Does Democracy Really Work?

If we're going to follow a foreign policy of persuading, cajoling, pressuring, and sometimes forcing other nations to adopt democratic systems of government, wouldn't it be nice to know if democracy even works?

I know that in one sense the proof is already in place: The United States of America is a democracy, of a sort anyway, and we're the biggest guy on the block, so obviously ...

Most of the world's superpowers weren't remotely democratic. Genghis Khan didn't set up voting booths in conquered territory. The tsars of Russia conquered half of Asia without a plebiscite. Mohammed and his successors swept through the Mediterranean world and ruled for a thousand years without allowing the people a chance to vote on anything. Not one Chinese dynasty ever consulted with the people on anything.

Rome was sort of democratic, but it gave up being a republic soon after it conquered the known world. The first emperor, Augustus, put a stop to any serious attempt to expand the empire, but even so, the Roman Empire did last as a dictatorship for five hundred years -- and a thousand years beyond that, if you count Byzantium.

So why do we think that being a democracy is any part of the reason for our success on the world stage?

After all, almost half the country right now, in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, is utterly convinced that democracy is an utter failure, having elected George W. Bush to a second term.

And four years earlier, the other half was deeply grateful that the U.S. is not a complete democracy, so that Al Gore did not become president despite having a plurality of the votes cast.

Plato and many other political philosophers were convinced that the only good government was a meritocracy -- a government by experts who actually know what they're doing.

If opinion polls show anything, it's the profound ignorance of the general public.

And yet here we are, committed to getting Egypt and Jordan, and eventually even Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia, to let the people choose their governments by majority vote.

James Surowiecki, a business writer for The New Yorker, says that, under the right circumstances, democracy is absolutely the best way to make right decisions.

And in his book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations, he shows, through science, logic, and anecdotal experience, why that is so.

There aren't a lot of books in the world that are -- and deserve to be -- transformative of the way we think. Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel is such a book, completely revising and deeply informing the way we look at history.

The Wisdom of Crowds may well be another such book. In it, Surowiecki demonstrates the improbable idea that a large, diverse group of non-experts will, by the use of common sense and guessing, consistently make better judgments than small groups of experts.

Which is not to say that you can't fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time. Democracy is far from perfect.

For a long time, democracy had a bad name, mostly because it was regarded as a synonym for "mob rule." Nothing struck terror into the hearts of serious political philosophers than when masses of people took to the streets with violence and looting.

And they had seen it. In the more tightly packed cities of the past, where cars had not spread us out and people had only to go out of their doors to join a crowd, mobs formed far more frequently than they do now.

And everyone knew that, once inside a mob, an individual person would do terrible things that he would never do alone, where he would bear sole responsibility for his actions.

It was only natural that in the days before universal suffrage, philosophers would assume that, allowed to vote secretly, human beings would make the same kind of irrational, immoral, stupid, and unjust decisions that mobs make.

They would be just as anonymous, wouldn't they? Just as unlikely to be held responsible for their actions; just as likely to indulge their basest motivations.

What they didn't take into account was the dignity of voting -- not just in ballot boxes, but in casual circumstances. Even if no one knows how you're going to vote, and even if you're voting because of gut feelings or passions, you still take the responsibility of voting seriously.

When you think about it, taking a single vote seriously is absurd. Look at the amount of time we take to make up our minds about candidates when our one vote will be of minuscule effect. Most elections aren't even close. And yet we still go; and when we vote, we rarely vote like a mob.

When we act as a democracy, we are not necessarily, as one writer put it, "a gathering of imbeciles."

The seminal researchers into the judgment of crowds were not expecting the results they got. They expected to prove the stupidity of crowds; which makes their results all the more trustworthy.

For instance, take the story of a naval officer named John Craven, who was part of the effort to locate the missing U.S. submarine Scorpion, which disappeared in May 1968.

The part of the ocean in which it was likeliest to have gone down was small, compared to the size of the ocean, but huge, compared to the size of the sub. Craven could consult "experts," but the truth is the only experts on the location of the sub when it went down were the people who were on it. Nobody else knew all that much.

So Craven "assembled a team of men with a wide range of knowledge, including mathematicians, submarine specialists, and salvage men. Instead of asking them to consult with each other to come up with an answer, he asked each of them to offer his best guess" as to the sub's location, based on several scenarios of what might have happened to it.

He structured the guesses as wagers -- they were betting on why the sub "ran into trouble, its speed as it headed toward the ocean bottom, on the steepness of its descent, and so forth."

Nobody had any privileged or expert information. But when Craven took their bets and processed them using a mathematical formula called "Bayes's theorem," he had what could reasonably be called the group's "collective estimate" of the location of the sub.

No individual member of the group picked that location. No one person had, in his head, a correct picture of what had happened and where the sub was.

But the sub really was only 220 yards from where Craven's group collectively predicted it would be.

One story like that could be a coincidence, like the obvious coincidence involved when, out of millions of phone calls a day, and millions of people thinking about absent friends and relatives, some of those calls are bound to consist of a person calling somebody right after they just happened to think of them.

But Surowiecki's book shows that this is not just a coincidence, it is arepeated pattern.

First, crowds are wisest only at solving certain kinds of problems. They are better at guessing definable outcomes (who will win the game; where the sub will be found; how many beans are in the jar).

Obviously, when you're working on fixing a car engine, a skilled mechanic will have a far greater chance of finding the specific problem and solving it than someone like me, who thinks of the internal combustion engine as a particularly loud and greasy kind of magic.

But when the question is one that nobody can be sure of, like predicting the outcome of a series of events -- or choosing the "best" among candidates for office who are all functionally strangers masked behind image-making machinery -- experts are actually at a disadvantage.

1. Diversity of opinion. ("Each person should have some private information, even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.")

2. Independence. ("People's opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.")

3. Decentralization. ("People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.")

4. Aggregation. ("Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.")

What happens with groups of experts is that they are usually part of the same intellectual community. So they have already shared a common set of "facts" -- meaning that they see problems through a similar worldview and apply a similar set of mental tools.

This is fine as long as the solution to a problem is obvious -- it fits their worldview and lends itself to the tools they possess.

But when the problem is not in accordance with group expectations, they will not only be wrong, they will all be wrong in the same direction. And, to clinch it, they will not know that they are wrong and will have trouble believing they were wrong even when the outcome is clearly different from their prediction.

One thinks, for instance, of the CIA's intransigent rejection of President Bush's war plan in Iraq, even though the CIA was consistently wrong in the information it provided the President and consistently wrong in its predictions of what would happen at each stage of the occupation.

In fact, this is the primary reason why creating a single intelligence source to filter all our data about enemy actions is exactly the stupidest move we could have made. Yes, the lack of communication between the CIA and the FBI let the events of 9/11 take place.

But the solution was not to have a single funnel through which all information had to flow; the solution was to get rid of those funnels and let all the intelligence officers, with all their different sources of information, pool their knowledge and offer many, many guesses as to what would happen.

Centralization is the opposite of democracy; and the only way a crowd of spies can possibly be "wise" is to keep them diverse, independent, and decentralized.

Everybody knows only what they know; and when one person has the ability to quash any idea that doesn't fit in with what he thinks is "likely," you are essentially throwing away every other source of intelligence but that one expert -- who is likely, most of the time, to be wrong.

Groupthink is a pervasive danger wherever elites gain prestige and are able to influence the thinking of others through authority alone. One thinks of the way college students seem to march in lockstep with the ultra-leftist opinions of professors, especially on campuses where political incorrectness will get you ostracized at best, expelled at worst.

The reason why some sciences have advanced so slowly or not at all in recent years is because people who don't share the groupthink conclusions of those academic disciplines are not hired in the first place, or not granted tenure if they somehow do slip through.

(On thinks of "family studies" departments where anyone who actually thinks fathers are needed and day care might be harmful or religion might be a positive influence on a family are actively excluded from hiring or the bestowal of research grants. No surprise: The same wrong conclusions keep showing up again and again from shoddy research, with only a glimmer of real science showing up here and there, almost by accident.)

The Democratic Party is in a groupthink haze right now, enforcing uniformity of thought with increasing rigor and therefore making ludicrous choices -- like Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean. Ludicrous, that is, if their goal is to achieve legislative goals or win future elections; perfectly sensible if the goal is to encourage fanatical extremist thinking and action that will continue to alienate more and more of the American public.

Historically, the political parties have thrived best when they "broadened the tent," making strong efforts to include people who are not "ideologically pure."

Where the Democratic Party's "diversity" these days is cosmetic only -- lots of races and groups, but only those individuals from those races and groups who happen to think exactly like the elitists who rule the party -- FDR's old coalition included groups that really did see the world very differently.

You get a party of labor unions, blacks, Jews, immigrants, liberals, and the diehard Confederates of the solid South, and you will really have diversity.

And it's from diversity, not unity, that large groups of people make wise collective decisions.

Like, for instance, choosing presidential candidates who have a hope of winning the general election.

Surowiecki covers an amazing amount of territory in such a small book, from sports betting to the stock market to politics, from corporations to traffic flow to science.

It's a small book with less than three hundred pages, and Surowiecki is an extraordinarily clear and engaging writer. You won't suffer any pain from reading it.

And at the end, you'll not only know why markets work while market experts constantly fail, you'll know why we -- and other nations -- are right to put our trust in democracy, as long as we maintain the conditions that allow crowds to make wise decisions.

When we think of Iraqis braving the threat of death to go to the polls, what we saw was not only courage and determination -- we also saw a nation adopt the mechanism that will, in the long run, give them the best chance of making the right decisions to ensure their future freedom, prosperity, and happiness.

You have assumed: a) that people would rather not have a different form of government that works better

I have actually presumed that if people want to throw away their dignity then we have a responsibility to disallow that.

and b) that the democratic system has come closest to recognizing the rights and dignity of the governed, a point that I could not disagree with more,

Feel free to elaborate. That's what discussions are. Absent a statement of why you disagree I have nothing to defend.

Shalom.

I have actually presumed that if people want to throw away their dignity then we have a responsibility to disallow that.

In your eyes, they have thrown away their dignity, in their eyes they may have defined the good society differently from you. Your particular brand of authoritarianism is not less offensive because it is "for the sake of the people's dignity". Indeed, that was the hallmark of the leaders of the French Revolution.

...that the democratic system has come closest to recognizing the rights and dignity of the governed, a point that I could not disagree with more.

This country has a bad habit of eliminating rights of one group of people whenever it secures the rights of another. The saddest part of it all is that so-called conservative economists talk about people individually and collectively as commodities; that has precious little to do with human dignity.

Democracy is one political ideal among many, when you start seeing a moral imperative to force your political ideals on another person (or people or nation) you have become what the Soviet Union used to be. Is there a democratic version of the Internationale? I'm sure the words can't be much different.

In your eyes, they have thrown away their dignity, in their eyes they may have defined the good society differently from you.

Truth has no eyes. It is there to be discovered. We have to decide whether we have discovered it however we make such decisions, but it doesn't boil down to my truth vs. your truth. That's a haven for forensic cowards.

Your particular brand of authoritarianism is not less offensive because it is "for the sake of the people's dignity".

I suppose if we found a place where we forced authoritarians out and they voted authoritarians back in I would have to reconsider. Otherwise I won't consider it authoritarian to give people an opportunity to live in the dignity that is theirs by virtue of their humanity.

Indeed, that was the hallmark of the leaders of the French Revolution.

With one important difference. They did not build a system that accounted for people's inherent dignity. They shouted about liberty, equality, and fraternity, but did not create institutions that could protect any of the three. It was noise. Our history shows we have not just talked about it, but created it.

This country has a bad habit of eliminating rights of one group of people whenever it secures the rights of another.

Imperfect execution does not make the concept imperfect. Our goals are correct and we have a tendency to correct the imperfect executions over time.

The saddest part of it all is that so-called conservative economists talk about people individually and collectively as commodities; that has precious little to do with human dignity.

Some economists have tended toward that position in the very recent past. John Nash's Governing Dynamics recognized some of the problem there and has corrected it in a large measure. It is not conservative to fail to recognize what makes us human. That's part of the libertarian fallacy.

Except they were wrong. All governments impose a political ideal on another person. We are discussing whether an ideal, once proven, should be expanded to other nations as well.

Shalom.

Truth is not merely subjective or objective, I agree, but no one has a complete grasp on absolute Truth except God.

Otherwise I won't consider it authoritarian to give people an opportunity to live in the dignity that is theirs by virtue of their humanity.

Our history shows we have not just talked about it, but created it.

Our democracy is killing 1.5 million children per year in the name of women's dignity, we seem to have a bad habit of spewing pornography at every other turn and the government keeps on getting more bloated by day. Where is the dignity in that?

Imperfect execution does not make the concept imperfect. Our goals are correct and we have a tendency to correct the imperfect executions over time.

Spoken like a true Trotskyite. William Buckley wrote some years back that "specific ideologies come and go but that rhetorical totalism is always in the air, searching for the ideologue-on-the-make."

John Nash's Governing Dynamics recognized some of the problem there and has corrected it in a large measure.

Um, writing a book, at best offers a different perspective on problems, issues and solutions; that doesn't correct a thing in the real world.

Except they were wrong. All governments impose a political ideal on another person. We are discussing whether an ideal, once proven, should be expanded to other nations as well.

Wrong in your opinion, and of course anyone who disagrees ought not stand in your way. What was Stalin's old line? If you want to make an omelet, you've got to break a few eggs. For someone who talks so much about human dignity, you leave precious little room for self-determination, once again, back to the French Revolution and Their hypocrisy.

An ideal in politics can never be "proven" for the simple reason that proof is a scientific term and if one is going to approach politics as a science then you need to have a control group and an experimental group and make sure that all other factors are even. This doesn't happen in the real world of course because there are so many variables. This is why political science isn't.

Now for the sake of argument you could prove that with a group of specific people that democracy was better, it does not follow that then you may impose it on other peoples and cultures. To get some perspective on this imagine if I felt the same way about Christianity that you feel about democracy. Pax vobiscum.

Truth is not merely subjective or objective, I agree, but no one has a complete grasp on absolute Truth except God.

Then he would be a good place to start, don't you think? And starting with G-d is as clear a difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution as anyone can point to - besides the result. Our democracy is killing 1.5 million children per year in the name of women's dignity, we seem to have a bad habit of spewing pornography at every other turn and the government keeps on getting more bloated by day. Where is the dignity in that?

As I said, imperfect execution does not mean an imperfect ideal. You point to things that have escalated terribly since the 1960s - oddly since the time G-d was tossed finally out of the public square. If you wanted me to admit that it takes a partnership with G-d to create a good government you had only to ask. I know it is true.

Wrong in your opinion, and of course anyone who disagrees ought not stand in your way.

Once again, truth isn't a matter of my opinion.

What was Stalin's old line? If you want to make an omelet, you've got to break a few eggs.

And for all that, Stalin didn't make anything but burnt toast.

For someone who talks so much about human dignity, you leave precious little room for self-determination, once again, back to the French Revolution and Their hypocrisy.

So liberating a people so they can create a government of self-determination is leaving precious little room for self-determination? As I said, once we liberate a people to choose their own form of government and they choose to live under a tyrant then I'll modify my stance. Until then, freeing people from tyrrany so they can make their own choice remains a moral imperative - even if they haven't the strength to free themselves nor the freedom to ask for our help.

Shalom.

Which happened in a democracy, being as it is, a humanist institution, ergo fatally flawed from the get-go. The only difference between the French and American revolutions is they did it quickly while we stretched it out for 150 years.

So liberating a people so they can create a government of self-determination is leaving precious little room for self-determination?

They are free already to be self-determining, but like the feminists of yesteryear who didn't want motherhood to be seen as a woman's choice "because too many women would make the wrong choice" you feel it is necessary to impose your political ideals on other cultures because your morality tells you a particular political system is imperative. That is truly the very arrogance that inspires hatred for America around the world.

As I said, once we liberate a people to choose their own form of government and they choose to live under a tyrant then I'll modify my stance.

Noted. However it'll probably be a theocratic oligarchy and we'll most likely have them as an enemy within a decade from when we ever leave.

And we may yet go the way of the French. Or we may return to a society that understands G-d's relationship to man. Or we may find yet a different way. The issue is we have the opportunity to seek that as we will. It's the same opportunity G-d Himself gave us. It respects our dignity as human beings.

They were not free to be self-determining. If they had arisen they would have been slaughtered, just like the students at Tiannaman Square. The ideal is that people can only be subjugated if they allow themselves. The reality is that not all men are equal unless they are equally armed.

That is truly the very arrogance that inspires hatred for America around the world.

I can't agree. We aren't imposing our form of government, just our concept of self-determination. We aren't deposing freely elected and empowered despots, we are deposing thugs who took their power by force. There is nothing wrong or arrogant with that. I think there is something very wrong with saying, "Well, they must have wanted rape and torture rooms so we'll continue to do business with their leader."

Noted. However it'll probably be a theocratic oligarchy and we'll most likely have them as an enemy within a decade from when we ever leave.

I doubt it. We'll have to watch. Perhaps we can start a thread in 10 years.

Shalom.

Or the confederates in the civil war,

Very bad comparison. The confederates had a state, a structure, and a military. They also had funding and international friends.

or the Japanese-Americans during WWII,

And the result of their uprising?

or the students at Kent State,

See above.

or the folks at Waco, Texas etc, etc,.

Ditto.

Democracy is no respecter of those who have perspectives other than those of the governments of democracies. They are in their own way narrow, as this thread has shown. Pax vobiscum.

I can't figure out what you are trying to say. I stand by the statement that handing out the opportunity to self-determination, even using force to overthrow the thugs who are denying it, is never wrong.

Shalom.

More terminology games. The short answer is that "democracy" as a political force has a completely different meaning from "democracy" as a precise form of government.

We aren't foisting any political system on anyone, nor have we in the past, or at least not one with any resemblance to our own. The governments of Germany and Japan, both instituted by force, differ from one another as much as they differ from ours. Neither particularly resembles the nascent one of Iraq as near as we can tell at this point.

What is being forced is the notion that the common people have a voice in the form of their own government and especially in its behavior. This last may be by direct vote - possible only in relatively small polises, or by indirect vote, a representative government. What is significant is the ongoing nature of this control of government, however imperfect. One does not simply throw the matter into the hands of "experts," the rich, the pious, or the well-born, and let them carry on from there. One does place it in the hands of the unwashed, much to the horror of the other four groups. Too bad.

More terminology games. The short answer is that "democracy" as a political force has a completely different meaning from "democracy" as a precise form of government.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.