32 The Nation. October 9, 2017too many evenings. More worryingly still,
hobbits are so ignorant and ill-informed that
they can’t recognize the superior reasoning
of the vulcans and take their cues from them.
For these low-information voters, Brennan
asserts, certified experts are more or less on
the same level as the far-right radio host and
conspiracy theorist Alex Jones when it comes
to professional reputation and credibility.B
rennan’s answer to this “essential
flaw” of democracy is as drastic as
it is seemingly logical: Restrict the
franchise on the grounds of some
basic test of knowledge. Following the
philosopher David Estlund, Brennan dubs
this “epistocracy”—rule by the knowledge-
able—which has a long and disturbingly
distinguished history in Western political
thought: Plato advocated it, as did, in much
attenuated form, a 19th-century liberal like
John Stuart Mill, who wanted university
graduates to have additional votes. (He got
his wish: In the UK, “university constituen-
cies”—which allowed Oxbridge alumni to
cast two ballots—were only abolished in
1950, by a Labour government.)
Although Republicans remain busy in
the United States restricting the franchise
on the basis of essentially fraudulent claims
about “voter fraud,” neither the Republican
nor the Democratic party openly advocates
for the exclusion of voters on the grounds of
incompetence—a notion that is still taboo in
contemporary democracies. Even so, exclud-
ing children and the mentally incapacitated
from casting a ballot is a largely uncontro-
versial practice across these same democra-
cies; and in many American states, felons are
disenfranchised for the rest of their lives.
Of course, Brennan is well aware that
restricting the franchise on the basis of tests
was long deployed in the United States for
the purpose of racial discrimination. But he
wants us to ignore its past uses and marshals
a range of abstract arguments as to why
epistocracy deserves serious consideration.
For one thing, he claims, democratic citi-
zenship is not like fandom for a sports club.
Even if one’s personal vote is unlikely to
make a difference, letting lots of ignorant
people cast a ballot for their favorite “team”
has dramatic consequences: their choices
empower lawmakers to pass legislation
which ultimately authorizes police officers
to coerce anyone who is not willing to com-
ply with the “team’s” ideals. Here “fandom”
is sure to result in violence. Brennan also
insists that the varying degrees of ignorance
and prejudice displayed by different citizens
don’t somehow end up neutralizing eachother. Ignoramuses, he says, don’t vote
randomly; instead, they will empower those
who support irrational economic policies or
seek to trample our civil liberties. And if all
that weren’t bad enough, mass-democratic
politics turns people into “civic enemies” of
one another, in Brennan’s view. Rejecting
the pious notion that political participation
tends to “educate, enlighten, and ennoble,”
Brennan argues that more political involve-
ment is likely to turn hobbits into hooligans.
One need only think about the polarization
in the United States today to see his point
that “politics gives us genuine grounds to
hate each other.” Or so it might seem.
An obvious rejoinder to Brennan’s call for
disenfranchisement is that any meaningful
concept of democracy is predicated not just
on an ideal of freedom, but on a notion of
political equality. Epistocrats have to reckon
with the fact that they are advocating for a
basic inequality in our fundamental rights.
Brennan thinks this isn’t really a problem:
What are sometimes called the “expres-
sive” functions of democracy, he argues, are
massively overrated. If people want to ex-
press themselves, they should write a poem
instead of heading to the ballot box; and
if the state wants to communicate to its
citizens that it cares about them, it should
ensure decent policy outcomes—as opposed
to formal political equality combined with
enormous social injustice, as is the case in
most democracies today. Epistocracy, in
other words, would be paternalistic—but,
so Brennan claims, even the worst-off today
would benefit from seeing it instituted.
As other critics have pointed out, Bren-
nan is long on identifying the flaws of the
actually existing democracies today and
short on the institutional details of even
an ideal epistocracy. Who would create the
test to establish who gets to vote and who
doesn’t? Who would be truly competent
to judge other people’s competency—and,
for that matter, what are the measures of
competence? How would the transition to
epistocracy be engineered and justified?
Should people actually have to vote to dis-
enfranchise themselves? And if the result-
ing policies were still judged insufficiently
rational, would the franchise have to be
ever more restricted? After all, even if the
ignorant weren’t able to vote anymore, they
could still use their rights of free speech and
free assembly to advocate for what the 44th
president of the United States famously
called “stupid shit.” Would the end point
then be what social scientists have referred
to as “bureaucratic authoritarianism”—
which is to say, rule by the few, purportedlyin the name of the collective well-being?
Reading Brennan in Beijing, one would
think, must provide a boost to the leaders of
the self-declared People’s Republic.
Apart from practical questions, there is
also the issue of whether one of the most
basic conditions of democracy—the univer-
sal franchise—is quite so easily waved away.
Can disenfranchisement really be done in
a “clean” way that doesn’t jeopardize equal
treatment and status in other spheres? In
effect, epistocracy would amount to a kind
of political quarantine: We, the knowledge-
bearers, need to protect the country from
“them.” It is hard to see how the people in
the latter category would not be effectively
stigmatized, even if the disenfranchisement
were somehow accomplished benignly.
Symbolic politics is never merely symbolic;
perceptions have consequences. To treat
disenfranchisement as if it were primarily
a question of “self-esteem,” or hurting citi-
zens’ feelings, is frivolous at best.
Brennan himself seems uneasy about
this possibility and hence feels compelled
to suggest a way for everyone to affirm epis-
tocracy and thereby smuggle some notion
of equality back into his system. He writes
that “it’s not difficult to imagine an epis-
tocratic society in which everyone regards
one another as having equal status. Perhaps
they endorse epistocracy because they think
it tends to produce more equitable results,
and for that reason think their commitment
to epistocracy expresses a commitment to
equality.” But voluntary consent to epistoc-
racy would presumably undermine the very
rationale for wanting such an elitist scheme
in the first place: If citizens were sufficiently
sophisticated to understand the reasons for
their own exclusion from electoral politics
and were willing to consent to such an in-
dignity, they would likely also understand
the basic pros and cons of candidates and
policies, which would qualify them as voters
in the first place.
So epistocracy doesn’t seem to square
with democracy’s intrinsic value in affirm-
ing equality and giving everyone a chance
to advance his or her interests, as idealized
as that notion might be. But Brennan’s ad-
vocacy is also based on a curiously unrealis-
tic way of understanding how democracies
fail on an instrumental level. In his view,
modern democracies are broken because
they don’t achieve rational ends. But the
democratic process isn’t really about indi-
vidual voters making rational or irrational
choices—a perspective that can only ever
yield variations on H.L. Mencken’s quip
that “democracy is a pathetic belief in the