De Mesquita and Smith, as well as CGP Grey, discuss some of the structural reasons for this: in technological advanced liberal democracies, wealth is produced primarily by educated knowledge workers. Therefore, one can’t neglect the needs of the population at large like you can in a dictatorship, or you will cut off the flow of revenue that funds your state-apparatus.
But that structural consideration doesn’t seem to be most of the story to me. It seems like the main factor is ideology.
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I can barely imagine a cabal of the majority of high ranking military officials agreeing to back a candidate that lost an election, even if that a cabal assessed that backing that candidate would be more profitable for them. My impression of military people in general is that they are extremely proud Americans, for whom the ideals of freedom and democracy are nigh-spiritual in their import.
Sounds like you’re trying to build a model shaped like “(educated knowledge workers) → democracy ← ideology”. I suggest that a better model is “(educated knowledge workers) → ideology → democracy”—i.e. the dominant ideology is itself downstream of economic “power”, and is determined by realpolitik-style dynamics.
Looking at the example of American military people, I’d say they are selected for being proud Americans with ideals of freedom and democracy. Why that particular selection pressure? There’s presumably more than one gear in the middle, and I don’t know what they all are, but that’s the sort of selection pressure I’d expect to spontaneously show up in a country economically dominated by educated knowledge workers.
That points toward a class of answers for this question:
In so far as we do live in a world where we have the ideology of Democracy, right in exactly the places where it needs to be to protect our republic, how did that happen?
Again, I don’t know all the gears, but I’d expect that an economically-dominant middle class somehow selected for a governmental structure which favors them, and that selection pressure propagates through the system (i.e. if I select X for some outcome, and Y is causally between X and the outcome, then I’ll end up exerting selection pressure on Y via X).
Sounds like you’re trying to build a model shaped like “(educated knowledge workers) → democracy ← ideology”. I suggest that a better model is “(educated knowledge workers) → ideology → democracy”—i.e. the dominant ideology is itself downstream of economic “power”, and is determined by realpolitik-style dynamics.
Looking at the example of American military people, I’d say they are selected for being proud Americans with ideals of freedom and democracy. Why that particular selection pressure? There’s presumably more than one gear in the middle, and I don’t know what they all are, but that’s the sort of selection pressure I’d expect to spontaneously show up in a country economically dominated by educated knowledge workers.
That points toward a class of answers for this question:
Again, I don’t know all the gears, but I’d expect that an economically-dominant middle class somehow selected for a governmental structure which favors them, and that selection pressure propagates through the system (i.e. if I select X for some outcome, and Y is causally between X and the outcome, then I’ll end up exerting selection pressure on Y via X).