The whole point of a democracy

I've been following with interest an argument between John Ganz and Eric Levitz, both of whom are writers I admire, on the role of polling in American politics. (See Ganz, Levitz, Ganz.)

I'm on Ganz's side of the argument. I don't begrudge individual candidates who use private polling to help shape at the margin how they compete. But using polling at a systemic level, having a political party that defines and redefines itself in dialogue with public polling (and private donors) is corrosive to the project of electoral democracy.

Levitz starts at the wrong place, and so ends up at the wrong conclusion. The unstated background is that we live in a country where there are the fascists and the Democrats, so we want the Democrats to win elections. The task before us is not to participate effectively in a larger system, a democracy, of which we (whoever we are) can only be one faction of many, but to see to it that Democrats in particular win elections. Questions of who we want to be or what we want to do are secondary. We must win elections, we must defeat the fascists, first. We have an instrumental task before us. We should use the tools that will help us most effectively accomplish that task.

He then points out, accurately, that people who are active in politics are atypical and unrepresentative, so our intuitions about what voters might want are unreliable. (David Shor deserves a tip of the hat here.) We are at risk of motivated reasoning, of imagining that whatever we support, because we are sure it would be good, is what the electorate would vote for. We require an objective guide to discipline us, to help us get things right, in this preordained task of winning elections — not necessarily to accomplish anything in particular, but so that the fascists do not. Polling, as flawed as it is, is the best tool we have.

Levitz's error is to imagine that it's possible to separate the background conditions under which all this makes sense from the approach that he advises. That there are the fascists and the Democrats, and we'd strongly prefer the Democrats to win elections so that the fascists do not, is not some eternal, preexisting fact about the world. Over many cycles, the interaction of America's two political parties created this reality. The approach to politics that Levitz advises, I would argue, helped to create it, and is unlikely to undo it.

Levitz, for a moment, kind of recognizes this in his piece:

the actual dispute between Ganz and the popularists is not about whether public opinion can change, but about how much scope Democratic politicians have to reshape the views of swing voters — which is to say, voters who do not particularly trust Democratic politicians.

Why do voters so distrust Democratic politicians? What is the Democratic Party "brand", ever since Bill Clinton overthrew the settled commitments of the party, hired Dick Morris, and triangulated?

I claim the helplessness and haplessness and electoral weakness of the Democratic Party derives in large part from party leaders taking the approach Levitz is so keen to defend. There really is no such thing as the Democratic Party anymore. The party's fortunes are just a referendum on how much the public hates Republicans at any given moment. Fortunately, Republicans govern so terribly that, while elections have been free and fair, even an empty suit, "Generic Democrat", has often been competitive.

To be fair, I should point out that Republicans are not so different. In order to help Donald Trump win, the Republican Party set aside its commitment to abortion-is-murder ideology, and to policies that would follow from that ideology, like a national abortion ban. America's two-party system renders it structurally untenable for either party to abstain entirely from shifting with the winds of public opinion.

However. Say what you will about MAGA Republicans, there is some actual content to their agenda that is solid and settled, that they will pursue regardless of public opinion, donor outrage, and everything else. The public doesn't like detention camps and mass deportation. But that's the very heart of what MAGA is and they'll move Heaven and Earth to do it. My view is this tenacity, this transparent committedness, is a large part of why they won, even though what they were committed to was never popular.

In the American political system, the marginal voter who decides Presidential elections is the voter least interested in, most aloof from, the matters over which the two parties contest. If, like me, the concerns that drive you are inequality and a commitment to social democracy, you voted for Democrats (as I did). If you are a businessperson whose interest in politics is primarily about getting taxed and regulated less, you voted for Republicans.

The people "in the middle" aren't people with "moderate" views on these issues. They are people who just don't think or care about them. It's not that they are inherently apolitical. It's just that whatever concerns might move them are not matters of active contestation between the parties.

An example in the recent presidential cycle is Gaza. People whose core political concern was the plight of the Palestinians didn't have a clear choice in the election. The two parties, the two Presidential candidates, did not draw plain, strong, lines between their positions. These people, many of whom might have been reliable Democrats when other issues were top-of-mind for them, became "marginal voters", who might have voted either way or not at all — not because they didn't care, but because they perceived their core political concern to be unaddressed by either party.

Gaza-focused "uncommitted" voters were a small fraction of the electorate. But the whole strata that constitutes "the marginal voter" has this in common — that whatever the two parties are actively contesting, it is not what they most care about. To comitted partisans, it feels like we are governed by aliens or chaos monkeys or coin flips, because we see very important stakes and then electoral outcomes that make no sense given the gravity of what will be lost. But the marginal voter does not see so much at stake. Things will be fine either way, she thinks, or she thinks it's all going to hell whichever of these assholes gets elected. Her vote is based on other things. Parasocial attachment, I've argued, is a big determinant of how these people actually vote.

But another big determinant, I think, is candor. Before you can even evaluate candidates or parties "on the issues", before it even makes sense to do so, you have to believe there is some straightforward relationship between how they present themselves, what they actually believe, and what they would do. A candidate who promises things you'd love but who is merely pandering to you and would not in fact work to make those things happen is not even right. A candidate who won't tell you what they really think or what they would do is hard to evaluate, and in a deep sense is doing something discreditable, committing a kind of crime against democracy, by failing to meet the basic preconditions under which electoral democracy makes sense.

I think the marginal voter often votes, whether for a person, or a movement, or a political party, on the basis of perceived candor. If I am right, then the technocratic instrumentalism that Levitz advises will prove, has already proved, self-defeating, on its own terms. And that technocratic instrumentalism, intended in opposition to fascism and therefore in the service of democracy, is itself a kind of subversion of democracy.

The whole point of a democracy is that no one can know what a public truly wants, both in the weak sense of subjectively wanting and the stronger sense of what would be in the public's interest. Democracy is precisely the project of constructing institutions not to measure or act upon some nonsensical notion of the public will, but to constitute a thing that the public recognizes ex post as its will (or at least does not rebel against as completely antithetical to its will), and that delivers outcomes that render at least passably contented an always fractious and divided collectivity.

If the true public will existed as a thing that could just be measured and correctly known, we'd have no need for democracy, at least not for anything like electoral democracy. "Consultative democracy", in which experts simply measure the true will of the public and acted correctly on its behalf, would be the obviously superior system. But the true public will does not exist. We have to construct, to constitute, one of many possible versions of it ourselves. How we constitute it will determine who we collectively are, how we will collectively understand ourselves going forward, how we act, whether we will live well or poorly or outright destroy ourselves.

"Popularism" as a project can be understood narrowly as a very instrumental — some might say cynical — approach to contesting elections. But I think there's often a broader and more deeply misguided vision behind it, a conceit that expert social science, relying on institutions like public polling, can supplant or circumvent or supersede messy, corrupt politics. This is the homonculous theory of democracy. It disdains the partisan and polemic, in favor of scientific rationality. It imagines there's some "truer" procedure that we can measure our democracy against. It's a project fundamentally in denial of the human condition — that we fundamentally cannot know how collectively to act or even how we "want" collectively to act, yet we must nevertheless act, together, in time and in the world. We must grope in the darkness to invent institutions, and then only afterwards see whether they function well or poorly, and do our best to adjust.

Representative democracy requires ideologues, sincere partisans, people genuinely committed to a way of going forward. That renders it possible for elections to constitute a representative body of such partisans to deliberate on affairs of state and make laws. When political parties reshape themselves on the basis of polling, it renders the whole process nonsensical, a kind of infinite regress. It deprives the public of meaningful choice in the name of giving it what it wants.

The United States has a shitty electoral system. It is structurally incapable of providing the public adequate choice, of offering voters a wide range of sincere partisans from which to constitute the legislature, the mini-public that governs.

Nevertheless, much of the public does understand that voting for people who have no settled views but are only pandering for your votes is not really voting for anyone or anything at all. The more poll-tested a candidate is, inherently the less worthy. We are living in the aftermath of the public insisting that it's better to vote for people you can trust to be who they claim to be and act accordingly than to just have no idea and let the insiders have at.

There's no such thing as the true public will. Nevertheless, perhaps polyannishly, I'll claim the American public does not, in fact, really favor the American Nazis. But the marginal voter, the weird sliver of the public that decides American Presidential elections, did favor the American Nazis over the who-the-fuck-knows-they're-just-triangulating party. I don't think we'll overthrow the Nazis by listening and hedging and triangulating more.