H ow did Donald Trump become a serious contender for president of the United States? It’s the question everyone is asking, but it’s the wrong question. Instead, given how ignorant and irrational voters tend to be, we should be asking how it is that someone like Trump — a candidate seemingly as ill-informed as he is uninterested in policy — hasn’t already made it to the Oval Office.
Americans widely believe that democracy is a uniquely just form of government, and that political participation enlightens and ennobles citizens. Call it democratic triumphalism. It is the American creed, so ubiquitous that it goes unquestioned. Philosophers and laypeople, optimists and cynics, partisans of the left and the right, your activist aunt and your languid uncle, all take it for granted. The three most important political philosophers of the past 50 years — John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and G.A. Cohen — disagreed about almost everything. Yet all three embraced some form of democratic triumphalism. As the Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro writes, “The democratic idea is close to nonnegotiable in today’s world.”
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
Sure, everyone admits democracy has problems. But the problems are superficial, like acne or a bad hairdo. And despite its flaws, the argument goes, democracy is better than the alternatives. If the wrong candidate wins, it’s because of gerrymandering or the influence of rich donors. If politicians push bad policies, it’s because they’ve been bought by the special interests.
The solution to what ails democracy, nearly everyone concludes, is more democracy. In the late 1800s, 70 to 80 percent of eligible Americans voted in major elections. We now muster, at most, 60 percent for a presidential election and 40 percent for midterm, state, and local elections. Because the greatness of democracy is an axiom in American life, we’re unshakeable in our faith that if more people voted, our politics would improve. We’re like Europeans in the Middle Ages; disease and poverty don’t shake our faith in an omnibenevolent God, and we blame the Devil for everything.
But the rise of Trump should challenge our faith in democracy. That’s because the presumptive Republican nominee is not an anomaly so much as a symptom of a disease deep within democracy’s bones.
John Stuart Mill believed that we should institute whatever form of government produces the best results. He speculated that the more people got involved in politics, the more concerned they’d become about the common good. Getting a factory worker to think about politics would be like getting a fish to discover there’s a world outside the ocean. Political engagement would cause us to look beyond our immediate interests, hardening our minds but softening our hearts.
The reality is that we are bad at politics, and politics is bad for us.
Mill wrote more than 150 years ago, when few people could participate in politics. His was a reasonable but untested hypothesis. The results are now in. They are largely negative. I think Mill would agree.
For the past 60 years, political scientists and others have been studying voters — what they care about, what they know, how they process information (if they have any), and how information affects their behavior. In general, scholars have found that voters are ignorant, misinformed, and irrational. Most Americans cannot identify any congressional candidates in their district. Voters generally don’t know which party controls Congress. They don’t know how much is spent on Social Security. Ilya Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University and author of Democracy and Political Ignorance, concludes that at least 35 percent of American voters are know-nothings.
Experimental work in political psychology reveals that most people process political information in a way that is biased and partisan, not dispassionate and rational. They pay attention to evidence that confirms the views they already hold. As the University of Pennsylvania political scientist Diana Mutz has found, citizens who can adequately explain political opinions other than their own rarely vote or participate in politics. It’s no surprise, then, that Trump voters ignore evidence that Trump is lying, and worse, dig in their heels.
Decades of social-science research suggest that political engagement tends not only to fail to educate or ennoble us, but also often to stultify and corrupt us. Joseph Schumpeter had it right: “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”
Contrary to what Mill expected, getting citizens to deliberate together typically backfires. Deliberation does not bring us together; it leads to polarization and anger. The model Mill imagined — of citizens solving problems together like dispassionate scientists — is mostly fantasy. The reality is that we are bad at politics, and politics is bad for us. For the sake of our characters and our country, most of us should minimize our involvement.
There’s little that democracies can do to fix these problems. More education and easier access to information have not helped. In 1940 less than 40 percent of adults over age 25 had a high-school diploma; now more than 80 percent do. Though Americans are better educated, and though political information has never been easier to acquire, people are as ignorant about politics today as they were 40 years ago. As the joke goes, “I have a device in my pocket capable of accessing all information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and argue with strangers.”
Voters are dumb because democracy makes them dumb. Democracy spreads power among a vast number of people; everyone gets an equal but tiny share — expressed through our vote — so small that none of us have an incentive to use our power wisely. The chance that an individual vote will make any difference in a national election is on par with the odds of winning Powerball. Voters have every incentive to remain ignorant about politics and to indulge their worst biases.
We cannot “fix” democratic ignorance, because we cannot change the incentives built into democracy. But perhaps we can mitigate the problem by changing our political system. What if instead of trying to make voters better informed and more reasonable, we tried to screen out the least reasonable and most misinformed voters? What if instead of a democracy, we had an epistocracy?
An epistocracy would look much like a modern democracy, with constitutional limits on power, a bill of rights, contests among political parties, free and open political speech, regular elections, checks and balances, division of powers, and the like. The difference is that not everyone would have equal voting power. Political power would be, by law, distributed according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act upon that skill. Suffrage would be widespread but not universal. An epistocracy would grant better-informed voters extra votes. It might require citizens to earn the right to vote by passing a test of basic political knowledge. Or it might allow panels of appointed experts to veto harmful legislation, just as the Supreme Court vetoes unconstitutional legislation.
To state the obvious: Any realistic form of epistocracy will be subject to abuse. If there is a voter “exam,” special interests will try to rig the test in their favor. If getting a college degree gets you three extra votes, politicians will mess around with what counts as a degree in order to further empower their voters. Epistocracy will have warts. But so does democracy. Politicians already gerrymander districts, lie to voters, and abuse voter-ID laws. Democracies sometimes choose disastrous leaders. The question isn’t whether epistocracy would be ideal, but whether it would be better than democracy.
Epistocracy might seem repulsive or dangerous. But before dismissing it out of hand, consider that built-in epistocratic checks — the disproportionate power of elites — are what stopped us from already having a President Trump. Political parties normally run establishment candidates. However corrupt the parties might be, they are generally better informed and more forward-looking than the typical voter. They keep populism in check. What we see now, with the rise of Trump, is what happens when the party system breaks down, and the worst of We the People get what we want.
Jason Brennan is an associate professor of strategy, economics, ethics, and public policy at Georgetown University. His new book, Against Democracy, will be published by Princeton University Press in August.
