In Defence of Democracy

Roslyn Fuller

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509533152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Should Brexit or Trump cause us to doubt our faith in democracy? Are 'the people' too ignorant or stupid to rule? Numerous commentators are seriously arguing that the answer to these questions might be 'yes'.

In this take-no-prisoners book, Canadian-Irish author Roslyn Fuller kicks these anti-democrats where it hurts the most – the facts. Fuller shows how many academics, journalists and politicians have embraced the idea that there can be 'too much democracy', and deftly unravels their attempts to end majority rule, whether through limiting the franchise, pursuing Chinese 'meritocracy' or confining participation to random legislation panels. She shows that Trump, Brexit or whatever other political event you may have disapproved of recently aren't doing half the damage to democracy that elite self-righteousness and corruption are. In fact, argues Fuller, there are real reasons to be optimistic. Ancient methods can be combined with modern technology to revitalize democracy and allow the people to truly rule.

In Defence of Democracy is a witty and energetic contribution to the debate on the future of democracy.

Part I
The Terrible Truth: People Aren’t All That Stupid or Evil

The first objective in the anti-democrat strategy is to create the idea that there are insurmountable ‘problems’ that make it impossible for one-person, one-vote majority rule to work. Unto itself, it is a fairly inchoate argument – the main point isn’t really to lead to any specific conclusions (that comes later), but merely to firmly anchor the idea that the biggest single problem with politics as we know it is … people. So if things aren’t 100 per cent satisfactory, then that is where the blame clearly lies. People, as a generality, just aren’t good enough for democracy to work. In fact, people are nothing less than stupid and evil.

Anti-democratic writers engage in a kind of Tet Offensive on the human psyche to try to drive home this point – articles decrying the depraved state of the average human and its fatal effect on politics can be found in virtually every newspaper virtually every day.

This onslaught, however, is based on half-truths, strange flights of fancy, leaps in logic that don’t hold up under the slightest scrutiny and point-blank factually inaccurate statements. Just a few minutes of scrutiny are enough to show that even the anti-democrats’ strongest and most coherent points on human fallibility make about as much sense as a bad piece of Dadaist poetry; that there really is nothing to the claim that ‘the people’ are dangerous, that their will is bad for humankind and that they need to be controlled by the benevolent few for everyone’s sake.

Let’s take a closer look.

Objection One: Democracy Can’t Work Because People Are Too Racist and Sexist

That’s right: one-person, one-vote democracy can’t work because people are racist and sexist. This is a specialized form of the more general ‘people are crazy’ argument that we’ll look at later on, but with an ugly twist. The crux of this thesis is that many people don’t really want the policies or politicians they vote for, but rather that they are led to vote a certain way due to their uncontrollable tendencies to racism and sexism which override all reason. Since these votes aren’t ‘real’ but merely the by-products of irrational and evil tendencies, it would only be right to discount them. Anti-democrats are a little vague on exactly how this would be achieved, but they are fairly clear on the point that political participation should not necessarily be a universal right, but rather something accorded only to people who possess a certain minimum level of ‘virtue’.

To give a flavour of how this sentiment is propagated: on 17 February 2018, science writer Ben Goldacre retweeted a Venn diagram in which circles labelled ‘racists’ and ‘idiots’ overlapped to form a category identified as ‘racist idiots’, adding the caption: ‘Brexit voters get tremendously upset when you say they are racists and idiots. I think they misunderstand the criticism. This Venn diagram communicates the issue very clearly. I hope it can bring some healing.’¹

Joining this general sentiment in his exhortation to the elite to rise up against the ignorant masses, Foreign Policy columnist James Traub speaks of Leave and Trump voters as an ‘angry, nationalist rank and file’ and as ‘people whose familiar world is vanishing beneath a welter of foreign tongues and multicultural celebrations’.² Others argue that ‘psychological predictors of xenophobia were strongly linked with voting to leave the EU’,³ while the leader of the British pro-Remain Liberal Democrat party stated that Leave voters longed for ‘a time when faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink’.⁴ In America, where, it appears, the wonders of the Venn diagram haven’t been discovered, arguments rage between pundits as to whether Trump voters are idiots⁵ or racists⁶ (but apparently not both), while Hillary Clinton’s difficulty in securing the Democratic Party nomination as well as her ultimate defeat in the 2016 presidential election is repeatedly blamed on sexism, not least by Clinton herself.⁷

So, the question is: are we there?

Have racism and sexism skyrocketed in the UK and the USA in past years to the point that our only hope lies in forgetting democracy as we know it, capping the political rights of the unworthy (albeit in some illdefined way) and throwing ourselves on the mercies of the blessed elite to ensure that the morally ‘right’ decisions are always taken? Have things deteriorated to the point where we need to predetermine which votes are good and which votes are not? Is it time we accepted that some people just don’t deserve to participate in the same way as others?

Let’s start with the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary in the USA.

The argument here is that Hillary Clinton’s lack of popularity with traditional Democratic voters was not related to her policies or political record, but rather to racism and sexism on the part of the voters themselves. It is this irrational racism and sexism that ‘distorts’ electoral outcomes from the ‘true’ considered will of the people, and provokes the need for anti-democrats to find ‘innovative’ ways to improve democracy by reducing the impact of those votes. In pursuit of this argument, anti-democrats frequently label supporters of Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s main rival in the 2016 Democratic primary, ‘Bernie Bros’ – white men who supported Bernie over Hillary out of sexist and racist motives. In their widely read book Democracy for Realists, political science professors Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels note that Bernie Sanders polled eleven points worse among women than among men and eighteen points worse among non-whites than among whites. Thus, they conclude that voters did not actually espouse Sanders’s left-wing policies, but rather that the Jewish septuagenarian with a forty-year track record as an Independent politician was merely ‘a convenient vehicle for anti-Clinton sentiment … especially [among] white men’.⁸

That’s right – Bernie supporters didn’t want universal healthcare, affordable tuition fees or a somewhat less warmongering foreign policy. They just said all that to rationalize their true motives of being racist and sexist ‘disaffected white men’ who wanted to follow a politician from ‘lily white Vermont’ for deeper identitarian reasons.⁹

It’s quite the claim.

Maybe if people don’t vote for any actual reasons, but merely to express their group identity, one-person, one-vote democracy doesn’t make sense.

But … the data adds up to a very different picture.

While Clinton did win more female votes during the primaries, as those who favour the sexism narrative for her flagging popularity like to point out, what they’re a little less keen on is the fact that Bernie Sanders consistently polled higher among young women than Clinton did, about … 500–600 per cent higher.

To say that is off the charts doesn’t even begin to cover it. In fact, during the primaries, the difference in voting preferences between the youngest and oldest female cohorts was greater than the difference between male and female voting preferences.

At the Iowa primary, 84 per cent of under 30s and 86 per cent of women under 30 indicated a preference for Sanders, with only 14 per cent in favour of Clinton,¹⁰ while in New Hampshire, Sanders took 82 per cent of votes from women under 30.¹¹ Just a month before he formally ended his campaign, Sanders was still polling 37 percentage points ahead of Clinton with women aged 18–29.¹²

And he wasn’t just more popular with young women, either. In an analysis of twenty-five...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: Why This? Why Me? Why Now?
• Part I The Terrible Truth: People Aren’t All That Stupid or Evil
• Part II Fixing Politics the Anti-Democrat Way
• Part III A World You Might Want to Actually Live In (Fuller Democracy)
• Final Words: Buckle-up Buttercup: The Future Is Going to be Interesting
• Index
• End User License Agreement