I do so here because I don’t think this is mind-killing. And I sure feel some rational debate about it would be educational, for me mostly, since there are so many great minds here and… I will come clean, I think democracy isn’t that great, considering this how is it possible that I am but ignorant? Or possibly evil. But before I can explain why I think as I do, I need to see why people think it is great. Who knows, maybe I’ve missed something vital? Or maybe people don’t like democracy already but they believe that they do. Or maybe I’m wrong about how popular such doubts are on this site, beyond a small but assuredly not tiny minority.
Now obviously there are doubts and doubts. Saying that democracy as it is in the West has problems, but only because it isn’t true democracy, isn’t what I mean by “doubting democracy” at all. To give an analogy I see this as like doubting communism by saying that what we are doing clearly isn’t true communism, this is why the 5 year plan has failed comrades! Those darn counter-revolutionary forces sabotaging us! Those darn undemocratic influences subverting our states. Indeed there are striking parallels about how true democracy should work great in theory but has never ever been fully implemented and how communism is great in theory but Communists never ever seem to be able to fully implement it.
And all ills stem from there not being enough Communism or democracy or piety. So to avoid true Scotsmen (surely wise as they are a bloodthirsty violent drunken lot, at least the true ones are) let me define casual use of democracy here. Let me even admit that pure or real or direct or whatever kind of untested democracy you prefer may work better than what I’m going to describe. Aren’t I criticizing because I think something better is possible? Your special brand of democracy might just be it!
So I’m going to start in Europe. Central Europe to be specific. I do this for two reasons. Firstly because I’m Slovenian and this is what I know and live in. If Americans can make casual assumptions about what is and isn’t a key feature of Parliamentary Democracy when talking government, I think I can make them too. Maybe this will make it easier for readers to detect and dissect my cached thoughts? Or maybe think about unexamined beliefs of their own. For example did you know that many modern western Parliamentary democracies have, even one very close culturally to the US, weak separation of powers? Or don’t really have free speech as you know it? Please don’t tell this to any aspiring Pentagon officials, they might try to fix us with bombs! Though I will admit this was needed previous time around. Secondly because educated opinion in America and Europe seems to admire the idealized version of this model.
I’ve discussed this with several democracy advocates (nice normal internet people) and I think an idealized version of the system can be summed up thus: People have different interests. People want to overcome tragedy of the commons situations. People want to avoid men of violence. We want a goodnessgeneratingmachine. We thus need government. And we would like this government to take into account the interest of all citizens equally. How to do this? I know! Let’s have show of hands to decide what we want (only some hands count). The People (a well known Eldritch abomination composed of millions of interacting brains) can pick and choose between different parties and politicians, hopefully based on their program and perhaps merit. In other words people tell the state what they want via elections. I mean we could ask them about their opinions on how to acheive such goals, perhaps even ask them to vote for the party with a nice sounding means of doing something, but they are rather ignorant sometimes aren’t they? Sure they will also decide to vote on how to do stuff too, but don’t encourage them too much, I’ll explain why shortly.
Wouldn’t it be better to leave the how to the experts? Perhaps even noticeably include them in public debate preceding the adoption of new laws or policies? Not only does this keep the experts somewhat accountable, it educates the public! My we are on a roll. So we have The Politicians chosen by The People who consult and hire The Experts to do what is needed to fulfil the goals they presented to The People during elections. Often politicians are more electable and trusted if they are experts in something besides politics themselves, this should make them better able to know how to find experts and how to judge their work. Why do we need the experts though? Well it turns out that politicians have a nasty incentive to distort the actual effects of the policies they endorse, these effects may not match the effects sought by the people. The idea is that experts (coming mostly from academia), have a certain truth seeking reputation to uphold. At least technically academia should be a truth seeking machine. Also the preceding public debate covered by a fair and balanced free media keeps them somewhat accountable and gives The People or at least the interested citizens a chance to see what is going on with the state as it happens.
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[ !!Public draft—work in progress!! ]
Feel free to comment on the contents. I’ve decided to keep it here to avoid both the vanishing spaces bug and because I want feedback as I go along. If you are making a response to a draft I suggest any direct comments quote the text they are referring to since it may change at any moment. No one expects frequent edits, their chief weapons are surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.. no wait that went wrong somewhere.
I’ve been wondering—there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I’ve never been sure why. Would you or anyone else be interested in explaining why democracy seems like an obviously bad idea to you?
I can understand not approving of government in general, but democracies (which I’m going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on) seem to have less awful failure modes than a lot of other sorts of governments.
(which I’m going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on)
Is this really key feature? Lots of elections considered perfectly democratic are more or less predictable. I mean you do have places like Norway or Japan where the same party kept winning for decades in a row. Once you knew who the party leader was before the election you would also usually know who the PM will be. Who will ascend in the Chinese Communist Party next is if anything less predictable than if say Obama will be re-elected. Also the conclaves often produce surprising choices for the Pope and they are elections, but I don’t think most people consider the Vatican to be a democracy.
Another angle is PJ O’Rourkes idea that societies which are good to live in have rule of law. Unfortunately, I don’t have convenient access to his description (if he’s got one) of rule of law. It would be in Eat the Rich.
Rule of law and democracy are not at all the same thing. They are probably related—hard to have meaningful elections without reliable laws about them, for instance. But it’s necessary to explain that connection more carefully—and find out which ways the causality goes—before you can argue for democracy on the basis of it promoting rule of law.
There are many examples of non-democratic governments that have reliable, predictable, and reasonably even-handed legal process. (Imperial France under Napoleon or Napoleon III had this reputation, as did Rome under the good emperors. Singapore is a modern example.) There are also plausible examples of democracies that don’t have reliable legal systems, I suspect.
I’m not sure I would have said that Ancient Athens had “rule of law” as we understand it, for instance.
there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I’ve never been sure why.
But why
Because I think “democratic” is an applause light. Indeed the ur example of an applause light. People go as far as to often think of it as having intrinsic value! Indeed I think Western civilization has had an affective death spiral around democracy.
I think we systematically overestimated how good democracy is partially because of the following reasons:
We cherry pick what counts as democracy and especially what a failed democracy is, why do we so seldom consider the aftermath of a failed democracy (think Weimar republic )? The badness of Communism is more often talked about in the context of the mess it left in former Communist countries after collapse than in the context of the millions of lives it lost. Why not talk about democracy that way every now and then? I mean sure ideally you don’t want your car to crash. But if your car does crash you do hope it has been designed to make crashes as survivable as possible.
Wealthy countries with well educated citizens tend to be democracies. Wealthy countries with well educated citizens also tend to have high rates of obesity. Clearly obesity is less bad than starvation and democracy is less bad than Communism, but is this really something to brag about?
Because it says it is and most of us grew up in it. Children will believe in God just because they are told by their parents, imagine what they will believe if told by not only their parents, and perhaps priests but teachers too!
I can understand not approving of government in general, but democracies (which I’m going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on) seem to have less awful failure modes than a lot of other sorts of governments.
Democracy is viewed as the only legitimate kind of government by Western thinkers. This stifles possible innovation in government. Democracy is also by far the most popular kind of government (who would have thought that popular government would be a popular concept?).
Also if democracy is indeed the best form of government tried so far, maybe by analysing it we can come up with something even better? Isn’t this argument for democracy merely a Burkean conservative one in nature ? LW dismisses those out of hand so often, yet when it comes to democracy it seems to be seldom questioned.
Think of the famous Churchill quote:
Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
A Vizier in Ancient Egypt could have said the same thing about divine right monarchy where the king is worshipped as a living god. Do we really expect no further positive (?) change in government except in the direction of it being more “democratic”?
Would you or anyone else be interested in explaining why democracy seems like an obviously bad idea to you?
That is more or less the point of the thread. But first I’d like to learn why people seem to think it is a great idea.
I think analysis of “democracy” would be more clear if we differentiated process from substance. In relation to your viewpoint, I think Churchill’s quote is best understood as:
[Particular process] is the worst process (at achieving particular [substantive result]), except for every other type of process ever tried.
Substitute Universal Suffrage elections for [particular process] and Idealized relationship of governed to government for [substantive result] and voila—Churchill’s quote. Just to be clear, the idealized relationship that Churchill is aiming for is the one I’ve called consent-of-the-governed.
My point is that you haven’t precisely articulated whether your argument is (1) the substantive goal is inappropriate for some reason, or (2) the process selected is unlikely to lead to that goal.
For example, the American Civil War can plausibly be considered a failure of the democratic process. But it can also be considered a success at improving the relationship of governed to government by changing the rules so that more humans were treated as citizens. If Lincoln had been absolute monarch (and accepted as such), I think the Civil War would have been less bloody even if Lincoln had attempted to achieve the same results that the Union actually achieved in history. (which weren’t precisely the aims that historical Lincoln actually articulated).
Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I’m not sure whether it’s germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?
For what it’s worth, I think of the failure mode of Communism as being partly the mass murder, and even in countries where there wasn’t mass murder, the impoverishment and oppression of citizens.
A sidetrack: Are there any sound generalizations about differences between communist countries which had genocide, and those which didn’t?
Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I’m not sure whether it’s germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?
To promote an informed population and democracy in Rwanda, international agencies had promoted development of the media during the years leading up to the genocide.[27] It appeared that promoting one aspect of democracy (in this case the media) may, in fact, negatively influence other aspects of democracy or human rights. After this experience it has been argued that international development agencies must be highly sensitive to the specific context of their programmes and the need for promotion of democracy in a holistic manner.[27]
Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I’m not sure whether it’s germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?
What is a failure mode? Are you seeking examples of bad outcomes and bad behavior in democracies, or something more specific?
A sidetrack: Are there any sound generalizations about differences between communist countries which had genocide, and those which didn’t?
What are some examples of communist countries that have not engaged in mass murder? In Cuba and Nepal the death tolls haven’t been so dramatic by Cambodian standards. Are there other tame examples?
Is the Cultural Revolution in China an example of mass murder? I learned that there was lots of oppression, suffering, and starvation. But deaths were not an intended result, only a byproduct that the ruling elite didn’t care to prevent. By contrast, Stalin’s starving of the Kulaks was intended to cause death.
Regardless, the Cultural Revolution doesn’t reflect well on communism.
I think you should read the article you linked to all the way through; starvation is not the only kind of violence that occurred. If someone dies during or as a consequence of your torturing them, it is standard to say you’ve committed murder even if your intentions were non-lethal, right? (I think it is too generous to grant such good intentions in this case, but irrelevant). If you torture ten thousand people and one hundred of them die, you have committed mass murder. This kind of mass murder was common throughout 20th century communist china, routine during the cultural revolution. There were some events during the CR on an even more enormous scale, in tibet and inner mongolia.
But nevertheless, I have a hard time reconciling the observations with non-incompetence explanations:
It presents two empirical findings: 1) in 1959, when the famine began, food production was almost three times more than population subsistence needs; and 2) regions with higher per capita food production that year suffered higher famine mortality rates, a surprising reversal of a typically negative correlation.
I’d say they count—if a system doesn’t allow for quickly changing (or better, preventing) policies which cause death on a grand scale, there’s something wrong with the system.
OK communist Yugoslavia is a more important example than communist Nepal. But you’re not counting the soviet union as eastern europe? Non-soviet eastern europe is not unrepresented on wikipedia’s digest of communist mass killings.
It always comes down to which politician can trick the most voters using their native biases. Even in an idealized setting where all voters were educated and all educated were voters, they’d still be humans with all the tribalism and biases that implies.
The traditional critique of democracy is that it leads to what we moderns would call class warfare, demosclerosis, and political corruption (by political corruption, I mean the regulatory state, spawned by Olsonian multiplication of special interests). All of this stuff used to be called the social war, named after the Roman civil wars leading to Sulla’s reforms.
To check theory against observation, compare Britain from the restoration to the mid nineteenth century, with Britain from the mid nineteenth century to the present.
Restoration Britain founded the scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions. British merchant adventurers went forth as mobile bandits, and settled down as stationary bandits, creating what was later called the British empire.
Democratic Britain has been downhill from there. If Cecil Rhodes or Lord Garnet was around, you can imagine what they would think of the present state of Britain.
I’ve been wondering—there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I’ve never been sure why.
I don’t think I’m revolted by democracy. I do currently disbelieve in democracy.
But I said I wanted to talk about democracy not that I have proof that it sucks more than anything else ever. I don’t think I’ve so far strawmaned how polite educated opinion thinks a particular brand of democracy should work (though I’ll admit I’m not done).
I think your essay should clearly articulate where you disagree with the democracy consensus. You discuss tragedy-of-the-commons and state-of-nature arguments, but those are about whether to have government or anarchy, not what form the government should take. That is, a competent absolute monarchy could avoid both problems pretty easily. If that isn’t what you intend to discuss, I recommend removing it from the essay.
I see the seeds of two distinct arguments against democracy in the essay at this point. First, you might be challenging the idea that what is best for “the People” is best for “the Nation.” I think I’ve read prior comments where you challenge the coherence of the concept consent-of-the-governed, but I’m not sure that this is the argument that you intend make here. If it is, pedantic-Tim says that consent-of-the-governed is a wider concept than democracy, so you should acknowledge your intent to refer to things like the justifications for the Glorious Revolution, which I wouldn’t call “democratic.” For reference, this is where my disagreements with Moldbug are located.
Alternatively, you could be arguing for the “public choice”/”interest group politics” failure mode of democratic governments. That is a specific critique of the previous point, but I think it should be handled distinctly. For example, it is a quite different from the “who counts as part of the people”/Patrician vs. Plebian debates that lurked within the debates about Landowner Suffrage v. Universal Manhood Suffrage v. Universal Suffrage. If this specific critique is your intended topic, I suggest you lay out some of the argument for why you think this failure mode is highly-likely/inevitable. I understand that the argument that this failure mode is not inevitable is laced with “No-True-Scotsman” issues, but it would still illustrate your thinking if you explained why you think that this is the most worrisome failure mode.
To the extent that you are looking for less controversial examples to discuss (in the drafting stages, if not the final essay), you might consider the Honor Harrington series by David Weber, in which the antagonist nation (The Republic of Haven) has a substantial portion of the population on “the Dole” and the elites seek the material wealth necessary to fund this situation and therefore stay in power by engaging in wars of expansion.
ETA: “Crown of Slaves” has a fair amount of the useful nation structure theory, if you want to read only one book. It’s a side-story, so it stands independently fairly well.
I think your essay should clearly articulate where you disagree with the democracy consensus.
Oh its just half an essay at this point. I was still describing how the idealized version of this government supposedly works.
I think your essay should clearly articulate where you disagree with the democracy consensus. You discuss tragedy-of-the-commons and state-of-nature arguments, but those are about whether to have government or anarchy, not what form the government should take. That is, a competent absolute monarchy could avoid both problems pretty easily. If that isn’t what you intend to discuss, I recommend removing it from the essay.
Maybe no government is better than democratic government, but I do think you have a point. I will assume few people will for now question that we need some kind of government, I will remove it from this essay.
I see the seeds of two distinct arguments against democracy in the essay at this point. First, you might be challenging the idea that what is best for “the People” is best for “the Nation.” I think I’ve read prior comments where you challenge the coherence of the concept consent-of-the-governed, but I’m not sure that this is the argument that you intend make here. If it is, pedantic-Tim says that consent-of-the-governed is a wider concept than democracy, so you should acknowledge your intent to refer to things like the justifications for the Glorious Revolution, which I wouldn’t call “democratic.” For reference, this is where my disagreements with Moldbug are located.
Overall, I must admit you seem to have a very good idea of where I was going to develop some of my arguments based on (it seems to me at least) not so much data. Considering that in the part of the essay written so far I just wanted to accurately if informally describe educated opinion on how this kind of democracy should work, would you say that I’ve failed and that I’m making a straw man? Or where the hints and foreshadowing not problematic in this regard?
Your articulation of the argument for democracy is strongly flavored with “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him”—and we know how that turned out. Particularly your comment:
My we are on a roll.
Also, you write much less formally in that paragraph than the proceeding ones.
Considering that in the part of the essay written so far I just wanted to accurately if informally describe educated opinion on how this kind of democracy should work, would you say that I’ve failed and that I’m making a straw man? Or where the hints and foreshadowing not problematic in this regard?
I think you have correctly described the gesturing a thoughtful reader of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would make to defend the concept of representational democracy. But such a figure is at least somewhat aware of the problems of public choice and special interests, even if that person is not sufficiently concerned by them to abandon the concept of democracy. Regarding consent-of-the-governed, I’m not sure what the idealized man-on-the street thinks of the problem—but I don’t see this quote:
Well it turns out that politicians have a nasty incentive to distort the actual effects of the policies they endorse, these effects may not match the effects sought by the people.
Stepping back for a second, if you don’t mind, to the meta-details surrounding this argument.
1) Theoretical democracy, fixed country democracy, or multiple-country semi-coherent abstraction?
As you’ve pointed out, in order to avoid endless no-scotsmanning, from the onset we have to make a choice as to whether we want to discuss a theoretical democratic framework, the democracy of a single historical country, or whether we want to discuss the abstract correlations between several different democracies—or any combination thereof, or something I haven’t thought of.
My thoughts on this matter are thus: it would be very hard, if not implausible, for a discussion on theoretical democracy to turn out well. It seems to me far too easy to state a theoretical model and then privately consider one’s own political condition. Trying to draw an inference from theoretical to historical would be invalid in either direction.
If one takes a specific example, it would seem to me that such a discussion would devolve into the Americans implicitly assuming the properties of American democracy generalize well enough to whatever hapless central European state one ultimately picks. You’ve already laid out why picking the states would be non-helpful. Separate from this sociological issue, we also have the trouble of deciding which properties of Centralistan are essential and which are accidental.
If one instead tries to list some loose “essential” properties of a democracy abstracted from a previously-constructed list of democracies, we still have the essential/accidental problem. Perhaps the Americans will think of the States at any rate, and it’s just not something that can be avoided.
2) Standards of debate
This just isn’t going to work if it’s considered acceptable to make potshots at various countries and nationalities.
3) Historicity
EY once recommended that if politics needs to be discussed, one should stick with examples so historical that the participants are not invested in the rightness of the politics. Of course, with democracy this is almost futile, since nothing I would call liberal democracy was really in evidence prior to the modern era. The problem then becomes, how do we prevent people’s System 1 from kicking in when discussing contemporary, relevant politics? I don’t know.
discuss the abstract correlations between several different democracies
I was aiming for European parliamentary democracy, implicitly more on the non-Monarchical ones (Parliamentary Republics ) as educated people in practice believe they should work and how they do work (belief in belief about what is happening and how they should work is trickier).
This just isn’t going to work if it’s considered acceptable to make potshots at various countries and nationalities.
I agree. Pentagonese isn’t a nationality (I hope). I think that’s the only one I made (besides Scotsmen, but there aren’t any true Scotesmen anyway).
EY once recommended that if politics needs to be discussed, one should stick with examples so historical that the participants are not invested in the rightness of the politics. Of course, with democracy this is almost futile, since nothing I would call liberal democracy was really in evidence prior to the modern era. The problem then becomes, how do we prevent people’s System 1 from kicking in when discussing contemporary, relevant politics? I don’t know.
Yes the historical gap is too vast. I was hoping that since I willl describe Parlimentary Democracy in Central European cultural context Americans will have an easier time thinking about it calmly than they would if I criticized their own particular system, even if I was attacking the same key points!
I however don’t think criticism of democracy is that mind-killing for most, for the reasons CaveJohnson described. But maybe if this essay gets done particularly well the realization that democracy is actually and seriously being questioned might kill some minds. Maybe I should take advice on talking about politics more seriously than I did originally.
4) Ontology
I’ll just link this here.
I tried to limit this by defining casual usage of the term to a very small set of seemingly decently run countries that share noticeable similarities in government stricture.
I’ve also heard that parliamentary democracies work better if there’s a size requirement for parties—otherwise tiny minority opinions get too much influence.
I believe this is mostly only a problem (and therefore the size requirement is only a solution) in countries with proportional representation. Britain’s system of first-past-the-post by district seems to work well in encouraging the formation of a few large stable parties.
I’d reply as I think Thomas Sowell would, with his standard question “compared to what?”
Compared to what is democracy a poor form of government?
Sure, sugar gum drop trees won’t spontaneously spring out of the earth when people get the vote. Nor is the vote an automatic cure for your aunt’s gout.
And there are plenty of failure modes. The particular ones you show from European parliamentary democracy are not surprising to me, as an American with a preference for the constitutional republic we nominally have here.
The key difference seems to be attitude toward government. In the US originally, and to some degree in pockets still, the federal government, and government in general, is seen as empowered with authority to secure your rights. Not positive rights to the fruits of the labor of others, but negative rights against abuse from others. From the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
This model of government does not include a “goodness generating machine” as one of the deliverables. Government exists to protect your “inalienable rights”, such as life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It is not a happiness generating machine, which will fedex you monthly packages of happiness, it is a machine to protect your freedom, leaving you free to live your life and pursue happiness. You are the happiness generating machine; it is the freedom protecting machine.
This model has it’s own failure modes, such as when much of the populace starts wanting the government to be a “goodness generating machine”.
And it’s not a perfect machine even in a society of people who support it for it’s original purpose. Inevitably, those controlling the levers will exercise that power for their own interests, while the general population will have both limited knowledge and incentive to properly watch over them. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” That’s an expensive price, suffering from free rider problems, so we should always expect some abuse of the system.
Wah wah wah! I can’t have all I want for the price of wishing for it!
So? It’s worked pretty well, and I’ll take it over the Gulag or the Great Leap Forward.
If you have a perfect machine handy, I’m all ears. The historical alternatives seem vastly inferior. So again I ask, compared to what does democracy suck?
I’d reply as I think Thomas Sowell would, with his standard question “compared to what?”
I agree with this criticism, yet I find it ironic that what I think is the strongest argument in favour of democracy is a fundamentally small c conservative one. Modern society (unwisely in my opinion) doesn’t let such arguments stop it from changing things. Yet when it comes to democracy someone just bringing up a quote by Churchill is enough to dispel all doubts.
You are the happiness generating machine; it is the freedom protecting machine.
I don’t think having government be a goodness generating machine is a good idea. I start here with an argument for setting up a democracy as one as someone who thinks this would work would present it. Hence the draft, before proceeding to critique it I wanted to make sure I was attacking a steel man of moderate social democracy the currently reigning Western ideology.
Looking from the outside it seems pretty obvious the US government is expected to be a goodness generating machine. This is especially true among the classes engaged in opinion making, let alone among the kinds of people who actually make up the USG and run the country. It also seems obvious democratic means will not change or restore it into an effective guardian of negative rights.
Recall what I said:
Secondly because educated opinion in America and Europe seems to admire the idealized version of this model.
Goodness generation is also the standard rationalization for the existence of everything from the department of education to an army geared for foreign intervention. For a reason, democracy basically is early stage socialism. Plato and Aristotle didn’t think much of democracy because of this. And we know from previous patients that early stage always gives way to late stages eventually, sometimes in a matter of months or years like in the case of the Russian revolution, sometimes decades and even centuries as is the case with the American one.
What does the “pro-freedom” or negative rights camp have? A few internet blogs and think thanks? Recall that even on lesswrong the Libertarian position is called “far right”. This is not an accident. In a democracy wealth redistribution with the pretext of higher goals is how elections are won. Even more damningly in a democracy the sate perhaps does not control the press but the press controls the state, and recall state power is supposed to be tied directly to public opinion! What we see is a power pump where public opinion drives changes in governance and changes in governance drive public belief. Nature finds a way, be it with birds loosing flight or herbivores finding a taste for meat or with “negative rights” memes suddenly finding themselves invested and nested in memeplexes supporting state expanding projects. I mean look at the Republican party.
And we know from previous patients that early stage always gives way to late stages eventually, sometimes in a matter of months or years like in the case of the Russian revolution, sometimes decades and even centuries as is the case with the American one.
No way, the Provisional Government wasn’t overthrown because it stuck to negative-rights-based policies and didn’t offer anything more—it was overthrown because it was too high-handed/spineless in Petrograd politics, carried on with a massively loathed war which stirred up the unrest in the first place, flirted with both the socialists and the right while not aligning itself with either… And the Russian Empire already had a bit of local self-government + public welfare and wealth and land redistribution going. Those welfare programs—preceded by things like Zubatov’s trade union experiment, - were launched precisely because the government wanted to quell revolutionary sentiment in the wake of 1905!
Up voted. I will take your word and consider myself corrected for now, since the Russian Revolution is on my list of things to study in the future.
The quick and dirty assessment I used was “a regime that is formally a liberal parliamentary democracy becomes communism” when picking the example. I didn’t however mean to imply it was just a guardian of negative rights, just that social democratic and socialist ideologies are strong attractors in democracies because they work like power pumps. This is why I called democracy early stage socialism. I’m farm from being alone in this view, many socialists basically think true democracy is socialism. The whole social democratic ideology was founded on this idea of step by step reforms towards socialism via democracy and that democracy will inevitably lead to it, so no need for violent revolution.
Hence the draft, before proceeding to critique it I wanted to make sure I was attacking a steel man of moderate social democracy the currently reigning Western ideology.
If the goal was to discuss a steel man of social democratic theory, it seems to me that you’ve done a reasonable job. But not being a social democrat, I don’t know that my opinion should count for much. You disagree with the social democrats for some reason. You don’t share some of their premises, so that what is steel as evaluated by your premises (or mine) is likely not so steely to them.
I like your basic thrust, of first identifying what government is supposed (by them) to be for. I was actually meaning to ask this of the social democratic crowd in our next monthly politics thread. As I related, in the US we have a specific narrative of what government is for, grounded in the ideology, events, and documents of the creation of the country. I don’t have a real sense of where Europeans get their answer to the question, “what is government for?”.
Should it be a goodness machine? I liked your explicit identification of it. That’s starts sounding uncomfortably theocratic, because it is.
But I haven’t liked your using “democracy” as a short hand for the party platform of generic social democrats. Calling it Social Democracy would at least consistently make it clear that you mean a complex of procedures, programs, and values, and not just voting, which was my initial impression when I’ve seen you question democracy in the past.
Unless you’re really opposed to voting per se, your use of democracy as shorthand for social democracy easily leads to mistaking your views on voting, and is just unnecessarily unclear regardless.
Looking from the outside it seems pretty obvious the US government is expected to be a goodness generating machine.
That’s the thing. The news you get is filtered through European Social Democratic media perusing American Social Democratic media. That’s the view you get from the outside.
But those who control the centralized levers are hardly all of the country. You’re not hearing what’s said at churches, and picnics, and group emails, and talk radio, and small town newspapers. Many people hear these voices instead, and don’t spend so much time listening to the Social Democratic media.
And as for “the educated”, you’ve got a biased sample again. Much of the educated are in science, technology, and business, and they are not quite so liberal. Socially liberal, but not social democrats.
I was most amused the other day to hear my sister rant about how the government had no right to tell her she had to wear a seat belt. I remember my dad similarly ranting, and thought the attitude was a rather old fashioned one that had died out as we increasingly accepted hyper regulation as an unquestioned fact of life. Having my thoroughly apolitical sister rant in this fashion was a surprise.
Probably in half the country, there is a large sentiment toward the negative rights view of government. People aren’t entirely consistent in this regard, and have been corrupted by programs such as Social Security that dishonestly sold themselves as government pension plans that you “earned” by paying into them. So they support this wealth transfer program because they feel they, and others, have earned their benefits.
And as long as the government is passing out goodies, people will push for their goodies. But talk to them about what government is for, and whether they want government to be passing out goodies at all, and you’ll get a different answer. There’s no real logical contradiction between condemning the trough and bellying up to the trough while it’s there.
If anything, in my lifetime, the negative rights view has made a huge comeback in the US, and particularly on explicit ideological grounds.
What does the “pro-freedom” or negative rights camp have? A few internet blogs and think thanks?
I was born in 1965. There was no institutional support of small government, libertarian ideas. Barry Goldwater had just gotten crushed when he ran for president, but he at least won the nomination as an explicitly pro freedom, small government candidate. See the quotes.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
Reagan ran on smaller government themes, which have largely become official Republican dogma. At least when they need to win an election. Like now.
Meanwhile, now they have blogs, and talk radio, and have even been making significant inroads into culture. Much of fantasy/scifi culture is explicitly libertarian. On the internet, libertarians have a huge presence, and the social democrats are usually on the retreat against them.
Multiple states have medical marijuana laws, which are largely hypocritical legalization laws, while explicit legalization initiatives in some states, and the demographics of support for legalization makes it almost inevitable to increasingly pass and spread in the next 20 years.
I mean look at the Republican party.
The Tea Party is largely made up of those who lean Republican but oppose the big government excesses of the Republican Party.
When people actually discuss the proper role of government, lots of Americans are very libertarian, and increasingly so in my lifetime.
Libertarian governments tend toward rent seeking bureaucracies as time goes on. But rent seeking creates pressure, both fiscal and regulatory, for a return to libertarian principles.
Meanwhile, now they have blogs, and talk radio, and have even been making significant inroads into culture. Much of fantasy/scifi culture is explicitly libertarian.
Joss Whedon strikes again. Just watched The Avengers last night. The movie started with various pontifications on freedom vs. submission to power.
I’m not sure I understand what question you are asking or what alternative you’re comparing democracy to.
Ultimately, a government is an organization that claims a right to compel obedience, and in practice, has the ability to compel. Some person or persons is ultimately going to be in charge of wielding that power. That means there has to be some means of choosing them.
To be more concrete: a government needs a military or at least a national police force. Those forces work much better with a unified command structure, which means there needs to be some supreme authority that can ultimately direct the coercive machinery.
In practice, it’s not possible to completely constrain the government by law and custom: presidents and prime ministers (to say nothing of monarchs and party secretaries) routinely do things that would have been thought illegal, before they were done. So being head-of-government comes with authority and power, and is therefore going to be attractive to people who value such things. As a result, there will be many people who want to be in charge.
Stable government requires having a reliable way to pick those leaders, that doesn’t result in coups, civil wars, or chaos. Elections seem to work well for this. The competing systems am aware of rely on leaders picking their successors, having an oligarchy to pick the leaders, or some combination of the two. (China and the Roman Catholic Church fall into this broad model.) This alternate system can be very stable, but is bad at incorporating shifts in public opinion, and lacks the cathartic benefits of mass elections. It doesn’t seem to work better in practice.
It might be useful if you gave a succinct explanation for what you mean by “democracy”. People use the word to describe just about every system in which the government is de facto elected on a regular basis by a large fraction of the population. That covers a lot of ground. It might be that you could do very much better than current parliamentary or presidential democracies, while still having something recognizable as elections.
So I’m going to start in Europe. Central Europe to be specific. I do this for two reasons. Firstly because I’m Slovenian and this is what I know and live in. If Americans can make casual assumptions about what is and isn’t a key feature of Parliamentary Democracy when talking government, I think I can make them too. Maybe this will make it easier for readers to detect and dissent my cached thoughts? Or maybe think about unexamined beliefs of their own. For example did you know that many modern western Parliamentary democracies have, even one very close culturally to the US have weak separation of powers? Or don’t really have free speech as you know it?
As an American (immigrant from Eastern Europe, but that’s not very relevant) I would find an argument against democracy based on who well it works in Eastern Europe about as relevant to American democracy, as someone on lesswrong would find an argument against rationality based on the mistakes Spock makes.
I was talking of Central not Eastern Europe. While Slovenia is indeed a former communist country, I focus far more on the states we have sought to model ourselves after (Germany, Scandinavia, ect.) that any deviations or imperfections we may have to them comparing ourselves by our standards. Also I suggest you check your assumptions, Slovenia is a developed country by nearly any ranking, and indeed one of the very much nicer parts of the planet to live in and according to international opinion and the estimates of various organizations one of the “moredemocratic” or “free” ones.
I mean sure they could be wrong, indeed I do suspect they are biased. But if they are wrong then basically democratic societies (naturally America is apriori the golden standard of democracy ) seem to systematically mislead its citizens to what a democratic society is or isn’t. That’s a bad isn’t it? And isn’t the NYT and your own educated opinion often leaning towards such models? Aren’t there many many people who criticze the US for supposedly not measuring up to the Liberal Democracies of Europe? I don’t think they mean Spain or Italy or Ukraine. I do think they mean places like Germany or Austria or Finland. And those are just the places I’m going to talk about!
Related to: List of public drafts on LessWrong
I want to talk about democracy.
I do so here because I don’t think this is mind-killing. And I sure feel some rational debate about it would be educational, for me mostly, since there are so many great minds here and… I will come clean, I think democracy isn’t that great, considering this how is it possible that I am but ignorant? Or possibly evil. But before I can explain why I think as I do, I need to see why people think it is great. Who knows, maybe I’ve missed something vital? Or maybe people don’t like democracy already but they believe that they do. Or maybe I’m wrong about how popular such doubts are on this site, beyond a small but assuredly not tiny minority.
Now obviously there are doubts and doubts. Saying that democracy as it is in the West has problems, but only because it isn’t true democracy, isn’t what I mean by “doubting democracy” at all. To give an analogy I see this as like doubting communism by saying that what we are doing clearly isn’t true communism, this is why the 5 year plan has failed comrades! Those darn counter-revolutionary forces sabotaging us! Those darn undemocratic influences subverting our states. Indeed there are striking parallels about how true democracy should work great in theory but has never ever been fully implemented and how communism is great in theory but Communists never ever seem to be able to fully implement it.
And all ills stem from there not being enough Communism or democracy or piety. So to avoid true Scotsmen (surely wise as they are a bloodthirsty violent drunken lot, at least the true ones are) let me define casual use of democracy here. Let me even admit that pure or real or direct or whatever kind of untested democracy you prefer may work better than what I’m going to describe. Aren’t I criticizing because I think something better is possible? Your special brand of democracy might just be it!
So I’m going to start in Europe. Central Europe to be specific. I do this for two reasons. Firstly because I’m Slovenian and this is what I know and live in. If Americans can make casual assumptions about what is and isn’t a key feature of Parliamentary Democracy when talking government, I think I can make them too. Maybe this will make it easier for readers to detect and dissect my cached thoughts? Or maybe think about unexamined beliefs of their own. For example did you know that many modern western Parliamentary democracies have, even one very close culturally to the US, weak separation of powers? Or don’t really have free speech as you know it? Please don’t tell this to any aspiring Pentagon officials, they might try to fix us with bombs! Though I will admit this was needed previous time around. Secondly because educated opinion in America and Europe seems to admire the idealized version of this model.
I’ve discussed this with several democracy advocates (nice normal internet people) and I think an idealized version of the system can be summed up thus: People have different interests. People want to overcome tragedy of the commons situations. People want to avoid men of violence. We want a goodness generating machine. We thus need government. And we would like this government to take into account the interest of all citizens equally. How to do this? I know! Let’s have show of hands to decide what we want (only some hands count). The People (a well known Eldritch abomination composed of millions of interacting brains) can pick and choose between different parties and politicians, hopefully based on their program and perhaps merit. In other words people tell the state what they want via elections. I mean we could ask them about their opinions on how to acheive such goals, perhaps even ask them to vote for the party with a nice sounding means of doing something, but they are rather ignorant sometimes aren’t they? Sure they will also decide to vote on how to do stuff too, but don’t encourage them too much, I’ll explain why shortly.
Wouldn’t it be better to leave the how to the experts? Perhaps even noticeably include them in public debate preceding the adoption of new laws or policies? Not only does this keep the experts somewhat accountable, it educates the public! My we are on a roll. So we have The Politicians chosen by The People who consult and hire The Experts to do what is needed to fulfil the goals they presented to The People during elections. Often politicians are more electable and trusted if they are experts in something besides politics themselves, this should make them better able to know how to find experts and how to judge their work. Why do we need the experts though? Well it turns out that politicians have a nasty incentive to distort the actual effects of the policies they endorse, these effects may not match the effects sought by the people. The idea is that experts (coming mostly from academia), have a certain truth seeking reputation to uphold. At least technically academia should be a truth seeking machine. Also the preceding public debate covered by a fair and balanced free media keeps them somewhat accountable and gives The People or at least the interested citizens a chance to see what is going on with the state as it happens.
...
[ !!Public draft—work in progress!! ]
Feel free to comment on the contents. I’ve decided to keep it here to avoid both the vanishing spaces bug and because I want feedback as I go along. If you are making a response to a draft I suggest any direct comments quote the text they are referring to since it may change at any moment. No one expects frequent edits, their chief weapons are surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.. no wait that went wrong somewhere.
I’ve been wondering—there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I’ve never been sure why. Would you or anyone else be interested in explaining why democracy seems like an obviously bad idea to you?
I can understand not approving of government in general, but democracies (which I’m going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on) seem to have less awful failure modes than a lot of other sorts of governments.
Is this really key feature? Lots of elections considered perfectly democratic are more or less predictable. I mean you do have places like Norway or Japan where the same party kept winning for decades in a row. Once you knew who the party leader was before the election you would also usually know who the PM will be. Who will ascend in the Chinese Communist Party next is if anything less predictable than if say Obama will be re-elected. Also the conclaves often produce surprising choices for the Pope and they are elections, but I don’t think most people consider the Vatican to be a democracy.
Fair enough. It was a tentative definition.
Another angle is PJ O’Rourkes idea that societies which are good to live in have rule of law. Unfortunately, I don’t have convenient access to his description (if he’s got one) of rule of law. It would be in Eat the Rich.
Rule of law and democracy are not at all the same thing. They are probably related—hard to have meaningful elections without reliable laws about them, for instance. But it’s necessary to explain that connection more carefully—and find out which ways the causality goes—before you can argue for democracy on the basis of it promoting rule of law.
There are many examples of non-democratic governments that have reliable, predictable, and reasonably even-handed legal process. (Imperial France under Napoleon or Napoleon III had this reputation, as did Rome under the good emperors. Singapore is a modern example.) There are also plausible examples of democracies that don’t have reliable legal systems, I suspect.
I’m not sure I would have said that Ancient Athens had “rule of law” as we understand it, for instance.
But why Because I think “democratic” is an applause light. Indeed the ur example of an applause light. People go as far as to often think of it as having intrinsic value! Indeed I think Western civilization has had an affective death spiral around democracy.
I think we systematically overestimated how good democracy is partially because of the following reasons:
We cherry pick what counts as democracy and especially what a failed democracy is, why do we so seldom consider the aftermath of a failed democracy (think Weimar republic )? The badness of Communism is more often talked about in the context of the mess it left in former Communist countries after collapse than in the context of the millions of lives it lost. Why not talk about democracy that way every now and then? I mean sure ideally you don’t want your car to crash. But if your car does crash you do hope it has been designed to make crashes as survivable as possible.
Wealthy countries with well educated citizens tend to be democracies. Wealthy countries with well educated citizens also tend to have high rates of obesity. Clearly obesity is less bad than starvation and democracy is less bad than Communism, but is this really something to brag about?
Because it says it is and most of us grew up in it. Children will believe in God just because they are told by their parents, imagine what they will believe if told by not only their parents, and perhaps priests but teachers too!
Democracy is viewed as the only legitimate kind of government by Western thinkers. This stifles possible innovation in government. Democracy is also by far the most popular kind of government (who would have thought that popular government would be a popular concept?).
Also if democracy is indeed the best form of government tried so far, maybe by analysing it we can come up with something even better? Isn’t this argument for democracy merely a Burkean conservative one in nature ? LW dismisses those out of hand so often, yet when it comes to democracy it seems to be seldom questioned.
Think of the famous Churchill quote:
A Vizier in Ancient Egypt could have said the same thing about divine right monarchy where the king is worshipped as a living god. Do we really expect no further positive (?) change in government except in the direction of it being more “democratic”?
That is more or less the point of the thread. But first I’d like to learn why people seem to think it is a great idea.
I think analysis of “democracy” would be more clear if we differentiated process from substance. In relation to your viewpoint, I think Churchill’s quote is best understood as:
Substitute Universal Suffrage elections for [particular process] and Idealized relationship of governed to government for [substantive result] and voila—Churchill’s quote. Just to be clear, the idealized relationship that Churchill is aiming for is the one I’ve called consent-of-the-governed.
My point is that you haven’t precisely articulated whether your argument is (1) the substantive goal is inappropriate for some reason, or (2) the process selected is unlikely to lead to that goal.
For example, the American Civil War can plausibly be considered a failure of the democratic process. But it can also be considered a success at improving the relationship of governed to government by changing the rules so that more humans were treated as citizens. If Lincoln had been absolute monarch (and accepted as such), I think the Civil War would have been less bloody even if Lincoln had attempted to achieve the same results that the Union actually achieved in history. (which weren’t precisely the aims that historical Lincoln actually articulated).
Good point about the Weimar Republic as an example of failure mode of democracy. I’m not sure whether it’s germaine that part of the failure was it ceasing to be a democracy. Any other examples?
For what it’s worth, I think of the failure mode of Communism as being partly the mass murder, and even in countries where there wasn’t mass murder, the impoverishment and oppression of citizens.
A sidetrack: Are there any sound generalizations about differences between communist countries which had genocide, and those which didn’t?
Here you go:
My comment on it.
What is a failure mode? Are you seeking examples of bad outcomes and bad behavior in democracies, or something more specific?
What are some examples of communist countries that have not engaged in mass murder? In Cuba and Nepal the death tolls haven’t been so dramatic by Cambodian standards. Are there other tame examples?
Is the Cultural Revolution in China an example of mass murder? I learned that there was lots of oppression, suffering, and starvation. But deaths were not an intended result, only a byproduct that the ruling elite didn’t care to prevent. By contrast, Stalin’s starving of the Kulaks was intended to cause death.
Regardless, the Cultural Revolution doesn’t reflect well on communism.
This question is so startling to me I’m not sure I understand it.
There are things as morally wrong as mass murder that don’t qualify as mass murder.
I think you should read the article you linked to all the way through; starvation is not the only kind of violence that occurred. If someone dies during or as a consequence of your torturing them, it is standard to say you’ve committed murder even if your intentions were non-lethal, right? (I think it is too generous to grant such good intentions in this case, but irrelevant). If you torture ten thousand people and one hundred of them die, you have committed mass murder. This kind of mass murder was common throughout 20th century communist china, routine during the cultural revolution. There were some events during the CR on an even more enormous scale, in tibet and inner mongolia.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/09/the-institutional-causes-of-chinas-great-famine-1959-61.html pointed to an interesting paper on that topic. I read it, but I don’t know enough about China to really evaluate it.
But nevertheless, I have a hard time reconciling the observations with non-incompetence explanations:
See also Tthe Great Leap Forward.
I’d say they count—if a system doesn’t allow for quickly changing (or better, preventing) policies which cause death on a grand scale, there’s something wrong with the system.
Something very wrong—yes.
Mass murder - ??
Edit to add: On reflection, the Great Leap Forward is a lot more like Stalin and the Kulaks than the unedited version of this comment might suggest.
Most of Eastern Europe, I think.
OK communist Yugoslavia is a more important example than communist Nepal. But you’re not counting the soviet union as eastern europe? Non-soviet eastern europe is not unrepresented on wikipedia’s digest of communist mass killings.
I’m not listing the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe.
The Wikipedia page lists mass murder in East Germany and Bulgaria as disputed, but it seems that things were generally worse than I thought.
It always comes down to which politician can trick the most voters using their native biases. Even in an idealized setting where all voters were educated and all educated were voters, they’d still be humans with all the tribalism and biases that implies.
The traditional critique of democracy is that it leads to what we moderns would call class warfare, demosclerosis, and political corruption (by political corruption, I mean the regulatory state, spawned by Olsonian multiplication of special interests). All of this stuff used to be called the social war, named after the Roman civil wars leading to Sulla’s reforms.
To check theory against observation, compare Britain from the restoration to the mid nineteenth century, with Britain from the mid nineteenth century to the present.
Restoration Britain founded the scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions. British merchant adventurers went forth as mobile bandits, and settled down as stationary bandits, creating what was later called the British empire.
Democratic Britain has been downhill from there. If Cecil Rhodes or Lord Garnet was around, you can imagine what they would think of the present state of Britain.
I don’t think I’m revolted by democracy. I do currently disbelieve in democracy.
But I said I wanted to talk about democracy not that I have proof that it sucks more than anything else ever. I don’t think I’ve so far strawmaned how polite educated opinion thinks a particular brand of democracy should work (though I’ll admit I’m not done).
I think your essay should clearly articulate where you disagree with the democracy consensus. You discuss tragedy-of-the-commons and state-of-nature arguments, but those are about whether to have government or anarchy, not what form the government should take. That is, a competent absolute monarchy could avoid both problems pretty easily. If that isn’t what you intend to discuss, I recommend removing it from the essay.
I see the seeds of two distinct arguments against democracy in the essay at this point. First, you might be challenging the idea that what is best for “the People” is best for “the Nation.” I think I’ve read prior comments where you challenge the coherence of the concept consent-of-the-governed, but I’m not sure that this is the argument that you intend make here. If it is, pedantic-Tim says that consent-of-the-governed is a wider concept than democracy, so you should acknowledge your intent to refer to things like the justifications for the Glorious Revolution, which I wouldn’t call “democratic.” For reference, this is where my disagreements with Moldbug are located.
Alternatively, you could be arguing for the “public choice”/”interest group politics” failure mode of democratic governments. That is a specific critique of the previous point, but I think it should be handled distinctly. For example, it is a quite different from the “who counts as part of the people”/Patrician vs. Plebian debates that lurked within the debates about Landowner Suffrage v. Universal Manhood Suffrage v. Universal Suffrage. If this specific critique is your intended topic, I suggest you lay out some of the argument for why you think this failure mode is highly-likely/inevitable. I understand that the argument that this failure mode is not inevitable is laced with “No-True-Scotsman” issues, but it would still illustrate your thinking if you explained why you think that this is the most worrisome failure mode.
To the extent that you are looking for less controversial examples to discuss (in the drafting stages, if not the final essay), you might consider the Honor Harrington series by David Weber, in which the antagonist nation (The Republic of Haven) has a substantial portion of the population on “the Dole” and the elites seek the material wealth necessary to fund this situation and therefore stay in power by engaging in wars of expansion.
ETA: “Crown of Slaves” has a fair amount of the useful nation structure theory, if you want to read only one book. It’s a side-story, so it stands independently fairly well.
Oh its just half an essay at this point. I was still describing how the idealized version of this government supposedly works.
Maybe no government is better than democratic government, but I do think you have a point. I will assume few people will for now question that we need some kind of government, I will remove it from this essay.
Overall, I must admit you seem to have a very good idea of where I was going to develop some of my arguments based on (it seems to me at least) not so much data. Considering that in the part of the essay written so far I just wanted to accurately if informally describe educated opinion on how this kind of democracy should work, would you say that I’ve failed and that I’m making a straw man? Or where the hints and foreshadowing not problematic in this regard?
Your articulation of the argument for democracy is strongly flavored with “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him”—and we know how that turned out. Particularly your comment:
Also, you write much less formally in that paragraph than the proceeding ones.
I think you have correctly described the gesturing a thoughtful reader of the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal would make to defend the concept of representational democracy. But such a figure is at least somewhat aware of the problems of public choice and special interests, even if that person is not sufficiently concerned by them to abandon the concept of democracy. Regarding consent-of-the-governed, I’m not sure what the idealized man-on-the street thinks of the problem—but I don’t see this quote:
as aimed at that issue.
Thanks for the feedback! I will then keep the contents of the paragraph similar but cut some of the jokes and try to make my tone a bit more formal.
I didn’t intend to touch on that yet.
Oh its just half an essay at this point. I was still describing how the idealized version of this government supposedly works.
Stepping back for a second, if you don’t mind, to the meta-details surrounding this argument.
1) Theoretical democracy, fixed country democracy, or multiple-country semi-coherent abstraction?
As you’ve pointed out, in order to avoid endless no-scotsmanning, from the onset we have to make a choice as to whether we want to discuss a theoretical democratic framework, the democracy of a single historical country, or whether we want to discuss the abstract correlations between several different democracies—or any combination thereof, or something I haven’t thought of.
My thoughts on this matter are thus: it would be very hard, if not implausible, for a discussion on theoretical democracy to turn out well. It seems to me far too easy to state a theoretical model and then privately consider one’s own political condition. Trying to draw an inference from theoretical to historical would be invalid in either direction.
If one takes a specific example, it would seem to me that such a discussion would devolve into the Americans implicitly assuming the properties of American democracy generalize well enough to whatever hapless central European state one ultimately picks. You’ve already laid out why picking the states would be non-helpful. Separate from this sociological issue, we also have the trouble of deciding which properties of Centralistan are essential and which are accidental.
If one instead tries to list some loose “essential” properties of a democracy abstracted from a previously-constructed list of democracies, we still have the essential/accidental problem. Perhaps the Americans will think of the States at any rate, and it’s just not something that can be avoided.
2) Standards of debate
This just isn’t going to work if it’s considered acceptable to make potshots at various countries and nationalities.
3) Historicity
EY once recommended that if politics needs to be discussed, one should stick with examples so historical that the participants are not invested in the rightness of the politics. Of course, with democracy this is almost futile, since nothing I would call liberal democracy was really in evidence prior to the modern era. The problem then becomes, how do we prevent people’s System 1 from kicking in when discussing contemporary, relevant politics? I don’t know.
4) Ontology
I’ll just link this here.
EDIT: Dammit markdown, DWIM!
I was aiming for European parliamentary democracy, implicitly more on the non-Monarchical ones (Parliamentary Republics ) as educated people in practice believe they should work and how they do work (belief in belief about what is happening and how they should work is trickier).
I agree. Pentagonese isn’t a nationality (I hope). I think that’s the only one I made (besides Scotsmen, but there aren’t any true Scotesmen anyway).
Yes the historical gap is too vast. I was hoping that since I willl describe Parlimentary Democracy in Central European cultural context Americans will have an easier time thinking about it calmly than they would if I criticized their own particular system, even if I was attacking the same key points!
I however don’t think criticism of democracy is that mind-killing for most, for the reasons CaveJohnson described. But maybe if this essay gets done particularly well the realization that democracy is actually and seriously being questioned might kill some minds. Maybe I should take advice on talking about politics more seriously than I did originally.
I tried to limit this by defining casual usage of the term to a very small set of seemingly decently run countries that share noticeable similarities in government stricture.
I’ve also heard that parliamentary democracies work better if there’s a size requirement for parties—otherwise tiny minority opinions get too much influence.
I believe this is mostly only a problem (and therefore the size requirement is only a solution) in countries with proportional representation. Britain’s system of first-past-the-post by district seems to work well in encouraging the formation of a few large stable parties.
Parliamentary republics aren’t necessarily democracies.
European ones currently are.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Thank you for your response, since it is a response to a draft I suggest any direct comments quote the text they are referring to?
I’d reply as I think Thomas Sowell would, with his standard question “compared to what?”
Compared to what is democracy a poor form of government?
Sure, sugar gum drop trees won’t spontaneously spring out of the earth when people get the vote. Nor is the vote an automatic cure for your aunt’s gout.
And there are plenty of failure modes. The particular ones you show from European parliamentary democracy are not surprising to me, as an American with a preference for the constitutional republic we nominally have here.
The key difference seems to be attitude toward government. In the US originally, and to some degree in pockets still, the federal government, and government in general, is seen as empowered with authority to secure your rights. Not positive rights to the fruits of the labor of others, but negative rights against abuse from others. From the Declaration of Independence:
This model of government does not include a “goodness generating machine” as one of the deliverables. Government exists to protect your “inalienable rights”, such as life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. It is not a happiness generating machine, which will fedex you monthly packages of happiness, it is a machine to protect your freedom, leaving you free to live your life and pursue happiness. You are the happiness generating machine; it is the freedom protecting machine.
This model has it’s own failure modes, such as when much of the populace starts wanting the government to be a “goodness generating machine”.
And it’s not a perfect machine even in a society of people who support it for it’s original purpose. Inevitably, those controlling the levers will exercise that power for their own interests, while the general population will have both limited knowledge and incentive to properly watch over them. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” That’s an expensive price, suffering from free rider problems, so we should always expect some abuse of the system.
Wah wah wah! I can’t have all I want for the price of wishing for it!
So? It’s worked pretty well, and I’ll take it over the Gulag or the Great Leap Forward.
If you have a perfect machine handy, I’m all ears. The historical alternatives seem vastly inferior. So again I ask, compared to what does democracy suck?
I agree with this criticism, yet I find it ironic that what I think is the strongest argument in favour of democracy is a fundamentally small c conservative one. Modern society (unwisely in my opinion) doesn’t let such arguments stop it from changing things. Yet when it comes to democracy someone just bringing up a quote by Churchill is enough to dispel all doubts.
I don’t think having government be a goodness generating machine is a good idea. I start here with an argument for setting up a democracy as one as someone who thinks this would work would present it. Hence the draft, before proceeding to critique it I wanted to make sure I was attacking a steel man of moderate social democracy the currently reigning Western ideology.
Looking from the outside it seems pretty obvious the US government is expected to be a goodness generating machine. This is especially true among the classes engaged in opinion making, let alone among the kinds of people who actually make up the USG and run the country. It also seems obvious democratic means will not change or restore it into an effective guardian of negative rights.
Recall what I said:
Goodness generation is also the standard rationalization for the existence of everything from the department of education to an army geared for foreign intervention. For a reason, democracy basically is early stage socialism. Plato and Aristotle didn’t think much of democracy because of this. And we know from previous patients that early stage always gives way to late stages eventually, sometimes in a matter of months or years like in the case of the Russian revolution, sometimes decades and even centuries as is the case with the American one.
What does the “pro-freedom” or negative rights camp have? A few internet blogs and think thanks? Recall that even on lesswrong the Libertarian position is called “far right”. This is not an accident. In a democracy wealth redistribution with the pretext of higher goals is how elections are won. Even more damningly in a democracy the sate perhaps does not control the press but the press controls the state, and recall state power is supposed to be tied directly to public opinion! What we see is a power pump where public opinion drives changes in governance and changes in governance drive public belief. Nature finds a way, be it with birds loosing flight or herbivores finding a taste for meat or with “negative rights” memes suddenly finding themselves invested and nested in memeplexes supporting state expanding projects. I mean look at the Republican party.
No way, the Provisional Government wasn’t overthrown because it stuck to negative-rights-based policies and didn’t offer anything more—it was overthrown because it was too high-handed/spineless in Petrograd politics, carried on with a massively loathed war which stirred up the unrest in the first place, flirted with both the socialists and the right while not aligning itself with either… And the Russian Empire already had a bit of local self-government + public welfare and wealth and land redistribution going. Those welfare programs—preceded by things like Zubatov’s trade union experiment, - were launched precisely because the government wanted to quell revolutionary sentiment in the wake of 1905!
Up voted. I will take your word and consider myself corrected for now, since the Russian Revolution is on my list of things to study in the future.
The quick and dirty assessment I used was “a regime that is formally a liberal parliamentary democracy becomes communism” when picking the example. I didn’t however mean to imply it was just a guardian of negative rights, just that social democratic and socialist ideologies are strong attractors in democracies because they work like power pumps. This is why I called democracy early stage socialism. I’m farm from being alone in this view, many socialists basically think true democracy is socialism. The whole social democratic ideology was founded on this idea of step by step reforms towards socialism via democracy and that democracy will inevitably lead to it, so no need for violent revolution.
If the goal was to discuss a steel man of social democratic theory, it seems to me that you’ve done a reasonable job. But not being a social democrat, I don’t know that my opinion should count for much. You disagree with the social democrats for some reason. You don’t share some of their premises, so that what is steel as evaluated by your premises (or mine) is likely not so steely to them.
I like your basic thrust, of first identifying what government is supposed (by them) to be for. I was actually meaning to ask this of the social democratic crowd in our next monthly politics thread. As I related, in the US we have a specific narrative of what government is for, grounded in the ideology, events, and documents of the creation of the country. I don’t have a real sense of where Europeans get their answer to the question, “what is government for?”.
Should it be a goodness machine? I liked your explicit identification of it. That’s starts sounding uncomfortably theocratic, because it is.
But I haven’t liked your using “democracy” as a short hand for the party platform of generic social democrats. Calling it Social Democracy would at least consistently make it clear that you mean a complex of procedures, programs, and values, and not just voting, which was my initial impression when I’ve seen you question democracy in the past.
Unless you’re really opposed to voting per se, your use of democracy as shorthand for social democracy easily leads to mistaking your views on voting, and is just unnecessarily unclear regardless.
That’s the thing. The news you get is filtered through European Social Democratic media perusing American Social Democratic media. That’s the view you get from the outside.
But those who control the centralized levers are hardly all of the country. You’re not hearing what’s said at churches, and picnics, and group emails, and talk radio, and small town newspapers. Many people hear these voices instead, and don’t spend so much time listening to the Social Democratic media.
And as for “the educated”, you’ve got a biased sample again. Much of the educated are in science, technology, and business, and they are not quite so liberal. Socially liberal, but not social democrats.
I was most amused the other day to hear my sister rant about how the government had no right to tell her she had to wear a seat belt. I remember my dad similarly ranting, and thought the attitude was a rather old fashioned one that had died out as we increasingly accepted hyper regulation as an unquestioned fact of life. Having my thoroughly apolitical sister rant in this fashion was a surprise.
Probably in half the country, there is a large sentiment toward the negative rights view of government. People aren’t entirely consistent in this regard, and have been corrupted by programs such as Social Security that dishonestly sold themselves as government pension plans that you “earned” by paying into them. So they support this wealth transfer program because they feel they, and others, have earned their benefits.
And as long as the government is passing out goodies, people will push for their goodies. But talk to them about what government is for, and whether they want government to be passing out goodies at all, and you’ll get a different answer. There’s no real logical contradiction between condemning the trough and bellying up to the trough while it’s there.
If anything, in my lifetime, the negative rights view has made a huge comeback in the US, and particularly on explicit ideological grounds.
I was born in 1965. There was no institutional support of small government, libertarian ideas. Barry Goldwater had just gotten crushed when he ran for president, but he at least won the nomination as an explicitly pro freedom, small government candidate. See the quotes. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater
Reagan ran on smaller government themes, which have largely become official Republican dogma. At least when they need to win an election. Like now.
Meanwhile, now they have blogs, and talk radio, and have even been making significant inroads into culture. Much of fantasy/scifi culture is explicitly libertarian. On the internet, libertarians have a huge presence, and the social democrats are usually on the retreat against them.
Multiple states have medical marijuana laws, which are largely hypocritical legalization laws, while explicit legalization initiatives in some states, and the demographics of support for legalization makes it almost inevitable to increasingly pass and spread in the next 20 years.
The Tea Party is largely made up of those who lean Republican but oppose the big government excesses of the Republican Party.
When people actually discuss the proper role of government, lots of Americans are very libertarian, and increasingly so in my lifetime.
Libertarian governments tend toward rent seeking bureaucracies as time goes on. But rent seeking creates pressure, both fiscal and regulatory, for a return to libertarian principles.
While the view may have made a comeback, the goals it seeks are growing more and more distant and politically difficult to acheive.
Joss Whedon strikes again. Just watched The Avengers last night. The movie started with various pontifications on freedom vs. submission to power.
I’m not sure I understand what question you are asking or what alternative you’re comparing democracy to.
Ultimately, a government is an organization that claims a right to compel obedience, and in practice, has the ability to compel. Some person or persons is ultimately going to be in charge of wielding that power. That means there has to be some means of choosing them.
To be more concrete: a government needs a military or at least a national police force. Those forces work much better with a unified command structure, which means there needs to be some supreme authority that can ultimately direct the coercive machinery.
In practice, it’s not possible to completely constrain the government by law and custom: presidents and prime ministers (to say nothing of monarchs and party secretaries) routinely do things that would have been thought illegal, before they were done. So being head-of-government comes with authority and power, and is therefore going to be attractive to people who value such things. As a result, there will be many people who want to be in charge.
Stable government requires having a reliable way to pick those leaders, that doesn’t result in coups, civil wars, or chaos. Elections seem to work well for this. The competing systems am aware of rely on leaders picking their successors, having an oligarchy to pick the leaders, or some combination of the two. (China and the Roman Catholic Church fall into this broad model.) This alternate system can be very stable, but is bad at incorporating shifts in public opinion, and lacks the cathartic benefits of mass elections. It doesn’t seem to work better in practice.
It might be useful if you gave a succinct explanation for what you mean by “democracy”. People use the word to describe just about every system in which the government is de facto elected on a regular basis by a large fraction of the population. That covers a lot of ground. It might be that you could do very much better than current parliamentary or presidential democracies, while still having something recognizable as elections.
This post was mostly about seeing if I’m getting the pro-democracy argument right.
As an American (immigrant from Eastern Europe, but that’s not very relevant) I would find an argument against democracy based on who well it works in Eastern Europe about as relevant to American democracy, as someone on lesswrong would find an argument against rationality based on the mistakes Spock makes.
I was talking of Central not Eastern Europe. While Slovenia is indeed a former communist country, I focus far more on the states we have sought to model ourselves after (Germany, Scandinavia, ect.) that any deviations or imperfections we may have to them comparing ourselves by our standards. Also I suggest you check your assumptions, Slovenia is a developed country by nearly any ranking, and indeed one of the very much nicer parts of the planet to live in and according to international opinion and the estimates of various organizations one of the “more democratic” or “free” ones.
I mean sure they could be wrong, indeed I do suspect they are biased. But if they are wrong then basically democratic societies (naturally America is apriori the golden standard of democracy ) seem to systematically mislead its citizens to what a democratic society is or isn’t. That’s a bad isn’t it? And isn’t the NYT and your own educated opinion often leaning towards such models? Aren’t there many many people who criticze the US for supposedly not measuring up to the Liberal Democracies of Europe? I don’t think they mean Spain or Italy or Ukraine. I do think they mean places like Germany or Austria or Finland. And those are just the places I’m going to talk about!