Can democracy work?

In "Public Opinion" (1922), Walter Lippmann argued that the vastness, complexity, and invisibility of the modern world make democracy impossible. He got a lot right.

“It was no part of political science… to think about how knowledge of the world could be brought to the ruler. . . . What counted was a good heart, a reasoning mind, a balanced judgment. These would ripen with age, but it was not necessary to consider how to inform the heart and feed reason. Men took in their facts as they took in their breath.”

—Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion

I. Knowledge, Decisions, Democracy

Good decisions depend on knowledge. If you cross the road and don’t know a car is hurtling towards you, you’ll be killed. If you invest money on the basis of wishful thinking, you’ll become destitute. If you marry an awful person you think is kind and trustworthy, you’ll be miserable.

It's plausible that this generalises to politics. If societies are governed by ignorant or misinformed rulers, they’ll produce bad laws and implement bad policies. For example, Mao believed that plants behave like uncompetitive communists, which led him to demand stupid farming practices. These practices played a role in famines that killed tens of millions of people.

In democracies, there’s an important sense in which voters are ultimately the rulers. Given this, it’s plausible to think that democracies will only make good decisions—pass good laws, implement good policies, and so on—if citizens are well-informed.

On the surface, this looks challenging. How could the average voter in a modern democracy become sufficiently well-informed about topics as diverse and complex as climate change, crime, economics, trade, international relations, and so on?

Perhaps this is the wrong way to think about it. In most democracies, it’s rare for citizens to vote on specific policies. Instead, they outsource their decisions to representatives. Given this, perhaps citizens don’t need to be well-informed about politics. They just need to be well-informed about which representatives are likely to make good decisions.

This doesn’t really help, though. If citizens aren’t knowledgeable enough to make good decisions, how could they be knowledgeable enough to decide which representatives would make good decisions? Further, these representatives aren’t a special breed of human beings. They’re just other citizens, confronted with the same seemingly impossible task.

II. Epistemic Critiques of Democracy

Democracy sounds good. It sounds so good that dictators characterise their societies as democracies and run sham elections. North Korea is a totalitarian state run by psychopathic thugs who murder, starve, and imprison the population. What’s it called? The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But is democracy good? Although many people treat democracy as sacred today, historically many intellectuals and philosophers thought the answer to this question is “obviously not”.

There are many critiques of democracy, but most of them are fundamentally epistemic. That is, they argue that democracy is bad because voters lack the knowledge, wisdom, or understanding required to make good decisions.

Some of these critiques identify contingent problems. For example, left-wing intellectuals often argue that voters are only misinformed as a result of elite manipulation. On this view, propaganda, “ideology”, and other sinister forces drive the hoi polloi to adopt beliefs at odds with their own interests. If you could get rid of those things, voters would see reality objectively (i.e., as left-wing intellectuals see it) and everything would be fine.