“Representation is Theft!” is a bi-weekly column critiquing electoral democracy and advocating for lottery-based sortition as a viable alternative.
Following an uncharacteristically eventful Democratic primary for the Ward 1 seat on the New Haven Board of Alders, traditionally reserved for a Yale College student from the local area, Elias Theodore, JE ’27 may now call this seat his own. His victory stemmed from a well-crafted campaign, which––instead of being based on clear policy goals––was founded on vague hopes for the future, personal charm, and sharp political strategizing aimed at compensating for his mediocrity. This effort was aided by his own rivals, Rhea McTiernan Huge, DC ’27 and Norah Laughter, PC ’26, whose campaigns’ inherent flaws would go on to benefit Theodore directly and indirectly, respectively. The result of the election is an obvious example of a core tool behind the political elite’s maintenance of the hidden coalition: the phenomenon of personality politics.
As prior readers may recollect, the political elite of “stable” representative democracies maintain power by forming hidden coalitions, which allows them to control the state’s monopoly on violence without sacrificing it over party politics. This monopoly, which comes with control over state apparatuses, allows the political elite to justify its control over said state apparatuses. One of the most effective of these justifications is the idea that serving in public office requires certain personality traits: natural charisma, sharp wit, and exemplary public speaking skills. These are all traits that society tells us are mandatory for anyone who seeks to directly participate in government. We are told that the halls of power are reserved for those who can show “popular appeal” through theatrics, as if the common person is supposed to be placated with buzzwords and faux inspiration, when in fact they desire actual reflection in governance.
If any candidate participating in the alder election needed these skills to win, it was certainly Theodore. A quick look at Theodore’s official platform reveals a hint of vagueness to his proposed actions that is characteristic of many Democrats; broad goals like “increase Yale’s engagement in the city” and “incentivize affordability” were suggested, but few concrete steps were laid out. The reason for this hesitancy became clear over time: Theodore’s censuring of local labor unions, hesitancy to more deeply criticize Yale’s administration, and refusal to explicitly accept the results of the Books Not Bombs referendum dogwhistled that he had few plans for his term, expecting to add the aldership to his resume before potentially scaling the political establishment, like many an American politician before him. While such a non-agenda may seem like a detriment, it worked in his favor, as he could focus more on what really matters: artificially curating a public image to best participate in personality politics.
Most people have too much going on in their professional and personal lives to care about closely following the political platforms of people they have never met. Yale students certainly fit into that category. Therefore, the common person will learn the most about electoral candidates from targeted media. Theodore capitalized on this phenomenon, curating a public image through social media posts and in-person events that highlighted personal stories, inspirational dreams, and relatable gags over anything substantive. Many Yalies, who could not be bothered to do more research than their classes required of them, saw these public performances and nothing more.
Of course, no personality-focused campaign can be successful without state apparatuses doing their job. Ideological state apparatuses, like the press, push narratives that justify a political elite’s existence; one of these is that an electoral system’s bias towards personality over substance is merely reflective of the elite’s “superiority” in appealing to the common person. The student press played along, focusing on the candidates’ personality and public performances rather than what they actually platformed. This role was fulfilled by this very magazine; the Herald’s editors-in-chief endorsed Theodore last week on the grounds of his engaging wit and inspiring anecdotes in the debate, making little mention of concrete policy goals, unwittingly playing into one of the primary narratives the elite uses to justify its separation from the masses in the form of the hidden coalition.
As much as Theodore’s conquering of personality politics worked in his favor, the fumbling of his two rivals certainly played a role as well. The most obvious example is that of McTiernan Huge, a fellow liberal candidate. Despite the stark similarity between the two platforms, McTiernan Huge performed far worse at the debate, with the Herald reporting that her quiet tone “got almost every answer swallowed” by the venue’s ambient humming. McTiernan Huge’s failure to truly embrace personality politics led to her downfall, as she bestowed upon Theodore the support of her voters and the former alderperson in a last-minute dropout.
We must also address the other example of Norah Laughter, an explicit socialist with the backing of those labor unions that Theodore critiqued. Perhaps she was doomed from the start as a non-local; being from Kentucky is certainly not the same as being from Connecticut, and her rivals targeted this weakness throughout the election. Nevertheless, she stayed in the race all the same, a persistence which seemed to reveal a disregard for the importance of such concerns. No matter the concrete policy plans Laughter advocated, Theodore could simply highlight his New Haven origin—an identity-based argument that was perfect for the age of personality politics.
In the end, the reliance Theodore gave to personality politics in conjunction with his neoliberal non-agenda revealed his nature as a politician: I expect him to be yet another cog in the machine, a satisfied participant in the hidden coalition that the Democrats currently seek to preserve. As the Democrats silently move to the right, will he speak out as academic freedoms at Yale are further curtailed, as Avelo displaces New Haveners and aids in transportation to Trump’s concentration camps, and as everyday life becomes less survivable for the city’s common people? His electoral victory is a success story for the political establishment, and plays a minute local role in sustaining their existence with lies about what a member of the “political class” is meant to be like. The way we free ourselves from such lies, of course, is to accept that there should be no separate political class at all.
A primary feature of a democratic state born from sortition—the selection of public officials at random—is that there is no longer any distinction between the makeup of the legislature and the makeup of the citizenry. Having the interests of the common person reflected in government will no longer require professionally tailoring a candidate to humiliate themself in a competition of personality. Through the statistical law of large numbers, the interests of the 99% will have 99% of the representation of the legislature; no one person will be able to misportray these interests, for they will already be reflected, and these interests will be undiluted by any barriers implemented by elections. The contemporary requirements for “personality politics” from both the hidden coalition and the nature of elections themselves will be rendered unenforceable. In New Haven, no “Yale Alder” would be required; again, through the law of large numbers, Yalies would get all the representation they deserve, and nothing more.
Theodore rose to the top by playing into the image of the ideal politician: supposedly superior in personality and wit, thus being able to quietly “represent” the people without doing much representing at all. When the people see past the limitations of representative democracy and institute sortition as the basis for humanity’s self-organization, self-identifying political leaders like Theodore, as well as Huge and Laughter, will have to share control over this self-organization with everybody else.
