This is more speculation than an idea ready-made for implementation. I’m not proposing any heuristic for testing whether a person meets this criteria or not. I’m simply asking if society would meet utilitarian goals better by taking votes away from people who put less value on critical thinking, logic, and evidence based reasoning, and put more value on emotional reasoning, common-sense, and traditional beliefs.
It’s hard to expect a positive outcome in modern democracies like America where voting rights are considered essential (at least for a few generations until it became the norm). Would this idea require a shift in cultural values, or would it fail in any setting?
I suggest you could offer up a “trade away your right to vote for season tickets!” offer in order to get people who shouldn’t be in the voting pool out of the voting pool.
Yes, you can be, but I was referring to people with certain values and ways of thinking; Not necessarily intelligence. Think of it as more personality driven than intelligence driven.
Given some of the stupid things that get said and done on campus these days, I’m not at all convinced that intellectuals should be credited with critical thinking, logic, and evidence based reasoning.
OP, you may be interested in the neoreactionary movement, which proposes, among other things, the abolition of democracy and a return to a traditional society with a monarch and an aristocracy. I couldn’t begin to restate the arguments for this idea, nor could I do so as eloquently as the original authors, but suffice it to say there is an enormous corpus for such a young and small idea. A good place to start, if you are interested, would be Mencius Moldbug’s A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations or for shorter, more broad commentary, the communal blog More Right.
To return to the OP, the problem is that not everyone who is logical in one area is such in all areas of their lives. For instance Ben Carson is a very accomplished neurosurgeon but would make a terrible President, similarly Noam Chomsky’s politics are naive and silly regardless of his expertise in linguistics. Also more generally a disproportionate number of public intellectuals (ie those who usually come to mind) are really not intellectuals such as the late Christopher Hitchens who mostly became famous for writing well-worded critiques of famous people or the hordes of aptly-named Very Serious People in DC who proclaim we would go back to the bipartisan 1950s if only the Democrats would gut Social Security in exchange for Republicans agreeing to gay marriage and an Assault Weapons Ban,
That is basically the way I feel about it too. There are plenty of people who are intellectuals of note in one field but are not even qualified to vote for the local animal control officer (at least least not more than anyone else). Noam Chompsky is a good example. There is no way to even identify ‘intellectuals’ that should run all of society. Communism tried that with inevitably terrible results even though, ironically, the standard line was that was what they were claiming to combat. College campuses are often microcosms of intellectual infighting among people with really opinionated marginal views and that is no way to run society at large.
I am not a big fan of forced voting laws either and would never advocate for them in the U.S. I think the best theoretical government model is the benevolent dictator but that could never work in practice either at least not in a sustainable way. There is room for improvement on the democratic republic model that we currently use but I will defer to Winston Churchill for the ultimate rebuttal for alternate systems.
I’m not sure it would necessarily fix gridlock. I think intellectuals have just as entrenched disputes and disagreements with each other, sometimes even seemingly more intractably so.
In terms of greater material success (at what cost to whom and at what benefit to whom)? Or in terms of emotional contentment (whose? and to whose dissatisfaction?)
The argument for democracy is that it is the only way in which competing views and interests can be resolved in a way that, by including all adults, gives them a stake in therefore secures general acceptance of the system and its decisions, and that allows for peaceful means of redress of problems and disagreements.
Different systems may well fall down on that criterion for a whole variety of reasons, but excluding people is not an answer to such problems, whether that’s on the basis of some abstract definition of intellectual quality or because they don’t own a sufficient level of physical property (as used to be the case until much more recently than is often realised).
Exclude people and they have no stake in and therefore no obligation to abide by the decisions made.
Smart people are quite capable of making bad decisions and stupid people are surprisingly capable of making good ones. The West Wing, where the President was an economist/Philosopher King, showcased a personality type that has never been elected in the history of the republic and probably for good reason. Our best presidents have included jacklegs and philanderers and our worst have included sober gentlemen with backgrounds in management and military service. I don’t know the answer to the OP’s question but I think you’re on the wrong track.
The fundamental problem is - who do you get to look after the interests of the dumb and uneducated?
They don’t have the skills … but at least they have the motivation.
An elite would lack the motivation.
At the moment, the elite can make policy in their own favour and against the interest of the masses, by convincing the masses that the policies are in their favour.
Taking away the ability of the masses to have any say at all wouldn’t get better policies for them - would make it easier for the political classes not to have to spend so much time on spin though.
We might get better policy on things that affect everyone though. Global Warming comes to mind…
I’m not referring to intellectuals as the hard leftist type on campuses that garner the most attention from the media. My definition of intellectual was one that did apply critical thinking, logic, and evidence based reasoning. People who adopt the term don’t necessarily qualify. I would expect to see more intellectuals in STEM fields, than I would in gender studies.
I wouldn’t at all be interested in a return to a monarch. A democracy is the best form of government (a republic ceases to exist as soon as a judge overwrites one of it’s laws by their “interpretation”). A limited amount of voters may be considered an aristocracy. I suppose that is what I’m proposing; A large aristocracy.
You we’re probably joking, but something like that would push us in that general direction.