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68 Drake L. Rev. 371 (2020)
Constitutional Democracy and Scholarly Fashions: Symposium Discussion: Schor

handle is hein.journals/drklr68 and id is 403 raw text is: CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY AND SCHOLARLY FASHIONS SYMPOSIUM DISCUSSION: SCHOR SEPTEMBER 21, 2019 DRAKE UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL Jack Balkin: What is the prescriptive thesis? And is this prescriptive thesis an alteration of the rules of free expression? Miguel Schor: No, I didn't make that argument. The point is that the problem is not political. It is deeply societal, and it's the very process of engagement with that amendment that can enable that kind of discussion. Audience Member: Do you feel that as much as there is a problem on a constitutional level, is there a failure of electorates in democracies across the world by not doing what they can to regulate the governments that they elect? Schor: The problem is, in terms of voters, that they were not as informed as they could be about that. I think one of the things to be most worried about is that we don't think of the news as a kind of public good. It's not being produced right now, and if we can't even begin to agree on some really basic facts, we simply don't have a functional government. For all of the promise of new technologies, it has not replaced what these newspapers once gave us. Sanford Levinson: One of Frank's colleagues at Antonin Scalia, formerly George Mason, is Ilya Somin, someone who, in fact, has been here at one of these symposiums. Ilya has written a very interesting book on basically rational ignorance, which is the idea that the larger the society, the less incentive any individual citizen has to become well-informed. This also represents a triumph of economics as a way of looking at the world, as against the kind of civic-republican notion that you ought to be a well- informed citizen, regardless of whether you're getting a constant payoff from your investment of time and energy. The more you adopt the economist's one way of thinking, the more you realize it's a kind of silly expenditure of your time and energy, which I think is a fundamental problem with any modern political system. One thing that Frank talks about in his forthcoming book on secession is that the United States is just too large to function as a single country. We have too many people, too many views, and if you combine that with Ilya's kind of argument, then you will end up getting the kind of elites that Leah is talking about that do have incentives to participate. 371

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