A friend was catching me up to speed on the latest Ezra Klein podcast. According to his recap, one of the key arguments of the most recent guests was that Democrats are falling short electorally due to a failure to swiftly and efficiently implement their own policies. Laws like the CHIPS and Science Act or the IRA are popular, these speakers argued—but heaps of the money allocated for them have simply not yet gotten out of the door. If Democrats could implement more effectively their own legislative achievements, they might not have lost the election (or so the argument went).
I have to say I'm skeptical. I have to say that, deep in my cynical soul, I find it far more plausible that Biden could have delivered any number of billions of dollars in grants for American semiconductor manufacturing—and still have lost the election. Why? Because, even if Democrats had spent every penny that was allocated for these purposes, large numbers of people would never have heard about it. And among those who did, even fewer would have cared.
I don't say this in order to look down on people. Indeed, I'm not sure I would have cared, if I had heard about it. I was not voting in this past election based on the CHIPS and Science Act either, I'm sorry to say.
We want to believe, based on democratic theory, that people are voting rationally in elections. But this hypothesis is about as justified as the concept of the self-interested actor in economic theory. Both may be true, that is to say, in a world where people have perfect and equal access to information. But, as we know from modern theorists, that is not the economic world we live in. And, as recent elections should have taught us—if we did not know it already—that is not the political world we live in either. People do not always know all the things that are relevant to their vote.
Walter Lippmann makes this point eloquently in his classic political science texts: Public Opinion and its even more jaded sequel, The Phantom Public. The voter in a modern democracy, Lippmann notes, is tasked with making rational policy judgments about a social and economic world that has become global in scope. As a result, that voter is effectively asked to do the impossible.
Lippmann did not mean, by this, to sneer at the "average voter" from an elitist perspective. To the contrary, he freely confesses that he suffers from the same problem. Lippmann's point is that no one could possibly keep in mind the host of relevant factors—no human brain could possibly be stocked with all the information—that should inform a sound policy judgement. As a result, when we vote, we are not in fact making an empirical verdict after weighing the evidence. We are voting based on something else—emotions and symbols, which have been boiled down for us into effective stereotypes.
To the extent that people vote based on policy, Lippmann argued—it is certainly not because they are weighing such granular details as how effectively the CHIPS and Science Act was implemented. It's based rather on something far more inchoate. These days, we might call them "vibes." As Lippmann puts it, in the most simple terms, the most that can be expected from the public is that, when they feel good about things, they will reward the incumbents; and when they feel bad about things, they will do the opposite.
As Lippmann puts it: "To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government."
It is moments like these when Lippmann—despite writing The Phantom Public almost a century ago—sounds like a contemporary pundit. After all, Matt Yglesias and others have been writing for months now about the global avalanche of "anti-incumbent bias" that has buried governments of both the right and the left around the world. Their point is that there is no ideological through-line connecting the Labour victory in Britain with the GOP victory in the U.S. or the recent electoral upset in Japan—except that all of these electoral results punished the incumbent party.
Lippmann's diagnosis of why this is happening still makes the most sense. Things seem to be going poorly. People are angry about prices, mass migration, crime, etc. (or what they perceive to be true about these things). And so, they vote out the incumbents. But this does not mean they have made a rational assessment that the incumbents are actually to blame for all these things they dislike—nor that the opposition, whom they are empowering in their place, have proposed sound policies to address them. Obviously, in the case of Trump and the Republicans, they manifestly have not!
Lippmann did not conclude from all this, to be clear, that the answer was to jettison democracy and majority rule. Again, he thought that every person—including if not especially a member of the "elite"—would be subject to the same limitations, because no one can actually hold in their minds all the information and data that would be needed to make a perfectly rational policy judgment.
Take the issue of inflation, which most likely determined—more than any other single factor—the outcome of this past election. People were clearly angry about it. They cast their votes in the 2024 race against the incumbents because they were voting against high prices.
But voting against inflation did not mean they were actually voting for a rational solution to inflation. To the contrary, their vote for Trump completely ignored the fact that many of the policies that led to the current inflation started under his administration; that the incumbent Democrats had managed to lower the rate of inflation again by the end of Biden's term; and that most of Trump's promised policies are widely expected to be inflationary.
So it goes with most elections. The results of most of our policy choices are too confused and indirect for each four-year election to be a sound referendum on their merits. As Lippmann puts it, later on in The Phantom Public: "The consequences [of our policy decisions] are often so remote and long delayed that error is not promptly disclosed."
So, as a result, we are always fighting the last war. We are always voting based on the negative consequences of some previous administration's policy decisions, which are only now becoming apparent. Each administration has to inherit the mistakes of its predecessor, and be blamed for them. So how could a vote taken at a single cross-section of time, based on how people feel about how things are going, just at that moment, ever be a rational verdict on their policies?
So is it hopeless? Is there nothing for a democratic majority to decide—even though we all agree with Lippmann that there is clearly no better system available than letting the majority decide? Is the best that is possible in the best of all possible worlds simply to hold what amounts to a random coin toss every four years, and hope that the new incumbents somehow make better decisions this time around—even though we may never hear about it or understand it if they do, and even though it will probably be the successor administration that is able to take credit for any positive results of these decisions, if they come?
No, Lippmann says. It's not hopeless. Because, even if we as humble members of the public can not actually make fully-informed technocratic judgments about the host of interlocking and complex global forces that will determine policy success or failure in each case—we can apply certain rules of thumb that will ensure that, if nothing else, those who are appointed as our representatives—those who will ultimately be in a position to have to make those policy judgments—can do so in a manner that will at least allow reason to get a hearing.
As such, Lippmann argues, the task of public opinion should be not so much to weigh in on specific policy judgments every four years, as to protect the process of policymaking. We may not know in advance what the best policy is to curb inflation. But we can tell roughly who will be most likely to learn from their mistakes, shift course if their policies fail, or leave power if they lose the next election. Lippmann calls this "the test of inquiry." As he puts it:
"The one test which the members of a public can apply in these circumstances is to note which party to the dispute is least willing to submit its whole claim to inquiry and to abide by the result."
By this standard, however—the public had all the reason in the world not to vote for Trump. Given the choice between the two candidates, after all—Harris and Trump—it's very clear which of the two passed the "test of inquiry." Harris graciously conceded the election after she lost. Whereas Trump never accepted the results of the 2020 election; and he spent the entire 2024 campaign hinting that he might falsely claim victory yet again, if he lost, and that he could even attempt some legally-dubious work-around with Mike Johnson in the House to try to overturn the results.
This, then, is the best reason why people should have voted for the Democrats in 2024. It's not because I'm certain all of their policies would have yielded better results. The effects of our choices are too remote for that. But we can tell which of the two candidates was willing to bring some of the necessary intellectual and political humility to the task of policymaking—which of the two was willing to learn from their mistakes, to confess error, and to cede power to the opposition when the voters decided they had failed— which of the two, that is to say, more fully embodies the "spirit of liberty," as defined by Justice Learned Hand: the spirit that "is not too sure that it is right."
It's one of the great ironies of the 2024 election, then, that so many pundits spent the entire race saying that Harris and Biden should stop talking about "process" issues, like saving democracy, and focus instead on substance. Matt Yglesias was constantly pounding away on this theme: stop making the campaign about sweeping moral concerns, he urged, and talk more about bread-and-butter issues: things like capping insulin prices, and lowering grocery bills.
But the fact is, if we take Lippmann's argument seriously (which I do), "process" is exactly the thing that this race ought to have been about. Indeed, protecting the integrity of the democratic process is just about the only thing we should care about, in national elections.
The policy choices that an incoming president will actually confront are too infinitely complex for these issues actually to be distilled into a single binary decision between two candidates made at a single point in time. The arc of the universe is long, and I can see but little ways, and all that. But we can vote to at least make sure that the people who take power will cede that power if they fail. We can at least make sure that we have some built-in mechanism to do a course correction, if we learn too late that the policy choice we selected was the wrong one.
And so—we should campaign and vote based on "process," rather than substance. The "surest" test the public can apply, Lippmann writes, "is whether" a politician at the very least "is willing to act according to the forms of law and through a process by which law may be made."
Trump, whatever his errors on substance (and there have been oh so many of those too) fails this most basic test of "process" as well. Not only does he make terrible decisions—he also pointedly rejects our democratic process—our system of checks and balances and public accountability through elections that leaves us at least some hope of eventually correcting for these decisions. He is not willing to even submit himself to the "test of public inquiry"—and so he fails it.
This—far more than prices—is what the public ought to have voted on in 2024. But we failed. And as a result, we may have forfeited our own birthright of democracy, because we weren't even willing to defend the bare minimum of democratic process, that is, to apply the bare minimum test of "public inquiry" to which we ought to hold every elected official, when it counted...
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