Democracy as Popular Responsibility

For the past couple of weeks I've been watching this show Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It's a curious entity: a Japanese anime from 1988 that, in a whole host of ways, has a shockingly progressive ethos. And it also manages something that I've almost never encountered: meaningful, interesting exploration of political philosophy through fictional narrative. I'm not sure why exactly that's so rare. Perhaps it's because democracies are boring, for narrative fiction purposes anyway. Stories demand characters but democracies are fundamentally not about any one person. Political stories set in democracies, therefore, will often over-emphasize the importance of individual figures, which is fine if they're just stories but problematic if they try to get philosophical. (I believe that's in part the story of The West Wing.) Most fantasy worlds, meanwhile, are pre-democratic, essentially feudal/monarchical societies, which are much better for storytelling but also boring for political theory purposes because, well, non-democratic political theory is wrong per se and therefore not very interesting.

Legend of the Galactic Heroes solves this dilemma I think in part by structuring itself as a conflict between the Empire, a Germanic society ruled by an autocratic Kaiser and an oppressive, entrenched nobility, and the Free Planets Alliance, a democratic society that broke away from the Empire some few hundred years ago. So far this sounds like a pretty standard Cold War-style Good vs. Evil story. The thing is, though, that the Alliance is actually a deeply diseased "democracy," probably as a result of 150 years of perpetual war. The show does a deft job of depicting a society that is simply not free despite its formally democratic institutions. The Empire, meanwhile, is equally decrepit after five hundred years of comfortable privilege for its aristocrats, but has the good fortune to be conquered by Reinhard von Lohengramm, one of the protagonists of the show, who rises up from the minor nobility to become Kaiser and begin his own, new dynasty. Though no democrat, Reinhard is very much a progressive reformer.

And what this dynamic sets up is the very interesting question of which side of this war between a corrupted democracy and an enlightened dictatorship is actually the good side. It's a particularly pressing question for the other chief protagonist, Yang Wenli, an admiral in the Alliance fleet who actually hates war and really just wants to be a history scholar, who feels uncomfortable about fighting on behalf of the in many ways unworthy Alliance government. And for whatever reason (credit presumably goes in large part to the writers of the show), Yang is spectacularly wise, and every single thing he says about political philosophy, every decision that he makes as the war goes along, is fascinating. It really gets at the ideas of, what is democracy, why is it good and important, etc., in a very deep way that you just don't see in a lot of fiction.

On Liberals, Politics, and even Democracy Itself

This is partly inspired by the Democratic primary, and an attempt to understand what's behind the Sanders phenomenon, but it's also inspired more generally by just a loose complex of phenomena over the past few years. Here's my basic idea: over the past few generations, America has been engaged in a rather massive culture war. Beginning in about the 1960s, a bunch of people came along who radically disagreed with mainstream, relatively conservative social norms and political beliefs. And these cultural liberals have been winning, spectacularly so. We've reached the point where many, if not all, of the new liberal views are pretty damn mainstream, such that people who violate them are broadly perceived as deviant (e.g. a Mr. Trump). But, quite rightly, we're not resting on our laurels. Nor are we accepting the current, relatively liberal mainstream views on those issues as sacred gospel. Rather, they're works in progress, and of late, particularly in the internet age, a ton of energy has gone into the development of the new progressive norms. The broad principles are increasingly being translated into a fairly comprehensive code of conduct, which aspires to a kind of perfection. For just about any question of "how should I behave toward other people," there's a right answer out there, which you should follow. The older, more conservative norms also prescribed such a code of conduct, although there is one major difference: the new liberal paradigm, more or less tautologically, gives far greater space for individual autonomy. There are a lot of rules that say, basically, "do whatever you want so long as you're respecting what others want." That last part requires a lot of elaboration, though, and it's been getting a lot of elaboration. All of this is great, and it proceeds within a more-or-less agreed-upon analytical framework. Then it's just a matter of proselytizing for the basic worldview that says you should follow these rules, of spreading the message that it's not okay to violate them. It's a work in progress, obviously, but we're working on it.

Like I said, that's all great. And the way that this enterprise aspires, basically, to Perfection, in a certain way, is great. For the first time we have a chance to implement widespread social norms based on genuinely liberal values, and so we have this opportunity to really think about how to get them Right in a way that's kind of new. But the thing is, then you get to politics. And the trouble with politics is that not everyone agrees with you. And I feel like on some level, the focus on developing liberal norms of righteous conduct, and on condemning those who don't follow them, has a bit of a tendency to distract from the fact that the people who disagree with us are within their rights to do so. Specifically they're within their political rights to do so. Their beliefs are wrongful ones, and as a matter of morality they ought to change them, but they do not lose their rights as democratic citizens because of those wrongful beliefs. The point here is not just that we, as liberals, have to be cognizant of the fact that democratic politics is hard and we won't get everything we want. It's that on some level, we shouldn't. Not so long as the things we want are unpopular with the American people. Because the American people really do have the right to make these decisions for themselves, even if they will make their decisions badly.

Now, to be clear, that last point doesn't apply to everything. I'm a big believer in democracy, but more specifically I'm a big believer in liberal democracy, and in constitutionally limited government. And we happen to have a Constitution that, I think, really does protect a lot of liberal values when properly read. That is to say, it really does restrain the political choice of the people in ways that are pleasing to modern social liberals. At the very least it's perfectly legitimate to argue, as to much of the agenda of modern social liberalism, that the issue has been constitutionalized and is not the subject of ongoing political choice anymore. Gay rights are a great example of that: it's absolutely right for us to say that we should win on that issue even if most Americans are against us. "Equal" really does mean equal. But constitutionalism only gets you so far. It's just not plausible that every single item on your agenda will be constitutionalized, and moreover, it would be bad if that were so, because democratic political choice is important and no constitution should lock in a country's entire political program.

I think the specific impetus for this post was actually when I saw some article about how Hillary Clinton's effort to present herself as the candidate of the modern Democratic Party's identity-politics coalition of oppressed groups is unconvincing because, in order for those various movements to be truly "intersectional," I believe was how they put it, they also need to be radically anti-corporate and what-have-you. My reaction to which was, okay, so what are you going to do if you find yourself in a country where "we shouldn't discriminate against women, or racial minorities, or LGBTQ&c. people" commands widespread support but "we should adopt radically anti-corporate economic policies" doesn't? Because the thing is, not only won't you be able to enact your whole "intersectional" program in such a world, there's a very real sense in which you shouldn't be able to, either. Now, again, it may well be wrongful of the public not to support your position on this. But their wrongness doesn't give you a right to govern them against their will.

This ties into something Barney Frank recently said in a column critiquing Bernie's campaign: "What troubles me and many of my former colleagues—among the most liberal members—is the belief that nothing short of this [Sanders's agenda] is worth fighting for." You have to figure out what's worth fighting for that you can plausibly get a democratic mandate for. But it goes further. In a democracy there's a need to accept that sometimes you lose, and that it's legitimate for the other side to enact its policies when that's the will of the people. Again, this is not always the case, and the modern conservative movement is quite generous in its willingness to have its bad-on-the-merits policies also be unconstitutional. But there's always got to be a large area where it's legitimate for the other side to win, and you have to be sort of graceful about that, because otherwise you start attacking democracy itself. This really isn't something we have to deal with in the project of creating liberal social norms; indeed, it's important that those norms be as uncompromised and as near to perfect as possible. But it's important not to lose sight of it in the political realm, not just as a matter of pragmatism but as a matter of principle.

The Deeper Problem With the Sanders Campaign "Voodoo"

There's been a big controversy of late over an economic analysis, originally performed by an independent economist but repeatedly endorsed by members of the Sanders campaign itself, purporting to show that Bernie Sanders's economic plan would great an essentially unprecedented economic paradise, featuring among other things 5% annual growth over the next decade. It's basically just the latest in a sequence of fights between the Sanders campaign and the liberal wonk community, in which the wonks keep saying that Bernie isn't being totally honest about the costs of some of his proposals and in return Sanders sympathizers, basically, accuse said wonks of being corporate shills or whatever. There's plenty to say about this, and why it would be a bad thing if the Democrats adopted the Republicans' willingness to say empirically absurd things and then just have all their supporters pretend that they're true.*

But there's one thing about this that I haven't seen said, possibly because most of the commenters have been coming at the issue from the perspective of the policy wonks. My idea is more of a political theory one: it's not a good thing when you feel the need to lie to the public about your agenda. It means that on some level you know that your agenda, on a full and honest accounting, is unpopular. That's why the Republicans do so much of it! They're committed to advancing a policy agenda that would not really be very popular, so they have to lie about it, and while they're at it they have to suppress lots of voters and such. To be sure, the Sanders campaign is only taking its very first steps down a path the Republicans sprinted all the way down long ago. But it's not a good path to tread even a little bit.

Because it also betrays a kind of contempt for democracy. You could, of course, say, well, yes, we're lying about this plan because it's unpopular, but it should be popular, it's wrong of the people not to support it. Maybe it'll even be better for them than the policies they support. And so, really, what we're doing will make the world the best place it can be. And, sure. That might be a good argument, from a certain perspective. Just, not from the perspective of democratic self-governance. The whole concept of democracy is that the people get to decide these things for themselves. And it is surely a noble quest to educate the people, to make popular what should be popular. Nor am I saying that politicians have a moral responsibility to follow the weathervane of public opinion in all things; I'm actually a pretty big believer in the "trustee" model of representation, as opposed to the "delegate" one.

But you do have to be honest. Honest about what you'll do and about what you've done. If you're right that your policies are better, then once you implement them they'll presumably prove, at least in the fullness of time, to be popular. (See, e.g., ObamaCare.) But if you sell the people on policies by concealing their costs or exaggerating their rewards in some absurd fashion, then when the results are worse than you promised you'll spark a backlash. And beyond that, you just can't have a meaningful democracy on any other basis. If the choice ultimately belongs to the people, rather than to some benign counsel of Those Who Know Better, then the people need to be told, honestly, what their choice is.

We're the Democratic Party. We should believe in democracy, not just pragmatically but philosophically. We should believe in the people's right to decide their own fate, and that means their right to choose wrongly. (There are of course exceptions, as provided by the Constitution, but that's not really about the kind of economic policy choices Sanders is talking about.) We shouldn't seek to force our legislative program on the American people through force or trickery. I don't think the Sanders campaign really disputes this, so they should try to live up to these ideals a little more fully.





*Here's a relatively sympathetic take on what the Sanders people are doing here. There was a process that began sometime, I dunno, in the 1960s or thereabouts, wherein the American left started incorporating the advice of mainstream economic theory, and thereby moderating, from a certain perspective, its policy proposals. It's why you see things like liberal support for carbon taxes or whatever: there's a pretty broad consensus, or there has been, around finding the most effective and efficient economic tools for the promotion of liberal values. It's hardly been absolute, and in some cases it's gone in the opposite direction: liberals kept supporting the minimum wage for decades when standard economics said it was a bad idea, and then, lo and behold, more recent economic research suggests that maybe the liberals aren't wrong. Whaddaya know. But there's been a pretty strong commitment of late to using policies which have empirical support for their effectiveness.

The worry, though, and it's an eminently reasonable one, is that liberals have actually absorbed not just the practical and strategic suggestions of mainstream economics but also some of the underlying values and goals, which are in many cases really not all that liberal. And it's admirable for the Sanders campaign to want to roll back that tendency, the tendency to get assimilated into the Yay Capitalism mindset. The problem is, though, that they sort of seem to be conflating the two trends--again, understandably, since I think they probably were conflated in their origins. They're not the same thing, though, and we ought properly roll back one of them and not the other.

A Modest Defense of Democratic Filibuster Hypocrisy

In 2005, Democrats filibustered a few George W. Bush judicial nominees, who they thought were particularly radical. For a while, at least. Then Majority Leader Bill Frist (yeah, remember that guy?) threatened to use the "nuclear option" to change the rules of the Senate while it was in session.* Democrats backed down. A bunch of moderate Senators crafted a deal in which Republicans agreed not to destroy the filibuster and Democrats agreed to stop filibustering. The nominees got confirmed, and hey, guess what? They're particularly radical. During the whole controversy, of course, lots of Democrats said a lot of stuff about how great the filibuster is, and lots of Republicans said lots of stuff about how terrible it is.

On November 21st, 2013, one day before the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination and two days before the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, the Democratic Senate majority used the "nuclear option" to prevent the minority from obstructing executive nominees or judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. This isn't the first time we've had tons of Democrats now saying stuff about how horrible the filibuster is and Republicans writing paeans to it, in a bit of entertaining "everyone's a hypocrite!" theater. There's these two pieces, for example, by Slate's Emma Roller, showing the flip-flops of both President Obama and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Mostly I think it's true that everyone's a hypocrite on this, or more specifically that this is a prime example of my long-time theory that no one has any actual beliefs about procedure except as they relate to substance. Republicans, for instance, tend to favor a small federal government because most of what the feds do these days is somewhat progressive economic stuff, regulation and redistribution and all that, but when the feds are criminalizing marijuana, suddenly Democrats love federalism. Except, and I know this is easy to mock coming from a hard-core Democratic partisan, I honestly think the combination of the two Democratic positions, from 2005 and 2013, is a lot more defensible than the combination of the Republican positions, for mostly kind of happenstance reasons.

Written Constitutions as a Trap for Hypocrisy

This is the first off-shoot of my general contemplation, in the wake of attending a talk by Bruce Ackerman yesterday evening, of what it is about his constitutional and political philosophy that I find so unacceptable that I have felt worthy of being written up. It's a fairly modest point, and not really much related to Ackerman at all except in that he inspires it through his apparent distaste for the idea that the Reconstruction Amendments, particularly the 14th and 15th, really did provide a textual constitutional basis amply sufficient for the 20th century civil rights movement. I don't know for sure whether the particular factor that I am about to discuss contributes to that distaste, but it seems to me that it might in part be motivated by the fact that the framers of the 14th and 15th Amendments were, for the most part, what we would today consider racists. Most of them were also, certainly, sexists and homophobes and religious bigots. In fact, "bigot" is just a good catch-all term to describe the attitudes of nearly every member of the "good" side of the 1860s political clashes, viewed by modern standards (with the possible exception of men like Thaddeus Stevens). To depend on the legacy of these men, these hypocrites who wrote the shining text of the 14th Amendment into the Constitution but who denied the vote to women and who abandoned any efforts to help black people within a few short years of the passage of that Amendment, who may only have been looking for Negro votes in any case, to craft the sweeping societal changes of the Civil Rights Movement could well seem offensive, as tainting the achievements of true egalitarians like Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, and (lest we leave out the contributions of African-Americans themselves) Martin Luther King.

Now, I obviously don't find the contrast between the text of the Reconstruction Amendments and the attitudes of those who wrote and passed them particularly unsettling, but it is definitely a striking contrast. Indeed, the same can be said of the original Constitution, which many (though not all) abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, argued forcefully was an anti-slavery document, even though it certainly contained a few provisions directly supporting the slave regime and though it was universally interpreted as protecting the "domestic institutions" of the Southern states. How did this happen? How did polities whose fundamental values we would today consider so prejudiced and even hateful manage to write these documents which are so open to much more enlightened interpretations than any their framers could have envisioned, or even to demand such interpretations? I think the answer lies in the concept of hypocrisy.

Adam Smith, Subordination, and Democracy

I've just been reading the part of On the Wealth of Nations wherein Adam Smith starts talking about political theory as such, as opposed to economic theory. It's very interesting. The first section was a lengthy discussion about military readiness in various kinds of societies, which seemed astute though not really my favorite subject. Currently he's talking about the administration of justice, and the relationships of subordination which are implicit in the notion of civil government. (Yeah, I know, more on that later.) According to Smith, there are four criteria on the basis of which one man might have authority over another:

1. Personal qualities, either of the body or of the mind
2. Age
3. Wealth
4. Superiority of birth

Personal qualities of the body, he says, are rarely of much importance, since even the very strong can be overpowered by two or three ordinary men. Qualities of the mind may conceptually give one a great deal of power over a great many, but since they are invisible qualities, societies rarely use them as the basis for social hierarchies. Age is nice and objective, so when there's not much else to go on it becomes the tie-breaker of rank, and in a hunter-gatherer society where there isn't much wealth, it is often the chief determinant of rank. Wealth will almost always matter more than either personal qualities or age, so long as some have more of it than others, but for various reasons it will matter the most in a nomadic shepherding society, and less in a more advanced society where the favors doled out by a rich man are doled in return for money. Superiority of birth, meanwhile, is primarily the residue of the wealth of one's ancestors, and so will matter most in societies where wealth stays in families for a long time without being dissipated.

Now, as I said above, the notion that civil government implies subordination is somewhat undermined by that most wonderful invention, democracy. It isn't entirely destroyed, though, since most of the people in a democratic government, be they judges, police officers, or the legislature as a whole, have a fair amount of authority to tell other people what to do. What I think is interesting is that, in a certain sense, a democratic form of government is designed to allow personal qualities of the mind to matter in deciding who will get to wield the public authority. Electoral campaigns are largely about showing that one person or another has the best combination of ideas and mental capabilities. Appointment to administrative positions, or to judicial ones, is usually based primarily on the same qualities, if only because the public won't like it if incompetent people get appointed because of their wealth or nobility. Hiring for those positions in public service which interact directly with the public, like police officers, proceed as hiring for most jobs, with considerable attention paid to a person's ability to do the job.

Now, of course, politics is not a "meritocracy" in the sense in which that word is usually meant. But personal qualities of the mind do matter a lot in determining who gets to hold political power. They're not the only thing, but they are indisputably one of the things that matters. Not being an expert in non-democratic forms of government I wouldn't want to state this for certain, but democracy may well be the only form of government in which personal qualities of the mind do matter for allocating public authority. This is not the principal argument for democracy, but I think it's a non-trivial point in its favor.

Voting as Sufficient, Con't

I just read a healthy-sized essay by John Rawls on the question of what creates an obligation to obey the law. But here's my problem: he's stipulating that we're talking about constitutional democracy, and indeed, in most of the scenarios he sketches out the person who has to decide whether or not they are obliged to follow a law they disagree with has in fact voted. A typical example: suppose you have a referendum or direct-democratic process for choosing between two income tax schemes, Person X votes for Law A, but the majority votes for Law B and therefore Law B is enacted. But it seems to me that, in such a situation, there is nothing more to say about whether Person X has an obligation to obey the law. Presumably constitutional provisions specify that, as a result of this referendum, the tax code that receives majority support will be enacted. If you vote in that referendum, you know that, or at least you ought to know that. Therefore, by participating in the process, you accept that. Honestly, what's so hard about this? I'm open to arguments that the obligation of someone who has never voted requires a more complex theory, but it simply does not need explaining why someone much obey a law that passes over their vote to the contrary. If "social contract" means nothing else, it means this.

Obeying the Law, Authority, and Might vs. Right

My Philosophy of Law class has started up this week, and the first question we are pondering is whether there exists a general obligation to obey the law. Specifically, as my textbook puts it, is there a general obligation to obey every law, even laws that do not happen to coincide with an independent moral commandment? It wouldn't mean that it was morally right to obey every law if that obligation did exist, just that there was some moral force in favor of obedience. Maybe there would be a stronger moral force arguing for disobedience, for instance in the case of the civil rights movement, but there's some, admittedly inferior reason to obey the law even so.

The textbook's conclusion, at least during the introduction, appears to be no. They consider several arguments, and find all of them lacking. They consider consequentialist arguments, social-contract arguments, and finally John Rawls' fairness argument, and reject them each in turn. I do feel that, especially in considering the consequentialist arguments, they get a little forgetful of the fact that finding such an obligation to follow the law does not actually mean that one should follow the law; by the original premise of the question it strikes me that if one can show that on a consequentialist "pro/con" diagram on the question, "should I follow the law?" there is always some non-negligible entry in the "pro" column, you've found a general consequentialist moral impetus in favor of obedience. But I digress, because I think the most fruitful line of inquiry is in the social-contract category. I also think that asking the question the way my book does, "should one obey every law?", is rather confusing. It's better to ask, why should I follow any law?

The Median Voter Theorem, Revisited

The median voter theorem states that if you assume the ideologies of the electorate can be represented as a one-dimensional space and there are only two parties/candidates in the election, each candidate will maximize their expected votes by adopting the policy preferences of the median voter. In that world the two candidates are indistinguishable and will each receive half of the votes of the electorate, at random. The prediction is that politicians will all gravitate toward the center and elections will be very close contests between two exceedingly similar options. I have always thought and continue to think that this theorem is at best useless and at worst a load of bull.

There are a lot of conditions that go into the Median Voter Theorem that don't hold in the real world. For starters you assume that we are restricted to a two-party system; new parties placing themselves at the 49th and 51st percentiles of the electorate would instantly obliterate the two median-voter parties, though you can argue that they, then, would become the two parties in turn and would move toward the center. It is also not clear that policy preferences can be meaningfully restricted to a single dimension without losing information crucial to vote-predicting; this gives rise to the probabilistic voting models, which can make similar unique-equilibrium predictions in multiple dimensions. But I think there's a deeper flaw here, and we can see it when we look at the two supposed "examples" of the MVT in action: the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections.

The Case for Mandatory Voting

My tendency is very much to think that mandatory voting is the kind of thing that you just shouldn't do. It is, rather directly, an interference with an individual's decision-making as to how they want to participate in the democratic process, and I tend to find such things sketchy. That said, there are a whole lot of elections that would have turned out very, very differently last year if we had mandatory voting in this country. When I was taking a course in modern political theory we discussed the notion of negative versus positive liberty, where (roughly speaking) negative liberty is freedom from interference but positive liberty is freedom of self-determination. Though nearly equivalent in definition, the two freedoms have historically developed along very different lines, with the particular quirk of positive liberty being the idea that true positive liberty consists in doing what your true self wants. The idea is that people have a higher self, more rational or whatever, and a lower, base self, and what we really want is to do what our higher self wants but our pesky lower self is oppressing us. External restrictions, therefore, that force you to follow your superego rather than your id, so to speak, are actually increases in liberty. It's an argument I'm generally very skeptical of, again, in no small part because people have a tendency to think they know what other people's higher selves want.

But I think you can make a fairly strong positive-liberty case for mandatory voting, actually. Suppose I'm a citizen of Wisconsin who, if you had put a ballot in front of me last November and told me I wasn't getting out of the room until I voted for someone, or even if you just asked me in a casual telephone poll, would have voted against Republican Scott Walker in the governor's race. More or less by definition, I currently wish Scott Walker hadn't won. Maybe I don't care very much, but I would have preferred a world in which Scott Walker weren't governor. And it's predictable that I would prefer that world. If you simultaneously made voting mandatory and quite easy indeed, then I would have voted and Scott Walker would have lost. And there would be a lot fewer people saying, damn, why didn't I bother voting last year? Obviously there are systemic biases in who votes and who doesn't vote, with disempowered groups tending very much not to vote, which means that the lack of mandatory voting shifts a whole lot of power away from those who already lack power. It strikes me that there's something kind of non-oppressive about saying to someone, here, look, you have this power, now use it.

That said, I don't think I actually support mandatory voting. But I do think it's indefensible to have a system that doesn't try to get as close as possible to 100% turnout without actually requiring it. The practice of requiring prior registration for voting, which is as far as I know unique to this country, is simply absurd. So is conducting elections for one day only and having that day be Tuesday. So is requiring in-person voting; Oregon does its elections entirely by mail now, and they have higher turnout and fewer problems. I've never actually been able to see any reason why you couldn't get an internet-voting scheme to be just as safe as paper-ballot voting, which, mind you, has never been exactly a paragon of tamper-proof reliability. It's possible that an internet voting scheme would require some kind of comprehensive internet identification system more rigorous than what we currently have, but I can imagine that there could be ways to do that which would be a price worth paying to make our democracy so much easier.

Instead we're disenfranchising college students. What does it say about a party when keeping people from voting is one of its main electoral strategies? It says that it knows it is losing the battle of democracy and it doesn't give a damn.

The Republican Party As A Faction

I have often argued that people tend to misinterpret the phrase "tyranny of the majority," and the related concept of factionalism. Tyranny of the majority, I insist, is not simply the practice of letting the party that wins an election implement its preferred policy agenda as thoroughly as it sees fit. Rather, it is when the majority enacts policies whose purpose is to benefit the group holding majority-based political power and disadvantage the group currently losing the game of democracy. The most extreme example, of course, would be when a certain Germany government decided to, uh, kill millions of those who weren't in its faction. But you also saw tyranny of the majority in the century between the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, when black voters were enfranchised but a tiny majority and the white majority routinely elected representatives who favored active segregation and discrimination by the government. Other examples would be if, say, a country had a majority of its population who were farmers, and the ruling Farmer's Party enacted a tax on all people who weren't farmers (or something that worked out to the same thing).

I contend that the 2011 Republican Party is acting in a largely factional manner, and making every attempt at various kinds of tyranny of the majority. Here's what I mean by that. I think the Republicans are going after a lot of groups now simply because those groups vote Democratic. The student-disenfranchisement thing is because college students vote Democratic. The anti-union thing is because the unions vote Democratic, and even more importantly spend Democratic. The anti-immigrant thing is because Hispanics vote Democratic. With every ounce of power it has left, the conservative section of our society is doing its damnedest to crush the political influence of Democratic-leaning groups. And it's not just generational snobbery, or anti-labor sentiment, or xenophobia, though to be sure there's a lot of that in the voting bloc that makes it possible and those feelings are exploited like hell by the politicians who are making this play. If you listened to the Wisconsin debate closely enough you heard Republicans admitting that it wasn't about the budget. Hell, it wasn't even about the decades-old battle of labor versus management, one of the most active fronts of the class wars. No, it was about the fact that unions help get Democrats elected. Likewise the New Hampshire anti-student-voting bill is being pushed not because of anything about how it's kind of silly to let college students vote somewhere they don't ever really live, but because they vote Democratic.

These aren't real acts of public policy. These are the acts of a particular faction of America, the non-young, white, Christian, conservative faction, to take the political power it won last year and use it to fend off demographic changes it fears will push it out of power before too long. These are the acts of a political movement that is so terrified of ever losing at democracy again that it wants to just scrap the whole thing, and rule, itself, by virtue of being the "real" Americans. This is tyranny of the majority (or at least attempted tyranny of the majority).

Shouldn't This Be a Gaffe?

The right to vote is, justly, seen as more or less the single most important political right in a free society. Mainly this is because the vote is the simplest weapon to use in protecting all of your other rights. Accordingly, almost everyone in most nations not currently adhering to either the Islamic or the Communist philosophies agree (at least in public) that all adult citizens should have the right to vote. Disenfranchisement based on wealth, race, gender, religion, all of these have come to be seen as deeply illegitimate. But of course there's that pesky word "adult" in the formula. Everyone also agrees that it's basically meaningless to talk about giving a one-month-old infant the right to vote; the closest you could come would be to let their parents vote for them, which violates other rules like not having some people voting twice. So we need to have some way to figure out who, like the infant, can be legitimately disenfranchised and who must be given their vote. I, as someone who would probably have ranked upwards of 90th percentile in the whole country for pure political informedness when I was fourteen, have been known to wish there were some kind of test that teenagers could take to qualify to vote early, but that approach is typically rejected rather thoroughly. Instead we just draw a bright line at some particular age. It used to be twenty-one in this country, then we moved it to eighteen when the whole "old enough to fight" thing got pointed out. In fact the voting age is 18 in the vast majority of the world, though it's 16 in Brazil and 20 in Japan (where that's the traditional age of adulthood). I think you can make a reasonable argument that 18 is too high, and I think you can also make a reasonable argument that it's too low, though I wouldn't be inclined to make that argument myself.

You can also make a reasonable argument, I think, that the current way American elections law treats college students is a little bit silly. I spent the first eighteen years of my life living primarily in New Jersey, and will have spent the next four spending most of my time in Rhode Island, but still considering New Jersey my home. So naturally in 2009 I voted in New Jersey while a college student at Brown, in 2010 I voted in Rhode Island, and in 2011 and 2012 I expect to vote in New Jersey again. I get to jurisdiction-hop. Will I spend any time living in Rhode Island after I graduate? Who knows? Likewise New Jersey. That this way of doing things is the best possible solution is not, I think, immediately self-evident, though I myself (being a rather emphatic small-d democrat) wouldn't like to make it more stringent. But I think you can argue that it should be more strict and not be a horrible person.

But here's what you can't do. You can't say what the Speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives said to a Tea Party meeting recently in support of a bill against college student voting rights. He said that college kids are "foolish" when they vote, lack "life experience," and "just vote their feelings." But that's not all he said. The unforgivable offense that college kids commit when voting? "Voting as a liberal. That's what kids do." This, see, is what it's not okay to say. This is not a respectable argument. This is the "you disagree with me, so you're doing it wrong" argument. I myself happen to be of the opinion that there are a lot of relatively more aged white persons in this country who have an instinctive, emotional reaction against the idea of a multicultural, culturally liberated society, and "just vote their feelings" in favor of oppression. There are a whole lot of other people who I think are damn foolish for, to use an example that isn't picking on the right wing, having voted for Ralph effing Nader in 2000. I'd even call any of those people who lived in a swing state downright stupid, at least with respect to their decisions on voting that year.

But you don't get to disenfranchise those people. It's possible that if we made voting a privilege that you had to demonstrate some degree of political literacy to qualify for, and could potentially lose, the quality of governance would increase. I don't think it's likely, but I have to admit it's possible. But the legitimacy of government would go to zero, instantly and immediately. And this proposal is even worse. It's not enough that this guy is arguing in favor of a policy that you can make a pretty good argument for if you've a mind. He said, explicitly, that he wants to disenfranchise college students because they vote Democratic. There's no way that allowing the party in power to disenfranchise those who will vote against them can make government better. It's just a pure power grab. It's nothing but oppressing and persecuting your political enemies. We aren't supposed to do that in this country.
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