Democracy and Wisdom (Dr Joseph Yu)

In an era of democratic anxiety and populist resurgence, the question of whether the "lettered" or "unlettered" best protects democracy has become newly urgent. David Hume, writing in the 18the century, famously praised the "wisdom of unlettered men" (1896: 611), suggesting that ordinary citizens - guided by lived experience and moral instinct - could show more political prudence than detached intellectual elites. Yet, in the modern world, distrust of both expertise and emotion runs high. This essay examines the relevance of Hume's claim through four key cases: the democratic rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany, Brexit in the UK (2016), Donald Trump's re-election in 2024, and the 2008 financial crisis. Each reveals that neither group can safeguard democracy alone. The unlettered may be swept up by affect and spectacle, while the lettered may fall prey to arrogance or technocratic failure. Overall, democracy depends on not the virtue of one group, but on institutions that mediate between elite knowledge and popular wisdom - ensuring that the instincts of the many and the ideas of the few are held in constructive tension.

'Popular Wisdom'

David Hume's (1886: 611) celebration of the "wisdom of unlettered men" suggests that ordinary citizens, guided by moral intuition and lived experience, may act with greater political prudence than ideological elites. Democratic theorists like Tocqueville echoed this sentiment, arguing that while educated elites often become detached from communal life, the common citizen - embedded in local contexts - can act with restraint and moral clarity (Tocqueville and Kramnick 2007). Yet, the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany challenges this optimistic view. 

In 1932, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party were democratically elected into the Reichstag, marking the beginning of a brutal regime. Although Adolf Hitler was ultimately appointed Chancellor by President Hindenburg, a conservative 'lettered' elite, Hitler's electoral legitimacy rested on mass support, particularly from the rural and working-class unlettered Germans who voted Nazi Party in the 1932-33 General Elections. Far from exerising Humean prudence, these citizens were swept up in a politics of spectacle and affect. As Evans notes, "Goebbels and his propaganda team aimed to overwhelm the electorate with an unremitting barrrage of assaults on their senses ... mobilising resentment and the need for redemption." (Evans 2003 349). Rather than judging policy or principle, many voters were emotionally drawn to nationalist symbols and the promise of revival. A young supporter’s admission, “I was overcome with a burning desire to belong… I wanted to attach myself to something great and fundamental” (Ibid., 373), exposes the vulnerability of the unlettered to charismatic manipulation. Their votes, rather than protecting democracy, helped dismantle it.

Yet Hume’s critique of reason applies equally to the lettered. These figures, far from acting as safeguards of the republic, orchestrated Hitler’s ascent out of arrogance and short-term calculation. As Evans (2003, 366) writes, “Frantic negotiations finally led to a plan to put Hitler in as Chancellor… to keep him in check”. Here, elite decision-making was not guided by civic responsibility or foresight, but by strategic cynicism, which is a failure of intellectual virtue. Thus, both the emotional unlettered and the calculating lettered made decisions that facilitated authoritarianism. Rather than affirming Hume’s faith in common wisdom or elite rationality, this case exposes the fragility of both. Ultimately, this disproves Hume's theory since the unlettered, being overrided by strong emotions, failed to choose a dependable leader relying on their habitual and moral intuitions, while the lettered elites also failed to govern wisely. Only robust institutions, such as press, judiciary, civic education, can mediate between intuitive morality and specialised expertise to guard against bad ideas.

A similar pattern can be observed more recently in Britain's 2016 Brexit referendum. Then-Prime Minister David Cameron, a 'lettered' political elite, called a public vote on continued European Union (EU) membership - an act of democratic risk-taking intended to placate his party's right flank. The Leave campaign won narrowly with 51.6% of the vote. Once again, it was not the wisdom of the unlettered that triumphed, but the weaponisation of hteir legitimate grievances by opportunistic elites. As Bale writes, populist leaders "prefer 'common sense' solutions and patriotic pride to purported expertise and naive internationalism." (UK in a Changing Europe, 2019) Complex questions about trade, law and sovereignty were flattened into emotive slogans like "Take Back Control". Here, too, we see emotional mobilisation overpowering informed deliberation. Populist figures did not offer meaningful explanations of EU treaties or migration policy, but "turned up the heat" (Ibid.) of discontent to inflame identity politics. The unlettered did not err because they were irrational - but because their moral intuitions were manipulated by elites willing to provoke inability for personal or partisan gain.

The Brexit example, then, sharpens the critique of Hume's optimism. The moral instincts he praised were not sufficient to navigate a complicated geopolitical question. Instead of protecting democracy from bad elite ideas, the unlettered vote was captured by elite-engineered emotion. Nor did the lettered act as safeguards: Cameron's miscalculation and media failures left the filed open to misinformation. As with Nazi Germany, it was not just the actions of the unlettered or the lettered, but their interaction - resentment below, cynicism above - that created a democratic failure. In both cases, Hume's idea is not disproven because the lettered lack value, but because no group, isolated, can defend democracy without institutional and civic checks that enable wisdom to flourish.

The 'Lettered'

If David Hume praised the wisdom of the “unlettered,” suggesting that those untainted by abstract ideology might act with moral restraint, then historical tragedies like the Great Terror during the French Revolutoin (McPhee, 2016) and Mao's Great Famine (Dikötter, 2010) point to a darker reality: the lettered are not only fallible, but can enable or initiate catastrophe. More recently, the rise and return of President Donald Trump further illustrates this. In both 2016 and 2024, America's educated elites failed to defend democracy from populist backlash - not because of public ignorance alone, but due to elite moral and institutional failure.

The first failure was moral and communicative. The Democrats, traditionally seen as a party of expertise and rational governance, often spoke at rather than to the unlettered. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark epitomized this elite disdain. As Ben Domenech noted, “Ask any media elite if they knew a Trump voter personally. Most didn’t. That bubble of ignorance cost them the election.” (Open to Debate, 2023) This blindness to social and emotional realities led elites to misdiagnose the cultural and economic anxieties driving Trumpism, deepening resentment among working-class and rural voters. Instead of fostering democratic deliberation, many elites intensified the divide between cultural cosmopolitans and the economically anxious.

Secondly, the lettered elites failed to address or resolve the economic grievances that made Trump’s populism plausible. Tim Carney’s observation, that “five of the six richest counties in America are within commuting distance of the U.S. capital” (Open to Debate, 2023), symbolizes the geographic and economic detachment of the elite from the everyday experiences of most Americans. When CBS’s Anthony Salvanto asked voters why they rejected elite economic narratives of recovery, they responded with lived realities: grocery bills, gas prices, rising credit card interest. As Farmer (2024) reports, diner manager Roz Werkheiser expressed her reasons for voting Trump: “All my bills went up… maybe he can help.” Here, economic populism wasn’t merely a rejection of facts—it was a rejection of abstracted technocratic success stories that bore no resemblance to everyday hardship. Elites talked growth; voters felt inflation.

Yet even if elites were economically complacent, their institutional negligence proved most damaging. According to Sciences Po (2025), Trump’s 2024 win was not a triumph of the unlettered over the elite, but of a new “anti-elite elite”, i.e. a cohort of fiercely loyal political operatives who cast off traditional elite norms like meritocracy, institutional autonomy, and legal restraint. These figures did not dismantle elitism; they reconstructed it in Trump’s image, transforming the executive branch into a vehicle of loyalty, grievance, and ideological enforcement. The “anti-elite elite” now champions initiatives like Project 2025, designed to “deconstruct the administrative state” and reorient federal power toward MAGA priorities. As a Sciences Po report (2025) warns, this amounts to “a more lasting victory: the transformation of democratic elitism into populist elitism.”

What we see, then, is a dual abdication. The unlettered succumbed to emotional narratives that traded policy for catharsis. But the lettered, those with the training, resources, and platforms to uphold democratic reason, failed to translate their expertise into moral and political leadership. As Bret Stephens put it: “It’s about accountability… Who is responsible for the problems that this country faces today?” (Open to Debate, 2023) The answer is: the very class that believed it had the duty to lead.

This case challenges the simple binary implied in Hume’s celebration of the “wisdom of unlettered men.” If the unlettered are vulnerable to affect and manipulation, and the lettered to arrogance, detachment, or institutional cowardice, then democracy fails not when either group errs individually, but when neither is able to correct the other. Hume was right to caution against the tyranny of passion, but he underestimated how reason, untempered by empathy and accountability, can retreat into irrelevance. In Trump’s America, the votes of the lettered did not protect against the bad ideas of the unlettered; they instead reflected an elite class that had lost both the trust of the people and the moral clarity to lead. The collapse of this relationship between expertise and legitimacy is what opened the door to populist authoritarianism. As Bartels observes, “It is they who choose to manage, mollify, ignore, or inflame populist sentiment” (Bartels 2024). In this case, the lettered chose to mollify and ignore, allowing dangerous ideas to move from the margins to the mainstream. The result was not the wisdom of the masses tempering elite folly, nor elite rationality guiding mass emotion, but the failure of both, leaving democracy exposed to the erosion of its own institutions.

Similarly, the 2008 financial crisis starkly illustrates elite failure. As Tett (2009) shows, highly educated bankers, armed with Ivy League credentials and complex models, engineered financial tools they didn’t fully understand. “Most bankers were willing to ignore the risks,” she writes (p.123). Rather than exercising prudence, they created financial time bombs based on synthetic CDOs and subprime securities. Nearly half of all mortgage-backed securities were tied to subprime loans by 2005 (Tett, 2009). These were sold to borrowers with little financial literacy—yet it was the lettered who built and sold the products. As Tett notes, these elites repeatedly “skimmed off the riskiest portions” in pursuit of returns (Ibid., 121).

When collapse came, the unlettered bore the burden. According to the Federal Reserve, GDP dropped 4.3% and unemployment doubled to 10%, the worst since WWII (Weinberg, 2013). Yet the unlettered had no role in designing this system. This was elite epistemic failure: when technocratic intelligence became unmoored from moral judgment. Hume’s celebration of common-sense prudence warns us that the unlettered may serve as a necessary check on elite overreach. In this case, the votes of the lettered failed, not only to protect democracy or the economy, but to prevent calamity of their own making.

Conclusion

In conclusion, neither of the votes of the lettered nor the unlettered can safeguard democracy alone. The unlettered are often vulnerable to emotional manipulation, while the lettered may pursue self-interest at the expense of public good. Though Hume praised the unlettered for their moral instincts, these can be distorted in a political climate shaped by elite misjudgment and exploitation. The lettered, therefore, bear greater responsibility: their design systems, frame narratives, and hold institutional power, often using the unlettered to legitimise harmful agendas. However, democracy cannot rely solely on elite ratoinality or mass intuition. What preserves democratic stability is the interaction - and fraction - between the two, which, when mediated by robust institutions, can prevent either group from dominating unchecked. It is this balance, not any single group's wisdom, that protects democratic society. 

Reference

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Weinberg, J. (2013). The Great Recession and Its Aftermath. [online] Federal Reserve History. Available at: https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-and-its-aftermath.