Wittman Versus the Last 25 Years of American Democracy

A podcast retrospective on *The Myth of Democratic Failure*

Donald Wittman, now professor emeritus at UC Santa Cruz, was my first official intellectual nemesis. A friendly, funny nemesis, but a nemesis nonetheless. When I started my Ph.D. program, I was a convinced mainstream public choice economist. Wittman’s The Myth of Democratic Failure awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers. While he never came close to making me think that democracy worked well, he quickly persuaded me that standard public choice complaints about democracy needed a new foundation: a foundation of voter irrationality, placed on a deeper foundation of rational irrationality. My first book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, was a conscious response to Donald Wittman, and we had multiple lively exchanges about our radically divergent perspectives.

When The Myth of Democratic Failure released in 1995, the friends of “democratic capitalism” were triumphant and triumphalist. There was never a better time to be a Panglossian, to believe that Western democracy was a wise, effective system for handling human societies’ division of labor between markets and government. The 21st century, in contrast, has made this optimistic vision of democratic wisdom and efficacy hard for almost everyone to sustain.

Last year, however, I started wondering, “Well, what would Wittman think about all this?” It took a while to arrange, but I finally had this delightful hour-long conversation with my first nemesis. Is Wittman finally ready to rethink the efficiency of democracy?

At risk of spoiling the suspense, the answer is Yes. Late Wittman is so disillusioned with American democracy that I found myself role-playing early Wittman to change his mind. Personally, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. If you watch, I hope you feel the same way.