In a magnificent novel by Bruno Arpaia entitled
Il ghost dei fatti
, Sir d'Arcy Osborne, British ambassador to the Vatican, writes in 1943: “The principles and rules of democracy are foreign to the nature of the Italian people.
The great mass of Italians are individualistic and politically irresponsible, and are concerned only with their most immediate economic problems.
"Mussolini was right when he said that Italians have always been poor people."
These words are an excellent example of a certain British supremacism, but, Mussolini aside, they prefigure other almost identical ones that many luminaries would later utter in places where, such as Italy at the end of the war, the possibility of establishing a democracy was being considered: in the Spain of Franco's agony, in Latin America that in the eighties began to free itself from military dictatorships, in the countries of Eastern Europe that, shortly after, tried to emerge from more than half a century of communism, or during the Spring Arab.
It is true that some of these democratic revolutions were frustrated, or only half-succeeded;
It is also true that, in reality, no one is prepared for democracy.
This is not a gift, or a grace;
It is a daily achievement, very demanding: the proof is that it is enough to take it for granted to put it in danger.
The natural thing, let's be clear, is submission: being free costs a tremendous effort.
It has always been like this, but now, far from the optimism of the beginning of the century, when democracy seemed the only possible political horizon (that was Fukuyama's famous “end of history”), the evidence has become blatant.
On the one hand because, as a result of the 2008 crisis, democracy has had a fierce competitor: that form of authoritarianism that we call national populism;
on the other, because democracies show symptoms of fatigue, if not exhaustion.
Democracy urgently needs to be renewed, and it can only be done in one way: with more democracy.
This is what lotocracy proposes, a type of democracy that defends the election of our political representatives by lottery;
It is not a panacea, but, as I recently wrote in this column, managed intelligently, cautiously and progressively — read
Against the elections
, by David van Reybrouck—can contribute to permanent political regeneration and become an antidote to the madness caused by power, an incentive for all of us to take responsibility for what belongs to everyone and, perhaps, the only hope It is likely that the dirty word democracy will recover its clean original meaning: power of the people.
“So we are going to elect our Prime Minister by lottery?” professional politicians will immediately mock, terrified at the prospect of being left without a job;
The question recalls others that were asked a century or a century and a half ago: “So are we going to allow the vote of a professor to count the same as that of a worker?”;
or better: “So are we going to allow women to vote too?”
The lotocracy does not propose that the President of the Government be chosen by lot (or suppress elections, nor the politicians elected in elections - who would coexist with those chosen by lot - nor even the political parties, the Gordian knot of current democracy), but Let us recognize that it would not be easy to elect by lottery leaders as stupid, uneducated and cynical as some we have suffered.
A utopia, lotocracy?
No more than universal suffrage was recently.
Sir d'Arcy Osborne was an understatement: we all, and not just Italians, tend towards irresponsibility;
It is a suicidal tendency, which is counteracted by acquiring more and more responsibility.
That is what lotocracy consists of: progressively but unstoppably opening up governance to the governed in order to build a more legitimate, egalitarian, fair and effective system, and to gradually get closer to the Aristotelian ideal: that citizens be alternative rulers. and governed.
And that is what I believe the next revolution should consist of.
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