As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning. Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
Words don't have objective meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas in your head. They are like named memory addresses that can be de-referenced. That's why "woke" can have different meanings to different groups of people who speak together. Words are sociologically derived, not objectively meaningful. Eventually these words can even become shibboleths which can be used to determine whether you are part of a group or not.
People deeply underestimate the power of linguistics, especially in the hands of those who wish to exploit it. Control/influence over language and it's mapping is political power.
"almost all controversy would be removed from among Philosophers, if they were always to agree as to the meaning of words" (c)
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.
It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.
And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)
It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.
I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
We designed the civil rights code so as to be least unacceptable to bigots. They feel that bigotry is an unalienable right, and to be honest, it took some serious rereading of the Constitution to not make it so.
Even now they are finding that the Constitution does not in fact allow civil rights, and the Civil Rights Act is being pared away.
You can call it out by whatever name you want, but in the end a lot of Americans want that and you don't have the overwhelming political force required to override them.
The one small upside: they'll tell you that you're only making it worse by name calling. That's not actually true. It may not make things better, but it is not the cause of it. Arguing about words is just a common tactic to get you to stop talking about the actual subject.
It’s important for sanity’s sake to remember that the bigots are a minority of Americans. They’re just a more reliable vote than the rest of us (and you can thank the Koch Brothers and John Birch Society for the multi-decade conspiracy that made this so.)
I believe that only a minority actively think of themselves as bigots.
But in addition to that extremely reliable and enthusiastic vote are a lot of allies who say things like "I'm not racist but...". Often followed by "I just happen to have totally non bigoted reasons to always vote with the bigots".
Populism is definitely a part of democracy, but it is a criticism from "responsible" politicians for "irresponsible" ones.
Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.
But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.
One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.
The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.
Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
So by that logic both democrats and republicans are populist parties, because neither is willing to propose the hefty middle class tax increases, or entitlement cuts, that are mathematically necessary to balance the budget (much less to fund additional programs). Do I have that correct?
as I understand it, populism is when you exploit 'popular' causes to get a mass backing to bring yourself into, and to stay in, power.
It is opportunistic, 'goal justifies means' philosophy.
So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'.
It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.
In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
This has an obvious aside of letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried, for example scaling back globalization in at attempt to prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens. This could well backfire and voters would then want something else, which turncoats will happily endorse. The alternative is that we can't get to something else because it has no popular support yet.
> "Prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens"
Of which citizens, by what measure and in what direction? Up or down? "Quo bono" is never answered. Well, it's clear if you look at the charts - the curves never change direction regardless of who's in charge.
> "letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried"
Washing hands with the will of the voters is demagogy. Trump promised stopping the U war in 24 hours, bringing prices down and unseen prosperity from day one but all that was replaced by "it was a joke" and endless "necessary pain" (for you, not him). The spin now is that the voters elected a person, not his promises, and if he lied and joked... it's voters' fault. As if there was ever a choice without jokers in it.
I'm sure you can look up the dictionary definition like everyone else, and it won't mention anything similar to "democracy", but if you want one from a random internet person: it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
> it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.
What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
> You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews.
I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...
> many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power
Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.
The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.
Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
This is true for other areas as well. Our healthcare, education, and tax systems for example aren't what anyone proposed or ever would propose. They ended up that way for a variety of reasons and now we're stuck with them because the only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch.
> only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch
The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.
Not sure why you've chosen to go off on a tangent about immigration to the United States in response to my post about populists of all stripes typically trying to remove all sorts of checks on their power, including the democratic ones in the guise of "protecting" the people from the enemy du jour.
But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason with noone else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...
No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...
But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error. In a republic like the US it's actually not the job of the official elected in the belief he'd get the price of eggs down to overrule courts, and it seems hollow to claim it'd be more democratic to skip the process of legislative change in favour of executive fiat when the public doesn't agree with him on many of the details.
It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better though it would be more democratic. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves the president insisting his his yuge popular mandate places him so far above the law that bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it, never mind other populists like Maduro or Mao or Mussolini who didn't even worry too much about the mandate bit.
I used that example because, across the developed world, immigration policy is the issue that reflects the disconnect between what the public wants and what anti-democratic checks on democracy have allowed.
We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.
What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.
This often gets forgotten but by all appearances, Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS sec, facilitated mass migration illegally but avoided ever being called anti-democratic, authoritarian, or whatever else people are called for doing deportations. (So importations are more democratic than deportations I guess somehow??). No one gave him a mandate to do the CHNV program flying people in, to spend money building a highway in Panama, to grant parole to alleged asylum seekers, etc. It's surprisingly missing from all this passionate debate about authoritarians, populism, and the end of the rule of law.
Mayorkas had exactly the same thin mandate as Trump appointees, and was also unpopular, but he wasn't trying to claim his mandate was so strong that he could ignore courts and the constitution.
If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?
I point to issue polling because I'm pointing out the obvious fact that much of what he and his appointees actually done isn't the will of the public, no matter how much shouting about migration or egg prices during the election resonated with certain segments of it.
The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.
I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.
The judicial resistance to deportation because they didn't follow the law on how to do deportation. That is, the judicial opposition is exactly the rule of law.
The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.
Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?
> Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t.
I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.
the important part of populism isn't the fear and discontent, it's the pandering. some fear and discontent is valid, some isn't, that's not relevant to whether something is populist or not.
populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.
Having evidence that the fears are based in reality and proposed policies that would help said people is a point for the latter, obvious contradictions in those one for the former.
Proposed policies being realistic vs vague broad strokes that are unlikely to be legal to implement would be another indicative axis.
I suspect that having "obvious contradictions" in policies is an extremely high bar for modern political groupings generally - ie all political parties and their leaders are populist now.
I think that populism has an element of "tear the system down", which is something that goes considerably further than the usual "throw those bums out".
When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.
How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
> Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
At least on the GOP side, it’s because they care only about cheap labor. Free trade to harness cheap labor abroad, and mass immigration to harness cheap labor for what can’t be outsourced.
If by "tear the system down" you mean anti-establishment and anti-elite, I agree. That's an essential component of populism.
I don't think many people would say Biden was anti-establishment. In 2020, Trump hadn't been in office long enough to change the establishment very much.
Populism is to (small d) democracy like a popularity contest is to a job interview. Populism asks "which candidate do I like more" while democracy depends on asking "which candidate will perform the job the best."
That’s a weird (but revealing) comparison, because it makes it seem like there’s some too-down HR or manager deciding what the job criteria are what constitutes good job performance.
What elites call populist voters are picking the candidate that they think will do the best at the job they want done.
Populism and democracy are orthogonal. Usually populists just ride democracy as a vehicle to where they really want to go.
If The People selected you as their Chosen Leader, who needs pesky Elites in the courts and the Corrupt bureaucrats holding you back, the Chosen One? All opposition to what The People want is elitist gatekeeping and needs to be violently eradicated.
Suppose a political candidate runs on a platform of mass deportations of illegal aliens. If he wins the election and then makes good on this campaign promise, is that populism or democracy?
There's a couple of aspects to it that, in my opinion, need to come together. Bypassing and/or undermining democratic institutions (media, courts, bureaucracy) and claiming exclusive representation - "I alone represent The People" - come to mind.
Mass deportations, without more context, in and of themselves are more a policy and less a political style.
You can execute this policy in a democratic or populist fashion.
Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.
It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.
In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
Something I just realized that might be germane to this little discussion: I am European, not American.
We often use the word "democracy" as the vast eco-system underlying and upholding modern liberal societies in general, not just the elected parts. Whether that's correct use of the word - I suspect you think it's not - I leave open for discussion. If you want I can use the narrow definition in which case we are mostly in agreement.
Judges should exercise due caution and be mindful of their obvious biases.
However, this works both ways. Officials cater to their often not so well-informed electorate and this group, The People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
As you can tell I am also very much an amateur. I suggest you don't approach me as someone who has studied political science because I'll have a hard time keeping up.
I didn’t know this was something europeans did, because it’s alien to how americans historically have used the term. During the founding, there were explicit debates about democracies versus republics. The Democratic party originated as what europeans might call a “populist” party. And over time we changed the original constitutional structure to make it more democratic and less of a republic (such as direct election of senators).
> People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext). As usual, the scandinavians have figured this out.
I can see how it is a possible source of confusion which is something we can ill afford in this already treacherous waters.
> But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate.
> [...]
> while protecting legally recognized rights
Agreed, provided that by "elites" we mean the branches of government not just "successful people". I guess we're mostly in agreement. I'm just cranky about The People because in my country they are quite ... self-destructive, but that is a topic for another time.
I have a more maximalist view of what democracy means which is I believe more common in Europe and I suspect that's where most of your disagreement stems from.
First of all no single judge will be capable of upholding this, but let's say the entire judiciary has indeed decided to disenfranchise half the population I'd say they are grossly failing at their job. But anyway, your question was: is that democracy?
Well, it depends. In my democracy it would not be, because freedom is a big part of what democracy means here - even if The People decide freedom is unimportant. That's what we don't like about naked democracy, it easily leads to mob rule in which freedom is stripped and the tyrannical majority overrides all other concerns.
In my mind democracy is a broad system of checks, balances and institutions in which the will of the people is just one element. An important one, but definitely not the only one.
Just for entertainment consider this: if The People vote to keep women out of the electoral process, is that democracy?
It’s Schrödinger’s democracy. Roe voiding nearly every state’s abortion laws was “democracy,” but Dobbs returning the issue to the states was “judicial fiat.”
Depends on how you do it. Yes, they are here in violation of the law. But if that's what bothers you, then the process you use to deport them had better be in keeping with the law. If what bothers you about them being here is the "illegal" aspect, then you must not trample the legal process in order to remove them.
Surely there is some kind of due process? You can't just pick up foreign looking types and ship them off in black vans. That would be an illegal way to do that, I believe (I hope). I'm not American so I don't know how it works over there.
If you read the thread you replied to, we were referring specifically to deporting "illegal immigrants", meaning the due process has been already run and determined they are illegal, which is why I asked how do you illegally deport an illegal.
That’s a bizarre argument. Conduct is illegal because it’s bad or has harmful effects. Immigration laws exist because society recognizes that immigration has various undesirable effects (cultural change, strain on public resources, etc.), so we need to restrict immigration to controllable levels that manage those negative effects.
The objection to illegal immigrants is that they’re here. While deportation efforts should follow the law like everything else, there’s nothing about illegal immigration that makes the legal process especially important compared to other things.
Populism refers to any movement that claims to represent the interests of the common people against the elite. It might be left, right, democratic, or authoritarian. It might really serve the people or just use anti-establishment sentiment for its own benefit.
It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.
Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
> Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.
That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
But it ought to be reported, maybe not negatively, but at least skeptically. Representing the people against the elites almost always means destroying (to at least some degree) the system that has elevated those elites.
That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
What you're describing is basically Conservativism. The root word is conserve.
Liberals are often about taking down (liberating) the current system. But for some reason they often don't want or don't get the populist labels. For example, I don't think anyone ever called BLM a populist movement.
It was just a slur against the People's Party. It was like how people now call whatever Trump said last "Trumpism."
Look at the People's Party's policies and that's what it stands for. The shorthand is that the policies prioritize wage laborers and small business over massive entrenched interests and insiders. The way the term has been used since then (always by people who disapprove) means "whatever the rabble are asking for now." Or "appealing to the lowest common denominator voter."
So the term is really meaningless, just a slur used against people whose ideas sometimes overlap with People's Party policies, used by people who would have hated the People's Party at the time.
When the state cannot get rid of a popular idea that benefits the people, the state puts on a mask with that idea and then hollows it out. The most cartoonish example is the "democratic" republic of north korea.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.
> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.
> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
Pretty much true.
> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]
People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.
> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.
This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.
And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.
> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]
[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda
[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part
> "But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia."
Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
I'm a fan of Joseph Tainter's analysis around organization of societies and issues around collapse being related to diminishing marginal returns. I think there's a lot to that position when you look at the general political party agendas. Technocratic solutions trying to squeeze more blood from the stone while providing less and less to participants (I have less of a theory on effectiveness for any given action, this is more of an observation).
some time ago i discovered Wardley maps [1] (about company's "landscape" and strategy there), and one thing that stick with me was this:
there are 4 levels/stages of development there - genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. With three transitions, made by different kind of people - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-planners. And the last one, mass-production, is about "ruthless removal of deviation".
i guess these "diminishing returns" in keeping long-time same-thing (democracy?) have something in common with the removal of deviations/variety..
reading about Eno's ideas on organization and variety makes me want to share some perspectives directly from my experience with music performance practice, specifically in live coding.
For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.
This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.
Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.
A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.
Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version:
I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.
The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.
So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.
I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the "scares" they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.
Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
I enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise.
In TFA, the author wrote:
Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws.
Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
David Graeber wrote how in Sparta everyone carrying weapons meant that they couldn’t afford to displease even a small fraction of them. So they had to resort to 100% consent and not majoritarian voting.
And then goes on to assert that the majoritarian voting process works only in a system where the state apparatus has an absolute control over violence with which the disgruntled minority opinions are suppressed. I think it sort of helped to resolve some of my internal contradictions around democracy as it exists today.
That's the point of a constitution: you take certain matters out of the hands of any (normal) majority.
Of course, one can bicker about what the constitutional amendment process actually is, and obviously about the actual content of the constitution. But the central point remains: minority (and majority) rights are protected by a constitution that cannot be altered by a (simple) majority vote.
.... the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides.
> the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides
Or when the majority decides this? If the system is defined to put checks on the majority power as well as the minority, there's no reason that the majority might not decide to try to push the boundaries of the system with similar incentives. I think there's a reasonable argument that this sort of boundary pushing is more responsible for the erosion of constitutional norms historically compared to when the minority wants more rights; we have headlines literally from this morning talking about how the American president claimed that he doesn't know if he needs to follow the constitution due to the mandate of his election[0]:
> WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, asked during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” whether he believes that he needs to uphold the Constitution during his presidency, responded, “I don’t know.”
> The comment came as Trump remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.
> “I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
> Pressed on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”
If a suitably-sized majority wants to amend the constitution (where "suitably sized" is defined by the constitutional amendment process), they can go ahead, always. That's why to some degree this is just pushing the issue of "tyranny of the majority" out one level - but that doesn't mean it is not worthwhile.
On the other hand, electing leaders who simply decide to not follow the constitution (perhaps because they believe they have "a majority" at their backs, or perhaps not) is something entirely different.
we would not have this narrow vision of losers/winners IF the inequalities were reduced, it would not be as strong as it is today in our world view if this parameter was adjusted.
In turns, "winners" would not feel like they are at the verge of loosing it all, constantly, because the wealth they generate would be stored into a living organism (a nation, or else). like having multiple bank accounts, with multiple currencies, that one being .... bio-economic i guess.
democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
It also explicitly requires the parties and candidates to think beyond the current election cycle. That behavior is not in evidence for at least one major party in the U.S.
A candidate's personal expectation of costs must also be factored in. When a candidate faces criminal charges (to pick an example totally out of the blue) if they lose but can eliminate those if they win, the calculus changes for them.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
A lot of people really kick back on sortition. I think a good compromise is this: everyone votes like normal. We then take the top K candidates who got more than some fraction of the votes. (Say: greater than 1/9th of the total votes.) The winner is selected, at random, proportional to the number of votes they received. Such a system would really really on having a large number of candidates on the ballot; my preference would be (in party ballots): top 2 (or 3!) candidates from each party, and any person who can get more than T signatures. (Where T is some number like “20000” or “5% VAP”.)
That compromise has all the downsides of both systems without preserving the upsides - it creates a pool of candidates that will be biased towards narcissistic lunatics but no democratic checks so they can get in to office even if there is a consensus that their policies will be destructive.
It isn't a terrible idea; I've long liked that sort of plan as a fallback in very tight elections to randomly decide between the candidates. But it isn't really a compromise with the sortition folk because it doesn't have the properties they're looking for.
“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.”
The compromise is to defeat gerrymandering. It has the nice quality of being constitutional. Most policies I've seen for defeating gerrymandering don't pass constitutional muster. I say this as someone who worked in the antigerrymandering & redistricting space for 15 years.
Does the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.
The longer a regime’s power is aligned with the establishment, the less democratic it becomes. There’s no clear-cut distinction between democracy or not democracy.
However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.
Dr. Devereaux of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has a really nice overview of the position of Roman dictator over at his blog. [1]
The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done.
The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy.
Appointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy.
If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
> "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
That sounds very American though. For example how does the Westminster style system fit into it? While the Prime Minister might be described as the executive, they're actually just the leader of the majority Legislative party.
Democracy is more fundamental than that. It simply means rule by the people. The three branches of government was a later invention, and not all democracies feature it. Political theory surrounding the definition of democracy is more concerned with who has power and how they have it, and has less to do with how it is structured, as much as a US-centric definition may take it to be. Eg parliamentary systems are considered democratic despite a different structure.
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
This assumes ruling parties start out as “good” but becomes “bad” over time. A more pragmatic view is that different people and different interests have different ideas about what is good and what is bad, and politics is the stuggle between these viewpoints.
My understanding has always been that one of the "killer apps" of democracy as a system of government is peaceful transfer of power. It seems like one of those "nobody asks what the old software did well" questions; so many people (i.e. Americans) are so used to the idea of peaceful transfer of power that we don't ever think about what a major achievement it is, and how dependent on it everything we take for granted is.
Another advantage of democracy is a source of popular legitimacy for the government, which helps prevent coups. Dictatorships struggle with this, and have to apply other countermeasures to prevent coups.
Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.
Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.
They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
> Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers.
But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people.
So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
A democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We've lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.
American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.
As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.
It's also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.
Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.
I don't know, it doesn't seem simplistic in conclusion. The article describes a dynamic environment and you're just postulating further variation than described there. That doesn't mean the ideas don't agree or that the general formula isn't sufficiently complex to incorporate more nuance than the article lays out.
The linked solution isn't as interesting, mainly because the idea of there being a solution seems the simplistic part. It is a system and it will play out.
I could cite dozens of times a society has gone 80 years (4-5 generations) without serious threat from foreign parties. How is our case unlike those?
The entire world has seen greater technical advances in the past 80 years than any time before, but zero percent of that is related to the politics of any one nation: either causally or effectually.
> This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to.
The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.
> Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system
Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
Most countries with multi party systems use different methods for selecting their representatives. When you do a straight aggregation of geographical areas in which you take whomever gets the most votes in each area (sometimes called first past the post) it becomes possible for the most disliked party in a country to win, widely geographical distributed concerns (like ecological concerns) become underrepresented, and most relevant to this conversation, having multiple parties that are close to each other is a huge disadvantage compared to having a single party attracting more people. Because of this, countries with this system will usually see smaller parties merge and stabilise on a 2 party government / opposition set up.
The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.
Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo
Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
To further add to that, many states do closed primaries. If a voter isn't registered with one of the two ordained parties, they realistically cannot participate in primaries at all.
If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful. But since we have a duopoly, they exclude a significant portion of the voting population from participating until late in the process.
First-past-the-post tend to lead to two-party systems while proportional representation tend to lead to multi-party systems. But you can’t have proportional representation in presidental elections since only one candidate can win. Countries with multi-party systems tend to have parlimentary systems.
And yet the French somehow manage to have a multi-party system while citizens directly vote for the president. And they also have a parliament, as does the USA.
The European systems, I'd argue are absolutely worse than many of the "direct republic" systems in the US and other American countries because in the European systems there's a pretense of "consensus" reaching and it mostly ends up preserving an elite status quo and hiding any problems. That's why there's such a big tendency of nanny stating and censorship. It's entrenched in a bureocratic way.
The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
Cardew's score expect singers able to recognize tones, sing them and hear harmony. Im not sure if this analogy could work for general society. Probably most people don't even know if they are able to sing a tone they hear.
> Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
Plus Eno is brilliant, which is a far cry from most politicians.
In music his works can sometimes be considered way different than most, because of even further distance from the familiar composer/songwriter/conductor/bandleader paradigm.
Even more so than things like pure jazz improvisation which can be one of the most "democratic" combos where each person has equal creative input and a wider-than-average freedom of expression. Sometimes the bandleader here is actually voted into position as the one most qualified to do the unavoidable "guidance" tasks of leading even free-form musicians.
As "opposed" to classical orchestral works where each musician's part is well-prescribed, they may have an equal voice among themselves but this is art intended to express the composer's efforts, overwhelmingly more than each individual musician's talent. The conductor here can be more like a dictator and get away with it more often because this tradition has much closer roots to medieval practices.
All these ways, it's the resulting sound that counts to the most significant degree, and it can be a wonder to behold across the spectrum.
Now if there's one type of conductor or bandleader who would be most suitable under all conditions, I would have to describe their most valuable quality as being "magnanimous". Otherwise you can not expect the music to be as satisfying as it could be from the same talented underlying musicians.
And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it's being replaced by another party, that the ruling "elite" isn't really replaced. They know what part of democracy they have to discredit. This is what the AfD in Germany is doing: they say EVERY party except the AfD belongs to the "block" of "Altparteien" meaning "old parties". There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".
Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.
> And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it's being replaced by another party, that the ruling "elite" isn't really replaced.
I think this line of argument requires some self-scrutiny. If you're suggesting that people are being manipulated into believing there's a ruling class of elites that span the traditional parties then you have to be willing to examine the possibility that you have been manipulated into dismissing that concern prematurely yourself. Propaganda absolutely exists, but assuming that it is the driving force behind opposing views in a democratic system turns valid concerns into illegitimate concerns which leads to disaffection by those who legitimately hold it.
> There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".
This isn't unique to Germany. In the US, many call it the "uniparty" which consists of establishment/neocon Republicans and Democrats. In the UK the Reform party portrays both Labour and the Conservatives as indistinguishable. France's National Rally makes similar arguments from what I understand. It seems to be a recurring pattern.
The rise of these alternative parties across Western democracies suggests that a significant portion of the electorate feels under-represented politically. From their perspective the political establishment dismisses their concerns while simultaneously labeling the alternative parties that address these concerns as being anti-democratic. I think this is a very dangerous place for any sort of democracy to be in.
> Przeworski’s theory starts from a simple seeming claim: that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”
I like this, but a more general point is that at all scales, we need to resolve the tension tension between the singular and the plural, the individual and the group, the `int` and `[int]`.
Results vary between Milton Friedman's famous pencil to the devastation of war.
I'd argue that the instability of our democracies and their tendency to break down into fascism isn't an intrinsic property of theirs. Rather, this instability is fueled by growing power imbalances among the economic classes.
Unless we ever address the issue of rampant capital accumulation in the hands of the few, we are condemned to suffer fascism, propped-up by an all-powerful oligarchical class, every 80 years or so.
Economic disparities were at their lowest after WWII, and have been steadily rising ever since. They have now surpassed what they were at their worst, before FDR and his New Deal.
Discontent is rising, and neither party is addressing the real issue. Not the weakly neoliberal democrats, and certainly not the republicans, too busy scapegoating migrants and LGBT people.
Democracy is complicated in practice and has a complicated history. But the theory is simple. Most of my own studies into the subject was learning and conceptualizing the wrong-headed mainstream conceptions of democracy.
No useful theory of democracy involves game theory. As a democrat the idea of social scientists maintaining a quasi-mechanical machine offends me. Politics needs less eggheads.
Then there’s the part about humility about Trump coming to power. Well by your own admission then your theories were just bad. People ranging from Richard Rorty to Noam Chomsky had predicted that someone like Trump could come to power if the current trajectory of the time kept on going. That was in the 90’s.
The quote about parties losing power isn’t true. America has an undemocratic duopoly. But I guess “fear” might be the keyword. Since neither party seem to truly fear it.
without a constitution that is the absolute definition of peoples rights and government power in an easily understood and brief document, you have nothing to govern, there is no law, just deciders, chosen in a popularity contest, each hopeing for a chance at dynastic power.
the current situation highlights exactly what you get with an "amended" constitution
the fundamental question is do we want a world where indivuals have very strong personal rights
to themselves and there property, or do we want to meddle, pick, and choose, deciding this way and that....since the answer is very, very , clearly
that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing, then they can only complain about what they,have done, can do, will do again.
It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation.
pick a lane......
> It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation
Asserted without evidence.
> the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing
Asserted without evidence. Most people don't want to be involved in decision making at all - witness participation in civic institutions and groups. Most people simply want a working system which gives them the right amount and the right kinds of liberty (in all possible senses) and safety. They may choose to "meddle" when they perceive these goals as not being met.
For a democracy to make sense, the people need to be educated enough to understand policy that affects them and they need access to accurate and timely information (a functioning 4th estate). If either of those two are false, then full democracy becomes a force of destruction and harm. Partial democracy where local governance is democratic but provincial and national level governance cannot be directed by the voice of the people is more tenable.
Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn't a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.
I won't comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn't enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.
Democracy is not about policy or institutions. Those are downstream of what democracy is really about, which is the Demos. The community. The people themselves who recognize each other as being like themselves in some fundamental, exclusive way. This is beyond reason or rationality. It is a matter of arbitrary culture, history and identity.
Policy in a complex system like society is infinitely debatable and no amount of education will ever find a "right" or optimal answer to the hard questions a society faces. Division and partisanship is guaranteed in a democracy that allows free debate and expression, regardless of the level of education among the people. The most acrimonious debates often take place among the most educated of the citizenry. Therefore something else must sustain the people as a community and bind them together.
True, but even “least bad” is not correct unless the public is well informed [as in not being fed misinformation] and in a rational state of mind [as in not scared of or trained to despise the jews, immigrants, woke etc.].
The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
Perhaps it would be more useful to consider "least bad" over a reasonable period of time. That is to say, there are probably times when, due to the factors you mention, the people steer democracy to do something bad that a strong dictator or group of elders would not have done. However, over a given period of time, it's likely that a democracy does less bad things then the alternatives.
That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.
The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
"Truth" in Education, understanding, and Press easily becomes "propaganda and lies" without the system blinking nor anyone being notified.
The only way to ensure the existence of truth is to give people a choice in what to believe. There are no wildflowers (truth) without also permitting weeds (lies). Certainly, no "organization to manage and protect" can be trusted to manage and protect truth.
The democratic ideal is that people are permitted to come to their own conclusions, given all arguments. Not that the arguments are institutionally restricted.
What happens when your ideological opponents suddenly come into control of the "truth police"?
Freedom to choose is the only protection, unless one's goal isn't democratic.
> The only way to ensure the existence of truth is [...]
there is no way to ensure the existence of a thing until there is first some consensus on how the thing is defined.
with the conservative right adopting and extending foucault-era post-modern epistemology ("alternative facts", "that's just, like, your opinion"), it isn't even possible to discuss what "the truth" is, because the agreement on what how we would arrive at an answer is has been undermined (intentionally so, IMO).
for some period of time, much of the west's population bought into the idea that truth was arrived at using some variety of evidence collection, falsification, logic, experimentation and debate. this consensus has been undermined to the point where questions like "do vaccines cause autism" can be asked without any willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer would be arrived at.
I'm speaking about an environment that passively allows truth by default, because of truly free speech. Something that works simply, and that people can simply understand. Which is a prerequisite for democracy.
You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people, which isn't possible in principle. While using pseudo-intellectual refences to Foucault and the scientific method in an attempt to slyly imply that, in the end, truth has to be defined by your party interests.
I argue for freedom of individual choice, which is the fundamental democratic principle. You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief, which is not a democratic principle.
Does a willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer "would be arrived at" include the functional banning of future science and debate?
For the record, I wrote a graduate paper on the best evidence for the cause of autism. Not that the then-current best evidence definitely revealed the cause, but only that it was the best evidence at the time. Although the evidence did not point to vaccines, I would hold anyone who wanted to ban such debate as being too academically compromised to be a member of the scientific community. In private, I would be more direct.
> You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people,
No, this is the opposite of what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that if a community agrees on a definition of what truth is (the old consensus was "something arrived at via a process mostly like <this>"), then "truths can exist" within that community. By contrast, if they do not agree on a definition what truth is, then no truths can exist within that community.
I'm not using references to Foucault to talk about what I think about defining truth; I'm making those references because that's what the public intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right relies on. Personally, I think that some of what Foucault had to say is insightful and interesting, but the extension of his observations to knowledge in general is unsupportable. And not just unsupportable - utterly destructive of a consensus about truth-generating processes that in turn is vital for functioning (democratic) communities.
> You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief
No, I'm arguing for a society wide consensus about how we choose between beliefs. Societies in the past have had this and still accomodated different beliefs. Most of the time this is resolved by noting that the beliefs can't be resolved via evidence. For example: what is the correct role of the state? There is no truth-generating process that can provide an answer to this question, but there can still be multiple different beliefs about the right answer.
> anyone who wanted to ban such debate
The issue is not "ban such debate". The issue is unwillingness to tackle in good faith the debate that has already taken place. No truth-generating process can involve an ever-present willingness to endlessly discard things already accepted as true. Clearly, it cannot refuse to ever reconsider either. So the actual path followed is a compromise between these two: if you don't have radically divergent and NEW evidence or data explanations for something considered settled, you'll have to wait a while. We're not going to relitigate whether the earth is round or not unless someone comes along with either major new data that is incongruous with our current "truth" about this, or someone finds incongruities within the data/"truth" we already have. That doesn't mean "debate is shut down" - it's a reflection of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary whatnot to be worthy of spending any time on".
I don't think anyone serious claims to know the cause of autism; I don't think anyone serious claims it is vaccines, which is in turn a reflection of what the the truth-generating process (the one we had consensus about until recently) says about that.
Classical Athens offers a fascinating example. It was a radical democracy of citizens who certainly understood what they were doing, and it became the most imperially ambitious, expansive, destructive, and exploitative polis of the classical period. They put an entire city to death for refusing to join the 'defensive' alliance that they led and massively enriched themselves at the expense of member states.
That's not how it works. However you can see its success in China, Vietnam and Laos, countries that happen to now significantly cripple the world hegemon's economic foundation. Maybe if they studied it, westerners would find a way to reverse the century of humiliation they are about to face.
If that’s not how it works then the framework isn’t useful which is why it isn’t taken seriously.
> However you can see its success in China, Vietnam and Laos, countries that happen to now significantly cripple the world hegemon's economic foundation.
What do you think these countries are doing that has significantly crippled the American economy?
This obviously depends significantly on the social scientist, but in general, a damn sight more than the people that were convinced they knew better than the social scientists...
Ah, so it turns out the solution to the centre not holding is to create as many falconry schools as possible, hoping to yield a dynamic system of falcons in a variety of overlapping gyres, so that at least some remain in hearing distance of a falconer? Big if true.
I came to a conclusion that democracy is not as good as I thought initially. It has be replaced with a better system quickly or else we are going to loose all advancements humanity made so far
As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning. Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone. And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
Words don't have objective meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas in your head. They are like named memory addresses that can be de-referenced. That's why "woke" can have different meanings to different groups of people who speak together. Words are sociologically derived, not objectively meaningful. Eventually these words can even become shibboleths which can be used to determine whether you are part of a group or not.
People deeply underestimate the power of linguistics, especially in the hands of those who wish to exploit it. Control/influence over language and it's mapping is political power.
"almost all controversy would be removed from among Philosophers, if they were always to agree as to the meaning of words" (c)
One could say it was always the case, you can cut through bs and have a productive dialogue if you define the meaning of words before the message, i.e. scientific papers do that. The problem with that is that most people won't do it because its hard and on the other end you will get ostracized most of the time if you try doing that in casual conversations. This problem is even bigger in politics which is a game of large numbers and you have to be as stupid as possible for your message to reach the masses.
On "reduced linguistic precision":
Another example (this is a hard one imo) "discrimination". It is used in the US in an important legal document, a part of a powerful legal social right.
It's both the NEGATIVE and unjust social process of dividing minorities, often segregating them away from the resource-plenty enjoyed by majorities -- basic 'good favor', low prices, neighborhoods with food oases.
And it's also the POSITIVE or NEUTRAL term of "making a fine distinction and discerning". Such as, "The experienced journalist listened intently to the politician's statement, applying a keen sense of intellectual discrimination. She was able to quickly discern the subtle ways in which key facts were being selectively highlighted and crucial context was being omitted, allowing her to call out the misrepresentation rather than accepting the narrative at face value." (gen'd by ai <3)
It was once an efficient term for identifying careful critical thinking. I speculate we do less of this as we have fewer words to do this with, nowadays.
I suppose "bigot" and "bigotry" ought to have been used by the US when it made its civil rights advancements.
We designed the civil rights code so as to be least unacceptable to bigots. They feel that bigotry is an unalienable right, and to be honest, it took some serious rereading of the Constitution to not make it so.
Even now they are finding that the Constitution does not in fact allow civil rights, and the Civil Rights Act is being pared away.
You can call it out by whatever name you want, but in the end a lot of Americans want that and you don't have the overwhelming political force required to override them.
The one small upside: they'll tell you that you're only making it worse by name calling. That's not actually true. It may not make things better, but it is not the cause of it. Arguing about words is just a common tactic to get you to stop talking about the actual subject.
It’s important for sanity’s sake to remember that the bigots are a minority of Americans. They’re just a more reliable vote than the rest of us (and you can thank the Koch Brothers and John Birch Society for the multi-decade conspiracy that made this so.)
I believe that only a minority actively think of themselves as bigots.
But in addition to that extremely reliable and enthusiastic vote are a lot of allies who say things like "I'm not racist but...". Often followed by "I just happen to have totally non bigoted reasons to always vote with the bigots".
Speaking of literacy: what does "populism" mean? Isn't it just another word for "democracy," in contrast to "republicanism?"
Populism is definitely a part of democracy, but it is a criticism from "responsible" politicians for "irresponsible" ones.
Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.
But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.
One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.
The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.
Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
So by that logic both democrats and republicans are populist parties, because neither is willing to propose the hefty middle class tax increases, or entitlement cuts, that are mathematically necessary to balance the budget (much less to fund additional programs). Do I have that correct?
as I understand it, populism is when you exploit 'popular' causes to get a mass backing to bring yourself into, and to stay in, power. It is opportunistic, 'goal justifies means' philosophy.
So, you don't really have orinciples or a cause, apart from 'I should be in charge'. It also means voters, if they are capable of judging that, cant really trust you, because you will switch causes whenever it suits you.
In my own country, I could name politicians who always carried the same color as the reigning political movement, and who would switch when the winds change, because their real principle was 'be on the winning side'.
This has an obvious aside of letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried, for example scaling back globalization in at attempt to prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens. This could well backfire and voters would then want something else, which turncoats will happily endorse. The alternative is that we can't get to something else because it has no popular support yet.
> "Prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens"
Of which citizens, by what measure and in what direction? Up or down? "Quo bono" is never answered. Well, it's clear if you look at the charts - the curves never change direction regardless of who's in charge.
> "letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried"
Washing hands with the will of the voters is demagogy. Trump promised stopping the U war in 24 hours, bringing prices down and unseen prosperity from day one but all that was replaced by "it was a joke" and endless "necessary pain" (for you, not him). The spin now is that the voters elected a person, not his promises, and if he lied and joked... it's voters' fault. As if there was ever a choice without jokers in it.
I'm sure you can look up the dictionary definition like everyone else, and it won't mention anything similar to "democracy", but if you want one from a random internet person: it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
Of course it is never that easy.
> it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.
That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.
What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.
> You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews.
I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...
> many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power
Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.
The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.
Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.
This is true for other areas as well. Our healthcare, education, and tax systems for example aren't what anyone proposed or ever would propose. They ended up that way for a variety of reasons and now we're stuck with them because the only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch.
> only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch
The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.
Not sure why you've chosen to go off on a tangent about immigration to the United States in response to my post about populists of all stripes typically trying to remove all sorts of checks on their power, including the democratic ones in the guise of "protecting" the people from the enemy du jour.
But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason with noone else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...
No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...
But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error. In a republic like the US it's actually not the job of the official elected in the belief he'd get the price of eggs down to overrule courts, and it seems hollow to claim it'd be more democratic to skip the process of legislative change in favour of executive fiat when the public doesn't agree with him on many of the details.
It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better though it would be more democratic. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves the president insisting his his yuge popular mandate places him so far above the law that bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it, never mind other populists like Maduro or Mao or Mussolini who didn't even worry too much about the mandate bit.
I used that example because, across the developed world, immigration policy is the issue that reflects the disconnect between what the public wants and what anti-democratic checks on democracy have allowed.
We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.
What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.
This often gets forgotten but by all appearances, Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS sec, facilitated mass migration illegally but avoided ever being called anti-democratic, authoritarian, or whatever else people are called for doing deportations. (So importations are more democratic than deportations I guess somehow??). No one gave him a mandate to do the CHNV program flying people in, to spend money building a highway in Panama, to grant parole to alleged asylum seekers, etc. It's surprisingly missing from all this passionate debate about authoritarians, populism, and the end of the rule of law.
Mayorkas had exactly the same thin mandate as Trump appointees, and was also unpopular, but he wasn't trying to claim his mandate was so strong that he could ignore courts and the constitution.
If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?
I point to issue polling because I'm pointing out the obvious fact that much of what he and his appointees actually done isn't the will of the public, no matter how much shouting about migration or egg prices during the election resonated with certain segments of it.
The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.
I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.
The judicial resistance to deportation because they didn't follow the law on how to do deportation. That is, the judicial opposition is exactly the rule of law.
The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.
Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?
> Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t.
I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.
the important part of populism isn't the fear and discontent, it's the pandering. some fear and discontent is valid, some isn't, that's not relevant to whether something is populist or not.
populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.
Everyone not already in power who wants to be elected tries to appeal to those who are unhappy with the current government.
How do you decide if they are "pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace" or "standing up for neglected people"?
Having evidence that the fears are based in reality and proposed policies that would help said people is a point for the latter, obvious contradictions in those one for the former.
Proposed policies being realistic vs vague broad strokes that are unlikely to be legal to implement would be another indicative axis.
I suspect that having "obvious contradictions" in policies is an extremely high bar for modern political groupings generally - ie all political parties and their leaders are populist now.
It's certainly not an uncommon trait, although there are still large differences in degree.
I think that populism has an element of "tear the system down", which is something that goes considerably further than the usual "throw those bums out".
When Biden ran against Trump, he tried to appeal to voters who were unhappy with Trump, but nobody called him a populist. He was just a normal politician. Trump isn't. Neither is Bernie Sanders.
How do you decide? I can't give you a clear answer there. Still, there is a difference. (Maybe "do they talk like a normal politician"?) Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
> Most out-of-office politicians are on the Biden side; only a few are on the Trump/Sanders side.
At least on the GOP side, it’s because they care only about cheap labor. Free trade to harness cheap labor abroad, and mass immigration to harness cheap labor for what can’t be outsourced.
If by "tear the system down" you mean anti-establishment and anti-elite, I agree. That's an essential component of populism.
I don't think many people would say Biden was anti-establishment. In 2020, Trump hadn't been in office long enough to change the establishment very much.
Populism is to (small d) democracy like a popularity contest is to a job interview. Populism asks "which candidate do I like more" while democracy depends on asking "which candidate will perform the job the best."
That’s a weird (but revealing) comparison, because it makes it seem like there’s some too-down HR or manager deciding what the job criteria are what constitutes good job performance.
What elites call populist voters are picking the candidate that they think will do the best at the job they want done.
Populism and democracy are orthogonal. Usually populists just ride democracy as a vehicle to where they really want to go.
If The People selected you as their Chosen Leader, who needs pesky Elites in the courts and the Corrupt bureaucrats holding you back, the Chosen One? All opposition to what The People want is elitist gatekeeping and needs to be violently eradicated.
Suppose a political candidate runs on a platform of mass deportations of illegal aliens. If he wins the election and then makes good on this campaign promise, is that populism or democracy?
There's a couple of aspects to it that, in my opinion, need to come together. Bypassing and/or undermining democratic institutions (media, courts, bureaucracy) and claiming exclusive representation - "I alone represent The People" - come to mind.
Mass deportations, without more context, in and of themselves are more a policy and less a political style.
You can execute this policy in a democratic or populist fashion.
> Bypassing and/or undermining democratic institutions (media, courts, bureaucracy)
Those are all explicitly anti-democratic institutions! You can argue that we’re not a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic, and those are appropriate checks on democracy. But that is a different argument.
It’s important to keep the terminology straight so you can think of the situation clearly. To address the mass deportation hypothetical: judges are very different from the people. They are cognitive elites with degrees from elite institutions. Insofar as judges interpret laws to check deportation efforts—for example, expansively interpreting the criteria for asylum, which they have done—you should understand that what’s happening is a conflict between voters on one hand, and elites who are far more sympathetic to immigration.
In a functional democracy, these anti-democratic checks should be maintained within their proper scope. For example, judges should avoid allowing the pro-immigrant sympathies of their class to color their legal opinions.
Something I just realized that might be germane to this little discussion: I am European, not American.
We often use the word "democracy" as the vast eco-system underlying and upholding modern liberal societies in general, not just the elected parts. Whether that's correct use of the word - I suspect you think it's not - I leave open for discussion. If you want I can use the narrow definition in which case we are mostly in agreement.
Judges should exercise due caution and be mindful of their obvious biases.
However, this works both ways. Officials cater to their often not so well-informed electorate and this group, The People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
As you can tell I am also very much an amateur. I suggest you don't approach me as someone who has studied political science because I'll have a hard time keeping up.
I didn’t know this was something europeans did, because it’s alien to how americans historically have used the term. During the founding, there were explicit debates about democracies versus republics. The Democratic party originated as what europeans might call a “populist” party. And over time we changed the original constitutional structure to make it more democratic and less of a republic (such as direct election of senators).
> People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.
But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext). As usual, the scandinavians have figured this out.
I can see how it is a possible source of confusion which is something we can ill afford in this already treacherous waters.
> But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. > [...] > while protecting legally recognized rights
Agreed, provided that by "elites" we mean the branches of government not just "successful people". I guess we're mostly in agreement. I'm just cranky about The People because in my country they are quite ... self-destructive, but that is a topic for another time.
> media, courts, bureaucracy
This is a gross redefinition of democracy.
But we can go down this path if you wish. If a judge rules that only men can vote by their interpretation of the constitution, is that democracy?
I have a more maximalist view of what democracy means which is I believe more common in Europe and I suspect that's where most of your disagreement stems from.
First of all no single judge will be capable of upholding this, but let's say the entire judiciary has indeed decided to disenfranchise half the population I'd say they are grossly failing at their job. But anyway, your question was: is that democracy?
Well, it depends. In my democracy it would not be, because freedom is a big part of what democracy means here - even if The People decide freedom is unimportant. That's what we don't like about naked democracy, it easily leads to mob rule in which freedom is stripped and the tyrannical majority overrides all other concerns.
In my mind democracy is a broad system of checks, balances and institutions in which the will of the people is just one element. An important one, but definitely not the only one.
Just for entertainment consider this: if The People vote to keep women out of the electoral process, is that democracy?
It’s Schrödinger’s democracy. Roe voiding nearly every state’s abortion laws was “democracy,” but Dobbs returning the issue to the states was “judicial fiat.”
It was called Fascism when Hitler did it. Why, did you have somebody else in mind?
Deporting illegal immigrants is called enforcing the law, not fascism.
Depends on how you do it. Yes, they are here in violation of the law. But if that's what bothers you, then the process you use to deport them had better be in keeping with the law. If what bothers you about them being here is the "illegal" aspect, then you must not trample the legal process in order to remove them.
For example what's an illegal way of departing an illegal immigrant?
Surely there is some kind of due process? You can't just pick up foreign looking types and ship them off in black vans. That would be an illegal way to do that, I believe (I hope). I'm not American so I don't know how it works over there.
If you read the thread you replied to, we were referring specifically to deporting "illegal immigrants", meaning the due process has been already run and determined they are illegal, which is why I asked how do you illegally deport an illegal.
That’s a bizarre argument. Conduct is illegal because it’s bad or has harmful effects. Immigration laws exist because society recognizes that immigration has various undesirable effects (cultural change, strain on public resources, etc.), so we need to restrict immigration to controllable levels that manage those negative effects.
The objection to illegal immigrants is that they’re here. While deportation efforts should follow the law like everything else, there’s nothing about illegal immigration that makes the legal process especially important compared to other things.
Populism refers to any movement that claims to represent the interests of the common people against the elite. It might be left, right, democratic, or authoritarian. It might really serve the people or just use anti-establishment sentiment for its own benefit.
It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's almost always reported negatively because the media is owned by the elite. Even elites who claim to care about the people don't want to be cast as the villain or lose power themselves.
Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
> Ironically, a successful populist movement becomes the new elite and creates an opportunity for other people to be populists.
Generally the first part is the defining feature of a populist movement: a leader or faction that seeks to insist that the only solution to elites or other hated minorities or purported threats is to assume that anyone trying to stop them accumulating more power is an agent of the elites. Naturally this rhetorical style suits people that want to accumulate a lot of power and wealth and don't want to give too many straight answers to questions about what they're doing with it.
That's why Maduro, an oligarch who's been in power for over 12 years and decides exactly who is and isn't "elite" in his country is characterised as "populist" because his rhetorical style is all about claiming that he's on the side of the poor against [what's left of] the middle classes, whilst a civil war or coup which usually leads to elites being deposed may not involve populists at all.
But it ought to be reported, maybe not negatively, but at least skeptically. Representing the people against the elites almost always means destroying (to at least some degree) the system that has elevated those elites.
That may be needed, it may be justified, but we still need to ask what the replacement system is. It is easy to criticize, but harder to offer a better alternative. It is easy to destroy; hard to build. The populist's answer to what comes next often boils down to "trust me, bro" - there isn't a concrete, workable plan. As a result, the net result often winds up worse than what came before, not just for the elite, but even for the people the populist claimed to represent. This is true even if the populist was honest, that is, sincerely had the interest of the common people at heart.
What you're describing is basically Conservativism. The root word is conserve.
Liberals are often about taking down (liberating) the current system. But for some reason they often don't want or don't get the populist labels. For example, I don't think anyone ever called BLM a populist movement.
It was just a slur against the People's Party. It was like how people now call whatever Trump said last "Trumpism."
Look at the People's Party's policies and that's what it stands for. The shorthand is that the policies prioritize wage laborers and small business over massive entrenched interests and insiders. The way the term has been used since then (always by people who disapprove) means "whatever the rabble are asking for now." Or "appealing to the lowest common denominator voter."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_(United_States)
So the term is really meaningless, just a slur used against people whose ideas sometimes overlap with People's Party policies, used by people who would have hated the People's Party at the time.
> democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses […]
Power sure, but knowledge? Nope. If anything it’s the opposite.
IMO, that's the sign of a different process.
When the state cannot get rid of a popular idea that benefits the people, the state puts on a mask with that idea and then hollows it out. The most cartoonish example is the "democratic" republic of north korea.
> As general literacy declines, one of the consequences seems to be that words with multiple meanings or variations become compressed into a single vague meaning.
I don’t know for who the literacy is declining. But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia.[1] So it’s the educated that narrow and widen definitions.
> Not so long ago there was a common distinction between capital-D Democracy the political system and small-d democracy the process of power or knowledge being diffused through the masses. You don’t see this idea expressed much anymore, and even the expression “making something more democratic” almost always implies a reference to the political system, not the the second sense.
That’s not true. When people talk about “democratizing X” where X is distant from the political process they mean people participation and power. Like “democratizing social media” could mean user-controlled and driven social media as opposed to everything being controlled a by corporation or something.
> This distinction is useful, because one of the biggest trends of the technological age is the capital-D version supplanting and erasing the small-d version. Almost all of the institutional “defenders of democracy” have essentially no interest in small-d democratization processes, because they are themselves in the driver’s seat in the political democratic system.
Pretty much true.
> This leads them to ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people, which leads to populism, which is of course the biggest global political trend of the last decade.
Pretty much. That there are a group of people who can ignore or disregard the issues of everyday people means (by its very premise) that there is no democracy.[2]
People who then might have tolerated that then have enough and turn to the correct political theory: elites rule the commoners. Again the premise proves the theory correct.
> This is kind of a shame for tech in particular, because for the most part technology has been a democratizing (small-d sense) force throughout history. Phones, computers, cars, on and on: all examples of expensive exclusive technologies that became democratized and accessible to everyone.
This is a bit of a vulgar[3] conception of democratization. Democracy is about power, not access to X. If a car indirectly gives you political power by being able to travel and organize then it indirectly has that effect. But if it only gives you the opportunity to commute one hour each way to your workplace then it has got nothing to do with democratization.
And if your phone just makes you addicted to social media—as the technologists on this board so smugly like to point out—then it doesn’t give you power.
> And yet that same force doesn’t seem to have been applied to the political system itself.
Democracy is about governing your own life in harmony with the rest of the people under that democracy. The political system is a big deal there. But there are other spheres of life the workplace.[4]
[1] Parochial way of referring to relatively wealthy people who set the intellectual agenda
[2] Although people can call it “liberal democracy” if they want since the Liberal in that is much more important to the system (according to its defenders) than the Democracy part
[3] Tongue in cheek!
[4] Referring to socialism
> "But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia."
Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
I'm a fan of Joseph Tainter's analysis around organization of societies and issues around collapse being related to diminishing marginal returns. I think there's a lot to that position when you look at the general political party agendas. Technocratic solutions trying to squeeze more blood from the stone while providing less and less to participants (I have less of a theory on effectiveness for any given action, this is more of an observation).
https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources...
you might be onto something here.
some time ago i discovered Wardley maps [1] (about company's "landscape" and strategy there), and one thing that stick with me was this:
there are 4 levels/stages of development there - genesis, custom-built, product, commodity. With three transitions, made by different kind of people - Pioneers, Settlers, Town-planners. And the last one, mass-production, is about "ruthless removal of deviation".
i guess these "diminishing returns" in keeping long-time same-thing (democracy?) have something in common with the removal of deviations/variety..
[1] https://feststelltaste.github.io/wardley-maps-book/#_the_fir...
What is your theory, if you are willing to share?
reading about Eno's ideas on organization and variety makes me want to share some perspectives directly from my experience with music performance practice, specifically in live coding.
For a long time, the common practice in live coding, which you might see on platforms like Flok.cc (https://flok.cc) supporting various interesting languages, has been like this: Everyone gets their own 'space' or editor. From there, they send messages to a central audio server to control their own sound synthesis.
This is heavily influenced by architectures like SuperCollider's client-server model, where the server is seen as a neutral entity.
Crucially, this relies a lot on social rules, not system guarantees. You could technically control someone else's track, or even mute everything. People generally restrain themselves.
A downside is that one person's error can sometimes crash the entire server for everyone.
Later, while developing my own live coding language, Glicol (https://glicol.org), I started exploring a different approach, beginning with a very naive version: I implemented a shared editor, much like Google Docs. Everyone types in the same space, and what you see is (ideally) what you hear, a direct code-to-sound mapping.
The problems with this naive system were significant. You couldn't even reliably re-run the code, because you couldn't guarantee if a teammate was halfway through typing 0.1 (maybe they only typed 0.) or had only typed part of a keyword.
So, I improved the Glicol system: We still use a shared interface for coding, but there's a kind of consensus mechanism. When you press Cmd+Enter (or equivalent), the code doesn't execute instantly. Instead, it's like raising your hand – it signals "I'm ready". The code only updates after everyone involved has signaled they are ready. This gives the last person to signal 'ready' a bit more responsibility to ensure the musical code change makes sense.
I'm just sharing these experiences from the music-making side, without judgment on which approach is better.
Feedback accepted and acted upon by those in power is what any country really needs. Uncertainty for those in power means they would take feedack. Democracy give each person over a certain age a vote and a stake in the outcome. Populism promises anything, including the impossible to draw in votes. Fascism herds the voters by scaring them away from the opposition - an easy benchmark is to check if you know anyone directly who has been impacted by the "scares" they promote. Autocrats accept feedback by only those who pay them with political or financial favors. They may use any of the above methods to gain power and then use violence and complete control of media to retain it.
Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.
It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
I enjoyed the article but it could be clearer and more concise.
In TFA, the author wrote:
The essence is that all participants must be co-operative in their education, motives, and intentions. And this requires a system of reliable information and agreed laws.Democracy works within the tolerances of reliable information, demonstrable co-operation, and the rule of law.
The US implosion is not yet irreparable, but it is a societal failure.
Respect for minorities also needs to happen in democracies.
Even if democracy in some strict sense means that majority decides, you still need to care about the minorities to keep the system credible.
Otherwise any minority will soon realize that they will never win and break out of the system.
I guess that’s called tyranny of the majority?
David Graeber wrote how in Sparta everyone carrying weapons meant that they couldn’t afford to displease even a small fraction of them. So they had to resort to 100% consent and not majoritarian voting.
And then goes on to assert that the majoritarian voting process works only in a system where the state apparatus has an absolute control over violence with which the disgruntled minority opinions are suppressed. I think it sort of helped to resolve some of my internal contradictions around democracy as it exists today.
That's the point of a constitution: you take certain matters out of the hands of any (normal) majority.
Of course, one can bicker about what the constitutional amendment process actually is, and obviously about the actual content of the constitution. But the central point remains: minority (and majority) rights are protected by a constitution that cannot be altered by a (simple) majority vote.
.... the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides.
> the problem comes, however, when the minority decides it wants more than the constitution provides
Or when the majority decides this? If the system is defined to put checks on the majority power as well as the minority, there's no reason that the majority might not decide to try to push the boundaries of the system with similar incentives. I think there's a reasonable argument that this sort of boundary pushing is more responsible for the erosion of constitutional norms historically compared to when the minority wants more rights; we have headlines literally from this morning talking about how the American president claimed that he doesn't know if he needs to follow the constitution due to the mandate of his election[0]:
> WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, asked during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker,” whether he believes that he needs to uphold the Constitution during his presidency, responded, “I don’t know.”
> The comment came as Trump remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.
> “I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
> Pressed on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/04/trump-nbc...
If a suitably-sized majority wants to amend the constitution (where "suitably sized" is defined by the constitutional amendment process), they can go ahead, always. That's why to some degree this is just pushing the issue of "tyranny of the majority" out one level - but that doesn't mean it is not worthwhile.
On the other hand, electing leaders who simply decide to not follow the constitution (perhaps because they believe they have "a majority" at their backs, or perhaps not) is something entirely different.
we would not have this narrow vision of losers/winners IF the inequalities were reduced, it would not be as strong as it is today in our world view if this parameter was adjusted. In turns, "winners" would not feel like they are at the verge of loosing it all, constantly, because the wealth they generate would be stored into a living organism (a nation, or else). like having multiple bank accounts, with multiple currencies, that one being .... bio-economic i guess.
democracy does not work. Or first, we should clarify the meaning of "it works". IMO, it did not prevented us from burning the world, this is sufficient to say that in a parallel universe i would bet differently.
Capitalism (control of land, labor, and money) has been on the rise since the 1600s[0]; to what degree has this economic model shaped Democracy?
[0] according to Invisible Doctrine, a history of capitalism by Monbiot and Hutchison (2024)
I have not read the book, i only read a short at editionsdufaubourg[.]fr/livre/la-doctrine-invisible
it definitely speaks out to me.
though, it looks likes another of those illusions to entertain you, us. You may want to consider that possibility some day, at least out of curiosity.
It also explicitly requires the parties and candidates to think beyond the current election cycle. That behavior is not in evidence for at least one major party in the U.S.
A candidate's personal expectation of costs must also be factored in. When a candidate faces criminal charges (to pick an example totally out of the blue) if they lose but can eliminate those if they win, the calculus changes for them.
And there are actually more flavors of democracy that have been used to break this death spiral:
- ostracism, where the people voted to ban a person who was too mighty or dangerous from the city of Athens for a period of 10 years;
- random selection of (some kind of) representatives. This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
Big fan of the second, which is called “Sortition.” Seems powerful
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
A lot of people really kick back on sortition. I think a good compromise is this: everyone votes like normal. We then take the top K candidates who got more than some fraction of the votes. (Say: greater than 1/9th of the total votes.) The winner is selected, at random, proportional to the number of votes they received. Such a system would really really on having a large number of candidates on the ballot; my preference would be (in party ballots): top 2 (or 3!) candidates from each party, and any person who can get more than T signatures. (Where T is some number like “20000” or “5% VAP”.)
That compromise has all the downsides of both systems without preserving the upsides - it creates a pool of candidates that will be biased towards narcissistic lunatics but no democratic checks so they can get in to office even if there is a consensus that their policies will be destructive.
It isn't a terrible idea; I've long liked that sort of plan as a fallback in very tight elections to randomly decide between the candidates. But it isn't really a compromise with the sortition folk because it doesn't have the properties they're looking for.
“Whenever the time came to elect a new doge of Venice, an official went to pray in St. Mark’s Basilica, grabbed the first boy he could find in the piazza, and took him back to the ducal palace. The boy’s job was to draw lots to choose an electoral college from the members of Venice’s grand families, which was the first step in a performance that has been called tortuous, ridiculous, and profound. Here is how it went, more or less unchanged, for five hundred years, from 1268 until the end of the Venetian Republic.
Thirty electors were chosen by lot, and then a second lottery reduced them to nine, who nominated forty candidates in all, each of whom had to be approved by at least seven electors in order to pass to the next stage. The forty were pruned by lot to twelve, who nominated a total of twenty-five, who needed at least nine nominations each. The twenty-five were culled to nine, who picked an electoral college of forty-five, each with at least seven nominations. The forty-five became eleven, who chose a final college of forty-one. Each member proposed one candidate, all of whom were discussed and, if necessary, examined in person, whereupon each elector cast a vote for every candidate of whom he approved. The candidate with the most approvals was the winner, provided he had been endorsed by at least twenty-five of the forty-one.”
https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge
The compromise is to defeat gerrymandering. It has the nice quality of being constitutional. Most policies I've seen for defeating gerrymandering don't pass constitutional muster. I say this as someone who worked in the antigerrymandering & redistricting space for 15 years.
Does the Roman republic's tradition of appointing a dictator count? Do "illiberal democracies" with quasi-kings like Orban, Erdogan, Maduro, et al, still count as something comparable, or are these the downside of that spiral? Obviously everything that works, works until it doesn't.
The longer a regime’s power is aligned with the establishment, the less democratic it becomes. There’s no clear-cut distinction between democracy or not democracy.
However, if a leader remains in power for decades, it’s highly probable that the establishment has a firm grip on the reins and is unlikely to relinquish control.
Dr. Devereaux of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry has a really nice overview of the position of Roman dictator over at his blog. [1]
The very short version is that 'dictator' refers to two different things. One version is the dictator appointed by the Senate in the early Republic to solve a particular crisis, who had absolute power within their sphere of responsibility and who uniformly relinquished power when their job was done.
The later dictators towards the end of the Republic were Sulla and Caesar. They seized Rome by force, then claimed the long-disused title of 'dictator' to give their actions an appearance of legitimacy.
1. https://acoup.blog/2022/03/18/collections-the-roman-dictator...
Appointing a dictator for a period of a year in case of emergency is compatible with democracy. Appointing a dictator for life is not. Mainly because the dictator for the period of a year is, after that year, still accountable. Orban, Erdogan, and Maduro are on various stages of the road from democracy to non-democracy. Regarding the Romans another matter is of course that only a small part of the population has any influence on the senate, so it is in fact clearly not a democracy.
If I have to judge what is a democracy, I am going back quite a while to what I learned in high school as the definition of a democracy. "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
> "A democracy is a form of government where the three branches of government, the legislative, the executive and the judicial branch are separated and the legislative branch is in the hands of representatives elected by the people."
This seems like it's overfitting quite a bit to the American political system; I've never heard of a definition of a democracy that required exactly these branches before, and it's hard for me to agree with the idea that something with two our four branches (or the division between the branches being slightly different) is somehow impossible to be a democracy by definition.
That sounds very American though. For example how does the Westminster style system fit into it? While the Prime Minister might be described as the executive, they're actually just the leader of the majority Legislative party.
Democracy is more fundamental than that. It simply means rule by the people. The three branches of government was a later invention, and not all democracies feature it. Political theory surrounding the definition of democracy is more concerned with who has power and how they have it, and has less to do with how it is structured, as much as a US-centric definition may take it to be. Eg parliamentary systems are considered democratic despite a different structure.
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
> This has predictable downsides, but ensures fair representation and prevents the existence of a political class.
This depends one whether you consider the existence of a political class to be purely negative.
Seems like random selection of candidates who have no influence over what happens after their term selects for all the negative aspects of a political class (ability to enrich themselves and their friends at others expense, tendency to be ignorant of and ambivalent about issues that don't really affect them) and against the [at least arguably] positive aspects (institutional knowledge of how things operate, some sort of political philosophy which has some public support, some level of skill and drive to get things done, and the motivation to try to keep the public happy enough to reelect them or their compatriots)
This assumes ruling parties start out as “good” but becomes “bad” over time. A more pragmatic view is that different people and different interests have different ideas about what is good and what is bad, and politics is the stuggle between these viewpoints.
My understanding has always been that one of the "killer apps" of democracy as a system of government is peaceful transfer of power. It seems like one of those "nobody asks what the old software did well" questions; so many people (i.e. Americans) are so used to the idea of peaceful transfer of power that we don't ever think about what a major achievement it is, and how dependent on it everything we take for granted is.
Another advantage of democracy is a source of popular legitimacy for the government, which helps prevent coups. Dictatorships struggle with this, and have to apply other countermeasures to prevent coups.
Unless a dictator is some kind of super-popular national hero or has managed to convince everyone that they have a divine right to rule, they depend on the support of a group of elites to maintain their power, and have no choice but to prevent other ambitious people from concentrating power themselves. This means that even in cases where the dictator happens to be wise, skillful, and benevolent, their regime will suffer from corruption and fragility, because they have to keep doing favors for their support group to keep them loyal or else risk a coup.
Being a dictator is a position that tends to invite well-grounded paranoia and suspicion, because you know that ambitious and bloodthirsty people want your job. So you need to keep files on people.
They can't defer too much independent authority to talented bureaucrats or military generals or private business leaders, at least not without some guarantees on their loyalty, or else they run the risk of those people attempting to seize power. They can mitigate this by developing a cult of personality, but that makes it impossible to gracefully admit mistakes, and in conflict with maintaining a free press.
> Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.
You could look at it that way if you believe that there is a unique right policy answer and government is the solution to finding it, but that's not what democracy and separation of powers are about, in terms og why they have historically been adopted. It can certainly be viewed as a reason to prefer democracy and separation of powers.
But, really, democracy is about people having the right to make their own decisions and how to incorporate that into a collective government (or, more cynically, about people rebelling when they feel they have been deprived of that right and how to prevent it for the sake of domestic peace), and separation of powers is about protecting democracy by preventing the concentration of power in a particular institution within a representative democacy being leveraged to make a dictatorship.
It prevents more than one path to destruction.
"You either die a hero, or you live long enough to become the villain". Stay in power long enough and you are likely to become the villain, because power corrupts many people.
So people who stay in power may have the wrong policy (because their approach quit working), or they may just become corrupt. Either way, there needs to be a way to get rid of them that is more peaceful than assassination or civil war.
> But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.
History presents us with far more examples of successful autocracies.
Factually true, but this is like saying that history presents more examples of rotten teeth.
No it isn’t.
What is successful?
I think a form of governance is successful when it manages to serve the interests of the ones who are outside the establishment circle.
A royal family can rule for millennia a kingdom that grows smaller and smaller.
Persistence over time.
If we manage to blow up the earth and all life ends, a state that 'persists over time' will be created. Is this the ultimate success?
It would save future generations from having to read inane questions so I don’t think we can rule it out.
I really like his talk about basic income and communities role in fostering ideas:
”Although great new ideas are articulated by individuals they are nearly always generated by communities.”
https://archive.org/details/brian-eno-on-basic-income
Unfortunately, this is a little too simplistic.
A democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We've lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.
American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.
As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.
It's also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.
Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.
I don't know, it doesn't seem simplistic in conclusion. The article describes a dynamic environment and you're just postulating further variation than described there. That doesn't mean the ideas don't agree or that the general formula isn't sufficiently complex to incorporate more nuance than the article lays out.
The linked solution isn't as interesting, mainly because the idea of there being a solution seems the simplistic part. It is a system and it will play out.
I could cite dozens of times a society has gone 80 years (4-5 generations) without serious threat from foreign parties. How is our case unlike those?
The entire world has seen greater technical advances in the past 80 years than any time before, but zero percent of that is related to the politics of any one nation: either causally or effectually.
Also, democracy let vote for dictatorship that killed most people in human history. It's harder to implement ideologies in decentralised society.
Is the last sentence satire? I can't really tell. Literally entire fields of study are dedicated to this, including one at Harvard. https://sts.hks.harvard.edu/about/whatissts.html
We need a new game, this one is so full of loop holes by now that practical implementations are the opposite of the idea.
Same with Agile in the form of Scrum.
Humans are very good at playing games.
> This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of, although he is visibly and emphatically committed to its practice. But Eno’s arguments about the arts tell us important things about how democracy ought work, and what kinds of democratic stability and variety we ought aspire to.
So... clickbait.
The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.
> Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system
Yes, the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists know that they cannot be replaced because of the two party system. (Likewise, neither faces the threat of, if it fails to be replaced, being completely re-oriented in a political realignment.) It's not as if, currently, scholars disagree about whether the US is in its Sixth or Seventh Party system -- the two major parties are dominant, stable, and forever unchanging.
How come it's just a 2 party system and not a multi party system like in some European countries?
Most countries with multi party systems use different methods for selecting their representatives. When you do a straight aggregation of geographical areas in which you take whomever gets the most votes in each area (sometimes called first past the post) it becomes possible for the most disliked party in a country to win, widely geographical distributed concerns (like ecological concerns) become underrepresented, and most relevant to this conversation, having multiple parties that are close to each other is a huge disadvantage compared to having a single party attracting more people. Because of this, countries with this system will usually see smaller parties merge and stabilise on a 2 party government / opposition set up.
The study of how different kinds of voting systems work and their advantages, disadvantages and consequences is called social choice theory. There's an interesting theorem called Arrow's theorem that proves that given a certain set of assumptions, there can be no voting system that works exactly as we would like. Sometimes this is used to argue that all systems are equally bad, but I think this is not true at all - even while imperfect, some systems are much better than others.
You remind me of Veritasium's video [1]. I should rewatch it and pay actual attention.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qf7ws2DF-zk
Not a direct cause but popped into my head:
Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.
Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.
At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.
Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.
---
[0] https://www.lwv.org
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p...
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s...
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm
Beyond that, a quirk of the American system in many states is registering your party affiliation at the time you register votes so that you can participate in primaries. When you've got >45% of registered voters identifying as being a supporter of one of the major two parties closely enough to add it to their name on the electoral roll, it's not exactly an encouraging environment to break that status quo
Other majoritarian democratic systems often also converge into two party (or two and a bit party, or two parties per region systems) but few seem to normalise voting for the same party every time in quite the same way.
To further add to that, many states do closed primaries. If a voter isn't registered with one of the two ordained parties, they realistically cannot participate in primaries at all.
If there would six parties to choose from, for example, I think it would be hard to argue that closed primaries are harmful. But since we have a duopoly, they exclude a significant portion of the voting population from participating until late in the process.
First-past-the-post tend to lead to two-party systems while proportional representation tend to lead to multi-party systems. But you can’t have proportional representation in presidental elections since only one candidate can win. Countries with multi-party systems tend to have parlimentary systems.
The executive body in Switzerland has members from 5 different parties, but it's elected by the federal assembly, not directly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)
Its not really an "election" since they have to stick to the Zauberformel and reproduce the results of the parliament.
The only elective part is which "faction" of the party the person will be coming from, i.e "Zürich"/"Bern for UDC/SVP.
And yet the French somehow manage to have a multi-party system while citizens directly vote for the president. And they also have a parliament, as does the USA.
Because they can have two rounds of voting: the first time you vote for who you really want, the second time you choose the lesser evil
The European systems, I'd argue are absolutely worse than many of the "direct republic" systems in the US and other American countries because in the European systems there's a pretense of "consensus" reaching and it mostly ends up preserving an elite status quo and hiding any problems. That's why there's such a big tendency of nanny stating and censorship. It's entrenched in a bureocratic way.
The direct vote gets a better chance at subverting the system radically and that's a good thing. Regardless of criticism from the losers about "populism". The end result is great for democracy and actual change.
That question got a downvote? I wonder why. It's a genuine question. Why can't good faith be assumed?
Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask.
I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it.
Asking for feedback is more important.
I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
I appreciated your question. I don't really know the answer, and I grew up in the USA. Maybe someone took it as a rhetorical question?
Cardew's score expect singers able to recognize tones, sing them and hear harmony. Im not sure if this analogy could work for general society. Probably most people don't even know if they are able to sing a tone they hear.
> Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.
Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
> This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of
Well I do know he's politically active and worked with Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky. So it's more than a little cheeky.
Plus Eno is brilliant, which is a far cry from most politicians.
In music his works can sometimes be considered way different than most, because of even further distance from the familiar composer/songwriter/conductor/bandleader paradigm.
Even more so than things like pure jazz improvisation which can be one of the most "democratic" combos where each person has equal creative input and a wider-than-average freedom of expression. Sometimes the bandleader here is actually voted into position as the one most qualified to do the unavoidable "guidance" tasks of leading even free-form musicians.
As "opposed" to classical orchestral works where each musician's part is well-prescribed, they may have an equal voice among themselves but this is art intended to express the composer's efforts, overwhelmingly more than each individual musician's talent. The conductor here can be more like a dictator and get away with it more often because this tradition has much closer roots to medieval practices.
All these ways, it's the resulting sound that counts to the most significant degree, and it can be a wonder to behold across the spectrum.
Now if there's one type of conductor or bandleader who would be most suitable under all conditions, I would have to describe their most valuable quality as being "magnanimous". Otherwise you can not expect the music to be as satisfying as it could be from the same talented underlying musicians.
And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it's being replaced by another party, that the ruling "elite" isn't really replaced. They know what part of democracy they have to discredit. This is what the AfD in Germany is doing: they say EVERY party except the AfD belongs to the "block" of "Altparteien" meaning "old parties". There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".
Politicians who cast such doubt into the democratic principle that a government can lose its power, those politicians are up to destroying democracy and the very principle that they have to step down.
> And the method by which autocrats and fascists destroy democracy is make people believe, that when a party loses and it's being replaced by another party, that the ruling "elite" isn't really replaced.
I think this line of argument requires some self-scrutiny. If you're suggesting that people are being manipulated into believing there's a ruling class of elites that span the traditional parties then you have to be willing to examine the possibility that you have been manipulated into dismissing that concern prematurely yourself. Propaganda absolutely exists, but assuming that it is the driving force behind opposing views in a democratic system turns valid concerns into illegitimate concerns which leads to disaffection by those who legitimately hold it.
> There's only two parties really in Germany left, according to the AfD, the "real opposition party" namely the AfD, and then there's the other party, a hegemonial woke block of "Altparteien".
This isn't unique to Germany. In the US, many call it the "uniparty" which consists of establishment/neocon Republicans and Democrats. In the UK the Reform party portrays both Labour and the Conservatives as indistinguishable. France's National Rally makes similar arguments from what I understand. It seems to be a recurring pattern.
The rise of these alternative parties across Western democracies suggests that a significant portion of the electorate feels under-represented politically. From their perspective the political establishment dismisses their concerns while simultaneously labeling the alternative parties that address these concerns as being anti-democratic. I think this is a very dangerous place for any sort of democracy to be in.
> Przeworski’s theory starts from a simple seeming claim: that “democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.”
I like this, but a more general point is that at all scales, we need to resolve the tension tension between the singular and the plural, the individual and the group, the `int` and `[int]`.
Results vary between Milton Friedman's famous pencil to the devastation of war.
I'd argue that the instability of our democracies and their tendency to break down into fascism isn't an intrinsic property of theirs. Rather, this instability is fueled by growing power imbalances among the economic classes.
Unless we ever address the issue of rampant capital accumulation in the hands of the few, we are condemned to suffer fascism, propped-up by an all-powerful oligarchical class, every 80 years or so.
Economic disparities were at their lowest after WWII, and have been steadily rising ever since. They have now surpassed what they were at their worst, before FDR and his New Deal.
Discontent is rising, and neither party is addressing the real issue. Not the weakly neoliberal democrats, and certainly not the republicans, too busy scapegoating migrants and LGBT people.
Democracy is complicated in practice and has a complicated history. But the theory is simple. Most of my own studies into the subject was learning and conceptualizing the wrong-headed mainstream conceptions of democracy.
No useful theory of democracy involves game theory. As a democrat the idea of social scientists maintaining a quasi-mechanical machine offends me. Politics needs less eggheads.
Then there’s the part about humility about Trump coming to power. Well by your own admission then your theories were just bad. People ranging from Richard Rorty to Noam Chomsky had predicted that someone like Trump could come to power if the current trajectory of the time kept on going. That was in the 90’s.
The quote about parties losing power isn’t true. America has an undemocratic duopoly. But I guess “fear” might be the keyword. Since neither party seem to truly fear it.
without a constitution that is the absolute definition of peoples rights and government power in an easily understood and brief document, you have nothing to govern, there is no law, just deciders, chosen in a popularity contest, each hopeing for a chance at dynastic power. the current situation highlights exactly what you get with an "amended" constitution the fundamental question is do we want a world where indivuals have very strong personal rights to themselves and there property, or do we want to meddle, pick, and choose, deciding this way and that....since the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing, then they can only complain about what they,have done, can do, will do again. It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation. pick a lane......
> It is impossible to meddle ,choose and decide our way into a prosperous, sustainable, just, and happy civilisation
Asserted without evidence.
> the answer is very, very , clearly that most wish to meddle and decide about every little thing
Asserted without evidence. Most people don't want to be involved in decision making at all - witness participation in civic institutions and groups. Most people simply want a working system which gives them the right amount and the right kinds of liberty (in all possible senses) and safety. They may choose to "meddle" when they perceive these goals as not being met.
For a democracy to make sense, the people need to be educated enough to understand policy that affects them and they need access to accurate and timely information (a functioning 4th estate). If either of those two are false, then full democracy becomes a force of destruction and harm. Partial democracy where local governance is democratic but provincial and national level governance cannot be directed by the voice of the people is more tenable.
Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct. democracy isn't a religion and the form of governance a nation chooses should be adjusted and tuned over time.
I won't comment on current matters, but I will say that education and press should have been fundamental institutions of the American republic, the same way the supreme court and the house of reps are. It isn't enough that the freedom (and responsibility!) of the press is a right, an organization to manage and protect it should have been established, as should have an organization to maintain and police education.
Democracy is not about policy or institutions. Those are downstream of what democracy is really about, which is the Demos. The community. The people themselves who recognize each other as being like themselves in some fundamental, exclusive way. This is beyond reason or rationality. It is a matter of arbitrary culture, history and identity.
Policy in a complex system like society is infinitely debatable and no amount of education will ever find a "right" or optimal answer to the hard questions a society faces. Division and partisanship is guaranteed in a democracy that allows free debate and expression, regardless of the level of education among the people. The most acrimonious debates often take place among the most educated of the citizenry. Therefore something else must sustain the people as a community and bind them together.
> Contrary to common sentiment, there is nothing about democracy that makes it inherently correct.
"Least bad" is all anyone claims.
True, but even “least bad” is not correct unless the public is well informed [as in not being fed misinformation] and in a rational state of mind [as in not scared of or trained to despise the jews, immigrants, woke etc.].
The difference in election outcomes around the 1930s, 1990s and 2020s can be mostly explained by these factors.
Perhaps it would be more useful to consider "least bad" over a reasonable period of time. That is to say, there are probably times when, due to the factors you mention, the people steer democracy to do something bad that a strong dictator or group of elders would not have done. However, over a given period of time, it's likely that a democracy does less bad things then the alternatives.
> well informed
That's a hell of a dangerous phrase. Usually, it means that the speaker is frustrated that the broader public is not curatedly informed in a way that makes them vote how the speaker wants them to vote.
The great, and terrifying, thing about democracy is that everyone can be informed however they're informed and usually we don't literally burn everything all the way to the ground.
"Truth" in Education, understanding, and Press easily becomes "propaganda and lies" without the system blinking nor anyone being notified.
The only way to ensure the existence of truth is to give people a choice in what to believe. There are no wildflowers (truth) without also permitting weeds (lies). Certainly, no "organization to manage and protect" can be trusted to manage and protect truth.
The democratic ideal is that people are permitted to come to their own conclusions, given all arguments. Not that the arguments are institutionally restricted.
What happens when your ideological opponents suddenly come into control of the "truth police"?
Freedom to choose is the only protection, unless one's goal isn't democratic.
> The only way to ensure the existence of truth is [...]
there is no way to ensure the existence of a thing until there is first some consensus on how the thing is defined.
with the conservative right adopting and extending foucault-era post-modern epistemology ("alternative facts", "that's just, like, your opinion"), it isn't even possible to discuss what "the truth" is, because the agreement on what how we would arrive at an answer is has been undermined (intentionally so, IMO).
for some period of time, much of the west's population bought into the idea that truth was arrived at using some variety of evidence collection, falsification, logic, experimentation and debate. this consensus has been undermined to the point where questions like "do vaccines cause autism" can be asked without any willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer would be arrived at.
I'm speaking about an environment that passively allows truth by default, because of truly free speech. Something that works simply, and that people can simply understand. Which is a prerequisite for democracy.
You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people, which isn't possible in principle. While using pseudo-intellectual refences to Foucault and the scientific method in an attempt to slyly imply that, in the end, truth has to be defined by your party interests.
I argue for freedom of individual choice, which is the fundamental democratic principle. You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief, which is not a democratic principle.
Does a willingness to engage with the historical definition of how a true answer "would be arrived at" include the functional banning of future science and debate?
For the record, I wrote a graduate paper on the best evidence for the cause of autism. Not that the then-current best evidence definitely revealed the cause, but only that it was the best evidence at the time. Although the evidence did not point to vaccines, I would hold anyone who wanted to ban such debate as being too academically compromised to be a member of the scientific community. In private, I would be more direct.
> You're arguing for active assurance of truth, assumedly forced on people,
No, this is the opposite of what I'm arguing for. I'm saying that if a community agrees on a definition of what truth is (the old consensus was "something arrived at via a process mostly like <this>"), then "truths can exist" within that community. By contrast, if they do not agree on a definition what truth is, then no truths can exist within that community.
I'm not using references to Foucault to talk about what I think about defining truth; I'm making those references because that's what the public intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right relies on. Personally, I think that some of what Foucault had to say is insightful and interesting, but the extension of his observations to knowledge in general is unsupportable. And not just unsupportable - utterly destructive of a consensus about truth-generating processes that in turn is vital for functioning (democratic) communities.
> You're arguing for the need for society wide consensus in belief
No, I'm arguing for a society wide consensus about how we choose between beliefs. Societies in the past have had this and still accomodated different beliefs. Most of the time this is resolved by noting that the beliefs can't be resolved via evidence. For example: what is the correct role of the state? There is no truth-generating process that can provide an answer to this question, but there can still be multiple different beliefs about the right answer.
> anyone who wanted to ban such debate
The issue is not "ban such debate". The issue is unwillingness to tackle in good faith the debate that has already taken place. No truth-generating process can involve an ever-present willingness to endlessly discard things already accepted as true. Clearly, it cannot refuse to ever reconsider either. So the actual path followed is a compromise between these two: if you don't have radically divergent and NEW evidence or data explanations for something considered settled, you'll have to wait a while. We're not going to relitigate whether the earth is round or not unless someone comes along with either major new data that is incongruous with our current "truth" about this, or someone finds incongruities within the data/"truth" we already have. That doesn't mean "debate is shut down" - it's a reflection of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary whatnot to be worthy of spending any time on".
I don't think anyone serious claims to know the cause of autism; I don't think anyone serious claims it is vaccines, which is in turn a reflection of what the the truth-generating process (the one we had consensus about until recently) says about that.
Classical Athens offers a fascinating example. It was a radical democracy of citizens who certainly understood what they were doing, and it became the most imperially ambitious, expansive, destructive, and exploitative polis of the classical period. They put an entire city to death for refusing to join the 'defensive' alliance that they led and massively enriched themselves at the expense of member states.
Democracy is based on citizens making informed decisions about how they are to be run, therefore misinformation is a fundamental assault on democracy.
Politicians know that using emotional arguments is much more effective than factual arguments. I don’t really expect that to change anytime soon.
One could hope for emotional, factual arguments ...
Those elected to power can and should be held to a higher standard than the citizens that they serve, and that could include freedoms of speech.
An analogue might be how a CEO and board of directors are limited by law about what they can say publicly, so that they do not mislead shareholders.
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If dialectics could predict the future, you would have earned enough money to finance the revolution by now.
That's not how it works. However you can see its success in China, Vietnam and Laos, countries that happen to now significantly cripple the world hegemon's economic foundation. Maybe if they studied it, westerners would find a way to reverse the century of humiliation they are about to face.
> That's not how it works.
If that’s not how it works then the framework isn’t useful which is why it isn’t taken seriously.
> However you can see its success in China, Vietnam and Laos, countries that happen to now significantly cripple the world hegemon's economic foundation.
What do you think these countries are doing that has significantly crippled the American economy?
what the heck has skin pigment to do with anything?
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This obviously depends significantly on the social scientist, but in general, a damn sight more than the people that were convinced they knew better than the social scientists...
Such as?
Ah, so it turns out the solution to the centre not holding is to create as many falconry schools as possible, hoping to yield a dynamic system of falcons in a variety of overlapping gyres, so that at least some remain in hearing distance of a falconer? Big if true.
I came to a conclusion that democracy is not as good as I thought initially. It has be replaced with a better system quickly or else we are going to loose all advancements humanity made so far
And what is that better system? To date, it appears to be the "least worst" option. Regardless, the two-party system has to go.
Ask yourself whether society is flourishing or crumbling?
Great! Stand against Majoritarianism!