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Forget democracy. What we need is epistocracy, where voting power is accorded by competence and knowledge.
H ow did Donald Trump become a serious contender for president of the United States? It's the question everyone is asking, but it's the wrong question. Instead, given how ignorant and irrational voters tend to be, we should be asking how it is that someone like Trump -- a candidate seemingly as ill-informed as he is uninterested in policy -- hasn't already made it to the Oval Office.
Americans widely believe that democracy is a uniquely just form of government, and that political participation enlightens and ennobles citizens. Call it democratic triumphalism. It is the American creed, so ubiquitous that it goes unquestioned. Philosophers and laypeople, optimists and cynics, partisans of the left and the right, your activist aunt and your languid uncle, all take it for granted. The three most important political philosophers of the past 50 years -- John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and G.A. Cohen -- disagreed about almost everything. Yet all three embraced some form of democratic triumphalism. As the Yale political scientist Ian Shapiro writes, "The democratic idea is close to nonnegotiable in today's world."
Sure, everyone admits democracy has problems. But the problems are superficial, like acne or a bad hairdo. And despite its flaws, the argument goes, democracy is better than the alternatives. If the wrong candidate wins, it's because of gerrymandering or the influence of rich donors. If politicians push bad policies, it's because they've been bought by the special interests.
The solution to what ails democracy, nearly everyone concludes, is more democracy. In the late 1800s, 70 to 80 percent of eligible Americans voted in major elections. We now muster, at most, 60 percent for a presidential election and 40 percent for midterm, state, and local elections. Because the greatness of democracy is an axiom in American life, we're unshakeable in our faith that if more people voted, our politics would improve. We're like Europeans in the Middle Ages; disease and poverty don't shake our faith in an omnibenevolent God, and we blame the Devil for everything.
But the rise of Trump should...