[D66] The Case Against Democracy

[René Oudeweg]

(and the case against Government)

newyorker.com
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy>


  The Case Against Democracy

Caleb Crain
9-12 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Voter ignorance has worried political philosophers since Plato.

Roughly a third of American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From
each according to his ability to each according to his need” appears in
the Constitution. About as many are incapable of naming even one of the
three branches of the United States government. Fewer than a quarter
know who their senators are, and only half are aware that their state
has two of them.

Democracy is other people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled
the few, especially the few who consider themselves intellectuals.
Plato, one of the earliest to see democracy as a problem, saw its
typical citizen as shiftless and flighty:

    Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the flute; at other
    times, he drinks only water and is on a diet; sometimes he goes in
    for physical training; at other times, he’s idle and neglects
    everything; and sometimes he even occupies himself with what he
    takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully
educated guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractions—such as
family, money, and the inherent pleasures of naughtiness—he proposed
housing them in a eugenically supervised free-love compound where they
could be taught to fear the touch of gold and prevented from reading any
literature in which the characters have speaking parts, which might lead
them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and cockamamie
that many suspect Plato couldn’t have been serious; Hobbes, for one,
called the idea “useless.”

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth
century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or
intellectually demanding jobs. (In fact, in Mill’s day, select
universities had had their own constituencies for centuries, allowing
someone with a degree from, say, Oxford to vote both in his university
constituency and wherever he lived. The system wasn’t abolished until
1950.) Mill’s larger project—at a time when no more than nine per cent
of British adults could vote—was for the franchise to expand and to
include women. But he worried that new voters would lack knowledge and
judgment, and fixed on supplementary votes as a defense against ignorance.

In the United States, élites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants
tried to restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the first
literacy test for American voters. Although a New York Democrat
protested, in 1868, that “if a man is ignorant, he needs the ballot for
his protection all the more,” in the next half century the tests spread
to almost all parts of the country. They helped racists in the South
circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment and disenfranchise blacks, and even
in immigrant-rich New York a 1921 law required new voters to take a test
if they couldn’t prove that they had an eighth-grade education. About
fifteen per cent flunked. Voter literacy tests weren’t permanently
outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement
had discredited them.

Worry about voters’ intelligence lingers, however. Mill’s proposal, in
particular, remains “actually fairly formidable,” according to David
Estlund, a political philosopher at Brown. His 2008 book, “Democratic
Authority,” tried to construct a philosophical justification for
democracy, a feat that he thought could be achieved only by balancing
two propositions: democratic procedures tend to make correct policy
decisions, and democratic procedures are fair in the eyes of reasonable
observers. Fairness alone didn’t seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund
wrote, “why not flip a coin?” It must be that we value democracy for
tending to get things right more often than not, which democracy seems
to do by making use of the information in our votes. Indeed, although
this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does
have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya
Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other
scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another,
rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful
transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently
than other regimes do.

Still, democracy is far from perfect—“the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” as
Churchill famously said. So, if we value its power to make good
decisions, why not try a system that’s a little less fair but makes good
decisions even more often? Jamming the stub of the Greek word for
“knowledge” into the Greek word for “rule,” Estlund coined the word
“epistocracy,” meaning “government by the knowledgeable.” It’s an idea
that “advocates of democracy, and other enemies of despotism, will want
to resist,” he wrote, and he counted himself among the resisters. As a
purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections.

First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring
political judgment. This sounds extreme, but it’s a fairly common move
in political philosophy. After all, in debates over contentious issues,
such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the
planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. Truth “peremptorily
claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate,” Hannah Arendt pointed
out in this magazine, in 1967, “and debate constitutes the very essence
of political life.” Estlund wasn’t a relativist, however; he agreed that
politicians should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he
didn’t think a political theorist could avoid doing so.

The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some
citizens know more about good government than others. Estlund simply
didn’t find this plausible (maybe a political philosopher is
professionally disinclined to). The third and final option: deny that
knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, “You might
be right, but who made you boss?”

It’s a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy
on it, but he felt obliged to look for holes in his argument. He had a
sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably
/would/ perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the
resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged
groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be
underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade
could be given additional votes, in compensation.

By the end of Estlund’s analysis, there were only two practical
arguments against epistocracy left standing. The first was the
possibility that an epistocracy’s method of screening voters might be
biased in a way that couldn’t readily be identified and therefore
couldn’t be corrected for. The second was that universal suffrage is so
established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable
power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those
in the majority power over those in the minority. As defenses of
democracy go, these are even less rousing than Churchill’s shruggie.

<https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a20336>

“Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back, right?”

In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a
political philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlund’s hedging inside
out to create an uninhibited argument /for/ epistocracy. Against
Estlund’s claim that universal suffrage is the default, Brennan argues
that it’s entirely justifiable to limit the political power that the
irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To
counter Estlund’s concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the
public’s welfare is more important than anyone’s hurt feelings; after
all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify jurors who
are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlund’s worry about
demographic bias, Brennan waves it off. Empirical research shows that
people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social
Security no more strongly than the young do. Brennan suggests that since
voters in an epistocracy would be more enlightened about crime and
policing, “excluding the bottom 80 percent of white voters from voting
might be just what poor blacks need.”

Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsman’s
pleasure in upsetting pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights
may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating
once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New
Guinea. To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is
no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities
build character.

Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voter’s
cluelessness from the legal scholar Ilya Somin’s “Democracy and
Political Ignorance” (2013), which shows that American voters have
remained ignorant despite decades of rising education levels. Some
economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or
self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors. If the odds that
your vote will be decisive are minuscule—Brennan writes that “you are
more likely to win Powerball a few times in a row”—then learning about
politics isn’t worth even a few minutes of your time. In “The Myth of
the Rational Voter” (2007), the economist Bryan Caplan suggested that
ignorance may even be gratifying to voters. “Some beliefs are more
emotionally appealing,” Caplan observed, so if your vote isn’t likely to
do anything why not indulge yourself in what you want to believe,
whether or not it’s true? Caplan argues that it’s only because of the
worthlessness of an individual vote that so many voters look beyond
their narrow self-interest: in the polling booth, the warm, fuzzy
feeling of altruism can be had cheap.
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