Hand-Waving the New Democratic Skeptics

Jonathan Benson’s Intelligent Democracy defends democracy against recent democratic skeptics by arguing that democracy should be evaluated as a complex epistemic system rather than merely as a mechanism of electoral decision-making. I argue this defense does not adequately answer the skeptical challenge. First, Benson’s systems-level defense attributes epistemic successes to democracy that alternative institutional arrangements can also incorporate, while his claim that democracy is especially well suited to select among and regulate these institutions remains largely undefended. Second, his treatment of voter competence focuses primarily on ignorance and motivation while largely bypassing the deeper challenge posed by democratic realism: the evidence that political identities often determine citizens’ policy preferences rather than the reverse. Third, Benson’s principal objection to epistocracy targets restricted suffrage and invokes the demographic objection, but does not engage stronger epistocratic alternatives or my earlier argument that demographic inequalities afflict electoral democracy as well. Indeed, some forms of epistocracy may perform better than ordinary democracy by the demographic objection’s own standards. These omissions matter because answering democratic skepticism requires comparative institutional analysis. It is not enough to show that democratic systems can perform well; defenders of democracy must show either that democracy has independent moral value or that it performs better than feasible alternatives. Benson establishes neither.