polity
Copyright © Roslyn Fuller 2019
The right of Roslyn Fuller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2019 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3315-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fuller, Roslyn, author.
Title: In defence of democracy / Roslyn Fuller.
Other titles: In defense of democracy
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004023 (print) | LCCN 2019016699 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509533152 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509533121 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509533138 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Democracy--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JC423 (ebook) | LCC JC423 .F895 2019 (print) | DDC 321.8--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004023
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When I first started writing about democracy in 2006, I did not feel the need to defend the idea of self-government. After all, back in those halcyon days, people who started a conversation on why there shouldn’t be democracy often quickly moved on to why Hitler wasn’t totally wrong, with occasional asides on the merits of tin foil hats. To be against democracy, against majority rule, against political equality as concepts was considered to be vaguely treasonous and definitely pretty fringe.
Unfortunately, only a dozen years later, things have changed dramatically.
There are plenty of people willing to attack the idea of democracy today, and they are agreed on what the problem is: the ‘demos’ bit, that is ‘the people’ – specifically anyone who doesn’t belong to what they define as the class of ‘superior’,1 ‘respectable elite’2 or ‘knowledgeable’3 persons.
This latest wave of anti-democrats is of a decidedly new and peculiar stripe. Unlike so many of their predecessors, they don’t sport swastika tattoos or dispose over small but varied arsenals of pilfered Apocalypse-ready army materiel. Instead, you’ll find twenty-first-century anti-democrats lounging in professorial chairs, clinking glasses at intellectual soirées and delivering their opinions on the faults of the masses straight into camera on prime time. Some of these new anti-democrats are libertarians, others are liberals, still others technocratic centrists, but they all have something in common: they oppose the idea of majority rule; they reject the doctrine of human equality; they deny the inherent value of one-person, one-vote. Philosophers now openly argue that some people don’t deserve a voice in politics;4 professors preach that it is permissible to ignore the popular will because people don’t actually want the things they say they want;5 newspaper editors float the idea that maybe it’s time to just give up on the whole democracy thing.
Like medieval inquisitors, these new anti-democrats claim to have always known the horrible ‘truth’ about humanity – that we are all just too stupid and evil for politics – they were just waiting for proof so that they could swing into action.
With Britain’s vote in favour of leaving the European Union in June 2016 (the so-called ‘Brexit’ referendum) and the election of President Donald Trump in the United States in November of the same year, they’re sure that they’ve finally got it. At last, the people have been caught red-handed exercising their virulent racism, sexism and general stupidity at the ballot box, bringing poor government upon us all. Since ‘the people’ were at the base of these two ‘wrong’ votes, the obvious answer is to cut them out of politics and allow society to be governed by an ‘enlightened minority’ that would never have voted for either Trump or Brexit.
This version of events, which casts majority rule as an illegitimate evil and a self-proclaimed enlightened minority as a noble good, has, despite its arrogant and fanatic overtones, been persistently put across by the political left, right and centre over the past few years with an insistence as pervasive as it is aggressive. In an October 2016 article published in the Guardian, philosopher Julian Baggini described trusting the majority ‘to reach fair and wise decisions’ as ‘borderline insane’, before telling us that ‘Plato and Aristotle get a bad rap these days for their rejection of democracy. But the substance of their objections were spot-on.’6 According to the Spiegel Online, Brexit is nothing less than an ‘abuse’ of ‘direct democracy’ that shows that ‘[i]n our complex 21st century world, we have no choice but to delegate authority for most decision-making to our elected representatives’.7 British human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson urged MPs to overturn the Brexit vote because ‘[d]emocracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority’,8 while the UK Independent ran articles arguing that some things are just ‘too important to be decided by the people’9 and accusing British MPs of hiding ‘behind the vapid UKIP mantra – the so-called will of the people’.10 According to Mai’a K. Davis Cross, Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University in Boston, there is ‘Nothing Democratic About Brexit’.11 Gerard Delanty, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sussex, agreed in his post, ‘Brexit and the Great Pretence of Democracy’ that ‘the notion that 50 per cent plus one is an acceptable threshold is a fiction’,12 while in Foreign Policy James Traub let us know that it is ‘Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses’.13 Belgian author David van Reybrouck called the Brexit referendum a ‘primitive procedure’ and a ‘blunt axe wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens’,14 while former Independent journalist Richard Askwith warned readers that they were about to be overrun by the ‘tyranny of the mob’.15 Simon Wren-Lewis, Professor of Economics at Oxford, proclaimed: ‘You may say that Leave Voters will lose their faith in the democratic system if Brexit doesn’t happen, but the same is surely true of Republican voters if Obamacare is not repealed. That is hardly a reason to do it.’16 In ‘More Professionalism, Less Populism: How Voting Makes Us Stupid and What to Do About It’,17 Brookings Fellows Jonathan Rauch and Benjamin Wittes argued for less participation by the average person and more ‘intermediation’ by institutions built from a political class empowered to do no less than engage in corrupt practices for everyone’s sake. Kenneth Rogoff, former Chief Economist of the IMF and a professor at Harvard, declared that simple majority rule is ‘a formula for chaos’ and this ‘isn’t democracy’,18 while Daniel W. Drezner at Tufts University proclaimed that ‘Of course, there can be too much democracy’.19 Last, but not least, in their much quoted book Democracy for Realists,20 Professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels promulgated research that purported to show that people are so incapable of expressing their own best interests at the ballot box that elections are won and lost on everything from shark attacks to the weather; an interview with the authors ran on Vox under the headline ‘The Problem with Democracy is Voters’.21
While these writers by and large consider themselves to be liberal progressives, or at least centrist technocrats, whose sole noble aim consists of rescuing the ignorant from themselves, when it comes to democracy they’re singing off the same hymn sheet as their decidedly more conservative and libertarian brethren. According to Jason Brennan, Georgetown University philosopher and author of Against Democracy, the stupid and ignorant should simply be disenfranchised, a state of affairs he terms ‘epistocracy’ or ‘rule by the knowledgeable’. Against Democracy was reviewed in The New Yorker22 and The Washington Post,23 and Brennan’s genius concept of simply depriving people of their right to vote was deemed so worthy of discussion that numerous papers published his op-eds24 elaborating on his view that: ‘In an epistocracy, not everyone has the same voting power. But what’s so wrong with that?’25 Brennan is buttressed by fellow academics and Cato Institute scholars Ilya Somin and Bryan Caplan, whose numerous op-eds26 and books, such as Democracy and Political Ignorance27 and the Myth of the Rational Voter,28 repeatedly excoriate the ‘ignorance’ of any voters who happen to disagree with their views on labour regulation and free trade. Canadian academic Daniel Bell provides a snobbier twist on the same theme in his book The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, arguing for rule by an unelected virtuous ‘superior’ elite.
Right-wing journalists haven’t just been generous in granting column inches and interviews to these authors, either; they’ve been more than willing to chime in against wayward voters themselves. According to James Kirchick, writing in the Los Angeles Times, the 2017 British election in which Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party surged in the polls is ‘a Reminder of the Perils of Too Much Democracy’, because ‘“the people” – that expression beloved of Third World tyrants and increasingly adopted by leaders in advanced industrial democracies – got their say’. Kirchick went on to claim: ‘Amidst the global populist insurgency, our duly elected representatives should depend more upon their own judgment and worry less about the uninformed opinion of the masses.’29 In New York Magazine, Andrew Sullivan confidently informed the world that ‘Democracies End When They Are Too Democratic’;30 at Bloomberg, Justin Fox opined that ‘Voters are Making a Mess of Democracy’;31 and in the New York Times, Bret Stephens claimed that ‘the people’ are responsible for ‘anti-Semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism; anti-Americanism masquerading as pacifism; fellow-traveling with dictators and terrorists masquerading as sympathy for the wretched of the earth’, which evils apparently manifest themselves in voting for long-time MP and current British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.32
It’s endless, it’s alarming (and purposely alarmist) and it’s bullshit. In fact, it is all so ridiculous and shoddily researched that were these books and articles to be published at all, it should have been in the entertainment section. ‘E for effort’, my mother often says when confronted with a piece of particular stupidity, but this doesn’t even rate that. F for failure, F for fraud, and F for trying to fuck you over.
And it is no coincidence at all that this is coming out of the woodwork now.
The anti-democratic movement isn’t really, when it gets down to it, about Trump or Brexit. It’s about something else entirely, something much bigger.
You see, agreeing to the theoretical principle of political equality is a different ball of wax entirely than agreeing to the reality of it. But up until now an agreement in principle was all that was required of anyone who wanted to label themselves a democrat.
This is because democracy has traditionally been a fairly passive activity, involving nothing more impactful than casting a ballot for one of a tiny number of candidates every few years. For practical reasons only very small numbers of people could be directly involved in politics on a daily basis and for that reason it has been the nature of the beast that in our democracy to date there has been a split between the ideology of equal participation and the practical reality of elites running the show: political elites drafted and voted on laws; media elites decided which stories to publish; financial elites determined which candidates and parties to back. Thinking, speaking and acting publicly were activities that the average person had virtually no share in. The occasional mass mobilization surfaced when things were really tough, but such movements were rare and difficult to get off the ground, because it was impossible even to know what millions of individuals thought or wanted at any given time, much less effectively channel that into action or any kind of government.
But now it is impossible not to know.
Technology finally managed to do what it promised to do for so long – disrupt things – and it did so by sending the cost of political participation through the floor. Thinking, speaking and acting publicly, and therefore politically, has within a few short years become as cheap as it is easy. Suddenly, anyone and everyone can engage in political action on their own at any time. People who had for decades become comfortable saying that they supported ordinary citizens holding power as an ideal, but that it sadly just wasn’t possible, have woken up to a world where it is possible. And they don’t seem to like it quite as much as they claimed they would.
Indeed, the theoretical understanding that people held power in our democracies, but that this rather conveniently manifested itself in passively receiving information and instructions from ‘the respectable elite’, suddenly clashes very, very hard with a real-world set of circumstances in which the traditional middlemen of politics – politicians, journalists, academics – are no longer strictly speaking necessary for the system to operate. You don’t need a reporter to tell you what is going on in India or China when you can get on Facebook and ask someone who lives there; you don’t always need to ‘ask an expert’ when you can access more information than you will ever be able to digest on Wikipedia and YouTube; and if you want to know what people think about current affairs, you need look no farther than the comments section of any major news website. From a ‘value-added’ point of view, the traditional power-broking jobs are taking a nosedive, as rather than facilitating participation, as they previously (to some extent) had done, they have become a bottleneck for something that could happen more efficiently without them.
Just as we can book our own flight tickets and manage our stock portfolios online, we no longer technically need anyone to guess ‘what the people want’ or tell us ‘what everyone thinks’, because it is possible to acquire that information directly.
Thus, the elites who traditionally exercised the political functions of speaking, thinking and acting publicly on behalf of everyone else are rapidly becoming surplus to requirements. If democracy continues to evolve with advances in technology, it will naturally become more participatory and direct, because not only is it now possible for people to communicate easily on a peer-to-peer basis and thus to coordinate political action without involving middlemen, it is already foreseeable that this trend will only continue into the future. If elites want to prevent that from happening – and many of them do consciously or unconsciously want just that – they have no choice but to attack the idea of democracy and convince us (the people) that we cannot trust each other and need the elites – not to fulfil traditional democratic functions (like providing information or a best-guess at the popular will) that would otherwise go unmet, but to save us from ourselves.
In other words, they are attempting to change their job description, because, like a courtier around Louis XVI, they have begun to have a vague sense of foreboding that if the ancien régime goes down they are going with it. In this changed world, the only hope for anti-democrats to maintain their prestige and power is to clamp down and exclude the ungrateful masses even further from political life than they have been in the past.
And they are hard at work on doing just that, which is why I think this book is so necessary.
In the following pages I’m going to examine some of the most celebrated arguments and research purporting to show that the problem with democracy is the people; that they are stupid, that they are racist, that they are incapable of assessing their own welfare; that we must give up on political equality for our own good; that disagreement is the same as treason; that the worthy must be separated from the unworthy; that submitting to control is the only way to be safe.
While, as I will show, these claims are every bit as crazy as they appear to be on the surface, anti-democrats have already made progress in putting them into action and attempting to restrict the principle of one-person, one-vote.
Their proposed solutions to cure democracy of its ‘people problem’ – and we will go into these in some detail – range from the apparently brilliantly simple (‘don’t let them vote’) to the somewhat more subtly complex (‘select people at random and subject them to expert lectures until they agree to do the right thing’). Anti-democrats around the world have already established well-funded institutions and organizations to implement these strategies and bring about their goal of sanitizing democracy from the ‘demos’. And the very fact that anti-democrats have managed to get this far means that now we – the masses, as it were – are at a crossroads, too.
We don’t actually have to sit by and watch our civilization dissolve into a dystopian hellscape of warring factions or rigid, hierarchical control. We have the means to make things better – to make a more participatory and inclusive democracy than any of us has ever known – and we should grasp those possibilities with both hands.
Democracy isn’t getting worse – it’s getting better.
Some people just don’t want democracy.