As you sat at your kitchen table and looked over your mail-in ballot for November’s election, you might have pondered the effectiveness of asking citizens to make decisions on important issues. Democracy is a great idea, but it’s not a wish-fulfillment process. And sometimes, it backfires when political leaders are convinced they’re smarter and better than their people.
Bangers and mashed
In 2016, British Prime Minister David Cameron was sick of euroskeptics in his Tory party who endlessly complained about the country’s European Union membership. He saw the carping as a distraction from what the voters really wanted to talk about; instead of dealing with policies that affect voters’ daily lives, he quipped that his right flank was “banging on about Europe.”
So he agreed to hold a referendum, thinking he would call the euroskeptics’ bluff and demonstrate that the majority of people in Great Britain wanted to retain the benefits of European Union membership. But after more than 71 percent of voters showed up for the June 23, 2016, referendum, it turned out that a majority of them wanted to leave. (If you’re keeping score at home, Scotland and Northern Ireland strongly supported remaining in the bloc, but Wales and England — where the majority of the kingdom’s population resides — voted to leave.)
The consequences have been serious, and the British are paying for it. “The U.K. is the only major rich economy that remains smaller — poorer — than prior to the pandemic and Brexit may be a factor,” reported the BBC last year in a review of various economic metrics.
It’s not the first time the people surprised their leaders at the ballot box. After the pro-independence Scottish National Party gained power, it jumped at the chance to hold a referendum on its pet cause: Independence for Scotland. A whopping 84.6 percent of the voters in Scotland participated in the resultant 2014 vote on Scottish independence. They voted against it, calling the bluff of the office holders.
Whether a post-Brexit Scottish independence vote would go differently is a question that might well be put before the voters over there, where leaders just can’t stop themselves from querying their citizens. In 2016, an online poll in the United Kingdom to suggest names for a research ship resulted in Boaty McBoatface winning handily.
Seriously, stop asking questions of the British.
What’s French for McBoatface?
It’s not just referendums that lead political leaders to miscalculate. When far-right French politicians scored big in European Union parliamentary elections, France’s president, centrist Emmanuel Macron, thought he could hobble them and demonstrate the common sense of the French people by calling a snap election for the French parliament. He thought voters would recoil from the far right; instead, the right-wing National Rally won, forcing the parties of the left to ally with the dwindling centrist parties to score a win in the second round. (Yes, they have two rounds of voting; imagine what delights they’d come up with if they had ranked-choice voting.)
Or journey farther east to Japan, where new prime minister Shigeru Ishiba is scrambling to stay in office after an ill-advised decision to hold a snap election. The result was a disaster for his Liberal Democratic Party, already reeling from a financial scandal, which lost its majority in the Diet in the election.
Asking for a friend …
If you asked Californians whether they would like retail crime to be reduced, they would vote “yes” overwhelmingly. It’s such an obvious question. What’s not obvious is how to accomplish that. What many Californians have concluded is that at least a big part of the blame for retail crime in the state is due to Proposition 47, which passed a decade ago and reduced penalties for a number of crimes.
Now, democracy doesn’t mean you always end up with the best result; but it means everyone lives to vote again another day and try to do better next time.
Proposition 36 would take some thefts and drug crimes currently classified as misdemeanors and make them felonies. According to mid-October polling, as many as 73 percent of likely voters say they’ll support Proposition 36. If that is reflective of the final voter tally on the referendum, it will be a huge defeat for Gov. Gavin Newsom and his allies, who waged a fierce campaign to first place a competing ballot measure before voters (they failed) and then pass a raft of bills that they said will make it easier to prosecute people for retail theft (they passed them in August, but in October 73 percent of voters still said they’d support Proposition 36).
I’m not making an argument for or against Proposition 36, and it wouldn’t matter anyway if I did, because with early voting, it’s very likely most of you have already cast your ballot. But I do think the ballot measure is a good example of political leaders being out of sync with their voters and instead of finding a way to meet voter needs, they insist the voters are wrong.
Assuming voters turn their stated intentions into actual votes and Proposition 36 becomes law, there will be a heated round of recriminations among Democrats in Sacramento. Was the messaging wrong? Did they not have enough time or money to counter Proposition 36 proponents? Or, more likely, were they acting like David Cameron, Emmanuel Macron, and Shigeru Ishiba by not listening to what voters were saying loud and clear and addressing their real concerns. The “x” for which they needed to solve was action to create a visible decrease in retail crime. The “x” for which Newsom and Co. decided to solve was to preserve Proposition 47. Was there really no one in Sacramento who could come up with a way to ditch Proposition 47 while still keeping to some of the criminal justice reforms they wanted?
Worse alternatives
In an age when tens of millions of our fellow citizens are happily canoodling with autocratic candidates, it’s worth noting that that would be worse. If you want to get wonky, buy Japanese historian Eri Hotta’s book Japan 1941. In sometimes hour-by-hour recounting of deliberations and decisions by wartime Japan’s top leaders, we see them walking lockstep into making their biggest error: attacking the United States and drawing it into the war. These leaders were pretty sure (a) they were going to lose, and (b) it would be a civilizationally catastrophic loss. But they did it anyway. Even the emperor, who reportedly did not like the plan, did nothing more than, at a meeting with his government leaders, recite a poem that could obliquely be interpreted as being anti-war. And you know the result: Japan suffered a civilizationally catastrophic loss.
They might have wanted some voter input on that before doing it.
Democracy is no guarantee of the right decisions being made, but at least it allows for everyone to try to get their voices heard and it allows for the system to self-correct before it gets too bad. It is possible that super majorities in Sacramento have led Democratic leaders to forget how to translate voter desires into sound laws, just as Republican leaders in states with GOP super majorities have failed their constituents.
Until our new AI overlords learn how to make better decisions than us, we’ll stick with this democracy thing and hope we can retrain our elected leaders.
