Voting for a Person Is How You Get Rid of the Responsibility to Understand

Voting is presented to us as the citizen's act of responsibility. You go to the booth, you make your mark, you have done your part. The person who does not vote is the irresponsible one.

I want to argue the reverse. Voting for a representative is the act by which you shed responsibility, and with the responsibility you shed the understanding that would have come with it. The act we call the height of citizenship is the moment we hand citizenship to someone else.

What You Actually Do in the Booth

Look at what the mark on the ballot means. It does not say: I have considered the questions facing the country and here is what I conclude. It says: here is a person; let him consider them.

From that moment the questions are his. When the war goes badly, it was his decision. When the budget is misspent, it was his mismanagement. When the law turns out to be foolish, he voted for it, not you. The entire structure of political blame in a representative system runs toward the representative, and that is not a flaw in the structure. It is what the structure is for. You bought, with your vote, the right not to be the one who was wrong.

Responsibility Is Where Understanding Comes From

Here is why that matters beyond the moral bookkeeping.

People understand what they are responsible for. Not because they are virtuous, but because responsibility is the thing that makes understanding pay. The mechanic understands engines because the car comes back if he does not. The parent understands the child because there is nobody else. You understand your own finances, roughly, because the consequences of not understanding them land on you within the month.

Public questions have none of this pull for the ordinary citizen, and the reason is that he is not going to have to decide them. Why learn how the pension system works if your entire contribution to its design is a mark next to a name every four years? The rational allocation of attention says: do not bother. And people do not bother, and then we call them apathetic, as though the apathy were a character trait rather than the correct response to having no decision to make.

Shed the responsibility and the understanding goes with it. The booth is where both leave.

Deciding Versus Cheering

What replaces understanding, once the decision has been delegated, is something that looks like political engagement and is not.

Watch people who care about politics under a representative system. They follow it closely. They know the names, the polls, the scandals, the gaffes. They have strong feelings about who should win. And almost none of this is about the questions. It is about the contest. They are not deciding; they are cheering, and a cheerleader's relationship to the game is exactly the relationship of someone who has handed the play to others and kept the emotion.

The energy is real. It is simply pointed at the wrong object. The passion that could have gone into understanding whether the policy works goes instead into wanting one's side to win, and the sides are happy to receive it, because a supporter who understands is harder to keep than a supporter who cheers.

The Anti-Democratic Act

So the claim in the title. Democracy, whatever else it means, means that the people decide. An act that transfers the decision to someone else, that relieves the people of the need to understand what is being decided, and that converts their remaining engagement into support for a team, is an act that moves the society away from the people deciding. It is, in its very structure, anti-democratic, and it is the central ritual of what we call democracy.

I do not say this to tell anyone to stop voting. Under the current arrangement the mark is the only lever you have, and a lever is better than none. I say it because the alternative is usually described as a burden, and I want to describe it accurately.

Under a system where the questions come to you, you would have to understand them. That is the burden. It is also the only thing that has ever made a population competent in its own affairs. Responsibility and understanding arrive together or not at all, and a system that lets you shed the first has, quietly and with your consent, taken the second.