I WAS ON THE HUGH HEWITT SHOW a little while ago, but he didn’t ask the questions I most feared: “Is the recall good? Is it good that Arnold Schwarzenegger is running?”

As to the first, well, I have to disagree with George Will, who disapproves of the recall’s “plebiscitary cynicism,” and says that real conservatives will vote against recalling Davis. That seems wrong to me. California’s voters put the recall into the state constitution and kept it there. Presumably, they like it. It may or may not be a good idea, but it seems a bit odd to say that the time for the voters to act against the recall petition is once it’s triggered. And if the California Constitution is to be recast in less plebiscitary terms — which wouldn’t be a bad thing, overall — what better way to bring the political class onboard with the project than by ejecting the epitome of the political class, Gray Davis?

At any rate, as I wrote in a law review article called Is Democracy Like Sex? (which inspired a column by Will back in 1995 when it came out), voting doesn’t have to make sense to benefit the body politic. In the article, I used a biological metaphor: Many evolutionary biologists believe that sex evolved, despite its cumbersome and expensive characteristics, because it jumbled up genes in a way that made their holders more resistant to parasites over time. (Read the article for a more elegant explanation).

If one looks at special interest groups as parasites on the body politic — as, I think, we probably should — then electoral politics has the effect of shaking up the cozy relationships between politicians and clients, and keeping society more open. (And under Davis, those relationships have been extra-cozy). This disruption of what economist Mancur Olson called the “web of special interests” may be very important way of keeping societies from ossifying. What’s more, it works even if (perhaps especially if) the voters occasionally act irrationally or unpredictably.

Is this what’s going on in California? It looks that way from here. So is the recall a good thing? Probably so.

What about Arnold? Well, he’s bound to be a better Governor than Davis if he gets the chance. Would he be better than, say, Bill Simon or Dick Riordan — or, hell, Cruz Bustamante? I don’t know. He will, however, bring a lot of voters to the polls who don’t usually vote, which I suspect will tend to amplify the anti-special-interest effects I mention above. So whether he ought to be Governor, I think it’s probably a good thing that he’s a candidate.

In his column about my article, George Will wrote: “Is democracy like sex? Surely not. If it were, more people would vote.” Democracy may not be like sex. But Schwarzenegger’s candidacy is making it sexy. And perhaps that’s close enough.

UPDATE: Howard Owens says that George Will is right, and I’m wrong. He adds: “Glenn’s point about California voters long ago approving the recall, never doing away with the recall, and approving the recall does not address the principle argument that the recall is against conservative doctrine.” Hmm. Well, I’m not a conservative, of course, but what about all that respect-for-long-established-traditions-even-if-they-seem-a-bit-irrational-now stuff? I thought that was part of conservatism.