19
uninsured medical crisis, confiscatory regulation, air pollution, you name it: the citizen
suffers from bad government. One does not need direct experience with fascism or
communism in order to reject politicians offering such alternatives. Citizens use
shortcuts, like party identification, or voting out incumbents when times are bad.
Schumpeter exaggerates. He complains further that political information is one-sided and
selective, but a moment’s reflection suggests the remedy. In an adversarial debate, such
as in a criminal court or a political contest, one side challenges the claims of the other, in
a manner such that a nonspecialized audience can adjudicate among the claims made by
the specialists.
8
Neutralizing the rhetorical excesses, let’s concede that Schumpeter is correct that
the typical citizen has little incentive to study and decide the panoply of political issues,
and that the special interests often do manufacture the popular will. Where does that
leave us? It leaves us with a powerful argument for a healthy public sphere and a
properly designed representative democracy. Bernard Manin (1987) suggests that
democracy is not legitimized by the unanimity of predetermined individual wills, but
rather is legitimized by the process of public deliberation which reforms and reconciles
the uninformed, incomplete, intransitive, and unjustified preferences of individuals. The
existence of contesting political parties in a representative democracy is essential for such
deliberation, he argues.
Schumpeter wants us to be scandalized that special interests can manufacture the
popular will. But we would be scandalized only if we believed there were a genuine will
that was being disregarded. Just as the skeptic cannot but assume a genuine common
good, so she cannot but assume a genuine will of the people. Perhaps this genuine will is
8
Mackie (1998) analyzes a variety of constraints working to promote speaker
credibility, including adversarial debate. Therein, an audience might usefully assume that
a claim of one side is true unless refuted by the other side, among other effects.
Convention