Against Democracy: New Preface

I think most people are bad at politics and politics is bad for most of us, yet I am not arguing that therefore we should have government do less (or more).

Enfranchisement lottery: Electoral cycles proceed as normal, except that by default no citizen has any right to vote. Immediately before the election, thousands of citizens are selected via a random lottery to become prevoters. These prevoters may then earn the right to vote, but only if they participate in certain competence-building exercises, su

Epistocracy means the rule of the knowledgeable. More precisely, a political regime is epistocratic to the extent that political power is formally distributed according to competence, skill, and the good faith to act on that skill.

When I say democracy is a hammer, I mean it is a means to an end, but not an end in itself. I will argue that democracy is not intrinsically just. It is not justified on proceduralist grounds. Any value democracy has is purely instrumental.

What about democracy? Most political philosophers agree that democracy has instrumental value. It functions pretty well and tends to produce relatively just outcomes. So, they think, democracy is valuable at least in the way a hammer is valuable. Most philosophers, however, also think we should value democracy the way we value a painting or person.

The reason I am interested in the rights to vote and hold office is that these rights—unlike what I am calling the civil or economic liberties—are primarily rights to exercise or attempt to acquire power over others. Our rights of free speech generally give us power only over ourselves, while rights to vote typically give us—as collectives, if not

To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.

This analogy fails. An electorate is not like an individual. It is a collection of individuals with separate goals, behaviors, and intellectual credentials. It is not a unified body in which every person advocates the same policies. Instead, some people impose their decisions on others. If most voters act foolishly, they don’t just hurt themselves.

In general, the best places to live right now are liberal democracies, not dictatorships, one-party governments, oligarchies, or real monarchies. Yet this does not show democracy is the ideal or even best feasible system. And even if democracy turns out to be the best feasible system, we might be able to improve it with less participation.