period from 1980 to the present) been in control over the U.S. Government, and it has been especially enormously effective at increasing the billionaires’ wealth at the expense of everyone else’s wealth. This is NOT a democracy. It is what the ancient Greeks called “oligarchy” which was their term for what in subsequent millennia has been known as “aristocracy”: rule by only the richest. (Yet another term for it is “plutocracy.”) It is one of the two types of group-dictatorship, the other being theocracy: rule by clerics. (The other type of dictatorship is “autocracy”: one-person rule, such as by Hitler — who won that position because Germany’s wealthiest funded his political victory and promoted it in and through their ‘news’-media — so, it culminated Germany’s aristocracy. Whether America will soon reach that point isn’t yet clear.)

Ancient Athens started trying to be democratic by having elections by the public, but then found that the wealthiest, or “oligarchs” came to rule, and that Athens’s Government was an “oligarchy” INSTEAD of the democracy they wanted; so, they added to elections “klerosis” or selection by lottery, and ultimately the Romans in their Latin language called it “sortition,” but what had actually ruled in Athens had been not ONLY sortition (lotteries) but ALSO elections; and, consequently, there still remained opportunities for corruption. Consequently, any political ‘scientist’ who says that Athens’s ‘democracy’ was by sortition would be correct ONLY in the sense that “sortition” can include elections by the public, but would be incorrect if the term “sortition” is being EQUATED WITH the selection of public officials by lottery — purely random means.

Whether such corruption contributed to the downfall of Athens is not known, but certainly (according to Thucydides paragraph 95) the decision by “the Athenians” to lead an empire did. And in U.S. history, that same decision (i.e., for America’s then-nascent empire to enormously expand into a full-fledged empire) occurred on 25 July 1945, as I have explained here and here, and it certainly DID produce the “military-industrial complex” and the rest of America’s decline into rampant corruption and resulting corruptness, which has produced the headline “Anti-Trump protesters gather in Washington, other US cities”. So: all of those links explain how America has, since its peak in 1945, degenerated into empire — even into hegemony — and so, ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991 and the supposed ‘enemy’ (that was the empire’s excuse) no longer even existed, the billionaires have seen their fortunes soaring, while the growth of America’s economy has sunk to below that of the global economy — this is super-thriving American billionaires along with increasingly struggling American public. Democracy (rule by the public) does not cause this: aristocracy (rule by the corrupters) does. It must be ended.

Consequently, I propose:

Selection of the U.S. President should be done by lottery (among all adults) for the legislatures, and that lottery-selected legislators would then have the power to expel from their midst any of them that a two-thirds majority of them vote to expel, and that the entire body will, by majority vote, appoint judges, and will select as the head-of-state, one among themselves who has served in the federal legislature for five years or more. There would be no term-limits, and Parties would be illegal. There would be no elections. The country would, over time, come to be ruled by professional legislators, who will not be competing against each other. Elections will be replaced by lottery-draws. There will be no “campaigns” to fund. Consequently, over time, the members of the legislature will come to know the strengths and weaknesses of each of the other members. All of the incentives that have caused America to be ruled by a tiny aristocracy of billionaires will have been removed. Just think of it: a country in which billionaires must adhere to the laws, and have no control OVER the laws. THAT would be a truly democratic revolution, even though the public would never vote. It would be a revolutionary revolution. Replacing elections with lotteries is the only way I can think of to get us out of the present situation in which Governments keep going from bad to even worse and are now — throughout at least the U.S. empire — incredibly atrocious. To anyone who opposes this, I ask “And what is YOUR proposed solution?” Whatever that ‘solution’ would be, will be far preferred by the billionaires, over what I have proposed here, which would end the “gravy train” of ‘the elite’.

This is my idea of a political left that’s NOT controlled by billionaires. And as for the political right, that has ALWAYS been representing ONLY the aristocracy — so, a ‘right-wing democracy’ is a self-contradiction: democracy can exist ONLY in a country that authentically has equality before the law — NO one is above the law (there IS no aristocracy).

Here are arguments that I have received against this proposal, and my responses to those:

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"There seems no attempt to identify qualities that might be useful in legislators." Your presumption there is that competency instead of corruptness is the biggest problem with our legislators. I would argue to the contrary if I were to answer that, but it would take too long.

"Parties are outlawed and I see what's possibly the motivation for that but its impractical and trouble making: parties are essentially simply collections of people with the same ideologies. The exist by nature we could say." No, that's false. In America, a political Party such as the DNC is a private corporation that has no legal obligation to voters but only to the individuals who are the Members of the Democratic National Committee, who control the DNC. See https://web.archive.org/web/20210919233328/https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2746&context=lawreview a law-review article about the 2017 case "Wilding v. DNC Services Corp." which concluded that a political Party may, if the Members wish, violate the Committee's Charter and public promises and even the votes cast, in order to rig its primaries. That is allowed. It's NOT illegal in America. Of course, the Members self-select each other, and their obsession to serve their megadonors drives their decisions regardless of what the voters in their primary elections want or whom they vote for. Our primary elections are a total charade. Once RFK Jr. knew this, he quit running against Biden. …

What I linked, there, to, is a lengthy article about the legal case that was brought against the DNC for its having violated the Party's charter and public promises by rigging its primaries so that Sanders would lose to Biden in the allocationing of delegates to the National Convention REGARDLESS of how voters in those primaries voted, and the article’s author rejects the outcome in the Judge's ruling which said that the owners of the DNC, its Members, have no obligation whatsoever to the voters. The author said on page 25 “the law should impose on party committee members the fiduciary duties of loyalty and care so that they act in the interest of the entire party.” But that is just his sentiment, NOT existing U.S. law. Your statement that “parties are essentially simply collections of people with the same ideologies. The exist by nature we could say.” is false because they exist by U.S. law and NOT “by nature.” Furthermore, since it is by now obvious that what the voters want is actually irrelevant to the Party's decision as to which candidate in its Presidential primaries will win its nomination, your statement that “parties are essentially simply collections of people with the same ideologies” is likewise false, because in a Party-based (i.e., elections-based) system, what the voters want is irrelevant — they can be, and are, manipulated by the billionaires.

“What you are calling for is a Dictatorship of the Midwits! … In Plato’s Republic, Socrates depicts Athenian democracy (Sortition) as almost the worst form of rule, although superior to tyranny, it is inferior to every other political arrangement.”” You mistake the cause for the rottenness of the Government that we have since FDR died on 12 April 1945. You are assuming that our legislators are incompetent — you are saying that if they had instead been randomly drawn from amongst the American public, then the result wold be intensified incompetence "a Dictatorship of the Midwits!" You are assuming that they would be even MORE incompetent.

The ACTUAL cause for the rottenness of this Government has NOT been its incompetence, but instead its corruptness, which results from its corruption by the individuals whose corporations etc. were the megadonors that got those corrupt officials elected by the voters into office. …

Plato — the founding father of fascism even before Mussolini and his teacher Pareto -- said that randomly assigning people to positions of power, regardless of their competence or experience, produces chaos because the average person lacks the competence and experience in order to produce anything else than chaos. Plato despised any form of democracy, but he considered the worst form of all is to select legislators by means of a lottery.

The problem with that view is its FALSE ASSUMPTION that the problem with any democracy is the inadequacy — the lack of expertise and of intelligence — of the average person; NOT the corruptness of the legislators that results from the corruption of them by the political megadonors who had placed them into those public offices.

Of course, down through the Ages, aristocracies have agreed with Plato, because his lies favored them. But the reality is that selection of legislators by means of public elections has produced results that are worse than if public officials had gotten their office by lottery INSTEAD OF by any public election at all.

Plato wanted rule by "philosopher kings" who have been accredited by academies that receive their funding from the aristocracy. Plato was the ideal philosopher for aristocrats. It is therefore interesting that you cite him as your 'authority'.

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Some people call this manipulation by the billionaires (or by the aristocracy) the “manufacture of consent,” as Walter Lippmann introduced that phrase in his 1922 book Public Opinion (page 248):

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough.

The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than on rule of thumb. And so, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication, the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place.

Written in the wake of WW1, that book by Lippmann ignored the implications of this, and he closed his book with affirmation of the refinement of professionalized lying, believing that the truth from God would inevitably win out in the end, because the same advancements in technology would overcome it:

Great as was the horror, it was not universal. There were corrupt, and there were incorruptible. There was muddle and there were miracles. There was huge lying. There were men with the will to uncover it. It is no judgment, but only a mood, when men deny that what some men have been, more men, and ultimately enough men, might be. You can despair of what has never been. You can despair of ever having three heads, though Mr. Shaw has declined to despair even of that. But you cannot despair of the possibilities that could exist by virtue of any human quality which a human being has exhibited. And if amidst all the evils of this decade, you have not seen men and women, known moments that you would like to multiply, the Lord himself cannot help you.

He ignored to understand that ultimately the wealthiest in society, the ultimate employers, would be the manufacturers of consent if there is a Government that is elected by the public. He ignored to understand that what has “improved enormously in technic,” and become professionalized into the Public Relations industries, is controlled by their beneficiaries, and NOT by their victims.

What amazes me is that people who trust in God and believe that random events aren’t that but are instead demonstrations of God’s will, nonetheless REJECT that belief when it comes to political rule via lotteries instead of via elections. What can be a purer public demonstration of their hypothesis that a God exists than a public demonstration that an entirely lottery-based political system such as I have proposed succeeds in improving the country? Yet they are repelled at my proposal, because it violates the systems (elections-based systems) that have worked so phenomenally well for the billionaires.

An extremely important and thoroughly scientific empirical study in the social sciences was published on 7 April 2018 in the Journal of Behavioral Addictions, “Placing your faith on the betting floor: Religiosity predicts disordered gambling via gambling fallacies”.

Its “Results” section said that:

Religiosity was not significantly associated with disordered gambling, B = −0.06, F(1, 3205) = 0.09, p = .77, R² = .001. However, religiosity significantly predicted gambling fallacies, B = 0.02, F(1, 3957) = 33.52, p < .001, R² = .01, such that individuals high in religiosity reported greater amount of gambling fallacies. Additionally, gambling fallacies were significantly associated with disordered gambling, B = 0.25, F(1, 3328) = 28.97, p < .001, R² = .01. As the hypothesized model specified that the effect of the religiosity (the independent variable) on symptoms of disordered gambling (the dependant variable) is indirect, we proceeded to test the full mediation model. Doing so is in line with Hayes (2009, 2013), MacKinnon, Fairchild, and Fritz (2007), and others who argue that assessment of indirect effects via bootstrapping is the most valid test of mediation. To this end, we once again used Preacher and Hayes’ (2004) bootstrapping method with 5,000 iterations. As predicted, the indirect effect of religiosity on disordered gambling severity was estimated to lie between 0.001 and 0.002 with 95% CI (b = 0.001, SE < 0.001) (Figure 2).

Its closing section, titled “Implications,” said that:

Previous research has found that individuals high in religious participation were less likely to report gambling problems (Hoffmann, 2000). However, among people of faith who already engage in gambling activities, religiosity may increase the risk of disordered gambling. We speculated that the link between religiosity and disordered gambling may be the result of religiosity facilitating the development of gambling fallacies, which have been linked to the risk of disordered gambling. Inherent to religion is the belief that a higher power can intervene to positively influence the cause-effect relations on behalf of the devotee. Although a belief that cause-effect relations can be positively influenced may provide comfort to the religious, problems may develop when transferred to the gambling context. It would behoove researchers to determine which types of gambling fallacies people who are high in religiosity are likely to endorse (e.g., magical thinking and illusion of control). Such information may be helpful in the development of targeted interventions among this potentially vulnerable population.

Therefore, religious people are engaging in self-contradiction if they think that random events will help themselves against others but not others against themselves. They are logically required to support instead of to oppose replacing political elections by lotteries for the legislature, and selection of the head-of-state by those legislators.

Non-religious people will approach the problem here from a standpoint that is not mediated by any such self-contradiction. My arguments here have been addressed especially to them — the NON-religious. (However, these arguments have the same factuality regardless of one’s personal situation.)

The basic problem I identify as I had addressed in this exchange:

"There seems no attempt to identify qualities that might be useful in legislators." Your presumption there is that competency instead of corruptness is the biggest problem with our legislators. I would argue to the contrary if I were to answer that, but it would take too long.

The basic problem is not that our holders of public offices are incompetent, but goes far deeper: it is that they are corrupt. The current, electoral, system requires them to be. It must be replaced by a 100% lottery-based system.

The present 3,400-word article is my answer to the basic problem (of how to achieve a democracy).

I seek feedback on my proposed solution the problem, and if anyone can explain to me why my proposed solution CANNOT work, then I shall welcome THAT type of input, also. I can be reached at the.eric.zuesse@gmail.com. Any way to IMPROVE my proposal will be especially heartily welcomed, from ANYONE. (However, I will not respond to any ad-hominem comments; ONLY to ad-rem ones.)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.