The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

If there’s no Homo economicus, there’s no Homo democraticus. In a lot of languages the word for “vote” is the same as the word for “voice” (ΓΌЛΌС, Stimme, voix). Democracy is the system in which the voice of the people is sovereign and beyond appeal. Nudge puts conditions on that sovereignty. In this sense its principles are those of civil rights law, in which the voice of the people is sovereign, once it has been cleared of the suspicion of bias. If people are blocked by bias from understanding the “true” nature of human relations, authorities have the license, even the obligation, to overrule them. Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.