Against Democracy: New Preface

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

My response is different: this decline in political engagement is a good start, but we still have a long way to go. We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statua

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

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.

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).

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.

The political truthiness has been flying thick and fast on this subject for decades now. Politicians are taking claims that have a very tenuous connection to economic reality—claims that feel true—and running with them, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes because of cynical calculation.

The problem is (as I will argue at length) that universal suffrage incentivizes most voters to make political decisions in an ignorant and irrational way, and then imposes these ignorant and irrational decisions on innocent people. The only thing that could justify unrestricted, universal suffrage would be that we cannot produce a better-performing

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.