What evidence is there for the assertion (by e.g. Moldbug) that democracy and liberalism has made the world a worse place: by the usual measures of peace and prosperity? Even if I buy the cynical story regarding the nature and origins of the current world order why shouldn’t my conclusion be that they’re doing a pretty good job?
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country. (Is now zimbabwe). Same story for most of the third world, AFAIK.
The fact that only rich imperialist powers happen to be progressive democracies isn’t much evidence; if democracy fails in 9 cases out of 10, and fails in a way that degenerates to third-world barbarism, you will see a few successful progressive democracies, and a lot of third-world hellholes. Mind you, this is not an argument for tearing down democracy, merely that it could be the case that setting up a new democracy is a bad idea (see afganistan, iraq, etc).
Further, if you accept the cynical take, realizing that you live in a brainwashing theocracy ought to affect your intuitions about what looks like “doing a pretty good job”. Have you taken this into account?
These are not my opinions. Being neither a historian, political philosopher, or government employee, I am not qualified to have opinions on this subject.
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country. (Is now zimbabwe). Same story for most of the third world, AFAIK.
The problem with that talking point is that Zimbabwe isn’t a liberal democracy, and neither are most third world countries. If you want an example of a third world country that is plausibly a liberal democracy, India comes to mind. And in this case at least, the country’s economy has performed much better post-independence than it did under colonial occupation. It’s true that India’s growth in the first three decades after independence (the 50s through the 70s) wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was still significantly better than its pre-independence record, which was positively dismal.
As Amartya Sen has pointed out, India hasn’t experienced a famine resulting in massive loss of life since its transition to liberal democracy. Under British rule, famines occured at regular intervals, with the last major one in 1943 involving 1.5 million starvation deaths. In contrast, the closest India has come to famine conditions since independence was in 1966, and the death toll was only about 2500. According to Sen, the institutions of liberal democracy, particularly a free press, guard against the kind of government inattention that turns a drought into a massive famine.
Even in Africa, the countries that perform the worst (and are clearly worse off than they were under colonialism) are not the ones that we would describe as liberal democracies. The uncontroversial liberal democracies in Africa are countries like Botswana, Ghana, Namibia and South Africa (I’m sure there are more I’m missing), and these are countries that do relatively well compared to their neighbors. Botswana is an even better example than India of a country that performed dismally under colonialism and has done well since then. Its per capita GDP (in PPP terms) increased from around $90 in 1966 (when it became independent) to about $16,000 today. It’s also one of the few African countries that has remained a liberal democracy consistently since its independence.
Sen goes on to argue that acute famines are better than chronic malnutrition, that democracy focusing on the obvious famines might make things worse, but no one quotes those parts.
I didn’t quote it because I don’t see the relevance in this context. Sure, malnutrition is a huge (and, apparently, growing) problem in contemporary India, but is there any evidence that it was a less serious problem under British rule? I’d be very surprised if there was. Periodic famine may be better than chronic malnutrition, but periodic famine plus chronic malnutrition is surely worse. I wasn’t trying to argue that liberal democracy solves everything, just that genuine post-colonial liberal democracies are doing better than they were under colonial rule, and that the transition of countries like India from colonies to democracies has plausibly made the world a better place.
The uncontroversial liberal democracies in Africa are countries like Botswana, Ghana, Namibia and South Africa
Note what Namibia and Botswana have in common besides being nice places to live in Africa and being considered “liberal democracies”. Note where they tend to land on this list and how their economies tend to be strongly tied to resource extraction.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to glean from those links. It’s true that the current president of Botswana is the son of the first president, but Botswana is hardly alone in this kind of dynastic succession. I can name a few first-world democracies where multiple members of the same family have been elected heads of state.
And yes, Botswana is overly dependent on the diamond trade, and De Beers is a very shady company. The forced relocation of the San bushmen was an atrocity. Also, the country has a huge HIV/AIDS epidemic. But I wasn’t holding up Botswana as a shining exemplar of all that is good in this world. I was saying that it is, overall, a much better place to live in than it was before independence. Do you disagree?
Note what Namibia and Botswana have in common besides being nice places to live in Africa and being considered “liberal democracies”. Note where they tend to land on this list and how their economies tend to be strongly tied to resource extraction.
Zimbabwe also has a low population density and an economy strongly tied to resource extraction, so those two factors by themselves don’t fully account for the relative prosperity of Botswana and Namibia.
I can name a few first-world democracies where multiple members of the same family have been elected heads of state.
Of course and a monarchist would expect such things to generally work out quite well on average. My point was that first president was royalty, his family had strong enough social capital to reach for power once more decades later which suggests strong background influence during the presidencies of Quett Masire and Festus Mogae. Note how the former of those was Vice-president under Seretse Khama and how Ian Khama served as Vice-president under the latter. If that family does not consider the country as something like a family business I don’t know which one does.
Also that the De Beers company likely has quite a strong role in the governance of the country it doesn’t need to share with many other corporate interests possibly approaching the United Fruit model, if this is so this is a very well run instance of that.
Moldbug’s theory of government in action? He seems to think so.
Zimbabwe also has a low population density and an economy strongly tied to resource extraction, so those two factors by themselves don’t fully account for the relative prosperity of Botswana and Namibia.
Of course not, but I’m saying they help. Note how low density countries tend to be either horrible (West Africa) or wonderful (Iceland) places to live.
Yeah, South Africa was led by an HIV denialist for a decade. Despite Jacob Zuma’s many other flaws, he has been a huge improvement in this regard . He massively expanded the distribution of ARVs, and the country’s life expectancy is now back up to 60.
The number in the article comes from a rapid mortality surveillance system created by the South African Medical Research Council to monitor trends in mortality without a substantial time lag. You can see their report here. I don’t know enough to comment on the reliabiity of the number.
Anyway, my point is that mortality rates in South Africa are improving rapidly with increased availability of antiretrovirals. That trend is corroborated by other sources (see page 6 of this Stats SA report, for instance).
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country.
Cite?
(Is now zimbabwe).
Which is definitely not a democracy.
The fact that only rich imperialist powers happen to be progressive democracies isn’t much evidence;
It isn’t true that “only rich imperialist powers are liberal democracies”. What is a “progressive democracy”?
if democracy fails in 9 cases out of 10,
Does democracy fail in 9 cases out of 10?
Mind you, this is not an argument for tearing down democracy
Sure. Though I am rather interested in hearing from the people who think we should tear down democracies.
merely that it could be the case that setting up a new democracy is a bad idea (see afganistan, iraq, etc).
Those examples certainly apply to invading a country and then telling it to become a democracy. It’s less obvious that, say, a Saudi or Iranian citizen should oppose domestic democratizing efforts. And there are older examples that suggest a conqueror willing commit sufficient resources can start a stable democracy (at least given certain populations).
Further, if you accept the cynical take, realizing that you live in a brainwashing theocracy ought to affect your intuitions about what looks like “doing a pretty good job”. Have you taken this into account?
Quite. But I still need some evidence that we haven’t always been at war with Eastasia and that Eurasia isn’t our eternally loyal ally. Romanticism about colonial Africa isn’t doing the trick.
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country.
Cite?
I know very little about the history of that part of the world, but the GDP graph for Zimbabwe has quite an unusual shape. (Graph shows per-capita GDP in 2000 dollars, with aggregate data for all of sub-Saharan Africa displayed for comparison.) On the other hand, “practically a first-world country” sounds like an exaggeration at best: as the graph shows, GDP per capita was actually below that of sub-Saharan Africa in general until the first of those spikes, and fell back again after.
For a very different story, see Botswana, which Wikipedia informs me gained its independence from Britain in 1966.
Gerry Mackie’s book Democracy Defended is probably the best scholarly counter-argument to Moldbug. It goes through all the usual arguments against democracy, and offers counter-counter arguments.
You would probably want to read Stephen Holmes’ The Anatomy of Antiliberalism and Albert O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction (Amazon link) as well to put Moldbug’s claims in historical and rhetorical context. Holmes’ book is on the history of reactionary thought, while Hirschman’s is on the rhetoric that reactionaries have used through history.
Not that I think all of Moldbug’s claims are bad. The idea that there is a definite connection between American Protestants and democracy is a very strong one, I think (see this paper that was linked on Moldbug’s comments section that is a much better scholarly take on Protestants and democracy).
I don’t actually agree with the assertion, but I can see at least one coherent way to argue it. The thinking would be:
The world is currently very prosperous due to advances in technology that are themselves a result of the interplay between Enlightenment ideals and the particular cultures of Western Europe and America in the 1600-1950 era. Democracy is essentially irrelevant to this process—the same thing would have happened under any moderately sane government, and indeed most of the West was neither democratic nor liberal (in the modern sense) during most of this time period.
The recent outbreak of peace, meanwhile, is due to two factors. Major powers rarely fight because they have nuclear weapons, which makes war insanely risky even for ruling elites. Meanwhile America has become a world-dominating superpower with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, so many small regional conflicts are suppressed by the threat of American intervention.
That gets us to “democracy/liberalism” doesn’t get credit for making things better. To go from there to “democracy / liberalism makes things worse” you just have to believe that modern liberal societies are oppressive in ways that plausible alternatives wouldn’t be, which is somewhat plausible if your personal values conflict with liberal thinking.
In reality I suspect that the alternative histories mostly involve autocratic governments banning innovation and fighting lots of pointless wars, which is why I don’t buy the argument. But the evidence that liberal democracy is better than, say, a moderately conservative republic or a constitutional monarchy, is actually pretty weak. The problem is the nice alternatives to democracy are rare, because normally a country that starts moving away from autocracy ends up falling completely into the populism attractor instead of stopping somewhere along the way.
What do you mean by “made the world a worse place”? Worse than it was before democracy and liberalism started spreading, i.e. pre-1700s? Or worse today than it would have been today if democracy and liberalism hadn’t spread? The first question seems easy (we’re more peaceful and prosperous than the past), the second a nearly impossible counterfactual, depending heavily on what government systems and philosophies we’d have instead.
I admit to not being clear what the claim is myself. I’m responding to to something that is routinely implied—and implicit in a lot of reactionary rhetoric—but for which I have never seen an extended defense. Steel-manning would recommend the second choice—but then, people in this thread are defending the former interpretation (at least in limited circumstances).
There might be good ways of evaluating the counterfactual claim. For example, we might examine measures we wouldn’t expect technological changes to alter—and see if monarchies performed better by those measures. Though of course—the extent to which a government encourages or discourages innovation and economic growth is central to the question.
One example I stumbled on today: from a brief reading of Wikipedia, it seems like Ethiopia was doing pretty well under Halle Selassie I, but not so great now.
That a bad liberal democracy doesn’t exist shouldn’t surprise us, since if it was bad, we wouldn’t consider it liberal.
I’m not sure why that would be the case. I used the word liberal because sometimes all people mean by “democracy” is that there be voting—when what we’re talking about is copying the institutions of the West which includes more than just voting.
Does the Democracy Index even allow for the possibility of an “authoritarian democracy”?
What would that mean?. You’re welcome to review their process. In the case of Ethiopia: it’s basically a one party state where that one party controls all media and prior to elections arrested opposition leadership en masse, including members of parliament and charged them with treason. If this is the best data point for “liberal democracy is bad” I am unimpressed.
Which isn’t to say Ethiopia wouldn’t be better off with Fredrick the Great running things—but given the dearth of people with the ability to rule, rule effectively and then replace themselves, liberal democratic institutions seem like a solid option. I’m aware there are untried alternatives in the ideaspace but a)the fact that they have never been tried says something about the possibility of their ever happening and b)it’s a large risk to take when you have a large number of existing successful states which all have similar institutions.
That a bad liberal democracy doesn’t exist shouldn’t surprise us, since, if it was bad, we wouldn’t consider it liberal.
The “liberal” in liberal democracy stands for classical liberalism, not “liberalism” in the US sense. Moldbug’s philosophy is consistent with classical liberalism; when he talks about “liberalism” being a bad thing, he means the US modern sense.
IOW, the fact that “authoritarian democracies” exist at all, and are even common in “transitioning”, “democratizing” countries without a strong historical legacy, would seem to argue for Moldbug’s point. For comparison, consider countries such as Singapore and South Korea; the latter successfully transitioned from a non-democratic regime which did nonetheless uphold liberal principles and individual rights to a modern liberal democracy. Japan is also an interesting case, although its involvement in WWII makes things unclear. Nonetheless, the Tokugawa-Meiji-Taishou periods did involve increasing recognition of individual rights.
The “liberal” in liberal democracy stands for classical liberalism, not “liberalism” in the US sense.
Classical liberalism is often identified with libertarianism so I just want to emphasize that the “liberal democracy” refers to liberalism in a generic, John Stuart Mill, sense. From wikipedia:
It is characterized by fair, free, and competitive elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life as part of an open society, and the protection of human rights and civil liberties for all persons.
This generally includes strong private property rights but certainly doesn’t prohibit a welfare state.
Moldbug’s philosophy is consistent with classical liberalism; when he talks about “liberalism” being a bad thing, he means the US modern sense.
I don’t agree.
Moldbug is basically pro-free market but that doesn’t, at all, make him a classical liberal. And he treats the American left as continuous with it’s classically liberal ancestors—who were all women’s liberationists and abolitionists and free marketers! John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham were humanists, to the Left of Quakers and Unitarians.
“Liberalism” in the modern US sense he is, of course, particularly critical of. But aside from recognizing the success and power of the free market, I don’t see how his philosophy is at all consistent with classical liberalism or the liberal democrats of old.
Sure. But can we agree that he takes the liberal democratic world order to be the method of government created and prefered by Anglo-American Progressives?
Thomas Sowell comes to mind—worse, compared to that?
In Moldbug’s case, it seems to be anarchocapitalism with non geographically overlappping defense agencies. Which sounds like what we have now, except for people believing that they should have no say and exert no power against the defense agencies. As much as I find harmful in the progressive world order, I don’t think that abjection toward government power would be an improvement.
Not entirely sure. I think Moldbug has a very uneven consciousness of importance of less-formal social influences on government. In particular, I see a difference between some traditionalist govt. structures in which there is a clear sense of responsibility, and those in which there is not.
What evidence is there for the assertion (by e.g. Moldbug) that democracy and liberalism has made the world a worse place: by the usual measures of peace and prosperity? Even if I buy the cynical story regarding the nature and origins of the current world order why shouldn’t my conclusion be that they’re doing a pretty good job?
A quick talking point is that colonial Rhodesia used to be practically a first-world country. (Is now zimbabwe). Same story for most of the third world, AFAIK.
The fact that only rich imperialist powers happen to be progressive democracies isn’t much evidence; if democracy fails in 9 cases out of 10, and fails in a way that degenerates to third-world barbarism, you will see a few successful progressive democracies, and a lot of third-world hellholes. Mind you, this is not an argument for tearing down democracy, merely that it could be the case that setting up a new democracy is a bad idea (see afganistan, iraq, etc).
Further, if you accept the cynical take, realizing that you live in a brainwashing theocracy ought to affect your intuitions about what looks like “doing a pretty good job”. Have you taken this into account?
These are not my opinions. Being neither a historian, political philosopher, or government employee, I am not qualified to have opinions on this subject.
The problem with that talking point is that Zimbabwe isn’t a liberal democracy, and neither are most third world countries. If you want an example of a third world country that is plausibly a liberal democracy, India comes to mind. And in this case at least, the country’s economy has performed much better post-independence than it did under colonial occupation. It’s true that India’s growth in the first three decades after independence (the 50s through the 70s) wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was still significantly better than its pre-independence record, which was positively dismal.
As Amartya Sen has pointed out, India hasn’t experienced a famine resulting in massive loss of life since its transition to liberal democracy. Under British rule, famines occured at regular intervals, with the last major one in 1943 involving 1.5 million starvation deaths. In contrast, the closest India has come to famine conditions since independence was in 1966, and the death toll was only about 2500. According to Sen, the institutions of liberal democracy, particularly a free press, guard against the kind of government inattention that turns a drought into a massive famine.
Even in Africa, the countries that perform the worst (and are clearly worse off than they were under colonialism) are not the ones that we would describe as liberal democracies. The uncontroversial liberal democracies in Africa are countries like Botswana, Ghana, Namibia and South Africa (I’m sure there are more I’m missing), and these are countries that do relatively well compared to their neighbors. Botswana is an even better example than India of a country that performed dismally under colonialism and has done well since then. Its per capita GDP (in PPP terms) increased from around $90 in 1966 (when it became independent) to about $16,000 today. It’s also one of the few African countries that has remained a liberal democracy consistently since its independence.
Sen goes on to argue that acute famines are better than chronic malnutrition, that democracy focusing on the obvious famines might make things worse, but no one quotes those parts.
I didn’t quote it because I don’t see the relevance in this context. Sure, malnutrition is a huge (and, apparently, growing) problem in contemporary India, but is there any evidence that it was a less serious problem under British rule? I’d be very surprised if there was. Periodic famine may be better than chronic malnutrition, but periodic famine plus chronic malnutrition is surely worse. I wasn’t trying to argue that liberal democracy solves everything, just that genuine post-colonial liberal democracies are doing better than they were under colonial rule, and that the transition of countries like India from colonies to democracies has plausibly made the world a better place.
Three links on that country
First President
Current president
De Beers
Responsible government at its finest.
Note what Namibia and Botswana have in common besides being nice places to live in Africa and being considered “liberal democracies”. Note where they tend to land on this list and how their economies tend to be strongly tied to resource extraction.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m supposed to glean from those links. It’s true that the current president of Botswana is the son of the first president, but Botswana is hardly alone in this kind of dynastic succession. I can name a few first-world democracies where multiple members of the same family have been elected heads of state.
And yes, Botswana is overly dependent on the diamond trade, and De Beers is a very shady company. The forced relocation of the San bushmen was an atrocity. Also, the country has a huge HIV/AIDS epidemic. But I wasn’t holding up Botswana as a shining exemplar of all that is good in this world. I was saying that it is, overall, a much better place to live in than it was before independence. Do you disagree?
Zimbabwe also has a low population density and an economy strongly tied to resource extraction, so those two factors by themselves don’t fully account for the relative prosperity of Botswana and Namibia.
Of course and a monarchist would expect such things to generally work out quite well on average. My point was that first president was royalty, his family had strong enough social capital to reach for power once more decades later which suggests strong background influence during the presidencies of Quett Masire and Festus Mogae. Note how the former of those was Vice-president under Seretse Khama and how Ian Khama served as Vice-president under the latter. If that family does not consider the country as something like a family business I don’t know which one does.
Also that the De Beers company likely has quite a strong role in the governance of the country it doesn’t need to share with many other corporate interests possibly approaching the United Fruit model, if this is so this is a very well run instance of that.
Moldbug’s theory of government in action? He seems to think so.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I misunderstood the point you were trying to make.
No its ok I should have given more context but was in a hurry.
Of course not, but I’m saying they help. Note how low density countries tend to be either horrible (West Africa) or wonderful (Iceland) places to live.
In the 10 years after South Africa became a democracy in 1994 they managed to reduce their average life expectance from 61 to 51.
I don’t think that a country can do much worse than South Africa as it became a democracy.
Yeah, South Africa was led by an HIV denialist for a decade. Despite Jacob Zuma’s many other flaws, he has been a huge improvement in this regard . He massively expanded the distribution of ARVs, and the country’s life expectancy is now back up to 60.
That’s a very strange article it quotes 54 for the life expectancy in 2009 and 60 for the life expectancy in 2012?
Google Public Data has a life expectancy of 52 for 2011 while Gapminder has one of 52 for 2010 and 53 for 2011.
The number in the article comes from a rapid mortality surveillance system created by the South African Medical Research Council to monitor trends in mortality without a substantial time lag. You can see their report here. I don’t know enough to comment on the reliabiity of the number.
Anyway, my point is that mortality rates in South Africa are improving rapidly with increased availability of antiretrovirals. That trend is corroborated by other sources (see page 6 of this Stats SA report, for instance).
I have heard that the country described differently.
Well that’s just anti-democratic of you!
Cite?
Which is definitely not a democracy.
It isn’t true that “only rich imperialist powers are liberal democracies”. What is a “progressive democracy”?
Does democracy fail in 9 cases out of 10?
Sure. Though I am rather interested in hearing from the people who think we should tear down democracies.
Those examples certainly apply to invading a country and then telling it to become a democracy. It’s less obvious that, say, a Saudi or Iranian citizen should oppose domestic democratizing efforts. And there are older examples that suggest a conqueror willing commit sufficient resources can start a stable democracy (at least given certain populations).
Quite. But I still need some evidence that we haven’t always been at war with Eastasia and that Eurasia isn’t our eternally loyal ally. Romanticism about colonial Africa isn’t doing the trick.
I know very little about the history of that part of the world, but the GDP graph for Zimbabwe has quite an unusual shape. (Graph shows per-capita GDP in 2000 dollars, with aggregate data for all of sub-Saharan Africa displayed for comparison.) On the other hand, “practically a first-world country” sounds like an exaggeration at best: as the graph shows, GDP per capita was actually below that of sub-Saharan Africa in general until the first of those spikes, and fell back again after.
For a very different story, see Botswana, which Wikipedia informs me gained its independence from Britain in 1966.
Gerry Mackie’s book Democracy Defended is probably the best scholarly counter-argument to Moldbug. It goes through all the usual arguments against democracy, and offers counter-counter arguments.
You would probably want to read Stephen Holmes’ The Anatomy of Antiliberalism and Albert O. Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction (Amazon link) as well to put Moldbug’s claims in historical and rhetorical context. Holmes’ book is on the history of reactionary thought, while Hirschman’s is on the rhetoric that reactionaries have used through history.
Not that I think all of Moldbug’s claims are bad. The idea that there is a definite connection between American Protestants and democracy is a very strong one, I think (see this paper that was linked on Moldbug’s comments section that is a much better scholarly take on Protestants and democracy).
I don’t actually agree with the assertion, but I can see at least one coherent way to argue it. The thinking would be:
The world is currently very prosperous due to advances in technology that are themselves a result of the interplay between Enlightenment ideals and the particular cultures of Western Europe and America in the 1600-1950 era. Democracy is essentially irrelevant to this process—the same thing would have happened under any moderately sane government, and indeed most of the West was neither democratic nor liberal (in the modern sense) during most of this time period.
The recent outbreak of peace, meanwhile, is due to two factors. Major powers rarely fight because they have nuclear weapons, which makes war insanely risky even for ruling elites. Meanwhile America has become a world-dominating superpower with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, so many small regional conflicts are suppressed by the threat of American intervention.
That gets us to “democracy/liberalism” doesn’t get credit for making things better. To go from there to “democracy / liberalism makes things worse” you just have to believe that modern liberal societies are oppressive in ways that plausible alternatives wouldn’t be, which is somewhat plausible if your personal values conflict with liberal thinking.
In reality I suspect that the alternative histories mostly involve autocratic governments banning innovation and fighting lots of pointless wars, which is why I don’t buy the argument. But the evidence that liberal democracy is better than, say, a moderately conservative republic or a constitutional monarchy, is actually pretty weak. The problem is the nice alternatives to democracy are rare, because normally a country that starts moving away from autocracy ends up falling completely into the populism attractor instead of stopping somewhere along the way.
What do you mean by “made the world a worse place”? Worse than it was before democracy and liberalism started spreading, i.e. pre-1700s? Or worse today than it would have been today if democracy and liberalism hadn’t spread? The first question seems easy (we’re more peaceful and prosperous than the past), the second a nearly impossible counterfactual, depending heavily on what government systems and philosophies we’d have instead.
I admit to not being clear what the claim is myself. I’m responding to to something that is routinely implied—and implicit in a lot of reactionary rhetoric—but for which I have never seen an extended defense. Steel-manning would recommend the second choice—but then, people in this thread are defending the former interpretation (at least in limited circumstances).
There might be good ways of evaluating the counterfactual claim. For example, we might examine measures we wouldn’t expect technological changes to alter—and see if monarchies performed better by those measures. Though of course—the extent to which a government encourages or discourages innovation and economic growth is central to the question.
One example I stumbled on today: from a brief reading of Wikipedia, it seems like Ethiopia was doing pretty well under Halle Selassie I, but not so great now.
I’m not sure we can call Ethiopia a democracy but we certainly can’t call it a liberal one. The Democracy Index labels them an “authoritarian regime”.
That a bad liberal democracy doesn’t exist shouldn’t surprise us, since, if it was bad, we wouldn’t consider it liberal.
I’m not sure why that would be the case. I used the word liberal because sometimes all people mean by “democracy” is that there be voting—when what we’re talking about is copying the institutions of the West which includes more than just voting.
What would that mean?. You’re welcome to review their process. In the case of Ethiopia: it’s basically a one party state where that one party controls all media and prior to elections arrested opposition leadership en masse, including members of parliament and charged them with treason. If this is the best data point for “liberal democracy is bad” I am unimpressed.
Which isn’t to say Ethiopia wouldn’t be better off with Fredrick the Great running things—but given the dearth of people with the ability to rule, rule effectively and then replace themselves, liberal democratic institutions seem like a solid option. I’m aware there are untried alternatives in the ideaspace but a)the fact that they have never been tried says something about the possibility of their ever happening and b)it’s a large risk to take when you have a large number of existing successful states which all have similar institutions.
Edit: Authoritarian democracy as in this?
The “liberal” in liberal democracy stands for classical liberalism, not “liberalism” in the US sense. Moldbug’s philosophy is consistent with classical liberalism; when he talks about “liberalism” being a bad thing, he means the US modern sense.
IOW, the fact that “authoritarian democracies” exist at all, and are even common in “transitioning”, “democratizing” countries without a strong historical legacy, would seem to argue for Moldbug’s point. For comparison, consider countries such as Singapore and South Korea; the latter successfully transitioned from a non-democratic regime which did nonetheless uphold liberal principles and individual rights to a modern liberal democracy. Japan is also an interesting case, although its involvement in WWII makes things unclear. Nonetheless, the Tokugawa-Meiji-Taishou periods did involve increasing recognition of individual rights.
Classical liberalism is often identified with libertarianism so I just want to emphasize that the “liberal democracy” refers to liberalism in a generic, John Stuart Mill, sense. From wikipedia:
This generally includes strong private property rights but certainly doesn’t prohibit a welfare state.
I don’t agree.
Moldbug is basically pro-free market but that doesn’t, at all, make him a classical liberal. And he treats the American left as continuous with it’s classically liberal ancestors—who were all women’s liberationists and abolitionists and free marketers! John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham were humanists, to the Left of Quakers and Unitarians.
“Liberalism” in the modern US sense he is, of course, particularly critical of. But aside from recognizing the success and power of the free market, I don’t see how his philosophy is at all consistent with classical liberalism or the liberal democrats of old.
A potential issue here—liberalism can be taken in very different ways. Moldbug uses the term Progressivism for the target of his criticism.
Sure. But can we agree that he takes the liberal democratic world order to be the method of government created and prefered by Anglo-American Progressives?
Thomas Sowell comes to mind—worse, compared to that?
In Moldbug’s case, it seems to be anarchocapitalism with non geographically overlappping defense agencies. Which sounds like what we have now, except for people believing that they should have no say and exert no power against the defense agencies. As much as I find harmful in the progressive world order, I don’t think that abjection toward government power would be an improvement.
Not entirely sure. I think Moldbug has a very uneven consciousness of importance of less-formal social influences on government. In particular, I see a difference between some traditionalist govt. structures in which there is a clear sense of responsibility, and those in which there is not.
.