Anantonese Journal of Economics and Theory

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Contra Democracy
The dangers of moral equality as a system of Government

Carolina M. Ananto-Connor
Empress, Empire of Ananto and Kalistan

Editors' Note: The following article, written by the pre-eminent public official in the Empire of Ananto and Kalistan, namely, Her Imperial Majesty Empress Carolina II Ananto, was submitted via the online submissions portal, and was approved via a doubleblind peer review process. Despite not being written by a professional academic, it did meet the standards of this journal, and was approved by a panel of five peers following moderate revision and resubmission. Her Imperial Majesty did not inappropriately influence the placement decision of this Journal, which values its academic and ideological independence. -Ed.

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Abstract
An article was recently placed in The Valruzian Journal of Political Thought, (5621), No. 3 that discussed the differences between deliberative and majoritarian forms of democratic participation. This serious piece argued that substantive democracy is achieved not through mere aggregation of preferences through simple majorities, but through the process of deliberation which allows citizens to have a more complete and thoughtful expression of interests in the society. The article used Valruzia's recent constitutional alterations as an example of efforts to put deliberation into the democratic process to give the people of that nation a more complete experience with self governance. The article makes several important points, that form a coherent and intelligent argument for deliberative democracy as superior to vulgar majoritarianism. However, while it presents itself as a epistemic evaluation of deliberation, it makes a number of a priori assumptions about citizens and government itself which must be accepted for the argument to hold. If those a priori assumptions are challenged, the moral argument for democracy, and also democracy of the deliberative variety, falls apart. In short, citizens "can", but the author fails to examine whether they "should" engage in self government in the first place. This article hopes to shine a light on the normative side of the that author's argument, where he unfortunately fails.

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Introduction
Earlier this year, Mr. Gawel Sandow, who is the President and Chancellor of the Republic of Valruzia, published an article in The Valruzian Journal of Political Thought. In it, the scholar turned politician and leader of his nation, made a very impressive argument for deliberative democracy. One could in fact argue that indeed, it was quite persuasive, and if a country is committed to democracy, as an ideological matter, his prescriptions certainly should be considered and in fact heeded. They were well thought out, very well argued, and well presented in the journal.

The most impressive arguments had to do with knocking out the intellectual supports for majoritarianism. The author stated very eloquently that "the preferences of individuals are often ill-formed, inconsistent, manipulable and indifferent to the interests of others. A democracy conceived purely as preference-aggregation would be, at best, an elaborate and expensive way of formalising the prejudices of the moment." (Sandow, 8) This is of course not a critique of democracy, as the author explicitly states, but more a critique of the prevailing notion that preferences are the same as interests, and the confusion among apologists for democracy, especially majoritarian democracy, that votes are interest-based when in fact, this is often quite far from the truth. Most especially in situations where voters participate in elections as a discrete event and as a political spectacle, rather than something that is solemn and should be extremely deliberate.

There is a lot in this article to appreciate. But: This article has one fatal flaw which kills it in its cradle, sadly. It makes a number of assumptions that are utterly unsustainable. It assumes first of all, and most devastatingly that democracy is necessarily a good thing. By good, we mean, morally good. The poison pill is so casually buried in the prose that it could be missed by someone who is already inured to support democracy. The coup de grace of the article, the reason according to the author, why we should adopt deliberative democracy can be made with the reasons of his argument alone. But he shows his hand unfortunately when he steps from the positive to the normative realm.

At his heart, Sandow is less a theorist and more a crusader, and unfortunately, that weakens the positive arguments he makes above. He states: "Democratic procedures are valuable because they embody equal respect for persons, and because ( talking always under the right conditions) they tend to produce outcomes that are wiser and more just than those that any individual or small group could generate alone."

We ask "Why?" This is, after all, the meat of a theoretical discussion--An understanding of a phenomenon, be it physical or metaphysical. In the debate we are engaging here, this is essentially THE epistemological question. Why do democratic procedures automatically produce outcomes that are wiser and more just than those that any individual or small group could generate alone? The author gives absolutely no reason for this massive argument in his work: He just assumes that it is so. And here is the weakness, not just of his argument, but all arguments which try to provide a moral justification for the superiority of any democracy, whether it be prefaced with an adjective like "deliberative" or just in its native naked state: The a priori assumptions are that groups of people always come to a better decision or a more just decision than a single individual. And this is simply not true, and therefore, the argument for democracy is fatally flawed. It wants that to be so, but you cannot simply make it so by wanting it. This is the bedrock that the deliberative democracy argument is based upon, and unfortunately, its as vacuous as if the foundation were set in sand.

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Points of Argeement
Let's set aside the normative weakness for a moment, and list the points that the author made in support of his argument, which, in the absence of the a priori normative assumptions, would go to very strongly make the author's case. Sandow shines when he takes apart majoritarianism. He very correctly states "Democracy, properly understood, is not a counting mechanism. It is a system of collective self-governance..." Yes, this is correct: our own understanding of the term democracy talks not about self-government specifically, because self government would be fundamentally anarchic in nature, but where the people themselves rule themselves, as a body. The author make this distinction implicitly. Democracy is "the People Govern", not "I govern Myself". This is a fundamental but very important distinction. Because even in a democracy, there is no expectation that each individual, who, the liberals will say, knows his own mind and his own interests best, shall nonetheless be charged to make a government for and unto himself. That would be what they refer to as the State of Nature, and we all, perhaps Mr. Sandow included, can agree that where-ever we are, we are not there.

He goes on to say: "[...Majorities] can be wrong, can act unjustly, and that democratic legitimacy requires something more than headcounts." In fact, we would even go so far as to say they frequently are wrong. There is the notion of central tendencies in statistics that underlies the concept that majorities are frequently right, but this notion applies to datapoints, not living breathing individuals. In other words, 1000 individuals can correctly guess the number of jelly beans in a jar almost always if their guesses are averaged; 10,000 can do so without fail, where one person can be wildly off so much so that we could say their guess was entirely random. That's central tendencies.

But when interests are involved, or worse, when preferences are involved, central tendencies rather always just fall apart. Put another way, when a guess is made on the jar with the instrumentalist goal of the guesser personally benefitting from the contest, as we see in elections, there is a tendency to cheat introduced. And the central tendency-ness of the game goes out the window. When interest is introduced, majorities fail to select socially acceptable choices, let alone normatively good ones, so frequently that it is impossible to guess the outcome of a contested election with any regularity, regardless of how much data you bring to the question.

In fact, majorities have almost always been the enemy of the minority. If the wolves are the majority, the sheep always get eaten for dinner. So the author's critique is well made and founded in history. Whatever, majorities do not produce socially desirable outcomes with any more regularity than throwing a dart at a wall filled with a list of all possible social outcomes of a policy while blindfolded would.

We also absolutely agree that votes are expressions of "a set of beliefs, preferences and values that have been formed largely outside any deliberative process..." and that what passes for discourse in a modern liberal democracy is "more often than not, a competition between pre-packaged narratives, each designed not to inform but to activate... not the considered judgment of an informed citizenry, but the aggregated emotional response of a population..." We agree because it is difficult to view the vote in liberal democracies--who make voting into a ritual unto itself and divorce the expression of the voters from any sort of policy outcomes, which is a problem in nearly every modern democracy in Terra--as anything other than a statement of taste and preference, akin to the answer of the question, "Which do you want? Dark Chocolate or Milk Chocolate?" There is no more substance in an election decision in a liberal, majoritarian democracy than this, because the elections themselves are proforma, rather than substantive.

A good remedy for this is, as the author prescribes, a deliberative process which encourages slow, collaborative thinking and discussion among informed citizens who have the time and the opportunity, in a society which encourages that sort of behavior, to make decisions with an eye to the common good, rather than the individual good. A society which doesn't treat its elections like popularity contests, a society which encourages informative and empowering political education and meaningful participation of its citizenry at all times, not just at elections, where the people do not just think, but know that their interests are reflected in public policy. We can agree to all of that, and with these slight revisions, let it all lay on the table unmolested.

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Democracy is its own worst enemy
And yet: We would argue that democracy actually undermines deliberative process, explicitly because it set interests at odds with competing interests. It does not resolve the problem that supposedly gives rise to the need for democracy in the first place. Even if we agreed with all of these things, we have to acknowledge that there is a difference between "should" and "is" which are not to be conflated, and we think the author also acknowledges this.

Sandow argues: "The working person who lacks the time to follow parliamentary debates, the rural community that receives its political information exclusively through a single partisan media outlet, the young person whose civic education consisted of hearing heated debates in their family lunches rather than practicing the habits of collective reasoning – none of these people are stupid. They are poorly served. The remedy is not to discard their votes but to transform the conditions under which they form their political judgments."

But in making this argument for "should" which he does, the Author also acknowledges the "is". In this world, not in the world as it should be, our voters do form their opinions from partisan media sources, hearing heated debates by bigoted or opinionated adults, workers do not have time or, it could be said, interest to follow esoteric policy debates in Parliament. All of these things are acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Sandow himself pays homage to this when he mentions that sociologists have "documented the systematic irrationality of human choice." Human choice is often formed by many things other than reason, even when it is a free decision. Prejudice often comes into play, and that prejudice is not always structurally conditioned, but may sometime be informed by experience or just plain ignorance. One's ideology necessarily causes a person to privilege certain sources of information over others, and then discount ones which do not conform to their ideology, even though they may be freely available and may be saying the correct thing. A lot of things inform voters which have nothing to do with structural limitations, and those opinions aggregated in a vote may be beneficial or harmful to the rest of society.

Put plainly, political attitudes are not solely the result of concentration of the ownership of the means of political communication, underfunding or devaluation of civic education, and economic insecurity that reduces the cognitive and temporal resources available for political reflection. We could look at Kalistan, with a militantly free press, an explicit and very robust commitment to civic education and participation in our schools and in our society, and relative economic equality that provides workers with the sort of resources which would free them to learn all about government and the law. We should be the most obvious case for the structural preconditions for deliberative democracy, and yet, we reject democracy, as a society: Just like those who cannot pay attention are not stupid, those who are opposed to democracy are not brainwashed.

So why should we ask people in democracies, flawed though they are whether by structural or individual causes, to participate in government anyway? What makes those people any more qualified to determine the course of public policy, or say anything about the justness of a war, or help determine the rate of taxation for people they will never meet, than a group of people whose job it is to do just that? Who DO have access to the debates, and who DO deliberate with peers about justness and fairness rather than getting distracted by the proper operation of a highly technical machine? Who MUST follow discussions in Parliament? Why would a person who has no worldly interest or experience in government be given a vote anyway? That makes no sense.

Put another way: Should we be encouraged to express our opinion on a technical skill for which we are not trained at all? Should we be consulted over the operation of a brain surgery or the team mechanics necessary for a football team to prevail on Sunday? One may watch television dramas about brain surgery and watch football religiously, but asking them to then perform brain surgery or coach a team to victory is the same request you make of even the most informed yeoman citizens when you ask them to vote. They are not legislators. Why should they be given the power to select leaders? Worse yet, why would you give novices, which every even nominally informed citizen must necessarily be, the opportunity to become a legislator without some form of general training first?

When we separate the world as we would like it to be from the world as it is, we see a system which is ripe for plucking by corrupt individuals who will prop up a demagogue, using the people's ignorance as a vehicle for political power to pursue their wicked ends. Not always, of course, but this is where institutional rules come into play. Yes, some governments still do punish corruption. Kalistan is among the most enthusiastic about punishing corrupted public officials, but, most nations just hope elections will take care of them, because, strangely enough, those same corrupt people, when they were in office, wrote rules to protect themselves and other corrupt people like them.

But institutions are not free-for-alls. All institutions have some structure, by their definition. The Government itself is an institution. One could compare it to a military organization, in fact. For many of the same reasons. No reasonable military in the world operates on democratic bases. The defining characteristic of a modern, professional military is a unified and clearly stated chain of command. You do not let the troops vote. Why not, one may ask. Everyone, from the lowest boot private to the Commander in Chief knows that orders must be followed or people die. Nobody goes into the military expecting to get to vote, and those few in history who have instituted democracy within the ranks in the past did so because their goal was to destroy morale and demobilize the military.

If we do not trust those we ask to kill for us with democracy, why would we trust the state, which holds perhaps more comprehensive power over life or death in their hands, with democracy? The state's power is potentially far more deadly than the military's power. So why would you ask uneducated, uninterested, and uninformed individuals to manage that power? There is no good reason why. But this does not stop democrats from attempting to make them do so anyway, and sadly today, that category includes the wonderful thinker, Mr. Sandow.

Before we get to the meat, we wish to take the detour that the Author did as well and talk about technocracy. We agree that technocracy is not necessarily a suitable alternative for majoritarianism. There is no reason that an epidemiologist should be expected to know the first thing about the balance between individual liberty and collective public health. This is correct. We would not argue for this either. But technocracy is not the only alternative to either majoritarian or deliberative models. Another model would be a functional model: Our government is itself an institution and those who are within it are purely functionary. They either do their job or they do not. If they do, they return to continue to do their job. If they do not, they are replaced by someone who will. Without sentiment or regret.

This allows our public servants to be judged based on what they accomplish, rather than what they are able to trick our voters into believing. These are measurable results, not ideational ones. And literally any person is as good as the next in any role. The only thing that matters is whether they do their job. But democrats are also willing to put up with this system as well: they see functionalism every single day in the working classes of their own economy. Not in the managing classes to be sure; In Kalistan we have extended that functionalism to most of our managers as well.

Ending the digression, we return at last to the real problem here.

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