Why You Should Vote, etc. (Part 2)

In the last post, I made an argument about why it was important that everyone vote, even so-called “bad” voters. I picked as my example a group of farmers from Appalachia. Some readers might accuse me of playing to stereotype there. Well, I was playing to stereotype, and consciously so, and that’s part of my whole problem with Brennan’s argument.

In his Bloggingheads discussion with Will Wilkinson, Brennan is pretty vague about what constitutes “good voting.” It evidently includes being well informed, using reason rather than emotion in making one’s choice, and carefully considering both sides of an issue before deciding. Also, people who question their own motives are probably good voters. Of course those criteria, self-applied, would include pretty much every American who has voted in any election since the birth of the republic. As Brennan himself concedes, a friend of his—a person who Brennan assures us is NOT a good voter—saw himself reflected in the description of the good voter: consequently, this friend was pretty enthusiastic about Brennan’s argument. Brennan, unsurprisingly, also includes himself in the category of people who are good voters, as does Wilkinson.

So, who isn’t in that category? It’s pretty big, according to Brennan, who estimates only about 30 to 40 per cent of the population are good voters (Wilkinson says that’s high). Although they don’t directly discuss demographics, it’s pretty clear from their indirect comments (at least it’s clear to me) that many if not most of the bad voters these guys have in mind are: a) uneducated, and b) poor. That’s okay, though, because Brennan figures that he’ll make better decisions for these people than they would for themselves. Even Wilkinson finds that notion breathtakingly presumptuous: to which Brennan’s response is more or less to give a gimcrack grin and shrug his shoulders. Yeah, what’re we gonna do? Someone has to look after these rubes.

The problem with this kind of elitism is not that it underestimates the wisdom of the people, who are every bit as narrow-minded and ignorant as it assumes. The problem is that it overestimates the wisdom of elites. And it seems to me that Brennan’s argument exaggerates the intelligence especially of a particular segment of the American elite: the professoriate. I say this not to disparage that class, of which I am a proud member. We are no worse than any group, all things considered. We are also no better. We have a role to play in a democratic life and public debate, and when we ignore that role, democracy suffers. But people like Brennan strike me as being wondrously unaware of how restricted their lives are, how narrow their range of daily experience (and no, I don’t care if he was raised by a single mom on food stamps. He’s an Ivy League professor. I grew up amidst grain fields in Southern Alberta. That’s not where I live now). The ways that we make choices in our lives are not appropriate for everyone. Again, this is the potential genius of democracy, if it works right: different kinds of people arriving at their decisions in different ways.

In the end, an argument like Brennan’s does what all ideology does. It takes a specific perspective—which may be perfectly fine on its own terms—and then universalizes that perspective, so that it becomes the right and natural one for all people. Such behavior is inevitably, and profoundly, undemocratic.