Response to Joseph Bronski

The voting masses aren't rational, and that matters

Someone called Joseph Bronski wrote a Substack essay critiquing my video about the problems of mass democracy. In this video I discussed a book called Democracy For Realists, which argues that Democracy does not produce responsive governments, and that all of the intellectual defences of Democracy fail when put up against what we know about voter behaviour.

I don’t know much about Bronski, other than that he seems to really dislike what he calls idealists. He is going to spend much of this essay attacking me for being an idealist, though he never explains what that means. On my channel, I have made videos defending metaphysical idealism, but Brosnki seems to think I am also committed to a naive political idealism where I believe ideas are the only thing that drives history, with things like genetics and money power having no real relevance to understanding politics. I do not hold this position, and it certainly does not follow from a commitment to metaphysical idealism, so most of these criticisms are kind of moot. It also seems like he did not actually watch the video he is critiquing.

Against my supposed naive idealism, Bronski presents himself as a cold realist understanding politics through the lens of empiricism. Bronski believes that voters behave as selfish utility maximizers rewarding politicians who will improve their material well-being the most.

I suspect that voters can be modeled as predominantly selfish utility maximizers. This is different from the Enlightenment view of democracy where every man is a king who philosophizes about the destiny of the nation and the general welfare of the people. I predict that voters will vote for wealth redistribution and will give assent to leaders who do the rest of the thinking for them, as long as the economy remains good.

This is a version of the “retrospective accountability” theory that I discussed in the video in question.

Bronski then begins his debunking of my video by picking apart individual slides; though he doesn’t seem to have listened to the accompanying commentary, which the slides were intended as an aid to:

Idealists are confused and find that the masses aren’t Hegel reading philosophers who care about abstractions like “left and right.” This is consistent with selfish utility maximization, but idealists are naive and think that this means that voters are too schizophrenic to maximize their wealth. They HAVE to care about post-Freudo Marxist class struggle and its implications for the deductions of post-modern philosophy or else they are too dumb to not vote for a 300% tax increase that give them no public good!

I don’t know about you, but when I read that paragraph I definitely feel like I am about to get a very fair, good faith treatment here. And as everyone who follows me knows, I’m eternally frustrated that the masses aren’t more into Freudo-Marxism.

They give the masses obscure geography tests and think because they don’t know every city in Afghanistan, that the masses won’t notice when gas prices are up 200%.

This is a non sequitur, and of the statistics highlighted in my slide which Bronski is referring to only one had any geographical component. It actually is very relevant for a critique of mass democracy if the majority of voters can’t name the branches of government or who the prime minister is, because that means they can’t make informed decisions about their voting.

They think that because signaling campaigns lead the masses to change their signals, that this means they can be fooled into accepting wealth decay. But people can’t be “psy-opped” into acting on costly beliefs.

Once again, the question is the success of mass democracy at reflecting the people’s desires in government. If people can be swayed into voting for parties or politicians who will make them less well off, then they can indeed be “psy-opped” into acting on costly beliefs. Bronski’s theory about voters treating politics as a means of maximising utility assumes they have some knowledge about how competing parties or policies would effect their wealth, but the point is that the assumption of even the most basic knowledge regarding the relationship between political policies and economic outcomes is wrong.

Idealists think that adopting a leader’s signals means adopting their “policy views”.

It’s not clear exactly how Bronski is separating “signals” from “policy views”, but if voters adopt all the signals of their preferred candidate/party and start signalling to support their individual policy views, what’s the difference?

In fact, idealists are so wrong-headed, that they’re attacking a strawman. They literally think we have elections BECAUSE of a “folk theory of democracy.” This is wrong. We have a “folk theory of democracy” because we have elections.

After multiple paragraphs ascribing a bunch of positions to “idealists” which actually have nothing to do with idealism, political or metaphysical, Bronski is now accusing them of strawmanning. In the video and the book I was discussing, the folk theory of democracy was presented as the kind of naive view of democracy liberals would defend; namely that democracy allows for the desired policies of the masses to be effectively expressed through the ballot box. At no point in the video did I claim we have elections because everyone is a naive believer in the wonders of democracy, far from it. In fact, I basically agree with the statement “We have a “folk theory of democracy” because we have elections.”

Why do we have elections? I haven’t seen good work on this but we can be guided by asking a simple question: what happens if the elections are canceled? What happens if suffrage contracts? Costly violence, probably. So maybe violence or the threat of violence made it expand. Professing the folk theory of democracy just means you go with the flow, you read the room, you respect the material balance of power. It’s not a real belief. In this way, idealists are kind of autistic, they take everything literally and don’t realize everyone is just reading the room.

Once again, it’s a shame Bronski didn’t actually watch the video, because I said something similar in my conclusion. Namely, that the only real defence of mass democracy is a means of preventing political violence. As for “not reading the room” and realising no one actually believes in democracy, I acknowledged early in the video that very few political theorists would seriously defend the simple version of the folk theory of democracy, but many of their more nuanced intellectual defences of democracy still hold onto it in some sense. Whether Brosnki believes it or not, there are true believers who attempt a serious defence of democracy as a responsive means of government. They are not just “reading the room”.

This slide indicates that idealists have a verbal tilt. It says that parties were punished for the 2008 recession but then acts all shocked when it’s discovered that voters don’t care about micro-fluctuations. Maybe voters have a threshold? You’re telling me they don’t notice when they’re a cent poorer but they do notice when they lose thousands? Wow!

This time he’s not even responding to the what’s in the slide. The point about the weakness of the theory of retrospective accountability (which is the same kind of theory Bronski is defending) isn’t that the masses aren’t perfectly responsive to minor economic fluctuations, but that their response to the macro fluctuations don’t make any sense even as a punish/reward mechanism. I cited ample examples in the video, like how ruling parties were equally punished by the European electorate after the 2008 financial crash, regardless of whether they were left or right, and regardless of their performance relative to other OECD countries. The masses might respond to economic hardship in their voting patterns, but it isn’t in a way that expresses any desire other than voting for whoever the other guys are, even if they might have handled things much worse.

Oh my Fauci, people will vote for public goods that apply to them?!?! You’re telling me black people will vote for wealth redistribution to black people when it’s offered?!?!? Wow I guess voters are just RNGs.

Another non sequitur. Bronski apparently thinks me talking about the phenomenon of people voting on the basis of their tribal affinities means I think they might as well be random number generators. I don’t think anyone watching the video suffered this confusion, but no, I don’t think voting motivated by group interests is completely irrational or random.

I now want to highlight how the incoherent idealist position totally impedes the ability to dissect society and understand what is happening. I have already covered the contents of this slide above — the US has been undergoing increasing mutational load for about a century and it’s further along than many European countries, probably due to greater wealth. Idealists have no theoretical apparatus or mathematical theory, and so they think somehow this contradicts voter behavior theory.

These idealists sound terrible, denying all explanations for anything except Hegelian Freudo-Marxism, or something. I have no idea why Bronski thinks me being a metaphysical idealist would mean I have to ignore the effect of something like mutational loads; in fact, I discussed that issue in my stream just prior to the video in question.

Bronski’s assumption that I believe people being motivated by culture war issues somehow contradicts voter behaviour theory is also wrong. In the video, I called on a study which showed the relationship between the stability of political affiliation and culture war stances as a relevant counter-point to the “follow the leader” theory of voter behaviour, instead showing that on certain social issues, voters are much more willing to choose policy over party. Not only that, but I argued that people’s stance on these culture war issues and how deeply they care for them are largely determined by primitive predispositions like their level of disgust sensitivity and sense of purity. Not very idealist of me!

In sum, this whole critique is premised on Bronski constructing a strawman of “idealists” who reduce history solely to the interplay of ideas. Maybe this is a fair characterisation of some liberal approaches to understanding politics, but I have never encountered one of these people as described by Bronski, and it certainly does not describe my own approach. Very few of these criticisms apply to what I argued in the video, and he never provides a very convincing defence of his view of voters as utility maximisers which is meant to explain voter behaviour.

Ironically, the video and book he is critiquing are themselves intended as a kind of critique of the naive “idealist” perspective on politics, arguing instead that the voting masses are too ill-informed to ever have the kind of rational, ideas-focused approach to voting that liberals dream of. Instead, tribal affiliation - ethnic or political - and pre-rational moral feelings are far more important to understanding the behaviour of the public in mass democracies. I advise Bronski to give it a second look.