Take Our Poll: Whither Democracy?

Filed under: Anglosphere

For the first time in human history, the illusion of global democracy is present -- due to the power of the Internet. How you react to this illusion tells you a lot about who you are.

Here's a test question: Which world would you prefer to live in?

WORLD A: There are 10 widgets. 9 are great, 1 is appalling.

WORLD B: There are 1,000 widgets, 500 are great, 500 are appalling.

In World A, you have a 100 times smaller chance of being able to get your hands on a widget than in World B (assume a widget is something you want, that a great one will improve the quality of your life significantly). But in World B, you have five times more chance of receiving a bad widget than in World A. Please cast your vote now:

Now, let's reflect on the consequences of your vote. Maybe you don't realize it (or maybe you realize it only too well): You've just decided between democracy and dictatorship.

A recent story in the New York Times reveals how ordinary people are now able to do something that previously only a tiny elite cadre of experts could accomplish -- map-making. The Times quotes one map expert staying: "Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools."

This is, of course, the illusion and not the reality of global democracy. The vast majority of the world's citizens have no access to the Internet, much less do they have the inclination to make maps. However, it's a powerful illusion, because in fact far more people are making maps now than used to. And that means that far more maps are going to be available, and far more people can get a map, and far more people can get a bad one. Even though it's an illusion, it presents the fundamental conundrum of democracy very neatly.

"Some people are potentially going to do really stupid things with these tools" is an understatement. Thousands, perhaps millions, will do so. All sorts of totally bogus information will flood us, information we would never have had to avoid if the centralized control over map-making had persisted. Bogus choices and their consequences are the price we pay for democracy. But at the same time, of course, lots more perfectly valid information will be made available, and people who never had maps before will get them.

There's more, of course, to making the choice between democracy and dictatorship than just that. An economist from George Mason University named Brian Caplan recently published a book called The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Politics (Princeton; $29.95). It was reviewed in the New Yorker magazine by English professor Louis Menand. Caplan's weird thesis (he also publishes weird graphic novels, refers to himself as "a well known anarchist and libertarian," hosts the "Museum of Communism," is a proud athiest and fully looks the part of a weirdo) is that people can't be trusted to govern themselves, they're too stupid (in fact, irrational) so they shouldn't be allowed to. It's not exactly a new idea, of course, we've heard it from folks like Hitler, Stalin and Mao for ages now, but Caplan tries to bring the analytical techniques of economics to bear in order to prove they were right. It's an odd thing for him to be doing since he's a sharp critic of the profession in general. Odd, too, that he doesn't seem to realize he is a person (well, sort of) and stupid like the rest of us, making his advice, by his own admission, inherently bogus.

As Menand writes:

Negotiating the tension between "rational" policy choices and "irrational" preferences and anxieties -- between the desirability of more productivity and the desire to preserve a way of life -- is what democratic politics is all about. It is a messy negotiation. Having the franchise be universal makes it even messier. If all policy decisions were straightforward economic calculations, it might be simpler and better for everyone if only people who had a grasp of economics participated in the political process. But many policy decisions don't have an optimal answer. They involve values that are deeply contested: when life begins, whether liberty is more important than equality, how racial integration is best achieved (and what would count as genuine integration). In the end, the group that loses these contests must abide by the outcome, must regard the wishes of the majority as legitimate. The only way it can be expected to do so is if it has been made to feel that it had a voice in the process, even if that voice is, in practical terms, symbolic. A great virtue of democratic polities is stability. The toleration of silly opinions is (to speak like an economist) a small price to pay for it.

To put it another way Caplan, being an "economist" and "philosopher" doesn't know a thing about history. He seems to be surprised and disappointed that America's political system is dysfunctional, when in fact that's exactly what it was intended to be by our founding fathers. The whole point of the U.S. Constitution is to create a government that doesn't work, and hence can't oppress people. Our founding fathers had no difficulty answering our poll question, because unlike Caplan they actually lived under tyranny. Caplan, obviously a ridiculously immature child, has never spent one single day living the horror of life under a tyrant like Josef Stalin. Therefore, he overestimates the cost of democracy, the only cost he's ever had to pay.

What's more, who says dictatorship is functional? Russia's political system today is about as undemocratic as you can get, yet it's not a success. No free media, no opposition parties, no debates, rubber-stamp political activity from top to bottom. Yet time after time, international ratings give Russia's government failing marks. Yet, up to 1 million are lost from the population every year. Yet, the average wage is $3/hour. And Russia is a democratic paradise compared to the old USSR, which imploded after less than a century. Apparently, the goofy Caplan thinks it would have been even worse if Russians had been allowed to vote.

And in the end, even if the costs of democracy were greater than for dictatorship, Caplan seems utterly unfamiliar with the concept of morality. By what right does one person decide he can take control of another person's life, to "save" him from himself? By Caplan's "logic," the majority-religious population of the U.S. should be able to grab him by his godless collar and torture him until he sees the light of religion, in order to save him from an eternity of damnation.

Now there's an idea.

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