Within Reason - #53 Jason Brennan - The Case Against Democracy

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

Jason Brennan is an American philosopher and business professo at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. Brennan writes about democratic theory, the ethics of voting, competence and power, freedom, and the moral foundations of commercial society. (Wikipedia.) He speaks in this episode about the faults and flaws of democracy, and why people are often not as good as voting as they think they are. Buy "Against Democracy" (affiliate link): https://amzn.to/3HBA5df Buy "Democracy: A Guided Tour": https://amzn.to/3udeuF2 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Brennan, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. What is democracy? Oh, who knows? It's an essentially contested concept, as the theorists like to say. Yeah, people, this is one of those things where people spend a lot of time fighting over the definition, I think because they think they can win an ideological battle by picking a definition. But as a philosopher, I think what we want to do is use like a pretty mundane definition

and then fight the ideological battles on substantive grounds. So like Tom Cristiano and David Esland and a few others, I like to use a pretty expansive notion what democracy is. The democracy is any kind of political system in which the fundamental political power is spread equally among all members of that polity. And then the idea of membership needs to be understood in a very inclusive way. So if you have like, say, Athens and they say all of our members have equal power, but by members, they only need 20% of the population.

It's not really democratic. And then there's a question of like what counts as fundamental? fundamental power, how much power is that? But that's the basic idea. And that way, instead of asking questions like, is direct democracy and republicanism and, you know, bi-camera legislatures or this or that, is that the right form of democracy? We can just say, these are all forms of democracy. We can just ask which ones are better than others on substantive grounds. Sure. You open your most recent book on democracy with the line, democracy is both an obvious and a dubious idea. What do you mean by this? Yeah. I mean, just sort of a

recite the book, it's obvious in the sense that there's a really clear argument for democracy that goes, look, you have a problem when you have a distinction between the people who rule and the people who are ruled, because then the people who rule might take advantage of an exploit and misuse, mistreat the people who are ruled for their own benefit. So the obvious solution is to eliminate that distinction. The people rule themselves. People tend to know what's in their interest. They tend to know what's good for themselves. They'll make good choices in the long run. And then as result, there will be less exploitation and the government will work for the advantage of the many, if not literally everybody, at least many people. And it's just too bad. It took us some along in

history to figure this out. So that's like the basic argument for democracy. And the most obvious argument against it is that the things that we're thinking about and deciding in democratic politics are actually pretty complicated. Should United Kingdom leave the European Union? It's a pretty complicated question. It involves understanding a whole bunch of things about constitutional law, about international relations, about foreign trade. People can study just one aspect of that their entire lives and get a PhD and publish 60 articles and barely understand it. And that's one small thing that politics decides. So in order to know how to vote, you need to know either what the answer is to these questions or at least

be very good at identifying who has these answers. But we have a little reason to think people know either of these things. And so democracy ends up being the method by which the masses shoot themselves in the feet. They don't know what they need to know in order to govern themselves correctly, so they govern themselves badly. So you go, two arguments, one for or one against. If it's the case, I mean, most people will easily understand what you're saying. And in fact, in the modern political climate, people are always complaining about how uninformed the electorate is. We constantly hear about fake news and about ideologues, taking over conversational spaces and radicalizing people. And everybody's talking about this all.

the time. And so it should be fairly obvious, in a sense, in the opposite direction. I mean, people know that politics is complicated. During the referendum on the European Union in the United Kingdom, one of the biggest points of contention was the fact that people didn't seem to know what they were talking about. People would be pleading with the general public, you know, listen to the economists or listen to the experts. And it became like a bit of a, a bit of a meme. I think one of our elected officials said that people had had enough of experts and that became a bit of a newsline, but everybody knows that this is the case. And if that's so, and if it is the case that government is one of the most important things in our lives to get right, then why is it that on the other hand, democracy is seen as something of a, it seems to be like a sacred concept in politics such that, I mean, George Orwell even wrote in the 20th century that, democracy has become such a sort of, such a desirable thing that states will, will describe

themselves as democratic, whether they are or not, because it's essentially seen as a synonym for good, for good government. How has that happened if it's so obviously the case that people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to, when it comes to politics? Yeah, that's a great question. You're right, because I even said in the book, it's like, even dictators today, like Putin will go on TV and say that he speaks for the people. people and that he's a proper democratic leader. And we know that's not true, but it's interesting that say Genghis Khan or Louis the 14th felt no need to say this kind of thing, right?

They derive their authority from something else, from the sword or from birth or whatever. And nowadays, everyone claims that they have a democratic backing. Even like Adolf Hitler famously had a bullshit election. It's like with, you know, the yes was very big and Noah's small to sort of prove that he was speaking for the people. So, you know, I think it is just. there is this kind of philosophical ascendancy to the idea of democracy. And I think it comes down to the idea that people are in a way skeptical of authority. I say that even though I think most

people are radical authoritarian, too. But despite that, I think they're very inconsistent. I think they have a kind of in built-in skepticism of authority and the idea that like one person should have power over another. And so democracy has this story that it tells about how in reality the people who are ruling us are authorized by us. We're really just ruling ourselves. And And so this is a special kind of circumstance, and every other form of government is unequal and unfair and involves, you know, invidious comparisons between people or gives some people an unjust power over others and so on. And so I think that kind of story is very, I guess it's, it's very seductive.

But there's also things where, you know, if you look inside of philosophy, something weird goes on. So, for instance, if you go to like the Phil surveys that David Chalmers and a few other people run asking philosophers what they think, you find. something kind of odd. The typical philosopher worldwide or the English-speaking world is an atheist of some sort. And you know they're not atheists, they're like they will say they're agnostic, but they don't actually believe in God. Religious belief is very uncommon. But then when you look inside of the subfield of philosophy of religion, it's overwhelmingly religious, right? It's overwhelmingly, not just religious, but overwhelmingly write it up of evangelical Christians. So Catholics and Jewish people

and Muslims are actually pretty rare. It's mostly evangelical Protestant Christians who are running that field. So one possibility is that if you actually specialize in philosophy of religion, you encounter these arguments, you see that they're really good. And in fact, you should be evangelical Christian. That's what the evidence supports. Sometimes if a particular subfield believes something, that's just because they know something other people don't. However, it could also just be that the field has a weird sociology, people who have a certain stake in a view, self-select into it. They end up running the journals. They tend to exclude people who disagree with them. And what you get is like reinforcement within that field. Which is it for philosophy.

religion, I will uncharacteristically forbear for passing judgment on that. I don't really follow that feel, so I don't know. I just happen to know that that's the case. However, in Democratic theory, you get something else like that going on as well. The people who tend to specialize in democratic theory, both in political theory as done in political science departments, which is sort of like a junior version of political philosophy. They'll hate me saying that, but it's true. And political philosophy has done in philosophy departments, you have people who tend to be unusually enthusiastic about democracy. And it's interesting. So you get this thing where inside of the field, people tend to think that the stuff about political ignorance isn't that big of a deal. Or if they do think

it matters, then they'll tend to rely upon various deontological arguments that show that democracy is good, even if other systems outperform it. So an example, this would be David Sland, as a former colleague of mine at Brown University, has a famous book that's defending democracy. And he says, epistocracy, which is a system in which the right to vote or the power of one's vote is in some way weighed according to knowledge, probably would outperform democracy, but it's just excluded on other grounds. He basically says, you can't prove to the average person who counts as an authority. They have a reasonable person could go, I don't think you're an expert, a reasonable person to say, I doubt that you really know what you claim to know and so on. And we can't prove otherwise, so they can just exclude this. You know, so he has this like sweeping principle that cuts out almost all possible forms of government and leaves us with just three choices.

And then democracy is the best of the remaining choices. And we're not to get all the details of his theory, but that's the kind of thing that you see is often heavily heavy deontological arguments on behalf of democracy as opposed to consequentialist arguments about how well it performs. But there are however just people, I don't deny it. I mean, you know, there's a recent paper that came out in American political science review that was responding to me and a few other. And one of the weird things that authors do is just deny that all this overwhelming evidence of political ignorance actually says people they're ignorant and that it really matters. And I'm just like at that point you stop your hands ago, it's not even worth talking to you. Like you're just, you know, you can say the sky is purple if you want, but it doesn't make it true. You said a moment ago that it's interesting that sort of monarchs of the past, for example, didn't feel the need to even feign democratic legitimacy.

I think there's always been, so long as political rulers have in some sense been in the hands of their citizens. That is, there's a chance that they could rise up and overthrow them. There has to be some reference to the people. I think maybe the difference here is that in a democracy, the idea is the people get to decide, whereas in something like a monarchy, the idea is the people don't get to decide, but we're going to decide for your sake. We're going to decide because it will be better for you this way. And the change in the modern time is, I think, something you've just alluded to. which is that whereas previously democracy might have been valued instrumentally, that is people might think, well, you know what, I think the most effective way to bring about

good government is to do democracy. And then a monarchist might say, no, no, I think a monarchy is a much better way to bring about that end, and you can debate that. Once democracy becomes the norm, it's no longer that people believe in democracy because they think it brings out the best results, but because there's something intrinsically good about democracy itself. And that's why now you can't have a world leader, you can't have a Putin stand up and say, well, sure, like I'm, I'm an autocrat, but I'm doing it for the sake of the people, because people don't care about it instrumentally anymore. They care about the intrinsic value of something like democracy. And so he has to say he's a Democrat. North Korea has to describe itself as democratic, because Democratic has become something that's intrinsically valuable. This, I would imagine, is something you would see as a mistake. Right. And again, you're right, because even Louis XIV and others might say things like, well, I'm appointed by God.

odd in some sense, but I'm sort of like the father of the French people. And I rule in the way that a father does for their sake and so on. Yeah, there's a couple. So one thing that happens in the book against democracy, people tend to focus on the end where I talk about epistocracy. And that's really not the main part of it. It's the most, maybe it's what people find interesting. But the main point in that book is to sort of take democracy down a few notches and try to argue that all of these down to logic arguments for democracy fail. It's ultimately going to come down to how well it works. And so I go through, I don't know, of 12 or 13 major arguments for democracy. And many of them are based upon the symbolic value of democracy. It's something

I find kind of perplexing about philosophers. Philosophers love to make arguments about what an institution expresses. So a whole different field of research of mind is on things like people say, sure, a market in kidneys would save lives, but we shouldn't have it because putting a kidney up for sale expresses the idea that a human life is not of intrinsic value and it's not sacred. So we have to let people die in order to express that people have sacred value. And that's a very common argument that lay people make, that the Pope makes, that Michael Sandel makes. People make similar kinds of arguments and democratic theory.

They'll say, so people like John Rawls and Steve Wall and others will say things like, democracy expresses the idea that we are all fundamentally equal. And if we have a non-democratic system, this involves invidious comparisons between people. It will hurt their self-esteem. It's saying that one person is better than another. And that's the basic idea. And then people flesh that out in more rigorous ways than giving them credit for in this brief discussion.

But they find that really compelling. Democracy expresses equality. Other people just say democracy simply constitutes equality. If you have a system in which some people rule and some people don't, the people who don't are simply less equal. They're not as valuable. They're not as powerful. They have a lower status than other people.

And so therefore, we have to have democracy for equality's sake, even if it doesn't work that well. And people find that to be a very compelling argument. So a lot of what I try to do is just take arguments like that and show how you wouldn't find that plausible in other cases. So you can give us one example of such a case. Yeah. So let me go through maybe one argument.

So there's this idea that I think the following is true. In a typical modern democracy, when you are given the right to vote, that sort of functions as a public marker. that you are considered a valuable person in a full member of society. I think as a sociological explanation of how people view that, in fact, it does have that meaning. It's not a meaning built into it. It's a meaning that we attach to it. And that's part of the reason why when you see civil rights movements, what ends up happening is certain people are excluded from the right to vote because they're seen as inferior.

Like even today in many countries, felons, convicted felons are deprived of the right to vote, which, by the way, I don't advocate that. But they're deprived of the right to vote because society's basically saying you committed a serious crime and as a result, we're giving you the middle finger and we're telling you your lower status. You don't get to vote anymore. So people fight for this right because they think of it as this is what allows me to look you in the eye. It's the public affirmation of my standing as an equal person. Like that seems true, but to me it seems contingent. It doesn't seem like a fact of the universe. It just seems to be a way that people think about the right to vote. You can imagine a society in which, say, the right to practice medicine

is seen as the same way. So, like, in your country and mine, not everyone can be just practice medicine. I'm not allowed to just go start offering medical services to people. I have to get a license. But no one thinks that the fact that I'm forbidden by law to practice medicine in some way reduces my status as a person. It makes me unable to look other people in the eye. They just go, yeah, I mean, even if you, even if you're opposed to medical licensing,

like, as many libertarians are, they don't think it like reduces people's status. They think it's a bad idea, but they don't think it like hurts their self-esteem or makes them inferior. So imagine a different kind of world from ours. Imagine a world in which at age 18, everybody receives, let's say a red scarf from the government and you wear this outside. And wearing this scarf is sort of a public marker that you are considered a full and equal member of our society. There might be other things going on as well, but just imagine that's the case. And now suppose like some new kind of far right wing party comes to power that is anti-gay. They think that anyone who's like queer or homosexual or whatever is an inferior person.

And when they come to power, the first thing they do is they remove the legal right to wear that scarf from people who don't meet their preferred sexuality and they stop issuing it to anyone who's gay. Like they issue a test and somehow determine who's gay and who's not and they take the scarf away. If they did that, that would be the, that really would be the government telling those people, you are inferior. F you, you're not as good as the rest of us. And it would make sense in that world to march on the streets and demand that they get the red. scarves back, right, given the sociological meaning of those scarves. However, sitting here in the orange hair imagining that world, we know that it's not like the scarves fundamentally have to mean that. It's just a meaning that they've implanted into the scars. So then you might start asking

questions about what if it turns out that the meaning of this, like the scarves have other effects that people didn't know about. So for instance, suppose we found out that if you wear a red scarf, this causes cancer. It turns out every single red dye that exists causes cancer. And that's a killing people and a whole host of other diseases. In fact, unbeknownst to us, the reason that there's even mortality in the first place is that people wear the color red. If only you never touch the color red, you live forever. You know, imagine we discovered that. Well, what we wouldn't do is go, well, it's too bad. We have to wear red scarves. And I guess that means we all have to die. We'd recognize it's like, look, it's a contingent sociological construct that we imbue

red scarf wearing with this social meaning. Once we discover that red scarf wearing has these other pernicious effects, what we should do is change the meaning of this practice, revise it for an alternative practice. So what I'm arguing is that it looks to me like the idea that giving someone the right to vote is the way that you show that they are an equal full member of society is equivalent to saying that it's red scars. And I think if you think about it kind of obviously is because you could simply imagine a society. It's easy. You can do it right now. Like I promise you the like listener can do this right now. Just imagine a society in which people think having the right to vote isn't that big of a deal. And what makes you a full and

equal member society is that you're given a full range of liberal rights. That is the grounds of your status. That is the grounds of your power. That's what makes you a person. That's what makes you a thing that deserves respect. And in that world, having the right to vote is treated like being a medical doctor. Yeah, some people can do it. Some people don't. It's not a big deal. We license it the way we license plumbers and medical doctors. It's easy to imagine a world where people think that way. So now it's a question of should we think that way? Yeah, I mean, I think I would hesitate to call the

medical practice and voting analogous in this circumstance for the reason that if we imagine this world where yes, okay, being a full equal member of society is signified by having a full set of liberal rights. The thing about voting

is that whoever gets voted for is going to be able to directly affect those rights. The definition of those rights, the number of the rights, whether those rights remain or whether they're taken away medical practice is very important of course you know people live and die on the basis of it but i don't think that there's a similar level of well if i'm not a medical doctor i'm worried that you know the the medical care is going to be

going to be worse or it's going to become immoral or corrupt i i don't have a real fear that because of the fact that not everybody can be a medical doctor there's going to be some kind of like you know medical tyranny that that results in the medical community suddenly deciding that they're not going to treat a certain race or they're not going to treat women or something. And in part, that's because there's like a second order consideration that the medical community is itself beholden to this more fundamental thing called government

and it's government that voting bears upon. And so in a way, in this world, voting kind of does bear upon medical practice as well in the sense that if you do have a problem with the fact that, you know, you have to get a medical license, the way to solve that problem is through government action if you see what I'm saying. And so I think that I understand what you mean, that it's not necessarily the case that being able to vote means that you're an equal and full member of

society. But there's a level at which not being able to vote does put that in jeopardy in a way that not being able to be a medical doctor doesn't put your physical health in jeopardy. Yeah, I agree with that. And I agree that's an important argument. I think it's a different argument. And for what it's worth, the argument I just gave you about the red scarf thing, that comes in a section after arguments like the one that you just gave. Sure. So a different set of arguments that are, they're kind of dantological, they're kind of consequentialist, are arguments that in some way push what you're just saying.

Giving a person the right to vote is essential to protect them. It prevents them from being dominated. It's the mechanism that ensures government response to their interests, et cetera, et cetera. And there's a variety of different versions of this. I think I go through like six or so in the book. And so I think the response to that is to be ask, well, what exactly is the value of a vote to a particular person or even to a group of people? So someone like, let's say Philip Hettit might say that I might be dominated if I don't have any kind of ability to participate in government, but it seems pretty implausible that my ability to participate in government is going to be the thing that protects me from domination. If whatever, like let's say, you know, people,

vote in sort of like demographic blocks, right? Like you're a member of a certain race and like you think of yourself as a member of race or you're thinking yourself as a particular kind of identity. In fact, we have a strong empirical evidence people do this. So that's not an unreasonable supposition. It's probably true actually. It's whatever group I belong to, if everyone in that group but me has the right to vote, that's going to offer me as equal protection as everyone including me. It's not like my individual right to vote is going to make any kind of difference in these things. It's astronomically unlikely that it'll ever have any profound effect. I mean, having a right to vote is like having a bucket and a tsunami is approaching you. And the tsunami is all

the other voters. Like, you don't really matter. So what they have to try to do is argue that it matters on a collective basis. And the reason that you have the right to vote is not because your individual right matters, but because just distributing votes widely has certain kinds of effects. But now we're back into these kinds of empirical arguments about how do people actually use their votes. Are they using them to protect themselves? Are there alternative systems in which people might be better off? You know, then we get some weird results. Things like, you know, elite voters are actually more liberal than non-elite voters.

You know, so like the masses are much closer to being Nazis than like the elites are. The masses wouldn't say that about themselves, but we have all this evidence. We know we're not saying they're Nazis, but we know that they're, they tend to be illiberal. They actually tend to be more authoritarian. That's one of the reasons why populist movements usually lead to authoritarian results. because the masses don't really believe in constitutional limits and these other kinds of things. They believe in having a strong person

who just pushes other people around and gets their way. We can start asking about do the masses actually vote on their interests? Yes. So this is like we really have, we're like the model of how democracy works really matters. And this is really why I got into democratic theory. I happened to like have a background in economics and political science. I knew about the work that people were doing there.

And then I would read Democratic theory as done by philosophy. person go, what the hell are they talking about? What does this have to do with the real world? It's not a justification of democracy as we find it. It doesn't justify the UK government or the U.S. government or the French government. It's justifying a hypothetical government where people behave differently from how they behave. And so I think the model of democracy that most people work with is what I like to call the sixth grade model. I like to call that because in the United States, like around what we call sixth grade, you're typically taught this. You know, like I have a kid who literally was just taught this in sixth grade, like this year.

So the model says that the typical adult has a set of values and things that they care about. They might learn from other people, but they care about some stuff. They don't have to be selfish. They might care about the environment or divinity or love or social justice or whatever. They have values. And then the second step is they learn how the world works. So they find out like what causes what, how institutions fail or could succeed, what things are able to do. You know, what is the government able to do and not able to do?

How does socialism work? how does capitalism work? How does this law work? So on the basis of this empirical information about how the world works and their values, they're going to form some sort of ideology or at least an ideological bent. You know, they're like, I think that this set of institutions or laws or rules has a tendency to promote my values better than the alternatives. The next step is they go on election day and they look for the party or the person who best matches their ideological bent. Now, the theory allows them to be strategic and sophisticated. It couldn't include things like I recognize that maybe the party that best matches my bent has no chance

of winning. So maybe I'm going to vote for second or best party. I might even do things like maybe I recognize no party supports my views, but if I can have gridlock, that would be better for me than not. So this can allow for strategic voting. But the basic idea is they vote in order to cause government to do things that promote their values based upon their ideological bent. According to this theory, everybody is doing this. And then the parties are themselves trying to win power. So when they run candidates and run platforms, they're doing this in order to get power for themselves. They're going to run things that they think will actually succeed and get them elected. So it might be that because the people want this, not that, this is what

we support. And then as a result, when the parties come into power on election day, the person who was elected to the party that's elected is going to match the ideological preferences, at least a large chunk of the population, if not literally everybody. And these, remember, these preferences are based upon their understanding of the world. their values. So as Philip Parvin says, but he doesn't endorse this theory himself, he thinks it's wrong. Democracy converts the popular will into power. And finally, the last step is if the party does a bad job, either because they give the people what they want, and it turns out it was a bad idea to want it, or because they fail to do it, people vote them out in an election

day and elect somebody else. So they're going to be disciplined to make sure that they govern well because they'll be punished down the road. In the same way that, I don't know, Chipotle is required to make sure you like the food that you eat there because you won't come back, right? So that is the theory of democracy people work with. And if it were true, there'd be a lot to be said for democracy. It still have lots of problems about minorities and so on. But nevertheless, it'd be a pretty good theory. The problem is probably every single thing I said was wrong. Every single step of that is mistaken. Like not a single bit of it is correct. It turns out we have lots and lots of evidence of this. Even in fact, the very earliest

studies of voter behavior by people like Philip Converse and others were finding bizarre things like the typical person doesn't seem to have any real values. I don't mean like they believe things like you shouldn't kick a baby in the face for fun and it would be better if they were a piece rather than not. They care about these really basic kinds of things, but not much else beyond that. They don't appear to have something like an ideological bent. Right. So there's a good book called neither liberal nor conservative by Kelmo and Kinder, which goes through about 75 years of evidence on this, their own work plus other people. And their high estimate, granted, this is American data, but their high estimate is that something like 15 to 16 percent of the public,

maybe it's like 20 percent of the public, has something like a stable ideological bent. And the other 80 percent are just non-ideological. Oddly, these people vote for the same party almost every time. Very few people swing. It turns out most people don't know. what their party stands for. If you interview them and ask them what they themselves stand for, they'll give you an answer, but you can ask them the same question a month later. They'll give you a different answer.

If you ask them why they change their minds, they'll say, I didn't change my mind. I've always thought this, which isn't true. We know it's not true. They'll vote for things other than the basis of ideology. And the political system reflects that.

Plus, people don't have the information that they're supposedly need to know. So Apaya has a good sort of summary of this alternative view, which is often called democratic realism. which says that people vote for who they are, not what they want. Voting is sort of an expression of my identity. I'm a Boston Irish Catholic. Other Boston Irish Catholic people, they root for the Boston Red So to show that I'm one of them, I'm also going to root for the Boston Red Sox.

And when I do that, I get social benefits. You know, they drink this beer, not that beer. So I'm going to drink that beer too when I get social benefits. And one of the things they do is they vote Democrat. And when I vote Democrat, then they go, ah, you're one of us. And I get social benefits. So on the realist view, the majority of people are, like overwhelming majority of people are using voting and political affiliation as an expression of their identity for social

reasons. Policy is incidental. Politics is not about policy. On this view, elections are, in effect, essentially random events. And even by the way, on this view, the majority of people who seem to have an ideology are actually just copying what their party says. So a nice instance of this is, it's like, I don't vote, I'm not pro-choice, I don't, sorry, I'm not a Democrat because I'm pro choice. I'm pro choice because I'm a

Democrat. That's the idea. That sounds implausible, but then there's ways of testing it. The evidence seems to suggest this is true for most people. So a nice instance of this would be, say, take American Republicans on the issue of free trade. In 2016, the typical Republican, if you ask them, what's your view on free trade? If they were able to give you a consistent answer month after month, would say that they're pro free trade. Donald Trump becomes the presumptive nominee and they interview these same Republicans again and ask them, what's your view on free trade? And all of a sudden, they're protectionist.

You would think that this is an entrenched view among Republicans, but it's not. You asked those same people like, why did you change your mind? Three months ago, you said you're a pro-free trade. Now, a perfectly reasonable thing for them, well, I shouldn't say reasonable. An understandable thing for them to say would be, Donald Trump had such good arguments against free trade, I changed my mind. That's not what they say, though. They say, what are you talking about?

I've always been pro-protectionist. They don't even realize that they should mind. Or you might take, say, attitudes towards Russia in the United States. It used to be that Democrats were pretty soft on Russia and Republicans were hard on it. But because of Trump's weird kind of entanglements with Russia, suddenly it became a marker of Democratic identity to be like very warmongering towards Russia and anti-Russia and for Republicans to be pretty soft. Like so, you know, Aiken and Bartels say, you would think that if anything, attitudes towards

Russia were totally entrenched in American ideology. But it turns out, no, that's just another thing that we use to sort of, root for our team. Yeah, and so the fear is that people don't know what they're voting for. When they do, it's unclear that the beliefs that they hold that are motivating that vote are, let's say, I don't want to say sincere, but, you know, rationalize and thought out and not just adopted because that's essentially the party or societal line, along with the fact that even if all that were the case and their individual vote might make some kind of difference when in

reality even in the closest elections when you have like a few hundred votes in in the balance I think um George Bush became the governor of of Texas by a margin of something like 500 votes or something if I'm remembering rightly and even in those cases it's still quite a small chance that your individual vote is going to make a difference. put together, leads us to a conclusion that what democracy is is unfeasible, that it's, that it's bad, that it's immoral, that it's, how would you best sort of put into a sentence what the issue is here with democracy? I mean, I would just say, one sentence, God, I have too many sentences to say.

I would say the most important thing to think is democracy doesn't work the way you think it does. That's takeaway. Regardless of any kind of value, a judgment you put on it, it doesn't work the way you think it does. So once we get an account of how it works, then we can start asking what kind of value it has. So one argument people make, like Winston Churchill makes, is it's the worst form of government except for all the others. That might still be true. We can still make a comparative pace and ask, of all the feasible alternatives, how do they match up according to some

external values? Maybe it is, in fact, the best. Maybe there's alternatives that could work better. However, I do think that there is a built-in criticism of democracy that comes with this. So that is, I think that I have this idea I've been pushing called the competence principle, which I see as a principle of legitimacy that is not itself a full theory of governmental legitimacy. It's just a principle that regardless of your background ideology, I think you should insert into your theory. In fact, I think you probably already believe it if you think about it. And this theory says that anyone who is going to exercise political power over somebody else, at least if it's a high-stakes decision, has an obligation to act competently and in good

faith. And then I think democracy runs a foul of that obligation or frequently does. So the analogy I like to use is to think about a trial by jury. Let's suppose that you've been accused of first-degree murder or whatever the equivalent is in you can. I don't know if you have that distinction, but whatever the worst form of murder is, you know, intentional, premeditated, cold-hearted So let's say you've been accused of that and you have a jury trial and during the trial, the jury doesn't pay any attention to the evidence. They just completely zone out and then they decide to flip a coin and they find you guilty on the basis of a coin flip. Or they decide to find you guilty because they just don't like people like you. Maybe they don't like your religion.

Maybe they don't like you as a person. Or perhaps you own a rival business. You own a bagel shop. They own a bagel shop. They want to put you out of business so they find you guilty. or they do it because they're just mean. They just think it'd be fun to watch someone suffer and they know that jail stinks, so they're not going to put you in jail.

Or let's say the evidence is given to them, but they're just completely unable to understand it. It's just above their heads and it goes over their heads, so they find you guilty without understanding what they're talking about. Or imagine they have weird conspiracy theory beliefs. They think that you are a member of the Illuminati or the Knights Templar, which is a secret organization still around destroying the world, or you're one of these lizard people

that secretly rules the world and they find you guilty on that basis. In any of these situations, we would think that the jury's decision is unjust and not just unjust, but that if we knew that they made this decision, we should not enforce it. And in fact, in the U.S. in certain states,

if you can demonstrate that the jury has made the decision on one of these bases, ignorance, malice, selfishness, irrationality, et cetera, you can get a new trial because you're part of the idea of a fair trial that they have to know what they're doing. doing. So I think that that's right, but I think if you think about why that applies to a jury, it applies not only to juries. It applies to generals and presidents and prime ministers and members

of parliament. And I think there are a lot of people who agree. Yeah, the president or the prime minister has to act competently in good faith. You know, it's not permissible to decide to, you know, instantiate a law because it benefits you selfishly if it hurts the people. Or you're not allowed to just wake up and be like, should we bomb Russia today? Well, I'm going to flip a coin. Heads, okay, I guess the nukes are flying. You're not allowed to do that. So these are deontological constraints on how you decide. You must act competently and you must act in good faith. Where they resist this is when you get to democracy because they're going to tell themselves a story that it doesn't apply here because we're only deciding for ourselves, which I think is just obviously

false when you think about it. I'm I'm not a paternalist at all. I think it's very stupid for you to drive without a seatbelt, but I think you should be legally allowed to drive without a seatbelt if you're an adult. I think it's stupid for you to do cocaine, but you should be like, well, you know, not stupid. If you do it every day, if you don't want some wild who cares, but if you do, if you're like, addicted to cocaine doing it every day, I think that's a really stupid choice, but you should be allowed to do that. I think you should be allowed to, like, eat yourself into diabetes or whatever else you want to do. I think people have radical authority over themselves to make terrible and stupid choices. I am anti-paternalist, like, as deep as you can get there. However,

when we make decisions in the political realm, we're not simply deciding for ourselves. It's not like when I go to the voting booth and vote, I'm deciding what is going to happen to me. I'm just an input into a mechanism that decides for everybody. So it's in any actual democracy, it's a small number of people deciding a bunch of rules that will be affect other people who oppose the rules, people who weren't able to vote, people who aren't legally allowed to vote, people who are affected by the rules, but who don't have the rights, who have any kind of say in them, foreigners, residents and so on. Future generations. I mean, think about how Brexit has a massive effect on future generations, and it was largely decided by elderly people. Right. So, like, people who are now just, who are just being born now, this will affect their lives, but they didn't get us saying that. Right. So democracy is not us ruling ourselves in the way that my deciding to eat, you know, too much Cadbury chocolate is me deciding for myself. It's a group of people deciding for others. Yes. And indeed, I think the debate around seatbelts, as far as, as I've heard, it offers a good analogy because most people I know who share a sort of anti-paternalism

that say, no, even if it's harmful, you should be able to do what you like. You say, okay, wearing a seatbelt, you shouldn't be forced to do it by law. And they say, yeah, sure, I agree with that actually. Yeah, if you don't want to wear a seatbelt, then fine. Then you point out to people that if you don't wear a seatbelt, then when your car crashes, you're far more likely to harm another person. You know, you fly through the windshield. You crash into the car. It makes the crash worse. And so if you crash into a car or you run over somebody else, it can actually make it more dangerous for them. At which point they then might go, oh, okay, do you know what? Okay, I'm not a paternalist. But because you've just pointed out to me that wearing a seatbelt isn't just about

me, I can understand why it should be a legal requirement. And the same thing here can be said of voting, that people don't vote, although they might vote sort of motivated by their own interests, the result of their vote does not only bear upon them. And again, I think this is something that people can understand. I think people will, it's sort of a, it's somewhat radical in a democratic society to suggest that this makes democracy illegitimate or something, but it's not a sort of unintelligible view to most people. They, they get it immediately what it is that you're saying. The problem, of course, the most important problem that people will always raise is that once you start saying that there needs to be some kind of competency test in order to exert political power,

including voting. Somebody has to design this test. We have to figure out how we're going to test for competence and also how we're going to prevent that test from being politically exploitable to determine who can and can't vote based on pursuit of political aim. What do you have to say about that? Yeah, that's the most important thing. It might very well be that this is a real complaint about democracy and the answer is, well, we can't do any better. Sure. Yeah. We talk about we might be able to say things like perhaps proportional voting is better than first past the post voting and that needs to better government, you know, or perhaps a parliamentary system is better than a presidential system and that leads to better government. But these are all

variations on democracy. By the way, this question about competency, even radical Democrats worry about this. So one way of reading people like Habermas and Dreisik and other deliberative Democrats is that in their view for democracy, democratic decisions to be legitimate, they have to be very, very stringent considerations of rational deliberation. And in matter of fact, no government's meeting, even Switzerland isn't meeting these standards. So there are people who are seen as radically democratic, but if you take their philosophy as stated, what they should, they would also be saying that like government as we see it is not very good. And you actually can get people say that in practice. Like when I debate my frequent debate partner, Helen Landemore,

a lot of to complain about like what we see in the real world. And she goes, who says that's democracy. That's not real democracy. And she means that great point. So having stringent idea, but then that very same point applies to them. It's one thing if in a laboratory, a supposedly disinterested researcher can get a bunch of people to deliberate together and produce very good results. It's another question about whether once this is instantiated to law as a method of decision making, whether it can be done in a fair and just way or whether it would instead be captured by parties who would try to run deliberation and have the people facilitate it be biased in certain way or Jerry Rick who gets to be in the deliberative body in order to generate the

results that they want. So I think this is a super important criticism. And it's the kind of criticism I would, I myself bring it up in the book because one of the things I tend to think philosophers ignore is the issue of government failure. Like things will not work the way that you want. You know, philosophers have a tendency to say, imagine angels running a political system. How would it work? And I go, if we're going to imagine angels, we can just be anarchist. So every time we're talking about government, we're talking about flawed people. It's a whole other debate, but I think that you get that pretty quickly. So we always have to be, whenever we defend a political system, we have to be saying, how would this work with people like us, not how would work with angels.

With angels, we don't need it. We don't need criminal courts with angels and we don't need government. Yeah, you say in the book that people could debate, well, if we had an ideal monarchy and an ideal democracy, which would be better, but this is kind of a waste of time because that doesn't take into account an ideal monarchy, which all monarchies are going to be, at least human monarchies, unideal versus unideal democracies, but even like ideal democracy versus unideal monarchy or ideal monarchy against unideal democracy,

what we need to talk about is the real world and that is a world of flawed human beings who most of the time don't know what they're talking about. Right. So for this reason, I think what I'd like to do if I could mess around with this is really experiment with different kinds of systems on small scale in relatively stable

and non-corrupt environments. and sort of see what works and learn from it and then scale up. In a way, I think of it, like, as a person who's considering alternatives to democracy, and that's the thing applies, by the way, to deliberative Democrats themselves, even though they see themselves as trying to make democracy work in a truly democratic fashion, you don't really know until you try it. We know there are always going to be unintended consequences when we scale something. So we have to experiment on a small scale and then see what works and then scale up. For that reason, I think the kind of political system I'd like to experiment with is what you might call enlightened preference voting. So there's this method in

political science and economics right now where you use statistics to try to assess things like what influences why people vote. So for instance, I was giving a talk at Wellesley College a few years ago for like some winter obsession that they had. And I was telling them about how economists tend to overwhelmingly favor free trade. They can think of special circumstances where it's not efficient, but they say in the real world those don't obtain that much. And you can't really trust politicians to judge anyway. So let's just have free trade. And a student raised her hand and said, yeah, but economists are weird. They tend to be like compared to the demographics of the public as a whole. They tend to be skewed male. They tend to either be white or Asian. I don't like

that category Asian that Americans use, because it's not a race, but whatever, Asian, as opposed to other ethnicities, they tend to be upper middle class or rich, which is all true. So how do we know that economists thinking this is not a result of them being white slash Asian rich and yes, et cetera. And I think she thought I was going to be really bothered by this. And I said, no, actually, that's a perfectly legitimate scientific hypothesis. That's what's causing it. But you're going to be interested to find out that economists have actually tested this hypothesis.

And one way you test it is to find out what people's beliefs are and then control for information and control statistically for their demographics. And what you find is actually all things equal, being rich tends to make you slightly pro, anti-free trade, right? not pro, anti. It actually has the negative effect. It's the information that has, it's economists information that makes them pro free trade. Even if you look at the American National Election Studies, which are surveys done of Americans every two years, finding out, which often give them a multiple choice test and find out who they are and what they know, you find

that information as an isolated variable pushes towards free trade, whereas various demographics push it foreign against it. So I told her about this research and she's like, oh, cool. Yeah. we know. So this is something that economists and others have been doing. It's like if we want to know what causes you to think what you believe, we can do is ask, find out what you know, find out who you are, and then just use basic statistics to isolate each variable to see how it affects your attitudes. So, and so one thing the economists and political science are doing with this is trying to estimate, like, what would the public support if only it were fully informed? What would the public support if it were completely ignorant? And this has been a method

around for decades. So what if we use this as a way of kind of stimulating an informed public? So it is on election day, everyone gets to vote. Children, your cat doesn't matter. Let them all vote. When they vote, they don't vote, when they vote, they're going to do three things. The first thing is they're going to tell us who they are. There's a question about how we demarcate demographic categories, how will they prove it and so on. These are complicated questions. It might turn out that it collapses because of this. The second thing they do is they tell us what they want. Whatever it is we're voting on, whether it's who our member of parliament will be or who the dog catcher should be or whether a referendum should be passed, whatever is we're voting on to give us their answer to that. The third thing they do is tell us what they know.

We give them, say, a 40 question battery of questions about basic political information. This test does not determine whether their vote counts. It doesn't exclude some votes and let some votes in. Rather, it goes kind of into the statistical black box. And now what you do is when you get this set of. of data with lots and lots of people, what you can do is estimate what would a demographically identical public have voted for if only it had gotten a perfect score on this test. It's possible that there will be radical divergence. It's not built into the system that they're

going to converge on something. But that's sort of like a way of estimating if I could wave a magic wand and make it to the public knew what it was talking about, what would it have supported? So then, as you said, the big question is, who decides what goes on the test? Yeah. I mean, also, I wanted to just, just, I mean, you said, In this case, it's not that, you know, your performance on the test determines whether you can vote or not, but in a way, it seems indirectly that that is what's happening because, you know, the result you get of how would people vote if they were fully informed is going to be skewed by what people are writing as answers to their tests and what it is that they're voting for. So it doesn't sort of count in a direct manner. But, I mean, it doesn't count directly when you vote anyway because your vote is such a minimal contribution. It does seem to still have that effect. And so the question that the you were about to go on to of what's on that test is going to be the really important, really important point of contention here. Yeah.

I think it is true, like after the fact, you could statistically go back and go, okay, well, given how the test happened to work, given everyone else's inputs, it turns out that you had 7.1 times voting power as this person. Yeah. You know, after the fact, ahead of time, you don't really know. It's going to just depend. So I think it's in a way, yeah, you won't have equal voting power. which so that's why you know one question is whether this counts is democratic or not because sometimes

I propose and people like this is just a funky form of democracy and other people say what you saying no I guess it's really not truly democracy because sort of post hoc we can kind of we could in principle figure out like who had more power than others however it's still going to be like you know if it's it's not going to be like you have a slice of cake and I don't it's going to be more like you have I have a very tiny crumb and you have a crumb that's seven times that but it's still crumb. Yeah. I think we shouldn't make too much a bigger video of political equality because we're

not fighting over equal slices of cape or fighting over crumbs. So the question, who puts decides what goes on the test? So here's my bizarre proposal that people think is weird that I would say this, but I actually think it's perfectly sensible. Okay. We have democracy decide. We have a democratic forum, a deliberative democratic forum, and they get to decide what goes on the test.

We randomly select 500 people and we say, you, 500 citizens, we're going to pay you $2,000, and we're going to put you in a hotel for a weekend, and you have to decide what will be on the test that is used to estimate an enlightened public in six weeks during the election. You can put anything you want on there. It could be the price of milk. It could be the price of a bus ticket.

It could be like unemployment rate. But you just have to, we just are going to charge you with the question of what counts as an informed voter according to you. And you might think, but these voters are uninformed. How are they going to know? We're not asking them to answer these questions. We're just asking what they think the questions are. And the reason I think this is okay is because the weird thing is, if you go and you ask people, we have studies on this.

You go and ask people already, what counts as an informed voter? They say really sensible things. Well, you probably should know which laws were passed. You probably should know who the executives are. You probably should know things like the unemployment rate or how much money is being spent on this or that. You probably should know like how the government works. And by the way, not just that stuff. You maybe should know things about what it's like to be an everyday person.

maybe you should know the price of a gallon of milk, right? That's what they say? And then you're like, cool, what are the answers to those questions? And they don't know them. So it's kind of like if you've ever been in a class where, you know, you've done well enough in the class to sort of know what questions are going to be on the final exam, but not well enough to answer them, you know, or my son just took his driver's ed class final yesterday.

And it's kind of like they knew the sorts of questions they were going to be asked, but a lot of I was there watching kids walk out and some of them are crying because they failed. It's like they knew they were going to ask them questions about right-of-way, but they didn't actually know the rules of right-of-way. Yeah. That's where the public is. They know they should, they know that an informed voter, like, would know something like what the unemployment rate is. They know the uninformed voters, or uninformed voter is going to know things like, what is Congress able to do and not. They just don't know that stuff, right?

They know that informed voter should know who their congressperson is. They just happen not to know it. So I think democracies are perfectly capable of deciding what counts as an informed voter, even though they themselves don't meet that test. I mean, doesn't it run into the scene? On that point, that's why some people say this is actually democratic, because they'll go, well, if democracy decides what counts as competence, then fundamentally, that deliberative body decides. I don't want to get into that. Isn't this just like a step back of, I mean, if you look at something like a representative democracy, we essentially say, look, we don't have the time to actually run the government. So what we're going to do is we're going to vote for who we think is competent.

And those people get to make the decisions on our behalf. and you know once every five years or however long it is in whatever country we're talking about we choose again we decide who is this person competent to to make the decisions on my behalf and if they are then sure and that's that's essentially the system that we have here in the UK for example what's the difference between that and saying well what we're going to do is we're going to decide who's competent enough to vote for those who are competent enough to make the decisions on our behalf so it seems like it's just maybe sort of an extra step to a process that already exists.

Like, what's the difference here? Yeah. And if that's all it is, because there is this question like, is this democratic or not? You know, and part of me wants to be, well,

if it isn't, then that's more radical and for philosophy points or something. But in a way, I don't really care. It's just a question of whether it's better, right? Would it work better?

Yeah. And so my work is, you know, empirically speaking, it turns out that when people are voting for the representative, they're not doing what we hope they're doing. They're not doing something like,

well, I don't really know how to run the government, but I'm pretty sure it should be run in a social democratic fashion because that's what my, the evidence I have suggests would support my values, but I'm not really sure much beyond that. But I think that person over there is the person who really knows what they're doing, right? And I'm going to vote for that person. That's the sort of hope, like the sixth grade model democracy is seeing something like that. That's a variation of it. But it turns out people aren't doing that. It turns out it's more like, I really want to impress my friends that

I'm like, you know, a good member of our community. So for the same reason I've root for this football team, you know, and kind of irrationally root for them, even when they suck or say things like, you know, like if one of the things that happens like in sports and politics is like, let's say somebody commits a foul and they get a red card, right? Also, that was unfair. And if it's obviously fair, the other members of my team will be like, wow, you're a really good loyal person. Like you really love our team. So you have this tendency in politics to do the same thing. You say and believe really stupid things because it's proof of your loyalty. That's what's going on, this social stuff. So they're not picking this person because they think, they're not

genuinely picking the person because they think they're the best person to implement it. In fact, the fact that the person's terrible might be the reason they vote for them. It's all this social stuff and the politics is incidental. So in a way, you could say what I'm trying to do is fix that part of it, make the system that selects the representatives better. However, it's not quite that because I'm officially agnostic as far as to far as what we're going to be voting on. Maybe this is a system of referenda. Instead of voting for a member parliament, we just have all policies decided directly through the system. Maybe they're doing something else. So it's just whatever is they're voting for, given that people tend to use voting for social mechanisms,

this is a way of sort of extracting information from the crowd and simulating a wise crowd that's trying to produce the right outcomes rather than a unwise crowd that's using politics for social reasons. How do we protect against political manipulation? in that the moment that we've got some kind of test involved as to who gets to be in government, including who gets to vote for who is in government, even just like sort of intricate changes over a very long period of time, unnoticeably so, can lead to quite drastic results. You know what I mean? Like, say we decided that a basic maths competency is needed in order to vote.

We say, you know, well, asking questions about politics is too political. So why don't we ask sort of more objective things like maths? Can this person understand logic? You know, does this person have a have a familiarity with logical fallacies or how, how a deduction works? But it might be the case that, for instance, you know, universities tend to be left-leaning. And so people with a university degree in logic or maths might tend to be left-leading just by chance. But they also tend to perform better on the competence test. And then you have a populace of people that sort of sort of.

selects for left-leaning voters. You see what I mean, like a sort of unintended consequence. Now, this might be very minute and small, but at the beginning, sure, but then they vote for who maybe determines the next competency test, and they vote for who determines the next competency test, and you're slowly sort of changing the nature of the electorate in such a way that leads to, you know, 10, 15 years down the line, obvious political manipulation, and this time they can do it intentionally. Yeah. I'm imagining more something like, when we, We have the group that determines what's on the test. We use random sortition of all adults to do that.

So one way to check that is just have random sortition. Like we're not going to have any kind of check beyond like you can breathe. You're breathing and awake. You're in. If you get selected at random, you're in. However, I think despite that there are always going to be instances of this kind of thing, all the time in politics, parties are manipulating the system for their benefit. So, you know, I think it's, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist in the US.

thinks first past the post voting is a good idea. It's like pretty clearly a crappy system. But it will it's not going to change in the U.S. because both the Democrats and Republicans know that their their duopoly depends upon this and they're never going to vote for a new system. Yes. Our politics is radically determined by things like first past the post voting, which is a shitty way of voting, right? And it won't ever, it will never, it won't change in my lifetime. You know, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money on that. So maybe, you know, Alaska might get rid of it, but it's not like it's going to get changed at the national level. So, yes, it will be manipulated.

It will be abused. So for me, it's like, I just think it has to be better. It doesn't have to be perfect. Of course it's going to be done badly. Of course, it's going to be manipulated. Of course, there's going to be gaming. Of course, if you have things like a facilitator who tries to take this randomly selected group of citizens and their job is to try to, like, get them to discuss what's

going to go on the exam, of course, political parties are going to try to have some control over who that facilitator is to try to nudge them in the direction. of their party. I mean, absolutely, these are, people are flawed and they're flawed all around, right? So I think the question is not, is it flawed, but comparatively, is it better? Does it fix some of the problems? Does it lead to better outcomes? Is it overall a better system? And I think at the end, that's what we're stuck with. I think basically, what I try to do against democracy is argue all the deontological arguments for democracy fail. The arguments that say it's good regardless of the consequences or apart from the consequences fail.

All we're left with is democracy performs better than the alternatives according to whatever the objective criteria of good outcomes are, you know, including, so one of the things I have in the book is to criticize a view that says there's no such thing as that, like democracy is good because of what it decides. So if once you get to that point where you're an instrumentalist about government, the best government's the one that works the best, then a government can be flawed, just has to be better than the alternatives. So, yeah, the, if there is a problem with any form of epistocracy that you're putting forward or any form of alternate voting system, people will be quite right to say, well, what about political manipulation? What about the

negative unintended consequences that this might have? But the question should always be, is that also true of democracy? And if it is, which is going to be worse? It's been interesting. I think, I'm hoping that some of the people listening, this might be the first time they've come across this kind of idea. And so perhaps in a display of iron, irony, we could put it down to a vote or something in the comment section as to whether people like democracy as a political ideal. Jason Brennan, the book that we've been talking about mostly is against democracy, published in 2016, but most recently also Democracy, a guided tour. I'll make sure that they are linked in the description and in the show notes. Thanks for coming

on the podcast. Thanks for having me.