So this makes for a better metaphor: those are the words of a child who has fallen in someone else’s shit, spent a few curious moments smearing it around, and now insists that he likes the smell.

I’m tempted to describe that bit about defending angels as the opening gambit of a man who likes the smell of his own bullshit. But that wouldn’t be entirely fair, because there’s nothing original in Brennan’s book.

That declaration appears on the very first page of Brennan’s Against Democracy , a clumsy, unoriginal treatise, far too convinced of its own edginess, that attempts to do for libertarianism what The Moosewood Cookbook did for spaghetti squash — that is, turn something unpalatable into something righteous.

At the very least, democratic theory needs someone to play devil’s advocate. Although I’m happy to play that role, in true devilish fashion I now doubt whether I’m defending the devil, and philosophers and political theorists are defending the angels.

So we should applaud libertarian luminary Jason Brennan for maintaining the intellectual posture of a college sophomore well into his academic career.

All this is to say: most people grow out of their devil’s advocate phase before they’re old enough to vote. The rest, before they’re old enough to rent a car.

True, some kids do make it all the way to college with their knee-jerk contrarianism intact. But even these undergrads tend to notice their classmates’ eyerolls by sophomore or junior year, so they move on to other ways of arguing.

Young children, for example, are also fond of the “what about” and the “well, actually.” Teenagers too. Of course, as their self-awareness develops, they usually cut that out.

Democracy Sucks

So whose shit does Brennan have on his face?

The Georgetown University professor is part of the academic milieu that coheres around the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians (BHL) — a group of free-market apologists who have built a brand out of applying lipstick to the libertarian pig.

These BHL types claim an interest in “social justice” — though they can’t agree on what that means — and frame their defense of the free market as advocacy for the poor.

Online, Brennan presents himself as libertarianism’s millennial maverick. But in Against Democracy, he takes great pains to place himself in a pedigree of conservative thinkers that extends from Burke, to Mill, to John Adams, stretching back even to Plato — men who, in Brennan’s view, valiantly defended reality from the dreamers.

For Brennan, results-based pragmatism is at the core of conservative thought. He begins his book by invoking Mill’s call for “whatever form of government produces the best results.” But as Brennan’s arguments develop, it becomes clear that his insistent pragmatism is shrewdness more than clearheadedness — the emphasis on “best results” allows Brennan to elide his argument’s repugnant implications by appealing to an ideal standard of good government (“competent rule”) that he leaves abstract and unexplained.

Two points are central to Brennan’s argument in Against Democracy — first, “that politics is bad for us, and most of us should, for the sake of our characters, minimize our involvement”; and second, that one-person-one-vote democracy, far from being empowering, actually violates individual liberties.

Brennan rides the high horse of these two points all the way to his big idea: democracy should be replaced by “epistocracy” — in other words, the rule of the learned, the qualified, should prevail over the will of the people.

It’s not a new idea. In fact, it’s a very old idea — and a bad one — that Brennan attempts to rehabilitate in 245 pages of plodding prose.

So let’s take each of his two main claims individually. First, politics is bad for us, and most of us should really just cut it out of our lives.

Brennan divides people into three categories based on political temperament — “hobbits” don’t have strong political opinions or interests; “hooligans” have intensely partisan views, and can’t help but ridicule or out-shout those they disagree with; and “vulcans” are thoroughly rational, with well-informed opinions that shift according to new information and fresh insight.

The problem with democracy, Brennan suggests, is that it incentivizes us to be hooligans. By their very nature, political people are crass, partisan, irrational — not fit to be rulers.

Responding to democratic theorists like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls — who advocate deliberative democracy on the grounds that it creates enlightened political subjects — Brennan claims to demonstrate through empirical evidence that political participation in fact encourages irrational behavior.

But the empirical evidence he musters is underwhelming, to say the least.

A flashy array of pseudo-intellectual buzzwords — “tribalism”; “in group/out group dynamics”; “confirmation bias” — sprinkle his polemic, eventually cohering around a strawman political subject: the hypothetical hobbit who enters the deliberative fray and emerges worse — transformed into a hooligan, lost forever to the vulcans’ world of cool-as-a-cucumber political rationality.

Brennan seems unable to grasp that people don’t enter political discussions as pure individuals — we’re all thoroughly enmeshed in collectives. By virtue of our position in society, we are inclined to ally with those who share our social priorities, and opposed to those who don’t.

The transformative potential of deliberative democracy lies in its capacity for making these social distinctions clear — not in some mystical quality that allows us to transcend our material circumstances through the power of measured discussion.

For all his hand-wringing about polarization, Brennan never stops to consider that maybe establishing clear lines between antagonistic forces is, in fact, the point of politics — not its unhappy side effect.

But this all starts to make sense when we consider that, according to Brennan, the great evil of democracy is that it violates the happy community of the market — in which all people are connected to all others in a diffuse web of mutual benefit.

For Brennan, giving people the right to vote transforms them from market collaborators into “civic enemies” — precisely because it opens the door to the possibility that individuals might, by acting together, exert power over other market participants.

“In civil society,” Brennan writes, “most of my fellow citizens are my civic friends, part of a great cooperative scheme [the market]. One of the repugnant features of democracy is that it transforms these people into threats to my well-being.” How? By enabling them to control his behavior “in risky and incompetent ways.”

That brings us to Brennan’s second key point. One-person-one-vote democracy doesn’t empower us, as those wily democracy-boosters would have us believe — actually, it violates our rights.

Brennan disputes the democrats’ principle that people have the right to participate in government by introducing a different principle — people have the right to competent rule.

Then he continues for forty pages about how, overwhelmingly, voters are just too dumb to be trusted with that great responsibility. By voting wrong, Brennan claims, other people violate his personal right to good government.

Luckily, Brennan has a solution to this predicament — “Just as we regulate emissions in order to control air pollution, should we regulate voting in order to control voting pollution?” he asks.

We cleanse the air. Why not cleanse the voter rolls?

Then we can leave politics to the experts — the epistocrats.