The preferential voting experts are not making logical contact with the people when they use words like "majority" and "fairness" or phrases like "freedom of speech". This is because preferential voting is an ideological movement which abuses these terms and which is therefore rejected by all true Neopopulists.
In particular, the axiological assumption that it is somehow "bad" or "negative" (politically, culturally, or sociologically counterproductive) for a relatively small voting bloc to "spoil" the opportunity of a potential "majority" candidate is very obscure at this point by philosophical standards.
Political philosophers will encourage political scientists to withdraw from projects which assume what should first be investigated and established. Why assume that there is a problem to solve, while the problem definition is either unclear or seems entirely controversial? Project objectives for political "science" would become more relevant by focusing on why people might look upon any simple democratic result as somehow negative in some sense other than that their side may not have won. In other words, let's all get on the same page even if what that means is recognizing precisely where our logical constructs are completely disconnected.
From a Neopopulist perspective, any claim made by political "scientists" that the people hold to a notion (and I use the word formally here to refer to the preconceptual, prephilosophical feelings of people) that there is something negative about the "spoiler" effect in plurality elections, is a sociological observation, not a philosophical truth. Our first question is "How did people get so brainwashed in the first place?"
Reason (not rationalism, which is always ideological) requires that we engage in a transcendental critique of this vague notion that there is something negative about pluralities.
What kind of reply will I get if I ask someone who represents the "spoiler" school of thought why it is a bad thing for a few people to prevent the victory of the candidate who, we assume, would have otherwise won? Without question, from a neopopulist point of view, the "expert" who thinks there is a problem and would tinker with the voting process to try to fix it is The Rationalist.
Here's the transcendental critique in a Socratic dialogue starting with The Rationalist's reply:
The Rationalist: It is obviously a bad thing for democracy when a small group of people can defeat the intentions of the majority.
The Neopopulist: What do you mean -- "majority"?
The Rationalist: Well, we know that if the small group who voted for Bean, had not voted at all, or mostly voted for Baker in Bean's absence, Benson would NOT have won. Bean and his supporters are just spoilers.
The Neopopulist: So?
The Rationalist: So Baker should have won.
The Neopopulist: But he didn't get the votes.
The Rationalist: But he should have gotten the votes.
The Neopopulist: So is that all your saying? That YOU think Benson should have won? Why is this anything more than an expression of your opinion and values? In what sense are you describing an objective failure of the system -- a structural flaw to be fixed by "experts"?
The Rationalist: The clear intent of the voters has not been realized.
The Neopopulist: Ah, so you are an expert and you know what the clear intent of the people is despite the fact that the actual outcome contradicts what it is that you propose to know. This is called "begging the question". It is certainly not empiricism. You cannot know, at the exact point in time when the vote took place, that a majority of all the people favored Baker even if you somehow how knew it at another point in time. And in any given election, once again at a specific point in time, the fact that a majority of voters favors Baker cannot assure us that a majority of all the people favored him. Unless you want to force people to vote you will never perfect the relationship between all of the people and a majority of those who vote -- which must be an even clearer and more important flaw from an expert perspective than plurality elections. You cannot make the democratic process morally perfect without gross and probably hopeless intervention, all of which will occur from your entirely relative point of view. What you are really up to is making up an excuse to intervene in ways that cannot fix the moral issues, but can present you with the power to influence the election.
The Rationalist: Well, if we can't even agree that Baker would have won, and should have won if the system was working, then we cannot even have a discussion.
The Neopopulist: Now you're talking. Let's see if we can repair our ability to make logical contact by exploring whether or not we can even agree on what a "majority" is.
The Rationalist: All right. I guess that much is worth a try.
Neopopulist: If the small contingent that voted for Bean, had joined entirely to Benson, Benson would have won by even more than he did, correct?
Rationalist: Correct.
Neopopulist: So would you have then been satisfied that that was a majority?
Rationalist: Of course.
Neopopulist: So you are satisfied that a "true" majority has suddenly appeared for Benson simply because you do not otherwise know that they would have voted for Bean?
Rationalist: Hm. I'm already getting confused.
Neopopulist: So am I. If the only difference between a legitimate outcome and a "spoiled" outcome is your ignorance of what would have otherwise happened, it is simply empty in ANY context to think of an election as either having been spoiled or unspoiled. It is nothing but the application of a value judgment. If you are ignorant of the possibility that a small group would have voted for Bean, had he been running, it's a legitimate majority. But if you are somehow able to know that had Bean been running, Benson would have achieved only a plurality, this is now suddenly, simply by virtue of your presumption to know what would have otherwise happened, spoiled and illegitimate? Obviously this is nothing more than an elitist complaining that history did not perform the way he wanted it to, and that HE "knows" it would have performed differently if only it had not been "spoiled". This whole line of argument has no moral reason. And it certainly isn't "science" unless you are willing to admit that science is presumption and ideology.
Rationalist: So it's all just relative? What I regard as a plurality is what you regard as a majority? Nonsense. A majority is a mathematical fact, and so is a plurality.
Neopopulist: So why are you applying a value to either? How can either of these mathematical facts in itself be more valuable in any sense than the other?
Rationalist: I am not following you.
Neopopulist: That's right, you're not. This is where it all breaks down. In your confused mind, a majority is in some obscure sense objectively more valuable than a plurality, in spite of the fact that in any given election, a given candidate, sporting the exact same policies, might be elected by either a majority or a plurality. The value you place in the majority outcome is just subjective and relative to you. It's a ritualistic preference. Whether made by a plurality or majority, a political decision has the same intrinsic pragmatic soundness (or lack of it), which, of course, is assessed in totally relative ways by every constituency. Why would the very same decision suddenly become more valuable in itself because a majority rather than a plurality made it? In addition, an election that results in a plurality for Bean may falsify, for all we know, the majority of all the citizens supporting Bean at a particular moment in time because many supporters simply failed to vote. Just how far to do you want to go in perfecting democracy? At any moment in time after an election, the support of the majority may be lost by the elected candidate and shift to the loser making the office holder a plurality winner for the day. Should we have an election every day? But the most important point is that being elected by a majority instead of a plurality, all other things being equal, does not make the decision in itself more fit in any ethical sense. As long as everyone has the right and the opportunity to vote it is impossible to describe why a majority decision is morally superior in itself to a plurality decision without a wholesale rejection of democracy. If a plurality is somehow corrupt compared to a majority then democracy is intrinsically corrupt and hopeless wherever it means that people can run and vote freely. Under these desirable conditions there is always the possibility and reality of pluralities. Rationalists will not settle for the obvious and simple justice of the plurality. They insist that the decision must be more technically correct in some moral sense and that somehow, by producing a 51% majority at the end of a voting process, this is achieved. We haven't the slightest idea what they are talking about. A moral point, as such, had better be intuitive. This is technocracy and rationalism run amok. It's gobbledygook, political poetry, an obscure sentiment of some kind, a foreign language. Democracy has no technical moral goals (like perfect majorities) by nature. It can only have technical moral goals imposed upon it by philosophically naive "experts" who are really just emoting. Hiding behind any devaluation of pluralities is the totally silly notion that democracy should be perfectly rational from some expert's perfectly relative point of view. In other words, what this is really about is the experts attempting to reduce the impact of splinter groups on the left who often cost left-wing candidates a plurality decision - plurality decisions which would be embraced by the very same experts if they happened more reliably. It makes perfect sense that the emphasis on a majority decision is morally unintelligible since it is just camouflage for disappointment over a lack of plurality wins. It's just a rhetorical device.
Rationalist: That is quite a speech. But if what you are saying is that there's really no such thing as a majority in any election and that it is always just pretense to propose that one can know the majority's will when elections get screwed up, then I have to disagree. I believe that reasonable people can know what's best for everybody, and that a majority of the people will, on average, recognize what is best for everybody and vote for it. When that doesn't happen, the process is screwed up.
Neopopulist: Ah, a true believer in the Utilitarian calculation! The rationalists finally did create a utility calculator. They call it an "expert". They refuse to publish the logical design of the device. It seems to arrive at any conclusion it wants.
The key words in your reply are the pretentious ones: "When elections get screwed up." I don't mind that you believe this -- that simple elections get screwed up when they result in a plurality that inhibits your view of what's best for everybody. What I mind is that you fail to recognize that your view leads to nothing but expertism and authoritarianism. The truth is, those that would tinker with simple democracy, start with the joke of utilitarian expertism and an agenda, and work back to the conclusion that a given election is a travesty because there can be no doubt that it should have and would have served their rational ends if it had not somehow been corrupted. Those who would tinker with simple democracy to fix a problem that exists only from their rationalist point of view, are ideologues, not "scientists" or democrats. The idea that pluralities are less valuable in some obscure technical, but nevertheless moral sense, is not at all clear. It certainly isn't an empirically based, "scientific" claim. Rationalist: So you are saying that it is merely and completely ideological to see a "spoiler" effect in any given election.
Neopopulist: That is exactly what I am saying. The idea that an election is "spoiled" in any sense, simply because it did not produce the majority that some expert or elitist thought it should, is nothing but an ideological exercise. It can only come from completely relative and obviously questionable premises even if they are premises washed into the brains of many, many people.
Rationalist: You are irrational.
Neopopulist: Now you are really talking. Obviously, Rationalists and Neopopulists cannot even agree on the nature of reason. Thank God. Perhaps one day, rationalists will catch up to the post-modern age, and begin to understand why Neopopulists so easily deconstruct all of their rationalist ideology, including preferential voting. |
