Two cheers for democracy

Whenever I’ve expressed reservations about loosening voting rules to increase voter turnout, I’ve been accused of “opposing democracy.”

Such accusations suggest confusion regarding the purposes of self-government; more precisely, that too many of us mistake it as an end rather than a means.

It is important to not put cart before horse here—democracy is a decision-making system; a set of procedures rather than something substantive in nature.

It is not, contrary to populist rhetoric and popular misconception, the primary purpose of the American project; rather, it is a contributing component toward the larger project of securing human freedom.

Once we understand democracy as merely a means toward an end, a set of rules for filling many public offices and indirectly determining our laws and policies in accord with majority preferences, it becomes easier to properly identify its virtues (and limitations).

First among these is that the holding of free, fair elections endows democratic states with the kind of legitimacy (defined as perceptions of rightful authority) dictatorships can never possess. As Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are likely to discover down the road, there is a difference between “performance legitimacy,” which is temporarily granted in return for high economic growth or baubles provided by the state, and the real thing.

Efforts at democratization sometimes fail (see Weimar), but democracies that are viewed as legitimate in the eyes of their people tend to be more politically stable than authoritarian alternatives which, lacking the legitimacy conferred by the ballot box, exist in constant fear of dissent and rebellion.

Closely related is an argument advanced by Steven Pinker in “Enlightenment Now,” which is that democracies provide the best means of changing out a bad government (through ballots instead of bullets). When a democratic government performs poorly, you replace those who govern; when a dictatorship performs poorly (as is so often the case) the only solution is to overthrow the government itself.

In democracies we can blame Donald Trump, Joe Biden or other rascals and vote new rascals in. In dictatorships the abused citizenry have no choice but to blame the regime and no means short of revolution to replace it.

Finally, democracies, however messy and inefficient they sometimes seem, make better public-policy decisions over time than dictatorships. Whereas government officials in democracies will often attempt to lie to the people (and sometimes succeed), dictatorships force citizens to lie to the government and everyone else, and government officials to routinely lie to each other, precisely the formula for trundling off the cliff together.

Ironically, given the usually massive size of their secret police apparatuses, dictators have no reliable way of knowing what is really happening around them, what their people actually think, or how well the policies they impose work. They suffer from a debilitating system of preference falsification and institutionalized lying that undermines their ability to make effective decisions.

Because dictatorships lack debate and freedom of expression and any forms of checks and balances, they also lack any forms of quality control.

That democracies are better at most things than dictatorships also tells us why the gradual expansion of the franchise over time (to include women, minorities, etc.) has been beneficial not just in terms of bringing principle and practice closer to alignment but also because the larger the franchise, the more legitimacy, the greater the likelihood of peaceful, smooth transitions of power, and the stronger the system of checks and balances that enhances the quality of public policy (or at least reduces the likelihood of costly public-policy mistakes).

None of this means, however, that democracy is a mechanism that should be applied whenever possible, or that discussion of “perfecting” it is anything other than silly, even dangerous.

That democracies grant the right to vote to the overwhelming majority of adults doesn’t mean that voting should determine everything, or even the most important things—democracy does a better job of protecting our unalienable rights than the alternatives, but that doesn’t mean that our freedom of speech, press, assembly, and religion is or should be subject to the whims of ephemeral majorities flowing out of a ballot box.

The best parts of the Constitution are actually the “counter-majoritarian” parts, those that, in Kevin Williamson’s colorful words, “you *$%#& idiots don’t get to mess with.” There is a powerful argument on behalf of democratic government only if that government remains limited in scope and power and is prevented from infringing upon the rights of the minority (to which we all belong at times).

Indeed, a dictatorship that left the vast majority of human activity undisturbed might be considered preferential to a massive state that by democratic process left nothing alone.

Democracy purists consider any architecture or outcomes that fail to precisely reflect the will of the people to be defective, but the founders, with an almost certainly fuller understanding of the defects of human nature, also rightly conflated too much democracy with “mob rule” and consequently crafted a document that effectively left many parts well beyond the reach of temporary majorities.

It is, in short, possible to both embrace democracy and argue that it is possible to have too much of it.