Is America Moving toward Democracy or Dictatorship?
(UC Berkeley’s Natalie Wolchover pictured on Scientific American site)
Every week now someone forwards a new set of photos supposedly depicting downscale Walmart shoppers. The implication is that they represent the true face of democracy in our world.
No, we immediately tell ourselves. Our candidates for local political offices are the best and brightest that our community affords. However, others say that local political jobs might just as well go to the homeless (that is, decent people who, through no fault of their own, suddenly find themselves down and out and in need of food welfare being raised by local television channels).
If America is staking our political future on a pyramid that might have a shaky base in terms of quality, then can we at least congratulate ourselves about how well our democracy functions in selecting leaders closer to the top? Not even our supercomputers could have chosen better candidates than Romney and Obama. Some social scientists already believe that the growing 47% “automatic” voting bloc witnessed in the last election is proof that the US will remain in the very best hands.
But Natalie Wolchover suggests that some scientific studies find that democracy is synonymous with survival of the least fit. In her essay “People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say,” Wolchover lays out her findings at the beginning: “The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.”
In short, Wolchover implies that even the smartest people tend to project their own mental strengths onto fellow citizens, who often can’t see beyond their own appetites and obtuseness. If so, then the Americas might be headed for a resurgence of dictatorships than a happy life within a socialist utopia.
