Against Democracy is a provocative book. At the heart of Jason Brennan’s case against democracy are three claims. The first is an empirical claim as old as democracy itself: citizens lack the requisite competence to rule. The second is a philosophical argument that regime types can be coherently defended or criticized on instrumental grounds alone (whether they produce or fail to produce good, or at least competent, outcomes). All attempts at procedural defenses, for example, that democratic procedures are fair, instantiate equality, or recognize each person’s dignity and autonomy, fail according to Brennan. The third part of his case against democracy is a libertarian rights claim that denies an equal right to vote (yes, that’s right, he thinks we can dispense with universal suffrage) but defends a right of each individual not to be ruled by incompetent and unreasonable people. In democracies, then, incompetent citizens produce incompetent government that violates a right not to be ruled by incompetent decision-makers. Brennan suggests that we think seriously about “epistocracy,” the rule of the competent minority, as an alternative to democracy. As the title suggests, Brennan is primarily interested in the case against democracy rather than offering details about what a full blown epistocracy might look like, or how we could possibly get there from here, particularly as the U.S. Constitution would seem to stand squarely in the way. But Brennan is an analytic philosopher so he is very focused on the argument and less on the practicality or feasibility of an epistocracy.

Let me begin then with the empirical claim which is the linchpin of his case against democracy. Brennan outlines three types of citizens: “hobbits,” “hooligans,” and “vulcans.” Hobbits are “apathetic and ignorant about politics” (p. 4). Hooligans are partisan political actors who consume information but only to further the cause of their political team. Vulcans are rational, impartial creatures of good will. There are, it turns out, very few vulcans. Chapter 2, entitled “Ignorant, Irrational, Misinformed Nationalist,” rehearses the usual depressing data, familiar to all political scientists, about how little Americans know about politics, how humans generally are susceptible to numerous cognitive biases, and finally how powerful group identities are in influencing our preferences. This is hugely important data that clearly poses serious challenges both to our theories of democracy and to contemporary democratic practice.

Brennan, however, squanders the opportunity to take serious stock of this research. Just as we no longer debate the heliocentric view of planetary movement, he maintains that the case is closed and the verdict is in on citizen competency. But this is inaccurate. Political science continues to conduct a lively and sometimes heated debate about what to conclude from this research, especially the research on the relation between identity and opinion. But even more misleading is Brennan’s assertion that hard empirical science has proven his case about hooligans and vulcans. “The overwhelming consensus in political psychology, based on a huge and diverse range of studies, is that most citizens process political information in deeply biased, partisan, motivated ways rather than dispassionate, rational ways. Most people are much more like hooligans than vulcans” (p. 37). More modestly, I would say that there is a consensus in political psychology that humans are not vulcans. Vulcans only exist on the screen and as straw-beings constructed by the Brennans of this world to show that they don’t exist. Citizens are not dispassionate rational actors (and most democratic theory makes no such assumption), but are they hooligans? Does the science show this? Here are some of the ways Brennan describes hooligans: they “are the rabid sports fans of politics . . . they tend to despise people who disagree with them, holding that people with alternative worldviews are stupid, evil, selfish, or at best, deeply misguided. Most regular voters, active politics participants, activists, registered party members, and politicians are hooligans” (p. 5). Is Brennan suggesting that this is an accurate description of, let’s just take the first category, “most regular voters” in all modern democracies over time and place? Science does not show this is true even in the contemporary USA, where much of this data comes from. There is a lot of evidence that humans are in-group/out-group thinkers and that group identity is used as a shortcut in preference articulation. This often makes very good sense. There is nothing rabid or irrational about looking at politics from the point of view of, say, the shared fate of African Americans, Texans, or Muslim-Americans and taking one’s voting cues from these memberships. This general and observable feature of our cognitive make up only results in the pathological preference formation of the hooligan under certain conditions. Brennan admits as much when he cites data that shows how much more hooligan-like Americans are now as opposed to the 1960s when we were OK with our children marrying into the other party (p. 234). The evidence indicates that hooliganism is a variable rather than a constant. The best Brennan can show is that in some places today (like the USA) hooliganism is on the rise (and this I admit is bad for democracy). But this is a reason to address the problem of hooliganism, not to abandon democracy. The really interesting question is what brings out the hooligan in us and on this question there is no scientific consensus, although it would appear that polarization contributes in some way to the hooliganization of identity politics and not the other way around.

Once Brennan has established that most citizens are unfit to rule and that there is at least some evidence that an epistemic elite might do a better job from a purely instrumental/outcome-based perspective, he tackles what he refers to as procedural views of democracy. These are views (and most people who value democracy adhere to some version of this) that value democracy for something more than the outcomes it produces. The most common versions of these sorts of arguments appeal to ideas of fairness, equality, autonomy, respect, and dignity. So in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 he takes these proceduralists to task. First he takes on deliberative democracy claims that deliberative participation makes people better citizens. He points to empirical data reputedly showing that deliberation not only does not make people better, more informed citizens, it actually makes them worse. This is the worst chapter in the book. It shows that Brennan really does not know what he is talking about. He grossly misrepresents theories of deliberative democracy and what they claim, he confuses Habermas’s moral theory for his political theory, he cherry-picks studies that have been challenged or discredited, and he fails to engage any of the extensive empirical literature that makes exactly the opposite case (by such scholars as Laura W. Black et al; James N. Druckman and Kjerston R. Nelson; James Fishkin; Kimmo Grönlund, André Bächtiger, and Maija Setäla; Christopher Karpowitz and Chad Raphael; and Michael Neblo).

Chapter 4 assesses the claim that we should value democratic participation because it empowers individuals in important ways. The bottom line of Brennan’s rejection of any claim to empowerment is that, as a matter of mathematics, the power of one vote is infinitesimal. So no real measurable empowerment for the individual is going on in voting even though of course the aggregative effect of incompetent voting can have a large impact. Chapter 5 looks at claims of equality. Some people are said to value democracy because “one person-one vote” expresses our modern day endorsement of equal respect and dignity. Brennan thinks these types of arguments are semiotic in that they see institutions as expressing meaning. As the title of this chapter—“Politics is Not a Poem”—suggests, Brennan thinks semiotic arguments are ridiculous. This is not the worst chapter in the book but his reduction of the equal dignity, respect, and inclusion sought in the fight for voting rights by African Americans and women to purely symbolic status was startling, to say the least. Brennan assures the reader that he is a staunch defender of social equality and a fierce critic of any form of racism, sexism, or discrimination. Equal voting rights, he believes, can be separated from social equality. It might be that Jim Crow literacy requirements were unjustly discriminatory, but epistocracy does not have to be. “The fact that government used to hide their racism beneath an epistemic disguise does not show us that epistocracy exams are inherently objectionable” (p. 224). If medical licenses were distributed in racist ways we would correct for the objectionable racism, not get rid of the licensing exam. Like Plato, another philosopher deeply suspicious of democracy, Brennan is fond of the medical analogy. Would you really want patients voting on the cure? Would you really want know-nothings prescribing you (and your family) drugs?

Chapter 6 defends the third plank in Brennan’s case against democracy: “most citizens are incompetent, irrational and morally unreasonable about politics. Despite that they hold political power over me. . . . I should not have to tolerate that. Just as it would be wrong to force me to go under the knife of an incompetent surgeon . . . it seems wrong to force me to submit to the decisions of incompetent voters.” Citizens have a presumptive right to be governed by competent decision-makers and “in realistic circumstances, universal suffrage will often violate this presumptive right. Current democracies are to that extent unjust” (p. 143). Chapter 7 addresses “wisdom of the crowd” objections to his arguments. Brennan suggests that democracies work well to the extent that they have institutionalized epistocratic safeguards which limit the damage that irrational majorities can do. The final chapter returns to the theme of “hooliganism.” Entitled “Civic Enemies,” the chapter argues that political participation brings out the worst in us. Politics spawns resentment, hatred, and adversarial attitudes. We would be much happier if we stayed at home and left ruling to the people who are good at it.

Jason Brennan is smart and his book contains many clever arguments and interesting points. But one has to ask oneself why he wrote it the way he did. It is in the end hard to take seriously because it is so intellectually inflammatory and one-sided. Jacob Levy, in blurbing the book, suggests that we should welcome challenges to comfortable pieties. I agree and I worry that democracy is at risk of becoming dead dogma—something we hang on to without really thinking through why. It would be nice to think that Brennan’s secret mission is to play devil’s advocate to our complacency and so instigate strong and well thought out defenses of democracy. But I doubt it. He does not appear to be interested in actually nudging us closer to an epistocracy or he would not have written a book that is bound to put almost everyone’s hackles up and seems completely uninterested in feasibility within our given context. There is an old joke about political philosophers and political theorists. Philosophers read theory and ask, where is the argument? Theorists read philosophers and ask, what is the point? I see the arguments in this book but I am at a loss to see the point. Or perhaps the point is just to see if the argument can be made but this seems self-indulgent, and honestly, a little hooliganish.