Indoctrination and Democratic Legitimacy

I argue that indoctrination undermines voter competence, and that widespread indoctrination thereby compromises the legitimacy of otherwise free and fair elections. Drawing on recent work in virtue epistemology, I provide an epistemic account of indoctrination according to which one is indoctrinated only if they hold an epistemically impactful belief with an intellectually vicious dogmatic attitude. After clarifying these notions, I show that politically indoctrinated subjects lack epistemic agency with respect to their vote, rendering them incompetent as voters. Therefore, if indoctrinated voters successfully elect a candidate, then the result is illegitimate, even if the election is otherwise free and fair. More speculatively, I suggest that this problem is not merely contingent, but structural: under conditions of low-cost distribution of information, democracy incentivizes widespread indoctrination as a political strategy, thereby incentivizing a practice that undermines its own legitimacy.