Knowledge And Decisions

The dissonance between the intellectual vision and the experience and opinions of the public has led to a new phenomenon in recent years, sometimes called “totalitarian democracy.” Whereas in earlier times — the New Deal era, for example — the “intelligentsia saw The People as its ally in the struggle for power,”²¹⁴ and “a plebiscitary interpretation of democracy”²¹⁵

was considered a hallmark of liberalism, they now see public opinion and democratic processes as obstacles to be overcome. While intellectuals still speak in the name of The People and espouse democratic ideals, “their ceaseless strategy is inconsistent with their professed thought.”²¹⁶ Such strategy features “rules that minimize majority participation, thereby permitting a small faction to gain control.”²¹⁷

Whether within political party caucuses, environmental agencies, or other social decision-making institutions, complex rules and tiresome procedures are sorting devices that ensure the differential survival of intellectuals in decision-making processes. These procedures are, in effect, “the poll tax that the New Elite has been imposing on everyone else.”²¹⁸ Recourse to courts and administrative agencies as the preferred mechanisms of decision making also favors the chances of intellectuals in imposing their vision on the rest of society. As a leader in the fight for eliminating capital punishment observed, there was “an unmistakable preference for the courts,” because reform through democratic legislation requires either “public consensus or a powerful minority lobby,”²¹⁹

as contrasted with the greater ease of attempts to “market new constitutional protections to judges.”²²⁰ A bow toward democracy is made with claims that the newly created “constitutional” rights are “a response to deeply rooted social conflicts that elected representatives have not addressed” because “the interests that the Court protected could not mobilize sufficient power,”²²¹

but these vague references to “deeply rooted social conflicts” and “power” boil down to the simple fact that a majority of the public — indeed, “a twenty-year high” — supported the death penalty in the midst of the intellectuals’ crusade to abolish it.²²² Appeals to a higher moral code — of which they are axiomatically the keepers — not only justifies the superseding of the democratic will or the constitutional processes, but justifies calling it “democracy,” for it is what the people would want, if only they knew better, if only they shared the intellectuals’ vision. This approach has been aptly called “totalitarian democracy.” Sometimes the moral superiority of intellectuals is put even more bluntly, as in the assertion that “a more equal society is a better society even if its citizens prefer inequality.”²²³