Athens is a tiny community. And within that the citizens are the aristocrats who know each other by name. Ordinary residents are merchants or slaves.

Sure and when the US was founded the majority of residents were similarly not allowed to vote because voting was restricted voting to a minority of property-owning white males over the age of 21. Democracy has evolved from its Athenian origins, presumably sortition would as well.

I think their point was that it only worked because of such a cohort to randomly select from.

That was also my interpretation and why I made the point that democratic processes have evolved to account for a changing polity.

The US government could not be managed by Athenian sortition any more than it could be by Athenian direct democracy -- the citizenry is too different, the questions too complex.

However, just as the Romans evolved their original Athenian-style direct democracy into representative democracy as their empire grew and became more heterogeneous, sortition has similarly evolved into deliberative democracy.

Well I’m saying more than that.

There is no historical precedent for our democratic system. Not Romans, Greeks, or 13 colonies. Why cite them?

Nobody has ever had a system with 300 million people having almost direct voting while simultaneously having no definition of a citizen besides “born here”.

I’m skeptical. The Trump/Fetterman/RFK phenomenon is the fruit of this democracy, not an unlikely aberration.