I don’t know about you, but it annoys me when I learn that a quote I treasure has been misattributed or told with the wrong phrasing. So, it’s hard for me to give up the idea that P.T. Barnum said that “there’s a sucker born every minute.” Regardless of who said it, however, it remains a very succinct way of pointing out that there are a tremendous number of really gullible people in the world. I’m more confident of the provenance of the phrase: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” That came from H.L. Mencken, and it means the same thing.
It’s a feature of the human condition that most of us aren’t in any way conventionally intelligent or logical. And that means that the public is always at risk of falling for some scam or another. This is the premise of the entire snake oil industry and all political demagoguery.
On the other hand, most of us aren’t wealthy, either. Most of us don’t own businesses or any truly meaningful amount of stock. Most of us don’t have adequate savings for retirement. Most of us can’t afford to send our kids to college without some assistance or taking on debt. So, while it’s true that we can’t think our way out of a paper bag, we do have things in common that provide a common political interest. If college tuition is more affordable for you, it is also more affordable for me. We don’t have to be philosophers or physicists to understand that a system of taxation that progressively increases the wealth disparity of the nation is not in our interests.
There can be cases where our lack of brain power leads us to support things that seem to be in our collective interests but are in fact counterproductive. Conservatives argue that this is the case in a number of areas, including raising the minimum wage (leads to fewer jobs), opposing free trade (keeps consumer costs low and ultimately grows the economy leading to better quality jobs and more wealth), and subsidized access to health care (leads to rationing, lower quality health care, and government interference in doctor/patient relationships).
And, it’s true, there are tradeoffs to everything and there are many times in life when something seems like a good deal but turns out to be lousy in the long run.
We do have ways of dealing politically with the shortcomings of the mental capacity of the average human being.
In a representative democracy, we are ideally hiring someone to represent us who we trust to weigh the pros and cons of different policies and choose ones that seem best designed to do more good than harm. We elect them and then we go about our lives, our jobs, our family obligations. It’s supposed to be their job to do the due diligence of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that because we are potential sources of valuable information about what works and what doesn’t. We might be able to tell a politician firsthand how some regulation isn’t working as intended because we have to interact with that regulation as part of the work we do for a living. We might know how some policing policy is backfiring because we live in the community that is being adversely affected by that policy. Or, we might even be part of what is derisively called an “interest group” and have information about how our group is being negatively or positively impacted by policies or lack of policies. So, part of our job goes beyond simply choosing someone to represent us. We need to be ready to educate or “lobby” our representative. All the more so because there are other groups out there that have gotten organized to try to persuade our representatives to do things that are counter to our interests.
Still, on the theoretical/ideal level, we’re not supposed to be the deciders. We’re supposed to delegate that responsibility. And if we don’t like how the job is getting done, our right is to pick someone new to represent us.
Now, Mark Kleiman wants to know how Donald Trump gets away with saying stuff that any “thinking” person finds outrageous, and he finds the answer in the fact that, for most people, there is no aversion to talking nonsense. This is true. And it presents a problem for the idea that the best form of government is one in which we ask the people their opinion and accept the majority opinion as the most valuable. The depressing level of intelligence of the median voter is why brilliant minds like H.L. Mencken and Friedrich Nietzsche had a low opinion of democratic representative government. It’s also why conservatives frequently will come right out and say that they don’t want everyone voting. Or, as Brown University Professor Jason Brennan puts it:
“If most voters decide, ‘We don’t know anything, we’re just going to kind of choose whatever we find emotionally appealing,’ then they’re imposing that upon other people,” said Brennan, a professor of political philosophy at Brown University. “And not only are they imposing it upon other people, they’re imposing it literally at gunpoint.”
The idea here is that what we really need is an informed electorate, one that knows that you can’t balance the budget by eliminating earmarks and foreign aid, for example, and hopefully one that can understand that none of those things would be desirable anyway. This kind of electorate wouldn’t fall for Donald Trump’s so-called “plan” to build a 3,000 mile wall on our border with Mexico.
There’s something to this, certainly. But people who truly understand issues are alway a minority and if the majority comes to agree with them, even for a short time, it’s usually no more than a happy coincidence. So, the question becomes, why should we value the opinion of a majority? Why would we want more people to vote irrespective of their familiarity with the issues and their capacity to logically assess pros and cons?
And the answer is really twofold.
First, we like participatory representative government foremost because it’s better than all the alternatives. And one reason it is superior is that it creates the “consent of the governed.” If the people will not abide by the rules laid down by our authorities, we can’t have any kind of civil order, and without civil order we can’t have nice things like civilization. The most important part of gaining that consent is that we allow our leaders to be held accountable. And we convince the people that if a majority of them reject a politician then that’s a valid decision that should be respected rather than an affront that should lead to civil war or domestic terrorism.
Second, we already have a bunch of anti-democratic features built into our system that mitigate against mob rule or our leaders making really bad impulsive decisions. Our Senate is one of these. It was not intended to have popularly elected officials for precisely this reason. Having legislatures elect them and giving them six-year terms was supposed to keep them from being overly responsive to the popular will. They’re supposed to ignore us.
The Electoral College is another means by which our betters are supposed to maintain some control over our political fate. And, like everything else, there are pros and cons to this. Does anyone really think it would be an awful thing if a bunch of state leaders decided to simply reject Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee because that’s a fucking crazy idea hatched by a public that is currently out of its damn mind?
I don’t.
I know that this is a giant heresy, but the will of the public can be destructive. I don’t have a problem with having a mechanism in place to deal with this part of the human condition even if I can almost never imagine it being a good idea to use it. Likewise, the Senate frustrates me to no end because it thwarts progress. But it also thwarts right-wing insanity, and I’m more concerned about the latter than the former.
This puts me the position of an elitist, certainly, because I ultimately see democracy as a means to an end rather than something sacrosanct. Our political leadership will always be formed of an elite. I’d like to see that elite made up of people of the broadest possible set of backgrounds and I want an incredibly low barrier of entry for joining this elite. I want this elite to be civic-minded and responsive to the people and mindful foremost of the people who are in need. But I also want them to be insulated enough to be able to tell us to go pound sand when we ask for something that is manifestly not good for us.
When it comes to demagogues, Kleiman has a good formulation:
The deepest mistake is to regard someone who acts as if he doesn’t give a damn whether anything he says is true, or consistent with what he said yesterday, as stupid. That’s the mistake many liberals made (and some still make) about George W.
It’s true that this is a mistake, but I’m not sure that it matters all that much. What’s important is not so much that there are politicians who have no intellectual conscience as that the majority of the people are vulnerable to being taken in by them. This isn’t supposed to be possible in a system wherein the most valid and binding opinion is the opinion of the majority of voters, but it is not only possible but a constant and unchanging condition that can be only modestly improved.
What we’re doing, in part, is making a tradeoff. The majority of the people may be worthless for determining whether the negotiated deal with Iran is a good deal or a poor risk, but they have a collective wisdom in more general matters that is a better guide than the whims of a few unaccountable and corruptible individuals.
Now, progressives will argue that things can be made better if we just do a better job of educating the public. We need to teach them how to think. I agree with this because the more informed people are, the better. But, as a matter of principle, the value of the majority opinion (and its binding power in our system) does not and never has rested on it being good reasoning. In principle, majority-opinion is the best way to resolve disputes and prevent them from becoming violent. In principle, accountability is the best way to keep our representative leaders from becoming overly corrupt or of serving interests other than our own.
Finally, this desire to have a more informed electorate has been misappropriated to apply tests that have the purpose not of getting a smarter result but of preventing whole classes of people from voting at all. This is what the Jim Crow election laws were all about, for example. In the end, quite aside from the unfairness of the Jim Crow election system, it failed to maintain the consent of the governed or to keep civil order. Excluding people from the political system for any reason is a violation of their rights as citizens and so this cannot be a solution to improving the median decision-making capability of the electorate. Even if it succeeded in the latter, it would fail in the former. In any case, it could never work in a country in which people are not set on an equal footing and you have a history of systemic race-based discrimination, especially in education. After all, one of the legitimate demands of the black community since the beginning of the Civil Rights Era was for an improvement in access to quality education. To exclude many of them from the process because they don’t meet your educational standard is nothing more than the perpetuation of an injustice, using past injustices to rationalize future injustices.
So, we kind of sell this ideal that the best answer to a political question can be found by ascertaining the opinion of the majority of the people, and that the more people who participate, the better and more valid and more binding the answer will be. This is basically bullcrap.
What’s true, though, is that this is a better ideal than any known alternative, and we should fight for it every day.
