The New York Times takes aim at the 2016 election and tries to make the case that elections are bad for democracy. Is this a bad time to be talking about elections? or is it a good time to talk about them?
00:01:08.760They go ahead and change it and hope that most people don't see it.
00:01:11.980This means that now people can kind of A-B test headlines.
00:01:16.260Papers can run something spicier out there in the front to make sure it gets clicks, gets attention for a second.
00:01:22.340And if they don't like where it's going, then they just go back and change it.
00:01:25.880Now, obviously, you know, we still have the record there, but it's a strategy that they use to see if they can, you know, they want to get the clicks.
00:02:08.040Why were they suddenly attacking elections?
00:02:11.020Isn't this a bad time for them to be attacking elections?
00:02:13.880We'll get into all that in just a moment, guys.
00:02:15.880But before we do, let's hear from today's sponsor.
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00:03:43.640All right, guys, so let's get back to our article here.
00:03:48.580Now, as you can see, there's now the much safer headline, the worst people run for office.
00:03:54.120It's a time, it's time for a better way.
00:03:57.120Now, obviously, like I said, this is a dicey time for the New York Times to be talking about elections.
00:04:01.880Obviously, the topic of elections is hot and only getting hotter as the left tries to jail the primary political opposition in the United States.
00:04:14.280Whether you love him or hate him, Donald Trump is very clearly the most prominent person when it comes to political opposition of the left in the United States.
00:04:24.000And so going out there and saying we're going to get rid of elections is something that's probably a little too spicy for the New York Times.
00:04:31.380Kind of saying the quiet part out loud in a very real way.
00:04:34.740But, of course, that wasn't the intention.
00:04:37.040They're going to say something a little different.
00:04:38.320They didn't just mean get rid of elections.
00:04:40.720They're going to propose something different here.
00:04:42.400So let's go ahead and dive into this real quick and we'll see what their plan is here.
00:05:58.200That's not true even in the slightest.
00:06:00.360Actually, officials have been working very, very hard to bend and break the rules when it comes to the electoral process,
00:06:07.020which is why no one trusts the government or one of the very big reasons that no one trusts the government.
00:06:13.060And again, we don't need to have any kind of conspiracy theories.
00:06:15.740I mean, you can believe what you want about, you know, bursting pipes and water mains and, you know, magical shipments of ballots at 3M.
00:06:22.720Like, I'll let you speculate on all that stuff.
00:06:24.720I'm not making, to be very clear, YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.
00:06:27.680I'm not making any official statements on that one way or another, but we don't have to speculate about that kind of stuff, no matter how obvious it might be.
00:06:39.860There are plenty of things that are well inside the Overton window, things that have been openly admitted, that are openly documented,
00:06:46.680that show that actually government officials have not been working at all to safeguard elections.
00:06:51.920We've seen from the Twitter files that there's active interference by intelligence agencies, by FBI and other federal law enforcement apparatus to directly interfere in the kind of knowledge that gets spread on social media.
00:07:07.640Even things that we know are explicitly true when it comes to a certain disease people have heard about or when it comes to, say, the story from the New York Post about the Hunter Biden laptop.
00:07:23.600Elon Musk provided it through the Twitter files that these are things that the government actively manipulates during an election cycle.
00:07:32.280We also know for sure that people like Mark Zuckerberg bought out basically large chunks of the American electoral system through a funding scheme.
00:07:40.820You can check out Molly Hemingway's book about that if you want to get more details.
00:07:44.540And then, of course, we also know that Time Magazine explicitly ran an article talking about what they call a cabal, a shadowy cabal that worked together to save or fortify elections.
00:07:58.760So all of those things, they're not hidden.
00:08:03.440Those are things that are openly admitted to by the government or openly admitted to by mainstream media or that we have explicit documentation from the source of kind of social media companies like Twitter.
00:08:16.200So we know all of this stuff is stuff is going on.
00:08:18.720But you still notice that in the second sentence, he still frames it as if electoral officials are working to safeguard the reputation of elections.
00:08:29.160That's obviously not true. So there's nothing controversial is going to come out of this article is basically what I'm going to say right away, because we know he's hedging his bets at the beginning.
00:08:38.200He wants to make sure that he knows he's one of the good ones, that he's not one of those very dangerous right wing people who would throw questions on the electoral process.
00:08:47.380So this is just really a bit of kind of a navel gazing, edgy posting a little bit by this guy here.
00:08:54.560But I want to go into it because it does reveal some interesting things about how academics might think about democracy.
00:09:01.200The language he uses and the way he shades it, I think, reveals a number of things about the way people think about democracy, especially the ruling class that is well worth getting into.
00:09:10.240So let's get back to our article. But if if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.
00:09:19.000So here we go. And to be fair, based based, right, you know, that he's not entirely wrong here.
00:09:25.680I want to be clear. But but let's get into this a little more before I before I explain what I agree with and what I'd quibble on.
00:09:31.260If you think that this sounds anti-democratic, think again, the ancient Greeks invented democracy and in Athens, many government officials were selected to sortition a random lottery from a pool of candidates in the United States.
00:09:45.160We are used a version of lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?
00:09:52.260I hate to break it to this guy, but jurors probably aren't your best example.
00:09:58.060The American justice system isn't really known for its excellent jury trials or excellent juror pools.
00:10:04.800Also, no one wants to do these anymore. The only people who are stuck in kind of, you know, and this is a bad sign, right, that people feel stuck kind of kind of doing this civic duty.
00:10:14.560But the only people who end up stuck in these situations are those who don't have another way to get out.
00:10:20.840Everyone with an excuse uses it to immediately opt out of jury duty, that kind of thing.
00:10:26.140So, so this probably isn't a great, a great thing to begin with, but you'll also notice that he references Athens and their founding of democracy.
00:10:34.680A lot of people do this when I taught, you know, American history and they would reference, you know, the founding and its, its ties back to Athens.
00:10:43.020They would often leave out the fact that Athenian democracy wasn't exactly a rousing success.
00:10:48.040A lot of people think of Athens as just the first democracy, but actually that's very late in its history and things didn't exactly go well kind of for very long after it transitioned to democracy.
00:10:59.400So, you know, they just say Athenian democracy because they think that's something that we're supposed to like, that that's something we're supposed to kind of be excited about, but they never really go into it.
00:11:09.520So, cause you never want the history to get, you know, in the way of, of your example, I guess.
00:11:13.900So they just kind of sweep that aside.
00:11:17.740People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picks systemically.
00:11:22.140But in multiple experiments led by psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true.
00:11:28.260Now, to be fair, again, I'm all for kind of pointing out the problems systemically when it comes to group selection.
00:11:36.160There's a lot of problems with the mechanics of the democratic process that create real issues.
00:11:41.140And so I'm going to agree with him on some of this, right?
00:11:43.900That there's going to be points of this where I think, I think this is actually true.
00:11:47.500However, this experiment citation is pretty dubious because if you look into the experiment, it's just kind of a couple of groups that were selected.
00:11:56.220You know, they're, they're supposed to be in this life and death situation, but of course, it can't really be in a life and death situation because this is an experiment.
00:12:06.260But anyway, one, one group, they kind of vote.
00:12:08.940The other one, they come in at random and the random ones do better in general.
00:12:12.640But this is really in no way a good way to understand what would happen to say randomly selecting leaders for a global spanning empire like the United States or when real life and death is on the line, these kind of things.
00:12:25.320So this is kind of one of those I cited experts and studies scenarios, you know, thing where we say this to just justify the point we're trying to make.
00:12:34.180But there's not really a lot of weight to this.
00:12:36.300It's not like he has some kind of scientific data that really shows what's happening here.
00:12:43.140This is the softest of the soft social science.
00:12:45.320That's just kind of tagged on to here to try to give it legitimacy while he's writing his opinion.
00:12:50.700Groups actually make smarter decisions when leaders are chosen at random than when they are elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.
00:13:11.820Systemically elected leaders can undermine group goals, said Dr. Islam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to assert their personal superiority.
00:13:23.960When you're anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head.
00:13:28.040OK, so there's a lot here that I think is bad reasoning here.
00:13:31.880So first, I'm willing to guess that, yeah, actually, you could, in certain scenarios, get a random person who's going to do better than elected leaders, because there are a number of perversive incentives in elected leaders.
00:13:45.380But I don't really think they're the ones that he's necessarily identifying here.
00:13:48.780So the first one is kind of talking about how they undermine group goals because people who are chosen randomly are rule more democratically.
00:13:58.540So notice what's happening to the word democratically here.
00:14:02.040So originally, most people would think democracy means selecting your leaders by voting.
00:14:07.360That's kind of the most basic understanding for most people when it comes to democracy.
00:14:12.260But now we've removed that definition of democracy, and we're just saying that, well, some of the officials in one democracy were selected a particular way.
00:14:22.340Again, that's not all officials in Athenian democracy.
00:14:24.980There is voting in Athenian democracy.
00:14:27.740But he's just picking one specific section of one specific democracy, one ancient democracy, and saying, well, this is a norm throughout democracy.
00:14:38.240So we're already radically changing the name of it.
00:14:40.840And then when he says led more democratically, that just means in the interest of the group.
00:14:45.600But of course, that's not the only way that one can rule in the interest of a group.
00:14:50.620Democracy is not the only time and the only government system in which the government works for the better of a group.
00:14:59.840And anyway, that's not what most people mean when they mean democracy.
00:15:03.140When they mean democracy, they mean input, right?
00:15:05.740The voice is the key aspect that people think about when it comes to democracy.
00:15:29.300But the monarch is just going to be chosen from the people.
00:15:32.660He doesn't really talk about, like, how often, how long.
00:15:35.480I'm just going to assume I'm going to go with a Roman guess of, like, a year, right, for, you know, for leadership.
00:15:42.440Like, they get chosen for a year or something.
00:15:44.200So I'm just going to assume you become consul for a year like you would in Rome, though, again, that's not random in Rome.
00:15:52.220But the point being is you would be selected, but there would be no vote, right?
00:15:57.520So he's really talking about getting rid of the democracy from democracy, which, again, okay, yeah, that's probably going to remove a lot of the problems, a lot of the issues around the incentives of democracy.
00:16:09.360But that is not democratic, and that's certainly not ruling or being led or being selected more democratically.
00:16:17.240It's actually removing large chunks of the democracy, but you're just feeling better because you called it, like, randomness instead of, I don't know, the divine right of kings or, you know, will to power or something.
00:16:29.420But you still have the same thing, which is basically an autocracy by another name.
00:16:34.860And so this is really a lot of word games here, right?
00:16:38.440Maybe he's stretching and twisting and recompacting the definition of democracy in a very specific way to kind of try to make a novel point.
00:16:47.760And this is really a big problem with academics is that it's all about just kind of making this.
00:16:54.240Obviously, he made a big splash on The New York Times.
00:16:56.620But like I said, I wanted to dive into this because I want to note the trickery of some of this language and how it does make some reasonable points about problems with our electoral democracy.
00:17:07.000But it then couches them in very safe and particular language to keep kind of coding himself as somebody who isn't suggesting what he's really suggesting, which is autocracy at random.
00:17:18.880But he says, because they have a tendency to assert their personal superiority, when you're anointed by a group, it can quickly go to your head.
00:17:40.980But I'll get into that more in a second.
00:17:42.400The main thing here, because he talks about it more, but the main thing here is this idea that, you know, you're going to get the I am the chosen one mentality.
00:17:58.400So, for instance, again, a lot of people have made this point, you know, Bertrand de Juvenal, Curtis Yarvin, that somebody who speaks with the popular voice has more authority.
00:18:22.080And he had to negotiate with many of the local or regional powers, his barons, his, you know, those kind of things, his noblemen, for him to be able to take action.
00:18:32.280So we're kind of seeing a scenario where, again, he's really describing something that's like the strength of a monarchy, right?
00:18:39.780Where you are an autocracy, where, like, one man doesn't have, he's not speaking with the voice of the people because he wasn't, you know, he wasn't selected in this way.
00:18:48.680He doesn't have this force of democracy behind him.
00:18:52.160So you're really just talking about fixing democracy by removing all the incentives of democracy, which, again, may be a good point, but it's not fixing democracy.
00:19:06.240When you know you're picked at random, you don't experience enough power to be corrupted by it.
00:19:10.700Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility.
00:19:13.820I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well.
00:19:18.420And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group's decisions.
00:19:26.420So, again, I think there's a lot of bad reasoning here.
00:19:33.180So, yeah, there might be people who feel this way, but I think that's only because they have grown up in the democratic system.
00:19:40.980So it's not actually, if you look at history, apparent to people that people should be selected through some kind of democratic process.
00:19:48.520In fact, it's rather odd that people are selected through this process.
00:19:52.200And so the idea that, you know, you would feel bad or guilty for not being selected democratically is really specifically tied to the context of kind of modernity, especially the last, you know, 100 years of modern, you know, Western liberal democracy, where this has become the norm and everyone just kind of assumes this is how power is transferred.
00:20:12.840So I can definitely see a bunch of people who are used to voting, used to the idea that you kind of get this vote and that's what gives you power.
00:20:21.720I could see them sheepishly being like, oh, well, I didn't earn this.
00:20:24.960I didn't go through the process, so I can't really take advantage of this.
00:20:28.680I could see a first generation of people who grew up with this norm feeling this way.
00:20:34.400The problem is assuming that this would continue.
00:20:36.540And, again, that's the problem with this experiment in general.
00:20:38.760It's not really an experiment, and even if it was, you can't really follow its second, third, fourth generations of what would happen after.
00:20:45.980I think if leadership became something that was random on a regular basis and everyone just assumed this is how it would run, I think the kind of the novelty of being chosen at random would wear off.
00:20:57.460And I think then people would really shift their incentive structure, especially when the first person who does this realizes like, hey, I get here by random.
00:21:05.620I didn't actually do anything to earn it, and I can't lose it until it's time for someone else to be chosen at random.
00:21:12.980So, really, I can kind of just do whatever I want.
00:21:16.900One of the problems with a democracy we already have is that the limited time people are in charge means that it's best for them to just kind of take everything they can while they're there because they don't have to worry about passing it on to somebody else.
00:21:30.660The only incentive to actually take care of anything in a democracy is that you might be held accountable by the voters, which isn't still very good incentive because actually you're not elected by the voters.
00:21:41.340You're elected by a very selectorate, a very particular swath of the voters who are connected to your patronage network, that kind of thing.
00:21:52.400But now you're going to even remove that, and you're going to just basically hand the person a rental car, right?
00:21:56.720You got a rental car for a week, you got it for free, and you'll turn it in when you're done, and you don't have to worry about it.
00:22:03.640You can't pass it on to your children.
00:22:05.340You don't have to deal with the consequences of what you did to it during that week.
00:22:08.880So treat it however you like, and that's basically what you're incentivizing if you're just picking people at random.
00:22:13.500So yeah, I can see, again, people who were raised in a tradition where a merit or some kind of election was tied to you being selected as maybe feeling sheepish and feeling unworthy and doing their best for the group because they want to prove that they deserve to be there.
00:22:30.560But I really doubt that that would continue long term because that's just not how human nature works.
00:22:34.980And I think that's going to be a consistent problem in this article is he's going to ignore how human nature works.
00:22:42.020He's just going to hope that this is going to engineer the best outcome, that people are going to continuously kind of have this goodwill about them by being randomly selected.
00:22:51.120But I don't really think that would be the case over the long term.
00:22:54.580Over the past year, I've floated the idea of sortition with a number of different members of Congress.
00:23:13.320We all saw the, I mean, how many people who are well into their 70s or 80s have like now frozen up, you know, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi.
00:23:22.680These people, you know, we have people who can barely talk, barely think, should not be involved in government at all.
00:23:34.340Removing that is probably a positive thing.
00:23:37.520You really need to put an age limit on that random selection.
00:23:41.180I don't think he actually suggests that here, but he most certainly should.
00:23:44.780So, yeah, getting rid of that is a good idea.
00:23:46.960And I think any members of Congress who think that that's a problem should probably kind of check their own ability to govern at this point.
00:23:54.020In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery.
00:35:32.180So this has been a myth of theirs for a long time.
00:35:35.760In the United States, presidents assessed as having a psychopathic or narcissistic tendencies were more persuasive with the public than their peers.
00:35:48.960Again, demagoguery is a skill that is probably attached to that.
00:35:54.660But again, if you're removing that, you're just talking about getting away from public opinion, which, again, is what most people think equals democracy.
00:36:02.240So I'm with you that getting rid of this incentive for leaders to have this kind of very specific persuasive ability over public opinion might yield us better leaders.
00:36:14.060I think that's actually probably a true statement.
00:36:45.960Though, remember, this is also a combo deal, right?
00:36:49.760This is kind of the great man is somebody who is both competent and able to rouse the crowd.
00:36:57.800This is why people, they tend to fear people like Trump.
00:37:00.400This is why history tends to fear leaders like this.
00:37:03.940Understandably, it hasn't always gone so well, right?
00:37:06.460But, you know, that is a combination of things that doesn't necessarily come along all the time.
00:37:12.920So, yeah, there's plenty of people who are better at public speaking, a lot of people who are better at rousing a crowd who have no competency in actual governance.
00:37:23.000Even kids who display narcissistic personality traits get more leadership nominations and claim to be better leaders.
00:37:29.980In some ways, honestly, this feels like revenge of the nerd stuff, you know, and I'm obviously a nerd.
00:37:36.140I spend a lot of time talking about political theory.
00:37:38.000I don't think anyone's confused about that.
00:37:39.400But this feels like some revenge of the nerd stuff where it's like, oh, well, everybody who's popular and good at social situations, they're bad.
00:37:48.360And they shouldn't get the advantages that they can.
00:37:51.040But it's like, okay, you know, I get you.
00:37:53.400But, you know, I don't feel like this is motivated entirely out of, you know, the well-being of people.
00:37:59.560And there's there's a little more than a little bit of schoolyard resentment going on here.
00:38:04.260And the dark triad, if the dark triad wins elections, we all lose.
00:38:08.800Again, you know, the social scientists just love these labels, man.
00:38:12.840They love to slap the stuff on people and then build entire theories about it and use it to push public policy.
00:38:19.540When psychologists rated their first 42 American presidents, okay, I would like to be very clear here.
00:38:25.780I would not want to be ruled by anybody who's voted competent by psychologists.
00:38:31.580Like, I don't know how many psychologists you've talked to.
00:38:35.100They're not always the best judge of either character or leadership ability or even competence.
00:38:41.280So, yeah, I'm not sure why these experts would be any better at selecting, you know, or judging who's a good president as opposed to, you know, American people, again, at random.
00:38:54.600So, also, this is a funny thing that happens throughout this article that you'll notice.
00:38:59.760He's appealing to all kinds of, you know, studies and experts.
00:39:05.400But at the same time, he's saying random people would be better than those with the expertise of governing.
00:39:11.280So, it's this very strange signal where, like, he totally trusts in expertise and it's the only thing he really knows how to use to justify the arguments he's making.
00:39:21.860But at the same time, he's basically getting rid of expertise in governance.
00:39:25.580So, it's just expertise in his area that matters.
00:39:28.640And, again, this is a very social science thing to do or really any kind of academic thing to do.
00:39:34.580Expertise in my area matters and all other expertise are more or less irrelevant.
00:39:37.980And so, expertise in governance, you know, demonstrating that, that's not useful.