Where Achen and Bartels go too far in their criticism of democracy

Achen and Bartels, in their book Democracy For Realists, end with a rant that attacks all forms of human government, not just democracy.

Achen and Bartels do a good job of illustrating some of the problems of our current systems of voting. Up to a point, their skepticism is refreshing and eye-opening and forces us to rethink what we thought we knew about democracy. Many citizens accept too easy explanations of an ideal system and then assume the ideal system is something like what we really have. Achen and Bartels perform a useful service by taking dynamite to many of these myths.

However, towards the end of their book they go on a rant in which they talk about the many flaws that people have, and they conclude that the "omnicompetent citizen" does not exist. But their rant is really more an attack on all human government, rather than an attack on democracy.

An ancient tradition (using different rhetoric in differen centuries) suggests something like this: all humans are fallen and fallible, therefore any government constituted of mortal flesh will be a government of error. This applies to monarchs, oligarchs, and citizens, it applies to autocracies and aristocracies and democracies. Perhaps some day some power, far greater than any mortal power, shall abolish our current universe and elsewhere establish a government of perfect justice, but such things are beyond human understanding. What we must seek in government, while we are on this Earth, is the best balance of forces and incentives that fallen flesh is capable of establishing.

Democracy for Realists, 2016

Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government

By Christopher H. Achen & Larry M. Bartels

Page 310-311

Well-informed citizens are likely to have more elaborate and internally consistent worldviews than inattentive people do, but that just reflects the fact that their rationalizations are better rehearsed. For example, as we saw in the case of the budget deficit, the political beliefs of more attentive, knowledgeable citizens are often more subject to partisan bias than those of their less attentive neighbors. For most people most of the time, social identities and partisan loyalties color political perceptions as well as political opinions.

The role of political “sophistication” in analyses of this sort underlines the fact that the task of being a good citizen by the standards of conventional democratic theory is too hard for everyone. Attentive readers will already have surmised our view of intellectuals in politics, but for clarity, we spell it out here. The historical record leaves little doubt that the educated, including the highly educated, have gone astray in their moral and political judgments as often as anyone else. In the antebellum era, prominent southern professors and university administrators often defended slavery (Faust 1981). Brilliant 19th-century German professors helped give shape to German nationalism and the racial identity theorists that led to Nazism, and German university students in the 1930s were often enthusiastic supporters of Hitler (Meinecke 1925; esp. 377-433; Kershaw 1998, 76, 80). Protestant and secular professors backed Otto von Bismarck’s campaign to suppress the civil liberties of Catholics in 19th-century Germany (Gross 2004). Crude prejudice against Catholics, Jews, and others was common among American intellectuals until recent decades, too (Billington 1938; McGreevy 2003).

More recently, 20th-century communism attracted many highly educated people around the world. Numerous French intellectuals supported Russian communism well after its crimes had been exposed (Aron 1957; Caute 1964). Radical Chinese intellectuals backed Mao Zedong’s campaign to establish his regime and keep it in power - a regime that eventually became, not just a relentless oppressor of intellectuals, but the most murderous government in the history of the world (Goldman 1981; Townsend and Womack 1986, 58-62). In the United States, prominent political science professors became advisors to the American government during the disastrous Vietnam War, while others naively favored Ho Chi Minh in his ultimately successful effort to establish a repressive communist state in that country (Halberstam 1972).

Of course, a great many other people in each of these countries made the same or other equally appalling judgments. The point is simply that, as Gustave Le Bon (1895, 122) put it more than a century ago, “It does not follow because an individual knows Greek or mathematics, in an architect, a veterinary surgeon, a doctor, or a barrister, that he is endowed with a special intelligence of social questions….Were the electorate solely composed of persons stuffed with sciences their votes would be no better than those emitted at present.” Gifted in their own spheres, artists and intellectuals have no special expertise in politics. In our political judgments and actions, we all make mistakes, sometimes even morally indefensible errors. Thus, when we say that voters routinely err, we mean all voters. This is not a book about the political misjudgments of people with modest educations. It is a book about the conceptual limitations of human beings - including the authors of this book and its readers. As Walter Lippmann (1925, 10-11) remarked, “I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.”

Again, this read like an attack on all human government, rather than an attack on democracy. While it is useful to remember that everyone has flaws, we can still build functional democracies despite flawed human beings. The most successful societies on Earth point the way, and careful study of them might allow us to discover methods for building a society still happier than anything achieved so far.