“What if we could somehow limit voting to only people who could demonstrate actual understanding of the relevant issues and policies? Wouldn’t that be a solution to our toxic politics?”
Arguably, it might be, and I found myself thinking about that a lot recently. Unfortunately, something nominally similar was tried once in the US, and turned out to be a spectacularly bad idea. It was called a “literacy test” and it was promoted on the terms I just stated – to limit voting to people who understood the issues enough to make an informed decision. The problem was that it was just a way to exclude black people from voting, because at the time, most of them had not had an opportunity to learn to read. And it was a potentially moving target; if they learned to read, the test would just be adjusted to cover topics taught only in white schools.
Ultimately, any such process, even if attempted in a truly objective way without devious intent, is going to lead to disenfranchisement of groups that need to be represented if the idea of “democracy” has any meaning.
I can certainly imagine science fiction alternatives. The basic problem with democracy as a principle is that it inevitably leads to people voting without understanding the issues, and candidates who rather than focusing on truly doing the best job at policy itself, focus on emotional manipulation. In our present politics, this describes one party more than the other but neither is exempt; all of the Democratic fundraising emails that I get have emotionally loaded subject lines, and despite many of the candidates actually having very intelligent policy goals, they inevitably campaign on gut feeling bumper sticker slogans just like the other guys. How do you fix that? How do you change the fact that voters by and large are going to have a limited attention span for the kind of information that would truly lead to effective policy choices?
I myself, not being a genius, cannot yet think of a way that solves this problem while retaining the benefits of democracy. Neither has any of the philosophers or policy thinkers I’ve read. (Note that the word used to be “philosopher” but now that is something different and the people we ask about this stuff are “economists” and “political scientists” as the art of pondering has become much more structured and regimented.) To the contrary, every proposal that seems to be workable is essentially anti-democratic in some key way. Imposing credential requirements on candidates? Well, for one thing in the US it’s not in the constitution, and so we have elected judges who are not even judges, and for the most part almost none of our elected legislators or executives are scientists or have any real training relevant to understanding policy. Maybe we don’t need a knowledge test for voters but what if we did for candidates? That would eliminate people like Trump… and maybe Biden too, or maybe if someone like Biden or Obama had been born into a world with such rules they would have just gone through the relevant process. “But that would just give us career politicians with no experience of the real world!” Certainly possible, but also workable. We could for example do a “reverse draft” and require everyone on the path to qualify as a policy leader to spend five years rotating through entry level jobs in different industries. I did that myself on purpose, and for that specific reason. There are already countries that do things like this, with a “national service” requirement that places future leaders in humble roles.
I actually do believe that academia and science did have a model that could be used for a purpose like this, but not anymore as they have come to be dominated by principles of capitalism. Now pure science is hard to fund unless the lead scientist can articulate a profitable implementation of the work, and slow methodical deliberation is discouraged. People see me as immoral for my refusal to generally jump on the anger wagon (note generally, I’m plenty angry at stuff but I think about it for a while first).
So I have this kind of vision for maybe a better way to run the world if we could simply place people who are educated, methodical deciders in charge, but I still have really no clue how such a system could be put in place. For one thing, it’s mathematically impossible to achieve in the US. You would need a constitutional amendment to change the requirements to run for office, and that today is impossible with the existing party politics. I don’t see any political party with any power even really attempting that internally, nor do I see the likelihood of a critical mass of similar thinkers getting anywhere in the primary process, let alone beating an opponent doing it the opposite way. I don’t see this happening at all for something as large as the presidency, and I don’t see it happening for nearly enough state and federal legislative seats to get the numbers needed for a constitutional amendment. It certainly not going to happen through a violent revolution; by their nature, those are not ever dominated by slow cerebral analysts, and I don’t see the people who engage violence effectively enough to accomplish a revolution voluntarily putting such rules in place.
When I read science fiction and speculative stories that posit ideas like this, they are usually presented as dystopias. Inevitably, the society governed by educated leaders becomes a rigid caste system where most people are treated as livestock like Logan‘s Run, Zardoz, Divergent, and The Giver. Interestingly though, very few of these stories ever actually discuss the origins of those societies, how they got to such a system in the first place. The stories are usually just about much later when the originally good ideas have decayed into stagnation and corruption.
I really would like it if I could have some hope that humanity would eventually get there. And I really want to believe, and some of the data helps me; many metrics show that our modern semi-democratic, mostly-corporate republic has for the most part elevated the standard of living for most people. Of course, that two is cast into doubt when you look at what those metrics really measure. We have a better standard of living because our lifespans are a little bit longer and we have less starvation and fewer of us are severely injured in weather events, and we have things like cars and televisions. Yet there is also a growing movement within our culture of a retreat toward simpler structures, and of people craving lives of more physical labor and less idle passive recreation. Many people believe that many of the core elements of industrial modernity have essentially been wrong turns in the ultimate pursuit of happiness not just in terms of material comfort but meaning and significance.
Plato posited a society of philosopher kings, and essentially said that robust public education would solve the basic problems of democracy. Interestingly enough, he said this before any of the great Republics really took hold. Plato came from Athens, and early democracy that we mostly view as successful, but our grade school history classes seldom mention that the city stagnated and fell when it became too large for democracy to work effectively. In fact, the fall of Athens was largely the result of placing too much trust in one revered leader and not enough shared accountability. So really, it didn’t even work there. What hope can we have?
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