Definitions and the problem of the word
Bob Zadek opened a December 2021 conversation by noting that “democracy” has become a word “that has become so general so it kind of loses its meaning,” and asked his guest to say how he used it. Ilan Wurman answered that in the context of that conversation, democracy is the idea that the people decide who rules over them on a continuing basis — the people choosing, through election, the people who make the rules for them on an ongoing basis. Wurman added that he did not think the founders believed democracy was an end in and of itself, and that he was not sure he believed it either, describing himself as “a Churchillian in this regard”: the worst form of government except for all the other ones tried. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
A different definitional problem runs through the two 2022 episodes featuring Ilya Somin. Zadek framed the discussion around the show’s premise that democracy is supposed to work in a certain way and then does not, and asked whether the problem might be democracy itself — whether the country had “too much democracy,” citing the Seventeenth Amendment as an example of increased democracy and the disappearance of an effective Electoral College as another movement toward more popular democracy. Somin rejected the assumption that more democracy is always better, saying that depending on how democracy is defined, “we can try to do too much through the democratic process,” and that somewhere there is “sort of an optimal amount of democracy.” The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022)
Democracy as learning versus democracy as cancer
Andrei Illarionov, in an April 2017 episode on Russia, described democracy as “a process of learning and of education,” noting that the United States has lived under a democratic political regime for the last 200 years and that many European countries have done so for more than a century, and that today’s American democracy is quite different from the American democracy of 200 years ago. He said Russia did not experience two centuries of democracy, that its democratic episodes were rather short, but that when democracy arrived roughly 25 years earlier, Russians embraced it wholeheartedly and democratic mechanisms and institutions began to operate, not without mistakes and problems. He also said people really preferred to live under a democratic political regime rather than under an autocratic one, and that the fight Russia went through in the 1990s was not only about economic reforms or economic catastrophe but also a fight for a democratic political regime. Russia Today (Yesterday & Tomorrow) (2017)
Jayant Bhandari, in a December 2017 episode on capitalism and morality, took the opposite position. Asked which country best illustrated his thesis, he named Pakistan, saying it had done reasonably well under military dictatorship and that each time it became a democratic country, “the fanatic elements” ruled and women got locked back into their houses. His stated mechanism was arithmetic: democracy does not work because “the lowest common denominator in every society, the lowest 51% of the society, decides who should run your country,” making it “a non- and anti-meritocratic system of governance.” He compared choosing rulers to choosing a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer who builds bridges — selections made meritocratically, not by vote — and said the least competent people in terms of understanding public policy and governance are the ones who vote, driven by bread and circuses. In his view, “democracy actually is the worst form of government,” a cancer that corrupts associations and businesses with “the virus of populism,” visible in third-world countries and only slowly decaying Western societies over the last 200 years. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)
Zadek’s own framing in that episode was that democracy is looked upon generally in the world as a universal good — that you cannot have too much democracy, like you cannot be too rich or too thin — and that Bhandari’s position, which Zadek said he agreed with 100%, is that democracy is not automatically a universal good but simply one element of governance.
Guardrails, deliberation and the anti-democratic Senate
Wurman’s contribution to the December 2021 episode centered on what he called democratic deliberation. He said the constitution he and his co-authors proposed eschewed putting substantively political conservative ends into the document — it does not talk about gay marriage or abortion — because a constitution should set the structure and terms of deliberation for the common good. As an example he described a Senate that doubles down on what he called the anti-democratic quality of the United States Senate: smaller, with one senator per state, so 50 senators, each serving a single nine-year term and therefore not up for reelection, and required to take an oath to legislate for the common good. He said the group almost made Senate deliberation secret but that this was too far for some on the committee in their mini-convention. The point, he said, is that the structure is partially anti-democratic but resolves the problems of democracy while still being a popular government: the people choose the senators, who then deliberate and legislate for the common good, avoiding rent-seeking, partiality and partial interest — “saving democracy from itself and for itself.” He invoked Federalist 10 and Publius on creating a popular government that remedies the diseases most incident to popular government, and the need for fundamental liberties in a Bill of Rights and separation of powers so that ambition counteracts ambition. The Conservative Constitution (2021)
Somin’s two 2022 episodes set out a taxonomy of problems rather than a verdict on democracy as such. He distinguished problems inherent to democracy — such as voters having very little incentive to be well-informed, because the chance any one vote makes a difference is incredibly small, about one in 60 million in a presidential election — from problems not inherent to it, such as a loser of an election refusing to recognize the result and trying to overturn it by various means. He said some inherent problems probably cannot be dealt with but others can be mitigated, and that some degree of conflict is unavoidable in democracy because some people will be disappointed when their preferred candidate, party or ideology loses. 3 Libertarian Ideas to Strengthen Democracy (2022)
In the companion episode, Somin listed three problems that had come to a head in recent years: efforts to overturn elections and monkey around with them, as seen with Trump and his supporters in the last election, with precursors in previous elections; growing polarization and hostility between the parties and their supporters; and the growing sense, and in some ways the reality, that it is very difficult for individual voters, as opposed to political elites, to have a meaningful say in the policies they live under. He noted that most voters have very little idea of the issues they are voting on and therefore often make poor decisions. On polarization specifically, he said that by just about any measure — distance between the parties on policy issues, or how supporters of the two parties feel about the other party — polarization is higher now than in at least several decades, perhaps throughout the entire time it has been measurable with modern survey data; the share of people who think the opposing party is a menace to America or a threat to democracy is much higher than in the past, and around 40% or more would be angry or hostile if a family member married a member of the opposing party. He said it has been rising for several decades and is likely higher today than at any time in the post-World War II era, while allowing that data of that kind does not exist for the Civil War period. The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022)
Somin also described solutions. He said the report proposes specific fixes to plug holes revealed in the Electoral College system and the way Electoral College votes are counted and certified, many of them embodied in the Electoral Count Reform Act, which he said was likely to pass Congress soon. A second set of recommendations addresses political ignorance and polarization, and a section of the report is devoted to expanding opportunities for other kinds of decision-making, such as voting with your feet and the jury system, which he said has some commonalities with democracy but is also different. He added that trying to do too much through a democratic process, particularly in a centralized way with the federal government having more and more power, can be dysfunctional and can even help to undermine democracy itself. The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022)
Across episodes: the same question, four answers
The question of whether democracy is good in itself, and whether more of it is better, is argued in all four episodes, and the treatments do not build on one another so much as run in parallel. Illarionov in 2017 treats democracy as a learnable practice whose quality improves over generations; Bhandari in December 2017 treats it as a mechanism that selects the lowest 51% and calls it a cancer; Wurman in 2021 treats it as one element of a constitutional structure that must be checked by deliberation and by an intentionally anti-democratic Senate; Somin in 2022 treats it as a system with an optimal quantity, some of whose problems are inherent and some institutional. Zadek supplies the recurring frame — the worry that democracy is a vague ideal everyone aspires to without appreciating that it is complex and sometimes produces unsatisfactory results — and in the Bhandari and Somin episodes presses the specific question of whether there can be too much democracy. The excerpts show no development from one episode to the next; each guest answers the question from his own premises.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not supply a history of any democratic institution, a definition of democracy shared by all four guests, or any account of how the positions advanced here were received. They do not state what the Electoral Count Reform Act provides, what the Seventeenth Amendment says, or what Federalist 10 argued beyond Wurman’s paraphrase. Several segments break off mid-exchange, including the Illarionov discussion of Germany and the Bhandari segment on technical competence versus the popular vote, so the arguments in those episodes are only partially represented.