We are in late-stage democracy

Democracy brought stability and progress for centuries. Why is it failing us now?

Now that the US election dust has settled, let’s talk politics. I am disappointed in the electoral outcome, but I am also disappointed in the post-election discussion. Liberals seem close to seeing the problem, but they just can’t get all the way there.

Some say the Democrats could’ve messaged better. Or they went for the wrong voters. Elections are important, say these analysts, so we should have better strategy! All the while, they fail to question the system in which strategy is more important than substance.

Others blame the voters for being ill-informed, or worse. There was and is much anger at Trump voters, and these angry people are so close to pointing to the real problem. If only they could make the leap to questioning a pillar of their political beliefs. So let’s leap together.

The problem isn’t that these particular American voters in 2024 are flawed. The problem isn’t that these particular Democrats botched their strategy. In 2024, the problem is democracy itself.

If Harris had won, with swing states shifted slightly left, the system wouldn’t suddenly have been working well. Many millions would still have voted for Trump, who has thrived on divisive, short-term-oriented, outrage-focused political messaging. And many millions of others would have voted for Harris, who used similar messaging because that’s what works in democracy.

So let’s talk about democracy. Let’s talk about why—as mindful, rational people—democracy will not give us what we want. By the end of this post, I don’t expect you to agree with me yet because the idealization of democracy runs deep. But stick with me, and see if you still think democracy is worth holding onto so tightly.

The shifting seascape

Last week, we covered the constantly shifting fitness seascape. Evolution is a never-ending process because the conditions of the world change. A once-ideal strategy will fail in a different time and context. This explains why democracy wasn’t viable until 250 years ago, why it has been so successful over the past 250 years, and why it may not be viable for much longer.

Despite the perks of democracy (increased social stability during power transfers, wider representation, rapid development), it was not always the best choice for governments. In medieval times and earlier, the masses were much less informed than monarchs and their advisors, and it was far too costly to poll the citizenry. Then widespread education (due to The Enlightenment, printing press, and industrialization) reduced the knowledge gap between citizens and the elite. Improved roads and bureacratic organization made it financially feasible to hold elections. Social and technological contexts shifted, giving democracy a clear advantage over previous governments.

The world continues to change. Democratic systems well-suited to past eras are showing their age. Presently, the knowledge gap is widening between experts and average citizens, with voters increasingly uninformed on complex topics like foreign policy, economics, and climate change. Technology has enabled viral disinformation campaigns, which are very difficult to inoculate against. And ultimately, voting involves strong emotions, which often overshadow rational analysis. How many times was the word “vibes” used during discussions of the recent US election? The public’s limited understanding leads to oversimplified political discourse and policies that fail to leverage the deep expertise available.

The exploitable voter

To understand why this is happening, let’s examine the foundation of democracy: the voter. We need to look clearly at their psychologies, which includes the intersection of nature (evolutionary emotions) and nurture (cultural beliefs).

As we covered last week, humans were optimized for a very different context, and our genes have not changed much since. Our ancestors lived in much smaller groups and could only maintain roughly 150 stable social relationships, a number which persists today. Formal language had not yet been invented, so instead of logic and reason, early humans evolved with emotional shortcuts. Since we couldn’t use rigorous cost-benefit analyses, evolution fine-tuned our emotions with just the right balance of long- and short-term concerns. Just the right balance of concern for self and others.

Always, the “right” balance was the one which optimized survival in that specific context. A context in which small tribes had to compete with other small tribes. A context in which planning for more than one generation beyond would have been suboptimal and selected against. A context in which negative experiences were more significant to survival than positive ones. Coming out of that context, our present-day emotions are unsurprisingly focused on the short term and negativity.

This ancient history affects our cultural beliefs too. Evolution needed us to be certain of our beliefs, even if we were wrong. There was a greater penalty for waffling and less reward for changing our minds. Now, we humans cling too tightly to our beliefs because it feels good to “stand firm” or “stick to our guns,” even though truly rational beings would constantly learn and update beliefs. So our cultural beliefs—like, say, unrelenting belief in democracy—become rigidities: entrenched, hard to change, and ultimately exploitable.

Even if you think you are above these primal challenges (spoiler: you aren’t), there are further challenges, like implicit bias. Our evolved pattern recognition gives us a preference for in-groups, and culture tells us which in-groups to prefer. Research has shown that no one is immune to such bias. These effects may be small in any individual, but when adding up in large groups, like a voting population, implicit bias can influence the direction of nations and history.

As the world continues to change, our context becomes more and more different from our evolutionary context, leaving us all too emotionally short-sighted, too confident in our beliefs, and full of biases we aren’t even aware of. Reason can mitigate against this prehistoric emotional hardware, but using it is difficult and time-consuming, so voters don’t use it as much as one would hope. And these voters are the foundation of the system.

Too much democracy

Some think the problem is that we are not democratic enough. It is true that economic and political inequality is increasing. But I argue that we are more democratic than we have ever been.

I’m not the first to point this out. Andrew Sullivan wrote about hyperdemocracy in May 2016, before Trump’s first Republican nomination, in his provocatively-titled article “Democracies end when they are too democratic.” Citing recent electoral victories for non-establishment candidates, he wrote, “The evidence suggests that direct democracy, far from being throttled, is actually intensifying its grip on American politics.”

Things have not always been this way. As Sullivan recapped, “To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, [the Founding Fathers] constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.” He goes on to point out that these barriers have been eroded over time. I argue that one reason for this is our rigid support for democracy. “Democracy!” is a rallying cry for Americans, especially on the left, as we push incessantly for more voting, more access, more of the “Voice of The People.” It feels good to fight for “empowerment,” nevermind the long-term effects. Nevermind the optimal balance for our current place in the seascape.

So we exercise our voices. We cancel and boycott and ratio. We now have editorial oversight on what stories Disney can produce, even if we aren’t their direct customer. We now force the hands of the gatekeepers, reading only news that confirms our biases, creating a polarized media. We push for influence as good supporters of democracy, getting exactly what we wish for. Our voices are being heard, so we’re winning, right?

We pursue this “empowerment” for the same reason that capitalists seek exploitation: short-term gain. We feel instantly gratified when we express outrage, and our outrage is instantly gratified with more likes and retweets. Our political parties gain votes by appealing to anger and dissatisfaction, making us feel we need major changes (right now!) and more “Democracy!” On short time scales, these gains feel good and important, but persistence in this harsh universe requires us to look to the long term, or else be drowned in the waves.

The quickening seascape

In theory, democracies should be deliberative: “for a democratic decision to be legitimate, it must be preceded by authentic deliberation, not merely the aggregation of preferences that occurs in voting.” That doesn’t sound like the discussions we have in America.

Democracies worked better in slow-moving information landscapes. When people largely received their news from newspapers—which took significant time and effort to print in addition to editorial oversight—information disseminated much more slowly. This gave more time for deliberation among the populace. Democratic structures were built for this slow-moving environment.

Then yellow journalism, then radio, then television, then the internet and social media, and oh boy, where did the deliberation go? Our online systems have been optimized according to our evolved emotions. Now our natural attraction to extremism rewards hot takes and ragebait, rather than nuance. Now our confirmation bias fuels echo chambers, incentivizing users to attack strawmen of the opposing political side, rather than engage in reasonable discourse.

To put it simply, the theory of democracy is not compatible with such a rapid-fire information landscape. And it will get worse, not better. Change is accelerating. It is already infeasible to educate the entire voting populace on all the complicated systems we have built. Those systems will become more incomprehensible as evolutionary trends cause further specialization. Knowledge gaps will continue to widen, voters will be tossed about in the hyperdemocratic information seascape, and democracy will become more and more suboptimal.

Ideally, political parties would be staffed with experts who are able to disentangle the complexities and distill the information for voters. However, the parties survive by winning elections, so they have evolved to be staffed with people with expertise in winning those elections.

Democracy on steroids

Political parties, aided by technology, have become more skilled at the game of politics. The point of the game is to get the most votes using the least dollars. A simple evolutionary optimization. Find the cheapest voters to convince, and convince them. How do you do that? Big data.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is a recent example of data harvesting for use by political campaigns. This case is the tip of the iceberg. User data will continue to be harvested. And again, this is the point of the game of democracy. In order to compete, parties will continue to find ways to skirt around the rules, in the same way that defenders in basketball or football will always use as much contact as they are allowed. If a disingenuous argument is shown to be effective in focus groups, parties will use them, or else they will lose elections. This is what optimization looks like.

These trends will get worse, not better. We can try to pass laws limiting these behaviors, but parties will always find ways around them because, I repeat, this is the point of the game. So why do we keep demanding to play it?

“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried.”

Churchill was right¹, but we haven’t tried everything. Newer forms of government have been theorized, and recent technologies change what is optimal and possible. So let’s consider other forms. Forms that better balance the forces of evolutionary optimization. Forms that account for the growing knowledge gap between experts and laypeople. Forms that are nimble and can adjust to the ever-changing seascape. Forms that see voters clearly for what they really are: emotional, flawed, short-sighted agents who are nonetheless worthy of respect and representation.

There are many proposed systems which blend democratic ideals while also prioritizing expertise, deliberation, and long-term goals. Some of these are deliberative democracy, guided democracy, technocracy, epistocracy, and futarchy. It’s difficult to advocate for any one of them. But we need to consider systemic changes because shifting global conditions have pushed democracies to their breaking point.

We aren’t going to fix this with better messaging or with younger leaders or with more democracy. I believe we are in late-stage democracy. We must decide whether to idly watch the fall or start the serious work of shaping what comes next.

Of course, this work will take more than just me and the few of you who agree with me. So let’s at least start the conversation. We need to move the Overton Window such that popular political discourse includes a questioning of democracy. My next few posts will attempt to break this monumental task down into smaller pieces. By the end of this series, I hope you will see that change is both necessary and possible.

I’m sure you have objections or doubts at this point, and I’d love to hear them in the comments. Do you still believe democracy is optimal? Do you think we can actually make systemic changes?

As a note to my subscribers, I’m going to reduce my posting frequency to every other week. It was always ambitious to attempt weekly posts, and I’m finding that it takes too much time from my fiction writing. Thank you for reading so far. This all has spurred some great offline discussions, and I very much hope to continue as we all communally attempt to grapple with this complex world.

1. Apparently, he was quoting someone else.