Is Democracy Good Because Majority Votes "Track Public Policy Truths"?

In what is likely to be my last "scholarly paper" (journal publishing is just too aggravating for my delicate constitution), I argue against what is currently the most widely held view regarding the benefits of democratic government.

Marquis De Condorcet, the French Revolution supporter and eventual victim is justly celebrated for his "jury theorem" according to which majorities (of unbiased, independent, sufficiently knowledgeable, etc.) voters are more likely to be "right" than any smaller group. Partly because of the violent terror resulting from the very movement that whacked Condorcet, democracy has long been viewed with suspicion. (Since antiquity it has been claimed that the hungry masses aren't just stupid, but also rapacious and therefore dangerous; after all, there's a LOT of them.) Then, in the middle of the 20th Century, things got worse for majoritarians when Kenneth Arrow proved that, in addition to those other problems, it's also the case that elections are incoherent. 

What could democracy supporters say in reponse to these objections other than "Well, anyhow, nothing is more likely to get us to true public policies!" So that's what they have mostly said.

That's what I respond to. First, I don't think the idea of public policy truths makes much sense; and second, I believe both of the two main objections to democratic arrangements listed above can be overcome. A good deal of my 2020 book is on this stuff, as are many of my (nagging?) blog posts here at luckorcunning. But I wanted to try to distill my thoughts on this until they were reduced down to a single, article-length piece. And I have finally done so--whether I've gotten everything quite right or not.

Here's the abstract: 

According to supporters of epistemic democracy, the most important virtue of democratic forms of government is that they provide the best method for determining correct public policies. On their view, this does not primarily result from the fact that any policy a democratic government enacts will reflect conjoined citizen interests and so be more likely to satisfy them, but from the fact that, as they believe Condorcet has demonstrated, majorities are more likely to get things right than any minority is. I argue that any such view fails to capture what is usually meant by self-government, and that, due to this critical shortcoming, epistemic rationales for democracy should be abandoned in favor of voluntaristic, aggregative theories of the kind that were popular prior to mid-20th Century objections generally claiming either that collective preference aggregations are necessarily incoherent or that pervasive injustices must result from unconstrained, and hence tyrannical, majorities.

You can read the whole magilla either at SSRN or direct from Croatia at Prolegomena. So, pick your poison.

Yarvin v. Kofman on Monarchism and Democracy

In her excellent New Yorker portrait of monarch-loving, narcissistic tech bro, Curtis Yarvin, Ava Kofman points out a couple of things that those who (at least think they) like democracy should worry about. She notes that Yarvin's approach seizes on the reality that most Americans have never learned how to defend democracy; they were simply brought up to believe in it. I believe that concern is absolutely appropriate. I mean, although nobody will ever convince Yarvin of anything (as the piece points out repeatedly, Yarvin is a devout know-it-all who never listens to anybody else, even when he has asked them a question) there may nevertheless be significant benefit in those who think of themselves as (small "d") democrats having a sense of just why democracy is a good thing.

Apparently, Kofman and I aren't the only ones who consider this inability to defend democracy to be a problem for Yarvin doubters, whether they are liberals, conservatives, neolibs, communitarians,  communists or whatever. Kofman quotes one Yarvin devotee who says that what drew him to that contrarian's blog was the fact that it makes me feel like I've got something that people in Washington who think they're really smart can't actually make a compelling argument against. 

I don't think there's any question that this is  a legitimate problem. Indeed, almost everything I've written in the last decade myself has been part of my (obviously feeble) attempt to explain why democracy is a good thing--whatever problems it may engender. No Yarvin myself however, it is likely that very few (of my very few) readers will have taken much from my repetitive lectures. 

Sadly, I note that even Kofman may not quite get this stuff right--in spite of her surely getting Yarvin's flaws down beautifully. She writes, for example, that Without a vigorous system of checks and balances, one man's crank ideas--like starting an incoherent trade war that upends the global economy don't get filtered out. They become policies that enrich [Trump's] family and his allies. But that's not really the problem at all, and what's worse, checks are intended to be brakes on democracy, and thus cannot be sensibly used to support the very notion of majoritarianism. Kofman lets slip a sense of what she thinks is basic when whe writes that Yarvin has little to say on the question of human flourishing. Clearly she thinks that's a misstep on his part. But if flourishing is to be the ultimate goal, it's likely that those looking for an all-powerful CEO or philosopher king are just as likely to win the day. Sure, democracy may bring about human flourishing, but it also may not. That's part of its DNA: it simply allows a populace to (within limits*) get what it wants at the time, whether sensible or nuts. If the appropriate search is simply for happy endings, whether democracy is most likely to provide the best road is a purely empirical matter. 

Kofman seems also to conflate democracy with liberalism, forgetting--at least for a moment--that democracies may be (minimally in my view) illiberal.* She says, e.g., In the past decade, liberalism has taken a beating from both sides of the political spectrum. Its critics to the left view its measured gradualism as incommensurate to the present multiple emergencies; climate change, inequality, the rise of an ethno-nationalist right. Conservatives, by contrast, paint liberalism as a cultural leviathan that has trampled traditional values underfoot. Whether or not liberalism requires the reaching of any of the specified goals, is unclear, but democracy certainly need not. Again, it's a mistake to suggest that we can measure how democratic a polity is by how well it is doing in terms of  "human flourishing," as if a polity could not be democratic if its stupid and/or cruel citizens cannot govern in anything but stupid or cruel ways. Such a position actually falls into a Yarvinesque trap by accepting the view that democracy is bad idea if a populace is ignorant or easily fooled. 

I don't want to try to get into anything like a detailed defense of democracy and democratic values in a little blog post. I will only (again) suggest that those interested in my views should take a look at a bunch of relevant entries here at luckorcunning, my published papers on those subjects, or (best of all, imo) my book on democratic theory. But I will say here that if one is most in search of democratic means to prevent self-enrichment by an office-holder, the best answers seem to me to be robust Recall and Referendum provisions, rather than anything like bicameral legislatures, Filibuster capabilities, Executive vetoes, or requirements for supermajorities. Beefing up Madisonian "checks" (i.e., impediments) to authentic self-government are certainly neither the answer to Yarvin nor to the current problems besetting the United States under Trump.

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* I won't attempt to specify all the limits I believe must constrain majoritarianism for authentic democracy to obtain. But to give the general idea, there must at least be equal treatment and protection for all, a right to vote and run for office for all competent residents, free speech, free association, and free assembly.