Democracy doesn’t appeal to me, I’ve written before on this blog and elsewhere. The problem is that most of us, myself included, are not experts in the various areas in which we desperately need expertise for a government to function. Instead, I support a representative republic and I am okay with our elected officials employing a small army of specialized staffers to advise them.
I’m also in favor of limited government because that’s one protection against mob impulses. Governments make mistakes because they too often do what the masses believe they want in the heat of the moment, and then undoing bad laws and regulations can lead to yet more complications.
People want action and they want it now. And then they complain about whatever was done.
Humans make bad decisions. All of us do. Evolutionary psychology suggests we didn’t evolve to be reasonable creatures. We evolved to “get along” with groups and to make quick, snap decisions in a dangerous world. Our biases kept us alive, as much as we might not like that reality.
Historian Rick Shenkman, author of Political Animals: How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics, asks if we are not meant to manage our own fates via democracy. He reflects on the work of Shawn Rosenberg, one of the iconic figures in political science, who also questions if we, as a species, have evolved the skills necessary for democratic institutions.
The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy
Human brains aren’t built for self-rule, says Shawn Rosenberg. That’s more evident than ever.Politico
September 8, 2019…. As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about a hundred started shifting in their seats. They loudly whispered objections to their friends. Three women seated next to me near the back row grew so loud and heated I had difficulty hearing for a moment what Rosenberg was saying.
What caused the stir? Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging a core assumption about America and the West. His theory? Democracy is devouring itself—his phrase — and it won’t last.
As much as President Donald Trump’s liberal critics might want to lay America’s ills at his door, Rosenberg says the president is not the cause of democracy’s fall—even if Trump’s successful anti-immigrant populist campaign may have been a symptom of democracy’s decline.
We’re to blame, said Rosenberg. As in “we the people.”
Democracy is hard work. And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists.
His prediction? “In well-established democracies like the United States, democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will eventually fail.”
Democracy works in small groups, assuming the group includes well-informed individuals who are addressing relatively simple problems. By “simple” I am not suggesting that infrastructure and emergency systems aren’t complex, but they aren’t like regulating food safety or trying to manage a complex financial system.
I want scientists involved in science decisions and economists advising us on financial markets. I do not want my neighbors deciding clean water standards or setting interest rates. We can all generally agree on this: experts, technocrats if you will, are needed to at least advise and inform our political decision makers.
Again, I’d rather have limited government, but I also want those decisions that are made to be based on the best available evidence. I am not qualified to make a great many decisions without extra information — and I’m one of the over-educated elites. My ignorance is obvious to me; I worry ignorance isn’t self-evident to many voters.
We cannot digest all the data necessary to make tough choices. We cannot even analyze all the “news” that surrounds us. Trying to follow the news leaves me overwhelmed, and I studied journalism and rhetoric at some decent universities.
Because I’m aware of my ignorance, I research a lot of what I read. The average voter lacks the time, energy, or passion to research for hours a day. Voters select a side and then embrace the arguments of that side’s loudest voices. That’s scary, but that’s how we evolved.
And therein lies the core of his argument: Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don’t look like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic.
Our brains, says Rosenberg, are proving fatal to modern democracy. Humans just aren’t built for it.
I recognize I’m within the so-called elites. I’m also elitist enough to state that I don’t want “average” leaders. I do not want government based on my own impulses or those of anyone else. The elites have been trained to distrust themselves (in theory) and to challenge their own assumptions. We embrace the scientific method, models, and data. We accept that our theories and opinions can be wrong and often are wrong. The universities that train the elites at least aspire to teaching self-doubt and reflection. (I question that, however, as biases have entered many disciplines, too.)
The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have “the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively.” In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions—and have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic values.
It used to be that books, magazine articles, and the panels on news programs featured the informed views of elites. Now, everyone (including me) can be a blogger, a published author, and a media personality. There are no gatekeepers in the Internet age.
But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and garner attention for their cause—even if it’s rooted in conspiracy and is based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which ended in a shooting.
There are consequences to losing the gatekeepers. Sadly, loud voices on the right and left sought to dethrone the elite media and the elite scholars. The right used talk radio to overcome the perceived biases of the elites. The left now uses the Internet. Both fringes have to much faith in their understandings of the complex. I do disagree with assumptions that “conservatives” are the only misinformed, but they are more misinformed on major issues. It’s sad, but unlikely to change.
The Republican Party has devolved into a mess of conspiracies and lies under Donald Trump, but that doesn’t suggest Democrats would be immune to their own form of populist simplicity. One sees this when it comes to stories on “GMO foods” and other pulp science shared on left-leaning websites. New things scare everyone, but the GOP is dangerously xenophobic under Trump. Anti-GMO nonsense is slightly less destructive unless you need food in a place without hardy crops. The same goes for the fear of cell phone towers. Pulp science might prevent a cell tower, but that’s not quite like denying climate change.
Fake news. Simple to understand. That’s where politicians take over with slogans and populist causes.
While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their news from social media rather than from established newspapers or the old three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates.
I am pro-elitist, which (ironically) many of the educated elites dislike. Why? We studied and researched our fields. We are experts. We want experts when we seek medical care. We seek experts to repair our cars. We should want experts involved in the complex process of government.
What stirred the crowd was that Rosenberg has gone beyond pessimism into outright defeatism. What riled the crowd was that he’s seemingly embraced a kind of reverence for elitism no longer fashionable in the academy. When challenged on this front, he quickly insisted he didn’t mean to exempt himself from the claim that people suffer from cognitive and emotional limitations. He conceded that the psychological research shows everybody’s irrational, professors included! But it was unclear that he convinced the members of the audience he really meant it. And they apparently found this discomforting.
I don’t believe people will suddenly learn to use reason and logic for democratic decision making. We haven’t mastered logic in thousands of years. In the ultimate irony, the elites want to reject the very scholarship their fields have produced. They want to imagine humans aren’t the way data suggest. How can we know people are irrational, impulsive, biased… and reject those findings?
There were less discomforting moments in Lisbon. The convention gave an award to George Marcus, one of the founders of the discipline, who has dedicated his career to the optimistic theory that human beings by nature readjust their ideas to match the world as it is and not as they’d like it to be—just as democracy requires.
Democracy might work with small groups. It isn’t working for the United States, the United Kingdom, or much of Europe. People, overloaded with data, are giving up and embracing the simple populist solutions. That’s troubling.
But this isn’t a moment for optimism, is it? What is happening around the world shows that the far-right is on the march. And when it comes to the U.S., the problem might be larger than one man. Liberals have been praying for the end of the Trump presidency, but if Rosenberg is right, democracy will remain under threat no matter who is in power.
Again, I’m not an optimist, either.