What’s behind the dangerous new notion that democracy should be left to the well-educated.
It’s been a rough ten years for democracy. It isn’t just that Donald Trump was elected against the wishes of the majority of American voters, and that he then tried to overturn an election that he lost. Nor is it even that democracy is challenged elsewhere in the world, as China doubles down on single-leader rule and fragile democracies like Turkey and Hungary become more despotic. It’s that democracy’s sense of manifest destiny is gone.
Three decades ago, it seemed plausible that the despots were embattled holdouts, desperately trying to stem the inevitable tide of democracy. Now, they appear stronger. Many democratically elected politicians and their supporters seem to long for a future without democratic competition, in which the right people (i.e., they) are permanently in charge, and their enemies are marginalized or eliminated. Some right-wing intellectuals provide ammunition for the anti-democrats, claiming that democracy can’t work because citizens are just too biased and ignorant. They argue that democracy should be shrunk down or even replaced by new systems of rule, where the intelligent and knowledgeable (i.e., those who believe in neoclassical economics and efficient markets) would be privileged over those too foolish and uninformed to understand their own best interests.
If democracy is to do more than survive—if it is to flourish—it needs to change. The period of its apparent greatest success was also when the rot set in. When the citizens and leaders of seemingly stable democracies took that stability for granted, they mostly ignored democracy’s suppurating underbelly: the systematic economic inequalities, the groups that consistently lost out under it, and the many opportunities that it offered to game the system. Many social scientists took its benefits for granted, too. Some offered abstract justifications for democracy, which tended to be based on unrealistic claims about how human beings think and act. Most just assumed that democracy would somehow keep itself on track.
Fixing democracy will require a myriad of reforms. Just in the United States, this includes preventing gerrymandering, getting rid of the filibuster, guaranteeing voting rights, and constraining the power of an anti-democratic Supreme Court. But to ensure that such reforms add up to a healthier and more sustainable form of democracy, we need something more. Instead of democratic triumphalism, we need to understand when collective decision-making works well and when it works badly. We can’t base this understanding on idealistic theories of how democracy is always wonderful, or how human beings are always responsible, knowledgeable citizens. Instead, we need to start from the psychology of real humans, and build up toward institutions that actually work and are likely to be stable over time, even if citizens are flawed. In short, we need to move away from the assumption that democracy is best, to an understanding of how to make it better.
Henry Farrell, Hugo Mercier and Melissa Schwartzberg, “The New Libertarian Elitists,” Democracy, 68, Spring 2023.
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