The case against democracy

Politics & Elections
1

Inspired in part by two different closely related articles I was just reading and the “Talk me off the ledge” thread here (yes, I’m worried, too). Mods, please move if this is deemed more appropriate elsewhere but it seemed to me to tie directly into the present election madness.

“The case against democracy” is the title of a current book review in the New Yorker. It’s not as if we need any further reminders of the insanity that currently prevails, but here is some anyway, from a CBC article titled ‘Time for revolution’: Trump’s Deep South diehards ready for revolt if he loses:
Peebles, a gentle-spoken Southerner, was wearing a psychedelic “We Are the Trumpions” T-shirt last week depicting Trump staring down a lion. But from the wood-panelled living room where she blares Fox News for the conservative musings of Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs, her timid manner dissolved as she spoke of “revolution,” a term that to some ears carries a whisper of violence …

… PJ Owens, a 76-year-old “super volunteer” at Trump’s Mobile County headquarters, fears widespread in-person voter fraud, a phenomenon that, according to a 2014 Washington Post investigation, does not exist in any way that could affect results.

As with many Trump supporters in the Bible Belt, the retired teacher buys into some falsehoods about Clinton.

With charged language, for example, she echoed Trump’s claims that Clinton plans to abolish the Second Amendment (“You can bet your dollar on this, they will take your guns away from you”); that Clinton supports unlimited abortion on demand (“Right up until a baby is born, it’s fine with her to go ahead and murder the baby”); that a biased liberal media is colluding with the Clinton machine (“The papers are all a bunch of liberal leftists”); and that the Democrats will use voter fraud to cheat their way into the Oval Office.

Which sort of thing leads directly to why some, including a couple of notable political philosophers, have been exploring the implications of replacing democracy as we know it with an “epistocracy”, a word coined to denote the concept of “government by the knowledgeable”. The premise is that self-governance by uninformed mobs at large is becoming an increasingly untenable concept in America. The rise of Trump seems to be frightening evidence of that fact, with potentially dire consequences. The most recent book to that effect is the one by political philosopher Jason Brennan, about which the New Yorker writes as follows:
In a new book, “Against Democracy” (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political philosopher at Georgetown … [creates] 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.

Ridiculous hyperbole, or the next logical step in the evolution of democracy? Let’s remember that a few years ago some nutjob named Donald Trump pretended to be running for president mainly on the basis that Obama was secretly born in Kenya and he had the proof: his intrepid investigators in Hawaii had jaw-dropping awesome evidence of all kinds of things backing that up. Trump was widely regarded as a buffoon and a joke. He’s still a buffoon and a joke, but now he stands on the brink of being the next president of the US.

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Humans are not angels. We are barely better than apes. Political systems that contemplate some version of philosopher kings are not just less just–they are also less effective. That was one of the central insights of the American founders. The key is not to try to get better people to wield power. The key is to try to construct a system such that people’s self-serving nature will be balanced and constrained and channeled toward the greater good.

The idea that we could somehow select smart people to wield political power in some reasonably fair way, and that these selectees would wield it marginally more in the public interest than our current politicians simply because they are smart, is quite divorced from the reality of how human beings work.

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Clearly, the epistocracy argument is debatable, and I’m not advocating for or against it. What is not debatable is that the Rise of the Trumpster and the fact-free and conspiracy-riddled beliefs of his supporters is evidence that whatever is currently in place and the parameters under which it operates is not working very well – the nature of the media and the influence of money in politics, for example, as contributors to voter ignorance. It wouldn’t be a concern if it was a tiny minority, but it’s not.

I would also disagree about the way you’re representing the Founders – they had a pretty strong distrust of basic democracy, hence only proper upstanding landowners were allowed to vote (they feared the uneducated rabble) and measures like the electoral college, state-appointed senators, and an intentionally burdensome legislative process.

As for what is most effective, the proponents of epistocracy argue – rightly or wrongly – that it would indeed be a good deal more effective. It is nowhere near “philosopher kings” – it’s more like the idea that the people who vote in a democracy of qualified electors are at least vaguely acquainted with the facts of what they’re voting on.

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Any government is subject to corruption. Clearly, we are getting an education on how democracies can fail, but I don’t think our system of government is inherently flawed. There might be some aspects of it - like the electoral college - that I would prefer to jettison but there’s an argument for its retention as well. What I wish we had was a stronger national government and a more centralized, robust education system.

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Hate to Godwinize, but wasn’t the Holocaust/Final Solution something that the “government of the knowledgeable” came up with in Nazi Germany? That the Jews, Gypsies, etc. were dubbed scientifically, intellectually, unworthy of life?

6

So basically you want to disenfranchise people that disagree with you. That’s a lousy idea.

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Sorry if this is mentioned in the articles, but how exactly would this be done in the US? Constitutional reform? The same people whom this reform would seek to disenfranchise (i.e., Trumpers,) would be the one who would vote against the Constitutional amendments.

8

Isn’t that why the country is a republic, because there were fears democracy would mean mob rule?

Also we live in an age of very advanced education and intelligence. Due to the Flynn effect, the average person today has an IQ that would be in the gifted, near genius range a century ago. A century ago barely 1/4 of people graduated from high school.

So we live in an age where people are smarter and more educated than they’ve ever been.

Did we ever live in an age where the voters were informed, dispassionate and thoughtful on average?

I do know that in the 60s and 80s, it was possible for people to switch over. LBJ got about 60% of the vote in 1964, and then Reagan got about 60% in 1984. You wouldn’t see those kinds of switching allegiances today, we are much more partisan and ideological about politics.

9

Of course you’d say that, you have the brainpan of stagecoach tilter

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We don’t currently have a democracy. We have a system where every so often we vote for which person we want to decide things on our behalf, and they compete for our votes and then ignore our opinions otherwise. Certainly it’s an improvement over far-less-democratic systems we’ve used in prior eras, but it’s not as if we’ve arrived at some pinnacle or endpoint.

Me, I favor the maximum possible democracy. And I say this knowing full well that if you immediately handed over the authority to make all the political decisions to the populace in general (omitting for the moment how you go about making the policy proposals in the first place and polling the entire populate for each policy decision), then YES it would be a lurch in an ignorantly reactionary xenophobic pro-coercion difference-erasing kind of conservative direction.

But that’s because the average person, who is quite accustomed to having their opinions on policy completely ignored, has not spent much time thinking about such matters.

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The problem with Godwinizing is that analogies with the later stages of the Hitler regime become ridiculous in the modern context. But we might do well to remember that Hitler was elected – in a conventional routine democracy – as a demagogue who energized a population largely motivated by emotion rather than facts, much of it based on demonizing a particular demographic, and that the initial policies for dealing with the demonized demographic involved, first, the removal of basic rights, and then later, deportations and worse. The worst of what happened later was largely unknown to the doofuses who elected the regime responsible. The analogy with Trump is actually quite disturbing.

If you’re referring to the OP, no, the basic idea of the epistocracy is to limit the franchise to people who actually know things. There really is an objective way to assess facts. It’s one of the reasons that referendums – the most direct form of unmediated democracy – usually work out so badly, rife with unintended consequences by people who just want simple things like lower taxes or getting rid of immigrants.

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So you are saying you want what exactly?

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Basically what I want is to know is how come a dangerous self-serving ignorant and hateful demagogue may possibly become the next president of the United States. How it comes to be that he is propelled there by supporters whose world view is largely based on falsehoods and outrageous conspiracy theories, and what could be done to prevent such a grave risk in the future.

Because otherwise, even if Trump loses, the reality of his support base lives on. This has nothing to do with ideology, it has to do with idiots. It’s about gullible voters who believe outrageous bullshit that is provably false. You can’t build a stable and functional society on delusions.

Frankly I think there are more realistic real-world solutions than an epistocracy, but they would still involve groundbreaking changes to laws about electioneering and media that would stress the goals of a more reasonably informed electorate.

14

If only there was some way to get people to vote against their interests…

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Personally, I don’t care who wins or loses as long as I can fend for myself. Nothing to panic about really, it’s only the executive branch of a government that we’ll still be complaining about as to why it’s still not working.

Hey, I don’t mind if Trump wins, despite voting straight D in Illinois. It means that the country can stay stagnant for years with nothing to worry about because of the gridlock in the legislative/judicial branches. It’ll also give me time to not worry about politics until we elect Illinois’ next governor (and conveniently, the 2018 US Legislative elections). Bruce Rauner doesn’t get my vote. He’s a failure. But that’s later.

I actually can’t see what would happen in 2017-2020 with Clinton. With Trump it’s easy to determine, but not with Clinton. And that’s probably not a good sign.

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What things? And who gets to decide those things? People that agree with you? Yeah…still a lousy idea.

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To begin with, it’s useful to have some knowledge of Brennan’s ideology and intentions. Wikipedia lists him as a “bleeding heart” (lmao) libertarian which makes everything pretty clear. Like most of the more intelligent libertarians, Brennan has realized that in virtually all societies the majority of the population finds it not in their interest to have a minimal or nonexistant welfare state and government regulation of the economy. Thus taking a leaf from the classical liberals of old, they realize the only way to achieve a libertarian society outside of a dictatorship (which to be fair many libertarians would support-see Hayek’s praise of Pinochet for example) is to have a system of restricted suffrage passed on property or in this “epistocracy”. I guess Brennan is somewhat more clever then most in that he has adopted the language of the Social Justice Warriors and published his book in the year of Trump and Brexit, to which Western bourgeois liberalism (all too predictably) has responded with elitist condesencion and mockery of the stupidity of the masses. This has allowed him to dupe many people supposedly on the left into taking his utterly reactionary positions seriously, as we are seeing on this very board.

I suggest people saying stuff like this take a look at the history of American politics as well as those of other democracies. All societies have had their share of demagouges engaged in slander and libel and sometimes they’ve even achieved power.

And as I’ve said many times before why should we care about the intentions of the Founders? The Founders were quite sensible for their times, but ultimately they were planning on creating a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, agrarian republic under the rule of a landowning gentry and commercial elite. Most people today happen to think that no longer is nor should be the America we should be working towards.

Such an electorate in an American context would be overwhelmingly upper middle-class, and white (with a distinct Ashkenazi bias)/Asian in racial composition.

There are numerous examples of semi-democratic societies with limited suffrage in the past and we can take a look at how well they’ve worked. They included 18th Century Britain where 222 crimes were punishable by death including offences such as poaching and larceny and closer to home, early 20th Century Dixie (it should be remembered that the Southern states tried not just to suppress the black vote which in anycase were a majority of the population in many Deep South states but also that of poor whites) with her execution of 14 year-olds. It seems to be the expansion of suffrage by contrast has been accompanied by a greater expansion of rights and state protections for the underprivileged as the masses took advantage of their political power to establish greater justice and security for the lives of themselves and their fellow citizens.

18

Perhaps we could all agree on a few things that are not subject to the popular vote. Some things we could write down on a piece of paper, maybe 4 pages or so, and agree that it takes a super majority to change. Things that would protect us from the excesses of one individual in charge.

Nah… that s crazy talk! Better to disenfranchise people in order to prevent a revolution! I’m sure those disenfranchised will be equally distributed among the various demographic groups, too!

19

We probably need to tinker with the Constitution a bit so that we limit the ability of minority factions to cause harm while at the same time limiting the ability of a strong centralized government to oppress the masses.

When the Constitution was developed, a majority of people lived and worked in rural or sparsely populated areas. One of the fears was that a handful of population centers could dictate policy to the vast majority of people who did not share common interests.

Today most people live either in urban areas and have urban problems. What we have now is a situation in which people in less populated areas, an obvious minority, are dictating policy on terms that increasingly fail to reflect the interests of most people. This is not to say that everyone in urban areas votes liberally or that they should, but consider how gerrymandering and presidential elections give an unnatural and disproportionate advantage to the republicans, many of whom represent less urbanized communities.

Unfortunately, it’s not like people are just going to give over the keys to the kingdom. Power will have to be wrested away somehow. The test of a healthy democracy is in how peacefully such a transition can take place.

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This is why the founders had the right idea. While certain powers must be centralized(foreign policy, warmaking, interstate matters), governmental power is very diffuse in this country. If the President sucks, okay, Congress might be better and the courts can keep everyone in line. State governments handle more stuff that directly affects our lives.

The key is to not allow power to accrue too much to one man. There’s been a temptation, since people actually pay attention to presidential elections and vote in them, to regard the President as somehow more legitimate than other officeholders and to let him gather more and more power unto himself, or even worse, to allow an unelected bureaucracy to increase in power and effectively make all the laws.

What we should be doing is what the Constitution actually is designed for: let no one office become so important that a bad man in the office can ruin the country. Democracies are safest when elections aren’t such high stakes affairs. I’ve been hearing for the last 4 elections that “this is the most important election in our lifetime!” Just stop. Let the President be the President, whose constitutional duty is to carry out the laws of our nation. Stop letting him make laws, stop letting him go around Congress, stop letting him interpret the law the way HE wants because Congress or the courts interpretations don’t entirely meet with his approval. Let’s return the executive branch to its proper role and then electing a celebrity doesn’t matter as much.