Too Much Democracy

Posted on: 28 February 2017 by Simon Morley in Posts

In the wake of the referendum, a depressing quantity of the political conversation in the UK has been given over to the question of whether it’s legitimate to refer to certain sections of the voting public as stupid.

It seems that it’s becoming more and more difficult to maintain confidence in the general intellect. I’ve been surprised how many of my metropolitan liberal friends have taken to wondering aloud about whether we might be suffering from too much democracy, and I know I’m not the only one to have heard such complaints.

Anti-democratic thought is enjoying renewed intellectual prestige. Recently, the mainstream press has given favourable coverage to Jason Brennan’s Against Democracy, which argues that suffrage should be restricted to citizens who can prove themselves knowledgeable about politics, and to Daniel Bell’s advocacy in The China Model of an East Asian-style “political meritocracy”.  In view of the reactionary turn on both sides of the Atlantic – the Tory government is considering introducing voter ID legislation reminiscent of laws already in place in some parts of the United States – it’s more important than ever to uphold the right of everyone to take part in politics. Instead, this right is being smothered in ambivalence.   

I know where the ambivalence comes from and I can’t help sharing it. Is it possible to offer an unequivocal defence of democracy in light what we know about voters’ astonishing political ignorance? Surveys show that the British public wildly overestimates the number of immigrants and Muslims living in the UK, and hold equally mistaken views about welfare recipients. I have little idea whether the consequences of Brexit will be as disastrous as certain experts have predicted, but I find it hard to believe that many of those who voted for it did so on the basis of an appropriately considered and sceptical examination of the evidence.  

It’s striking that the liberal critics of Brennan and Bell’s suggestion that universal suffrage be replaced by some kind of “epistocracy” – government by the knowledgeable – have seemed unwilling or unable to advance any positive arguments in favour of extending democratic rights. They point out that there’s no guarantee epistocracy would lead to better decision-making or be less vulnerable to corruption, but decline to go much beyond this. Caleb Crain, in an essay on Brennan’s ideas, notes that high intelligence and education are often no barrier to stupidity. ‘In recent memory,’ he writes, ‘sophisticated experts have been confident 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.’ And yet he seems unable to shake off the belief that the steadfast ignorance of the mass of voters will always pose a danger to the order and prosperity of democratic nations.  Like other commentators, the best he can think to offer is Churchill’s definition of democracy as “the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Progressive hope – the hope that human beings can free themselves from violence, oppression and exploitation – requires faith in the human mind in general, not just the minds of a few select individuals.  ‘We are all wise,’ the American philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted in his essay ‘Intellect’; everyone has ‘some access to primary truth’. Emerson knew how implausible this claim would sound to his 19^th century readers, but he wanted to remind them that the democratic ideal required them to look out for perception and insight everywhere. ‘Do you think the porter and the cook have no anecdotes, no experiences, no wonders for you?’ he asked, ‘Everybody knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. They shall one day bring a lantern and read the inscriptions.’

Emerson was, I hope, right to believe in universal human wisdom. We’re all stupid most of the time, but thinking the stupidity of others to be incorrigible is surely one of the worst forms of obtuseness. If we’re going to survive, we need to develop the love and reverence for democracy that Emerson and his friend Walt Whitman felt towards it. This involves cultivating humility in ourselves, but also confidence in others’ power of understanding. Many voters can be classified as “low information”, but this does not mean that they are incapable of being informed. That our fellow citizens make what may seem to us to be gross errors of judgment tell us little about their capacity to engage intelligently in political deliberation.