Psephocracy, beleaguered
In 2016, I wrote an article for the New Yorker about whether voters are well informed enough for democracy to succeed. It was published a week before the presidential election that year, so the situational irony was kinda heavy.
It's a complex problem. Voters are remarkably ignorant, and crowds of them are not wiser than they are as individuals, because their ignorance has a shape—errors in one direction aren't balanced out by errors in another. Nonetheless, democracy doesn't fail all that often, and has some incontrovertible up-sides; democratic countries almost never have famines, for instance, and get into wars with one another infrequently.
So how does democracy manage to work, when it does? No theorist thinks it's infallible, I hasten to say. The only question is why it isn't even worse. One theory: retrospective voting. Maybe it's enough if voters react according to whether they're happier than the last time they went to the ballot box.
It's not hard to see how retrospective voting could fail. Thoughtless voters might punish an incumbent for misfortunes that are coincidences, beyond his control, such as hurricanes or plagues. In fact, researchers have found that voters punish incumbents when their hometown sports team has a bad season. Timing might also interfere. Voters could punish an incumbent for a slow-to-bloom unhappiness the seeds of which were planted by his predecessor. And they could fail to reward an incumbent whose policies wouldn't yield happiness until after the next election. Such a timing error, in my opinion, is part of what happened to Biden and the Democrats in 2024. Biden stood up for unions as no President of either party had done for decades, but four years of solidarity, after five decades of backsliding, neglect, and even sabotage, weren't enough to bring about a change in economic potency that a considerable number of workers could yet feel. And while some of the economic stimulus from Biden's Inflation Reduction Act may have begun to register, most of it was yet to come (the overwhelming majority, by the way, will be in red states), and the mitigation of climate change that it was designed to induce was even farther off in the future. Of course, even when that mitigation does arrive (if it arrives, that is—Trump looks likely to sabotage it), it's going to arrive as an absence of harm, which by definition will be hard for anyone to have a vivid perception of. The world needs to be saved, but no one has yet figured out how a politician can win points for keeping it from ending.
In America, retrospective voting is buttressed by the federal government's cumulative structure. The federal government's operations are largely stable from one administration to the next, and when change happens—when Congress passes a law creating a new agency, or zeroes out an existing agency's budget—voters notice the alteration in their well-being, and vote for or against. If a new President adds something to the federal government that no one wants, or is ready for, it is likely to get discarded by the next administration. And contrariwise, if a new President takes away something many people need and appreciate, it gets put back. The Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) didn't become a success the moment it was signed into law; it was proved a success when, a few years later, it turned out to be too popular for Republicans to dare dismantle it. Like Social Security, like Medicare, it became part of the core collection of legislative decisions that the institution of federal government perpetuates. Bureaucratic inertia has a bad reputation, but it's the memory of democracy. This is the part of Edmund Burke's conservative political philosophy that even liberals are tempted to agree with: muddling through, over the course of years, brings about progress when it's done incrementally rather than radically, and although the result may look like a Rube Goldberg machine, assembled piecemeal and without foresight, it's the result of experiment, and bears pragmatism's warrant. Reformers should be cautious about renovating it wholesale.
Which is why it's more than a little terrifying that an unelected Elon Musk is boasting that in the past few weeks, he has fed whole agencies of the federal government into the wood chipper. He's yanking memory cartridges out of a benevolent HAL-9000; he's banjaxing the institutional memory that is democracy's mechanism for self-improvement. Trump, unusually for a Republican, didn't run on a platform of destroying the social safety net. He ran on a platform of deporting immigrants on a massive scale and ratcheting up tariffs—both sufficiently horrible policies, in my opinion—as if in quiet recognition of the fact that many of his constituents relied on and valued federal aid. By destroying programs like America's charitable efforts at disease prevention abroad, and its funding of biological research at home, Musk is dismantling systems whose social ramifications, and subsequent political effects, he is highly unlikely to understand. And by doing it at such a scale, so quickly, there's a risk that he will overwhelm the capacity of retrospective voting, which works best when policy changes are incremental, to respond to him meaningfully. He's wiping the hard drive of democracy.
Speed and irreversibility are no doubt exactly Musk's intention. But it's nonetheless very bad news! Before the election, I thought the worst of the second Trump administration would be concentration camps for immigrants. But recently I've become worried as well about the acceleration of disease and global warming. Last week Kennedy cancelled the annual meeting where the nation's health leaders were to choose which strains of influenza next fall's flu vaccine should protect against, and he has been cavalier about the outbreak of measles spreading in West Texas. Meanwhile, it looks like Trump is going to zero out as many as he can of Biden's efforts to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, including by bringing to a sudden halt almost all wind-power developments in America. A few paragraphs above, I worried that voters might unfairly punish a leader who happened to preside over hurricanes or plagues. But voters would be perfectly justified in punishing politicians who bring about conditions that make hurricanes and plagues more likely and more deleterious by abetting global warming and quack medicine.
Musk's dismantlings have happened too recently for most people to have yet felt the effects. Scientists have lost grant funding, and scholars of public health are terrified, but mass deaths haven't yet occurred. In my Instagram feed, park ranger after park ranger is posting about having his dream of national service shattered, but most people visit national parks in the summer, which is still a few months off. It won't be that long, however, and maybe sooner than we expect, before people do feel effects vividly. It's entirely possible that the economic consequences of Trump's mismanagement will hit first, which I think would be a blessing—I would much rather live through a recession at the hands of disbelievers in Keynesianism than through a bird-flu pandemic under a public-health system run by disbelievers in vaccines. When people do feel the consequences, however—when they perceive their prosperity, their health, their well-being, and even their lives to be endangered—the political reaction may be beyond current calculations. Think of what happened to George W. Bush's administration after the political and social order broke down in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. The seeds for the Occupy movement, and for mutual care efforts during the Covid pandemic and even for subsequent protest waves such as Black Lives Matter, were planted then, I suspect. Now imagine facing a pandemic with the knowledge that no vaccine is on the way, or days of orange wildfire smoke, and the washing away of a city in Florida, under a President whose actions guarantee that the temperature of the world will continue to rise steadily. I'm not sure anyone in politics today is ready for that lion to awaken.
Some personal news
On an incongruously lighter note: I'm the member of the month at my gym, Cross Fit South Brooklyn. You can read a Q&A with me about it here.