Less democracy, please

Democracy is surely the best system yet devised to manage the political affairs of a free people, perhaps even, as Francis Fukuyama claimed in The End of History, the only form of government compatible with human nature.

But that doesn’t mean that we should democratize everything in life, or make that which already has been democratized even more so.

Lest we forget, the American founders were especially skeptical of unbridled democracy, equating it with “mob rule,” the inchoate and volatile passions of those emboldened by sheer weight of numbers at some ephemeral point in time. In unfiltered form it was, for the likes of George Washington and James Madison, as likely to pose as great a threat to rights and liberties as the whims of the absolute monarch.

Lynch mobs are a form of “direct” democracy, but they aren’t something we wish to encourage as a basis for our politics. Indeed, the beauty of the American constitutional order is found in the way in which it limits (checks and balances) government for the sake of individual freedom, even democratically elected government.

A crude majoritarianism has, however, been demanded persistently by the political left since at least the storming of the Bastille, on the grounds that there is some kind of popular or general will that can somehow become manifest if obstacles to it are progressively dismantled; that abstract “people’s republics” are somehow superior to the constrained kind created in 1787 at Philadelphia.

The latest target of this simpleminded majoritarianism is of course the electoral college, which the left, disappointed by results flowing from it recently, wishes to replace with a national popular vote for the presidency (there usually being an inverse relationship between leftist respect for American institutions and the extent to which they are producing victories for the left).

That junking in a fit of political distemper

the founders’ ingenious mechanism for electing presidents would be an astonishingly bad idea can be proven by consideration of the likely consequence—a multitude of purely mercenary, entrepreneurial candidates, no longer needing to appeal to broad constituencies or tethered to those crucial mechanisms of political mobilization known as political parties, with each needing to win only slightly more votes than the other seven or eight or more contenders.

If we think our politics are dangerously polarized and fractured these days, imagine what they will become when candidates can campaign in just a few cities in just a region or two of the country and get elected president with just 25 percent or so of the popular vote, when the geographical cohesion of “these United States” is no longer preserved by any overarching electoral mechanism. And imagine also the quality of governance when the lure of winning our highest office with such a meager endorsement brings out all of the Hollywood nincompoops, talkshow blowhards, and fringe-dwelling knuckle-draggers.

Change as a logical matter is just as likely to be for the worse as for the better, and when what you’ve got (American politics under the electoral college) is pretty darn good, particularly compared with how things have worked out in other places, you have a lot more room to go down than up.

In politics, as in life in general, things can always get worse, even worse than Donald Trump.

There are other problematic ideas being put forth on the left, invariably on “democratic” grounds, including simplified voter registration procedures and various proposals for making voting itself easier, as in longer early voting periods and relaxed absentee requirements.

The central thread running through such schemes is the belief that low voter turnout somehow constitutes voter suppression and that the solution to our problems (and to more leftist political victories) is to get lots more morons to the polls that wouldn’t otherwise bother.

But the quality of the electorate matters much more for good governance than its sheer size, and the vote of a clueless person is worse than no vote at all. It might instead be better for people to have to make a bit of an effort to exercise the cherished franchise on the grounds that it should be a solemn commitment and that it hardly benefits the national interest to cultivate the votes of people who decide whether to show up or not depending on the weather.

It is, after all, a pathetic excuse for a political party whose prospects depend upon getting more dummies to the polls, and letting 16-year-olds cast ballots during breaks between study hour and PE, and serial killers and terrorists sending their preferences in from their bunks on death row (presumably for those who would abolish capital punishment for serial killers and terrorists, among others).

This hardly adds up to an elevated conception of republican government.

Not everything should be subject to a dictatorship formed by a slight edge in mere numbers.

As such, it makes no sense to talk of “perfecting democracy” purely in terms of expansion of the franchise or the removal of obstacles to the people’s fleeting desires.

To the contrary, the best form of democracy is one which, like that the founders designed, contains means to protect “the people” from their own ignorance and folly.