SMOOTH SAILING - By Richard Posner, Justice on the 7th circuit

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SMOOTH SAILING

Democracy doesn't need Deliberation Day. If spending a day talking about the issues were a worthwhile activity, you wouldn't have to pay voters to do it.

By Richard Posner

The proposal by Professors Ackerman and Fishkin for a Deliberation Day, on which citizens lured by federal financial incentives would engage in collective deliberation over issues and candidates in the forthcoming national election, seems to me to misunderstand what modern political democracy is and should be.

The remote inspiration for Deliberation Day is Athenian democracy, in which the citizenry as a whole was both the legislature and the principal court, and the appointment of most executive officials by lot prevented a distinct governing class from emerging (or at least impeded its emergence). It was a genuine and in many respects progressive and attractive system of self-rule, but one utterly irrelevant to a vast and complex modern polity such as the United States or, for that matter, a small and complex polity such as Belgium.

Modern democracy, for reasons of efficiency and feasibility, is representative democracy, which involves a division between rulers and ruled. The rulers are officials who are drawn from—to be realistic—a governing class consisting of ambitious, determined, and charismatic seekers of power, and the role of the citizenry is to vote candidates for officialdom in and out of office on the basis of their perceived leadership qualities and policy preferences. The system exploits the division of labor and resembles the economic market, in which sellers and consumers constitute distinct classes. In the marketplace, the slogan “consumer sovereignty” signifies that the essentially negative power of the consumer—the power not to buy a particular product, a power to choose though not to create—constrains the behavior of sellers despite the vast gulf of knowledge and incentives that separates sellers and consumers. The same relationship exists between politicians and voters.

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SMOOTH SAILING