Democracy in America: Knowledge & Elitism

We Americans have a curious relationship with our elites. The remark of Alexis de Toqueville on American elitism, in his seminal work Democracy in America – “there is no class here” – was probably more aspirational than accurate, but it does reflect a central tenet of the American Mythology, that before the law, before God, and before one’s citizens, no man is objectively better than the other.

A noble idea, equally powerful and resonant today in our own modern struggles for egalitarianism. Unfortunately, the American anti-classist ideal – that no citizen is predestined to mediocrity, but rather has the right to work, without restraints, to the very pinnacle of society – has been parlayed into a suspicion of earned expert knowledge as “elitist.” According to this tortured understanding of democracy, citizens are entitled not merely to an equality of opportunity in the marketplace of ideas, but to an equality of result between expert and the uninformed opinion. To save the Republic and its democratic foundations, we must distinguish between the right to compete in the marketplace of ideas, democratically and without restraint, and the right to vote out uncomfortable realities. Democracy demands the former; its very survival requires us to reject the latter.

Early in our political history, our rejection of classism began to bleed into politics and epistemology. If democracy is better than authoritarianism, necessarily the wisdom of the common farmer is more “democratic” and therefore better. After all, it derives from a larger base, and has been tested by time and frequent use. The wisdom of the elite, on the contrary, smacks of authority: “Americans resent authority in their everyday lives. In fact, as believers in the myth of rugged individualism, they dislike all authority,” even in matters of the intellect.[1] Presidents from the foundation of the Union to today have campaigned on the idea that the knowledge of the common man is superior to the knowledge of the learned elite. The 1828 Presidential campaign featured the victory of self-described illiterate backwoodsman Andrew Jackson over John Quincy Adams, whom Jackson relentlessly portrayed as an out-of-touch elite. Suffice it to say that, early in our political history, we began to value, politically, the champion of the common man over the skilled yet out-of-touch politicker. After all, the early myth was that one could have it both ways: like Cincinnatus and George Washington (Byron’s “Cincinnatus of the West”), the common farmer is always capable to govern the state, by virtue of the elusive and mythical Genius of the Commons. The problem, of course, is that this myth is a myth.

If Washington’s panegyrists portrayed him as a common man, who drew upon the Genius of the Commons in founding the Union, and if Jackson sought to portray himself as the same, the portrayals were effective but not founded in truth. Washington and Jackson were both, in fact, vastly wealthy and well-educated men, connoisseurs of the classics and American Renaissance men. Washington’s iconic standing in the American mind is due to the fact that he was a brilliant man, a skilled statesman, and a clever politician, and that is precisely the point. Our belief that our Founders were extraordinary common men, successful because they were endowed with the Genius of the Commons, is a myth. They were simply extraordinary men, endowed with extraordinary genius.

Just as the beginnings of the myth of the Genius of the Commons diverge from reality, its modern application to matters of politics and science diverges from reality at an ever increasing pace. While the common man may be endowed with unique perspective on daily life, knowledge of objective matters is not democratic in the sense that there is an equality of knowledge & skill across the populace. The shocking truth is that experts – who devote their lives to politics, science, or other learned disciplines – will know better than someone who has not, how best to form policy in relation to those disciplines. Democracy guarantees equality of access to the pursuit of knowledge, not equality of result in that pursuit. Exaggerated by the demands of a complicated, pluralist, and technological society, politics today requires that a skilled individual command the Ship of State. Our problem today is that we ignore this fact, buying into the old and mistaken myth of the Genius of the Commons, mistrusting elites and exalting the Common Man’s limited understanding of science, and subjecting knowledge itself to the democratic process.

Consider Representative John Duncan (R-TN), who recently expressed his opinion on the documented, unabashed failure of abstinence-only sex education:

It seems rather elitist to me, for people who maybe have degrees in this field to feel that they – because they’ve studied it – somehow know better than the parents.

Indeed. This is a problem. Politicians have long known about the “character versus competence” divide, in elections: when push comes to shove, depending upon the electoral climate, if the character and competence are framed as zero-sum, the voters may prefer character over competence.[3] But if voters prefer “character” over “competence” on issues of objective science, we risk carrying our myth of democratic knowledge too far, allowing it to swallow the very legitimacy of democracy from which it first spawned.

It should go without saying that no man is better than another. But a citizen may, by virtue of hard work and deep study in pursuit of expertise in a given field, know something better than another. This result is not undemocratic. Rather, it is in the unrestrained pursuit of expert knowledge, and free competition towards knowledge in the marketplace of ideas, that our own democracy realizes its own potential.
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[1]: Karen S. Johnson-Cartee and Gary A. Copeland, Manipulation of the American Voter: Political Campaign Commercials, (Westport, CT: Prager, 1997), 115.

[2]: U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section IX: “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.”

[3]: Theodore F. Sheckels and Lauren Cohen Bell, “Character versus Competence: Evidence from the 2000 Presidential Debates and Election,” in The Millennium Election: Communication in the 2000 Campaign, edited by Lynda Lee Kaid et. al (New York: Rowman and Littlefield inc., 2003), 64.