Essay: Democracy Can Goof

It looks as if my candidate for President is going to lose this election. If so, he will be constrained to be graceful about it. Not laboring under any such constraint, I am free to say that the voters — or at least a majority of them — are idiots, betrayers of their country’s future, misperceivers of their own best interests, ignorant about the issues, gulled by slick lies. Unless, of course, there’s an upset. In that case, the voters have magnificently exercised their ingrained popular wisdom, vindicated the faith of the Founding Fathers, demonstrated the innate genius of democracy, etc., etc., etc. I knew it all along. Regarding my candidate for Senator, kindly reverse those two explosions of prejudice.

It’s widely considered a breach of democratic etiquette to question the collective wisdom of the electorate. To suggest that the voters are wrong, let alone to characterize their error in more melodramatic terms, opens you up to charges of elitism. The contention that people have been misled or manipulated, wrote one smug supporter of the probable winner shortly before the election, “reveals an extraordinary contempt for the political intelligence of the public.”

The electorate’s decision is held to be self-validating. However knowledgeable or ignorant, focused or distracted, reflective or scatterbrained they may be individually, the voters collectively are always wise. Political pundits who have been concentrating for months on the shallowest and most mechanistic aspects of the election campaign — tactics, commercials, “likability” and so on — will switch gears on Election Day and begin interpreting the “message” of the election in the most grandiose philosophical terms. Reports of the candidates’ strategies for appealing to various groups or regions of the country will be replaced by theories about what an undifferentiated mass called “the people” was trying to say. These theories will often be of such exotic sophistication that no single one of the people, let alone all of the people, could possibly have thought of them before voting.

Foremost among the theorizers will be supporters of the winner, who will reject any notion that their man’s victory might be due to their own vigorous exertions of the previous few months. It was, instead, they will argue, a fundamental and clearheaded rejection of the “values” represented by the loser. And the neutral political observers will agree: an election loss is supposed to force losers to reconsider not merely their political strategy but their fundamental beliefs.

Yet why should this be so? As a matter of logic, it makes no sense. Serious beliefs derive from serious reflection, over a long time. A serious thinker should always be open to counterarguments from those who disagree, but the mere fact of disagreement, however widespread, shouldn’t count for much.

The real insult to democracy, it seems to me, is to treat it as some sort of tennis game where victory is the definitive judgment on the players. And the real insult to the electorate is the patronizing attitude that it is a sort of lumbering collective beast, immune from error because it reaches its judgments through some mystical process that is beyond rational discourse, rather than an amalgam of individuals, each one fully capable of being right and being wrong.

The commentator who sneers that it shows “contempt for the political intelligence of the public” to suggest that the voters may have been duped is a highbrow intellectual who wouldn’t dream of reaching his own political judgments based on the information and level of argument offered to the voters by his candidate. (Or mine, for that matter.) Who is showing real contempt for the public? Those who question the infallible wisdom of the majority, or those who hold the voters to a lower intellectual standard than they hold themselves to? Who is more “elitist”?

I extend every voter who votes differently from me the courtesy of serious disagreement: I think you’re wrong. You may well have been misled or underinformed or intellectually lazy, or you may be highly informed and thoughtful but have a faulty analysis, or you may have acted out of narrow, unpatriotic self-interest, or you may just be a fool. But whatever the reason, you blew it. In my opinion. And I take democracy seriously enough that my own decision on how to vote was the result of a lengthy intellectual process that is not going to reverse itself overnight on Nov. 8 just because a majority of voters disagrees with me. Finally, although I am always open to dissuasion about my political beliefs, and more than open to suggestions on how to make those beliefs more salable to others, I have enough respect for the political intelligence of the public that I hope a majority may come to agree with me the next time around.

One problem with American politics is that it is dominated by people — the candidates usually and their advisers almost invariably — who don’t hold any belief deeply enough to withstand evidence that the majority believes the opposite. Sincerely holding unpopular beliefs is something you accuse your opponent of, an accusation that is generally false.

The theory of democracy is not that the voters are always right. Nothing about voting magically assures a wise result, and for a citizen to dissent from the majority’s choice in an election is no more elitist than for a Supreme Court Justice to dissent from his or her colleagues’ judgment in some case. The proper form of democratic piety was nicely expressed by Senator Warren Rudman during the Iran-contra hearings (explaining why the illegal secret funding of the contras offended him, although he favored contra aid himself). “The American people,” he said, “have the constitutional right to be wrong.” You can value and honor that right without cheering every exercise of it.