John Stuart Mill saw it clearly, all the way back in 1861, when he published a book called Considerations on Representative Government. Rejecting the idea that the ability to vote could ever be a right in democratic societies, he argued instead that voting constitutes a specific trust. When we set out to vote, we implicitly promise to make abstract and impersonal decisions about the general public good. Voting, like every other political activity, is thus an exercise in power over others. And that kind of power should never be thought a right we possess but only a trust we are granted. Just as it would be absurd to say that any particular person has an inalienable right to be president or prime minister, so it is meaningless to claim that anyone has a right to vote.
As so often with Mill, he clarifies part of an issue for us: streamlining the question of political suffrage and trimming it down to a particular component. The result has a genuine allure. It’s a way of thinking about voting that can capture the imagination and explain the unease that any thoughtful person must feel about the expression of popular will through general election.
The allure of Mill’s line of thinking has recently captured a Georgetown University political science professor named Jason Brennan, who has penned a new book called Against Democracy. Curiously, for a self-described libertarian, Brennan takes the view that the franchise has spread much too far, and he proposes instead a principle of competence. We have (or, at least, used to have) a vision of presidential timber: Before we elect people to the trust of the presidency and thereby grant them power over others, we expect them to demonstrate some capacity and knowledge. So why not something similar, writ small,before granting people the power over others granted by access to the voting booth? Brennan suggests that we limit voting, and he proposes a number of ways in which the current system of suffrage might be replaced by a system better directed to social progress.
Against Democracy makes a persuasive argument—if we rely on Mill’s understanding of voting as the exercise of power over others. But the allure of that utilitarian thinking comes from its simplicity, and the simplicity comes from a terribly short-sighted intellectual reduction of the cause and purpose of voting in a representative democracy. Think of it this way: Considered as an collective act, voting is an exercise of power over others, since the officials we jointly elect gain the authority to pass laws that are binding on the citizens they represent. But considered as an individual act, voting is an exercise of power over the self, not the whole.
In other words, when a population votes, the aggregate of voters is involved in an act of public authority. But when people vote as individuals, they are engaged in something else: a singular expression of selfhood and a uniquely personal analysis of the moral balance between self-interest and the interests of others. The individual asserts a dignity and a claim for respect just by the act of marking a ballot. We manifestly fall short of others in wealth and intelligence and physique. In the act of voting, however, we are all equal citizens of equal worth.
It’s common, when speaking of these topics, to quote Churchill’s quip that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. But far more on point might be G.K. Chesterton’s observation that there are some things a man should do for himself, even if he does them poorly: blow his nose, for example, or write a love letter. Or vote. Perhaps we would gain something as a nation from restricting or revising suffrage, as Brennan suggests. But we would lose nationhood along the way, with disenfranchised voters learning that in the root activity of citizenship they are less respected—less equal and less dignified—than their betters.
In the early pages of Against Democracy, Brennan lays out the evidence that a large percentage of the American population has only the weakest grasp of the public policy issues at play in any given election. The nation’s citizens, he goes on to argue, can be divided into three broad camps. First are the Hobbits, who know little and care less about most of politics. Then come the Hooligans, who know more but who are so biased and partisan that they cannot accurately evaluate anything in politics. And finally we get the Vulcans, who have genuine knowledge and enough intellectual power to consider issues on an abstract, impersonal level.
Brennan insists that he sympathizes with the Hobbits. "Politics is bad for us," he writes, "and most of us should, for the sake of our characters, minimize our involvement." He has no sympathy, however, for the Hooligans. Partly on the left, but certainly on the right, the Hooligans are vociferous fools, opinionated far beyond their station. And neither the ignorant Hobbits nor the brutish Hooligans should be allowed to vote.
Which leaves us with the Vulcans. One way to fix what’s wrong with the nation, Brennan insists, is to limit the franchise to people who understand what they are doing when they vote: to install an epistocracy, a rule by those who know. Perhaps, he suggests, we could give a civics test and award extra votes to the citizens who pass. Or, if our concern is that American elections have prevented economic equality, perhaps we could grant extra votes to the members of underprivileged minorities.
As the law professor Ilya Somin observes, the irony of Brennan’s proposals for promoting political knowledge is that we don’t actually have enough political knowledge to make them work. The tests we might give voters would have to rely on definitions of political positions that perhaps should themselves be the subject of political debate.
And that leads to the even greater irony of all such elitisms: If somehow we did manage to establish a system that eliminates the ignorance and rowdiness of electoral politics, we would only have created a new arena for the battles of politics. Ambition and self-interest don’t go away simply by denying them their traditional outlets.
For Jason Brennan, and for far too many others, the features of democracy have come to seem the disadvantages of democracy. The trouble with democracy—what we might call the ordinary, everyday trouble with the political system—is that it is always messy.
There are other, extraordinary problems with democracies, of course. Democratically elected governments can make boneheaded choices about economic issues, vicious decisions about criminal justice, and immoral judgments about the deepest concerns of civilization. But the real focus of Against Democracy isn’t on such extraordinary failures. Jason Brennan simply can’t stomach the ordinary aspects of democracy: the roiling mass of diverse opinion, the maddening stupidity, and the rampant partisanship that mark elections in America.
Even Brennan’s political theory retreats before his feelings of disgust about the mess of democracy. He says he’s a libertarian, but he’ll accept a liberal agenda in which he doesn’t quite believe if that ostensibly high-minded leftism just promises to make it all stop.
It won’t, of course. Brennan’s proposal would simply shift the mess to a different place. But the greatest mistake in Against Democracy comes with the failure of broad shoulders and the democratic mind. In the United States, people disagree with us. Some of them scream and shout, and most of them lack the political knowledge possessed by a Georgetown professor. So what? All of them are part of the enormous and bizarre mess we call American democracy, where the foolish and the wise are of equal worth as citizens and human beings once they get in the voting booth.