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Okay then, fine, maybe democracy is generally better than autocracy at avoiding the worst possible outcomes like tyranny and slavery and genocide and so on. But that’s a pretty low bar. On the more basic level of day-to-day public administration, aren’t anti-statists still right to distrust its ability to always do the right thing? Considering how often politicians screw things up, can we really trust them at the most fundamental level?

Well, in one sense, democracy’s answer to this question is no, of course we shouldn’t trust them; that’s the whole reason why elections exist – so we can actually hold them accountable instead of just handing them the reins of power and leaving them to their own devices. But still, even with elections, isn’t the whole system just so inundated with incompetency and corruption as to not even be worth the effort? Isn’t the entire government just one big dysfunctional train wreck? Isn’t our democracy, as is so often said, a fundamentally “broken” institution?

This is a pretty popular attitude nowadays – and I’ll admit, it’s one that I used to repeat fairly often myself back when I was first getting interested in political issues. I suppose that to some extent, anyone who wants to reform politics in any way will find it ideologically expedient to claim that the current system is completely irredeemable, so as to strengthen the case for their proposed reforms. But these days, I no longer feel such an urge to write off our entire system as utterly “broken” or “unsalvageable” – and in fact, I’m now at a point where it frankly strikes me as a bit odd when people do use such terms to describe it. I mean, obviously our democracy isn’t perfect; no form of government is. But when people talk about our democracy being totally broken, the question nowadays that immediately comes to my mind is, “Compared to what?” After all, when you compare modern-day First World democracy to pretty much every other form of government that has ever existed, it’s one of the least corrupt and inefficient and dysfunctional systems in the history of the world. That’s not to say it can’t still be improved, of course (and we should always want to improve it where we can) – but to say that no government can even be considered so much as “pretty good” unless it’s completely faultless is unreasonable and unrealistic. If our only point of comparison is some perfect utopia that only exists in our heads, then every system will fall short of that idealization. A much fairer standard is to compare our democracy to all the other systems that have actually been tried in the real world – and compared to all those other nepotistic kleptocracies and corrupt dictatorships, our system really does look pretty darn good. There’s a reason why that classic Churchill line is always brought up in discussions like this, and that’s because it’s true: Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.

To be fair to the anti-statist critics, it’s not hard to understand why they’re so distrustful of government in general, considering how many examples of bad governments do exist. As we’ve discussed previously, giving the government too much power – particularly unaccountable power – has proven time and time again to be a recipe for disaster. But when the critics point to such examples of bad governments as proof that all governments are therefore bad, or that the very idea of government is innately flawed, it seems to me that they’re making a mistake on par with (say) pointing to a few bad movies as proof that all movies are bad, or pointing to a few poorly-run businesses as proof that it’s impossible to run a business well. The mere fact that bad versions of a thing exist doesn’t mean that it’s therefore impossible for good versions of it to exist; and just saying that the good versions could potentially turn bad doesn’t invalidate their goodness either. As commenter less-effort-than-my-real-blog points out, despite anti-statists’ protestations that we can’t trust politicians to decide what’s right and what isn’t (lest they abuse this power to infringe on our rights), the reality is that under our democratic system, we do in fact trust our elected representatives to do exactly that on all kinds of issues, and it hasn’t sent us down a slippery slope toward totalitarianism – it’s just enabled us to have a basic functional society:

[If you’re an anti-statist, you might insist that] you don’t trust the government to decide [what’s OK and what] isn’t, so you don’t want the government [involved at all. But how far do you go with this principle? Imagine, for instance,] a world in which most people are anti-murder, but there is a small but vocal pro-murder psychopath faction which argues that by murdering the weak we make our species stronger. Someone attempts to make a law banning murder, and someone else says “But you can’t ban murder. I don’t trust the government to decide which acts are OK and which aren’t; first they’ll be non-consensual violence and murder, which I’m fine with, but what if they ban BDSM or euthanasia or martial arts or owning kitchen knives?”

Or “That’s an unstable situation; first we’ll be telling the pro-murder faction that they’re not allowed to act on their values, which is fine, but I’m part of the cat-owning faction. Most of the population owns dogs. I don’t want to set a precedent of banning things that small factions like and the rest of society doesn’t, because although I’m OK with oppressing the pro-murder faction I’m kind of worried that the next faction they oppress will be the cat-owning faction and I’ll be forced to have a dog instead.”

Er, we don’t care. Banning murder is important, and as a matter of fact we actually do trust the government not to make it illegal to own a kitchen knife, because making that illegal would be fucking stupid and we’d vote for someone else. I’m pretty sure I could write at length about why these anti-banning-murder arguments are dumb but I’m also pretty sure I don’t need to because we all agree that banning murder is an Excellent Thing To Do.

And yeah, maybe the government will overstep its bounds and ban not just murder but also owning kitchen knives. In some cases, the government has overstepped its bounds. I think murder should be illegal, but abortion and euthanasia shouldn’t be. The government has nevertheless banned abortion after a certain number of weeks and banned euthanasia, and it has utterly failed to make cryonics mandatory. But this doesn’t seem like an argument for making murder legal. This really doesn’t seem like an argument for making murder legal.

For all the talk about the untrustworthiness of elected officials, the truth is that most of the time, they actually do a pretty good job of keeping their policy platforms aligned with voters’ preferences. There are occasional counterexamples, naturally, and they inevitably tend to get all the attention – but in the grand scheme of things, these really are relatively rare exceptions to the general rule. After all, just consider how many issues there are where a particular politician’s stance could potentially deviate from their constituents’ preferences; you could have a politician who believed that murder should be legal, for instance, or that owning kitchen knives should be illegal, or that having pet cats should be banned, or any of a million other things. But what we see instead under our democratic system (in contrast with autocratic countries, where leaders with such outlandish views actually do sometimes manage to come into power) is that on practically every major issue, elected officials’ stances tend to align pretty closely with the views and preferences of the median voter. They might lean slightly more to the left or right on certain issues depending on their party affiliation and so on – but they can’t deviate too much, or else it’ll cost them their ability to get elected in the first place. So for instance, Republicans might be able to successfully run on a platform of fortifying the southern border and cracking down on illegal immigration, but they can’t go too much further than that – e.g. declaring that they want to permanently ban all immigration (even if that’s what many of them do want) – because such an extreme stance would render them unelectable and their party would promptly go extinct. Likewise, Democrats might be able to successfully run on a platform of reducing penalties for certain drug crimes, but they can’t go so far as to say that they want to make all drugs 100% legal and available in stores (even if, again, that’s what many of them do want), because that stance would lose them so many votes that they’d never be able to win another election. The two parties, in other words, are forced to position themselves just slightly to the left and right of the median voter on every major issue, and no further – because if they tried to run on more extreme positions, the voting equivalent of natural selection would wipe them out of existence.

This whole phenomenon, which I’ve talked about briefly on here before, is known as the Median Voter Theorem, and I think it’s one of the more under-recognized forces in modern politics. Activists and commentators (of both parties) will often become fixated on the idea that if they can just fight hard enough for their favorite far-left or far-right candidates, then all that energy will be enough to propel those candidates into office, and they’ll finally be able to push through a real liberal agenda or conservative agenda – only for those activists to be frustrated when their favored candidates either lose their elections or, if they occasionally manage to win, turn out to have less of a radical impact than advertised. This will then typically trigger a bunch of complaints about the system being broken or corrupt or rigged, along with bitter comments about how “both parties are the same” and our so-called “choice” between them is a sham. But the fact that elected officials generally tend to be more centrist than what radical activists might prefer isn’t a symptom of the system being rigged; it’s a natural result of the Median Voter Theorem working exactly as you’d expect. And to the extent that this results in competing candidates having relatively similar policy positions, that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. As Alexander writes:

IDEALISM: My candidate stands for real values, unlike that awful other guy. And that’s great!

CYNICISM: Both candidates are pretty much the same; elections never offer any real choice. And that’s an outrage!

POSTCYNICISM: Both candidates are pretty much the same. This is exactly what the median voter theorem would predict if both candidates are trying to optimize to match the prevailing opinions of the American people as closely as possible. This proves that the system has done its work even before the final choice between the last two people, and that whoever is elected will agree with the values of the majority of Americans. And that’s great!

Of course, if you’re someone whose political views are more on the radical side, you might not consider it so great that the two parties consistently triangulate their platforms around the median voter’s positions in this way. But the fact that the system works like this doesn’t mean it’s corrupt or broken; all it means is that policies generally have to have a good degree of popular support before they can pass into law. If the kinds of policies you prefer aren’t able to pass into law, that doesn’t mean there’s some sinister cabal of puppet-master elites standing in the way; more likely, it just means that the policies you favor aren’t quite so favored among the rest of the electorate. For that reason, then, if you’re trying to effect real political change, your focus should probably be on trying to change some of those minds and budge the median voter’s position slightly more toward your own, rather than just continuing to operate on the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum, well outside what most people would consider the current range of viable policies (AKA the Overton Window). Changing minds is never easy, of course – but even so, if the reforms you’re pushing for are truly transformative ones, you’re likely to have more luck trying to shift popular opinion on them than just taking that popular opinion for granted and trying to gain electoral advantages within the Overton Window that already exists. In other words, instead of obsessing over elections and party politics and perpetually trying to figure out how to enable the candidates who agree with your preferred policies to defeat the candidates who don’t, you’ll probably be better off putting that same energy into shifting the Overton Window until (ideally) there’s enough of an ideological consensus around your position that the Median Voter Theorem forces both parties to come around and fall into alignment with it, and no candidate can viably contend for office in the first place unless they subscribe to it. That might sound like an impossibly tall order – and to be sure, it is extremely difficult, which is why big transformative policy changes are so rare. But on the occasions where such transformative policy changes actually do break through, it’s not typically because one of the parties has managed to get a supermajority of their most radical candidates elected despite the mass of voters not sharing those radical positions; it’s because the voters themselves have shifted in their positions, and therefore the range of candidates they’re willing to support has shifted as well. That is, the political shifts follow from the ideological shifts; the former is a downstream product of the latter. If the majority of voters oppose a particular policy, then usually not even an elected supermajority will be enough to push it through; back in the 1960s, for instance, not even a fully Democrat-controlled government would have been enough to get gay marriage legalized (even though many Democrats supported gay rights at the time), because pushing for that particular policy in that particular era would have drawn so much voter backlash that it would have cost those Democrats their seats. But once an issue gains enough popular support, passing it into law becomes not only possible but inevitable; in today’s political environment, any national candidate who tried to run on a platform opposing gay marriage would be fighting an uphill battle, if not completely sabotaging their political career.

At the end of the day, the median voters’ positions are what define the range of viable policies – and in turn, the representatives they elect actually do tend to approximate those positions fairly closely (hence why incumbents in the House of Representatives have a reelection rate of over 90%). That doesn’t mean that voters’ preferences are the only thing that matters, of course, or that politicians will always be entirely immune to other influences like special interest groups and lobbyists and so on – such groups can certainly still bend things their way here and there – but as Caplan points out, they can only really do so in the margins where voters don’t care all that much; when it comes to the biggest and most important issues, the will of the voters still holds ultimate sway:

Politicians’ wiggle room creates opportunities for special interest groups—private and public, lobbyists and bureaucrats—to get their way. On my account, though, interest groups are unlikely to directly “subvert” the democratic process. Politicians rarely stick their necks out for unpopular policies because an interest group begs them—or pays them—to do so. Their careers are on the line; it is not worth the risk. Instead, interest groups push along the margins of public indifference. If the public has no strong feelings about how to reduce dependence on foreign oil, ethanol producers might finagle a tax credit for themselves. No matter how hard they lobbied, though, they would fail to ban gasoline.

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