“Democracy is the most complicated and most burdensome system of government recorded in the history of humanity.” (Konstantin Pobedonostsev)
As all decent, responsible, civic-minded Americans prepare to cast their ballots in what is once again the most important election of anyone’s lifetime, an election in which Democracy itself is at stake and in which the choice is between an alleged Fascist and a purported Marxist, it is time to ask ourselves: is the democratic charade worth it? Is it even fooling anyone anymore?
When it comes to the democratic process, skeptics abound; they provide food for thought to sustain us as we wait for hours in the inevitable voting lines on November 5. I have sampled the anti-democracy buffet and have chosen a few of the more delectable offerings; I will make one available each day until the election.
The first item on the skeptical menu comes from Jason Brennan’s 2016 Against Democracy:
The mantra “Get out the vote! Every vote counts!” is dangerous. Most citizens are not doing us any favor by voting. Asking everyone to vote is like asking everyone to litter.
About 65 years ago, we started measuring how much voters know. The results were depressing then and they are depressing now. For as long as we’ve been measuring, the mean, model, and median voters have been misinformed or ignorant about basic political information; they have known even less about more advanced social scientific knowledge. Their ignorance and misinformation causes them to support policies and candidates they would not support if they were better-informed. As a result, we get suboptimal and sometimes quite bad political outcomes. Since democracy and the equal right to vote have no intrinsic value, we should be open to experimenting with other forms of governance. Justice requires “one person, one vote” only if it turns out, empirically, that doing so generates more substantively good outcomes than other forms of government.
I defend experimenting with what most people would regard as the most offensive alternative: epistocracy. 1 Epistocratic forms of government retain most of the normal features of republican representative government. Political power is widespread rather than concentrated in the hands of the few. Powers are separated. There are checks and balances. But, by law, epistocracies do not automatically distribute fundamental political power evenly. Rather, by law, in some way or other, more competent or knowledgeable citizens have slightly more political power than less competent or knowledgeable citizens.
In general, there are three models of voter behavior. (1) Hobbits are low-information citizens with low interest and low levels of participation in politics. Hobbits generally have unstable or only weak ideological commitments. (2) In contrast, hooligans are higher-information citizens who have strong commitments to politics and to their political identity. They are beset by cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias or intergroup bias. For them, politics is largely a team sport. (3) Vulcans are an ideal type—perfectly rational, high-information thinkers with no inappropriate loyalty to their beliefs.
Nearly all citizens fall on the hobbit-hooligan spectrum. The average non-voter in the United States is a hobbit and the average voter is a hooligan. But the problem is that many philosophical theories of democracy presume that citizens will behave like vulcans. Philosophers presume or hope that getting citizens involved in politics will transform them from hobbits into vulcans. But our best evidence is that political engagement tends to turn hobbits into hooligans and tends to make hooligans even worse hooligans. Democracy is the rule of hobbits and hooligans.
Is epistocracy therefore rule of vulcans? I should make it clear here: no. There are probably just too few vulcans out there. Further, while it’s relatively easy to distinguish high-information from low-information voters, it’s more difficult to test for cognitive bias on a large scale. That’s not to say it can’t be done. We could indeed create a test that both examines how much knowledge a person has, and also tests to see if they interpret data in a biased way. My point is less ambitious: realistically, epistocracy would be the rule of hooligans, but it would be a better batch of hooligans than what we get in democracy.
--------------------------------------------------------
Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (2016; Princeton University Press)
1 “Epistocracy” is a neologism. It means “rule by the wisest” or “rule by the smartest,” both terms (“wisest” and “smartest”) being infinitely contestable.
We have met the hooligans, and they are us.
Posted by: |