by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
The aspiration of democracy is that with its freedoms, we allow reasons to be exchanged so that the best will come to be recognized. Note that this is true of democracy at its best. And we know that real-world democracy is far from the ideal. We are in fact forced to live according to rules that are favored by ignorant, misinformed, and irrational citizens; and many of the rules we are forced to live by are defensible only by way of the flawed rationales embraced by the ignorant. In real-world democracy, we are indeed at the mercy of our irrational and ignorant fellow citizens. Knowing this, politicians and officials cater to majority irrationality, and, once in power, they govern for the sake of gaining reelection.
It's difficult to see what could justify democracy. Maybe this is as it should be? Even under ideal conditions, political orders are always coercive, and so the task of justifying any mode of politics should be onerous. And the difficulty of justifying democracy should increase under non-ideal conditions such as those we currently face. Part of the task of democracy, even in its most ideal versions, is to critically assess the prevailing democratic order. And one way to assess a democracy is to envision alternative arrangements that might be superior.
In a recent book, provocatively titled Against Democracy, Jason Brennan takes up the chore of assessing existing democracy. His central contention is appropriately modest. He claims that if there is a workable nondemocratic political arrangement that can reasonably be expected to more reliably produce morally better policy decisions than existing democratic arrangements, we ought to try that alternative arrangement. Ultimately, he identifies a range of alternatives that he alleges will outperform democracy, all of which instantiate a political form he calls (borrowing a term coined by David Estlund) epistocracy, the rule of the knowers.
Hence Brennan's argument is comparative; he aims to identify epistocratic alternatives that are better than democracy. Accordingly, he proceeds from a fairly dismal depiction of the state of the democratic citizenry. Brennan proposes a taxonomy of democratic character types: hobbits, hooligans, and Vulcans. Hobbits are uninterested in politics and so lack political information, frequently are devoid of stable political opinions, and tend to not vote. Hooligans, by contrast, consume political information and have strong and stable political views. However, they reason and gather political information in biased ways; they tend to be politically active, but they also tend to regard their political opposition as evil, ignorant, deluded, or worse. Vulcans are properly-behaved political epistemologists; they have well-grounded views, know the relevant social science and philosophy, and are able to disagree respectfully with others. However, as the requisite knowledge and dispositions are difficult to acquire, Vulcans are scarce.
According to Brennan, the trouble with democracy is that it is teeming with hooligans, "the rabid sports fans of politics." More than this, democracy tends to encourage political hooliganism. And as the citizenry is hooliganized, it is mobilized in the direction of policies that are increasingly unjust and harmful; hence, according to Brennan, democracy turns us all — including Vulcans — into civic enemies. Hence democracy rots from the inside.
Brennan's account of the corruption of democracy is undeniably resonant. Still, his depiction of the hooligan raises a difficulty. Unlike the images of the hobbit and the Vulcan, the portrayal of the hooligan is strictly second- or third-personal. That is, only the hobbits and Vulcans can embrace Brennan's rendering of their political character. That is, hobbits are capable of assessing themselves as hobbits, and the same goes for Vulcans. Not so with the hooligans.
The trouble with the hooligans is not simply that they form political opinions in epistemically irresponsibly ways and then behave badly in the political arena; it's also that they take themselves to be Vulcans. From the inside the hooligan takes himself to be a paragon of wisdom. His biases look to him like principles, his vices look like virtues, and his tribal allegiance to his political team looks to him perfectly rational. Political hooligans cannot understand themselves as such. To sincerely assess one's reasoning as plagued by bias is to lose confidence in one's reasoning. To assess one's belief as the product of systematic epistemic dysfunction is to see the belief itself as corrupt. Delusion and self-deception are ineradicable parts of the political hooligan's profile.
One might wonder, then, who Brennan's audience is. The hobbits don't read books about politics and don't care about arguments in political philosophy. The politically-engaged all take themselves to be Vulcans (or at least not hooligans), and most of them are frustrated by the current state of democracy. But only a few of them (i.e., the true Vulcans) are actually moveable by reason and argument. Hence the hooligans will welcome Brennan's call for epistocratic alternatives, but this is because they take themselves (and their fellow tribesmen) as especially strong candidates for leadership roles in whatever epistocratic order might take shape. Being hooligans, they believe themselves to be Vulcans, and they also are not susceptible to rational demonstration of their hooligan nature. Therefore any attempt to design an epistocracy that does not empower them (or members of their political tribe) will be regarded by them as yet another corrupt power-grab by their incompetent and sinister political enemies.
Accordingly, given Brennan's diagnosis of the trouble with democracy, the prospect of designing and implementing an episocratic alternative, even as an experiment to be tried, seems doomed. Given what hooligans are, any epistemologically responsible selection of an epistocratic body will be perceived by the majority of politically-active citizens (who are hooligans) as either rigged to favor their enemies, or designed to oppress their enemies. The hooligans of the former stripe will oppose the epistocratic innovation, and, as they're hooligans, their opposition will take unwelcome forms. The hooligans of the latter kind might at first embrace the epistocracy, but then rebel once it's clear that the epistocrats aren't ruling in the favored ways.
The point here is that epistocracy among a population comprised mostly of hooligans likely will be unstable. Yet part of what makes for a well-performing political order is stability, and stability is a matter not only of the substantive justice of the policies that the governing body implements, but also of the ways in which the policies — and the bodies that make them — are generally perceived. Brennan may be correct to hold that hooligans ruin democracy. But that's because hooligans ruin everything, including epistocracy.
A good deal of democratic theory is devoted to devising ways to transform hooligans into Vulcans. Brennan provides reasons for thinking that this project is unlikely to succeed. He proposes an epistocratic departure from democracy that aims to empower the Vulcans by constraining or eliminating the power of the hooligans and the hobbits. But this strategy invites social instability. Perhaps the better response is to sustain democratic political conditions but create ways to transform hooligans into hobbits?