Lots of right-leaning commentary on democracy recently has advocated for restricting the franchise to people who are “better” at making decisions, with very little — if any — attention paid to the vast social science literature on this topic. Some things worth thinking about:
https://twitter.com/leedrutman/status/1379792210208645123
Obviously, these arguments are situated in a context of historical racism — whites used the exact same justification to disenfranchise black voters throughout the Jim Crow south. Oh, if they can’t pass literacy tests, why should they get to vote? *wink*
In addition to that, tho:
In addition to that, tho:
The fundamental problem with this is that, in a democracy, “majority rules” really is the only legitimate decision rule for government action. You can talk about the dangers of crowds, etc, but those fears are relatively unfounded in representative govs. gelliottmorris.substack.com/p/democracy-is…
Individuals can make idiosyncratic “errors” in their attitudes, but this ignore that aggregate decisions are usually good! The public led the way to expanding rights for black Americans in the 1960s, favored same-sex marriage long before it was federally legal, &c.
On average, the public has decided in the “right” direction (press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…). One could also argue that historical “wrongs” in opinion, such as slavery, would have appeared much less desirable if the electorate included every citizen, not just white property-owning men.
There is even some pretty cool research that shows having a group of “uneducated” or “uninformed” ppl within the electorate helps aggregate opinion align w/ the majority, as deliberation counters the influence of a loud but small minority (such as NRO). science.sciencemag.org/content/334/60…
There is a lot more to say here, but I’ll end on this for now: America’s institutions cumulatively have a historically large bias toward Republicans today. Polling to the majority is one of the only ways to represent it in government. I’d be skeptical of people who oppose that.
One question for the anti-democracy folks ' at @NRO: how do you propose filtering out the “bad” voters from the “good?” Perhaps the answer will reveal a lot about the weakness of the argument.
Gonna leave this here
https://twitter.com/ejfagan/status/1379810841265061888
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