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Considered Position: Flawed Democracy – Voter Participation

photograph of "Vote" written on chalkboard with drawing of American flag

This piece concludes this Considered Position series on the United States’ claim to being a “flawed democracy.” To see the earlier segments, start here (part 2, part 3).

Most people need to vote if we want most people’s interests represented. Unfortunately, a great number of people don’t vote. Either because they are prevented from doing so or because they just don’t care, many people who can legally vote don’t. In this section we will explore the idea of the “rational nonvoter.” To do so, we will consider debates around mail-in voting. Afterward, we’ll examine what may be the greatest roadblock in having a functioning, representative democracy: voter apathy.

Mail-In Voting

In recent days, mail-in or absentee voting has gotten a lot of press. COVID-19 poses a significant threat to the upcoming election. Either people go to the polls, and the virus spreads and kills, or people don’t go to the polls and the low voter turnout diminishes the legitimacy and representativeness of the results.

One prominently suggested solution to this dilemma is to have people just vote from home via mail-in ballots. Absentee ballots are already used by military personnel while serving abroad. But they are also used domestically. All states allow at least some citizens to vote absentee and more than two-thirds allow all citizens to vote this way. Those states without “no-excuse” mail-in voting require some sort of reason that explains people’s inability to physically come to the polls. Lastly, some states conduct elections entirely by mail and automatically send ballots to all registered voters.

A number of Republican politicians, including Trump, have opposed this solution, typically spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation to justify their position, but most people, including many Republicans, support some sort of solution like this. Besides the patently false idea that mail-in voting increases voter fraud in any significant way, there is one common bad reason for opposing mail-in voting. As Trump himself put the common Republican worry, “if you’d ever agreed to [universal mail-in voting], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Fortunately, this too is false. While increasing access to mail-in voting might increase turn-out and increasing turn-out sometimes modestly aids Democrats in elections, it really matters more who turns-out, and the evidence suggests that “universal vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout or vote share.” In other words, if it changes anything, universal vote-by-mail increases the number of votes, but doesn’t do much of anything to affect who those votes are for.

Nonetheless, as we’ve discussed before, you can be right about something even if you don’t have good reasons. That’s the difference between true belief and knowledge. And in fact, there are some very good reasons to be wary of universal mail-in voting. It may be more of a necessary evil than a universal boon.

Probably the single greatest problem with mail-in voting is the loss of the secret ballot. “The secret ballot” refers to how, when you go to the polls to vote, you can vote whichever way you want without anyone knowing. This is fundamental to democracy. If people are paid or coerced to vote one way or another, the democratic process is delegitimized. With a secret ballot, it is still possible to pay or threaten someone to vote a certain way, but there is no way to confirm if your bribe or threat worked since no one but except maybe a few election officials will ever see your vote. So it isn’t much done. However, with mail-in voting this all changes. Someone’s abuser can stand over them, force them to vote one way, and seal and send the envelope themselves. A corrupt caretaker can do the same to an elderly person. And so could a parent coerce a child. Even without the threat of force, more subtle forms of coercion, including moral judgment and social pressure, can be much more powerful when the coercer can confirm whether or not you listened to them.

In addition, none of these examples even touch on the possibility of buying people’s votes. There are two main ways ballots are checked to make sure they are legitimate. First, there is the ballot itself. It is printed on very special paper with a special code, unique to each registered voter. This way, it’s almost impossible for people to make counterfeit ballots. Second, many states use signature verification to assure a particular voter was really the one filling out their ballot, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) has procedures for tracking mailed ballots and flagging potential fraud.

However, all this only stops people from wholly counterfeiting votes. It is perfectly possible for a real person to receive their ballot, sign it, and sell it to someone else. Even if the ballot is not mailed from the voter’s house, this will not result in it being flagged as potentially fraudulent by the USPS. This is because of the legality of ballot collection in some states. Ballot collection is the process of people other than the voters themselves collecting and submitting voters’ ballots. In some places, this is limited to family members or caretakers. In other places, people working for political campaigns can do it too. The potential for fraud is there and it would likely be difficult to identify and prevent. However, it cannot be reiterated enough that this does not happen sufficiently frequently to have been responsible for any election to have gone one way or another.

In any case, coercion of this sort would seem to be small-scale and disorganized. An abuser’s coercion of someone’s vote in one direction will be countered by another abuser’s coercion of someone’s vote in the other direction. The fact that ballot collection isn’t legal in most places, and that where it is legal there are usually limits, means buying votes in the way I described on a large-scale would be difficult. It would be tough to do systematically and given that the margins on elections are usually on the order of magnitude of at least thousands of votes, it would take a lot of work to change an election. Plus, the aforementioned USPS flagging would require any would-be election buyers to deposit those thousands or tens of thousands of ballots in a wide enough area to not arouse suspicion. And, finally, keeping any such operation secret would require each of those thousands of bought-off voters to keep quiet. The odds of this happening on such a large-scale are on par with the odds of other large-scale operations like the moon landing being faked.

On the other hand, there are some seriously good reasons to support universal mail-in voting. The biggest reason here has to do with those rational nonvoters I mentioned at the start. A rational nonvoter is someone who doesn’t vote who is rational in the economic sense. What this means is that for these people, the cost of voting to them surpasses the cost of not voting. A great deal of people, as we will discuss in more detail later, do not think their votes matter, mostly because of the influence of corporate interests like the ones we discussed when we talked about Citizens United. And if your vote doesn’t matter, why waste your time and gas money driving over to the polling station? More importantly, why take off time from work? Economic circumstance discourages many people from voting. Fourteen percent of registered voters who didn’t end up voting blame a conflicting schedule or being too busy. Filling out an absentee ballot, in contrast, is easy. They send it to you and you don’t even need to buy a stamp. By decreasing the cost of money and time in voting, you make it easier for voters to rationalize voting. And as we said at the start, the more voters, the more accurately an election represents citizens’ interests.

Universal mail-in voting would be a big change to our electoral system. Whether that change would be for the better or for the worse depends a lot on what precautions we take. Mail-in voting has real potential for fraud, even if it hasn’t commonly happened in the recent past. At the immense scale required to have universal mail-in voting for America’s hundreds of millions of registered voters, it’s certain any cracks in the system will be tested. As with any issue, we are forced to weigh the benefits and costs but we won’t really know whether we made the right choice until after the election is done.

Voter Apathy

If COVID-19 keeps a great number of people from turning out in the 2020 election, questions will be raised about the election’s legitimacy. If only a fraction of the population votes, and only a plurality of those votes are for the winning candidate, it will be difficult for the winner to claim a mandate from the people. At the same time, it would be hard for things to get much worse than they already are, turnout-wise.

In the 2016 election, 55.67 percent of the voting-age citizen population voted. That’s way lower than most other democratic nations. Let’s take things further. Donald Trump won the 2016 election according to the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, garnering only 46.09 percent of the votes cast. Doing some math here, we can see only 46.09 * 55.67 = 25.66 percent of the population cast a vote for the current President.

It is difficult to compare the election of our president to the elections of Prime Ministers in parliamentary states but doing so may give us a rough idea of how poor our president’s mandate is (importantly I don’t just mean Trump here: US turnout hasn’t changed much in the last several decades). Belgium had the highest turn out of any nation in 2014 at 87.21 percent. And, the governing coalition held 83 of 150 seats in their Parliament. With the same calculation, we can say roughly 48.25 percent voted for the ruling government. This is clearly a much stronger mandate.

Low voter participation raises fundamental questions about our democracy. A basic view of representative democracy (the sort we have) is that a representative only deserves power if they have popular support. The laws, too, are only legitimate if they are enacted by a government which has popular support. Ultimately, society and government are social constructions; they are part of the social imaginary. They don’t exist in the world like rocks or trees. So the power and effectiveness of government, much like the power of Santa Claus on small children, depends on how much people believe in it.

And people don’t believe in it very much. Around 30 percent of registered voters who did not vote in 2016 did not vote either because they “did not like the candidates or campaign issues” or because they were “not interested” or “felt [their] vote would not make a difference.” The former reason was more common than the latter but 2016 wasn’t terribly representative of people’s general reasons for not voting. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both disliked more than any candidates in recent memory. But more familiar is the sentiment people have that their vote “would not make a difference.”

There are a number of reasons for this sentiment. Foremost among these is a concern with money’s influence on elections. About 57 percent of people agreed in a poll with the statement “politics and elections are controlled by people with money and by big corporations.” This is an issue we have covered at length already. In short, there is little regulation on campaign donations and what regulation there is isn’t enforced very well.

Another major reason for people’s apathy toward voting is that they don’t think their votes matter in a numerical sense. In a nation of over 300 million people, the role each individual vote has in determining a presidential winner or loser has little relevance. This argument stems from a bit of a logical fallacy though. Consider a jar with red and blue sand. When mixed, it appears purple. And every grain of sand is very small. You can pluck out any grain of sand, red or blue, and say “this grain of sand is so small, it has no contribution to the color of this jar.” And when you remove it, you don’t change the color of the jar. Does this prove your point? Of course not. By the same logic, you could claim to be able to remove all the sand, grain by grain, and that the jar would remain purple instead of clear. You could claim the same about removing all the blue sand or red sand.

When one person or one grain of sand is missing from the ballot box or jar, the color of the results doesn’t change. But if many people do not vote, the outcome can change. The only case where it wouldn’t would be if those who didn’t vote were represented perfectly by those who did. If you’re the only one not voting in your whole state, yeah, your vote or lack thereof probably doesn’t matter. But when upwards of 20 percent of the population thinks that way and elections are decided by single digit margins, it is irrational for all those people to think their votes don’t matter. It’s the same logic that advocates apathy in the face of climate change and we all know how helpful such apathy has been so far.

One legitimate grievance voluntary nonvoters have (for many people are prevented from voting by reasons outside of their control) is that candidates don’t represent them. The fault for this at least in part lies with the primary system. Political primaries are the intra-party elections held to determine which candidates will represent the parties on general election ballots. These only started happening in the 1900s and had little real influence in the determination of candidates until the 1970s. Before this, party conventions decided who would be on the ballot. Typically, the candidates were chosen by conventions based on electability. Party values were secondary to victory. Nowadays, however, primaries dominate. However, it’s not immediately clear why this objectively more democratic system should lead to problems with how well candidates represent voters.

The best way to think about it involves first remembering how little people participate in elections in the first place. If you think turnout in general elections are bad, you will struggle to believe how bad turnout is for primaries. Only 28.5 percent of eligible voters voted in both parties’ primaries combined in 2016. Only those who care most about politics are going to turn out for these, and it’s easy to see that people with more extreme beliefs are thus going to turn out than people with moderate beliefs. People aren’t passionate about moderation and compromise. This leads to more extreme candidates being elected by primaries. Those who end up thinking about voting in the general elections will be far less extreme and will thus feel unrepresented leading them to refrain from voting.

Political primaries would be a great thing if everyone voted in them: they are certainly more democratic than the older convention-based system of candidate selection. The people who rallied for them to become the standard for candidate selection were not malicious or stupid. Just as we have seen with a variety of political problems, the cause can often come from rational and benevolent individual decisions. The same goes for corporate campaign donations. While the surface-level behavior of corporate donors seems greedy and self-serving, the roots can be good.

If we are a democracy, we need to encourage changes to our electoral system that will maximize the amount of democratic participation. Those reforms could take any number of shapes but they must be made for change in any other domain to occur. Without democratic legitimacy, any leader, whatever they do, is ineffectual, since their actions are not representative of the will of the people.

Conclusion

This series concludes with a discussion of voter apathy because it is a problem that must be resolved before change can be made for the better in any of the domains we have discussed. People have to care. They have to learn and think. And we have to take care as a community to watch over one another to assure none of us contributes to something terrible out of an innocent or even benevolent motive. Even after reading all of this, having seen all these arguments and motives laid out, it is unlikely that you will change your behavior anymore than I have for learning all this. As Portia said in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”

Nonetheless, life is a series of moments. And if in some of these we remember what we have learned, we might make the right decisions. To be apathetic is to submit to the unconscious, amoral, tide of the structures of our societies that already have great control over the paths we take. And so long as we push, just ever so slightly, perpendicularly to that tide, exerting some small amount of free, conscious will, in just a very few moments, from time to time, things can change and for the better. To refrain from even this is a choice that cannot be blamed on the system, even for all of its ills.

The mission of the Prindle Institute for Ethics is to foster the skills of moral reasoning that give us the real freedom to choose in those few, decisive moments. Without these skills, the possibility for even small change in those moments is lost. Without them, the unconscious tide is all there is. As we have discussed throughout this series, plenty of extraordinarily harmful actions can be superficially justified and rationally so. And the systems under which we live, this tide, strongly incentivize us to adopt some of these while ignoring broader reaching, more complex moral concerns.

Whoever you are, whatever issues you care about, if you live in a democracy, elections and election reform are critical. Those minutes spent voting are some of the few moments where we have the chance to participate in decisive action. This series has been a depressing one, pointing out flaw after flaw in the electoral system. But we can’t just give up and focus on how depressing it is. We must think critically, examine our values, and place our focus instead on what the world can be. As the Lorax famously said in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax:

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

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Does Character Matter?

photograph of empty oval office

One infamous feature of the Trump era is the shocking decline in the proportion of Republican voters who say that the president’s moral character matters to them. According to a recent Gallup poll, during the Clinton administration 86 percent of Republicans thought it was very important for “a president to provide moral leadership for the country.” In 2018, that number was down to 63 percent. The almost inescapable conclusion is that Republicans have simply dropped the requirement of good character — or perhaps made a special exception — in light of President Trump’s obvious moral turpitude.

However, in a certain way the shift is understandable. Although we may think that good moral character is desirable in our elected officials, it is less clear why this should be so. After all, it seems plausible that we ought to support politicians who will be most successful at their jobs, and that the success of an elected official consists solely in successful governance. But moral character is, at best, a weak indicator of a person’s capacity to govern. For example, Robert Caro’s monumental biography of President Lyndon Johnson conclusively demonstrates that he was a real piece of work, but he was also a fabulously effective politician. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether Mother Teresa could have become, like Johnson, a “master of the Senate,” despite — or perhaps because of — her saintly disposition. Thus, if we think that capacity to govern is the sole criteria of success for a politician, then it seems that moral character does not matter a great deal. Much more relevant is a would-be leader’s record of managing and utilizing unwieldy bureaucracies.

On the other hand, most people seem to have a strong intuition that it would be impermissible to allow a murderer or rapist to hold office, no matter how effective they are at governing. So, we are confronted with two contradictory intuitions: that we ought to support politicians solely based on their capacity to govern, and that we ought not support certain morally egregious politicians regardless of their capacity to govern. Something has got to give.

One might question the claim that moral character is a weak indicator of a person’s capacity to govern. An ancient strand of political thought stretching back to Plato and Aristotle has it that virtue is a necessary attribute of a successful leader since effective statecraft requires practical wisdom, and practical wisdom is both the crown of the practical virtues and cannot exist without them. Anecdotally, the evidence is at best unclear. After all, President Johnson will perhaps be forever known for his disastrous decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, a decision that may have been due, at least in part, to certain character flaws. Likewise, President Trump’s cruelty and stupidity seems to be reflected in his many cruel and stupid policies. At the same time, there are surely instances of morally exemplary characters who perform poorly in political office. Thus, a more systematic study than is possible here would be required to make this objection stick.

Another place that some have pushed back on the argument is the implicit claim that successful governance has nothing to do with having a morally good character. What if exercising virtue is part of governing? If to govern is, at least in part, to provide moral leadership, then an elected official’s acts of humility, kindness, justice, and prudence are also acts of governing. If this is the case, then when, for example, a president consoles victims of a natural disaster or school shooting, makes a wise decision about during a foreign policy crisis, or celebrates the civic contributions of particular citizens, these are all at least arguably instances of governing, and yet also (at their best) authentic demonstrations of virtue.

Another weak point of the argument against moral character is the claim that we ought, without qualification, to support politicians who will be most successful at their jobs. Of course, it is important that politicians be successful, since governing is a kind of job that one can do well or badly. But a political office is also a position that comes with a tremendous number of perks; it is not just a reward, but it certainly is one. Because of this, some have argued that we ought to assess a politician not only with respect to how successful she is in policy terms, but also in terms of whether she deserves to hold political office, with all of its advantages. It is this idea that, I believe, best explains why we feel that we ought not support a murderer or rapist for office, no matter how good they are at governing. At minimum, we think that there is a moral threshold below which a politician is disqualified from the advantages of office. Where exactly that threshold lies is a matter of debate, as is whether a politician can re-qualify herself by properly atoning for her moral failures.

In short, we should reject the argument that character does not matter for three reasons. First, it is not at all clear that character is only a weak indicator of the ability to govern. Second, the exercise of virtue is itself part of effective governance. Finally, because political office is accompanied by various perquisites, some decrepit characters may not merit it. With a firmer grip on why character matters, it may hopefully be easier for people to avoid inconsistently applying the character standard to their assessments of politicians.

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Is Biden Trapped by Identity Politics?

photograph of Biden at rally pointing to the crowd

As anticipation continues to build over Joe Biden’s choice of running mate, he’s announced  that his preference is for a candidate of a different race and gender than himself and followed this up with a commitment to selecting a candidate of a different gender. This rankles many people, even some with otherwise liberal leanings. The thought, it seems to them, is that candidates for office should be selected entirely on the basis of their qualifications, without consideration of their sex or race. To think otherwise, now, has come to be pejoratively called “identity politics”, and as more Democrats push for Biden to choose a Black woman, right-wing voices delight in the insistence that Biden is being held hostage by identity politics. What’s so bad about that?

Identity politics is often treated as a term of abuse. This is not surprising, as the concept now so often stands for politicians using their racial or gender identity — or proximity to such — as a means to achieve political aims such as winning an election or silencing critics. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, has seemingly attempted to counter the growing number of criticisms from African-American former allies by increasing public appearances with his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray.

Such uses of identity politics appear cynically calculated to influence voters’ decisions not through sound argument or policy, but by appealing to a desire to support one’s group. In the worst-case scenario, identity politics in this sense is meant to deceive voters: it tells them that a candidate is one of them, or on their side, while endorsing policies that harm them. Identity politics can, of course, be abused in this way, in what Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò has called “elite capture”: the process by which a movement is exploited by elites to serve their own purposes rather than those of the people it is supposed to help. But abuse of this kind is not unique to identity politics, and so not a reason to dismiss it as harmful in itself.

It would be objectionable if Biden or those pressuring him were using identity politics in order to manipulate voters into acting in ways that harm them while helping Biden or his party. But for that to be the case, it would have to be true that he is actively pushing for policies that would harm the voters such a stratagem is designed to win over, and it’s unclear that he is — at least compared to his opponent. Moreover, for him to be using identity politics in this way, it would need to be the case that distracting voters from their real interests were his main reason for leaning toward a Black woman as a running mate. But there is no evidence of this, and it seems unlikely considering the chorus of his supporters pushing him to make this choice. It’s true, of course, that Biden is trying to win the election, and any running mate he chooses will be someone calculated to help him do that. But presumably he does a lot of things with that aim, most of them unobjectionable. If his purported reliance on identity politics is a problem, then, there must be a further reason.

One common objection to identity politics holds that voters have “been presented with a narrative and arguments convincing them to rely on identity politics, or in other words, shallow stereotypes,” as Tammy Bruce puts it. On this uncharitable view of identity politics, it functions primarily by reducing people to representatives of particular identities rather than recognizing them as individuals. Perhaps, then, the critics mean that in having to choose a Black woman candidate, Biden is ensuring that whoever he eventually chooses is not chosen for her qualifications, but for her gender and race alone. This is a popular take on identity politics, but it comes with its own set of problems.

First, to think that the pressure on Biden forces him to choose not a person but a stereotype seems to itself reduce Black women to stereotypes, since simply committing to a Black woman candidate does not imply either that anyone who meets that description is equally qualified nor that everyone who meets that description is qualified. The thought, instead, could be that although a number of Black women are perfectly qualified to be vice president, no one from that demographic has ever been chosen for the role due to a social depreciation of their race and sex. Seen in this light, a commitment to choosing a Black woman need not appear as a commitment to choosing a stereotype, but to choosing from a typically overlooked pool of excellent candidates.

Second, there is an underlying assumption that one’s sex or race is irrelevant to one’s qualification for a job. But clearly this is not always the case. It makes good sense, for example, to choose a Black spokesperson for the NAACP or a woman to consult women on reproductive issues. In these cases, a candidate’s race or sex is a qualification for the position, though it is not the only qualification and may not even be a necessary one. If, for example, a reproductive counselor is needed but no women with the requisite training can be found, it would make sense to choose a man. Still, to strongly prefer a woman for that position is not in itself problematic. There is no reason that the same might not be true of a candidate for vice president, especially if we consider that what qualifies one for that role is not some fixed set of laws, but an interplay of the historical and cultural context with the presidential candidate’s and their party’s strategy and priorities.

But there is an even more widespread, and perhaps slightly more highbrow criticism of identity politics, leveled by pundits from the liberal middle to the far right of the spectrum, such as Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Jonah Goldberg, and the Heritage Foundation. The spirit of this criticism isn’t so much that identity politics encourages us to see each other — and ourselves — as stereotypes. Instead, while such critics sometimes express sympathy for identity politics, they argue that by focusing on group identities it undermines the communal ties that bind us together. On this view, identity politics weakens our shared values by encouraging us to view ourselves primarily as members of sub-national groups and to focus on the interests of our group rather than those of the country. From this perspective, in expressing a preference for a running mate of a particular race and sex, Biden is sending a signal to some social groups that he is on their side but simultaneously telling other groups that he is not on theirs, and that he represents a fundamentally different culture from their own: one that prizes diversity over their interests.

But the view of identity politics as essentially divisive only works if we assume the divisions aren’t there to start with, or that they are minor enough that drawing attention to them causes more harm than good. If the divisions are already there, however, the options are to ignore them or to work to repair them, which cannot be done without recognizing that they exist. Now suppose that an electorate overwhelmingly votes for white men, regardless of the qualifications of others in the running. We might think that such an electorate is flawed. Waiting for the political landscape to improve on its own might work, but it also might not, since the electorate reproduces its biases with every election, choosing the person who “looks right” for the job, and thereby ensuring that that’s the kind of person who looks right for the job. In the meantime, an entire field of highly qualified candidates is left out. Another alternative, then, is to change the landscape by providing extra support for the candidates who don’t fit that type.

Identity politics — or at least the term itself — began life with the statement composed by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. The Black lesbian activists who comprised the collective did not take the concept to mean that they should get special treatment simply because they were Black, women, and lesbians. Instead, the thought was that insofar as society is structured in a way that does not treat all equally, they have a better insight into the inequalities that affect them than Black men, or straight women, might have. But the goal is not to splinter into ever-smaller groups, each demanding different treatment. The goal, rather, is for each group to lay out the ways in which it is not treated equally, so that different groups can come together in solidarity to help right each other’s injustices. Identity politics is the means; solidarity is the end. Elizabeth Drew asks, “But why does a woman necessarily merit a head start on the next presidential nomination?” The answer, perhaps, is that it’s time that women — and especially Black women — have the platform from which to present their own solutions to injustice.

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Campaign Donations, Caveat Emptor, and #RefundPete

photograph of Mayor Pete at an even flipping pork chops in Iowa Pork apron

The second week of December saw another unusual wrinkle in an already-complicated Democratic primary season: grassroots donors began demanding refunds for political contributions made to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign. Citing concerns about Buttigieg’s pursuit of high-dollar donors, defenses of corporate interests, and dismissive attitudes towards questions regarding these tactics, as well as specific revelations regarding his work at the management consulting group McKinsey and Company, some voters who had once considered Buttigieg an interesting newcomer to the national stage are changing their minds. Although the Buttigieg campaign has declined to release data on the number of refunds requested, the movement appears to be growing as the hashtag #RefundPete began trending online.

As it stands, presidential campaigns are only legally obligated to refund a campaign donation if that donation somehow violates legal requirements (such as if it exceeds the FEC’s contribution limits) – no provision requires refunds simply because donors have had a change of heart. However, might Buttigieg’s campaign have a moral obligation to dispense refunds? Or does the Latin warning “Caveat Emptor” – “let the buyer beware” – apply to political donations just as much as it might to property sales?

On the one hand, you might think that a political donation is simply a non-binding show of support – a flat contribution demonstrating a thin sort of sponsorship that does not commit either a donor or a candidate to anything further. Put differently, this view sees a campaign donation as simply a gift with no strings attached. Even though a voter might give money to one (or even multiple) campaigns, that would in no way indicate how the donor would end up voting at the ballot box and, conversely, the candidate can use that money at-will.

On the other hand, it might be that making a campaign contribution thereby initiates the donor into the candidate’s group of supporters, creating a net of (at least some) obligations between the donor and the candidate – such as the expectation that the candidate represent the will of the donors/supporters. On this view, a donation is more like a contract or a promise that a candidate must perpetually merit. Presumably, on this second, thicker view, if the candidate breaks the contract (perhaps by initially misrepresenting themselves or by changing their positions), then the donor could have grounds to demand repayment.

If these choices are right, then it would seem like the #RefundPete movement is assuming the second option to ground their reimbursement expectations: although someone may have contributed to Buttigieg when he was presenting himself as a progressive, small-town mayor looking for grassroots support, that same contributor could easily feel deceived when Buttigieg later adopts a more openly centrist position, chases elitist funding, and cavalierly ignores questions regarding that shift. Because of that perceived deception, former Buttigieg donors might think they are entitled to a refund.

However, it is the first option which seems like the most natural understanding of how campaign donations actually function. Given that there is a clear difference between contributing to a campaign and actively campaigning for a candidate (via rallying, door-knocking, sign-posting, or a myriad of other approaches), it’s not clear that a simple financial transaction (often done impersonally through an online payment portal) is able to automatically create the thick sorts of relational obligations between a candidate and his supporters required to ground a reimbursement request. That is to say, although campaign donors and campaign workers are both supporters of a candidate, they are not identical political agents (someone can easily be one without being the other). If former Buttigieg-donors also put in the effort to build relational ties with the Buttigieg campaign (thereby becoming Buttigieg-campaign-workers), then they might indeed have standing to expect some form of recompense for their wasted efforts (given what they now know); if those former donors are now simply regretting their choice to toss some “pocket change” at a candidate that they now don’t like, then it’s much less clear that they deserve the refunds they’re requesting. Indeed, this second scenario seems fairly familiar to any voter who has ever ended up dissatisfied with the results of representative democracy.

To be fair, it seems like much of the #RefundPete hashtag is motivated by the opportunity to make a political statement about Buttigieg’s campaign tactics, policy positions, and general demeanor: for example, the hashtag was sparked by a campaign worker for Elizabeth Warren and one of the inspirations of the #RefundPete hashtag had only donated $1 to help Buttigieg qualify for an early debate. Particularly in a race where grassroots support has become a defining wedge issue among Democratic candidates (as Bernie Sanders joked about in the December debate), such statements might be perfectly legitimate – but that’s a far cry from saying that the concept of a campaign donation refund is, in principle, legitimate.

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Freedom and the 2016 Electoral Season

‘Tis the season for politics, once again, in the United States of America. And while some surprising new topics, like the size of candidates’ hands, have cropped up in this cycle, some of the mainstays of American political rhetoric are also at the rendez-vous.

Take Donald Trump, for instance.

In January, one of his campaign rallies featured the following performance:


While it features somewhat dated nationalist lyrics (including verses like “Come on boys, take them down!”), slightly updated for promoting Mr. Trump’s bid in the 2016 presidential contest, it also highlights a theme that is about as central to American political rhetoric as apple pie is to American cooking: freedom.

Whether freedom has been invoked as an empty rhetorical trope, as in this case, or whether it has been used more substantitvely, it has so completely permeated electoral discourse as to become inescapable.

Whether they have talked about government regulation, trade, national security, tax reform, education, abortion, or immigration, freedom has been Republican candidates’ preferred frame of reference.

Meanwhile, on the left of the political spectrum, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have been quite as single-minded. While Clinton has spent a great deal of her time trying to square away her commitments to free trade and to an equalitarian progressive politics, Sanders has explained his commitment to democratic socialism as meaning “that we must create a vibrant democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.” “True freedom” according to Sanders, “does not occur without economic security. People are not free, they are not truly free, when they are unable to feed their family.”

And yet, these invocations are largely based on outdated conceptions of what freedom is. The idea at the back of Sanders’ viewpoint, that economic independence is the necessary precondition for democratic citizenship harks back to Thomas Jefferson’s glorification of the yeoman farmer, as historian Eric Foner was already noting in his book, The History of American Freedom. And as sociologists have been observing since the 1950s, such an ideal of economic independence is woefully inadequate to the corporate economy in which we live.

But it is just as true that the thesis that deregulation of international trade or of the labor market will result in greater individual freedom is based on the idea, first defended by classical liberals like John Stuart Mill, that government power threatens individual liberty. Mill’s disciples in the twentieth century, intellectuals like Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman, argued that the crux of liberal freedom consists in the absence of coercion of the individual, either by private monopolies or by government power, so that the smaller the size of the government is and the less active it is in citizens’ lives, the greater will their freedom be.

But as early as the 1960s, the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram actually found, in a series of now famous experiments, that most people do not need to be coerced into doing things they don’t want to do, including engaging in actions which they are convinced will most likely result in the death of an innocent person: they will do these things of their own free will – a situation that suggests that “free will” and freedom may not be the same things after all.

In fact, a growing body of evidence has been produced in the human sciences over the past 40 years that suggests that the notion of a free-willing individual, who can make decisions independently of social and cultural contexts is a figment of our imagination. What this research reveals is that it is not the absence of context that enables individuals to act freely (whether it be the absence of a monopoly or the absence of a state bureaucracy), but on the contrary the presence of one.

This scientific research reveals several very surprising things about human nature that directly contradict the vision of human beings as rational, egoistic individuals, driven by an unquenchable lust for pleasure, money, or power, which we inherited from classical liberalism. The most recent of the great apes, it turns out, is a hypersocial being, whose subjective experience of the world is profoundly shaped by its empathetic openness to others, an openness that is not premised on any sort of fundamental or primitive goodness, but rather on the evolutionary mechanics of communication. Social psychologists, for instance, have discovered that in order to understand what someone else is saying we have to imitate the motion of their vocal chords (though in a much reduced fashion). We have to, in other words, become them. Neuroscientists have also found a specific type of neuron which corresponds to this process in the brain itself, the so-called “mirror neuron.”

Our identities, and therefore our desires, are profoundly affected by our cultural, social, and political contexts. To be free thus necessitates participating in the formation of the communicational contexts that affects and form us all. Freedom requires not only the freedom of expression cherished by classical liberals, but a certain freedom of connection – the power to shape the contexts in which this free expression happens. The freedom of choice advocated by classical liberals and their twentieth century followers confuses the fruit of freedom, the will, with its root. Likewise, those social liberals and socialists who emphasize economic independence while ignoring the other complex dimensions and processes involved in the creation of a free personality seem to be missing a significant component of the reality of the process of freedom.

This conception of freedom, if we examine it closely, suggests that democracy is not just a matter of elections or of constitutional rights (though it undoubtedly includes those concerns). Nor is the issue that of how “big” government bureaucracy will be. More fundamentally, political freedom consists in individuals and communities having the power to mutually affect each other and form each other. Democracy, understood from this perspective becomes a way of life rather than a formal mode of government, one that has consequences not only for the way in which ownership of the media of mass communication is organized for instance (a frequent complaint of the Sanders campaign is that this ownership structure is creating a bias in its coverage of politics), but also for every aspect of our lives, from the workplace to the bedroom, its fundamental principle being “equality of participation.” The aim of a “politics of freedom” in this context would be neither decreased regulation of the economy or increased government intervention but the creation of increased opportunities for participation by all members of society in both economic and political decision-making, regardless of their wealth or income level. Beyond the public funding of elections, one might imagine this agenda including decreased mediation of the mechanisms of political representation. Currently, for instance, the average ratio of representatives to represented in the US House of Representatives is something like 1: 290,000, making it extremely difficult for any but the most powerful interests to gain a hearing, regardless of the way elections are funded. And yet, there seem to be few technical impediments to cutting that ratio in half for instance. Any number of other reforms could be proposed that would enable greater citizen participation in the polity, from making congressional office-holders into recallable delegates in order to increase accountability, to instituting worker and consumer co-management councils in private corporations, legally entitled to raise concerns about the social and environmental consequences of business policies (corporations being legal entities to begin with, there seems to be little weight in the argument that this would be “undue government interference”).

Now, wouldn’t the transformation of everyday life from the standpoint of such a principle of “equality of participation” be the basis for a genuine “political revolution”?