The global spread of democracy over the last
generation or so has been accompanied by the global spread of criticisms of
democracy. In a sense, this is unsurprising: Popular ideas tend to generate
their own opposition. Democracy’s current popularity—almost universally valued,
institutionalized in more than three-fifths of the world’s states, and demanded
by large movements in many among the remaining two-fifths—makes it an ideal
target for critique. As a result, in recent years, a slowly accelerating wave
of skeptical and at times even hostile thought has arisen to challenge democracy’s
claim to be the best form of government. This wave is distinct from the
inchoate illiberal ideologies that autocrats in China, Russia, Iran, or Cuba
like to promote. Unlike those ideologies, it is a carefully argued,
social-scientific, and respectable critique of democracy that has been
developed largely by Western scholars. Almost unbeknownst to the legions of
democracy-builders or to the nearly four billion democratic citizens worldwide,
the belief in democracy has begun to crumble inside some of the world’s finest
minds and institutions.
Some of this dissent is healthy. Assuming a
feasible democratic ideal, criticism of democracy as practiced in the world’s
121 electoral democracies (the vast majority of which do not belong to the
traditional “West”) directs attention to shortcomings and can spur corrective
action. Now that democracy is the typical form of government, consideration of
the “varieties of democracy” and how they can be improved is a progressive endeavor.
A steady stream of new books describes the many improvements possible, from
involving citizens in “deliberative” efforts to make public policy to tinkering
with electoral rules.1
In other instances, however, this dissent is
destructive because it aims [114] not to improve democracy, but to eliminate it
altogether. Lacking any comparative or historical context, antidemocratic thought
easily spills into a disdain for all existing democracies. This disdain feeds
doubts within established democracies while strengthening antidemocrats in autocratic
countries.
Since it comes at a time when democracy has,
for the first time ever, become humanity’s dominant form of political
organization, this new wave of antidemocratic thought is best described as
dissent rather than reaction.2 As such, it has drawn a sympathetic hearing from
those predisposed to seek the progressive change of any entrenched practice.
Democracy and its defenders are described as “hegemons” in the marketplace of ideas.
Styling themselves as dissidents, these critics claim to be asking “subversive
questions” about democracy which, if left unaddressed, will threaten “our very
existence.”3 They see themselves as underdogs, or “realists” challenging the
untenable “romanticism” of democracy’s defenders. They encourage citizens to
disengage from democracy and put their faith in undemocratic alternatives—to
make an “exit” from the political realm rather than to exercise “voice” more
effectively, to borrow Albert O. Hirschman’s famous terms.4 The disastrous
results of such disenchantment can be read in the historical record of the
period between the two world wars of the last century, and are hinted at by the
“democratic recession” that has stalked the early years of the current century.
As David Spitz wrote in his 1949 classic
Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought, critiques of democracy have long come in
two varieties.5 The first questions democracy’s feasibility, while the second
questions its desirability (see Figure below). Dissenting claims about the
desirability of democracy are often grounded in personal dissatisfaction with
democratic outcomes: Rightists decry the debasement of virtue or the purloining
of property, for example, while leftists denounce the repression of women or the
poor, or the degree to which private property is protected. This is all fairly
easy to dismiss as routine complaining so long as those outcomes remain within
some limits, which they usually do. Democracies tend to produce polities that
are stabler, wealthier, fairer, more innovative, and better at respecting
rights than any available alternatives.6
Dissenting claims that democracy is infeasible
are more corrosive, however. They threaten to weaken the very ideal of
democracy—the notion that citizens, situated as political equals, can exercise
common control over political power. Democracy, the prophets of infeasibility contend,
is based upon a Great Lie,7 or several Great Lies. The sooner we wake up to
this, they add, the sooner we will be able to move on to some better age,
untrammeled by democratic delusions. When compared to the promised benefits of
these alternatives—more prosperous economies, scientific policies—actually
existing democracy can appear shabby indeed.
In many cases, critics of democracy’s
feasibility are moved by dissatisfaction [115] with democracy’s outcomes. A
government that does not rule for the people must not be a government by the
people. Critics of both right and left are prone to rationalize their
discontent with democratic outcomes by mounting sophisticated critiques of the
process itself (at least until those outcomes come back into line with their
own views, at which point the procedural constraints on the “silent majority”
are said to have magically vanished). But this tactical shift to the question
of democratic feasibility is harder to unmask as mere ire at democratic
results. As a general rule, feasibility critics on the right focus on the
unwillingness or inability of citizens to take up the heavy burdens of
self-rule, or on the logical problems of translating individual preferences
into public choices. Critics on the left focus on differences in power and
resources, or on elites’ efforts to fool or mystify the people. Critics on the
right, in other words, are suspicious about all citizens while critics on the
left are suspicious about only some of them. The historical trend has been for
such criticisms to migrate from the right (Plato through Burke) to the left
(Marx through Chomsky). But in the past decade, the critiques traditionally
offered from the right have enjoyed a resurgence, and indeed something of a
boom.
More interestingly still, these right-wing
critiques are now often voiced by figures who align themselves with the left.
This is surprising because those on the right never claim to be anything but
elitist, whereas those on the left pretend to be the true representatives of
“the people.” In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke commented wryly
on “the consistency of those democratists who, when they are not on their
guard, treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt,
whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of all
power.” But in many ways, it is the ability of these right-wing critiques to
appeal to the misanthropic tendencies of left-wing intellectuals that makes
them so potent.
For this reason, I want to focus here on the
feasibility critiques of the right. This is not to deny the influence (and far
less the continued production) of traditional leftist feasibility critiques—if
anything, the academy continues to publish and lavish attention on these far
more.8 My approach, rather, is to focus on the unexpected resurgence of what
was once deemed a reactionary, antidemocratic intellectual tide, now reborn as
a current of dissent.
Unpublic Choice
Feasibility critiques of the right long aimed a
good deal of analytical throw weight at the aggregate level of democratic
policy making, often under the rubric of “public-choice theory.” Accepting the
assumption of rational and informed citizens, public-choice theory asks whether
it is possible to take a set of individual preferences or judgments and
translate them into a public policy that reflects those views.[116]
Figure—Varieties of Antidemocratic Thought
Democracy is not possible
because of…
|
Democracy is not desirable
because it causes…
|
So it should be replaced by…
|
|
Say critics on the Left
|
·
Propaganda Power differences Social exclusion Agenda
control
|
·
Repression Inequality Westernization
|
·
Mass-party rule Worker rule Direct citizen rule
|
Say critics on the Right
|
·
Citizen stupidity Citizen ignorance Aggregation
problems
|
·
Instability Mob rule Inefficiency
|
·
Markets Experts/Guardians Free association Weighted
voting
|
In 1785, the Marquis de Condorcet noticed that
when public preferences are fairly evenly spread across three choices, the
option that wins the most votes might be inferior to another one in the minds
of most voters— Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative victory over a divided
opposition in 1983 is a commonly cited example. In modern times, political
scientists such as William H. Riker have had a field day devising examples
where “majority rule” however conceived does not lead to a “popular” outcome (or
in the jargon of the field, a “Condorcet winner”). Democracy, the reasoning
goes, is thereby exposed as meaningless, and struggles for it as misconceived.
Riker wanted democracy, which he derided as “populism,” replaced with rule by
virtuous philosopher-guardians, who were supposed to spearhead a system that he
misleadingly called “liberalism.”9 Right-wing East Asian critics of democracy
from Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew to China’s neo-Confucianist Kang Xiaoguang are
heirs to Riker’s elitism. So are such Western critics of “illiberal democracy”
as journalist Fareed Zakaria and political scientist Jack Snyder.
Not everyone who studies the problems of public
choice concludes that democracy is a sham, of course. Indeed, most of the
important work in this field has been done by scholars searching for ways to
minimize rather than eliminate the difficulties that can arise when many
individuals try to arrive at a single decision. Yet the challenges of public
choice have driven many to despair, giving rise to the conclusion that
democracy is impossible and should therefore be abandoned.
In his important 2003 work Defending Democracy,
Gerry Mackie considers classic “problems of public choice” and finds that upon
closer examination they are better described not as problems inherent in the decision-making
process itself, but rather as dilemmas of competing [117] values or preferences
that reflect the complexities of the real world in which people and groups must
make their choices and take their chances.10 Moreover, determines Mackie, few of
the problems touted by publicchoice theory actually erupt in practice. Logical
possibilities conjured by the academic mind are not in the same as empirical
probabilities in real-world democracies. While outcomes never align perfectly
with the common will, they are seldom much at odds with it either, at least in
wellfunctioning democracies. Agenda-setting and manipulation, for instance, are
rare in real-world politics because all players tend to be well aware of—and on
guard against—such tactics. When manipulations do occur, fairly simple
institutional fixes that improve rather than reject democracy are capable of
solving the problem.
In practical terms, public-choice critiques
have the serious drawback of lacking a revolutionary edge. No one is ever going
to rush to the antidemocratic barricades shouting “Down with strategic voting,
cycling majorities, and multidimensional issue spaces!” Whether because they
are false or because they are unprovocative, or quite likely for both reasons, these
critiques stand more as academic curiosities than as real threats to actually
existing democracy.
The Ignorant Public
More recently, right-wing critics of
democracy’s feasibility have returned to an older concern, the quality of
citizens themselves. In particular, the hottest claim today is that citizens
are too ignorant, irrational, or both to rule themselves. Democracy is
impossible because the demos is defective. “Idiocracy” and “dumbocracy” are the
favorite terms of abuse. In Thailand, middle-class protestors who backed the
2006 military coup and now agitate for weighted-voting rules that would
disenfranchise most of their country’s rural dwellers and hand vast powers to
unelected experts are willing to say openly that “it’s too easy to manipulate
poor people.”11
The public-ignorance critique, which has been
led in the United States by the Texas-based journal Critical Review, says that
citizens lack even the minimal information needed to make intelligent
choices.12 Commentators in this tradition like to make sport of citizens’
ignorance regarding basic political facts such as the identity of their local
legislative representative or where a certain country is located on the map.
The argument is not that citizens should be better informed so that democracy
will work better, but that any imaginable level of citizen information is still
too low for democracy to be possible in our day and age. The U.S. jurist and legal
scholar Richard Posner, for example, argues in his 2003 book Law, Pragmatism,
and Democracy that since people are and always will be “basically ignorant”
about politics, U.S. democracy should never aspire to be anything other than a
means of rotating elites.13 Similarly, George [118] Mason University law
professor Ilya Somin says that ignorance makes claims of democracy untenable
because citizens are unable to choose the policies or leaders that best fit
their interests.14
Like many antidemocratic critiques, the
public-ignorance critique has a long pedigree—in this case going all the way
back to Plato. Its more enduring modern formulation began with Phillip Converse,
who in a 1964 paper called “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics”
argued that most people have only half-baked attitudes subject to easy manipulation
by informational assault. Frustrated that citizens did not offer consistent answers
to survey questions, an exasperated Converse would eventually conclude that
“what needs repair is not the [survey] item but the population.”15
As Converse’s descent into unintentional
self-parody hints, the publicignorance critique has a paradoxical quality.
People may well count it as one of the blessings of life in a free and stable society
that they face no urgent need to learn about politics. Moreover, in a truly
democratic society where each person’s voice counts equally, the impact of a
single voice is so slight as to make investing in political learning seem
irrational. The democratic reply to this is that fairness demands that
beneficiaries of a free society devote sufficient attention to politics to
ensure that leaders and policies continue to aim at the common good, somehow
conceived.
The word “sufficient” is key: How much and what
kind of information do citizens need in order to do their civic duty? And what
exactly does it mean for citizens to “exercise” political power in an era in
which government has grown in size and complexity such that even heads of state
can be at best only generally aware of what occurs within the states they head?
In the first place, “gotcha” survey questions
ask about irrelevancies. Citizens need to know—and often do know—whether or not
their local roads are being repaired, their neighbors harassed by police, or
their taxes rising. Citizens, in other words, can and do carry out their
democratic mandates, even if they cannot list all the constitutional powers
that subnational governments enjoy in their country.16 From this perspective,
being “well-informed” may be easier than antidemocratic critics allow.
In addition, being “well-informed” is not the
same as agreeing with the views of some academics. In an era of
multibillion-dollar media industries all jostling to be seen as “fair” and
“objective,” not to mention research universities and policy think tanks
generating extensive research, valid information is not in short supply. Even
the “attack ads” so often decried [119] as a feature of U.S. politics often
contain valuable information, as John Geer has pointed out.17 Highly educated
and amply informed people still disagree on many basic issues. Complaints about
“public ignorance” may mask an inability of critics to come to terms with the
fact of complex moral and empirical disagreement.
Somin, for example, argues that “collusive
politicians” in the United States secretly band together to maintain public
ignorance of the fact that since U.S. blacks tend to die younger than their
white, Asian, and Hispanic compatriots, the country’s Social Security program
amounts to “a major hidden redistribution from black workers to white
retirees.”18 Yet no major black political leader argues that blacks should pay
lower Social Security taxes (nor for that matter, does any major male
politician argue that men should pay lower rates because women tend to outlive
them). Again, wellinformed people may simply differ on the appropriate policies
that should follow in response to a given set of facts. Elsewhere, Somin argues
that ideologies are no substitute for factual knowledge because there might be
“a factual or analytical error in the ideology in question”—as if the world’s
great and enduring ideologies could be snuffed out by hiring a few graduate
students to do some fact-checking.19
A few years ago, Larry Bartels of Princeton
claimed that public support for tax cuts that U.S. president George W. Bush had
persuaded Congress to enact in 2001 was based on pure ignorance.20 Revisiting
this claim, Arthur Lupia and colleagues found that Bartels had introduced a sleight
of hand: He had built into his analysis the assumption that most informed
voters should oppose the tax cuts. Bartels began with his own idea of what
people “should” think, and then declared them “ignorant” when they failed to
conform to his expectations. Imputing what informed voters “should” think is
one of the more scandalous misuses of the academic bully-pulpit. “Citizens have
reasons for the opinions and interests they have,” wrote Lupia and colleagues in
their response to Bartels. “We may or may not agree with them. However, we, as
social scientists, can contribute more by offering reliable explanations of
these reasons than we can by judging them prematurely.”21 More generally, Lupia
has argued, the public-ignorance critique is less about gathering evidence of what
people do not know than it is about masking an elitist dislike for the
substance of what most people believe.22
Even where citizens patently do lack the
information needed to make rational choices linked to their self-identified
interests, they may be able to rely on the opinions of people who make it their
business to be wellinformed. Experts, groups focused on particular issues, and
political leaders can all act as “shortcuts” that allow citizens to become
quickly informed by proxy, in essence delegating the job to trusted others.
Robert Erickson, the coauthor of a book that shows how U.S. democracy works well
in tracking public opinion, argues that even if people should happen to become
better informed, U.S. public policies would not change [120] much.23 Signals,
in other words, are effective substitutes for personal learning.24
Where ignorance persists, it is still not clear
that this means democracy is a failure. A well-known finding is that if 95
percent of the population is ignorant and votes randomly, the better-informed 5
percent will still be the deciding voters, leading to the best choice most of
the time thanks to the “wisdom of crowds” described in James Surowiecki’s 2004
book of the same title. In a two-party system such as the one found in the
United States, that better-informed (and therefore “swing”) vote can be
critical to electoral success.
The public-ignorance thesis, then, is either
false or else true but not threatening to democracy. As such, this critique
does not come close to challenging the democratic tenet that citizens
“exercise” collective political power in the sense of taking actions that
reflect credible facts about the political world. Claims of public ignorance
are certainly more provocative than those of unpublic choice. But they quickly
reveal problems of disagreement more than ignorance.
The Irrational Public
This leaves the claim that citizens are
irrational, or cognitively incompetent, as the final charge of infeasibility
from the right that could doom the democratic project. Such a charge verges
most nearly on the misanthropic since it concerns inherent rather than remediable
defects in the demos. In new democracies, we are told, citizens are too tribal
or too easily swayed by demagogues to exercise self-rule. In established democracies,
citizens simply refuse to act logically. If this is so, the “miracle of
aggregation” that underpins the wisdom of crowds must fail because citizens are
not merely ignorant and given to believing random things, but are actively
irrational and persistently believe things that make no sense. The rational and
well-informed 5 percent is swamped by the crazed 95 percent.
The most recent and public example of this line
of argument is Bryan D. Caplan’s 2007 book The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Columnist Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times called it “the best
political book this year,” while the Economist called it “a treat.”25 It is
probably the most widely read antidemocratic work of the post–Cold War era.It
has found a wide audience beyond the United States. Its enthusiastic readers
include elites in China who have long been fond of arguing that their country’s
peasants are both ignorant and irrational.26
Caplan, who is a professor of economics at
George Mason University, argues that citizens systematically vote for economic
policies which make them worse off (and that politicians duly heed their
wishes), not because citizens are ill-informed but because they are irrational
(or “boneheaded” as he wrote in one essay based on the book).27 As evidence,
Caplan cites [121] studies in which voters are systematically at odds with
economists concerning the correct economic policies in areas such as trade,
regulation, employment, and taxes.
It is far from clear that the mistakes which
Caplan purports to identify are in fact errors. For instance, Caplan believes
that voters irrationally support minimum-wage laws despite the role that such
laws play in worsening the plight of the poor by making jobs more scarce.
Although economists generally concur that minimum-wage laws decrease
employment, there is no agreement on the magnitude of such decreases, which
many studies show to be minimal.28 If so, then citizens who are also concerned
about worker dignity and overall income distribution (taking into account
unemployment benefits) may quite rationally decide to support minimumwage laws.
In this case, Caplan’s claim of irrationality is glossing over an area where
the rational truth is far from evident. The same goes for his arguments about
corporate regulation and trade barriers.
Caplan is right that voters do make some
patently irrational mistakes. But their impact is limited, especially in the
United States. Caplan struggles to unearth the ravages that democracy should,
by his telling, have wreaked upon American economic policy. His results do not
impress. He notes, for example, that most U.S. citizens believed that the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would worsen their living standards, yet
President Bill Clinton signed it into law anyway (not exactly an example of a
politician slavishly following irrational citizens). When regulation becomes
inefficient it is usually reformed, whatever its popularity. Irrational tax
breaks for the ethanol industry are being challenged by state governments in
the United States. Democracy is self-correcting in a way that alternatives are
not. Caplan notes the “pessimism bias” of people thinking things are worse than
they really are. But the same logic applies to his own pessimism about the
depredations of democracy.
Perhaps the greatest weakness of Caplan’s
critique, however, concerns the meaning that he assigns to rationality.
Economists often operate on the presumption that some narrowly defined material
self-interest is the only rational basis of choice (a view with its roots in
the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment and later, Marxism). Yet
emotion, community, fairness, freedom, and dignity are typically no less
important, especially in wealthier societies such as the United States where
increased material well-being often has a steeply declining utility.Caplan,
then, forgets or dislikes the variety of human motives, especially in wealthy,
postindustrial societies. As with claims of citizen ignorance, being rational
is not the same thing as agreeing with the views of certain intellectuals. The rationality
critics have not thought hard enough about what it means for a pluralistic
society to be truly democratic, or more accurately for a democratic society to
be truly pluralistic.
All three lines of right-wing feasibility
critique can thus be refuted. Democracy, or rule by the people, can be defended
as the first-best system—[122] rule for the people. But these critiques will
persist and in some instances may be proven all too true. After all, people can
easily be uninformed or boneheaded, and sometimes democratic outcomes satisfy
no one. Democracy’s defenders can then fall back to the Churchill trench,
resisting not this or that critique of the democratic ideal, but instead
denying the superiority of any proposed alternative. Can this battle be won as
well?
Those who adopt “rightist” critiques of
democracy typically call first for a reduction or elimination of democratic
participation. If citizens are the problem, out of the judgment seat they must
go. Public-choice critic Russell Hardin argues that “[t]he more of these issues
we can get off the collective agenda, the better for making collective choice
coherent.”29 Public-ignorance critic Jeffrey Friedman writes that “[i]f the
public doesn’t know what it’s doing politically, why should it have the power
to do so much?”30 And public-irrationality critic Caplan wants to “reduce or eliminate
efforts to increase voter turnout” since that would discourage the uneducated
and the poor from voting.31
Democracy’s Divided Opposition
It is notable that this first step of
departicipation is the polar opposite of the prescription demanded by left-wing
critics of electoral democracy. They want citizens to be more empowered, to
“take back power” from nefarious actors such as lobbyists, corporations,
political operatives, and the media.32 This is a reminder that even when it is
up against the ropes, democracy often remains standing because its opposition
is so divided.
Is departicipation even feasible in a
democratic age? Given the popularity of democracy, is it not more
cost-effective to educate and inform rather than try to disempower citizens?
The legitimacy and thus stability of even the “correct” policies delivered by
other means of rule might be gravely undermined if unceremoniously taken out of
the hands of voters. Given that most of these critics see democracy as a means
to an end, the danger of these ends being undermined by popular discontent is a
serious problem. Many critics recognize this, and argue that departicipation should
come only through democratic consent. But why would supposedly ignorant,
irrational citizens do the putatively well-informed, rational thing by
disempowering themselves?
Let us suppose for the sake of argument that it
would be relatively easy to convince democratic citizens that it is a good idea
for them to back voluntarily away from the exercise of political power. The
sober arguments of these critics are exactly attempts at such persuasion, and they
have certainly found a sympathetic audience that could broaden. Will the
alternatives be less bad than democracy?
In place of democracy, these critics usually
propose some combination of three things: markets, experts, and freely formed
associations. A fourth proposal—giving the better educated or the wealthier
more voting power— [123] is less often heard these days, although arguably the
appeal to experts is its close cousin. And it does crop up, as current events in
Thailand show.
In many realms of social choice, there is
little doubt that experts, markets, and free associations work better than
democracy. Indeed, that is why most democratic countries already leave so much
in the hands of precisely these three forces. It is no small irony that the
country on which the vast majority of democracy’s right-wing feasibility
critics have based their views, the United States, is the one where those
prescriptions have been taken most seriously. The U.S. economy is one of the
most liberalized in the world and delegates many complex decisions (some
prodemocratic critics say too many) to institutions such as the Federal Reserve
Board and the Supreme Court. Parties and governments with reputations to
protect make sure they get key policies right even by ignoring public opinion (on
issues such as NAFTA). Price controls have been unheard of since Richard Nixon,
and free-trade agreements are nearly sacrosanct. In many ways, then, these
critics are preaching to the choir. Their message would be more controversial,
and possibly more germane, in “overmobilized” democracies such as France or the
Philippines.
But markets, experts, and free association are
not infallible. Indeed the ongoing debate in most democracies is when to adopt
them and when to nullify them. Markets in particular are easiest to judge
because they are subject to many of the same problems that critics attribute to
democracy. The delegation of U.S. health care to markets, for instance, leads
to “public” choices that no one prefers, and is plagued by problems of citizen misinformation
(especially about the likelihood and costs of care options) and irrationality
(overinsuring or underinsuring). In highly marketized Hong Kong, public
decisions are made by a small group of property developers, prompting an
ongoing struggle for democratic control there.
Experts and their political judgements,
meanwhile, have come under sustained critique as being boneheaded themselves of
late.33 Experts appear to be no better than nonexperts at coming up with
“correct” policies, and are subject to their own “spirals of conviction” about
the right thing to do. Worse still, mistakes made by experts with unrestrained
power tend to have higher social, environmental, and economic costs. Hapless
citizens of many developing countries have suffered one wave after another of
rule by economists, often with only wreckage to show for it. As Machiavelli
wrote in his Discourses: “The defect[s] with which writers usually charge the multitude
may also be charged to individual men, and particularly to princes . . . [In
fact] the people are more prudent, more stable and more judicious than
princes.” As public-ignorance critic Friedman, after contemplating the problems
with experts, ruefully concedes: “If the actual alternative to rule by the
ignorant is rule by the doctrinaire, then modern democracy poses a true
Hobson’s choice.”34
Rule by free association, finally, can yield
some truly democratic results, as one finds in the autonomous cultural spaces
that minorities [124] have created in many democratic countries. But the
problem of political inequality inherent in such unstructured decision making
can easily create a problem shared with markets and experts, an overweighting
of the interests of the powerful. Free association– based land-use zoning in
Houston, Texas, caused widely acknowledged environmental, economic, and social
harm. The free association of fundamentalist Christian communities in Arizona,
Utah, and Texas led to the spread of coercive polygamy.
None of these comparisons are easy, of course,
and it may be that there is indeed greater scope for markets, experts, and free
association in most democracies. But once one enters into this comparison, democracy
is unlikely to be pushed aside completely, and indeed might expand its remit in
a country such as the United States. It is surprising how rarely feasibility
critics of the right point to any other country as an example of how things
could work better. Caplan’s flippant dismissal of comparative analysis (“It
beats life in the Middle Ages”) ignores the many nondemocracies that might
serve as examples of his advice. Does it beat life in Singapore today, or the
United States of the nineteenth century? Antidemocrats of the right typically want
to avoid having to attack Churchill’s trench, often arguing that the question
of what might beat democracy is “far too complex to be settled here.”35 Yet
allowing the debate to be held on these terms is already a concession to the
critiques of democracy as a first-best system. The least they can do is accept
a vigorous debate on the alternatives.
It is hard to avoid concluding that, given the
unalterable facts of pluralism and social complexity, democracy as actually
practiced in most of the world’s democracies is the first-best and therefore
unbeatable means of political organization. It need not be defended as merely
less bad than existing alternatives that might yet prove superior. The enduring
challenge posed by democracy, then, is not just to strive to fulfill the
radical implications of political equality and public control of politics, but
to do so in the full knowledge that serious alternatives are wanting. This
latter condition may be the most challenging of all, because it affords room
for democracies to slip into complacency.
In some obtuse way, then, even the unfair and
invalid cavilings of democracy critics such as those discussed here may play a
constructive role. There is an almost functionalist sense in which democracies
that are hampered by their inherent superiority produce critiques such as these
just to keep themselves on their toes, shadow-boxing in the absence of any real
challenger. To be forced to reckon again with the alternatives [125] is to be
reminded of why so many different peoples in so many different contexts have
chosen democracy. If this functionalist logic is valid, then one would suppose
that the virulence (and cleverness) of feasibility critiques will increase in
proportion to the strength of a country’s democratic commitment. The reason
that these criticisms have multiplied with such fecundity in the United States
may be that it is where the democratic ideal is strongest, and therefore the
dangers of complacency greatest. It is also the place where, in any comparative
sense, taking into account its huge and diverse population of 300 million,
democracy works “pretty good.”36 By grilling U.S. democracy about its
peccadilloes, these critics end up saving it from backsliding. In an ironic
way, then, they are democracy’s benefactors. Unfortunately, the possible
benefits for established democracies might be outweighed by the damage done to
new and struggling ones, where authoritarian rule is still a very serious
alternative.
It takes tolerance, a feel for context, and
most of all a full understanding of the varieties of human motivation to see
why feasibility critics of the right are so frighteningly wrong in their analysis
of democracy. Democracy is possible not just because no one has quite worked
out the details of the promised alternatives. Rather, it is possible for the
simple reason that it is the one form of government which evolves constantly to
ensure that it is possible. It is a self-correcting system in a way that others
are not. And the reason, ultimately, is that the demos has chosen to make it that
way—people decide to be democratic. In the final analysis, that is the most
compelling evidence for the continuing possibility of democracy.
NOTES
1. Steven J. Brams, Mathematics
and Democracy: Designing Better Voting and Fair- Division Procedures (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008); Robert E. Goodin, Innovating
Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the Deliberative Turn (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
2. Bruce Gilley, “The New
Antidemocrats,” Orbis 50 (Spring 2006): 259–71.
3. Jeffrey Friedman, “Ignorance
as a Starting Point: From Modest Epistemology to Realistic Political Theory,” Critical
Review 19 (January 2007): 4, 15.
4. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit,
Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1970).
5. David Spitz, Patterns
of Anti-Democratic Thought: An Analysis and a Criticism, with Special Reference
to the American Mind in Recent Times (New York: Macmillan,
1949).
6. Morton H. Halperin,
Joseph T. Siegle, and Michael M. Weinstein, The Democracy Advantage: How
Democracies Promote Prosperity and Peace (New York: Routledge,
2005).
7. Benjamin Ginsberg, The
American Lie: Government by the People and Other Political Fables (Boulder, Colo.:
Paradigm, 2007).
8. Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy
Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008); Alan Wolfe, Does American Democracy
Still Work? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Dorothy C. Holland et al.,
Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private
Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
9. William H. Riker, Liberalism
Against Populism: A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the
Theory of Social Choice (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982).
10. Gerry Mackie, Democracy
Defended (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
11. Thomas Fuller, “Thai
Government Backers Take to Streets,” New York Times, 1 September
2008.
12. In 1998, Critical
Review carried a symposium on “Public Ignorance and Democracy.” In 2006, it
carried another on “Democratic Competence.” At the 2008 annual meeting of the
American Political Science Association in Boston, the journal convened a
special “Conference on Political Ignorance” subtitled “Homo Politicus:
Ignorant, Closed-Minded, Irrational?”
13. Richard Posner, Law,
Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 16.
14. Ilya Somin, Democracy
and the Problem of Political Ignorance (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2009).
15. Philip E. Converse, “Attitudes
and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,” in Edward Tufte, ed., The
Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley,
1970), 176–77.
16. Doris A. Graber, “Government
by the People, for the People–Twenty-First Century Style,” Critical
Review 18 (Winter 2006):167–78; Arthur Lupia, “How Elitism Undermines the Study
of Voter Competence,” Critical Review 18 (Winter
2006): 217–32.
17. John G. Geer, In
Defense of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
18. Ilya Somin, “When
Ignorance Isn’t Bliss: How Political Ignorance Threatens Democracy,” Cato
Institute Policy Analysis No. 525, 22 September 2004, 14.
19. Ilya Somin, “Knowledge
About Ignorance: New Directions in the Study of Political Information,” Critical
Review 18 (Winter 2006): 265.
20. Larry M. Bartels, “Homer
Gets a Tax Cut: Inequality and Public Policy in the American Mind,” Perspectives
on Politics 3 (March 2005): 15–31.
21. Arthur Lupia et al., “Were
Bush Tax Cut Supporters ‘Simply Ignorant’? A Second Look at Conservatives and
Liberals in ‘Homer Gets a Tax Cut,’” Perspectives on Politics 5 (December
2007): 773–84.
22. Lupia, “How Elitism
Undermines the Study of Voter Competence.”
23. Robert S. Erikson,
Michael B. MacKuen, and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
24. Robert S. Erikson, “Does
Public Ignorance Matter?” Critical Review 19 (Winter 2007):
23–34. He was writing in response to Scott L. Althaus, Collective
Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003).
25. Bryan D. Caplan, The Myth
of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2007); Nicholas D. Kristof, “The Voters Speak:
Baaa!” New York Times, 30 July 2007; “Vote for me, dimwit,” Economist,
16 June 2007.
26. See, for example,
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Liu Yanhong’s review of Caplan’s
book in the February 2008 issue of the widely read Chinese academic journal Guowai
Shehui Kexue (Social sciences abroad), “Voter Rationality and the Efficiency of
Democratic Politics.”
27. Bryan D. Caplan, “The
Four Boneheaded Biases of Stupid Voters,” Reason, October 2007, 24–32.
28. See David Neumark and
William Wascher, “Minimum Wages and Employment,” Foundations and Trends in
Microeconomics 3 (2007): 1–186.
29. Russell Hardin, “Ignorant
Democracy,” Critical Review 18 (Winter 2006): 195.
30. Jeffrey Friedman, “Public
Ignorance and Democracy,” Cato Policy Report, July– August
1999, 4.
31. Caplan, Myth of
the Rational Voter, 198.
32. Wolin, Democracy
Incorporated; John Burnheim, Is Democracy Possible? The Alternative
to Electoral Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985); Frank M. Bryan, Real Democracy:
The New England Town Meeting and How It Works (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004).
33. Philip Tetlock, Expert
Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2005).
34. Friedman, “Ignorance as
a Starting Point,” 6.
35. Ilya Somin, “Democracy
and Voter Ignorance Revisited: Rejoinder to Ciepley,” Critical
Review 14, no. 1 (2000): 107.
36. John E. Mueller, Capitalism,
Democracy, and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999).
[1] Bruce Gilley is assistant
professor of political science at Portland State University in Oregon and a
member of the Journal of Democracy editorial board. His latest book is The
Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose
Legitimacy (2009).
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