October 9, 2017 The Nation.^31H
ow many bizarre electoral outcomes
does it take to shake our faith in de-
mocracy? Apparently, one is enough.
Even before the presidential election
last November, New York magazine’s
Andrew Sullivan was fretting about so-
called “hyperdemocracies,” in which people
have an unquenchable thirst for equality
and refuse to accept limits on the popular
will. This summer, writing in the Los Angeles
Times, James Kirchik concluded from the
Brexit vote and the recent snap election in
the United Kingdom that “our duly electedrepresentatives” should have the courage
to ignore “the uninformed opinion of the
masses.”
Social scientists as well as political phi-
losophers have been ready to second that
opinion: Ever since Philip Converse’s pio-
neering studies in the 1950s, American
political scientists have amassed a wealth of
evidence confirming just how little voters
know—and just how incoherent or plain
illogical their political choices can be. This
empirical work has run in tandem with that
of political theorists less worried about vot-by JAN-WERNER MÜLLER
BLAMING THE PEOPLE
Is democracy really the problem?
Against Democracy
By Jason Brennan
Princeton University Press. 304 pp. $29.95Jan-Werner Müller teaches politics at Princeton
University. His book What Is Populism? came
out last year.ers’ ignorance than about their intolerance.
John Rawls, still the most influential liberal
philosopher in the United States today, ar-
gued that for a liberal polity to be stable,
“unreasonable” citizens would have to be
“contained” just like “war and disease.”
One might think that the obvious an-
swer to voter ignorance is education, and
the answer to the more specific quandary
of voter unreasonableness is perhaps some
sort of civic reeducation. But the political
philosopher Jason Brennan is having none
of this argument. In his book Against De-
mocracy, Brennan points to evidence that
the generally rising education levels in the
United States have not made citizens more
knowledgeable about politics. Like many
social scientists, he thinks there’s a simple
explanation for why Americans remain so
clueless: Ignorance is a rational choice. Since
one’s individual vote has an infinitesimally
small chance of actually deciding the out-
come of an election, it simply isn’t worth
the time and effort to bone up on policy
basics—or even read the Constitution. As
Brennan argues in another of his writings
on the subject, democracy’s “essential flaw”
is that it spreads power out widely, thereby
removing any incentive for individual voters
to use their own, more diffuse power wisely.
Of course, some voters seem happy
to participate in the process nevertheless;
they still display a passionate interest in
political, and even constitutional, matters.
But most of them, according to Brennan,
treat politics like a spectator sport or, even
worse, a brutal contact sport. The com-
pletely ignorant are what he calls “hobbits”;
by contrast, those who root for one team
and hate the other are “hooligans.” For
hooligans, a little knowledge is a danger-
ous thing: They understand enough to be
deeply convinced that their team is on the
side of the angels and that the other side are
devils (witness how 40 percent of Trump
supporters in Florida thought that Hillary
Clinton had literally emerged from hell ).
But they are incapable of rationally weigh-
ing policy options or even comprehending
their own basic interests. For the hooligans,
it’s all about identity.
In Brennan’s peculiar typology, there is
a third species of voter, which he calls “vul-
cans.” Vulcans coolly examine the evidence
and then form their political judgments ac-
cordingly. Needless to say, they’re a mi-
nuscule minority, and, less obviously, they
cannot be upheld as anything resembling
role models: After all, most people simply
don’t have the leisure to become vulcans—as
Oscar Wilde once said of socialism, it takes
ILLUSTRATION BY TIM ROBINSON