This excerpt is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Democracy’s most radical, yet purist premise is people’s power as exercise of power, not simply consent to power. As I detail in my new book Politics Without Politicians, in classical Athens, governing was not the domain of a political class but a shared civic practice and a duty distributed in part on the basis of random selection (with frequent rotation). Additionally, whatever its profound exclusions in the definition of who counted as a citizen, the Athenian system was built on the idea that no citizen was too poor, too uneducated, or too timid to be deprived of a voice about common affairs. Democracy meant, in those days, ruling and being ruled in turn, as opposed to what it means today: regularly consenting, via elections, to never ruling and always being ruled by career politicians. At a moment when many Americans feel alienated from politics as something done by and for others, it seemed important to revisit a model that treated self-government as a lived, everyday responsibility.
