Ángela Sierra González is Professor and Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Latin American Studies (CEILAM) at the University of La Laguna and former member of the European Parliament. She is also co-editor of La filosofía ante el ocaso de la democracia representativa.
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.
The reflections of Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan are part of the “revisionist” current of democracy and its decision-making procedures. This theoretical current tends to reinterpret existing democratic procedures and present them in an unfavourable light, in view of the realities that emerge from the labyrinth of interests at play in the spheres of power. His works The Myth of the Rational Voter and Against Democracy, however, must be distinguished from the burgeoning anti-democracy “industry” of ideas that, with misleading intentions, seeks to unmask the “false democracy of the ballot box” with clichéd arguments —some of them put into circulation since the beginning of the 20th century by National Socialism. The intentions of this industry are misguided because the implementation of its ideas would lead to covert forms of authoritarianism. It claims to solve the problems of democracy by resorting to exhausted ways, such as elitism, which entail “serious risks of domination”1.
The revisionism in whose tradition The Myth of the Rational Voter and Against Delmocracy fit, albeit partially, within the democratic narrative. Caplan and Brennan do not seek to replace the democratic system with a different system; on the contrary, their proposals are aimed at reforming the democratic system so that it regains its legitimacy. But Caplan and Brennan are on the edge of revisionism. At some points they appear to be anti-democratic. At others, they suggest —particularly Brennan— that democracies, on the whole, work quite well. This fact makes the point that they are not anti-democratic; an anti-democrat would never acknowledge that the democratic system has any validity. In their works, Bryan Caplan and Jason Brennan do not harbour authoritarian aims, nor do they seek to empower one social class over another. On the contrary, they try, under different approaches, to rescue democracy as a system of "good government" or "just government", although their proposals may, in some cases, be debatable, but not absurd.
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