The Case For Limiting the Franchise

“Our Democracy” has long overstayed its welcome

This is something that I’ve long believed and I saw a post today that inspired me to get around to writing about it. Simon Laird made a post titled Feminism Must Be Completely Eradicated which contains the following passage:

“The Suffragettes were bad. It’s understandable that people thought it was unfair when men could vote and women couldn’t, but this problem arose only because we made the mistake of having voting in the first place. Democracy is a failed system. Neither men nor women should be allowed to vote.”

Um, hello, Based Department?

I don’t know whether Mr. Laird is a monarchist or a third-positionist or whatever else, but I appreciated his forthright rebuke to the value of voting here. The position that Voting Sucks, Actually has a lot of truth to it. I am not going to go so far as to say that no one should vote and that ackchyually we should all be ruled by a king, but I do think it is fairly self-evident that the drive for a universal franchise has not acquitted itself well in hindsight.

Let’s start by examining the unspoken premises behind the mythology of “Our Democracy.” Why is it the case that everyone must vote? It seems to me that this notion is downstream of people conflating politics with religion. The purpose of religion, or at least one legitimate purpose of it, is spiritual fulfillment through adherence to self-justifying principles. The nature of religious principles as first-mover axioms that precede logic and reason is a feature and a selling point, not a bug or an unintended downside.

Politics is not like this. Politics is instrumental. Politics is about arriving at correct policy outcomes. The question of which policy outcomes are correct is highly religious in nature, but the question of how we arrive at them is not, or at least shouldn’t be. Once we agree on which policy outcomes are correct, we should operate in an instrumental fashion, using logic and reasoning, to determine which form of governance will maximize those outcomes and select it based primarily on that criterion.

(A more cynical narrative of politics is that it is simply about who has power and gets to wield it, and this narrative also has a lot of truth to it, but here we are concerned with how politics should operate when political actors are at least somewhat virtuous and do not operate as pure sociopaths.)

The idea that everyone must vote has a religious quality to it. This notion is treated as a correct policy outcome that must be safeguarded because it is simply the way that the world ought to be. If we attack this assumption, vote-maximizers (who I will refer to as “vooters” because I find it amusing) may react with moral indignation and emotional outrage, which is another sign that the notion is religious in nature. But if they do try and actually mount some kind of defense of their position, it is likely to take one of two forms:

1.      The alternatives to vooting are all worse. We’ll get to this momentarily.

2.      Denying the vote to anyone is inherently unfair, because we are all equal in the eyes of God—well maybe let’s not use the G-word, “Our Democracy” types usually aren’t big fans of Him, but the basic sentiment is an egalitarian notion that everyone should have an equal voice in politics.

The association of vooting with fairness I think is quite easy to deconstruct. Here in this space which I suppose is best described as “the dissident right,” we have already come a long way in recognizing the fallacies of modern egalitarianism and tearing them down. Modern liberal egalitarianism, the “blank-slatist” idea that everyone is the same, has been found wanting in almost every conceivable aspect of life.

Are black people and white people actually the same? No! They are very different after all. What about men and women? Very much not the same, not interchangeable as it turns out! Now suppose that we venture into other areas of human endeavor outside of the political. Is everyone equally good at playing sports? At being doctors, professors, or even at being street-sweepers? Again, obviously not. In every single activity that humans undertake, without fail a hierarchy of competence develops, and it is almost always the case that the gap in competence between those at the top and at the bottom is extremely wide.

There is no real reason why this would not also be the case with regards to politics. If we look back in history to its many kings, queens and emperors, it is undeniable that some of them were much more competent rulers than the rest, and vice versa. Since political participation in “Our Democracy” is essentially a projection of how you’d like society to be run if you could rule it, the same thing surely applies to vooters. We all vote, but some of us vote much more competently than the rest.

It thus seems to me that, instead of being framed as an inalienable “human right,” a far better model of voting would be as a privilege that one earns and which requires good standing in order to keep. You can earn the privilege to vote, but it comes with responsibilities also, and if you fail to uphold those responsibilities then you can and will be stripped of your voting privileges. Again, we understand this basic principle very easily almost everywhere else in life. Any occupation where incompetence can lead to direct harm, such as airline pilot or doctor, requires a very thorough vetting process before someone is awarded a license to practice.

Likewise, we all recognize that while anyone can earn the privilege to drive a car, that privilege comes with responsibilities to operate the vehicle in a safe fashion, and it can be taken away from you if you fail to do so. Since political decisions have enormous ramifications for our well-being, it is quite plausible to apply a similar approach when it comes to voting. We do have a basic form of this in the sense that those convicted of felonies typically lose their voting rights, but this is different from a system in which people must actively earn the right to vote instead of having it granted automatically.

Now, let’s get to that stupid quote that we all know is coming, “democracy is the worst system that anyone has tried except for all the rest.” It goes something like that. I would say that I half-agree with this quote. I think it is true that there are no alternatives to democracy which are obviously better in the sense of alternatives which actually do away with voting altogether, such as monarchy. If we look at modern-day dictatorships, well, they don’t exactly inspire confidence. Whatever problems “Our Democracy” might have, I think you would have to be willfully blind to look at the track record of autocracy and not conclude that, at best, adopting it would only replace the problems of democracy with a different set of problems that could be just as severe or even worse.

This is why I am not a monarchist or whatever other obscure -ist that people might dream up as their personal ideal political thing. I do not reject democracy entirely. My position is simply that we have a bit too much democracy, we could stand to do with toning it down a notch or five. The biggest issue with limiting the franchise is not really with religious adherence to egalitarianism—screw that—or with the failure of non-democratic alternatives, the real issue is simply how we determine who should vote and who should not. Obviously, everyone will want to include themselves in the group who should be allowed to vote.

This is the same sort of prisoner’s dilemma that provides a fairly strong justification for standards of free speech. If we do away with the notion of free speech, everyone will want to censor everyone else, and the result will be rather unpleasant. Free speech provides a necessary neutral ground where some degree of intellectual sense-making can actually take place. Still, I have written before that I am not a heckin’ freeze peach absolootist, and that I find that position to be rather farcical. There is certainly some speech which has no redeeming value and should simply be censored. We usually recognize child pornography, even if it is drawn and does not involve images of real children, as falling within this category. I would extend it to things like pornography in general and the promotion of transgenderism, especially the promotion of transgenderism to children.

This is the same sort of balance that should be struck with voting. To have any voting or elections at all is to embrace a degree of uncertainty about how our society should be organized and to create a space where citizens can wrestle with that uncertainty and try to sort it out. At the same time, we do not have to go full retard in the other direction and say that just because we recognize a degree of uncertainty in the world, now all bets are off, anything and everything goes, and there are no standards at all.

So what should the restrictions on the franchise actually be? Who actually should vote and who actually shouldn’t? Here people sometimes go for lowbrow meme answers like “repeal the 19^th.” I think this is the wrong answer, and one reason that we have ended up with a universal franchise today is that previous limitations on voting were indeed unfair in the sense that they chose the wrong characteristics to discriminate on. It may well be true that removing the voting rights of all women and blacks would produce a better society. However, we can easily do better than that and avoid stepping on the landmine of discrimination based on immutable identity characteristics.

A proper voting license would engage in some degree of basic vetting based on character rather than simply using race or gender as proxies (insert MLK quote here to pwn the libs). I should pause here to specify that I think some nations would be quite justified in restricting the franchise based on ethnicity, but this is harder to justify in the United States and is an unnecessary tangent for the purposes of this article. Some examples of voting qualifications that I might propose:

--The requirement that one is a net taxpayer by some minimum amount, such that if one begins to draw more in welfare and other government services than they have paid in taxes, the privilege to vote is taken away. If some minimum threshold of net taxes paid cannot be met, for instance if a person never earns any income, then they never gain the privilege to vote at all.

--The requirement that one is married and never divorced. Additional requirements could be added such as cohabitating with one’s spouse and producing at least one biological child.

--The requirement that one is a member of the Christian church in good standing, with a sign-off from one’s priest required in order to gain the vote. Yes yes I know this can’t work because Protestants have gone off and made 5 million denominations, this is all hypothetical anyways.

These are just some very basic, very obvious ones. I have also seen suggestions such as requiring people to pass a citizenship test similar to the one that immigrants must pass in order to become naturalized citizens. If you wanted to get spicy, you could impose an IQ requirement.

One important feature of these qualifiers, at least my chosen three, is that anyone can attain them; they do not discriminate based on innate qualities such as race or gender. Not only does this make them more well-justified morally speaking, but it also means that we can expect them to do a better job of actually promoting the values that we wish to enshrine. I would prefer that Thomas Sowell and uhh… who’s a conservative woman… Amy Coney Barrett, I guess, retain the right to vote, while I would prefer to deny the vote to Tim Walz. I tried to think of a black conservative woman to use as an example here but I could only come up with Candace Owens, and… ehh. Moving on.

You might also notice that my three proposed requirements are heavily geared towards limiting the vote to people who are likely to share my values. That is deliberate. I’m quite unapologetic in thinking that our voter base would benefit from weeding out useless people, socialists, the childless (who are essentially societal parasites in my view), atheists, and so forth and so on.

If I really think that my values are so superior to those of my enemies—and I do think they’re at least better enough to make a big difference if they were to win out—then of course I should seek a system which reliably promotes those values. It would be immoral to do otherwise, as that would entail actively choosing to make the world a worse place to live and to impose all manner of harms that follow on from incorrect policy choices. This is where the distinction between the political and the religious is absolutely essential to understand.

Values are determined at the level of religion, of faith—we are not voted into them and cannot be voted out of them, generally speaking. A political system is nothing more than a vehicle for turning those abstract values into concrete government policies. Any good political system is therefore one which maximizes correct values and minimizes incorrect ones. If given the choice between a system where only 10% of the population votes but policy outcomes are always correct, and a system where everyone votes but policy outcomes are often incorrect, it is simply indefensible to ever choose the latter—unless, of course, you view the idea of everyone voting to be an end in and of itself, i.e. if you worship egalitarianism on a religious level.

Now, one might wonder why I don’t simply advocate for all Republicans to retain the right to vote and all Democrats to lose it. This is a matter of skin in the game. “Republican” and “Democrat” are just arbitrary labels at the end of the day. If we banned the Democrat party tomorrow and specified that only Republicans are allowed to vote, one hundred percent of the country will begin to identify as Republican—including the half that formerly identified as Democrats, who will proceed to split the Republican party in two along predictable lines. Nothing has been accomplished in such a scenario.

Instead, one has to seek costly signals of correct values. Getting married and having children are enormous lifestyle investments. We can imagine that few people, if any, would pursue these things only so that they can gain the right to vote. A society which limits the vote to married people with children will probably cause those behaviors to associate with higher status over time, or will at least cause refusal of those behaviors to associate with lower status, and so people might pursue them for reasons of status-seeking—but if this were to occur, then the goal has been achieved, the human psyche has been properly harnessed towards the ends to which we mean for it to go.

Finally, one criticism that people are likely to make is that determining what our religious values will be is part of the whole point of voting in the first place. Instead of setting up religious values that are determined a priori and then seeking to cultivate a population who will vote to uphold those values, people should be able to vote on what the a priori values will be to begin with. I disagree with this. This is the system that we have now, and how well is it working out for us? Better than a dictatorship, you might say, but that’s damning with faint praise.

I think it should be clear that any functional society will indeed have certain first principles that are held to be beyond reproach. In the United States, that might be things like our heckin’ freeze peach, our guns, stuff like that. The Constitution sets out certain things that are basically not up for a vote. We have seen various mechanisms add or remove things from this list of sacred values; notably, the Supreme Court added abortion to it, then removed abortion from it again fifty years later. Everyone has some values that fall within this category, even if they are a total nihilist and their sacred value is simply that no one should have any sacred values.

This must be the case because it is impossible for us to navigate the world in any other way. We cannot logic or reason ourselves into first principles, and we can see in today’s “post-truth” political landscape the results of deluding ourselves that we can. First principles interact very badly with voting because they are not only necessary, but also irreconcilable when they come into conflict. A society torn between two conflicting sets of first principles, which are then put up to a vote, simply results in one group imposing tyranny upon the other. Again, this is the system that we have now, with each election being a question of which 51% will be able to grab the government gun and aim it at the other 49% this time around.

The proper remedy for this situation is not to foolishly believe that it can somehow be put to rest by just “voting it out,” but rather to let each group live apart from the other. Here in the United States, that would look something like an increase in federalism, with the states being given more power to govern themselves instead of being forced to conform to a single national standard. Instead of having to constantly struggle over the tyranny stick, blue people and red people could simply go their own ways.

If for some reason we can’t do this, however, then it is still the case that my values should win and yours should lose. Again, it would be plainly immoral for me to do otherwise. We can perhaps debate whether it would be better to have separate societies where people can police their own communities according to different sets of values, or to have a single nation where one set of correct values is enforced uniformly even if much of the population does not like those values. Yet either one is inarguably superior to the status quo, in which correct values win at best a few battles here and there, but for the most part incorrect values are enforced uniformly despite much of the population vehemently hating them.