Doing the Job

I was thinking about the Yale article that I wrote about last week, the one that was titled "Study: Americans prize party loyalty over democratic principles." There's a short description that follows the title: "Given the choice between preserving democratic norms and achieving their ideal policy goals, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests."

It occurs to me that one can rewrite that into a more general principle, namely: "Given the choice between privileging a specific tool and accomplishing the task they set out to complete, many Americans would opt for the latter, new research suggests." Framed that way, it's remarkable that anyone, let alone some 3.5% of respondents, prefer the former.

My general listening habits when it comes to political podcasts leans left of center. Five Thirty Eight Politics is in regular rotation, and I listen to The Rest is Politics from time to time. Not because I'm really that much of a lefty (Alistair Campbell drives me up the wall), but because I like learning about politics (and polling) and right-leaning media tends to lean very hard into Culture War issues that I have zero interest in. National Public Radio podcasts are much less into that sort of thing and even they tend to spend more time on them than I have time for. In any event, one thing that I've noticed (especially from the aforementioned Mr. Campbell) is the tendency to reject the idea that liberal democracy is a means to an end. When it is treated as such, it's often described as a wonder tool that will magically solve everyone's (legitimate) problems. But more usually, it's treated a something along the lines of either an end in itself, or a moral imperative.

And maybe that's the problem that "democracy" has. I've noted a couple of times now that Rory Stewart from the The Rest is Politics has pointed out that if people are becoming wealthier under an authoritarian regime, they tend not to bemoan the lack of democratic institutions, and that such institutions had lost their association with prosperity. But it doesn't make sense to hand someone who wants to cut a board a hammer, and expect them to whack away out of loyalty to the item at hand.

Among the Democrats I know, there's something of a tendency to chalk former Vice President Kamala Harris' loss in November to factor like racism and sexism. But I never really felt that she was offering solutions to people's problems, unless their problem was specifically the idea that Donald Trump would return to the White House.

I understand the media types who understand liberal democratic norms to be of the utmost importance to them. But, Thomas Nagel aside, most people don't see the needs of others as binding  moral imperatives on themselves. Even if they see their own needs as requiring that others alter their lives.

For democracy to be people's number one choice, it has to deliver what they want. 96.5% of people would rather achieve their ideal policy goals than simply have a specific type of government. So rather than wringing their hands at people's pragmatism, the proponents of liberal democracy have to start ensuring that it delivers the goods.