Democracy & Elitism // Fish

There’s a “salon” here where people get together once in a fortnight to discuss a topic. The other week we were talking about politics and I floated the idea that there are “good” and “bad” voters: those who understand the issues to a greater extent and vote correctly representing their interests, and those who understand less, whose vote is essentially adding noise to the system. I’ve been groping towards an idea of “democratic elitism” for a while, in which the great value of democracy, I think, is that everyone’s interests are represented equally, but the messy practice of democracy muddies that and leads to suboptimal outcomes.

In this as in most things, it turns out that there’s a literature. While reading Alan Ryan’s biography John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism, I came across Dewey’s debates with journalist Walter Lippmann, a towering figure in American journalism I’d never heard of. He studied under Santayana at Harvard, co-founded the New Republic, and was a much read journalist and critic for half a century. (This helpful 1980 retrospective in Foreign Affairs is temporarily ungated, probably due to an oversight.) In the Lippmann-Dewey debates, Lippmann made several very prescient critiques of the media-public pipeline: firstly, reality is too complicated for anyone to understand, and journalists tend to fall back on a stereotype backed up by some reporting. Secondly, the public has little interest in political engagement, and is not prepared to pay the price of thorough, well-researched journalism. “For a dollar, you may not even get an armful of candy, but for a dollar or less people expect reality/representations of truth to fall into their laps.” A lot of important facts are impossible to find out, and editorial judgment adds bias to the allocation of news coverage. Thus, people don’t want to keep up, and wouldn’t be able to even if they could.

Lippmann advocated a technocracy, where a governing elite would be advised by a cadre of technocrats, experts in a very narrow field. (Lippmann’s name is thus associated with our modern vision of the neoliberal state, and in fact it was Foucault who pointed out that the the term originated at the first meeting in Paris of the Colloque Walter Lippmann.) Dewey’s side of the argument was in favour of civilian journalism, and a “Great Society” of slow community-wide consensus. (Always majestic in idealism but obscurely phrased, Dewey’s writing was perfectly described by Oliver Wendell Homes Jr.:“So methought God would have spoken had He been inarticulate but keenly desirous to tell you how it was.”)

Ryan notes that the classic theorist of democratic elitism is actually Joseph Schumpeter. In his famous work Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy Schumpeter argued that a) the people are unlikely to know what is best for them, since they are usually manipulated by politicians, and b) even if they did have a clear agenda, they wouldn’t know the best means to achieving it. He thus (following Weber) argued for a largely arms-length democratic system, in which policy decisions are made at a government level and the public’s role is restricted to choosing one of these options and giving it a rubber stamp.

Of course the issue here, where a lot of people disagree with me, is if there really is a rational, ideal way to run a modern society. The democratic upheaval of the last few years (which no doubt sowed the seed of these musings) can arguably be attributed to the failure of the watchman state during the financial crisis and America’s war on terror. If the technocrats cannot claim greater knowledge than the public, what authority do they hold? And if reason has no special status in public life, does that mean that we are all forever doomed to shout at each other to no end, ignorant voters on a darkling plain?

Today, for the first time in my life, I picked up a whole fish (red tilapia) at the souk, and decided to cook it. It feels so strange and primitive! I gingerly unwrapped the newspaper and plastic bag, let the liquid (blood?) drain, marinated it, added some garlic and thyme and banged it in the oven. A brave new world.