Democracy Criteria From the Woodstock Days

 

Back in 1968, Professor David Braybrooke published his book Three Tests for Democracy. Much of that work focuses on rights and welfare, but the final third proposes tests for whether a polity is a democracy based on whether "collective preferences" are satisfied there.

While the writing may seem a bit stilted to the modern reader--especially one with no extensive background in either analytic philosophy or welfare economics (I admit to briefly wondering whether Braybrooke's style might have benefitted from cutting down on what I imagine to have been a hefty diet of G.E. Moore)--the main idea is fairly commonsensical: criteria for democratic government must have "something to do with majority rule" As Braybrooke puts it, "Consider a community of sane adults for which a number of mutually exclusive policies P1, P2, P3....Pn have been proposed. Suppose that it is known that a majority of the members of the community prefer P3 to all of the other policies--i.e., it is known that with one vote each to cast [a majority] would would vote for P3. Nevertheless the policy adopted for the community is not P3, but P2....[A]dvocates of democracy would find this result objectionable....[I]t is a flagrantly undemocratic result."

Now, Braybridge doesn't suggest that that adoption of P2 in all such cases is sufficient to show that the group in question is a democracy. Other requirements must also be met. He proposes, in addition, an Adoption Condition, according to which the government in question must sincerely attempt to get P2 put into practice, and a Participation Condition, which looks into both who gets to vote, and who actually does so. For example, if only 5% of the eligible voters bother to cast ballots, and 95% of that cohort are from a minority class, gender, social class, geographic region, ethnicity or race, it will be doubtful that the majority is ruling just because it the polity is apparently functioning in accordance with the results of that election.

I bring this 60s sentiment up because there is an awful lot of gnashing of teeth these days due to a fear that the loss of 'our democracy' is imminent. This keening can be heard on both the left (because of the alleged increase in fascist tendencies among Republicans) and on the right (because of an alleged increased reliance on "fake voters" and other types of election fraud by Democrats). 

Well, whoever may be right about what's happening in the country these days (and I hope my own views about this are known to my readers), it's pretty obvious that to lose something, you first must have it. Set aside for the moment the problems produced for U.S. democracy by the Electoral College, the Senate (and its Filibuster), the effects of gerrymandering, and all the other well-known defects in the American governmental structure. In a recent Substack piece, Lee Drutman displays in broad, dark strokes something particularly depressing about the U.S.: wealthy people are much more likely to vote here than poorer people are.

Drutman's fine piece can be read in its entirety here.

But, of course, that distressing piece of news just provides a bit of the causal story behind what we already ought to have known to be true: quite substantial majorities in the U.S. are simply not getting most of what they are known to want. As I mentioned on page 30 of my 2020 book on democratic theory, a now classic study of this issue, [Gilens and Page (2014)] "looked at about 1,800 policy positions considered by Congress between 1981 and 2002, and found that the views of the majority of Americans on those issues were largely ignored in favor of the the views espoused by powerful (mostly corporate) lobbyists." 

This situation has not improved since 2002. According to the most recent credible polling, substantial majorities are not getting what they want in such areas as gun control, abortion rights, climate change policy, marijuana legalization, student debt, and healthcare coverage. There is no doubt that we are far from a passing grade on Braybrooke's test here.

In a word, all this mournful talk about "losing our precious democracy" is a little nonsensical--whether we're hearing it on MSNBC or FOX. A facade is crumbling: that's all. Furthermore, in my own view, the widespread grief over this loss of something we never had is part and parcel of the blanket disparagement of "populism" as a political theory always to be feared. What IS indisputably bad is autocracy, but, in reality, whether or not it has entirely descended into some sort of fascist tyranny, autocratic rule is the very opposite of (any appropriately "distilled") populism, for the latter insists that democracy must be real, rather than merely imagined--with or without any accompanying flag.