Liberalism—defined as the political philosophy that prioritizes individual freedom and human happiness—has always had an equivocal relationship with democracy. Democratic governments generally feature much greater liberty and happiness than other types of regimes. Liberals should resist the temptation to embrace authoritarianism.
But there are also multiple ways in which democracy can often threaten liberty and human welfare. These dangers include the tyranny of the majority and widespread voter ignorance. Democracy can also be a threat to its own perpetuation, by bringing to power authoritarian political movements. These are all longstanding problems. But recent events demonstrate their continuing—and in some cases growing—significance. Liberals need to acknowledge their gravity and more aggressively pursue various potential solutions. These include limiting and decentralizing government and possibly measures to make it more difficult for illiberal anti-democratic movements to take power.
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Democratic Tyranny
It is tempting to dismiss the idea of democracy devolving into tyranny or injustice as a contradiction in terms. People often use “democratic” as a synonym for “good,” and “undemocratic” for “bad.” Whatever the linguistic merits of this usage, it is not analytically helpful. If anything good is by definition also compatible with unconstrained democracy, and anything democratic is by definition also good, then democracy ceases to be an analytically useful concept. Better to define democracy as a political system governed by majoritarian political processes. Such processes can make both good decisions and bad ones.
A slightly more sophisticated basis for dismissing the possibility that democracy can be bad is the idea—advanced by a few political theorists, such as Ian Shapiro—that there is no objective external basis for evaluating democratic decisions. If the voters and their representatives support a particular policy, who are we to say it’s wrong?
Such moral relativism has a range of well-known flaws. Here I will merely note that, if we have no objective basis for evaluating the justice of democratically enacted policies, we also have no basis for concluding that democracy is superior to dictatorship, oligarchy, or theocracy. If there are metrics—such as liberty, equality, and human welfare—by which we can conclude that democracy is superior to these other systems, then those very same standards can be used to evaluate democracy’s own output, and to conclude that democratic government may need to be constrained or amended in various ways.
Once we recognize that democratic governments are not inherently just or immune to critical evaluation, it becomes clear that they may be prone to systematic flaws. The most obvious is the “tyranny of the majority.” If democratic governments represent the will of a majority of the population, that majority might sometimes oppress minorities. There are many obvious historical examples from around the world, including the oppression of ethnic, racial, religious, and other groups. This danger is once again a serious menace in many democratic nations, thanks in part to the rise of ethno-nationalist movements—like Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and similar ones in various European countries—that seek to mobilize ethnic majorities in their respective countries by highlighting the supposed threat posed by minority groups and immigrants. Nationalists have a long history of persecuting and oppressing minority groups, and today’s nationalist movements are much like their predecessors in that regard.
The Problem of Political Ignorance
Voter ignorance is a second way in which democracy often menaces liberal values. As described in many studies, including my book Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter, overwhelming evidence shows that most voters know little about government and public policy. Majorities are often ignorant even of such basics as the names of the three branches of government, how the national government spends its money (voters in many nations massively underestimate how much is spent on entitlement programs, while greatly overestimating foreign aid), and which government officials are responsible for which issues.
Such behavior is actually perfectly rational for most of the public. If your only reason for following politics is to be a better voter, that turns out to not be much of an incentive at all, because there is so little chance that your vote will make a difference to the outcome of an election (about 1 in 60 million in a U.S. presidential race, for example, though there are variations depending on the state). For most people, therefore, it is rational to devote very little time to learning about politics, and instead focus on other activities.
Of course there are people who learn political information for reasons other than becoming better voters. Just as there are sports fans who love to follow their favorite teams even though they cannot influence the outcomes of games, there are also “political fans” who enjoy following political issues, and cheering for their favorite candidates, parties, or ideologies.
There is nothing wrong with being a political fan. But if you are seeking out political information for the purpose of enhancing your fan experience, that objective is often inimical to the goal of seeking out the truth. Much like sports fans, political fans tend to evaluate new information in a highly biased way. They overvalue anything that supports their preexisting views, and undervalue or ignore new data that cuts against them, even to the extent of misinterpreting simple data that they could easily assess correctly in other contexts. Moreover, those most interested in political issues are also particularly prone to discuss politics only with others who agree with their views and to follow politics only through like-minded media. This problem may well be even worse today, in the age of social media and a fragmented internet, than in some previous eras.
Thus, we have a serious two-level problem of political ignorance. Most voters are rationally ignorant, knowing little about politics and government. The minority, who are much more knowledgeable, are mostly political fans—highly biased in their selection of information sources and their evaluation of what they learn. In combination, these problems predictably lead to the election of political leaders and parties that pursue a wide range of badly flawed policies, including many that threaten liberty and other liberal values.
Voter ignorance is exacerbated by the enormous size, scope, and complexity of modern government. In most advanced democracies, government spending accounts for a third or more of GDP, and the state regulates almost every form of human activity. Even relatively knowledgeable voters cannot effectively monitor more than a small fraction of these policies and their effects.
The harm caused by political ignorance also exacerbates the problem of tyranny of the majority. Much oppression of minorities is itself the result of ignorance and bias. For example, ethnic discrimination and xenophobic hostility to immigration are often rooted in the ignorant belief that the economy is a zero-sum game, in which gains for one group can only come at the expense of others—ignoring the reality of growth, innovation, and mutually beneficial gains from exchange.
When I first started writing about political ignorance over twenty-five years ago, many scholars argued that voter knowledge levels are not a significant problem, because voters who know very little about government and public policy can still do a good job thanks to information shortcuts, the “miracle of aggregation,” and other workarounds. Such optimism is far less prevalent today, thanks to the rise of Donald Trump and other similar right-wing populist leaders exploiting political ignorance to their advantage. But Trump and his ilk are just particularly egregious examples of a problem that long predated them.
As I and other critics have long argued, information shortcuts have serious shortcomings. Among other things, they often require preexisting knowledge to use effectively. For example, the most common information shortcut is “retrospective voting,” rewarding or punishing incumbent politicians based on whether things went well or badly during their terms. As explained in chapter four of Democracy and Political Ignorance, voters often reward or punish officeholders for things they didn’t cause (most notably short-term economic trends, but also things like droughts and even sports team victories), while ignoring some things that politicians are in fact responsible for.
The 2024 U.S. presidential election showed that shortcuts are even less effective than I previously thought. Key swing voters overlooked the dangerous—and obvious—menace to liberal democracy posed by Donald Trump’s efforts to use force and fraud to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Instead, they focused on punishing Democrats for the less severe problem of inflationary price increases. In the process, they failed to recognize that Trump’s own policies—most notably tariffs, mass deportation, and exclusion of immigrant workers—would predictably increase prices rather than lower them, as in fact went on to happen.
“Miracle of aggregation” theories hold that errors caused by voter ignorance matter little because ignorance-induced voter errors in one direction (e.g., in favor of Republicans) are offset by those in the other (e.g., in favor of Democrats), allowing more knowledgeable voters to determine the outcome. Alternatively, voters collectively might have greater knowledge than they do individually, and the electorate as a whole can make effective use of that aggregate wisdom. As discussed more fully in Democracy and Political Ignorance, this happy outcome can only occur if voter errors are randomly distributed or other highly improbable circumstances arise. In the real world, even a slight nonrandom ignorance-induced bias can make errors virtually certain.
Bringing Illiberal Authoritarians to Power
In worst-case but all-too-plausible scenarios, democracy can be the cause of its own demise by bringing to power illiberal authoritarians. This famously happened in the case of Nazi Germany. More recently, authoritarians have come to power by democratic means and then proceeded to subvert democracy in countries like Russia, Venezuela, Turkey, Nicaragua, and elsewhere. In Hungary, the authoritarian Viktor Orbán was elected by democratic means, used government power to suppress opposition, and stayed in power for sixteen years, until he was finally thrown out by an opposition landslide so great that it turned his rigged electoral map against him. Even in the United States—one of the world’s longest and most deeply established democracies—voters elected Donald Trump despite his visible authoritarian tendencies, and then reelected him in 2024, even after he incited violence to try to stay in power after losing the previous election.
Trump probably won’t be able to completely subvert America’s liberal institutions, which are better-entrenched than those of Hungary, Russia, or Venezuela. But the very fact that he twice got the opportunity to try highlights a serious weakness of democracy.
Possible Solutions
The traditional solution to the danger of tyranny of the majority is to impose constitutional limits on government power, and to ban various types of invidious discrimination. These approaches have great merit, and have achieved much, including the abolition of Jim Crow racial segregation in the United States. But they cannot always cope with the full range of majoritarian tyranny. Most obviously, current constitutional rules, as interpreted by U.S. courts and those in many other countries, often don’t do nearly enough to curb majoritarian oppression of immigrants. The enormous size and scope of the modern state also makes it very difficult to curb these dangers, as it multiplies opportunities for oppression and discrimination.
There is no easy way to “fix” political ignorance. Experience shows that we cannot rely on public education to increase voter knowledge significantly, as knowledge levels have stagnated even as education attainment greatly increased over the last several decades. I assess a range of other possible options in my 2023 article on “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to the Problem of Political Ignorance,” and in Democracy and Political Ignorance.
I believe the best approach is to make fewer decisions at the ballot box and more by “voting with your feet,” where incentives to seek out information and use it wisely are better. People can vote with their feet by choosing which governments to live under, based on their policies, and by making decisions in the private sector. As I discuss in various works, such as Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, we can empower people to make more decisions through foot voting by limiting and decentralizing government power, and by breaking down barriers to both domestic and international migration. These measures can increase the range of options available to foot voters and reduce moving costs. Decentralizing power to lower levels of government and—in many cases—to the private sector can empower foot voters to choose between a wide range of options without having to move long distances. We can also reduce the information burden on rationally ignorant voters by cutting back on the scope and complexity of government functions, thereby making it easier for voters to keep track of them.
In “Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions,” I suggest we should give more consideration to the possibility of simply paying voters to increase their levels of political knowledge, thereby altering the structure of incentives that leads to rational ignorance. For example, philanthropists or nonprofit groups could create a “Voter Achievement Test” that tests basic political knowledge, make it available to anyone who wants to take it, and give monetary awards to anyone who scores above a certain level, awarding perhaps $500 or $1,000 each. But any effective approach will take time, and there may be no one fix that is sufficient by itself. We likely need a combination of several strategies.
Constitutional constraints on government power can also help contain would-be authoritarians. But, given the opportunity, they can sometimes break through the constraints. A common strategy for doing so is the abuse of emergency powers, utilized by Vladimir Putin in Russia, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and others; and most famously by the Nazis, with the 1933 Enabling Act. Legislators would do well to strictly limit emergency powers, and courts should not defer to the executive’s claims that the emergency situation required to trigger their use actually exists; they should demand proof.
Liberals should also give more consideration to mechanisms by which illiberal authoritarians can be barred from power in the first place. Barring candidates and parties from running for office based on their illiberal ideologies alone is a dangerous tool, since it could be abused to suppress opposition parties more generally. On the other hand, there is less danger in barring officeholding by people with a demonstrated record of dangerous, illiberal, and anti-democratic actions. For example, several post-communist Eastern European nations enacted “lustration” laws barring from office some former officials of their communist dictatorships, particularly former agents of the secret police. These laws have helped prevent democratic backsliding, and they have not become a menace to democracy themselves. Had Russia enacted such a law, it might have avoided the horrific regime of ex-KGB Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin.
The United States, for its part, would have done well to enforce Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which barred future officeholding by public officials who engaged in “insurrection” against the United States, a provision originally aimed at Confederate insurrectionists after the Civil War. Elsewhere, I have argued that the Supreme Court was wrong to rule that Section 3 cannot be applied to Donald Trump because it supposedly could not be enforced without additional congressional legislation. A future Congress would do well to enact such enforcement legislation.
The above is just a preliminary overview of possible tools for mitigating the danger that democracy often poses to liberal values and—in some cases—to its own perpetuation. There is room for disagreement over exactly which solutions are best, and the optimal approach for some nations may well differ from that which is best for others. But the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that these are serious dangers indeed. Liberalism cannot do without democracy. But it also cannot survive a democracy with too few constraints on its power.
Image: Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Socrates” (1787), via Wikimedia Commons.
