The Economic Nationalist

As distant in so many ways as Iran stands from the Western world, Iran gives us nonetheless an important lesson in constitutional governance, if we can and will but summon the insight to take the lesson.

As readers may be aware, Iran has held a presidential election recently, a simple majority of the countrywide vote required for victory with a run-off between the top two candidates if needed. It is a simple system and, to the extent to which one believes in democracy, indisputably a fair system in form. The election’s results however are not indisputable. The results are in hot dispute.

Indeed, the results are in riots. A mob rallies in the streets of the capital.

The truth of the election is hard to know, and readers of the Economic Nationalist were wise not to credit plausible theories of fraud put forward by Western media, including theories based on the ethnic profile of the votes—not because ethnicity did not matter (it is indeed ironic that Politically Correct Western media would be the ones promoting the ethnic explanation) but because Western media have approximately zero understanding of the particular Iranian ethnic issues actually involved, and because the few Iranians that happen to speak English, who will have heard that certain Americans are itching to invade their country, are rather unlikely at the moment to tell us the truth. But the leading opposition candidate lost his home province, our media ask, and how likely is that? Well, Al Gore lost Tennessee, and Iran as we said is an extremely different country, so don’t let’s be too sure.

On the other hand, it appears that the votes were never counted, nor the totals published, at each precinct when the polls closed. Votes were rather counted out of public view, centrally, unverifiably, by government officials. It is not a system designed to foster public confidence in the vote.

Various Iranians ran opinion polls in advance of the vote. In the main, these polls contradict the government totals, but no more than the polls contradict one another. A secret, internal government opinion poll is supposed to have shown the incumbent, President Ahmadinejad, set to lose, thus motivating the fraud; except that one is not supposed to ask how this poll is known to us, if it exists and is actually a secret. It was leaked, you ask? Well, yes, but by whom and from where? Maybe it was leaked from inside Ahmadinejad’s government, and maybe it was leaked from someone’s kitchen table where the someone just made it up. The reader can estimate the relative likelihoods for himself, but you and I shall probably never know the truth of it.

It seems that one, obscure U.S. market research firm (actually some kind of cause-oriented nonprofit; not sure precisely what it is) conducted a heretofore hardly noticed opinion poll of its own in Iran in advance of the vote. This poll is roughly consistent with official returns, not only countrywide but also province by province, which would seem to support the government—especially when one considers that the liberal but thorough American political statistician Nate Silver can find in official returns no firm statistical evidence of cheating. However, none of this proves that the Iranian government did not cynically use the one U.S. poll as the basis to fabricate the vote.

We simply do not know what happened, nor (it seems safe to surmise) does our government. We may never know. Fortunately, it is not our business to know. Whether by persuasion or by coercion, or more likely by some combination of the two, Iranians are going to have to work this problem out for themselves.

So, one lesson is that you and I should not let televised images mislead us to hasty conclusions regarding distant events. There is however another, deeper lesson, even more relevant to us here.

The deeper lesson: direct democracy consumes itself.

The essential problem in Iran lies in the unverifiability of the vote. If you think about it, though, all votes by large electorates are unverifiable, not only in Iran. Except maybe where the democratical civic ethic is broadly, very firmly rooted—a precarious circumstance gravely threatened by mass immigration among other causes—there simply is no known way for a voter to be reasonably sure that vote totals are genuine, for a single corrupt precinct can counteract several honest precincts. One bad apple ruins the whole barrel, so to speak.

Suppose for example that you were running for office and led by 50 votes per precinct, when I introduced 500 fake votes in one corrupt precinct. It is a matter of incontestible arithmetic that such an act, if successful, would effectively wipe out ten of your precincts. If I introduced 5000 fake votes, it would wipe out a hundred of your precincts. On the other hand, if each precinct by local plurality deputized a delegate to a convention, leaving to the convention the final choice, my 5000-vote corruption would net me but a single delegate, being then hardly worth the effort and risk.

The example is conceptual only (it is specifically not a concrete reform proposal by me), but the concept is important. Honest direct democracy is extremely difficult to maintain. Representative, indirect democracy is inherently far more robust, even—indeed, especially—when the indirect democracy contradicts a narrow but apparent overall majority.

Stable governance in a democratic republic is probably impossible if this principle is not grasped. There simply exists no way to ensure reliable vote totals across a large, unified electorate, in which each precinct presents ambitious politicians a potentially corruptible point of failure. Suspected corruption in a past election will be felt to justify actual corruption in a present election and yet greater corruption in a future election, trending dangerously toward despotism by him whoever proves the strongest, most ruthless of the fraudsters.

Such a system is inherently unstable.

Americans that draw from the present Iranian news the lesson that Iranians somehow needed more democracy are worse than merely mistaken, worse even than merely vain. They are entirely missing the chief lesson useful to us in these distant events, which is that a wise people in a great republic ought to judge direct democracy inherently dangerous, shunning it in every form. A justifiable, robust public confidence in an electoral system is a republican advantage that far outweighs the largely imaginary benefit some pedantic, bean-counting majoritarianism were supposed to bring.

HJH

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 10:22 am and is filed under Political theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.