By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, April
17, 2024
Before I get to the new stuff, let’s review my case for
democracy.
Democracy guards against bad outcomes, but it in no way
guarantees good outcomes. I think virtually everyone who thinks seriously about
politics and democracy understands this to one extent or another. But virtually
no one involved in politics says this sort of thing out loud. Instead, they
talk about how elections are the “voice of the people.”
Again, I am all for giving people a voice. Here the
people rule and all that. I just don’t like, or agree with, a lot of the poetry
that comes with this stuff. (Voice can mean a lot of different things, of
course. But in this context, it means voting and not, say,
telling a Bakersfield City Council that their hearing room security proposals
are excessive because we can just “murder you”
at your homes.)
The worst rhetoric about democracy is of the sort when
the election results—decisive though they may be—prompt people to say things
like “the people have spoken.” Such statements are virtually never true. In any
given elections, even in a landslide, somewhere around a quarter to a third of
“the people” voted for someone else. And a vast number of people didn’t vote at
all. Are they not part of “the people” too? Do you not have the same rights and
dignity regardless of whether you voted for the winning side in some election?
Also, decisive majorities don’t speak in a single
“voice.” Everyone who votes for a Republican or Democrat isn’t saying the exact
same thing with their vote. Some voted because they agreed with the candidate’s
foreign policy or tax policy or just because they liked him or her more than
the opponent. Indeed, these days I think it’s fair to say that something close
to a majority of voters vote against the other candidate. And
yet politicians and their spinners routinely, nay relentlessly, insist that
“the people” are 100 percent on their side on every issue. This is always a
lie.
There’s an additional problem: The people can be wrong.
In fact, voters are wrong all the time. The ridiculous
slogan “vox populi, vox dei” (“the voice of the people is the voice
of God”) illustrates the point well. And you can substitute “nation” for
“God” if you like—that seems to be all the rage with some people anyway.
But nothing polls anywhere close to 100 percent and no
politician wins with anything close to 100 percent of the vote, even those who
run unopposed.
Fun fact: In the history of modern polling, only two
presidents had approval ratings that broke the 90 percent barrier and they both
had the last name Bush. Technically, Bush the Elder received 89 percent
approval after the first Iraq war, but we can give him the benefit of rounding
up one point. Bush the Younger actually hit 92 percent shortly after 9/11. The
best Democrat score wasn’t FDR’s 84 percent or JFK’s 83 percent, but Harry
Truman’s 87 percent in June of 1945. But you know that was just after we beat
the Nazis in Europe. I’m going to stipulate that it’s always good to be
president when the forces of democracy beat the stuffing out of Nazis. Now,
roughly 18 months after Bush the Elder hit that high, his approval ratings
dropped to 29 percent. At the end of the Younger’s presidency, his approval was
19 percent. Truman sunk to 22 percent at the end of his.
Now, I don’t want to get into the theological weeds, but
I kinda think that the Almighty’s opinion of these men—pro or con—wasn’t nearly
so fickle. The Supreme Court may read the election returns, but I’d like to
think God goes straight to the sports pages.
The point becomes even more obvious when it comes to
issue polling. Wherever you come down on abortion or, for that matter, the
carried interest deduction, I’m pretty certain that God’s opinion is more
consistent.
Interestingly pretty much all of the highwater marks in
public opinion are in response to war. In 2001, 94 percent of Americans
supported a military response to 9/11. I was definitely one of them. But I
don’t think it’s particularly helpful to think we are getting closest to God’s
will whenever we’re most determined to open a can of whup-ass on somebody. And,
besides, the remaining 6 percent were equal members of “the people.” Some of
them might actually be really good folks. I don’t see eye-to-eye with Quakers
and Amish people, but I’m very open to the idea that God has a better opinion
of them than He does of me, regardless of how wrong they are on foreign
policy.
I’m sorry to belabor this, but I sincerely believe that
the whole idea of the “people’s voice” is romantic hogwash. It’s a means of
smuggling in nationalistic, populist ideas, or even theocratic claims of
authority for the winners and “otherizing” dehumanizing notions about the
losers. I have so much more to say about this point, but I should get to what
elections are actually for.
They’re for firing people. They’re also for hiring
people. But the firing is much more important.
Democracy’s greatness lies in the fact it is a hedge
against bad things. (Its record in assuring good things is decidedly more mixed
and contestable.) The ability to fire people is essential to political
competition. If a politician or a party screws up or starts looking out for its
own interests more than the interests of the voters, the ability to kick them
out is essential. This was among the greatest innovations in human history.
Monarchs and aristocracies can get selfish and self-absorbed. Indeed, they
always do eventually. Politicians are prone to the same tendencies. But in a
democracy, you can get rid of them without swords or guns.
James Madison designed our political system on a very
different conception of the voice of the people. He understood that people
change their minds and that people disagree on stuff. There’s nothing wrong
with that. People and groups have different interests, religions, tastes,
ambitions, and ideologies. That’s why I dislike the rhetoric about “the people”
or “the nation”—it rhetorically erases the diversity of the people into a
homogenized lump.
Recognizing this, Madison wanted lots of
elections. Remember, before modern polling, elections were really the
only way to “take the temperature” of the people. So best to have a bunch of
them, often, to stay on top of changing attitudes and new problems. That’s why
this country is drenched in elections. We have them every year somewhere. The
most democratic branch of the federal government has elections every two years.
The idea wasn’t just to elect people voters agreed with. It
was to hold them accountable for how good or bad a job they did in
actually doing things. It’s great to have a representative who sees
the world the same way you do, but if they suck at the job, agreement is
largely irrelevant. Better to have a politician in office who disagrees with
you on some stuff, but is good at the job. I’m not saying it’s better to have
an effective representative who’s effective at doing things you dislike. I’m
saying it’s better to have an effective politician who at least does more of
the stuff, particularly the important stuff, you want them to do.
One of the problems today is that a lot of politicians
have figured out that they can raise money and win votes simply by testifying about
their feelings without delivering on facts. But you know my views on the
pundification of the political class.
What got me on this is that I’ve been reading a lot on
the various criticisms of democracy, and hooboy, there are a lot of
them. And, while I am still very much in the pro-democracy camp, the
critics make a lot of points I agree with. The anti-democratic tradition
usually begins with Plato. I’m not going to reprise it all here, in part
because I don’t want to, in part because his critique of democracy often elides
into a critique of liberty, and I don’t think democracy and liberty are
remotely synonymous concepts.
Voting is a small—but important!—subset of liberty. But
there’s a robust tradition that says democracy is an unreliable protector of
liberty, and there’s evidence to back up that view. The founders believed this,
which is why they put most of our core liberties on a very high shelf that was
hard to reach in a single election. You can democratically repeal the Bill of
Rights—but man it’s hard, and I’m glad for that. But Plato was right: Democracy
is vulnerable to all sorts of things, from tyranny to the death of expertise
and mob rule.
Some pre- and post-liberal critics of
democracy take this fact and conclude that democracy is therefore suboptimal.
The key flaw in their thinking is that there is some alternative system that
would do better over time. I have no doubt that if there was
some brilliant philosopher-king, modern George Washington, Cincinnatus, or even
a Frederick the Great waiting in the wings, we’d better off with them in
charge. But there’s no Zip Recruiter available to find such a person. And even
if we could find some enlightened despot, replacing him or her with an equally
qualified replacement is practically impossible. A system dependent on the
“good Czar” is powerless at preventing the bad Czar from taking his
place.
Other critics echo or amplify various aspects of the
Platonic critique. I’m particularly partial to the Italian elite theorists.
They argued, correctly, that elites are inevitable and that elites will
often—or always, opinions differ—prioritize their own interests
over the public’s. This is so obviously true of every city where one party has
a monopoly on political power, I don’t think it’s worth debating. I’m not
saying they don’t ever tend to the public interest, but they first work
assiduously to protect their own interest. That’s why if you’re against the
calcified NIMBYism and ideological nonsense hobbling so many cities, I think
you should vote to throw the bums out whenever feasible. Competition is
essential to a properly functioning democracy.
Anyway, the reason I started reading up on the critiques
of democracy is that it occurred to me that for all of the talk these days
about “our democracy” and the threats to it, very little of it tracks with the
anti-democratic tradition. The case for democracy starts from the premise that
elections are honest and function properly. Donald Trump’s attacks on
democracy—and he did attack democracy—go directly at this premise. Now, it’s
true that the more sophisticated defenders of Trump will argue that the election
was “rigged” precisely because the “Deep State” or the “Biden regime” in
waiting wanted to protect its hold on power. But this is a bad-faith argument
for the simple reason that the election wasn’t rigged. It’s pretextual to
defend Trump’s ego. And the amazing thing is how this argument has become the
one non-negotiable loyalty test in Trump’s party. Even abortion is negotiable
now, but not his stolen election claims.
But you know what controversy fits the classic critiques
of democracy perfectly? Joe Biden’s determination to cancel student loan debt.
(The same goes for Trump’s failed attempt at the end of his term to cut even
more stimulus checks to voters.) Countless skeptics of democracy warned that
democratic rulers would ignore the law or the public good and demagogically
pander to bribable constituencies. That’s what Biden is trying to do. He’s
ignoring the will of Congress, the most democratic branch, and to a certain
extent the Supreme Court, in a naked attempt to reward a constituency in exchange
for their votes. Whether or not you think it’s good policy—I think it is
horrible, immoral policy—the means and motives behind the effort are
quintessentially undemocratic. Biden was once skeptical
he had the authority to forgive student debt. You may like to believe he
changed his mind after carefully studying the law and the Constitution, but
Occam’s razor suggests he changed his mind after carefully studying the
polls. And yet, many of the people most inclined to rend their cloth and
gnash their teeth about the threats to “our democracy” think it’s bizarre to
complain about Biden’s lawless pursuit of mass bribery.
Student loan forgiveness is just an example of the larger
dynamic. We are so far down the road of the New Deal-era conception of
government that many are simply blind to it. The New Deal was a mixed bag, but
one of its core philosophical commitments was the idea of turning citizens into
clients of the state. Forget the law and Constitution for a minute and just
look at the math. Biden and Trump share an ironclad commitment to doing nothing
to fix entitlements. A Frederick the Great would have a cup of champagne-coffee-and-mustard
(no really, that was his preferred drink to get his day going), take one look
at the country’s books, and start slashing. But Frederick the Great didn’t give
a rat’s ass about the people’s voice.
And that gets me back to where I began. I don’t know any
serious expert on America’s finances who doesn’t think we need to seriously
reform entitlements. Opinions differ on how. But there’s a broad consensus on
the necessity. The problem is that there’s a broader consensus among
voters—that is, a majority of
voters—that the government shouldn’t touch them. (Thanks to the pandering of
demagogues, many of them also believe, incorrectly, that we can simply tax the
rich to fix the problem. This, too, is consistent with the critiques of
democracy).
You can prattle on about “vox populi, vox dei” or similar
nostrums all you like. It won’t change the fact that “the people” are wrong
(unless you think God wants America to become fiscally insolvent). Democracy
depends on good leaders, but it also requires good followers. And as bad as our
leadership problem is, our followership problem is worse. I am not a fan of
Joseph de Maistre—a great critic of democracy in all forms—but he had a point
when he said people get the government they deserve.
No comments:
Post a Comment