Tongdong Bai has an article on the Institute of Art and Ideas Blog arguing that democracy threatens the rule of law and hence liberalism, and that it would be better to have less democracy and more enlighten rule from those who understand policy.
The article makes several significant errors.
The first is to conflate democracy with populism and majoritarianism.
While at its crudest definition, “rule of the people” could be read as “rule of whatever 50%+1 of the people want”, this is not how most democracies work, nor is it the direction of travel for democratic reformers.
The majoritarian thinking that Bai criticises in democracy, as well as the decline of liberalism of which he complains are the fault of authoritarians, not democrats.
Actually existing democracy is liberal – those who are fighting against it are seeking to use the language but not the idea of democracy to overthrow it.
This is evident by looking at who is using which tools.
Plebiscites and referendums have been used cynically by the authoritarian right, as in Hungary, and opportunistically by some mainstream politicians, as in Britain. By contrast, there are no significant political movements or parties that call for politics-by-referendum from genuine democratic motives. Where referendums are called for, it is by authoritarians seeking to remove the rights of poor or non-native minorities, not by those supportive of the democratic process.
The same goes for the idea that populism is overwhelming liberal democracy with ideas of radical democracy. While populism is based on appeals to the true people (as opposed to the corrupt elite), the identity of the so-called élite – students, school teachers, doctors, poor immigrants, human rights campaigners – shows that this is not a movement interested in securing the will of the people, but in disguising their own political motives and self-interest as democracy, scorning and downplaying the majority of the demos.
Those of us who work and argue for democratic innovation push in a totally different direction. We seek to bring more citizen voice into politics within liberal frameworks, seeing participation, rights and representation as mutually complementary.
Even the minority who argue to replace elections with deliberative citizen assemblies are not arguing for the untrammeled will of the majority – in fact, they seek to disenfranchise the vast majority of voters in favour of a technocracy guided by deliberative groups.
The second mistake in the piece is to argue that democracy drives what the author calls “hyper-individualism”. How can democracy be individualist when it creates so many political parties, political movements, campaign groups, trade unions – of the independent sort, unlike those in China?
Indeed, market liberalism is far more individualist than democracy, in which majorities need to be assembled to achieve anything.
The failure of campaigners who promise cheques to voters (as Trump is doing now) demonstrate that people’s votes are not cast on pure self-interest, but on a vision of society and a better life that is about their identity as citizens, not the personal self-interest that governs their lives as consumers (hat tip to Jon Alexander here).
The third, and worst, mistake is to assume that less democracy means better decision making.
The author writes:
[Democracy] builds upon an unrealistic premise that voters are rational about their self-interests, a premise that is considered a myth by many economists and political scientists. It is unrealistic because almost all modern states are far too large for non-experts to understand state-level affairs, and the majority of people, who are so busy working, do not have time to understand them. By de facto limiting the voice of the people, the Confucian mixed regime may address this.
This suggests that the “mixed regime” he proposes, where the state is for the people but not by the people, would produce better social outcomes, because it would have wise leaders who could take long-term decisions in the public interest.
This is naïve to say the least. The idea that a race of philosopher kings can be found who will rule wisely and without self-interest, without entrenching their power and without oppressing those who stand up to them is disproved by five thousand years of human history, in which not one such state has arisen.
Moreover, we are fortunate to have before our eyes an example of what a wise, far-sighted regime can produce when it takes long-term decisions without democratic oversight: the one-child policy in China, which was as brutal and cruel in its execution as it has been disastrous in its consequences.
This was not a deliberately cruel decision. It was undertaken by state officials without democratic oversight or any fear of the people’s displeasure making a terrible decision. Without routes to redress, a few abused women and cracked heads were the price the people would just have to pay for the benefits of their enlightened rule.
No one would argue that democracies never take bad or short-sighted decisions – the summer we have just gone through in Europe proves that well enough – but democracy is a far better guarantee of liberalism than enlightened bureaucracy could ever be.