6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

BOOKS NOVEMBER 7, 2016 IUE

THE CASE AGAINST DEMOCRACY

If most voters are uninformed, who should make decisions about the publics welfare?
By Caleb Crain

Voter ignorance has worried political philosophers since Plato.

R oughly 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.

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 ighty:

Sometimes he drinks heavily while listening to the ute; at other times, he drinks only water and is on a
diet; sometimes he goes in for physical training; at other times, hes idle and neglects everything; and
sometimes he even occupies himself with what he takes to be philosophy.

It would be much safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated

guardians. To keep their minds pure of distractionssuch as family, money, and the
inherent pleasures of naughtinesshe 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
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 1/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

which might lead them to forget themselves. The scheme was so byzantine and
cockamamie that many suspect Plato couldnt have been serious; Hobbes, for one,
called the idea useless.

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
Mills 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 wasnt abolished until 1950.) Mills larger project
at a time when no more than nine per cent of British adults could votewas for the
franchise to expand and to include women. But he worried that new voters would lack
knowledge and judgment, and xed on supplementary votes as a defense against
ignorance.

In the United States, lites who feared the ignorance of poor immigrants tried to
restrict ballots. In 1855, Connecticut introduced the rst 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 couldnt prove that they had
an eighth-grade education. About fteen per cent unked. Voter literacy tests werent
permanently outlawed by Congress until 1975, years after the civil-rights movement
had discredited them.

Worry about voters intelligence lingers, however. Mills 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
justi cation 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 didnt
seem to be enough. If it were, Estlund wrote, why not ip 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
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 2/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

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.

Still, democracy is far from perfectthe 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 thats 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. Its 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.

First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political
judgment. This sounds extreme, but its 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 wasnt a relativist, however; he agreed that politicians
should refrain from appealing to absolute truth, but he didnt think a political theorist
could avoid doing so.

The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know
more about good government than others. Estlund simply didnt nd this plausible
(maybe a political philosopher is professionally disinclined to). The third and nal
option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. As Estlund put it, You
might be right, but who made you boss?

Its a very good question, and Estlund rested his defense of democracy on it, but he felt
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 3/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

Its 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 would 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.

By the end of Estlunds analysis, there were only two practical arguments against
epistocracy left standing. The rst was the possibility that an epistocracys method of
screening voters might be biased in a way that couldnt readily be identi ed and
therefore couldnt be corrected for. The second was that universal surage 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
Churchills shruggie.

Yours was the blue Prius with the two stoners passed out in back, right?

I n a new book, Against Democracy (Princeton), Jason Brennan, a political

philosopher at Georgetown, has turned Estlunds hedging inside out to create an
uninhibited argument for epistocracy. Against Estlunds claim that universal surage is
the default, Brennan argues that its entirely justi able to limit the political power that
the irrational, the ignorant, and the incompetent have over others. To counter Estlunds
concern for fairness, Brennan asserts that the publics welfare is more important than
anyones hurt feelings; after all, he writes, few would consider it unfair to disqualify
jurors who are morally or cognitively incompetent. As for Estlunds worry about
demographic bias, Brennan waves it o. 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.

Brennan has a bright, pugilistic style, and he takes a sportsmans pleasure in upsetting
pieties and demolishing weak logic. Voting rights may happen to signify human
dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signi ed respect for the dead among
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 4/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signi ed 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.

Brennan draws ample evidence of the average American voters cluelessness from the
legal scholar Ilya Somins 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 minusculeBrennan writes that you are more likely to win Powerball a few times
in a rowthen learning about politics isnt 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 isnt likely to do anything why not indulge
yourself in what you want to believe, whether or not its true? Caplan argues that its
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.

Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. Not even, says
Brennan: its multiple choice, so hardly expressive. If youre upset, write a poem,
Brennan counselled in an earlier book, The Ethics of Voting (2011). He was equally
unimpressed by the argument that its ones duty to vote. It would be bad if no one
farmed, he wrote, but that does not imply that everyone should farm. In fact, he
suspected, the imperative to vote might be even weaker than the imperative to farm.
After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. If I do not vote, your vote
counts more, Brennan wrote.

Brennan calls people who dont bother to learn about politics hobbits, and he thinks it
for the best if they stay home on Election Day. A second group of people enjoy
political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and
Brennan calls them hooligans. Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics
with scienti c objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their

opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. Its vulcans, presumably, who
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 5/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. Its vulcans, presumably, who
Brennan hopes will someday rule over us, but he doesnt present compelling evidence
that they really exist. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent
math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished
political belief. This shouldnt come as a surprise. In recent memory, sophisticated
experts have been con dent about many proposals that turned out to be disastrous
invading Iraq, having a single European currency, grinding subprime mortgages into
the sausage known as collateralized debt obligations, and so on.

How would an epistocracy actually work? Brennan is reluctant to get speci c, which is
understandable. It was the details of utopia that gave Plato so much trouble, and by not
going into them Brennan avoids stepping on the rake that thwacked Plato between the
eyes. He sketches some optionsextra votes for degree holders, a council of epistocrats
with veto power, a qualifying exam for votersbut he doesnt spend much time
considering what could go wrong. The idea of a voter exam, for example, was dismissed
by Brennan himself in The Ethics of Voting as ripe for abuse and institutional
capture. Theres no mention in his new book of any measures that he would put in
place to prevent such dangers.

Without more details, its dicult to assess Brennans proposal. Suppose I claim that
pixies always make sel ess, enlightened political decisions and that therefore we should
entrust our government to pixies. If I cant really say how well identify the pixies or
harness their sagacity, and if I also disclose evidence that pixies may be just as error-
prone as hobbits and hooligans, youd be justi ed in having doubts.

While were on the subject of vulcans and pixies, we might as well mention that theres
an elephant in the room. Knowledge about politics, Brennan reports, is higher in
people who have more education and higher income, live in the West, belong to the
Republican Party, and are middle-aged; its lower among blacks and women. Most
poor black women, as of right now at least, would fail even a mild voter quali cation
exam, he admits, but hes undeterred, insisting that their disenfranchisement would be
merely incidental to his epistocratic plana completely dierent matter, he maintains,
from the literacy tests of Americas past, which were administered with the intention of
disenfranchising blacks and ethnic whites.

Thats an awfully ne distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 6/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

Thats an awfully ne distinction. Bear in mind that, during the current Presidential
race, it looks as though the votes of blacks and women will serve as a bulwark against
the most reckless demagogue in living memory, whom white men with a college degree
have been favoring by a margin of forty-seven per cent to thirty- ve per cent.
Moreover, though political scientists mostly agree that voters are altruistic, something
doesnt tally: Brennan concedes that historically disadvantaged groups such as blacks
and women seem to gain political leverage once they get the franchise.

L ike many people I know, Ive spent recent months staying up late, reading polls in
terror. The awed and faulty nature of democracy has become a vivid companion.
But is democracy really failing, or is it just trying to say something?

Political scientists have long hoped to nd an invisible hand in politics comparable to

the one that Adam Smith described in economics. Voter ignorance wouldnt matter
much if a democracy were able to weave individual votes into collective political
wisdom, the way a market weaves the self-interested buy-and-sell decisions of
individual actors into a prudent collective allocation of resources. But, as Brennan
reports, the mathematical models that have been proposed work only if voter ignorance
has no shape of its ownif, for example, voters err on the side of liberalism as often as
they err on the side of conservatism, leaving decisions in the hands of a politically
knowledgeable minority in the center. Unfortunately, voter ignorance does seem to have
a shape. The political scientist Scott Althaus has calculated that a voter with more
knowledge of politics will, on balance, be less eager to go to war, less punitive about
crime, more tolerant on social issues, less accepting of government control of the
economy, and more willing to accept taxes in order to reduce the federal de cit. And
Caplan calculates that a voter ignorant of economics will tend to be more pessimistic,
more suspicious of market competition and of rises in productivity, and more wary of
foreign trade and immigration.

Its possible, though, that democracy works even though political scientists have failed
to nd a tidy equation to explain it. It could be that voters take a cognitive shortcut,
letting broad-brush markers like party aliation stand in for a close study of
candidates quali cations and policy stances. Brennan doubts that voters understand
party stereotypes well enough to do even this, but surely a shortcut neednt be perfect
to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 7/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

to be helpful. Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents
who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite
name of retrospective voting. Brennan argues that voters dont know enough to do
this, either. To impose full accountability, he writes, voters would need to know who
the incumbent bastards are, what they did, what they could have done, what happened
when the bastards did what they did, and whether the challengers are likely to be any
better than the incumbent bastards. Most dont know all this, of course. Somin points
out that voters have punished incumbents for droughts and shark attacks and rewarded
them for recent sports victories. Caplan dismisses retrospective voting, quoting a pair of
scholars who call it no more rational than killing the pharaoh when the Nile does not
ood.

But even if retrospective voting is sloppy, and works to the chagrin of the occasional
pharaoh, that doesnt necessarily make it valueless. It might, for instance, tend to
improve elected ocials policy decisions. Maybe all it takes is for a politician to worry
that she could be the unlucky chump who gets punished for something she actually
did. Caplan notes that a politician clever enough to worry about his constituents future
happiness as well as their present grati cation might be motivated to give them better
policies than they know to ask for. In such a case, he predicts, voters will feel a
perennial dissatisfaction, stemming from the tendency of their canniest and most long-
lasting politicians to be cavalier about campaign promises. Sound familiar?

When the Founding Fathers designed the federal system, not paying too much
attention to voters was a feature, not a bug. There are particular moments in public
aairs, Madison warned, when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or
some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men,
may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to
lament and condemn. Brennan, for all his cleverness, sometimes seems to be
struggling to reinvent the representative part of representative democracy, writing as
if voters need to know enough about policy to be able to make intelligent decisions
themselves, when, in most modern democracies, voters usually delegate that task. Its
when they dont, as in Californias ballot initiatives or the recent British referendum on
whether to leave the European Union, that disaster is especially likely to strike. The
economist Joseph Schumpeter didnt think democracy could even function if voters

paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 8/23
6/13/2017 TheCaseAgainstDemocracyTheNewYorker

paid too much attention to what their representatives did between elections.
Electorates normally do not control their political leaders in any way except by
refusing to reelect them, he wrote, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942).
The rest of the time, he thought, they should refrain from political back-seat driving.

Why do we vote, and is there a reason to do it or a duty to do it well? Its been said that
voting enables one to take an equal part in the building of ones political habitat.
Brennan thinks that such participation is worthless if what you value about
participation is the chance to in uence an elections outcome; odds are, you wont. Yet
he has previously written that participation can be meaningful even when its practical
eect is nil, as when a parent whose spouse willingly handles all child care still feels
compelled to help out. Brennan claims that no comparable duty to take part exists with
voting, because other kinds of good actions can take votings place. He believes, in
other words, that voting is part of a larger market in civic virtue, the way that farming
is part of a larger market in food, and he goes so far as to suggest that a businessman
who sells food and clothing to Martin Luther King, Jr., is making a genuine
contribution to civic virtue, even though he makes it indirectly. This doesnt seem
persuasive, in part because it dilutes the meaning of civic virtue too much, and in part
because it implies that a businessman who sells a cheeseburger to J. Edgar Hoover is
committing civic evil.

More than once, Brennan compares uninformed voting to air pollution. Its a
compelling analogy: in both cases, the conscientiousness of the enlightened few is no
match for the negligence of the many, and the cost of shirking duty is spread too
widely to keep any one malefactor in line. Your commute by bicycle probably isnt going
to make the citys air any cleaner, and even if you read up on candidates for civil-court
judge on Patch.com, it may still be the crook who gets elected. But though the
incentive for duty may be weakened, its not clear that the duty itself is lightened. The
whole point of democracy is that the number of people who participate in an election
is proportional to the number of people who will have to live intimately with an
elections outcome. Its worth noting, too, that if judicious voting is like clean air then it
cant also be like farming. Clean air is a commons, an instance of market failure,
dependent on government protection for its existence; farming is part of a market.

But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, its combat.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/thecaseagainstdemocracy?mbid=social_facebook 9/23