Voters Aren’t Dumb. And, Experts Aren’t as Smart as They Think.

Dan McCarthy, who edits Modern Age, thinks that what many believe to be “good” democratic citizenship is completely unrealistic. He challenges the idea that voters need expert-level knowledge and instead argues that elections are really judgments about whether life is getting better or worse. Along the way, he exposes the tension between intellectual elites and ordinary voters and why humility might be the missing ingredient in our politics. It’s a sharp, provocative conversation about expertise, democracy, and who we trust to know the truth.

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Transcript

Michael Lee : [00:00:00] When we disagree is a show about arguments, how we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. Have you ever sat in a confusing lecture and looked around at everyone nodding along and just assumed you were the only one who was lost? Later you discovered that everyone was confused.

Nobody had any idea what this person was talking about, but they all thought they were alone too. This is called pluralistic ignorance. When everyone privately rejects a norm, but thinks everyone else is accepting it, the social psychologist, Floyd Allport. Identified this phenomenon in 1924, and it explains why groups often make decisions that nobody actually wants.

Pluralistic ignorance creates bizarre disagreements where everyone argues for positions they don't really hold. The family just keeps going to the same restaurant every Sunday, even though each member secretly is bored and doesn't really like the restaurant. A team implements a policy where [00:01:00] everyone becomes privately convinced is stupid, but nobody speaks up because everyone else seems like they're on board.

We become prisoners of imaginary consensus. This dynamic happens in a friend group. When everyone pretends to enjoy activities, they've outgrown or tolerate someone's problematic behavior, assuming others are genuinely okay with it. In political discourse, pluralistic ignorance manufactures artificial polarization.

People assume their neighbors hold more extreme views than they actually do. So they either silence or moderate their positions or amplify them to fit in a community where 80% of people privately support compromise becomes gridlocked because everyone thinks they're surrounded by extremists. The silent majority stays silent because they think they're in the minority.

Breaking pluralistic ignorance requires someone to speak first. One person saying, I don't actually understand. This gives others permission to admit their own confusion. One family member suggesting a new restaurant reveals everyone's been pretending this [00:02:00] whole time. Understanding this phenomenon helps us recognize when groups might be trapped in unwanted patterns.

Sometimes the bravest thing to do in a disagreement is to admit uncertainty, discomfort, or disagreement. You might discover you're not alone. I'm Michael Lee, professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. Our guest today on When We Disagree is Dan McCarthy.

Dan is the editor of Modern Age Journal, which can be found@modernagejournal.com. Dan, tell us an argument story. 

Daniel McCarthy : Well, you know, right around the 2016 election, it was either shortly before or shortly after I went and spoke at a university in the Midwest on the topic of civic engagement and democracy.

And the argument that stuck with me is that the. Many of the professors I encountered and they were talking to students, they were talking on podcasts, they had a line which said that democracy is a straightforward process of learning the most you can about the [00:03:00] candidates, then making a sort of rational decision between them.

And you should be engaged by voting for one of the two major parties. You should never really contemplate either voting for a third party or writing in a candidate. And it seemed to me that the premises of this sort of argument or assumption on their part were actually quite false. And my own views were rather contrary actually to this, I think very conventional picture of correct.

Civic engagement and participation in democracy. 

Michael Lee : What was the alternative you were stressing? 

Daniel McCarthy : Well, you know, you can't say that people should be research. Oh, it's, it's not easy to say. People can simply research their way into knowing the best candidate because of course, where do you stop? And if you take the argument seriously enough, you would, you would say on their side that maybe you have to, you know, do years and years of research in order to figure out the Be Best candidate.

It would seem to suggest that there is, that this is a knowledge question. As opposed to a question of either evaluating immediate data that are available to everyone or a matter of evaluating philosophical fundamentals. And it seems to me that actually almost all [00:04:00] elections are referendums on the party in power and really anyone who is in the country is capable of knowing whether things are getting better or getting worse, and that's the key decision to make.

Michael Lee : I'm not sure if this term had taken off yet in 2016, but it's certainly taken off now. It almost seems like this is a debate about the utility of doing your own research as a citizen. 

Daniel McCarthy : It's weird because this is a rare example where you know, the people I'm criticizing would actually say you should do your own research.

Yeah. And that not only should you do it. But also they don't really have a natural limit to place upon this. And it would seem to be, you know, if you think that you have to be an educated voter in order to be worthy of casting a vote, then the question is, well, why don't we restrict voting simply to people who have PhDs or who are experts in particular issues?

If, if expertise is really the thing that democracy is meant to be maximizing for, then you would take that approach rather than having a mass electorate the way we do. So you can't possibly justify having universal suffrage. On the basis of knowledge and expertise [00:05:00] as being the thing that justifies democracy.

Michael Lee : There's this dispute about the American founding historians arguing about two foundings. That is one a kind of Jeffersonian small D Democratic founding. One, a little bit more of an elitist perhaps Madison, certainly Hamiltonian kind of a founding. And it seems like some of that dispute is being referenced here in your talk at this Midwestern university in 2016 with.

These professors having a kind of tacit faith in everyone's ability to access information, to criticize that information and separate the wheat from the chaff and what's good and what's bad information, and then vote for the candidate that best checks out. And so well, what I think, go ahead. Yeah, 

Daniel McCarthy : you, you, you've really hit upon something important because actually I think this rather conventional view that these academics were reflecting is in a way a kind of unexamined combination of both the elitist and the populist versions of democracy.

So on the elitist side, it says that this is fundamentally about knowledge. And making the one correct [00:06:00] decision. But then it also says that absolutely everyone can do this uhhuh. So those premises don't really match up very well because of course some people have much more time and many more resources to conduct research and other people don't really have you know, such resources at all.

And so you know, you have to choose you know, if you're gonna make a consistent argument, I think you have to choose one way or the other. You can have universal suffrage, or you can have a rule by well-educated elites, but trying to combine the two winds up getting you into difficulties because then you say.

Well, what do you do if voters actually first of all, are simply ignorant and haven't done the research? And what do you do if voters are lazy and don't want to do the research or if they do the research, but they don't come to the same conclusions that the experts have come to? So I think combining those elitist and populist elements into the conventional idea of how you have civic engagement and democracy actually winds up creating something which is a, a self contradiction.

Michael Lee : The other dispute, this really reminds me of, and, and a lot of these arguments are rehearsals of, or recreations of arguments in the 1920s between. John Dewey and Walter Lipman with Walter [00:07:00] Lipman largely saying in public opinion and a few other works, that there can be no such thing as what he called this Omnicompetent citizen that everybody inevitably thinks in terms of stereotypes.

And we should to some extent just be ruled by experts and social scientists and let. That the rest of us be free to live our lives. And Dewey seems to largely agree with all of the criticisms that there is no omni omnicompetent citizen. That the public sphere, as he says, is in Choate and is is impossible to be burn born under these educational circumstances.

But for him, democracy is the cure for all problems of democracy. And so we can only have faith that the populous amongst us can get a little better at making a little bit better decisions. 

Daniel McCarthy : What's interesting about that is that both Dewey and Lipman are coming from basically the same premise. They believe that there has to be a very high degree of expertise guiding society and guiding politics, right?

Whether that's coming from a set of experts who are set apart from the people, or [00:08:00] whether it comes from making the people, right, as you say, omnicompetent. Uhhuh and I, I think that premise is actually mistaken that the people don't have to be omnicompetent. They just have to be competent enough to know.

Again, whether the direction of the country is getting better or worse, and who's actually in charge right now, and therefore whether they should endorse the way in which our current leaders have been taking us or whether they should object to it. Now, admittedly, you know it would help perhaps to have a good rationale for why you think things are getting better or worse.

There may be a situations where things are getting worse in the short term, but they actually are necessary. For the long term health of the country. So there is a, a role to be played by a certain amount of education. I'm not denying that. Yeah. But I'm saying it's actually quite minimal and it doesn't require the degree of omni competence or even high expertise or even sure.

The degree of intense devotion to following politics that the the most highly educated among us, and that included lipman and, and Dewey, and it includes today's academics that all of them are, are overestimating exactly what's involved in politics and what's really necessary. Is to make a good [00:09:00] judgment about simply the people who are already ruling over you.

Michael Lee : I think some of this also seems like a dispute over the nature of the public sphere and participation in the public sphere, and so to, to, to stretch out and tease out exactly what your argument entails. If you're saying that capable participation in politics really just requires kinda meeting a minimum threshold about whether or not the country's going in the right direction or the wrong direction, that we need the same or new.

Leadership, but we exist in a very complicated public sphere where people very loudly are trying to manipulate whether I perceive the country to be going in the right direction or the wrong direction. And I'm uneducated or ill-equipped to criticize the information I'm getting than perhaps the country could be going in one direction.

But I'm hearing voices saying it's going in a different direction, and I've been persuaded at best, manipulated at worst, into making a decision that's against my own interests. 

Daniel McCarthy : Yeah. So again, it's interesting to me that, I think that [00:10:00] argument is something that a great many intellectuals automatically believe without examination, and I don't know that it really holds up very well because oftentimes, highly educated persons are themselves extremely susceptible to manipulation, and it simply isn't the case that highly educated people are necessarily.

Going to have a more accurate perception of reality or of the political situation in the country than the less educated do. Because sometimes, you know, if you are highly educated, if you're very sophisticated, you will buy into ideological frameworks or various sophisticated narratives which may actually, you know, be internally consistent.

Right? You are not consistent with the world outside your window, and I think if you are less educated. You may be misled in other ways, perhaps emotionally or else, or, you know, in other respects. But you're not gonna fall for that particular set of intellectual you know, delusions. And you see this with, you know, the enthusiasm that intellectuals often have for socialism and for various schemes, which seem to be.

You know, quite well thought through, but that in fact wind up being disastrous when [00:11:00] they're attempted to put, be put into effect. So that's not to say that I think the people are always right, but it is to say that I don't know that the intellectuals and the elite are necessarily more right than the people.

I think there's fallibility on all sides here 

Michael Lee : when some of us are manipulable. All of the time and all of us are manipulable some of the time. And with that in mind then what is to guide all of us who are, who are sinners, all of us who are imperfect E except to place some faith in some methodologically rigorous way to understand how the country's doing and how I should vote as such, not with the idea that I know more, therefore I'm.

I'm a better person or more capable actor that I'm, I'm manipulable just like you. And so it's not a faith in necessarily a class of person, but instead in the application of a method. 

Daniel McCarthy : Well, even that I think is a little bit problematic as you've concluded it because the application of a method, again, is something that tends to lend itself towards a, [00:12:00] a certain amount of formality and sophistication, which is not really what you find among the mass voting electorate.

I don't know that they have that kind of method, or at least not consciously. Right. What, what you said first, however, I think is exactly on track that we are all sinners and we need to approach politics with a certain amount of humility and what's required mm-hmm. Of the voter mm-hmm. Is in fact a certain degree of introspection about the state of the country and about whatever it is that they do know about the competing candidates.

And by the way, it seems to me that this introspection can, and, and some sometimes should. Lead them to want to vote for some alternative to the two major parties. And even if that's not going to have a, you know, an impact materially on the election, it can still be simply the right thing to do in terms of registering the appropriate response to perhaps a country that's being you know, misled.

Both by Republicans and by Democrats. If you constantly simply endorse the the very limited number of options that you're given, you're never gonna have any other options. Now, I would have, yeah, other criticism to make of third parties. I think it's usually [00:13:00] a silly idea to vote for them, but it's not something that should be written off in principle.

Michael Lee : Yeah, it seems like there's two, two disputes that are being had there in this 2016, and we're kind of teasing out one dispute about citizen capability, so I'm gonna stick with that one. But there is this other one about what is the outcome of, as you said, a certain degree of introspection. An interesting phrase I'm gonna come back to, and should that be something that is.

Tied to the existing two party system or something that explores additional options. So let's put that in the parking lot for just a second and come back to this, this certain degree of introspection. I guess my question would be, where do voters get that? 

Daniel McCarthy : That has to come from simply, you know, the habit of character.

So it's not so much an intellectual practice as it is simply one of you know, interacting with your fellow citizens and thinking about, you know, what is, what's happening in their lives as well as what's happening in one's own life and in one's own life. What are you expecting from government?

Are your expectations calibrated too high or are they perhaps too low in new? [00:14:00] Clearly different people will have different responses to that, but it really is a matter of thinking through what it means to be an American, what it means to be a human being. Certainly if you are of a religious background, what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be of whatever your faith tradition might be, and to think about how all of these things fit together in terms of your decision in the voting booth.

Michael Lee : Yeah, I guess, I guess if I, I'm trying to figure out the language to summarize this dispute as as efficiently as possible. 'cause when I spin it through in my mind sometimes I'm like, this doesn't seem like there's much of a gap here, but now I'm hearing a bigger gap. And so perhaps the one point of view is vote your values first and then use a kind of minimum threshold of information to figure out whether the current ruling climate is befitting your values, whatever those values are.

Then that is a kind of minimum threshold for effective political participation. And the other one, wa, is a little bit more blank slate, right? You have value commitments, but you really need to figure out which candidate most [00:15:00] thoroughly endorses those value commitments, which party which policy, et cetera.

And so there's a much higher participation threshold in terms of how much information you need to gather and sift. 

Daniel McCarthy : Except I would say that I think you're still bringing this back to the idea that you know, candidates, platforms, details are the things that are the substance of politics. Whereas in fact, it's really the more fundamental question of what is the state of the country?

Are you being well-served or ill-served by the people who are in charge? What has happened during the last interval between the previous election and the new one? And again, I think there's actually quite a lot of political science, which says that certainly presidential elections tend to be referenda on the party in power and people are simply saying.

Do I want to continue with the path that we're on by either reelecting the incumbent or electing the person following that person in their the same party? Or do I do, I think the country is in need of a change, right? That's, I think a very minimal standard, but it's a standard that actually maps democracy can meet.

Whereas if you have [00:16:00] a much more sophisticated standard, the question is why we would have democracy at all. And if you're going to have democracy, you're going to have to probably restrict it to highly educated persons. But again, if you're going to do that, then why? Have it at all, rather than simply saying what we actually need are not a mass of voters, even a restricted mass of voters, but rather the persons who know the specialties of politics, know the policy questions better than anyone else.

And ultimately, you know, you'd have a very small. Intellectual aristocracy that would be making those decisions. Sure. Or perhaps not even an intellectual aristocracy. Why we should perhaps, you know, just defer to you know, if there's a single individual who has the wisest possible understanding, right.

We should just all, you know, defer despotically to you know, letting this person make our decisions for us, because this is the wisest, best informed, most knowledgeable. Right. And in fact, and here of course, here in the 21st century. What this will increasingly wind up turning into is an argument for letting artificial intelligence make the decisions for us, because what human being can possibly process all this information as well as an information [00:17:00] processing machine possibly can do.

Michael Lee : Yeah, this is the electoral college at best, and the, the despotism at worst, perhaps even the kind of artificial intelligence controlled despotism. And so, and that, that really gets to the stakes of this dispute, which is where I wanted to turn to next, which is why does this argument about what we expect of people participating in, in a democracy matter?

And I want to state your case as charitably. I can, as I can, and get your, your sense of whether we're getting it right or not, which is that. What's at stake is that we overestimate the public's ability to participate in democracy at our peril and continued overestimation. Of that participation can lead us naturally to conclude that maybe their participation is not possible at the threshold that we hope.

And so instead, we should encourage people to continue to chat with their neighbors, to vote with their values, and to figure out, basically, as Reagan said, an 80, are they better off now [00:18:00] than they were four years ago? 

Daniel McCarthy : I agree with the latter part of your statement there, Uhhuh. It's actually not the former.

So the problem is not simply that we overestimate what the public is capable of and that that leads us off the rails in various ways. Mm-hmm. It's rather that you have a disjunction and an animosity, an alienation that begins to set in between people who think of themselves as being highly educated and therefore capable of making the right decisions.

The larger volume of voters who not only don't have that knowledge, but also don't think that that knowledge is necessarily the thing that should be guiding their decision. So you wind up with a a conflict between two layers in American society and that conflict winds up depriving in some ways the the mass public of the kind of loyal service it should be getting.

From the intellectuals who instead of, you know, telling people that they're not, you know, reading the newspaper often enough to make a decision mm-hmm. The intellectual should be saying, well here's, you know, instead I'm gonna make a case. Why you should perhaps read the newspaper, but more to the [00:19:00] point, I'm going to argue that, you know what, I need to learn something from you.

Just as you need to learn something from me. I need to learn something as an intellectual. From the temper of the people and why they're coming to the conclusions. They are not just, you know, tell them that they're wrong to be you know, voting for a candidate I don't like, or for not following the methodology that I think is appropriate mm-hmm.

For deciding how they should vote. 

Michael Lee : I follow you so there's, in, in your mind there's more of a kind of intellectual. Class war that's happening between the populist public and intellectuals. Those intellectuals in your mind need to be a bit more different to the organic knowledge that's generated from folks who don't have as many degrees as them.

Daniel McCarthy : Just so, and again, I would say that humility is one of the key ideas here. And what we've, what we've seen, I think, is that among our intellectual leadership in this country for, you know, a generation or more, there hasn't been the appropriate degree of humility. And that's created a great deal of strife between intellectuals on the one hand, and intellectuals, I mean, broadly it's people who are, you know, have college degrees and who.

Generally have [00:20:00] this, you know, sort of immediate faith and expertise, this unexamined faith, I should say, in expertise and who are not questioning their own fallibility, but instead tend to look at the fallibility of others. I'll just add, by the way, there is of course this, you know, very awkward paradox where many of the people who are.

You know progressive and who think that, you know maybe in a kind of Dewey, Dewey way that we could create this Omnicompetent citizenry. There are also people who argue that, you know, it's, it's unthinkable that you could possibly have, you know various kinds of tests of whether people are well enough informed that they should be voting.

And so again, I think they are kind of hoisted on their own guitar. They've got an argument. They have conflicting premises and they're not able to reconcile them, and they, so they wind up being very surprised especially when voters that they think of as being willing to defer to their experts like themselves wind up not being willing to defer to them.

So again, it creates a certain unnecessary level of strife because you have too much pride on the part of the more elite kind of citizen. Whereas humility would actually serve them better. It would help them understand why [00:21:00] voters are angry with them, perhaps, which is certainly where we find ourselves today.

Michael Lee : Last question and a and a big one to close on as well, which is that. We are involved in a cultural dispute about the role of the expert as we speak, and social media certainly has enabled generations of podcasters and influencers who are certainly not experts in, let's say science or democracy to hold forth and curry lots of public opinion and sway favors and so forth on these kinds of an issue.

So there has kind of been a, a. For lack of a better word, an awakening of, of sources that people can listen to. And many are saying that we now live in the most anti-intellectual age, the most anti expert age. And for them of course, it's about rebirthing, the, the role of the expert and the critic and so forth.

What would you say about that debate? It seems, I, I think I hear you on one side of it, but I'm curious how you respond to the claim that we live in an anti-intellectual age, and that's a bad thing. 

Daniel McCarthy : I think if we are living in an anti-intellectual age, it's purpose [00:22:00] because, no, it's not. Rather because the, the public has suddenly taken a unreasonable animosity towards the intellectual elite, but rather the opposite that you've had intellectuals who have become.

Almost you know, like followers of Lysenko in the old Soviet Union that we have. It's, it may not be quite as clear cut in some respects as it was back in the days of the old Soviet Union, whether we're talking about biology or whether we're talking about economics. But even today. The ideas which are proliferated in higher education are often very detached from reality and, you know, are often you know, incorrect, you know, even according to their own frameworks.

But the people who hold them are not necessarily examining them close enough. So again, I would just come back to this idea that intellectuals in their pride are sometimes dumber than the public because what they're doing is that they are sort of dazzled by their own verbal constructions, their own intellectual you know, sort of sandcastles.

And they can't, they have a difficulty escaping that and realizing that the real world, and [00:23:00] certainly the social world in which most Americans live is quite, quite different from what they're thinking about in their own minds or reading about in their communications, their books, and you know and other kinds, their lectures and so forth with people on the same intellectual level as themselves.

So there needs to be more humility. There needs to be a sense of stepping outside and not, you know being within an intellectual construct, all of one's life, otherwise. You wind up with an intellectual class, which again, instead of serving the public winds up feeling as if winds up feeling frustrated.

'cause it sees its role as being a tutor and it's being ignored. 

Michael Lee : You edit modern age. I'm curious about how modern age and in your writing or in your editorship is practicing some of these principles of humility and charity that you talk about. 

Daniel McCarthy : You know in a weird way, one of the ways you practice humility is not to take it for granted that you know where people should be categorized.

So the nice thing about modern age, modern age is a scholarly, intellectual quarterly. It goes back to the 1950s. It was founded by Russell Kirk, [00:24:00] but it's a magazine with a public mission, and it's not simply for area experts. It's not simply devoted to politics or one particular field. It's rather an omnibus publication for.

The educated, or rather the, the intellectually engaged layperson. And that means that we ap we appeal to academics, but we also appeal to anyone who wants to engage in the world of ideas. And that includes people who may be outside of the normal ambit of expertise within the university. So I think, you know, we have.

One different, one problem that emerges from this misunderstanding, mutual misunderstanding between intellectuals and the mass public is that the intellectuals underestimate what the public is capable of. It's not that the public is going to be herded through either a method or a set of intellectual commitments.

That the elite wants them to be herded through, but the public actually does include many people who take a, a personal interest in deepening their knowledge and engaging in the things that are that seem most important to them. And you should make [00:25:00] information freely available to them. So I'm actually encouraged by the proliferation of different sources.

It seems to me that trying to restrict information, trying to control it is usually going to be counterproductive. And in fact, you know, the best we can do is to say here is, you know, we're not simply gonna let you know the worst kind of you know the most depraved material be the only thing out there if you want to compete with.

You know, the material that may be leading citizens astray, you have to make good material available just as freely as the bad material is. 

Michael Lee : Dan McCarthy, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Daniel McCarthy : Thank you. 

Michael Lee : When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee.

Recording and sound engineering by Jesse k and Lance Laidlaw. Reach out to us at When We disagree@gmail.com.