I Can’t Believe this Is the Best We Can Do, but … Democracy
“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” –Winston Churchill
Some people overappreciate democracy – they think it’s a great idea, that it legitimates actions that would otherwise be rights-violations, that it works better than the market, that there’s nothing wrong with it that can’t be fixed by “more democracy”. I cannot sympathize with this view. The idea of a mob imposing its will on the minority never inspired in me that great reverence that it seems to inspire for others.
But also, some people underappreciate democracy – they think it’s total crap, that voters can’t be trusted to tie their own shoes, that there’s no point in trying to preserve democracy or to improve it.
So I thought I would give my take on democracy. The right view is in between the extremes: Democracy has serious flaws that are inherent in the system and not fixable; nevertheless, it is much better than anything else people have come up with, other than of course anarcho-capitalism.
I. Let’s Start with the Flaws
A. Voting is a stupid way of making decisions
The most obvious problems with democracy are well known (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071RNKSXC/, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B007AIXLDI/). Average voters are:
1. Stupid. That is, they are not intelligent enough to reliably answer moral and political questions using their own judgment. They are much less intelligent than the experts on those subjects, yet they (the voters) generally refuse to defer to experts. (To put it in other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AeO-dKGBLs.)
2. Ignorant. They won’t take the time to learn even the minimal facts relevant to political issues. They vote the way Bart Simpson does a book report (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp_EArT4H_E; he tries to give the report based purely on the cover picture).
For entertainment, here are some people who have the legal right to help determine the public policies to be forcibly imposed on everyone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRh1zXFKC_o. (They’re people on the street who were asked to name any country on a world map, and they couldn’t name a single one. Note: obviously, this is not a random sample – Jimmy Kimmel selected the funniest people to show. But there are many surveys showing the shocking ignorance of voters. E.g., most voters can’t name their congressman, can’t name the three branches of government, and can’t even name the form of government they live under.)
This problem is inherent in democracy, because: (a) there are large costs to collecting all the needed information, and (b) in any large democracy, the probability of your vote actually affecting an election outcome is negligible. Facts (a) and (b) are never going to change, and they make it rational to remain ignorant of political issues.
3. Irrational. They won’t exert any effort to think rationally about political issues. This is also inherent and unfixable, for the same reasons mentioned in (2).
In addition, there is a fourth obvious problem:
4. Many of those affected by government policy can’t even vote. For example, children, convicts, foreigners, other species, and future generations. Thus, they aren’t even in theory represented in a democracy.
B. Problems that democracy doesn’t work for
The above four points imply that democracy will not work well for the following kinds of problems:
1. Subtle problems. These are problems that require at least a little bit of research or thinking to recognize their existence. For instance, there is a problem of mass incarceration in the U.S., which results from the unjustly long sentences American prosecutors impose. But to know about this problem (unless you’re one of the people in prison, who can’t vote), you would have to do at least a bit of research and thinking. Therefore, most voters don’t in fact know about it. And therefore, democracy provides no reliable mechanism for this problem to be addressed. Which is why the problem exists in the first place and why it hasn’t been addressed.
2. Complex problems. These are problems that are at least slightly difficult to diagnose. For example, many Americans today know that the situation in Afghanistan has gone badly wrong. But it would require some knowledge and effort to figure out why it went wrong and who is to blame. Was it Bush’s fault for starting the war to begin with, Obama’s for continuing it, Trump’s for making a deal with the Taliban, or Biden’s for withdrawing incompetently? Democracy only works if voters know which politicians to blame when things go wrong. But they rarely do.
3. Long-term problems. These are problems that are going to occur long after the policy that causes them is adopted, or long after the policy to prevent them would have to have been adopted. For instance, the problem of the national debt is well-known and simple to diagnose, but it never gets addressed because each new round of borrowing produces immediate benefits while putting off the cost to future generations. For another example, the costs of global warming are mainly in the distant future – they will eventuate long after the current round of politicians is no longer in office. That is why the government is doing nothing about either of these problems.
4. Minority problems. Democracy is not good with problems that only affect a small minority of society, especially an unpopular minority. This is another reason why the problem of mass incarceration has not been addressed, along with the problems with the drug war. Drug users and criminals are unpopular minorities, so democratic countries don’t care about their suffering or unjust treatment.
Again, these are not accidental failures; they are systemic – meaning that they are built into the basic way that the democratic system works. It is not simply that we have observed these problems in the present world; we have a theoretical explanation of them, and that explanation rests upon very broad features of democratic society that are extremely unlikely to change – notably, the fact that individual votes are unlikely to be decisive. It is thus unrealistic to imagine that at some future date, democracy will somehow work much better with respect to these problems. These problems will never go away.
II. And Yet …
What does democracy get right? It does well at averting simple, obvious, immediate, widespread disasters. That’s pretty much it.
How could this be the best form of government? Because no other form of government even does that. All other forms of government (“monarchy”, “fascism”, “communism”, etc.) are just variations of dictatorship or oligarchy. Dictatorship/oligarchy has one basic problem: Only a small number of people have decision-making power; therefore, only a small number of people’s interests are taken into account. (Implicit premise: People are assholes.) It is unlikely that the political choices that are beneficial to the ruling class will happen to be beneficial to the rest of society. Thus, there is no reliable mechanism to avert even obvious, immediate, widespread disasters.
Hobbes' Folly
Thomas Hobbes, the most celebrated authoritarian philosopher in the Western canon, had an answer to this. He said that the ruler will naturally want to rule wisely so that his people prosper, so that he, the ruler, will be able to collect greater taxes and have a more powerful nation.
This was one of Hobbes’ more oblivious moments. Here, he overlooked more or less the entire history of government. He also overlooked the basic strategic situation. The ruler of a small, desperately poor nation can easily acquire vast wealth, enough to satisfy almost all material wants. Rather than maximally growing the tax base, therefore, the ruler is more likely to prioritize keeping his own power secure, indulging his own prejudices, and indulging his own ego. He would thus prioritize political repression, murdering any individuals or groups he happens to dislike, and forcing people to worship him.
Hence, we see countries like North Korea. Korea was divided into the North (with a communist dictatorship) and the South (with a capitalist democracy) in the 1950’s. At the start, their GDP’s per capita were about equal. Since the split, literally millions of North Koreans starved to death. Today, North Korea has a per capita GDP of $1,700; the South has $41,000. I include here a satellite image of the Korean peninsula at night. North Korea is the band of darkness in between China and South Korea.
Yet, in spite of the miserable poverty and oppression endured by North Koreans for the last 70 years, the whole thing is working out just fine for Kim Jong Un, whose net worth is estimated at $5 billion – probably much higher than that of any democratic leader in the world. The lesson being that in a country of millions, even after the nation suffers colossal disasters, a dictator can squeeze enough out of each dirt-poor subject to be a billionaire. That is why the dictator doesn’t care about making the people prosperous.
With his view of human nature, Hobbes should have immediately realized this (if a glance at history didn’t tell him), but he was too much excited by the idea of absolute power to think about it.
That is why stupid, incompetent democracy remains the best form of government.