On the eve of America ’s next Presidential
election, it is astonishing to witness the general mood of the voters. Never, in my entire life, have I experienced
such a sense of revulsion among my friends, coworkers, and relatives towards at
least one – and in some cases, both – of the major candidates. While it seems to be a perennial feature of
Presidential elections for many citizens to ask, in amazement, “Is this the
best that we could come up with?” the reaction to our choices this time goes
far, far beyond that. Many Americans –
and many in the rest of the world, as well – are questioning the general
intelligence of the voters in this country.
And, on a deeper level, many are probably questioning whether the
present debacle is a damning indictment against the system of democracy itself.
I am often tempted to condemn the competency of the average
voter, but when I do, I catch myself, for two reasons. First, when I base my condemnation on lack of
intelligence, I have to face the simple fact that we are not a country of
stupid people. I can attest to this
personally, in my daily encounters with individuals from all walks of
life. But demographic statistics support
this as well. While the U.S. no longer
ranks near the top of educational attainment in comparison with the other
developed nations of the world, it is still comfortably in the middle. And according to a recent study of 60
countries, the U.S. ranks 7th
in literacy: ahead of other countries such as Germany ,
France , and the United Kingdom . Accepting this fact, my second recourse is to
condemn the American voter as simply lazy: unwilling to fulfill the basic civic
responsibility of investigating candidates – doing the necessary homework to
make informed voting choices. There is
much more substance to this charge, but whenever I begin to slip into a fit of
self-righteous anger, I am forced to acknowledge that I am as great an offender
as my average fellow citizen. I am
embarrassed when I think of the many, many times that I have been in a polling
booth, choosing among a slate of candidates for many different offices –
judges, school board members, local representatives – and realizing that I
haven’t got a clue what distinguishes one candidate from another. I am particularly ashamed to remember the
methods I sometimes used to make these choices.
And it is no consolation to know that many if not most of my fellow
voters were resorting to similar methods.
I’ve gotten better over the years, perhaps due to more
maturity, but also with help from the internet.
One type of internet service that I have come across in recent years
offers a series of questions about where I stand on certain issues, such as the
national debt, birth control, immigration, climate change, etc., and when I
submit my answers to these, the various candidates are scored and ranked based
upon how closely their own positions are correlated with my own. And several years ago I learned that I could
get help with one of my most difficult voting choices – choosing judges – from
a performance rating that was offered online by the American Bar
Association. And, of course, when there
is simply no basis available for making an informed choice, one option is not
to vote at all. This option does present
a great risk, because if it is widely adopted, then it undermines the very
basis of electoral democracy. On the
other hand, if those who know that they can’t make an informed choice do not
vote, then it allows those who are
making an informed choice to have more of a relative say in the election. I belong to a number of professional
associations, and rarely vote in the election of officers, both because I
generally have no idea what the relative merits of the candidates are, but also
because I doubt that there is much at stake in the outcome of the elections:
the professional associations will continue to hold their conferences and
publish their journals regardless of who is at the helm. Interestingly, my reaction is apparently not
an uncommon one among members of such organizations, because I get a sense, as
I receive repeated appeals to vote – sometimes with an ill-disguised air of
desperation – that the number of votes received is very, very low.
When it comes right down to it, this seems to be a very
precarious way to live our lives: letting so many important decisions that
affect our wellbeing be made by a group of people who are selected by ignorant
and/or lazy voters. And not just our
political institutions, but our most powerful corporations are set up the same
way, with its leaders selected by the votes of shareholders – many if not most
of whom never actually vote. But this is
a feature of civilization itself. Call
it “proxyism”: the need to rely upon others to do certain things – including some
of our thinking – for us. It probably
goes all the way back to the days when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers,
foraging about as a group for food. Such
tribes probably realized that their livelihood could potentially be improved –
significantly – if they allowed one or more of their members to refrain from
the usual daily drudgery of cooking, making shelters, or picking fruits and
vegetables and instead wander about far and wide in the forests and the plains,
looking for herds of prey to hunt or new areas of vegetation to forage. These wanderers or scouts were given a share
of the foodstuffs collected by the rest of the tribe to sustain them while they
went off on their daily searches. When
such a system worked, the gains from new discoveries outweighed the losses
incurred by having one or more fewer bodies to do the regular daily
chores. But there were many risks
inherent in the system, as well. The scouts
might prove to be incompetent at their task.
Or worse, they might not do the task at all, and simply remove
themselves to some secluded spot where they did nothing, and returned each day
to the tribe and pretended that an exhaustive search had come up with no
rewards. And, worst of all, if they did
actually encounter new sources of food, they might be tempted to engorge themselves
on it, and not even tell the rest of the tribe about it. These, then, have always been the risks of
“proxyism”, and to mitigate these risks, one has to try to choose the most
competent – and ideally most honorable – proxies, and then have at least some
rudimentary way to make sure that they are doing what one wants them to do.
And clearly, simply relying on a vote for choosing someone
to take on important responsibilities does not guarantee that the most capable
will be selected for those positions. As
Winston Churchill put it, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute
conversation with the average voter.”
When voters make choices with little or no information, or out of
complete ignorance, the results can be devastating. Imagine an American voter, for example,
choosing among a list of candidates of whom he or she has absolutely no
knowledge, whatsoever. Basing the choice
only on the names, the voter might decide that candidates with more
“mainstream” names like Smith or Jones are “safer” choices than candidates with
names like Rodriguez or Alvarez. They
could convince themselves that this choice was not based on any bigotry
whatsoever against persons of Hispanic ancestry, but rather on a simple,
dispassionate, probabilistic calculation that in America persons with Hispanic-sounding
names have a higher probability of being immigrants, and therefore are more
likely to have a lower level of formal education than a Smith or a Jones. Something like this apparently happened in the
Democrat primary elections in Illinois
in 1986, when Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild were chosen by popular vote as the
candidates for that party of Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor,
respectively. It was only after they had
won the primary that it became widely known that they were followers of Lyndon
LaRouche, a conservative political extremist.
The establishment Democrat party candidate for governor, Adlai Stevenson
III, was then compelled to start a third party so that he would not have to run
on the same ticket as Hart and Fairchild, and eventually lost the
election. Here, then, was a case where
two people who didn’t even espouse the platforms of the party that they claimed
to be affiliated with won that party’s primary election, because voters,
failing to do even a cursory investigation of their political beliefs, were
satisfied that the names of these two candidates were sufficiently “mainstream”
to warrant supporting them. This of
course, is only a particularly egregious example of a voting behavior that is
all too common in democracies.
And the popular vote seems to be at least as ineffective in
rooting incompetent and/or unethical politicians out of office. A notorious case of this
occurred in the city of Bell, California, from 2005 to 2010, where city
officials were being paid exorbitantly high salaries (some of the highest in
the nation), in a small town where the average income per person in 2009 was
less than $25,000 per year. The most
conspicuous offender was city administrator Robert Rizzo, who was making an
annual salary of $1.5 million a year when the scandal was brought to light in
2010 by investigative journalists working for the Los Angeles Times. It was
not the actions of angry voters – at least not initially – but rather the
criminal investigations and hearings prompted by the revelations in the Los Angeles Times articles that led to
the conviction and ouster of Rizzo, along with the mayor, the assistant city
administrator, and four city council members.
Had it not been for the diligence of the press and actions of law
enforcement agencies, Rizzo and his cronies would have probably continued to
bilk the poor citizens of Bell
for years. This is a pattern that is all
too common in American politics, where it is the vigilance of state or federal
enforcement agencies, rather than that of voters, which is the primary
deterrent to blatantly self-aggrandizing and corrupt behavior on the part of
elected officials.
And if voters are ineffective in reigning in abuses
involving political offices, they are much more so when it comes to keeping the
behavior of big businesses in check. In
theory, large corporations are beholden to the owners of the common shares of
their stock, and these shareholders have the power to exercise their votes (in
proportion to the shares that they hold) to guide the policies of the
corporations, including the selection of corporate officers and the
determination of how much they will be compensated, and in what manner. In practice, of course, shareholders rarely
exercise this privilege, and even the large, institutional owners of shares,
who have significant voting power, rarely exercise this power in order to rein
in the behavior of those at the helm of the corporations ostensibly under their
control. As a consequence, it is all too
common to read about corporations engaging in unethical behavior, including
activities that endanger the lives of their employees and the communities where
their factories are located. The
compensation of corporate CEOs and other top tier executives continues to
spiral upwards, and again it is not uncommon to read about CEOs leaving
corporations with hefty cash rewards after grossly mismanaging them. Such was the case, for example, with Bob
Gannon, who had been CEO of the Montana Power Company, a venerable electric
utility that had served Montana
customers for 90 years. Gannon oversaw
the sale of that company’s generating assets and used the money to invest in a
high risk scheme to build a 26,000-mile fiber optic network. The venture failed, electricity prices
soared, utility employees were laid off, and the price of Montana Power Company
(or rather, Touch America, which was the name of the restructured “telecommunications”
company) stock plummeted to less than 30 cents a share by the time the company
filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003, which in turn decimated the retirement
savings of employees and others who had invested in what they thought would
always be a stable and secure income-generating asset. But Bob Gannon and three of his fellow
executives left the company with a $5.4 million dollar payout, and Gannon
retired into a $3 million dollar home.
The Great Recession was brought on in large part as the
result of reckless lending practices engaged in by some of the largest
financial institutions in the world.
None of the leaders of these institutions were ever held accountable for
their actions, and even those who led institutions that were particularly
culpable in contributing to the meltdown, such as AIG Financial Products (which
sold credit default swaps, one of the risky investments that ultimately
unraveled), did not suffer repercussions from their actions. Joseph Cassano, one of the executives in charge
of that organization, received a bonus of $34 million in 2008, the year that
AIGFG incurred enormous losses from the credit default swaps – an event that
played a pivotal role in the recession that ensued.
As voters, then, we often do an abysmal job both in
selecting those who make important decisions that will affect our lives, and in
retaining or ousting them. We rely
heavily on other third parties to monitor them for us, such as auditors and
police organizations. But in some of the
most egregious cases of malfeasance, many of the agencies entrusted with
guarding our interests have been compromised by the very organizations that
they were supposed to be watching. Enron
succeeded in doing this with its auditors, as did the crooked politicians at the
center of the Bell , California
On a more optimistic note, there is a growing body of
scientific literature that suggests that there really is a “wisdom of the
crowd”, in that several people making a decision collectively often tend to
make better judgments than any of the individuals that make up the group. This is particularly true when diversity
exists among the individuals who are involved in making the decision – in
expertise, educational backgrounds, and outlooks.
I had a personal experience of this about a decade ago, when
I was called upon to serve on a jury trial.
The case involved a Hispanic man in Chicago who had been accused of the attempted
murder of several police officers with a handgun. When the trial began, I was immediately
impressed by the dedication of nearly all of the members of my jury in getting
to the facts of the case. (There was one
exception: an elderly man who slept through most of the trial.) But when the deliberations began, I noticed
that there was a distinct difference in how the jurors had viewed the
case. We were evenly divided between
white jurors and black jurors, and while the white jurors (including me) tended
to believe the police officers’ account of what happened uncritically, the
black jurors were deeply suspicious of their testimony. And when it came time to make the first vote
on the innocence or guilt of the suspect, the voting fell along racial lines,
with the white jurors (again, myself included) voting the man guilty, and the
black jurors voting him not guilty. In
the intense discussion that ensued, the black jurors pointed out some troubling
facts about the evidence that had been presented to us which undermined the
police officers’ version of the events.
In the end, we all became convinced that these discrepancies were
sufficiently significant to provide a reasonable doubt against the defendant’s
guilt, and we voted unanimously to acquit him.
I feel satisfied that we made the right decision on that day; and since
then I continue to be a little less uncritical about the behavior and testimony
of police officers. The recent spate of
high profile killings of unarmed black persons by police officers in the U.S. only
highlights to me why the cynicism of my fellow black jurors toward the
testimony of the police officers may have been warranted by their collective
experience.
Of course, for every example of a group making a wise
collective decision, history provides plenty of counterexamples where voters,
or committees, or mobs, made terrible choices.
It just seems that using the vote to choose others who will make very
important decisions affecting one’s livelihood seems to be a very precarious
and risky venture. When making such a
choice, I as a voter am actually hoping to accomplish two things. First, I want to select someone who is
capable – ideally most capable – of making the decisions that I am entrusting
to them. And second, I want that person
to make those decisions in a manner that serves my interests, or, when this is
not the case, serves the community (or the long-term interests of the company,
in the case of shareholders) in a way that I consider to be just and fair to
all stakeholders. (While I would love to have said that I am solely looking for representatives who are capable and just, I would have been dishonest if I pretended that I did not also consider how well they would represent or serve my personal interests - at least with respect to certain matters. I think that all voters would have to admit the same. The American
philosopher John Rawls famously argued, in A
Theory of Justice, that the most just set of laws and regulations for a
society would be those that were designed by its future occupants behind “a
veil of ignorance”, i.e., in a condition where each of them had no
idea of whether they were going to be rich or poor, male or female, white or
black, etc. Hence, each occupant would
want to design a system in which nobody was unfairly advantaged or
disadvantaged for arbitrary reasons. It would be difficult if not impossible to design such an impartial system, Rawls contended, if each of the architects knew what their particular personal stake would be in the outcome.)
This is a tall set of expectations, and for that reason it seems that
the popular vote is a very wobbly tent pole to prop up the canopy of
civilization.
Churchill also famously said: “No one pretends that
democracy is perfect or all-wise.
Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government
except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He is right, of course. And I am confident that America will
survive beyond this next electoral cycle.
But the abuses of large corporations, such as those which contributed to
the massive economic downturn of the Great Recession, and the apparent growing
inability of our national government to solve its most fundamental problems,
tempts me to continue the search for something better than what we have. Perhaps, in the end, we will discover, as people
did in crises of comparable magnitude in earlier times, that it is not an
overhaul of the institutions that will save us, but the arrival of one or more
special individuals who truly are worthy of the offices they attain, who rise
above the institutional infirmities that they are saddled with and help their
constituents draw upon the latent greatness that always lies within all of us,
waiting to be tapped by a leader with courage, character, and vision.
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