About fifteen per cent flunked. Indeed, although this year we seem to be living through a rough patch, democracy does have a fairly good track record. The economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has made the case that democracies never have famines, and other scholars believe that they almost never go to war with one another, rarely murder their own populations, nearly always have peaceful transitions of government, and respect human rights more consistently than other regimes do.
As a purely philosophical matter, however, he saw only three valid objections. First, one could deny that truth was a suitable standard for measuring political judgment.
After all, in debates over contentious issues, such as when human life begins or whether human activity is warming the planet, appeals to the truth tend to be incendiary. The second argument against epistocracy would be to deny that some citizens know more about good government than others.
The third and final option: deny that knowing more imparts political authority. He had a sneaking suspicion that a polity ruled by educated voters probably would perform better than a democracy, and he thought that some of the resulting inequities could be remedied. If historically disadvantaged groups, such as African-Americans or women, turned out to be underrepresented in an epistocratic system, those who made the grade could be given additional votes, in compensation. The second was that universal suffrage is so established in our minds as a default that giving the knowledgeable power over the ignorant will always feel more unjust than giving those in the majority power over those in the minority.
Empirical research shows that people rarely vote for their narrow self-interest; seniors favor Social Security no more strongly than the young do. Voting rights may happen to signify human dignity to us, he writes, but corpse-eating once signified respect for the dead among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea.
To him, our faith in the ennobling power of political debate is no more well grounded than the supposition that college fraternities build character. Some economists have argued that ill-informed voters, far from being lazy or self-sabotaging, should be seen as rational actors.
Viewed that way, voting might seem like a form of pure self-expression. After all, by not voting you do your neighbor a good turn. A second group of people enjoy political news as a recreation, following it with the partisan devotion of sports fans, and Brennan calls them hooligans.
Third in his bestiary are vulcans, who investigate politics with scientific objectivity, respect opposing points of view, and carefully adjust their opinions to the facts, which they seek out diligently. In fact, one study he cites shows that even people with excellent math skills tend not to draw on them if doing so risks undermining a cherished political belief. Instead Hawley pointed the finger primarily at cultural institutions controlled by the left, a target that more unites the right, while also nodding toward the decline of American manufacturing in a globalized economy as a contributing cause.
Scholars studying the genuine problems Hawley alluded to—declining labor-force participation and social instability among men, especially those without college degrees—find his diagnosis for those difficulties largely beside the point. They attribute factors such as the decline in good-paying blue-collar jobs and a fraying of social support networks, whether labor unions or close friendships, especially among men without advanced education.
Read: The knives come out for Josh Hawley. Democrats are quick to note that Hawley, for all his expressed concern about opportunities for working-class men, opposes the Biden economic agenda both the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the broader reconciliation package , even though the plan targets many of its new benefits toward blue-collar families and would create millions of jobs in construction, manufacturing, and caregiving that do not require a college degree, according to analysis by the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. An editorial in the Orange County Register , however, saw this as a negative:. Here are some of her other decisions that have made the progressive wing of the Democratic Party suspicious of her:. During her tenure as district attorney in San Francisco, Harris reportedly oversaw more than 1, cannabis-related convictions.
According to a Forbes report , the majority of these convictions were for low-level possession and did not lead to imprisonment.
When it was ultimately approved in , Harris neither opposed nor supported the move, preferring instead to remain on the sidelines. It was finally in May that Harris publicly backed the legalisation of cannabis and has since, become vocal on the issue , even cosponsoring multiple bills proposing to federally decriminalise marijuana.
And that has never changed. Harris reportedly also supported the three-strikes law, under which a man was sentenced to 27 years to life. According to a Jacobin report, the accused, Daniel Larsen, was targeted by the police and wrongfully convicted:. Yet two years later, Larsen was still in jail.
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