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Democracy

8 min read

Part of Elections and politics.

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Every episode (4)

Who argued it

Randall Holcombe · Jayant Bhandari · Andrei Illarionov · Ilya Somin

Federalism · Public Choice Theory · Progressive Era · 17th Amendment · Morality · Capitalism · Immigration · Foot Voting

Background

Democracy as a learned process

In an April 2017 episode on Russia, Bob Zadek asked whether democracy is taught in the Russian system as a working practice or merely held up as an abstract ideal, noting his concern that democracy is “a vague ideal, something akin to freedom” that everyone automatically aspires to without appreciating that it is complex and sometimes produces unsatisfactory results. Andrei Illarionov answered that the level of understanding of democracy in Russia could differ from that in the United States or Switzerland, since the US has lived under a democratic political regime for the last 200 years and many European countries for more than a century. Democracy, he said, is a process of learning and of education, and American democracy today is quite different from the democracy of the same United States 200 years ago and is probably not perfect yet but is moving in that direction. Russia, by contrast, did not experience two centuries of democracy; its episodes were rather short. When democracy arrived roughly 25 years before the conversation, Russians embraced it wholeheartedly and democratic mechanisms and institutions began to operate, not without mistakes and problems, but people preferred to live under a democratic political regime rather than an autocratic one. The fight Russia went through in the 1990s was not only over economic reforms or catastrophe but also a fight for a democratic political regime. Illarionov’s sentence about Germany, which had a much stronger basement for building a democratic political regime, breaks off there. Russia Today (Yesterday & Tomorrow) (2017)

Democracy as anti-meritocratic

In a December 2017 episode on capitalism and morality, Jayant Bhandari used Pakistan as his example: a country that had done reasonably well under military dictatorship, where each time the masses came to the streets to get democracy, the moment they got democracy the fanatic elements of the society kicked in and made Pakistan slowly and surely a religious country, and women got locked back into their houses. Democracy, he argued, does not work because the lowest common denominator in every society, the lowest 51%, decides who should run the country; it is a non- and anti-meritocratic system of governance. Zadek drew out the implication that democracy is not necessarily the best tool for governance and is only effective in the right place at the right time, while the world treats it as a universal good on the model of being unable to have too much democracy. Bhandari went further, calling democracy the worst form of government and a cancer: because the least competent people, striving for bread and circuses, have the most votes, a cycle of populism overtakes the institutions of government and corrupts everything in society, so that associations and businesses become democratic and take on the virus of populism. Democracy, he said, is very visible in third-world countries but has only slowly decayed Western societies, and because the decay is slow over the last 200 years in the US it is not very visible. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)

Deliberation and the anti-democratic Senate

In a December 2021 episode on the conservative constitution, Zadek asked Ilan Wurman to define democracy before discussing his restructuring of the Senate and his approach to electing a president. Wurman defined it as the idea that the people decide who rules over them on a continuing basis, choosing through election the people who make the rules for them on an ongoing basis. He said he does not think the founders believed democracy was an end in itself, and that he is not sure he does either, describing himself as Churchillian: the worst form of government except for all the other ones tried. The question, he said, is how to create a regime in which human beings can exist and flourish consistent with their functions as human beings, and democracies overall have a slightly better track record at creating such regimes than non-democratic ones, though not a perfect one. He invoked Publius in Federalist 10 on creating a popular government that remedies the diseases most incident to popular government, and the need to enshrine fundamental liberties in a Bill of Rights and to have separation of powers and checks and balances so that ambition counteracts ambition. Wurman’s committee doubled down on the anti-democratic quality of the Senate: a smaller Senate of 50 senators, one per state, each with a single nine-year term so they are not up for reelection, required to take an oath to legislate for the common good. They almost made deliberation secret but that was too far for some on the committee in their mini-convention. The point, he said, is resolving the problems of democracy while still being a popular government—saving democracy from itself and for itself—with democratic deliberation as a big theme. The Conservative Constitution (2021)

Guardrails and the optimal amount of democracy

In two August 2022 episodes, Ilya Somin addressed a report on restoring guardrails to democracy. Zadek pressed the assumption that the project took more democracy as better, citing the 17th Amendment as an example of increased democracy, when power was given to the voting public at large rather than to a select group, and the disappearance of an effective Electoral College as another movement toward more popular democracy. Somin rejected the assumption: we can try to do too much through the democratic process, and in some ways we do, which is why the report devotes a section to expanding other decision-making mechanisms such as voting with your feet and, in some ways, the jury system. If you try to do too much through a democratic process, particularly in a very centralized way with the federal government having more and more power, that can be dysfunctional and problematic and can even help to undermine democracy itself. There is somewhere an optimal amount of democracy, hard to know exactly where, and too much of it produces serious problems. 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022)

Somin distinguished problems inherent to democracy from problems arising from specific current institutions. Voters often have very little incentive to be well-informed, and some such problems probably cannot be dealt with, though others can be mitigated. But it is not an inherent problem of democracy that a loser of an election like President Trump in 2020 refuses to recognize the result and tries to overturn it by various means; safeguards can be strengthened to prevent occurrences like that. He listed three problems: efforts to overturn elections and monkey around with them, growing polarization and hostility between the parties and their supporters, and the difficulty for individual voters to have a meaningful say, the chance that any one vote will make a difference being about one in 60 million in a presidential election. On polarization, he said that by just about any measure the amount is higher now than in at least several decades, with the percentage of people who think the opposing party is a menace to America or a threat to democracy much higher than in the past, and around 40% or more saying they would be angry if a family member married a member of the opposing party. 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022)

Across episodes: the same question, different answers

The question of whether democracy’s problems are inherent or institutional recurs across the 2022 Somin episodes and the 2021 Wurman episode, with Somin separating inherent problems like voter ignorance from contingent ones like a loser refusing to recognize a result, and Wurman treating anti-democratic structure as a remedy for democracy’s diseases; the 2017 episodes with Illarionov and Bhandari stake out the poles of the same argument, one treating democracy as a learnable practice and the other as a cancer.

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