Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. His books include Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, The Last Utopia, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cohost of the Digging a Hole podcast, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times and many other publications.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Sam Moyn discuss whether a truly fair democracy might weigh different citizens’ votes differently, whether the emphasis on human rights have got us into the mess we’re in today, and to what extent our democracy is in danger from populism.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: So why are the old people the problem, Sam?
Samuel Moyn: I don’t think old people are a problem. I think gerontocracy is—in the same way that whites may not be a problem, but white supremacy is real.
My goal is to show how older people actually sometimes suffer too under a regime of gerontocracy, and to look at how that regime came about and what its current form is—not just for the sake of younger folks, but also for the mass of older people themselves.
Mounk: All right, I’ll refrain from being flippant for the rest of the conversation. Walk us through some of the ways in which America is ruled by gerontocracy today.
Moyn: In the book I look at the first coinage of the term. It’s not Greek, but it’s based on Greek words. It’s supposed to add a dimension to our classification of forms of government like monarchy or oligarchy. The person who coined it made it very clear that it was taking a different form in modern times, having to do with the organization of the electoral system—how people have elections in a democratic society—and then a lot to do with how wealth is allocated and transmitted. I definitely talk about the politicians of our day, who in America are old men and women, but I’m mainly interested in showing that gerontocracy is systemic and that it affects what it means to go to the polls, the outcomes, how elections are financed, and how our economy is organized. I have this sense that we should think about power in the broadest sense—rather than just looking at who’s in office, as the Greeks did—and look more at who has power, meaning effective control of the lives of most people.
Mounk: Let’s go through some of these areas. As you’re saying, politics is the most straightforward, and then there are ones you think are perhaps more important or deeper. But just at a purely descriptive level, what’s the evidence that old people are ruling us in Congress, in the White House, and so on, in a way that hasn’t been the case in past eras?
Moyn: The most graphic evidence, if we’re talking about the United States, is the two most recent presidents. There had really only been one very old man in the presidency before Ronald Reagan, and that was William Henry Harrison, who died in short order of a cold in the nineteenth century. With Reagan we began to see older and older men in office, capped by the last two presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Now, in fairness, more than half of humanity is ruled by an old man over 70 at this point, largely because of the aging of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and so forth. The American syndrome is specific.
What I try to do—and this I think is tolerably well known—is go beyond the focus on Biden and cognitive decline to ask just how unrepresentative the political class generally is in the United States, looking in particular at Congress and the federal judiciary. What I’ve tried to do in the book across all these topics is provide the receipts, mainly generated by other people, and gather them in one place. Congress is aging; the Supreme Court is aging in the sense that even when appointed young, the justices stay for a long time.
Aside from cognitive decline, the risk of death is a very serious aspect of the problem. Donald Trump’s one big beautiful bill was facilitated in its passage by the death in droves of Democrats in the House in the six months before that bill. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, notorious for other reasons, died setting up the end of federal abortion rights. All of that pales in the end, if we’re talking about the political class, beside representational fairness, because cognitive decline or death are just the flagrant symptoms of a broader political class that’s old. Very few people in their thirties and forties hold any position of significance in the federal government. That’s the story when it comes to politicians.
Mounk: What do you think is the explanation here? Obviously, when it comes to the presidency, you said that’s been the trend since Ronald Reagan. Reagan was quite old when he assumed the presidency, but the three presidents afterwards were relatively young. He was followed by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all of whom were reasonably young men at the time they took office. Some of the dynamics in the Senate, and perhaps in the House of Representatives, have to do with very specific American institutions—though I think that’s harder as an explanation for the presidency. What I mean is that if you’re an incumbent senator, particularly in a safe state, of which there are now very many on both sides, it’s very hard to displace you. If you’re 70 or 80 years old and running for reelection, you probably wouldn’t win a primary contest when you’re first being elected, but with 25 years of service and all the favors owed to you and all the fundraising muscle at your disposal, you may be able to hold off a primary challenge—and then you’re going to sail to reelection in Texas or Massachusetts, if you’re in the right political party.
The presidency is harder to explain. In 2020, Joe Biden faced a lot of younger rivals for the Democratic nomination, and yet voters in the primaries freely chose him. In 2024, Donald Trump faced a number of opponents who were quite a bit younger than him, but he was clearly able to retain the loyalty of the Republican primary electorate to such an extent as to gain reelection. I haven’t seen analyses showing a very obvious age gradient in which primary voters voted for those candidates. In 2024, for example, it’s not clear to me that the people who voted for Trump in Republican primaries were systematically older than the people who voted for his rivals. Even in the general election itself, there was less of an age difference than we might have expected, and most of that is produced by partisanship rather than a preference for a particular age. So what do you think produces this? If this is the free choice of American voters, I’m free to disagree with that choice—and I think there’s good reason to disagree in both of those cases—but it’s somewhat unclear that we shouldn’t just leave it to American voters to make their own decisions.
Moyn: One reason I’m interested in pushing beyond politicians in general, and not just the president, is that I agree there’s a lot of contingency and idiosyncrasy in the political story—and yet it’s the one that, to the extent Americans care about this politics, they care about. So I’m using it as a door.
I agree with you, and I’d even add that if Donald Trump were to fulfill the fondest hopes of those who’ve resisted him and depart or die within a year, we’d immediately have the youngest president in U.S. history, because J.D. Vance would enter the office at an age younger than Theodore Roosevelt, who currently holds the record for youngest president.
Mounk: When you look at some of the leading Democratic contenders for the nomination in ’28, they go from middle-aged men—like Gavin Newsom—to very young contenders like AOC.
Moyn: Absolutely. The foundations of what I’m thinking of as the structure of gerontocracy—as a structural phenomenon that goes beyond these contingencies and therefore leads us beyond the level of politicians—the main driver is going to be the aging of humanity, and certainly of Americans. I would push back a bit on the moral you seem to hypothesize when it turns out that there’s a lot of contingency in accounting for the age of politicians.
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Voters only select and express their preferences within a system, and we have to critically inquire into that system. Let’s continue to take my analogy of white supremacy as something many people would acknowledge exists and may be systemic in the way I’m saying gerontocracy is. If you said that, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais, no Black politicians are being elected in the Deep South anymore—is that the will of the people, or is it because of the way the will of the people has been organized in an electoral system?
As far as I see it, it really matters that there are advantages of incumbency—which you mentioned—which means that especially when politicians in America are starting their careers later, you’re just going to have an older set of politicians than the electorate and certainly more than the population. Then we’d have to get into campaign finance, where the facts are glaring about just how old the median campaign donor is: over 60, sometimes higher. I devote a whole portion of the book to thinking about gerontocracy at the political level, not just in terms of the politicians, but in terms of the institutions. We do literally have a branch of government named after old men. We do have age minima in the Constitution for federal political office, with no age maxima. Those are also features of the way we’ve organized political choice. We can’t say “the will of the people” as if that’s pre-existing, because it utterly depends for its expression on the institutions we’ve devised and the rules we’re following to figure out what it is.
Mounk: Perhaps we’ll get into a little bit later what we should do about those institutions, what kinds of ways to reform them. Certainly when it comes to something like abolishing age minima, I think there’s a very strong democratic and liberal reason to abolish them. Some of the suggestions you make in the book are rather more ambitious, and we may have different views about them, but we can get into that.
Let’s get beyond politics. As somebody who is an immigrant to the United States having grown up in Europe, I’ve always been struck by how open American society is to the talents and contributions of young people. I feel that a little bit less now that people in my age group in Germany and France and so on are coming to have genuine roles of importance and responsibility in society. But I was struck when I was 30 years old that I had many friends and acquaintances in the United States who already had positions teaching at major universities, positions editing publications or at least important sections of publications, and very significant roles in law firms and investment banks. Obviously, when you look today at Silicon Valley, you have an enormous number of people in their thirties who have about as much power and influence as any human being has had in the history of humanity by certain standards.
This stood in contrast to a lot of 30-year-olds in Germany still being interns, to somebody getting to be the editor of a newspaper section of a major publication at the age of 30 being an incredibly exceptional achievement. When I worked in theater after college for a year, my first task as assistant director was to hire an intern—I was 21 years old, and the intern we ended up hiring was 29. So to what extent is it true, when you look at American society more broadly, that there is this kind of gerontocracy? Isn’t America still in many ways the country of the young, where people have enormous opportunities if they have the right kind of education and perhaps the right kind of background and the various advantages that play into that in a system that is not always as meritocratic as it claims to be? Isn’t it actually striking how much influence and power and money a lot of young people have in the United States compared to anywhere else in the world?
Moyn: Oscar Wilde famously said that the youth of America is its only tradition. I don’t think that’s true—I see the U.S. Constitution as a gerontocratic document in the ways we’ve already addressed, and that’s a big tradition—but I agree with you. It’s one reason I’m interested in thinking about the American case, that at times America has stood for launching youth and providing careers open to talent. I think you might overstate the transatlantic gulf, insofar as I think the whole point of modernity was to topple elder rule and put in place opportunities for young people. The whole modern novel and its roots in the so-called Bildungsroman is about the opportunities that young men could enjoy after the revolution, on the model of Napoleon.
The question is what’s happening now. The demography, I think, is unsuitable for the picture of America you’re saying still prevails. I’m not denying it: I became an Ivy League professor at twenty-nine and got tenure shortly after, so I have had enormous opportunities as a youth. Many of my students have not. Some have been the editors of those publications you mentioned, but in part because they were blocked from becoming professors in a way I wasn’t. The general story has to be that our demography is changing, with fewer young people and an overwhelming number—absolutely and relatively—of aging people who are not suffering decline and are not forced out of their power. The baseline is changing, and that’s the very modest claim I’m making.
Mounk: I wonder whether we need to distinguish between areas of American life and the American economy where you’re not just distributing a fixed number of positions of influence and opportunity, and ones in which you are. For a variety of reasons, I think universities—and particularly humanities departments within universities, and particularly humanities departments studying the sorts of things that you and I studied when we were applying for faculty jobs—are just at the extreme end of that distribution. Universities have not increased their numbers in part because it is an oligopoly that is trying to protect its prestige. The faculty of Columbia University recently voted by something like 80 or 90 percent against admitting more students to the opportunities that university may give to people. The number of students studying the humanities has crashed over the last 20 or 30 years for a whole set of reasons within the humanities. Political theory and European intellectual history—your discipline—are very much out of fashion. In those very specific areas of American life, there is indeed a highly limited number of positions and opportunities, and if professors no longer have to retire and some of them choose to stay in post until they’re 75 or 80 or 85, that means young doctoral students don’t have an opportunity to take up those faculty jobs.
I wonder whether the lesson of that is that universities should actually expand opportunity, that the humanities need to reform themselves to attract undergrads, that the institutional priorities of who’s getting hired are sometimes wrong, that we should hire more professors rather than more administrators—lessons which are more specific to this particular case rather than the broader thesis. When it comes to the broader economy, it doesn’t strike me that most talented, driven 25- or 30-year-olds don’t have enough opportunities to go and join banking or artificial intelligence, or that there’s not enough capital for them to do a startup, or that they can’t become pharmacists or teachers and so on. To what extent are we overgeneralizing from the world that you and I know?
Moyn: That’s a fair question, and I don’t mean to stake my case on academic gerontocracy—in the few pages I address it, it’s really treated as its own distinctive, idiosyncratic phenomenon. However, aspects of it turn out to be more familiar than your binary presentation suggests. I agree that we are a bit illusioned about the general picture because of certain vanguard sectors of the economy that do indeed provide youthful opportunity—Silicon Valley would be the classic example—but most of the analysis I give of the job situation is making the point not about the academic scene but about American business more generally, which has features that resemble universities to the extent that there are apex positions and a pyramid of authority. The higher you go, the older you are, in the last thirty years. In part, the reason is that across these sectors, mandatory retirement—which was once a familiar element of the American employment landscape—was abolished in the later nineteen-eighties through the early nineteen-nineties. More generally, all of these sectors involve aging Americans who are being not just kept alive but in at least a high enough functioning state to indulge the illusion that they’ve still got their mojo, and they stay. We’re really talking about most sectors where American innovation is at stake, and Silicon Valley would emerge as a kind of outlier.
Mounk: There is a distinction between areas where the argument seems immediately compelling—which is politics and academia—united by having a stagnant number of positions to be meted out. There’s only one president, there are only 100 senators, and the faculty of major universities hasn’t expanded in the way it might have. When it comes to CEOs of S&P 500 companies, by definition there are 500 of them. Opportunity in the economy as a whole does seem to be a different story.
Moyn: The S&P 500 takes up a gargantuan percentage of the economy as a whole. Those who own their own businesses are even less constrained and more likely to stay.
That may be permissible, and now we’re really talking about employment, not the economy in general. I am very modest in this regard. I agree with you that we need to analyze sector by sector, industry by industry, where there is a supply of younger people who are objectively blocked because of a bottleneck failure to organize succession. Until recently, big law—another elite profession—was a kind of outlier in requiring mandatory departure of its senior partners, and that’s eroding now. It was actually a sector that preserved a sense of the importance of arranging intergenerational succession of counsel for those who have legal problems, and it could be legally structured in such a way as to sidestep ordinary prohibitions in federal law on mandatory retirement.
That would be a different sector, although it’s increasingly looking like the dominant form. The difference between us may be whether to resolve all the complications in the direction of saying there’s a dominant situation—which I think is the case—or whether we really see a few pockets of gerontocracy and it’s more a minor problem to deal with in those few sectors where it’s significant. That can’t be right, because it’s too general even if we shouldn’t overgeneralize.
Mounk: I don’t have a strong stake in this fight, I have to say. I think there’s something clearly intuitive and appealing about the thesis of a gerontocracy in America, and there are certain elements—particularly in the political system and perhaps in academia—where that strikes me as being right. I perhaps have a comparative instinct where this problem seems so much more pronounced in every other society I know: whether that is China, looking at the composition of the central committee of the Communist Party and all of the top political officials; whether it’s the fact that a lot of young people who are graduates of the most prestigious universities feel they’re never going to be able to afford an apartment in Shanghai or Beijing if they don’t stand to inherit one; whether that is extreme rent protection laws that mean that if you came to Beijing or Shanghai from the countryside in the seventies or eighties, you’d probably live in a big apartment in the center, but as a result everybody else has that problem.
Or obviously looking at Europe—there you have additional problems, which in part China now has as well. If you find employment, you have an extremely generous pension system, as in France, where pensioners now on average have more income every month than working people. In the United Kingdom there is the triple lock, which basically ensures that pensions will always outgrow the salaries of working people by definition, as long as the policy stays in place. All of that is purchased at such strong levies on work that you have a huge problem of youth unemployment that by and large you don’t have in the United States. You can see that as a glass half empty or glass half full: either gerontocracy is actually a problem beyond America and perhaps America is in danger of ending up with the same depth of problems, which makes the problem even more urgent, or Americans are a little bit spoiled and should look at the ways in which other countries have this problem so much worse and appreciate what they have.
Moyn: In the end I’m always going to want to transcend comparison to other places that are worse, in the name of comparison to what society ought to look like and how it ought to be organized. The comparisons are complex because Western Europe is indeed suffering in terms of its capitalist growth compared to the United States right now, and so it’s producing fewer jobs for young people—even though in the American case those may be what David Graeber called bullshit jobs. At the same time, Western Europe has a much more widespread culture of retirement and a welfare state that comparatively enables retirement and allows Western Europeans to avoid fear of decline, in a way that Americans—not just because of their work ethic, but because of their extreme fear of what their long-term situations will be—can’t afford to do. It’s not surprising, then, that not just professors at the pinnacle UK institutions but all professors across Western Europe are subject to mandatory retirement rules, and that’s true in many industries. I see a lot of bright spots in Western Europe and a lot of resources for the anti-gerontocratic campaign.
Mounk: What is it worth if people have to retire at 65 but young people have a problem of mass unemployment? Wouldn’t you rather have people not having to retire and there’s actually opportunity for young people?
Moyn: Absolutely, but there may be sectors in which there’s actually a choice. I’ve made the argument that academia in America is like much of organized business, especially in large firms, where there are a lot of people in the firm who have the same experience of serving endlessly under old men and women. The market wants them to leave, and the stock price of companies actually increases when an old leader finally gives up power, whereas it goes down when a younger CEO falls ill or dies unexpectedly. In the name of growth, you might really want to take seriously how widespread the pipeline issues are, and argue that in the cases where that’s true, we should combine growth with mandatory retirement.
Mounk: Comparing those places, the United States seems to me to have both a lot more opportunity for young people and a lot fewer rules about all people having to retire. It seems superior on both of those metrics in terms of the opportunities it gives to people than Germany or France.
Moyn: Most millennials have a generational experience of living after the 2008–09 financial crisis and feeling an immense sense of blockage since, and that may not be shared universally. It doesn’t mean that jobs aren’t available to them—they may not be the jobs they wanted. I take your points, but I worry about vast generalizations when we should really look sector by sector and figure out whether it’s true that America is already this neoliberal utopia where, because of the lack of rules, it’s the land of opportunity for all comers. Not really.
Mounk: That’s not exactly what I said, but what do you think we should do about this? What is the set of responses we should have, including in the political realm, where you make some really quite provocative proposals?
Moyn: What’s helpful about your questions is that we’ve really isolated jobs—both political and nonpolitical—from the overall analysis. Whereas I said I’m as focused, and maybe more focused, on the political system, gerontocratic institutions, and the organization of elections—not just jobs in the economy, but the economy more generally. However, if we’re going to talk about jobs, I believe in age limits as well as youth quotas, for which we can look to Western Europe principally for inspiration. The trouble with term limits—which are very popular among Americans when polled, as are age limits—is that Americans are entering their political careers later in life. Term limits merely give them a time limit. Age limits have the virtue of guarding against the risk of cognitive decline or death to a much greater extent. Youth quotas are really exciting because, no matter where you set a limit on service, you’re basically going to have many or most politicians closer to that limit than we would like. What we really see as the problem, I think, is not cognitive decline or death, as I said earlier, but a lack of representation for most age cohorts. Youth quotas allow us to correct that to some extent.
Mounk: Age limits is a slightly broad term. What do you think is an appropriate age limit for a senator, a professor, or a CEO?
Moyn: I’d go for seventy right now, but I don’t feel strongly about the number. I’m more committed to the philosophical idea, especially as our life expectancy goes up—and it may go up in leaps and bounds. I don’t think it will, but we have to leave open the possibility that it will happen. The number has to be flexible and open to change. As of today, I’m for 70-ish.
Mounk: You’re the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and the head of Grace Hopper College. I believe if you introduced age limits of 70 for the professoriate, that would give you about 16 more years of service. Are you willing to pledge to retire when you turn 70?
Moyn: I’ve done it—in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I spun off the few pages in the book about gerontocracy and I did commit to that there. It’s not a problem because I would love to retire now and I really think of myself as semi-retired to begin with.
Mounk: Retirement for academics is kind of fake, right? I was speaking to a very prominent academic the other day who was saying they were really thinking about whether to retire next year or the year after. I asked how come, and they said, because it would allow them to write more books. Why should they, if they no longer need the money? Obviously they love teaching. But at some point you think you want to focus on your writing. That’s not really retirement in the way that it is for most people. A lot of people love their jobs, but they have jobs where when they retire they no longer get to do their jobs. That’s kind of different for us, where at least a lot of our work involves things that we get to do more of if we retire from our faculty positions.
Moyn: That’s true, and I discuss this in the book. My own view is that we should think of retirement, at least as a default, as a last chance to reinvent yourself. It’s just true that some people will have an experience of their vocations that makes it impossible for them to give it up—existentially. I think that’s a mistake for them existentially when that’s the case, but I’m not going to mandate that they go fishing. Is fishing really an acceptable way to spend your retirement?
Mounk: Tell us about some of the political proposals. One of the proposals you float is that perhaps—I forget the exact details—you get one vote if you’re 80 or over, two votes if you’re 70 or over, and three votes if you’re 60 or over, all the way down, not quite to toddlers. How seriously do you mean that? What about the straightforward objection that the point of democracy is meant to be one person, one vote, and that perhaps some of our constitutional realities—like the ban on running for president before you’re 35—should go out the window, that we should approach the principle of one person, one vote more rather than less? Saying that simply on the arbitrary basis of which year you were born you’re supposed to have five times more votes than the other person casting their ballot next to you seems like a pretty fundamental violation of that foundational democratic principle.
Moyn: There’s a general discussion to have about just how bad electoral gerontocracy is. Even when you and others are rightly on a campaign for #ourdemocracy, we really have to reckon with the truth about what we’re defending, which is an electoral gerontocracy. There’s a long list of remedies, many of which—actually all of which—are less radical than the one you’re speaking of now. Let’s talk about it philosophically. First, it’s just not true that we should think of democracy as involving one person, one vote. It certainly doesn’t in the United States right now, because of the Electoral College and the Senate, which basically overweights the votes of those from less populous states by constitutional design. More generally, the idea of one person, one vote became an article of faith in the United States largely as a result of Supreme Court decree in the context of the civil rights era. If you go back to the origins of democracy and mass suffrage in the nineteenth century, there were very widespread proposals for plural voting and organizing voting generally very differently than we do, and there was an argument for it. The argument I would make is: what does it mean to be equal in a democracy? Right now we basically say that if you have one body, no matter its age, you should get one vote. What if we had a principle of equality that said your vote should be correlated with how much time you have left, so that we don’t overweight—which we do now—the vote of those who are closer to death and therefore less likely to see and live under the policies they’re choosing.
Mounk: So if you’re diagnosed with a very serious disease that foreseeably leads to your demise within the next five years, you should get your vote discounted.
Moyn: The policy of so-called one person, one vote is a policy of systematically overweighting the votes of those who are older—on one conception of equality.
Mounk: So why is it over-weighting them? It’s weighting them equally.
Moyn: The question is what are we equalizing: bodies or life expectancy?
Mounk: The basic problem of society is that I have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed, and you have a bunch of boneheaded ideas about how we should be governed, and there isn’t a God or some kind of objective authority that’s going to tell us whether you’re right or whether I am right. We’re trying to design a set of institutions that we can all somehow live with, because we realize that not having political organization at all, or taking up arms in order to clobber the other’s boneheaded ideas out of their mind, is not worth it. The cost of that is too high. The whole point of democracy from that point of view is to say there isn’t one person who is in some way superior to the other—we should all have the same amount of voice. The idea of one person, one vote is not some kind of epiphenomenal invention; it flows relatively logically from that principle. Now, that doesn’t mean that this is perfectly respected in the United States or in any other democracy, and we can certainly discuss reforms—whether that’s campaign finance or reforms to the Electoral College that would allow us to more fully live up to this. To claim that there isn’t some fundamental set of reasons why one person, one vote really speaks to the basic aspirations of a democratic system is, I think, to ignore something quite important.
Moyn: The history just doesn’t back you up. It wasn’t obvious until it was, and that’s among other reasons why everyone—all liberals—believed for a long time that what mattered was not that you had a body that was alive, but that you had an adequate stake in the election and the capacity to exercise the relevant judgment, and then there was one person, one vote among those people. That was hegemonic for a very long time.
Maybe there were some folks who said there were exclusions, in the same way that I could say children and prisoners are kept from voting in the United States even though they have bodies that are alive. My actual point is somewhat different, which is that we could imagine historical circumstances in which it becomes equally intuitive to say that the equality that matters is the equality of your stake in the election. That actually was the rule, as I suggested, for much of the history of democracy, because it was a natural thought to those early democrats that you couldn’t have a stake in the election without education and, more importantly, property—because that’s what made politics matter, how property was going to be protected or not.
Mounk: Here I think we’ve come to our fundamental difference: you’re an intellectual historian, I’m a political theorist, so we have different approaches to this. I wasn’t making a historical claim; I was making a conceptual claim about the nature of democracy.
Moyn: I’m talking about the histories of political theorists who believed the opposite of what you do. I agree it’s totally intuitive now—you’re right that it’s totally intuitive. I guess I’m looking at the situation and saying: if that is really an ideological smokescreen for gerontocracy, then we might have to revisit it in creative ways.
Mounk: If we’re going to revisit this, if we’re going to open up the black box of one person, one vote and say that for various reasons various groups of voters should have a vote that counts for more than those of others, why is age the one that matters over others?
Moyn: It’s not. I think Black people should have more votes than I do. John Stuart Mill believed—something I don’t believe—that those of us with doctorates should have more votes.
Mounk: So who else? Should Latinos have more votes?
Moyn: We could give women a modest increase.
Mounk: So women should have more votes. What about disabled people?
Moyn: That would be subject to debate. If you’re someone who cares most of all about the fate of minorities who are unlikely themselves to enjoy political power unless they enter into compromising coalitions, then we could proceed that way.
Mounk: What about trans people?
Moyn: My own view is that we should have an ongoing debate about how to organize our elections. We do in some sense, but we’re locked into a constitution that basically forbids us from experimenting with our electoral system. If you’re asking what I would vote for: first of all, we need more descriptive representation—that’s to say, elected representatives need to be produced by the system who are understood by relevant sectors of the electorate to represent them. That’s why the Calais decision—I don’t know if you supported that one—is so noxious: it forbade arrangements that allowed Black people to have Black representatives in this country. More generally, now we’re talking about actually sculpting the electorate itself and who gets what powers, and there I would be open to experimentation. The age case is to me the clearest one.
Mounk: Your point is that if you’re young, you should have more votes. I challenged you by asking about ethnic minorities, trans people, disabled people, and as I take it your answer was broadly yes, they should all get more votes as well.
The problem with this is precisely that it undermines the point of democracy in adjudicating between our fundamentally different visions of government. Democracy is the technique that, perhaps not in a unique way but better than any of the alternatives in human history, has been able to say: we take this huge, diverse country with people with a vast multiplicity of views and preferences and interests, and the way that we keep social peace, the way that we avoid civil war, the way that we avoid a complete falling apart of this polity is to say everybody gets one vote. There is also a certain set of fundamental rights that protects you against, for example, the government locking you up for worshipping in a way that others don’t agree with. What you’re suggesting is completely exploding this. What we would then have to do is arrive at some Habermasian consensus about exactly how many votes Black persons should have, how many Latino persons should have, how many somebody with one Black parent and one Latino parent should have, and whether trans people should also have multiples. What it would actually encourage in any real-world sense is naked interest group politics along racial, ethnic, and other lines, in a way where there’s never any consensus and the only way to contribute to policy discussions is to band together explicitly as members of monolithic groups to protect the interests and vote of your group against those of the others. This isn’t about whether in the 1850s Mill had a different view and thought that more educated people should have multiple votes. It really is about whether this would be a deviation from a democratic principle that actually undermines the historic achievement of this political system.
Moyn: I really appreciate those arguments, but I’m not sure I agree with them, for a couple of reasons. One is that your alternative is the nightmare scenario. Your case there at the end was really the familiar case against affirmative action, familiar to us from the neoconservative movement’s theories about the Balkanization of America—Arthur Schlesinger and so forth. I don’t think that’s all that’s going on, and it’s certainly not how we avoid fascism or tyranny, which has a lot to do with material factors and not mainly how we organize elections. The big response I have is that there’s no non-neutral technique, and the idea that one person, one vote is it, I think, is not persuasive.
Mounk: Don’t you think there’s something less politically fraught, and less subject to the influence of changing electoral majorities and insiders and outsiders, about saying the moment you are a citizen you get one vote—versus having a multiplier where, depending on the particular intersection of identities at which you stand, that multiplier is three times or five times or seven times or 0.2 times?
Moyn: You’re certainly right that in the real world a lot depends on what people empirically think, and you’re probably right that as of today a lot of folks would say that one person, one vote is just the only credible way of organizing elections, because it’s the only neutral principle.
Someone could write a book, and there could be whole movements, basically saying that’s false and there’s a more just way to do this. I’m not saying there’s going to be some big conversion. I agree with you that what people think out there really matters. Even if affirmative action was just, it really matters that the majority thought it wasn’t—certainly the majority of white people. You’re completely right about that. I thought we were talking about the matter of principle: can we argue credibly for an alternative to one person, one vote if it turns out that’s itself a partisan, non-neutral view? More generally, if you went out into the street and said, okay, you say you’re for one person, one vote, but how can you defend the Senate?—no one would understand it. We can’t be hostage to public opinion in that way if we’re trying to think about our principles and whether they’re credible and consistent. I concede a lot to you. This is a very important point you’re making.
Mounk: On the Senate—virtually every democracy has ways to ensure that different territories have influence in different kinds of ways. In the European Union, Luxembourg has as much vote on certain kinds of votes as Germany or France does. That’s just the cost of large-scale political unions between entities that have, to some extent, a different identity that persists. The second thing to say is that I think there’s a lot of enthusiasm in America for either abolishing the Senate or diminishing the extent to which it is geographically unfair. That’s precisely because I think there is a compelling logic to one person, one vote that is perhaps cushioned by the need to have some kind of political representation for smaller states with their own identity. The reason people have trouble explaining the Senate is precisely that one of the fundamental principles to which they intuitively hold is that a voter in New York or Texas should have the same influence as a voter in Montana—and that’s currently not the case, and that seems unfair. The logic of that seems to suggest we should go closer toward one person, one vote, not that because we tolerate, for complicated historical reasons as well as for the need for geographical representation, some deviations from it, we should give up on the principle altogether and think it doesn’t constrain us when it comes to fundamental things like whether a 70-year-old should have the same vote as a 30-year-old, or a white person the same vote as a Black person.
Moyn: I love that and I’m sure it’s right up to a point. The question is whether concluding that we’re overweighting the wrong people’s votes—namely those in small states—means, logically or otherwise, that we shouldn’t overweight somebody else’s vote. I know a lot of people who hate the Senate but believe in majority-minority districts. What’s that about? It’s about saying we should organize the districts so that within them, Black people who are a minority in the state generally can get someone of their race elected. You may not agree with majority-minority districts, but it’s certainly the case that most liberals think both that the Senate is problematic and that Callais was bad.
Mounk: The most cynical reading of that—irrespective of the merits of each of those institutional arrangements, and one that I think you, as a certain kind of materialist intellectual historian, should actually be quite sympathetic to—is that most of the people you’re talking about prefer the Democratic Party, for all of the misgivings we may have about it, over the Republican Party, and the over-representation of small states harms the Democratic Party while majority-minority districts help the Democratic Party.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Sam discuss whether we should be skeptical of human rights, why Trump seems to be a spent force, and how the Democrats can present a credible alternative to populism. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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