You Cannot Fool All the People All the Time, So Do Not Let a Decision Stand Still

The saying is attributed to Lincoln, probably wrongly, and it is worth taking seriously anyway: you can fool some of the people some of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Read it as a statement about democracy's design rather than as folk wisdom, and it says something precise about how a direct democracy has to be built.

Three Kinds of Fooling

The saying distinguishes three cases, and each corresponds to a real tactic.

Some of the people, some of the time is ordinary persuasion. A lobby convinces a segment of the public of something false for a while. This is constant, unavoidable, and not very dangerous, because the segment is small and the effect wears off.

All of the people, some of the time is the dangerous case. It is possible. A whole population can be brought, for a period, to believe that a war is necessary, that a bubble is a new economy, that a threat is imminent. It takes a great deal of coordinated effort, a compliant press and usually a frightening event, and it does not last. But while it lasts, anything can be decided.

All of the people, all of the time is the one the saying declares impossible, and I think it is right. Sustaining a falsehood across an entire population indefinitely requires controlling every source of information forever, and no interest group has ever managed it. Reality keeps leaking in. Someone always notices the emperor's clothes, and once noticed it spreads.

What Interest Groups Actually Need

Now ask which of these three an interest group needs in order to get its way.

Under representative government, the answer is: the second, once. Fool all of the people for one election, or fool the few hundred people who decide for them, and the decision is taken. After that it does not matter what the public comes to believe. The law is passed, the contract is signed, the war has started, and the mechanism that let the public express its opinion has closed until the next cycle, by which time the question has been replaced by newer ones.

Representative government converts a temporary deception into a permanent outcome. That is its structural gift to every lobby. The lobby does not need to fool anyone forever; it needs to fool enough people for one moment, and the system freezes the result.

This is why so much political effort is concentrated around moments: election campaigns, the weeks before a vote in the legislature, the crisis that "cannot go to waste". Those are the windows in which fooling all of the people some of the time pays out in full.

A Decision That Can Be Revisited Cannot Be Bought Once

The design lesson follows directly. If a democracy takes a decision once and lets it stand, it is exposed to the second kind of fooling, which is achievable. If it takes the decision and then takes it again, it is exposed only to the third kind, which is not.

That is what I mean when I say a direct democracy must be dynamic. It is not enough to move the decisions from the representatives to the public. The decisions must also be revisitable, on a schedule or on demand, so that a public that was fooled into something in March can undo it in September once the fooling has worn off.

Consider what this does to the interest group's problem. It can no longer win by a single campaign timed to a single vote. It has to keep the public persuaded for as long as it wants the policy to last, against the constant leakage of reality and against opponents who now have a standing opportunity to reopen the question. Its cost goes from a one-off purchase to a permanent subscription, and the subscription is for something the saying tells us cannot be had at any price.

The bombardment does not stop; it stops working. Lobbies will still spend, still campaign, still try to frighten. But a public that decides often is a public that has to be fooled often, and fooling all of the people all of the time is exactly the case in which they fail.

Two Objections

Would constant revisiting mean constant instability? Less than one might think. Most decisions are not controversial and nobody reopens them. The ones that get reopened are the ones with a substantial constituency that believes it was misled, and those are precisely the ones that should be. In representative regimes the same decisions produce instability anyway, in the form of resentment, protest and the swing to whoever promises reversal; the difference is that the reversal there takes a decade and a change of government.

Could a lobby not simply fool the public again each time? It could try. But each round is fought on ground the public has already walked, against arguments it has already heard, with the results of the previous decision now visible. Fooling people about a war before it starts is one thing; fooling them about the same war three years in, with the bill in front of them, is another. Repetition is on the side of reality.

That is the whole point of the saying, and the whole point of designing a system that keeps asking. A single decision is a moment, and moments can be manufactured. A standing question cannot be.