"In 2019, a German journalist named Bastian Berbner wrote an article about an experiment in Ireland called a “citizens’ assembly.” Starting in 2013, “normal” Irish people — mailmen, baristas — were recruited from across the country to sit together in a ballroom for weeks to debate critical political issues. These assemblies were purposefully not referendums; the leaders who came up with the idea felt that referendums tended to push people toward divisiveness and partisanship. The way to overcome that would be a democratic intervention that felt far more intimate: a project where you actually conversed with your political adversaries."