Against Democracy Quotes

“In civil society, most of my fellow citizens are my civic friends, part of a great cooperative scheme. One of the repugnant features of democracy is that it transforms these people into threats to my well-being. My fellow citizens exercise power over me in risky and incompetent ways. This makes them my civic enemies.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“To justify democracy takes more work: we have to explain why some people should have the right to impose bad decisions on others. In particular, as I will show in later chapters, to justify democracy, we’ll need to explain why it’s legitimate to impose incompetently made decisions on innocent people.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“Since individual votes don’t matter and hating other people is fun, voters have every incentive to vote in ways that express their tribal biases.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“We should hope for even less participation, not more. Ideally, politics would occupy only a small portion of the average person’s attention. Ideally, most people would fill their days with painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain, or perhaps football, NASCAR, tractor pulls, celebrity gossip, and trips to Applebee’s. Most people, ideally, would not worry about politics at all.3”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“Democracy does not empower individuals. It disempowers individuals and instead empowers the majority of the moment. In”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy

“If Democrats were just unusually good at discovering the truth, that would explain why Democrats converge on one set of logically unrelated beliefs, but it wouldn’t explain why Republicans (or non-Democrats in general) converge on the opposite beliefs. We’d instead expect that Republicans would tend to have randomly distributed and disparate beliefs about most of these topics. We’d expect Democrats’ beliefs to be positively correlated with one another, but Republicans’ beliefs would have few or no positive correlations. We’d expect Democrats’ beliefs to form a cluster, but not Republicans’ beliefs. I suppose the Democrat objector might respond it’s not just that Democrats are unusually good at discovering the truth, but that Republicans are unusually inclined to form false beliefs. (Some of my academic colleagues, who are unrepentant hooligans, will laugh here and say, yes, that’s precisely it.) It’s possible that this is true. But the evidence speaks against it. If we knew that one party had high-information voters while the other had low-information ones, that fact would tend to support the hypothetical Democrat’s argument. Yet while the average Republican is slightly better informed than the average Democrat, the differences in knowledge are not staggering.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy: New Preface

“Consider the following topics: gun control, global warming, how to handle the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, mandatory paid maternity leave for women, the minimum wage, gay marriage, the Common Core curriculum, and flag burning. If I know your stance on any one of these issues, I can predict with a high degree of reliability what your stance is on all the others. If you think about that, it’s rather strange. The issues are logically unrelated. The arguments for and against abortion rights have almost nothing to do with gun control. Yet if you’re pro-choice, you’re almost certainly pro-gun control, and if you’re pro-life, you’re almost certainly anti-gun control.”
― Jason Brennan, Against Democracy: New Preface