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- [00:01]
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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I'm Caleb Zakrin, and you're listening to the Truth About Bullshit, a special series from the Princeton University Press Ideas Podcast. Today I speak with Elaine Landemore, professor of Political Science at Yale University, about democracy and bullshit, with a special focus on our 2020 book, Open Democracy Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century. Bullshit is a feature of both democracies and dictatorships alike, but it takes different forms. In democracies, while citizens enjoy the freedom of speech and the right to vote, a range of forces often conspire to limit their real power in favor of competing elites. The Political and Economic Elites toolkit includes the art of bullshit, the persuasive use of language without regard for truth, whether meritocratic or populist. Elites alike have mastered this form of manipulation, amplified by modern tools of dissemination and authority. To help us understand the challenges that bullshit poses to democratic citizens, I'm pleased to welcome Ellen Landemar. Elaine, thanks for joining me on the Truth About Bullshit.
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Thank you for having me, Caleb.
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B
I'm really excited to get the chance to talk with you. I feel like there aren't that many people that are thinking about democracy in the way that you are. I feel like you are both dealing with the practical applications of democracy, how democracy actually exists today, but you're also thinking a lot about how we can better in a way that is. Is. Is really quite creative. So I'm excited to introduce listeners to how you think about democracy and then also connect it a little bit to Harry Frankfurt's ideas on bullshit and how it poses a challenge for democracies today. But before jumping into your work and to Harry's book on bullshit, I was wondering if you just tell us a little about yourself and your background.
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Sure. I'm French by birth. I grew up in Normandy. I early on decided to study philosophy, then political science, and I moved to the US when I was 25 to pursue a PhD in political science at Harvard, after which I went on a few postdocs, then got a job at Yale, where I've been since 2009 at this point, and I've been teaching political theory here ever since. I have written several books. My first one in English was called Democratic Reason. I had one on David Hume in French, before that on the notion of probability in David Hume's moral philosophy, which actually, I think really shaped my thinking about democracy, now that I look back. And then I wrote my second book on open democracy, the one we're discussing today. And I have a new book as well, coming out in February 2026 called Politics Without Politicians. I recently developed an interest in the ethics of AI and more generally the ways technologies like AI can help augment democratic institutions. So this is roughly the, the arc of my career and my work.
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The way that you've been addressing issues related to democracy I find really interesting and part of the reason why we're looking at this book, Open Democracy Today, you know, amidst your other other works though we still might, might pick up on those too. So in many ways we're doing a kind of a showcase of, of your ideas and how they're relevant is that Open Democracy really addresses head on some of the problems that are faced by democracy today. And you also promote a sort of a novel way, a fresh approach of looking at democracy. There have been so many books written on the political theory of democracy. When you were setting down to write your book on it, how are you thinking about what your contribution would be and why you felt like it was important to really theorize democracy, even though it's been done so many times?
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Well, I think I probably reached the point at which I was becoming very, very skeptical that the thing we call democracy today is actually a democracy. And I wanted to kind of start from scratch almost and question the assumption that our entire worlds are built on. Because if we already live in democracies, since we keep using that term, then there's not much to think about. We can try to tinker at the margin and improve locally and talk about participatory democracy this and that, but we're not trying to fundamentally rethink the system. And I've just come to conclude that there are too many design flaws in what we call democracies. I mean, they are intentional, in fact. But if we had been setting out to create a democracy for real in the 18th century, I just don't think that's what we would have designed. And in fact, I don't even know why we keep this charade up. Because the founders of our modern systems didn't set out to create democracies, they said, so they wanted to create what they call republics, so governments for the common good. They wanted to create legitimate republics, so government for the common goods for the common good, with popular consent. But they didn't really want something much more radical, which is demos Cratos, you know, people's power. In Madison you have this idea that precisely was different between the modern republic and ancient democracies, that we're not going to have any form of democratus at the federal level. At least. So I guess I started thinking, well, why don't I try to think about what the principles, the institutional principles of an actual democracy that took this idea of Demos Kratos seriously would look like. And it turns out they are quite different from say, the principles that Bernard Manard had compiled to describe the historical regimes that were born in the 18th century and sort of survive in somewhat democratized forms today. But not fully democratic in my view. But are not fully democratic in my view.
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Right. When we look at the modern democracies today, almost all of them have some form of representative democracy. There are very few people that are actually making decisions day to day on what the government should do. You know, a certain portion of the population, you know, adults of a certain age, you know, assuming, depending where they are, that they're not not banned because of a variety of reasons, they get to essentially let their voice be heard during election day. What do you see as some of the problems around representative democracy and this system that really has come to just be synonymous with democracy?
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Well, I guess the problem I see that we've equated representation with election. So we've taken that world representation and made it to mean only a system in which elected officials rule on our behalf. And I think it sort of invisibilized another possibility which is a form of democratic representation that is not electoral and that allow ordinary citizens to actually access the center of power, the place where we make laws and policy and engage in what I call representing and being represented in turn. And just so I actually correct maybe a little bit the answer I gave to your previous question. It's not that when I started writing that book, I didn't sit down in front of my computer and just thought, hey, why don't I write? I write about a new paradigm of democracy. Actually, it started from a very concrete exposure to a process in Iceland that actually did things so differently from what I and anyone would have expected in trying to rewrite their social contract, that that's what really triggered my thinking. So it started from an actual experiment on the ground in this tiny country of Iceland. So what they did is that instead of having constitutional lawyers and elected politicians take it upon themselves to rewrite the constitution and then maybe have a referendum down the line, they did something qu different, in my view, quite revolutionary. They first asked a random sample of 950 randomly selected Icelanders to say what they thought Iceland was about, what were the key Icelandic values. And that was supposed to form the foundation for the rewriting of the constitution. And Then instead of choosing politicians or constitutional scholars to write the text, they actually led a bunch of, you know, citizens who had become visible during the Revolution in 2008 to access this council, this council of this constitutional council, and write the text for the rest of the country. And additionally, once those people were in power and they were by law, not professional politicians, those had been banned from running for that particular election. So they were roughly ordinary, not completely, of course, because they were still elected and so somewhat more educated and more urban than the rest of the population, but very diverse sample in many ways. You had a pastor, a video game designer, a student, a math professor, a museum director. I mean, these are not your typical sort of politicians, I would say. And they decided they couldn't do this behind, you know, doors. So they put their drafts online for everyone to see and for every Icelander who wanted to, to contribute and make, you know, edits. And then in the end, the whole thing went to a referendum and was approved by two thirds of the voting population. So I thought, wow, they're really willing to go against what was at the time a dogma in political science, which is that, you know, constitutions are the fundamental law of the land, and they need to be protected from popular pressures and passions. So you need to write them behind closed doors, and you need to leave that in the hands of people who actually know what they're doing and understand, you know, the complexities of constitutional writing and international treatises and all that. And they kind of did the opposite. They said, no, it's a social contract. It's a fundamental law of the land, therefore it needs to be written by the people, if it's got to be for the people. And so they were very innovative with this random sample at the upstream of the process, this group of 25 relatively ordinary citizens midstream, and a crowdsourcing sort of outreach paired with that, and then finally a referendum. And I thought, well, if they can do that for constitutional law, maybe we could do that for ordinary law as well. How come it's, you know, written only by elected politicians who are basically outsourcing the task to lawyers and lobbyists anyway? Maybe there's a way our law should be more popular that way. Popularly written, popularly contributed to, and perhaps also more legible if it's at all possible.
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Right? And this system of the kind of the random sample size of citizens, I mean, it bears a strong resemblance to, you know, for example, how like in the United States, select juries, you know, you get randomly selected. Obviously there's some haggling over who actually ends up being on the, the, you know, part of the trial. But you know, this is our, at least the United States and other places like this is the, the height of justice is, is a random sampling of citizens decide deciding a person's fate. So there we, we do use it in certain regards but, but you know, in the criminal justice system, but not necessarily for examp in the political system. When you look at some of the things that make representative democracy not very democratic, what do you see as some of the internal issues and some of the external issues?
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What do you mean by internal versus external issues?
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Just want to make sure internal issues maybe being the composition of the country. So if a country is quite homogenous versus one that's more, more diverse in its makeup one where is there, there's a lot of inequality versus A more external shocks for example like a pandemic or globalization or other. Other thing, you know, the policy of another country.
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Yeah, yeah. So. Well, so it's hard to generalize because every country has their issues. But I would, what I would say, I mean in my book at least I'm saying, look, all these countries have one thing in common is that they choose their representatives via election. And you end up in all these countries with the same problem of a plutocratic bias in the policy, the policies that result from this way of selecting our representatives. And I don't think it's a coincidence and I think it's got to do with the selection method. And initially I thought well maybe it's a problem specific to the US because money plays such a role in politics and crony capitalism has sort of like made things worse over the last 20 years. But I think that it's not unique to the United States. In fact, I was really struck. There was a recent study that I'm fond of quoting. It's called the Rich have a Slight Edge. It's a really ambitious survey of like something like 40 advanced democracies over the last 30, 40 years. They look at over 3,000 policy issues and they systematically find that in all these countries to various degrees. But still the policies that come out of so called democratic governments are always more congruent with the preferences of the rich than those of the poor. Definitely, but even the middle class and you know, it's just really striking. And you could say well it's just a slight edge. As the title indicates, it's three points, something like that. But over time it really adds up. I think this is why you'd never get say a wealth tax passed in France. Right now we're having this big debate about whether we should have a, you know, the so called Zookman tax. And I think three, three point is not much, but I think it says something about the accumulative advantage of economic groups and the top 10% of the population in having their views and their interests and their preferences better reflected in policies and laws than the rest of the population. And I'm not taking actually a position on the substance. I'm actually not quite sure that the Zookman tax or a wealth tax is a good idea in an open economy when you want to stay competitive technologically, et cetera. So I'm just saying that you see this bias across all these democracies, these so called democracies, and to me that indicates that the oligarchic component of electoral representation is very strong. And in the classic account by Bernard Manon in his book the Principle of Representative Government, he claims that elections are actually both democratic and oligarchic. That's usually how we reconcile ourselves with, with this mechanism. Well, it's true that it tends to send to power people who stand out in some way, right? Typically, I mean empirically, because they are wealthier, more educated, taller, more charismatic, more connected, et cetera. But look, it's fantastic because we still have one person, one vote. And so it's half democratic, half oligarchic. And on net it's like it's the best thing we can get because you've got an equilibrium. The elites will benefit from this mechanism because they'll be overwhelmingly more likely to be selected by. It would prefer to be judged by the people rather than fight amongst themselves. So that's a sort of way of choosing between them that outsources the decision and they don't have to feud. And on the opposite side, the argument is that while the people prefer to choose than not choose, so that's much better than having a birth aristocracy where you just observe the elites taking turn and you don't even get a say about which of them are making the decisions. But I think that equilibrium only works if you invisibilize another option, which of course is central to my book, that of lot, right, Because I think the public would benefit from moving from election to random selection. It's not like the odds individually would be much larger under a lottery system, but it would be, it would go from being non existent to at least being small. And additionally you would get the benefit of sending, of knowing that people like you are being sent to power you could have a baker, a nurse, a gardener, an Uber driver, a young person. A lot more young people actually than our gerontocratic, plutocratic parliaments right now that are over representing the usual suspects. And so I think that's. Yeah, that's what I'm seeing as one of the flaw of our system. It's based on this idea that the best method to choose our democratic representatives is election. When in fact elections are systematically produced. What's hard not to describe as oligarchies. And yes, these are oligarchies that we consent to and there's some turnover, although not that much. People tend to make a career out of politics, which is another problem actually. And I think because they are people who have only known politics and in the US they tend to be lawyers and they don't necessarily have much more exposure to anything else, it creates a sort of corporate class of people that is too distant from the concerns of everyday people. So it's not that they're corrupt, corruption is yet another problem. But even in places where they are not corrupt. Take Norway. I remember giving a talk in Norway and I was like, what am I going to tell them? It's like the perfect country. They don't have any issues.
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They have $2 trillion in oil assets.
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Exactly. And they have high trust in our politicians. There's none of the polarization you have in the US or that. But even there they told me, no, no, no, we completely recognize the diagnostic. We are not as bad indeed as the US or other countries. But we do have a problem with huge economic inequalities growing with climate issues and environmental issues, social justice issues. And I think there too it's due to the sort of bias in who gets to make the decisions. There it's not so much wealth, it's more like education, which I think is less of a problem. But still, educated people will tend to have the same ways of looking at things, the same ways of living, and they will have blind spots. So to the extent I tend to see democracy as an information system, as the brain of a society, it's a system through which the body politic perceives the dangers in the world, the problem in the world, and try to solve them for itself. And I think it's as if we were kind of like short sighted because the people in the brain who sort of operate this function only see part of the picture. They're missing out on a bunch of dimensions of the issues. They don't fully understand the problems of definitely the working class or the peri Urban workers that we call the yellow vests, that call themselves yellow vests in France because they feel invisible and unheard in contemporary France. So that's what I see as one big internal problem. The other question you had about was about external threats, I guess. So that, that I think has to do with external shocks indeed, like new technologies, AI for example, and maybe even more generally the economic dimension of many of our problems. For example, let's say globalization. It's not completely an external shock, of course, because it was chosen by elected elites. In many cases they pushed it. They push that agenda of opening borders, liberalizing the economy, deregulating, outsourcing to developing countries, offshoring, et cetera, production capabilities. So it's not something, it's not something that happened to us as much as something we also contributed to causing. But it has an element of, you could say inevitability in some ways because there was a absent, a global government, absent sort of global. Agreements to take it slowly and protect our working class. I think there was an element of inevitability. I think a lot. Look at what happened to Mitterrand in 1981. I mean, markets started putting so much pressure on government. There's only so much you could do at the national level if you're a smallish economy, although France wasn't small. But definitely it's something that is in part an external shock. So that's a big problem. I think the lesson we should learn from the last 60 years is that, well, we should have fought harder at the national level to protect our working class, to outsource less to other countries, to consult more our own populations. But I think that was not possible unless you had a representative that actually looked like the people. So those voices could be heard. Right. If it's Only the top 10%. Of the population that get to decide, they will interpret the protest of the working class as a form of ignorance. Right? You don't understand. Globalization lifts all boats. We all benefit in the aggregate. Don't worry, we're going to compensate you when the time comes. Of course, the working class saw it coming. They would never be compensated and they should have been listened to more. I don't know what the solution would have been, but I think that the ignorance at the top came from a lack of proper representation, if you want, and that was caused by the fact that we were represented by elected people. I mean, the other problem right now is AI, I would say so the brutal, super fast development of this technology with sweeping effects that led to this massive concentration of power in Silicon Valley. And it will have probably as much of an impact as globalization did. But globalization was sort of diffused over decades. And I feel like AI is going to contract this kind of impact into a few years. I mean, I've already done that actually. And we're again, completely paralyzed. It's as if we haven't learned the lessons from prior changes. Is it something that's happening to us? Well, not only it's happening to us, it's true, it's to some degree, but it's also something that we shape, I mean, or that our governments shape. And right now they're shaping it in a direction that will benefit only a few corporate actors, a small section of society. And it's again, because I think that these people in Congress, in the American Congress, are too detached and in that case, I would even say too much bought by special interests and lobbyists. I think the common man has no voice in this process right now. And it's again, in the name of. It's not like, oh, globalization lifts all boats. It's like, well, AI will cure cancer and will solve climate change, so therefore it's okay that now we're like hijacking water resources and land and making electricity costlier for everyone. It's going to be good in the end. Yeah, we've heard that before. And it's a tiny group of people with a vision for all of us. But the voice of most of us is not factored in this process. And unfortunately, the speed at which this is happening makes me worry that it will soon be too late. Like when there's this level of concentration of power, how do you walk it back? How do you return power to the masses? I think it's going to be harder and harder.
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B
Yeah. In the past, when we've seen rapid change and upheaval, we often will see the rise of pretty radical political ideas. You know, in the past and still today on some certain levels, you know, we've seen the rise of fascism, the rise of communism. There are people today where, maybe not necessarily under those more extreme banners, but they'll advocate for some form of what they might refer to as direct democracy, which is they see the problem that you're pointing out, which is basically that too few people have a say, have access to political power. What if we gave everyone a voice? What if we got rid of these systems of intermediation and let the people directly decide how their political future is shaped? Obviously how this actually occurs, what a direct democracy actually looks like. There's a Lot a lot of debate. But in the general sense, you know, what do you think about people that hear what you're saying and then say, okay, well, we should have some form of direct, direct democracy. What do you think about that proposition?
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Well, so. So in the book I talk about Rousseau's mistake as being precisely this illusion that direct democracy, at least, you know, left as unspecified as you just described, would be. The answer is this kind of naive idea that you can rule through pure aggregation of views, through referenda, through mass voting, et cetera. I mean, don't get me wrong, I really believe that referenda and direct democracy mechanisms are essential. I think they are essential for many ways. They're the form of expression of, you know, popular power, their accountability mechanisms, et cetera. Even under the best case scenario of an open democracy, I think you'd need those kind of accountability mechanisms. But at the end of the day, you cannot just aggregate views. Those views need to be, in my perspective, passed through the filter of collective deliberation. And we don't know how to conduct deliberation that is inclusive of all at a mass scale right now. So we need to kind of like delegate that task to a subset of representatives. Right. So you do have a need for a form of representation, which kinds of rules that direct democracy as the solution, as the end all, be all of politics. So what does that mean? It means to me that it's not so much direct democracy that is a solution, it's a different form of representative democracy. I guess that's the point that I make in the book. That's the main point really. We need to think representation beyond elections. We need to envision a type of democracy where the place there's the center of power, which for me is the legislative power, is in the hands of ordinary people who represent others and not an elected elite, which is too skewed in its makeup and its way of looking at the world to do that. Well, so I guess that's the answer. And I'm really struck by the naivety of this direct democracy movements because I was reading my colleague Lucia Rubinelli here at Yale, who was now researching.
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The.
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Second Republic in France in the 19th century. So 48, 1848, 1852. And you see how this can go wrong. Indeed, they had universal franchise for a brief two years or something like that, people including workers sent to power, relatively conservative representatives. And. And the first thing those representatives did is curb universal franchise and return property requirements. And next thing you know, what did they do the second time around? They voted for Bonaparte, an emperor. So you can very quickly end democracy with the use of direct democracy mechanisms that are not inserted in a more complex vision of democracy that for me needs to be deliberative, open, structured and representative in a different way than electoral democracy. So basically, I'm trying to give a complex answer to what is otherwise too simplistic of a question. Yes, we want to reintroduce popular power, we want to reintroduce empowerment of ordinary citizens, but it cannot take the form of just, oh, let's decide everything through referenda and mass voting. Because in the end, it's another point I try to make in the book. A lot of the power has to do with who sets the agenda. And as we saw under the second republic in France, when the agenda is set by elites, you can end up with variant democratic outcomes.
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B
Right? Obviously some of the problems of democracy, though this is a little different, are like tyranny of the majority, where we might think of, you know, a mass of people that have a particular viewpoint. You know, especially in a place where there might be an ethnic division, where the majority group ends up passing laws that end up, you know, attacking a minority group. Obviously there's plenty of examples of this, of, you know, of, you know, democratic, quasi democratic systems being used to oppress people. Then there's also, you know, with the more populist variety where the people vote in someone that sells them a good story, and then this person goes and essentially ends up passing policies or doing things to just center their own power or to remove power from, from the people. You go through some, some other ideas around democracy. You know, as you mentioned, you know, representation beyond elections, you know, other types like lottocratic methods that you were looking at before, where you, you know, kind of a random group of people are selected or people have var to let their voice be heard. Obviously, you know, freedom of speech. People can write op EDS all day long about what, what makes them unhappy, about how, how things are working to try and persuade people. The title of your book is, is Open Democracy. And I'm wondering if you could share what this idea is for open democracy, what its key principles are that you think are, are important and that should be emphasized when thinking about how to improve our democratic institutions.
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So the idea of openness really comes from the sort of visual image I had of ancient Athens, classical Athens, with its open assemblies, the demos pouring into the agora or later the pnyx up to capacity and then making decisions about the common good about, say, the Viking parliament in Iceland also An open space that anybody can join in the summer. And they were making the law, they were deciding criminal cases, et cetera. The sense of openness, really. And also the Icelandic case much later, where they try to break open this constitutional process that's elsewhere is always very, very exclusionary and closed up. So how do we make democracy today be open like that? So that's the image, right? In theory, I would like anyone to be able to access the center of power, anyone to be able to make a proposal to amend the law. So the idea of openness connects to the idea of open source, where code is made by anyone, remade by anyone. You can adjust this to our needs. Of course, there are procedures and protocols and accountability mechanisms and safety mechanism, but basically it's open. And I was trying to think of a way to make a democracy like that, without all the risks that you describe, which is tyranny of the majority captured by powerful orators or demagogues. And so it's a structured conception of openness. And in fact, when it comes to randomly selected bodies, those are not open to all at time t, because of course you need to be selected by lot on the basis of one person, one lottery ticket. But they're open kind of over time, right? Over time, if you rotate the pool of decision makers, everybody can go through it, given the law of large numbers. So that's the idea of openness really, that I was trying to contrast with this historical vision of very closed up, opaque democracies. Right.
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B
And in these sorts of, these sort of open democratic systems, you know, you, you look at some historical examples. I'm wondering when you look at contemporary systems today, you, you, you show some examples, you've already shared a little bit of examples, but are there any other examples that you see of this, this sort of approach, this, this system being quite effective?
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A
Well, in my own native country of France, we experimented with a form of openness, at least since the Yellow Vest movement. Precisely. Which was an attempt to break this fortress open.
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B
Right.
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A
They felt like they were not heard, they were not seen, their voice carried no weight, so they started to revolt. And that scared power. So power tried to first, you know, repress, then when that failed, try to listen. And we had a, the so called great national debate that I talk about in the book, whereby President Macron, you know, invited all the citizens of France and the overseas territories as well to join a global conversation about taxes, about democracy, about the environment, about state organization. And that took many, many forms. It took the form of local assemblies, it took the form of regional randomly selected assemblies. It took the form of an online platform that wasn't very deliberative, but served as a sort of, you know, place to vent about the system. And ultimately it concluded with what is to me to this day the most promising experiment, which was the Citizens Convention on climate that gathered 150 randomly selected French people from all over France for about nine months. And to my mind, it's the first time that, you know, in France at least, we gave ordinary citizens a quasi legislative power because they were asked by the Prime Minister to co create legislation. On ways to curb CO2 emissions in a spirit of social justice with the government. So that was pretty open if you want, as a method. Now the impact has been very diluted. We had a climate and resilience bill passed in 2021 that did mention the Citizens Convention as an influence and had some picked up some of their ideas. But you know, critics have been very, very vocal in saying that this was just a tactic to distract from the problems of the French Republic and that it didn't have much of an impact and it's the sort of participation washing, et cetera. I'm actually much more optim. I think this was truly innovative and interesting and needs to be replicated. And in fact, I'm so convinced of that that I'm trying to import this model in Connecticut right now, where me and my team here at Yale in the Citizens assembly program at ASPs and the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities were trying to bring about a Citizens assembly inspired by the French Convention on Climate, but the topic would be property tax reform. So I do believe it's a very inspiring precedent and that we should do more with it. There are other countries which I think are doing great to this day. Switzerland remains, in my view, a model of open democracy. They have this assemblies at the quantum level where they can decide, a bit like the in ancient Greece actually, about local issues at the federal level, the assembled people as final say, final sovereignty, right, they can change the constitution through referenda. It's pretty amazing. There's no Supreme Court, there's no higher authority than the assembled people. So going back to this direct democracy discussion we just had, they actually managed to implement a lot of direct democracy mechanisms, including of course, referenda and citizen initiatives. But they still have a fundamentally representative structure as well, especially at the federal level. So that seems to me a good articulation. What's missing still, in my view in the Swiss model is the more deliberative component. So the Citizens assembly model, which is a puzzle because they had random selection until about the middle of the 19th century, and then they dropped it because they were in awe of what was going on in France, apparently, and wanted to copy this sort of modern electoral democracies. And they dropped the use of sortition, which is a pity. So I think it's changing now. I hear they're doing very interesting experiments involving citizens assemblies in Geneva and. And elsewhere. So who knows? That's another country I would keep an eye on. Finally, you have a place like Taiwan, which I don't know as much, but I've read a lot about where people like Audrey Tang, the former Minister of Digital affairs, has managed to completely mainstream the use of crowdsourcing techniques so that the government is constantly checking in with the people online through tools like Police, for example, and figuring out areas of consensus among people at the large scale. So, you know, hundreds, even millions of people apparently join on these platforms and express their opinions about, you know, the place of Uber in the economy. When they first moved there, created a lot of tensions with local taxis, same thing with Airbnb and hotels. So. And they worked out some kind of consensus on the basis of these online tools, which were not that deliberative, interestingly, but still managed to emerge and diagnose, sort of identify consensus areas. So that's another way to open up the government to the larger public and try to make people feel heard and taken into account, and not just make them feel heard and taken into account, actually take them into account and actually hearing them.
- [43:18]
B
So I want to give a little bit of like the. An argument that someone might make that might even be, you know, not only just a criticism of democracy in general, but also the type of argument that someone who's advocating for, you know, a mixed system, one that empowers, you know, judges or empowers a select few to make decisions on behalf of the people and also insulates them in the event that the people decide that they don't want those people making decisions anymore. They, you know, the, the biggest argument they might make is that ordinary citizens just aren't competent enough. They don't know enough about economics or policy or various issues to actually have a informed opinion and to kind of bring in Harry's work a little bit. You know, they might even argue that, that ordinary citizens are especially susceptible to, that they won't be able to parse whether or not what someone's saying is truth or lies or just made completely whole cloth in order to get. To gain power by, by manipulating citizens. You know, many of the places where people today are able to deliberate, engage are platforms that are owned by extremely wealthy people who are able to control what is seen, what types of voices get amplified, what ideas get amplified. And, you know, I think we've seen pretty persuasively that people can see things that are complete falsehoods or completely made up and be convinced that they're real. This, this issue is only growing with AI because you can really make. I'm constantly getting tricked now by. I never thought I would be the type of person that would see an AI video and get tricked by it, but I feel like it's happening on a weekly basis to me at this point. Now, I wonder how you might think about this kind of claim that basically just, you know, regular people, ordinary people, they, you know, they don't know what interest rates should be. They don't know what our policy on the environment should be. They don't know that, that, you know, nuclear energy is actually really good, or that fracking is necessary, or that all these other things that an ordinary citizen might, might, might want to restrict or might want to embrace. They don't know that the, that the, the technocratic elites actually know better than them. So what do you sort of say to this general argument which is one that is employed by both people that claim to be Democrats and also people that are against democracy?
- [45:40]
A
Yes. No, it's really a litmus test for whether you're a true Democrat or not. Actually, I really think that. I really think that. My experience has been that people who call themselves Democrat but then come back to you with an argument like, well, actually, Americans are, you know, cowboys and they don't know enough and they're too uneducated. I just don't know that you can claim to be a Democrat if you actually fundamentally believe that. Okay, but let's assume that you do believe that. I would say that human beings are fundamentally social, cultural, political creatures. They're kind of made by the systems as much as they make the systems that rule them. So I think that to the extent that people don't know enough, it's endogenous to the system. Electoral democracies are precisely built to minimize the cognitive burden on voters. So why would you want them to do more than just check the list of people on the roster and then vote for them? We're outsourcing all the decisions to a political elite anyway to a special group of professional politicians. So it would be absurd, it would be irrational, in fact, for ordinary Americans to know more in this system. The question is, could they know more under a different system. And I think we have evidence that when you give them the time, the space, the conditions, the incentives to learn more, because it's also about learning. We don't need them to know all that stuff from the get go, right? They do, they learn. So you wouldn't believe the stuff I've observed in the Citizens Convention on Climate in France. At the beginning, people came in, they knew nothing, less than nothing. I remember this question which really worried me at the beginning by a woman was asking, why were there plastic bottles attached to windmills and what role did they play in creating electricity? And of course they were there just to scare the birds away. I was like, oh my God, right? But by the end, the same people were having extremely sophisticated conversations about the water pressure in like, I don't know, or the water temperature in washing machines and fiscal incentives and housing insulation systems. So over the course of several months, several weekends, listening to experts, questioning them, questioning their frameworks, but also learning from them, they became very competent. Also, let's not romanticize the competence of elected representatives, which are actually the competition in this comparison, right? They specialized in some issues, but they don't have the full picture either. They spend way too much time raising money, which is not exactly a skill that is that crucial to doing good governance. And they outsource many, many of the technical details and even the formulation of the law. Two specialists, we assume that they keep the control of the writing of the law and that they can still claim to be the author of the law. But sometimes you wonder, do they still have time to spend time with the detail and check. I saw the way the ordinary citizens in the Climate Convention engaged in it back and forth with the experts and kept them, as I always say, on tap, not on top, made them reformulate things when they didn't match their intentions, et cetera. So I think we have local sort of small scale evidence that citizens can do that at the macro scale, you could say historically, we know that the education of the masses, for example, the education of black citizens in the US followed democratization and political empowerment and access to rights, especially voting rights. It didn't precede it. So for me, the argument that, well, let's wait until people catch up, or we give them rights when they know more, when they are able to take tests and score sufficiently high. It's a classic elitist move that in fact never leads to any form of democratization. It's just a way to keep the masses at bay. So I just don't believe that there's sort of an intrinsic inferiority of the ordinary citizen and some intrinsic superiority of natural talents and aristocrats over the rest of us. Finally, I would just go back to this, to what to me is the radical intuition the Greeks had and that we seem to have lost, which is that there is a distinction between technical matters and moral political matters, right? So that's why in the Protagoras there's this discussion between Socrates and the sophist, and Socrates points out to the sophists, what are you teaching? There's nothing to teach in politics. Because the fact is that when it comes to affairs of the common good, we let everybody speak up in the assembly. Whereas when it's about shipbuilding or war or monetary policy, I guess was the equivalent at the time, we ask the experts and we boo into silence citizens who speak up and in fact have no expertise. But when it comes to the common good, should we go to war, not some sort of military strategy necessarily, or should we invade Sicily, should we build a temple, should we pay people to attend the assembly? These are all matters of the common good. It's about fairness, it's about justice, it's about risking our lives, preserving our polity, et cetera. Those questions can in theory be answered by anyone. And that's why we let even the poorest of the poor speak up in our democracy. And unfortunately I sense that that intuition's been lost, or perhaps it's never really existed in modern so called democracies, because the contempt I see for poor people, for ordinary citizens, for uneducated citizens, is really palpable. I've seen it come from politicians, I've seen it come from citizens themselves because of course some of them have internalized that. That's sort of a self hate and contempt. And I think it's the first barrier to reform and progress that we have this mindset that is profoundly elitist. Even when we call ourselves democrat, in fact we don't trust our fellow citizens. There's always this fear like, well, I can do it. I have some views that are most likely correct, but most other people don't. And so I, I'd rather have this billionaire make decisions for me, because obviously you know something I don't, or other people don't. And I don't know how you change that. I think through practice, that's one thing to show people they can do it. And that's why I'm very fond of all these experiments that consist in bringing ordinary people to the citizens assembly and to the table and see for themselves, actually. You can do it. You know, it's a form of a very practical empowerment and it's transformative. I've seen seeing people come in who were shy, who were sort of, you know, speaking softly and trying to disappear. Especially because when we brought them to the Citizens assembly in France, it's in this grand palace of the Jena palace in the center of Paris and they come from the project or they come from a rural area and they're not used to this kind of environment. But by the end of the process, at the end of the nine months, they come in and they speak loudly and proudly and they have things to say and they want to go and be engaged in even electoral politics going forward. They realize, you know what, it's not that hard and I'm capable, I can do this.
- [53:43]
B
Right? Yeah, it's, I think that, that this emphasis also on deliberation is really important and key because obviously in a representative system where the main ways that people really have to express themselves in a democracy is through voting. I don't really know how often people are, are talking about, they might be talking about bigger issues, you know, who you're going to vote for for president, but then when it comes down to the more fine grained issues, we're not actually getting that opportunity to talk with different types of people about how they're thinking through those issues. We oftentimes are having conversations just in our narrow bubble of people that might already have the same biases that we have, or not necessarily, you know, that the other knowledge bases that other people might be bringing to the table. I also, you know, think too, you know, so much of people that I feel like have done a lot of thinking and theorizing about democracy, like, you know, like John Dewey or Richard Rorty or others, they talk so much about this idea that part of having a democracy is, is lifting citizens up to the ability, you know, to the level to be able to engage. Like I think we know on some level that democracy, what democracy actually entails, it's actually really hard. It's, you know, we don't pick democracy because it's the easiest system. There are much easier systems out there where you don't have to take into account all these diverse opinions and you don't have to deal with, with the chaos that sometimes is bred by democracy. So I'm curious for you, when you are teaching or working with students and introducing a lot of these ideas about various political systems to students, is there an idea that you find is really important that you Try and communicate to them about how they should think about democracy and their role as just a student who's learning these things for the first time, how they can think about engaging in it, engaging their fellow citizens, engaging their politicians. Is there any advice that you have?
- [55:40]
A
Well, I try to make them experiment in themselves, what it means, like, to take seriously other people. Because especially in an Ivy League institution like Yale, so much of it is based on this elitist, Platonic model of, like, oh, we're educating the best and the brightest, and we're grading them on an individual basis, very generously most of the time, but sometimes on a curve, with a sense that, okay, we are competing with each other. We need to display our intelligence as individuals, as opposed to collaborate and sort of putting our competences and even our limited understanding of the situation in the service of this collective intelligence that the group can sometimes let emerge. And so I'm trying to show them through practice that this can be real. So I give them collective assignments that are graded as an average of the quality of the product and also the PR evaluations, kicking out the outliers just to not incentivize bad behavior. And I think it makes them realize, wow, I thought I was the smartest in the room, but actually what came out of our exchanges is better than what I had myself thought about or could have produced on my own. And that's humbling. And it's very humbling for people who've been told their whole life they're so smart. And I'll tell you, this is how I love myself. I also was kind of told, I'm so smart, but I've been in a situation many times where actually, you know what? I found that the group's decision was much better than my own sort of vision for the group. So it's just. That is really something that is hard to understand unless you go through it yourself, especially when you're a top student or someone who's been told that you're going to be in charge of the nation someday, which a lot of these Yalis have been told. So recognizing what others can contribute, even when they are not necessarily visibly super competent on a topic, but just their way of thinking might be different. Build a bridge to a better idea, sort of nudge you off a wrong path. That's very. That's one way. And then also I like to encourage them, but also more generally, anyone really, to think about the way you implement those ideas, like in your private life, in the way you treat your children, your spouse, your employees, my Brother told me one time something that I found interesting. He was becoming a boss. He had his own pharmacy at some point and he said, you know, I knew it was time to quit when I started behaving this weird way where I was encountering my employees in the corridor and the corridor was not large enough for both of us to pass and I pushed my way through. I assumed I was the one who had priority because I was the boss. So, you know, this kind of like imposition of hierarchy that become ingrained in your identity, it's really hard, but, but you have to resist that. I think democracy is about decentralizing. Power is about dispersing. Power is about rotating power. And a lot of us have a power that accumulates and you need to be very careful about what that does to you, whether you get your power from charisma, from pedigree, from hierarchical position. I think the democratic ethos is that you should ask yourself, okay, maybe I deserve this position, but that doesn't necessarily give me the right to push my way, you know, in a corridor or assault my views and stop listening to people or, you know, this sort of thing.
- [59:34]
B
Absolutely. And I think, I think that makes, that makes so much sense given how, you know, the united, the US system works where it does seem that there is this kind of elite funnel where the people, even if we don't know, it's not as pre selected as it might be in, you know, under other regimes where it's literally by birth. It's not that different.
- [60:00]
A
It's not that different. Absolutely.
- [60:02]
B
Yeah, yeah. The power masses over time to those that are educated, to those that are already wealthy, you know, there's like the Matthew effect where those that are wealthy get wealthier. And you know, we see that, we see this with, you know, so long as the rate of growth of the stock market outpaces wage growth, people will, the wealthier, will get wealthier and be able to impose their views. And they might have great views, but they might not be the best views. So you know, definitely factoring in other people's views, letting other people speak. I think it also does allow, allow people to, to rise to the occasion. And you know, even in the most centralized top down systems possible, you know, there still are issues that are facing local environments and you want people in the local environments to be able to, to, you know, to be able to, to set their, their own future, their own path because you know, they're going to know what might be better for their small town better than some extremely well educated bureaucrat. Located 2,000 miles away. I think that this book, you know, in addition to your other books, you know, you're really charting really interesting ways for people to think about democracy. I feel like what's useful about this is that while. While you are writing in the domain of political theory, I feel like you're dealing with it in an extremely practical way where someone could actually read this book. And this is not often the case with political theory. Someone could actually read this book and it could change the way that they think about or interact with their own political system. So, you know, I really encourage people to read Open Democracy, and I would also love if you could just share a little bit about your forthcoming book that's coming out, I believe, at the beginning of next year, which I think will be a really fantastic new addition to. To your bibliography.
- [61:47]
A
Thank you so much. You're very kind. So this new book, Politics without the Case for Citizen Rule, it's my attempt to address a wider audience than the political series that I wrote my previous books for. So that was kind of freeing in a way. I didn't have to have so many footnotes and go into so many arcane debates about the meaning of representation or legitimacy. All of that. That kind of weighed down the open. I mean, weigh down open democracy. I think it's still interesting, but it can be heavy at times. And it's also a book where actually it took me a while to get there, but I wanted to say more about the emotional and transformative aspect of this new kind of politics, which is something that I wasn't really prepared to talk about before, because I came to these questions from a very cerebral, I would say, or epistemic angle. I was looking at democracy as a way to produce good decisions and how we can reform it or deepen it so that it's more inclusive of more voices, et cetera. But what I observed in practice on the ground, in these citizens assemblies and even in Iceland, in retrospect, though I wasn't paying attention to that as much at the time, is that it's also deeply emotional. It's an emotional process. People get transformed in visceral ways. And I just talked about how they felt empowered by the end, but they also feel loved. That's the main sort of insight. They discover that there is something like solidarity, friendship, civic friendship, and a form of love that is possible in politics. And that, to me, is such an alien proposition, actually, it took me a while to actually realize that's what. That's what was happening. So I talk about that in the book. In fact, the best compliment I got for this book was someone told me, Philippe actually said, a political theorist from Colombia said, you're giving voice to ordinary citizens. You're bringing the voice of ordinary citizens into political theory. So for me, I don't think you can top that kind of compliment. I indeed would like to do that because we keep, keep speaking for them. And in this book I try to sort of, I quote them, I try to document the change and the experience from their point of view. More I am not doing. It's not completely thorough and exhaustive. Someday I hope one of them can actually write the book that speaks for more people. But at least there I'm trying to attend to this emotional dimension, the perspective of those I call the shy in the book, which is a shorthand for all the people that are not properly represented under electoral systems, and also document this emotional transformation.
- [64:42]
B
Really look forward to having you on the New Books Network to discuss that book in the future once it comes out. I think it will be really interesting to listeners who have enjoyed this conversation and definitely will expand on many of the ideas that we've talked about today in open democracy. Just kind of getting a sense lay of the land of, you know, how our different democratic systems that exist today function, how they could be improved. You know, I certainly think that democracy isn't worth giving up on yet. You know, if sometimes I think people, you know, when they see the democratic backsliding, there can be an impulse by some to. Obviously many people are terrified of it. But also I think that some people are feeling like, well, it's, it's an inevitability. Democracy is on its way out. It's going to be. Be replaced by something else. But, you know, certainly I think the way that you outline it, the way that you approach the question of democracy, I find it extremely compelling and, you know, really, really worthy of engagement from, from, from people, not just scholars, but also just citizens in general that are interested in the, in our common faith. So, you know, Ilana, it was so wonderful to get the chance to speak with you on the Truth About Bullshit special series from Princeton University Press. So thank you so much for being a guest.
- [66:01]
A
Thank you, Caleb. And I'll happily be back.