<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#f9f9fa">
<p> </p>
<div id="toolbar" class="toolbar-container"> </div>
<div class="container" style="--line-height: 1.6em;" dir="ltr"
lang="en-US">
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element">(and the
case against Government)</div>
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><br>
</div>
<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"><a
class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-case-against-democracy">newyorker.com</a>
<h1 class="reader-title">The Case Against Democracy</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Caleb Crain</div>
<div class="meta-data">
<div class="reader-estimated-time" dir="ltr">9-12 minutes</div>
</div>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div data-journey-hook="client-content"
data-testid="BodyWrapper">
<div data-testid="GenericCallout">
<figure>
<p><span>Voter ignorance has worried political
philosophers since Plato.</span></p>
</figure>
</div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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 <em>would</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<div data-testid="GenericCallout">
<figure>
<div>
<p><span></span></p>
<div data-testid="responsive-cartoon"><a
data-event-click="{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a20336"}"
href="https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a20336"
rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><picture></picture></a>
<p><span>“Yours was the blue Prius with the two
stoners passed out in back, right?”</span></p>
</div>
</div>
</figure>
</div>
<p>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 <em>for</em> 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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div> </div>
</div>
</body>
</html>