“It’s happened. And it’s bad. America has elected as president a man who doesn’t really bother hiding his authoritarianism. Again. It is alarming. And yet to give way to alarmism at a time like this is a mistake. If American democracy is to survive the test of the next four years—and no, that is not a given—it will be because we’ve understood clearly what this moment means.
To those of us raised to revere constitutional democracy, seeing millions of people line up to vote to weaken constitutional democracy will always be upsetting. Yet in voting for a candidate who promised to use the repressive power of the state to persecute and punish his political opponents, who refused to accept a previous election defeat and rails against the notion that anything lies outside the president’s powers, tens of millions of Americans have just done precisely that. It feels inexplicable.
But it isn’t.
Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances?” that doubles as a Rosetta Stone to our political moment.
Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik built a model to show there are circumstances where it is rational for voters to prefer leaders who reject democratic institutions. This doesn’t normally happen in well-functioning democracies. But where unelected elites have outsized power, checks and balances can function to hem politicians in, preventing them from enacting policies a majority of voters want. In those circumstances, voters can rationally interpret a leader’s disdain for democratic institutions as a feature, not a bug: checks and balances come to be seen as the eggs you have to crack to make the democratic omelet. “
“If the American polity isn’t going to break apart completely over the next four years, it’s important for everyone to accept Trump voters as rational actors. Acemoglu, Robinson and Torvik theorize that voters can come to see even the corruption that their preferred candidate is sure to engage in as a price worth paying for the enactment of policies that have no chance otherwise. The calculus Trump’s supporters have made may be appalling, it may be reckless—surely it is—and it may spectacularly backfire.
But irrational it is not.”
posted by f.sheikh
What’s the difference between “reckless” and “irrational”?
It depends on one’s perpective. Democratic Party is in its own self-righteous bubble which has no qualms about funding genocide with our hard earned tax dollars, against our laws, and wants to coninue it. For them only rational thing is to vote for them otherwise it is both reckless and irrational. That is the knid of arrogance that brought them humilating defeat. Democrts wants the voters to see the things only through their perspective. Vast majority of voters from all stripes refused to do that-that is neither wreckess nor irrational.