Elites Don’t Want You To Vote
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Every election cycle, men and women reemerge to tell us that our vote has no value. They insist that the public is generally misinformed about the issues and that we should instead let ourselves be led by smarter, more objective rulers who understand how the world really works.
Every time this advice is offered to me, I cannot help but think of the character Bran Stark (Isaac Hempstead Wright) from Game of Thrones (2011–2019). When the medieval fantasy show ended in the summer of 2019, the answer to who would sit on the Iron Throne and rule over the fictional continent of Westeros was finally answered: Bran Stark was appointed King because he was a dispassioned ruler who would not succumb to the petty impulses of the late King Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) or the genocidal ones of the Mad King.
All-knowing and singularly focused, Bran is cold, rational, and “perfect.” He does not get bogged down by the whims of his predecessors because he has transcended the person he used to be. He delegates most of the actual governing to the realm's technocrats, such as Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) and Samwell Tarly (John Bradley). He instead spends his supernatural abilities on larger tasks such as hunting down dragons.
I remembered being incredibly frustrated when the series finale ended, in part, because Bran didn’t seem like a good leader. He was unfeeling in his outlook, withholding his future sight to let thousands die during the battles of Winterfell and King’s Landing. Wasn’t this cold Machveiallian outlook no worse than Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) or the dozens of other ruthless leaders dotting the history of the show?
And yet, the idea of a cold, benevolent ruler has existed in the world of philosophy for generations. The shadow of this utopian figure has haunted our discussion of politics as commentators scoff at consensus-building and point to this mythical figure as the person who should lead us. We shouldn't listen to our own thoughts about justice or governance. No, we should rely on the Brans of the world.
Vote for them, or better yet, don’t vote at all.
This paternalistic outlook is as old as democracy itself. It has nothing to do with proper leadership, but rather, it is about convincing everyone else that they are better off not questioning those in power.
Democracy is a historical anomaly. While anthropological evidence suggests that some pre-agricultural societies were more egalitarian in the past, most of our recorded history has been one of tyrants, kings, emperors, high priests, and committees leading over their subjects. The idea that citizens should elect their leaders, and, in some cases, craft their own laws, has only enjoyed popularity very recently. It’s a sadly novel idea, and one that has faced immense resistance from our society’s most educated and celebrated minds.
One of the first recorded Democracies was ancient Athens during the late 6th century BCE, and it was slightly different from the representative democracies of the modern world. While citizenship was constrained only to free men (women, slaves, foreign residents, and children were not considered citizens), it was far more active than simply choosing a representative. Some political positions were chosen by lot (see the Boule), and their legislative Assembly (see the Ecclesia) was opened to all citizens who qualified.
Critics of this system emerged from men we widely celebrate today. Prolific philosopher Plato (428/427 — 348/347 BCE) wrote disdainfully of ancient democracy. He was deeply impacted by his mentor Socrates's prosecution and execution (470–399 BCE) in the Athenian justice system. Plato thought that this decision was indicative of majority rule in general. He advocated for leadership, not dictated by the majority's will, but through men skilled in governing. In book six of The Republic, he analogized a country's stewardship to the captain of a boat singularly focused on his craft — a metaphor popularly referred to as “Ship of State.”
A grim example of the Ship of State principle is the dystopian science fiction movie Snowpiercer (2013) by director Bong Joon-ho. The film takes place after geoengineering has created a new Ice Age that makes the Earth’s surface uninhabitable. The last surviving remnants of humanity live aboard a train that circles the globe indefinitely and is heavily stratified by class. This straightforward metaphor for capitalism has the poor living in the cramped tail section, while the rich live it up in first-class. The train is helmed by their leader Mr. Wilfred, and they have an almost God-like reverence for his leadership. As a teacher explains to a classroom full of children:
“If we ever go outside the train? We’d all freeze and die. If the engine stops running? We’d all die. And who takes care of the Sacred Engine? Mr. Wilford!”
The picture we have here in both Snowpiercer and Plato’s original Ship of State metaphor is of an educated man knowing what’s best — the inputs of his “lessers” be damned — which is an awfully convenient position for a powerful person to take when arguing for who should command a society. Plato’s conception of a good leader would go on to be called a “Philosopher King.”
This viewpoint would impact “Western” thought for thousands of years: Plato’s pupil Aristotle would argue that governments were best led not by the many, but by virtuous men; Nietzsche detested the “mob” of democracy in favor of a more virtuous Übermensch; John Stewart Mill suggested that extra votes should be given based on citizens’ education level; and even in the modern era, academics such as Jason Brennan argue that our government would be better off under the rule of knowledgeable technocrats and academics (known as an “epistocracy”).
Brennan labeled his ideal class of political participants “Vulcans,” after the aliens in Star Trek, for their ability to gauge facts dispassionately. As Writer Katherine Mangu-Ward wrote favorably of Brennan’s work in Reason Magazine:
“Encouraging more ignorant people to vote is not just pointless, argues Jason Brennan; it’s morally wrong. There is no duty to vote, but many people may have a duty not to vote. Boosting turnout among citizens who are young, uneducated, or otherwise less likely to be engaged — the primary targets of get-out-the-vote campaigns — is likely to have the unintended consequence of encouraging people to fail in that duty.”
Time and time again, the narrative is for common “ignorant” people to stand aside as more “sensible” minds take the helm. Yet, whether you are calling your objective, unfeeling leader a Vulcan, a Philosopher King, an Übermensch, or a Bran Stark, these figures are striking for their detachment from reality. Bran Stark could lead Westeros because he was a demi-God connected to a system of magical trees spanning the continent.
That type of person doesn’t exist in real life.
Despite this anti-Democratic critique's prolific nature, there is no concrete evidence that more “educated” people are better at making decisions. Educated people make poor decisions all the time. So much so that the question “Why are smart people so dumb?” has become a meme.
This oversight applies especially in politics, where educated people don’t seem to be more objective in their political decision-making. One widely cited study titled Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government suggests that your ability to solve math problems is impacted when said problem contradicts your political preferences. There are also historical events such as the war in Iraq, the election of Donald Trump, or the early spread of the Coronavirus, where educated people were confident about a decision that would later turn out to be calamitous. To that last point, as late as March, I, a person who researches for a living, still thought the Coronavirus was no worse than Influenza.
Smart people don’t know everything.
The idea of intelligence itself is a highly contentious and poorly understood concept that changes radically depending on your cultural context (see the racist history behind the concept of Intelligence). It’s common in the United States to associate more education with liberal thought. Still, a conflicting 2011 study by academics Rindermann, Flores-Mendoza, and Woodley found that education was linked to center-right and centrist ideology in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
Our perception of intelligence is based on subjective values that change greatly depending on where you are in the world.
Smart people are just like us in the sense that they have cognitive biases that prevent them from seeing the full picture. If we only listened to the educated unquestioningly, we would not have advanced in areas where they were wrong, and they are wrong a lot. For example, Charles Darwin, the person described by many as the Father of Modern Biology, was adamant in public that women were inferior to men and should exist within separate spheres. The fact that he was highly educated and knowledgeable about biology didn’t mean he was any better at handling the political question of female emancipation.
The idea that regular people shouldn’t participate in politics has less to do with the superiority of the knowledgeable and more about powerful people’s fear of what comes after they stop captaining the boat.
The powerful have always been terrified by the will of the majority. Plato believed that a pure democracy was one step away from tyranny. Philosopher Hobbes described in his seminal work the Leviathan that our state of nature outside of society is a “war of all against all.” There is this widespread fear amongst elites that if you remove the constraints of “civilization,” then the people will descend into an unruly mob.
In disaster studies, there is a name for the upper classes' widespread fear to assume the worst from people. It’s called “Elite Panic.” Coined by Caron Chess and Lee Clarke of Rutgers University, the term describes a phenomenon in disasters where the rich and powerful use this worldview as a justification to panic, and in some cases, preemptively punish the “mob” they fear will inevitably form in the aftermath.
A quintessential example of this is the response effort to Hurricane Katrina. The image portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed), evacuees were hurting each other. Mayor Nagin saying:
“They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”
These statements would later be deemed exaggerations, but this perception of looters would have a detrimental impact on the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to “secure the city.” As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisiana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard and private security forces hired by the wealthy entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did. As one community organizer told The New York Times several years later of the violence in the Algiers neighborhood:
“I done seen bodies lay in the streets for weeks. I’m not talking about the flooded Ninth Ward, I’m talking about dry Algiers. I watched them become bloated and torn apart by dogs. And they all had bullet wounds.”
This hodgepodge of local, state, federal, and private forces would be an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks to come: officers would detain and in some cases harass citizens distributing supplies; vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts, and very early into the recovery the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the looting. The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme).
Not only did “the mob” in New Orleans not devolve into chaos, but it was also followed by a lot of spontaneous mutual aid and charity. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic as well as distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed “the Cajun Navy” rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops.
While humans are not perfect during a crisis, much like our misconceptions about the Philosopher King, they don’t always devolve into chaos either. In fact, moments of crisis are often filled with examples of strangers coming together for no other reason than that they want to help each other. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), author Rebecca Solnit highlights dozens of examples of people preserving during moments of disaster. The early days of the 1906 San Franciso Earthquake are known for makeshift community kitchens. Londoners during The Blitz are routinely cited as being more unified following the bombings.
The mob that men like Mayor Nagin fear often doesn’t come, and yet we see this fear everywhere in our culture. You cannot turn on a movie, show, or briefing without some authority figure justifying why they won’t relay information to the public. “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.” says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn’t share the existence of aliens with the public. “Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but
panic,” says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The fear of public unrest, however, was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction.
In a more serious, real-life example, Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo refused to take more drastic steps to curb the Coronavirus out of the same concern. He said at a press conference in February: “We have to keep this in perspective. There is no reason to panic. There is no reason to have an inordinate amount of fear about this situation.”
We see this same fear of the mob built into the very bedrock of our government. James Madison in Federalist Paper Number 10 discussed a concern about curbing the influence of an “overbearing majority.” When we look at our political institutions, such as the Senate or the Electoral College, they are built on the premise that the government must be insulated from the people's will. For example, the presidency is not decided by the popular vote alone, but by electors who are awarded to states in a way that deflates the influence of more populous ones.
Like with disasters, however, this fear has not insulated the United States from the rise of right-wing populism but exacerbated it. The anti-populist Electoral College assured President Donald Trump’s victory. Hillary Clinton famously secured the popular vote, but because of the Founding Father’s fear of the people, an obviously incompetent authoritarian was put into office.
There is an argument to be made that the over-inflation of rural interests via the Senate and House of Representatives has likewise undermined our democracy. When it comes to voting overall, Democrats routinely outperform Republicans nationally in elections. Still, the federal legislature's structure means that the Democratic Party has to win by huge majorities to take hold of either chamber. Rather than form a coalition represented by the nation's interests, this disparity has incentivized the Republican party to rely on voter suppression to win elections, and it wouldn’t have been possible without the Founder’s fear of the public.
Anti-populism has not inoculated us from demagoguery, and it, in fact, ignores successful movements in history, such as FDR’s New Deal, that have given us noteworthy reforms. There are plenty of examples throughout history of leaders who have the public’s ear and do not use it to become tyrants.
This intrinsic fear of “the people” has less to do with our state of nature and more about the elite's cruelty.
From Plato to Nietzsche, most of the philosophers and academics we have referenced today were supporters, or in many cases, members of the upper class. Plato was born into a prominent Athenian family, and John Stuart Mill’s father was a famous philosopher who rubbed elbows with the likes of Jeremy Bentham.
As our values have progressed, we have had this desire to cauterize these thinkers' outdated views from the ones we consider useful. Plato is routinely cited as an influential political thinker, even if his views on women and slavery are rightfully deemed antiquated by today’s standards. We preface our most lauded thinkers with calls to place them into their proper historical context, ignoring that maybe their cold outlook is foundational, not ancillary, to their worldviews.
For example, when it comes to Plato’s understanding of human nature, we should recognize that his idea of slavery cannot be viewed in isolation. Plato, who also owned slaves, tied his justification of slavery into his aristocratic belief that certain people are just superior, writing in the Gorgias:
“…nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior.”
This is the logic of a fascist who does not value human life. There’s a scene from FX’s TV show Archer (2009 — present) where the secret agent protagonist Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is confronting a South American dictator named Caldarone, and the latter provides a very similar metaphor to Plato’s when justifying the violence of his leadership:
CALDARONE: Meat is whatever the tiger says is meat. Because God made him the boss and all the other animals his food.”
To which a sarcastic Archer replies:
“ARCHER:…thank you, George Bore-well, for that clunky analogy in defense of totalitarianism!”
I watched this episode very close to when I read Plato’s Gorgias, and it struck me because it was the same logic. Plato, like Caldarone, was a slave owner rationalizing his cruelty. He thought that slaves were just naturally meant to be slaves, and in a move very similar to chattel slavery, even advocated that the offsprings of slaves should belong to their masters. It should be noted that Plato and his student Aristotle stood against an ancient Athenian movement to abolish slavery. If they were transported to our time, then they probably would align more closely with far-right reactionaries than anyone we associate today with political freedom.
However, buried underneath this justification of a “natural order” was panic that the status quo would become disrupted. Plato was fearful of slave revolts and wrote in his work titled Laws a series of prescriptions to avoid them, including to make sure your country’s slaves do not have a shared heritage or language. He would go on in Laws to describe the various ways owners should treat their slaves to avoid insubordination.
Likewise, Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, although occasionally critical of the institution of slavery, was also fearful of the possibility of revolt. When it came to his own slaves, he would only free 10 out of the 600 enslaved people he held in bondage throughout the course of his life. Part of the reason for this hesitancy came down to fear. He once described owning a slave as holding “a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”
These men were terrified that the people they had enslaved — the people they had denied their humanity — would rise up and kill them. It was not an irrational fear. History is filled with slave revolts and uprisings. American history has at least 250, and Jefferson was aware of them — the Haitian Uprising generated particular concern for him.
However, these moments in time were not lawless masses of people descending into mayhem the moment their bondage was lifted. They were reacting to injustice and fighting for their freedom against the people who had robbed them of their humanity. As Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: “Riots are the language of the unheard.” Slaves revolted because they were in bondage — not because of the savagery of human nature.
We saw similar sentiments from elite academics in response to the French Revolution. People such as Edmund Burke claimed that it was destroying French society. In his seminal work Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), he discussed the tyranny of the mob, writing:
“If I recollect rightly, Aristotle observes that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance with a tyranny. Of this I am certain, that in a democracy, whenever strong divisions prevail (as they often must in that kind of polity), the majority of the citizens is capable of cruelly oppressing the minority, and that this oppression will extend to far greater numbers and will be carried on with much greater fury than can almost ever be feared from a monarchy.”
This claim that the majority is to be more feared than the monarchy may be true for someone of Burke’s standing (he was a famous writer and his father was a successful solicitor). Still, the fact remains that the French peasantry was suffering due to the monarchy’s political incompetence. The price of bread, the primary food stable for the peasantry at the time, had increased significantly after two years of failed harvests up to an estimated 88% of a worker’s wages. People blamed the aristocracy for that, not simply because of politics, but because they were starving.
It’s telling that the powerful choose to see these moments in isolation from the larger, systemic problems that caused the populace to revolt in the first place. Their labeling of humanity as a mob allowed them to uncritically sidestep all accusations of cruelty and mismanagement inflicted by those in charge. When you see all humans as potential barbarians-in-the-making, it becomes really easy to justify any violence against them.
The privileged have employed this belief as a shield to preserve their own power. They were and are continuing to project their fear of losing power onto humanity as a whole, and it has tainted how we perceive society and human nature itself.
The finale episode of Game of Thrones ends with Westeros' surviving lords and ladies deciding who will lead them. The character Samwell Tarly meekly stands up and suggests that maybe the people should elect their leader, to which the nobles respond with uproarious laughter. Lord Edmure Tully sarcastically remarking: “Maybe we should give the dogs a vote as well?”
They then elect Bran Stark — the unfeeling Vulcan and Philosopher King — who seems disinterested in bettering the lives of the average Westerosian. The series ends much how it started, with nobles arguing around a table about how to lead the country, all promises of broken wheels, and reform left to the wayside.
This is a form of propaganda thousands of years in the making. The elite have held disdain for those beneath them for as long as we have debated who holds power. Every year people — who are either wealthy or uplifted by wealthy interests — tell you paradoxically that not only does your vote not matter but that it is a dangerous thing worthy of being feared.
But dangerous to whom?
If we truly valued all voices, then those uplifted by wealth might have more to worry about than “too many voting.”