Great point. And dear God youre right about the globo-corps which is scary that the argument logically holds up. I hope WEF never sees your comment to fuel their fire
>multinational corporations are *more* democratic than governments when it comes to actions with a global impact because they are accountable to shareholders, employees, customers, and business partners around the world
Redefining 'democratic' as a measure of the geographic distribution of the individuals who have the capital to influence corporate decision making departs from common usage only slightly more than suggesting that current era multinationals are in any meaningful way 'accountable' to the vast majority of their customers. If your preference is corporate governance, you don't have mutilate existing terminology in order to argue in favor of it. Unless of course your goal is to make those preferences seem more socially palatable by masking them in disingenuous language.
Well, most countries are more democratic in this sense than global corporations, as they are depending on a working economy which is in turn depending on good external trade and good international relations. The big problem arises from big power imbalances when the powerful doesn't have to care if the small peers suffer as long he doesn't make most of them upset at the same time. This is true for economic actors as for states or criminal gangs.
But belonging to the strongest group lets you easily forget or oversee this. So I'm very much in favor of a multi-polar world without a single hegemony as much as I'm against any single person or group getting too rich and powerful.
Some people have been criticizing the conflation of "democracy" and "liberty" for decades. Mostly "extreme" (read as: "") libertarians, but also plenty of Tea Party Republicans.
As an extreme (even 'by read as "" standard') libertarian, yep, I do that.
As a cynic, I might go a little further, and observe that the only difference between the various things you can put in front of -cracy is who gets to wear the jackboots; as long as it's any kind of -cracy, someone's wearing them, that part of the word coming from the ancient Greek term meaning, approximately, "the beatings will continue until you obey".
I'd be inclined to argue that the link between liberty and democracy is almost purely correlative, not causative; the countries everyone usually cites as an example tend to be ones which have strong constitutional, traditional, or both, restraints on what any government is allowed to do, and as those erode over time, we get to see more of the violence (and totalitarianism) inherent in the system.
And, for myself, I applaud people who use "democratic" in the sense implying that the most democratic society is one in which every tiny decision down to what to eat for breakfast is subject to vote. Not for themselves - because they're usually terrible people - but rather because they do us the favor of laying bare that once you establish the principle that population makes right, you don't have really anywhere to stop but an endless series of special pleadings.
Good point... in the long run, when everyone understands that words like "democracy", "justice", and even "liberal" aren't just synonyms for "good". But I'm tempted to take Scott's view for now, as it seems tactically better in present circumstances.
Sadly, I think the right answer to a lot of real-world questions is that principles are kind of useful but they don't hold in general, so special pleadings are unavoidable.
The special pleading happens when one interest group says of something, generally the common way things are done, "That's undemocratic (because our tiny minority doesn't get its way)" and then make appeals based on the good associations the general public has with "democracy".
That the basic meaning of democracy is "the majority gets to decide", and hence too bad 1% special interest group, you don't get your way, is what is not accepted. Instead of saying "we want/need accommodation or special treatment", it's presented as "we live in a democracy and hence our voices should be heard!"
It should be noted that in the original example I had in mind, such special pleadings include "please don't kill, rob, and/or enslave us". Because if you really, *really* believe in the principle of democracy, that's all fair game for the 51%.
A lynch mob, after all, is a perfectly democratic institution.
Civilization is actually built up around the government having a monopoly on legal violence. Not doing this is actively bad and leads to sky-high homicide rates and much worse outcomes. This is one of the fundamental reasons why libertarianism does not work.
This is why pluralistic democracy with codified bills of rights work far better than other forms of government, because it gives a public level of accountability for what the government is doing and lets people make adjustments while simultaneously making certain rights much more difficult to get rid of.
Indeed, the US government is deliberately set up to prevent a so-called "tyranny of the majority", where a majority can simply trample over everyone else's rights.
Of course, this only works so long as the public agrees that the status quo is worth preserving. It would be interesting to see just how resilient the structure really is, now that both the left and the right in the US increasingly proclaim that true democracy can't be achieved until the outgroup is utterly crushed.
This is precisely why populists constantly lie about how everything is awful forever - because the truth (that things have been getting better and better) means that they're wrong. This is why you see the far left and far right claim that society is going down the drain.
On the former, firstly, you are conflating libertarianism with unplanned anarchy, and secondly, since the three states of affairs which cover almost the entirety of historical experience are (a) no controls on violence, (b) warlords competing to own the monopoly on legal violence, and (c) the victor of (b) having said monopoly, this looks much more like "this was deemed challenging and thus not tried" to me.
Much like every other governmental innovation was in its day; a practically isomorphic argument could be made as to why not having an absolute monarch is actively bad and leads to much worse outcomes, and thus it's fundamentally impossible for democracy to ever work - which would have seemed very credible right before the outbreak of democracy.
As for the latter - acknowledging that it is a single data point - it having been only just over a month from having had our pluralistic democracy's goon squad stomping through my house with machine-guns in complete defiance of the Bill of Rights's notional protections against such things, I can only laugh long, bitter, and hollow.
Sorry to be unclear - that was a reference to recent events in my life which, to avoid cluttering up the comments here with a tangent, I'll just say are summarized here:
(And which have confirmed my extremely jaundiced views on precisely how useless democracy, even with a bill of rights, actually *is* at protecting people from arbitrary state force.)
Oh, my God! I'm appalled. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm surprised. I've seen too much from Radley Balko, PINAC, and similar sources to be at all surprised.
Or you take this as a proof how much current 'democracy with bill of rights' is just broken right now. This does not disproof the concept if it works elsewhere, perhaps this proofs that of your democracy only the facade is left.
The US was founded as a libertarian state. It didn't work at all, which is why we discarded the Articles of Confederation and created the US Constitution with a much more powerful federal state.
The Founding Fathers wanted to create a more libertarian state but quickly realized it was unworkable so had to change course.
And indeed, the US federal government was not strong enough to keep the states sticking together until after the US Civil War.
This is all basic US history, which libertarians are in denial of. Having a weak central state does not result in good outcomes.
"A weak federal government with few powers over arbitrarily powerful state governments" isn't a libertarian system by any reasonable definition of the word, especially when some of those state governments use said power to back up their maximally anti-libertarian policies. You're thinking of states'-rights conservatives.
(Some of whom may call themselves libertarians, but people can call themselves anything they like.)
You’re confusing “federalist” with “libertarian”. The Articles of Confederation may not have been perfect - what is? - but it was supplanted because some wanted the federal government to have more power, not because the Articles “didn’t work”.
I agree with the use of "accountability" in a government context, where
a) There are pre-existing promises in the constitution which the government is not supposed to break and
b) The government is at least theoretically supposed to act as an agent for the public.
I'm less happy to see "accountability" more widely generalized, e.g. to situations where someone with private power has no analogous principal/agent relationship with the public and is violating none of our (vastly excessive) set of laws.
My personal preference is to arrange our society so that the median person is as free as possible. There are cases where private entities do things that reduce the median person's freedom. One example is Amazon's use of noncompete restrictions on their former employees. I wouldn't "hold accountable" Amazon for doing this, and I wouldn't villify anyone on their legal team for trying to tie the hands of their former employees this way, but I would, in the interest of the median person's freedom, make such constraints unenforceable.
In general, I'm not a fan of concentrated power, either governmental or corporate, but I don't see the people wielding it as "needing to held accountable" - I just want to see less concentrated power in the first place, more choices left in the hands of ordinary individual people. (Yeah, some of this tends to imply more laws - yetch!, but hard to avoid - and hard to arrange so that the laws themselves don't concentrate power.)
Totally, we can even go back to Edmund Burke in 1790. There are better ways to secure our liberties than to make them all subject to a democratically elected government. The more you want to protect something, the less you should centralize its safeguards. Democratic is not synonymous with "good". The British system with a limited power hereditary monarch, church power, a parliament, and strong private property is much more robust to attacks on the civil liberties they had. The consequences of a momentary fit of populist madness are mitigated.
I think of democracy merely as a way to obtain routine, peaceful changes of leaders. Other than that, it is not an expression of the "will of the people." Many people use the term that way, and you are correct that it then shades into totalitarianism.
I would add that the "routine peaceful changes of leaders" model does not require that the electoral system is perfect, but it does require that people accept the results. Like Nixon in 1960, as opposed to Trump in 2020 or Gore in 2000. And at some point it requires a government with limited powers, or else sooner or later people are going to want to fight over issues of succession.
He was better than Trump in that respect, but the Florida challenge was needlessly divisive, and for years afterward Democrats said that Bush won by 1 vote (in the Supreme Court). That helped ratchet up tribal partisanship.
To my mind the difference between filing available legal challenges--in a legitimately razor-thin election, in which who got more votes is still up for dispute--and continuing to dispute the election after all challenges have been resolved is a difference in kind, not degree.
I agree. No comparison between Gore and Trump makes any sense. Any politician would have demanded a recount given the freakishly close nature of the Florida vote. Not to have done so would have been inexcusable to everyone who had voted for him. And campaigned for him. I find nothing wrong with what Gore did nor do i find anything wrong with what Bush did or the Supreme Court.
I don't think Gore himself did, which makes him much much better than Trump. I believe that some 3rd party commenters may have made suggestions like "split Florida's electoral votes evenly" (which would give Gore the presidency, but obviously has no legal basis or precedent at all) or had positions that in practice amounted to "recount the votes until Gore wins" or "the court that has the authority to decide this case is the one that says Gore should win."
I think if we take the standard that democracy requires not just that the loser accepts the outcome, but that no random supporters say something self-serving about how their side really won, then very few of our presidential elections have been truly democratic.
Post-election studies basically found that the election with ballots as cast was genuinely inconclusive, and Gore would have won absent racially biased voter suppression limiting ballot access.
I say inconclusive because different permutations of different quasi-objective standards for counting give you different outcomes, and perhaps those are wrong also because the studies didn't get quite every single ballot.
Our ballot counting system, or at least the ballot counting system as applied in FL that year (with those ballot constructions and marking/counting technologies, etc) didn't have fine enough resolution to figure out who got more votes. It was a system failure, it's unsurprising and not blameworthy if it produced irrational behavior in participants.
And frankly, (obviously rigging it up post facto would be pretty skeevy, but) shouldn't we have taken that lesson going forward to implement some sort of proportionality (for divisible outcomes) or split/co-responsibility in the role (for non-divisible outcomes) in extremely close elections? I mean we fall back on randomization to pick a single winner when there are genuinely tied votes, for pete's sake.
So can we discuss election reforms instead of sniping at people caught in failures of unreformed election systems?
[EDIT - 3rd to last word read 'uninformed', I think probably it was supposed to be 'unreformed'. No offense intended to any well-read election systems, nor to any ignorant ones either.
The studies I saw did not even attempt to count the vast majority of ballots (and couldn't, given their limited resources)-- they were limited to counting machine-rejected ballots while assuming, somewhat inconsistently, that all machine-accepted ballots were tallied perfectly.
I don't see what your proposed fix buys us in return for the added complexity. Instead of Florida-style maneuvering to get a plurality, you get Florida-style maneuvering to reach or avoid the threshold for "extremely close election".
I'm not sure if this fits with what they're thinking, but I often advocate all States switching to the Maine-Nebraska system of allocating Electoral Votes. In the case of Florida 2000, they'd've only been contesting 5?-ish votes rather than the whole slate, which mightn't've been enough to swing the overall result.
Yes, sorry, you're right, those were recounts of rejected ballots. Arguably the ballots that the machines accepted didn't need separate recounting because the election was so close that an automatic recount was done a few days after the original tally? But yea I utterly mis-recorded that.
I want to clearly hedge that 1) There will always be a discontinuous threshold, it's not like we can fix that entirely, and 2) there isn't some deeply well-thought-out proposal here, what I wrote above is the full extent of it. But if we're sharing at all then we could actually share in ratios other than 1:1 to make the steps less steep and therefore weaken the incentive for expensive litigious maneuvering. Primarily I was thinking that the complexity buys greater representativeness? And if we're really lucky it militates against intense partisanship and ideological extremism? Eg it probably makes less sense to cast a 'vote against' or a 'hold your nose' vote if adding to someone else's pile doesn't reliably decrease that candidate's power, so maybe we reduce negative campaigning?
Other than the fact that we're 23 years out instead of 3, what difference is there between what Trump supporters say and what you are saying? They are saying that a different system (perhaps one that rejected more mail in ballots using the laws on record, instead of the COVID-era rules which rejected less ballots) would have resulted in Trump winning. You are saying a different system (with less racially biased voter suppression) would have resulted in Gore winning.
I was an adult in 2000 and clearly remember the gnashing of teeth from Democrats about how the election was stolen, so I'm less sympathetic to those that make a big deal about Trump's supporters now.
Trump is definitely acting differently than Gore and is behaving very inappropriately. In case that part was in doubt.
I think the thing Trump supporters claim that's especially problematic is not that the change in rules caused a change in results, but claims along the lines of, for instance, boxes of fake ballots were smuggled into election centers, Dominion voting machines were programmed to create fake votes for Biden, etc.—in other words, out-and-out election fraud.
I think I'm making an empirical claim and "they" are making a normative claim?
If you're saying that my claim sounds equally off-the-wall for lack of citation, you could just ask for the cite and I'd give you https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/ch9.htm . Note particularly the section about voter purges.
And, erm, Trump supporters attempted a coup about it, that's utterly incomparable to tooth gnashing and I stand by people who take exception to that.
Try to imagine Donald Trump ever having gone on the public airwaves and said this the day after 5 justices of the Supreme Court had summarily stopped all further reviews and awarded the presidency to his opponent:
Gore, immediately after the SCOTUS ruling, telling a prime-time live audience of tens of millions that he had just personally congratulated "President-elect Bush", and would do his part of certifying the election results, and that "while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it", and more....yes he was better than Trump "in that respect". In the same way that getting one's appendix removed is better than having it burst inside your gut.
Routine peaceful changes of leaders doesn't even require any democracy at all. An oligarchy could simply engage in round-robin cycling of positions, selecting their successors as members in the oligarchy.
Could, but don't. There's Singapore, and one can make arguments that it's happened in Russia and China, but this kind of succession seems to be rare enough that it's not a form of political organisation worth pursuing.
TGGP said oligarchy. I agree that monarchy has been one of the classic stable configurations that lots of different cultures have landed on. But monarchy doesn't enable *routine* peaceful change of leadership.
Monarchy per se doesn't solve the peaceful change of leadership, but monarch as the front end of an oligarchy can, if the oligarchs aren't required to select, e.g., "the eldest son". IIRC in the Anglo-Saxon society they could select anyone who was a son or nephew of the current king, and I wouldn't swear they couldn't range a bit further afield.
claims 17 british monarchs have been murdered. This does not count those who died on the battlefield. Considering that there were (according to Google) 63 english and scottish monarchs this was a dangerous (and not at all stable) job. Also, civil wars over succession were incomparably more common in monarchies than democracies: USA is now quarter of millenia old, and had just one civil war (and it was not even about succession). Monarchies or oligarchies equally stable I think are rather rare: (Tokugawa shogunate is one exception which comes to mind, and which survived for 260 years, though it was not completely peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dky%C5%8D_uprising)
France has had notably more civil wars since its original republican revolution at about the same time as the US (Wikipedia lists 7). I'm not sure using the US as your example of a democracy is any less cherry-picking than using the Tokugawa shogunate as your example of a monarchy. Also, four US presidents have been assassinated in office, which a similar annual rate as British monarchs, especially considering that you are counting two simultaneous monarchies in England and Scotland up until 1707. I acknowledge that it is a much lower rate in terms of murders per office-holder.
I think you need to read a bit of Shakespeare or the history of the Roman Empire. It's true that seems to happen in places we don't pay much attention to, and where we just accept the official histories...but I have strong doubts that it's really that calm.
OTOH, the Anglo-Saxon practice where a "council of elders" (I forget the requirements) selects the next king from a limited slate of contenders USUALLY worked. It guaranteed that the current power structure was already behind the candidate, and allowed any obvious bad apples to be skipped.
Which is part of why Popper favored first-past-the-post over proportional representation. The former allows people to "vote the bastards out" more easily, while the latter typically results in parties forming a coalition.
Given the outcome in China that system seems extremely vulnerable to a leader getting enough of an upper hand over the other factions that they can't stop him from dismantling it.
Your semi-regular reminder that, under the original ancient Greek classification, electing leaders is a mark of oligarchy; a democracy would choose its leaders by lot (for a fixed term, so you still get a routine peaceful change of leaders).
I have lots and lots of criticisms of Al Gore but lumping his response in 2000 with Trump's in 2020 is simply nonserious. On the contrary, Gore's very-public response to the 2000 election result once it was settled is one of the most important acts of statesmanship during our lifetimes.
I agree. There is also the point that if Florida hadn’t been close, Gore wouldn’t have invented a conspiracy theory about a stolen election. In fact, he had conceded before he realized how close it was.
I think "Trump in 2020 or Gore in 2000" suggests an equivalence where none exists, roughly like "unlawful behaviors such as armed robbery or jaywalking".
Gore lost by five electoral votes and Florida by about 570 votes, and decided to work within the system (sue in courts) and eventually lost and conceded.
Trump lost by 74 electoral votes and pushed lies about "election fraud" which incited his followers to try to stop the certification of the election.
ISTM there is some value in powerful people needing to care about what large numbers of people think about their actions, how those actions affect large numbers of people, etc. This won't necessarily give you good governance, but at least it means that the president/governor/mayor has to care that his people are starving or cowering in fear of criminals or whatever, so he has some incentive to want to make things better.
I also think making democracy into some kind of moral ideal is silly. It's a tool to get as good governance as we can, since we don't know how to live without a government and don't have a supply of incorruptible angels to put in charge of it.
"there is some value in powerful people needing to care about what large numbers of people think about their actions"
In my view, this is completely overwhelmed in practice by the ability of powerful people to game the system. The more faith we put into democracy, the more degrees of freedom that officials have to just do whatever they want. Constitutional checks were more effective than voting.
Or far worse, the often horrendously corrupt U.S. 19th century elections. In a way, elections work even when corrupt and fraudulent, as long as both sides have about equal access to it.
Yes, and that is a preventive against civil war. Sufficiently large majorities are going to get their way under *any* political system, if necessary by winning a civil war.
Far better to let them win bloodlessly via an election. Other than that (not inconsiderable!) benefit, I'm not sure there's anything very good about democracy - it certainly doesn't seem to lead to wise governance or honest leaders.
If you take this point of view, there's something to be said for limiting the franchise (or weighing votes) according to "ability to make trouble". It's probably why only landowners and men were allowed to vote - penniless peasants and women don't make civil war very effectively. Or children.
Agreed! To my mind, the main advantage of democracy (largely orthogonal to whether it is classically liberal or not) is by providing a mechanism for bloodlessly transferring power. This isn't _quite_ orthogonal to classical liberalism. There has to be enough freedom of speech for the opposition to campaign, and there has to be either a tradition or an enforced law for the party defeated in the election to at least more-or-less concede, and for the bulk of the populace (or, at least, as you said, potential troublemakers) to view the result as legitimate. I _think_ that that is enough to avoid civil war over power transfer.
The very large set of stuff that commenters have been putting into the classically liberal bucket: rule of law, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, trial by jury (oh wait, that has largely been lost to plea bargaining), freedom of religion, right to privacy (oh wait, that isn't in the constitution), freedom to bear arms, are all separable items, present in some more-or-less liberal nations and absent in others.
What? Historically many societies and nations have had routine, peaceful changes of leaders, and they have not been democracies, mostly monarchies. Whereas ever since Aristotle democracy has been agreed as the “rule of the many” phenomenon.
It can also help cut down on particularly egregious corruption, as this might annoy the voters sufficiently - you can't really get what you want through voting, but you can at least get _rid_ of people. Compared to a one-party dictatorships, it tends to result in more _varied_ rulership as well, and this is typically a good thing.
On the whole though, it's just a competition between elites as in any political system, with the electorate being wielded as tools in the competition. The system tends to mean that the losing side won't be persecuted and has a chance of getting back into power later, so this enabled a peaceful transfer of power. Without this, any potential transfer of power is a do or die situation, as the loser will be persecuted for certain, and this in turns makes a peaceful transfer a lot less likely.
There's a related trend that's becoming ever more annoying to me, where people seem to be confusing 'consultation' with 'getting my way'. If a decision, say in the city government about a zoning decision or a road use change doesn't go the way one wants, one can say 'There wasn't adequate consultation!' and have it published all over the local news.
No, actually, that the decision didn't go your way doesn't mean you weren't adequately consulted. Just as likely is that they listened to you and decided to you were wrong, or that they were going to prioritise other people's wishes.
That one's more a product of the specific veto points created by administrative laws like NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) and CEQA (it's extreme California state version). The courts aren't allowed to strike down a zoning decision because it's wrong (that would be substituting their policy judgment for those of the People's democratically elected representatives), but they are allowed to strike down a zoning decision because the agency failed to follow certain byzantine processes to the letter. Alleging a failure to adequately consult with a necessary stakeholder is one of the easiest ways to throw a wrench in the works.
My personal definition of "democracy" centres on how much people can choose their government and how much that government is empowered to enact their will.
So I don't think a state religion is inherently more democratic than freedom of religion. But a system that allows the government to institute a state religion if that's what people want is more democratic than one that doesn't.
A system of direct democracy that requires unanimity is both 100% democratic and guarantees freedom of religion as long as at least one person wants it.
No downsides to such a system as far as I can see.
I would wonder if a "system of direct democracy that requires unanimity" can work for very large populations. As a marriage counseling has found, it does not work for groups of two.
There is exactly one way I know of to get 100% of citizens of a significant-sized community to agree on every detail of what the government should and should not spend money on.
That way is to butcher citizens who disagree until all of them have changed their vote and/or been butchered.
A variant of such a system was in place in the Commonwealth for more than 150 years. Its main downside was the resulting paralysis; in time, in became nearly impossible to pass any new legislation. Many historians believe that this system was one of the principal reasons why the Commonwealth lost its independence at the end of 18th century.
So if the State is trying to impose a state religion, and 99 people vote "yes" and one person votes "no", there is freedom of religion.
That sounds great. But what about if the State is trying to get nuclear power plants built? 99 vote yes, 1 votes no, no nuclear power plants. We can argue over "are nuclear power plants safe?" but the downside is one person can hold up something. and maybe their motives aren't good: they are waiting to be bribed into changing their vote, or they are selfish about something, or they are making a bad decision.
It's tricky to balance between what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, which is why present democratic systems are as described: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
To be clear I wasn't seriously proposing such a system. However, what if there was a clause saying the 99 could always secede with their share of the land and re-form as a state of like-minded people?
That was the system used in Poland-Lithuania. The rule of unanimity meant that nothing, however necessary, ever actually got done, especially once neighbouring countries realised they only had to bribe one single deputy to paralyse the legislature.
It seems that most of the commenters on this subthread overlook that fact that not all decisions in a democracy must be voted on. Private property, markets, etc. anyone?
What's the point of a "personal definition" of a word? Language describes the way people communicate with one another. Why use a word in a way that's different than the way it's used by almost everyone else?
Everyone has a personal definition for all but the most trivial concepts. Most people don't realize that they do until they run into someone with a different one, like with accents. Those who recognize this sometimes choose to make their definition explicit so disagreements can be more substantial than "is a sub a sandwich?"
What does it mean for the people to want something? A simple majority?
Are there any limits? Does it make sense to separate a public sphere, where we negotiate how to use shared resources, and a private sphere, where we can experiment or be different?
Kind of depends on how much the public chooses to care about an issue. If 30% of people want policy A and 5% want policy B and everyone else doesn’t really care either way, I count that as the people wanting policy A.
If it’s a contentious issue where virtually everyone has an opinion, yes, a simple majority works.
I don’t make exceptions. All limits on the powers of a legitimate government acting with the consent of their people are undemocratic.
There absolutely can be distinctions between spheres where government can let people do their own thing and spheres where societal values are enforced. But what those distinctions are is itself a matter that is open to democratic choice.
E.g. A society majority disapproves of spanking children. It doesn’t necessarily follow that spanking must be made illegal - people must also agree that this is an area where societal values trump parental discretion.
This framework has some hidden assumptions, or is incomplete. Are “policies A and B” mutually exclusive and exhaustive? Do “the people” want one or the other for purely intrinsic reasons, or as a means for pursuing some end that they might succeed or fail in accomplishing which is the actual desired outcome? Do either of the policies violate prior commitments?
But I am moving the goalposts, aren’t I?
If 30% want A, 10% want B, 50% don’t care, and 10% are diametrically opposed to both A and B for some reason, what does “the people” want?
Going further into the weeds, I think laws should be decided by some form of representative democracy. Many issues are messy and complicated, with many different possible options. Many issues are boring and arcane, with citizens mostly having no opinion or interest in forming one. But if you can form a government that retains the confidence of the people with how you handle the things they don’t have clear unified opinions on and is responsive to their concerns on the issues where they do, that’s good enough in my book.
Do you think laws should be decided by some form of representative democracy because this is an abstract principle that we know is good by some a priori argument? Or because that is what the empirical data seem to indicate? If the issue came under careful empirical study, and the results indicated that representative democracy was only mediocre at getting things right, would that change your conclusion?
“ if you can form a government that retains the confidence of the people “
Another difficult to parse concept. How do we know when the government does or doesn’t retain the confidence of the people? There are always at least a few complainers, and also at least a few fanboys. How do we draw the line?
How does it help me to figure out what “the people” want if 30% want A, 10% want B, 50% don’t care, and 10% are diametrically opposed to both A and B for some reason?
People are not a unified thing. We can at that best describe them statistically.
All of the complaints you raise are reasons why I think representative democracy is the way to go. It is a system where the people in charge are heavily incentivised to get the answers to these difficult questions right.
“ what those distinctions are is itself a matter that is open to democratic choice.”
Shouldn’t you say, what those distinctions are *ought to be* open to democratic choice? There have certainly been instances in history when those distinctions were not made democratically.
Can we know what ought to be without checking to see if it is supported by the majority? It is possible to interpret what you wrote as a sort of democratic positivism, where what is good is defined entirely by what is popular. By those criteria, when slavery was popular, it was good, and it became evil only after a sufficient number of persons were persuaded that it was evil. Or in a less extreme form, slavery was always evil, but when it was popular, the government was obligated to adopt it as a policy.
Presumably you do not mean to bite that bullet, but how do we pull it back from there? There seem to be some historical examples where popular policies were mistaken in important ways. Is there just nothing we can/should do to try to avoid that?
I guess the alternative/steelman is to think that we can know that the metaprinciple is true/obligatory independently of popular opinion, and then use popular opinion to derive the rest? But that admits that there are relevant criteria beyond popular opinion, and so does not preclude the possibility that there are more relevant principles that should affect the outcome.
No, I’m totally willing to bite the bullet of “slavery was always evil, but when it was popular government was obligated to allow it.”
If we want laws to simply reflect what is good and right, the clearly optimal governance system is to make me personally god-emperor and I can then rule on everything according to my own moral compass, which is of course the correct one.
But if we make the concession to reality that I may perhaps not be right about everything, or that there may be other people who disagree with me, or that it may be unworkable to have a system that tries to enforce standards that only the god-emperor believes in, you need a system that takes account of everyone’s views. Democracy does that the most cleanly.
Of course it’s possible for a mass of people to jointly agree to commit horrors together. But it’s also possible for a god-emperor to commit horrors. And the range of horrors that can win the support of one man is wider than the range of horrors that can win the support of the whole community.
What is the argument for biting the bullet, for saying government must do evil if that's what the people want? Government is exempt from morality? Government is merely an instrumentality, and so it can do for persons things they could not morally do themselves? These are a bit strawmanish, please supply the steelman.
The argument is that evil is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly would like to impose my own moral standards on everyone - for example, by banning the horror of murdering babies in the womb. To me, that is an evil greater than slavery ever was.
You might disagree with my morality there. Or perhaps you might object to my moral view that the stock market is evil. Or perhaps you might object to my view that emitting more carbon dioxide is the right moral choice as it will enhance the growth of plants and give us cheaper crops. Or any one of my other idiosyncratic views.
But if we aren’t going to adopt my moral standards, then whose? Yours? No thanks.
So maybe the best answer is for us to try to have a system that tries to account for everyone’s views as much as possible. We can at least agree slavery is bad? Ok, slavery is banned. Everyone else thinks we should reduce CO2 emissions? Ok, I lose on that one. Abortion is contentious? Ok, let’s have some elections and see who wins.
It’s a practical system for dealing with the reality that different people want different things.
Some egalitarian-minded people might think it is unfair or dangerous if individual people or tiny groups get a lot of power over others in society. Those individuals might get their power from non-governmental means, like running the world's largest social media website or just having a lot of money. The egalitarians might say that those people are "unaccountable" for how they run their privately owned social media sites, or the ways in which they spend their billions of dollars.
On the whole I like the lines Scott is drawing in OP, but also have some sympathy with egalitarians who want to talk about powerful private actors being "held accountable".
The American federal government spends $60 billion per year on foreign aid. I'm pretty sure that does not include Ukraine.
No idea how much Bill Gates spends on "helping the global poor" but it's not that much. It may be better targeted, although that depends on your opinion of Gates' judgement.
Attempting to generalize that, it sounds like you're proposing we use "accountable" language for everyone with power, regardless of how they got it, rather than only for agents who have been entrusted with power by some principal?
When you say "trolley problem type logic", I think you mean externalities? That is, costs of your actions that fall on people who aren't party to those actions.
Glad I could help clarify, but I think I like the agents version better. It has clear answers for who you are accountable to (the principal) and why (an implied contract).
You could tell a story where powerful people are accountable to the collective for allowing them to keep whatever powers they've got, but at that point you're back to giving the government an implied veto on everything that everyone does.
We definitely do want the government to stop people from taking certain actions (e.g. murder). And perhaps that even means not allowing people to be billionaires; I'm not sure. But I'd prefer to have a story where the government is choosing to place coercive restrictions on people in specific cases that need to be justified by strong reasons, rather than a story where everyone's a slave by default and you owe the government for doing you the favor of letting you keep your money.
Not so much a slave as a hunter-gatherer or Mad Max nomad. Government's doing you the favor of encouraging that money exist at all, reliably retain more value than the paper it's printed on (a baseline Somali shillings fell to). "Render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's," as the saying goes.
I'd be a lot more comfortable with billionaires existing if the business models involved, and broader distribution of wealth, seemed consistent with them having some proper personal claim to adding that much value, rather than effectively extorting a few bucks each from everyone else in the world by occupying the natural niche of a new public utility and then deliberately poisoning it.
Go ahead and let profit-seekers find it first, prove the viability, scale it up, collect some rent and prestige for that legitimate accomplishment in making the world a better place. Only take the reins away and make it a public utility once they start to squeeze by charging more while delivering lower quality.
If the public sector grabs too quickly, that'll just end up subsidizing scammers and megalomaniacs with utopian plans which would fall apart if actually attempted.
Money does not require government - although fiat money does. As the government's power wanes, so does its money - which is what happened to Somali shillings, Confederate dollars, the Chinese empire's experiments with paper currency, etc.
Money does require government. Trade goods don't require government. Money is, in essence, a government controlled trade good. Value of that trade good is a separate thing. Government (partially) stabilize the value of the trade good "money" by demanding payment in money for services, like not stealing your stuff.
It's justifiable if it is part of a reasonable system that applies to everyone, e.g. some form of progressive taxation is fine as a means to avoid billionairs aquiring too much money and power.
Such systematic rules is and should be set by a democratic elected government to defend the interest of the general public (that may not be in line with the interest of the billionaire) within reason.
Yeah it's not as if Jeff Bezos employs hundreds of thousands of people (millions, indirectly) and provides a plethora of goods faster and cheaper than otherwise possible to hundreds of millions. He's in it for himself, absolutely, but indirectly this benefits the public much more than politicians who supposedly (big if there) act in the interest of the general public. The marginal dollar Bezos keeps is much better spent than the marginal dollar he gives to the government.
Is that just a rhetorical flourish meaning that you think so little of the justifications you've heard so far that it's "as if" they didn't exist, or are you actually predicting that your philosophical opponents will be unable to articulate any justification at all?
Facebook only has power because users signed up for it and gave away their data. Isn't that being "entrusted with power by some principal", even if it's decentralized?
And by that token, there's also a decentralized form of accountability. We could each decide not to use Facebook any longer if we dislike what they've done with our data.
I understand that might not be the right solution when we're dealing with a company the size of Facebook, but I at least think it's worth thinking through when and why the accountability of the normal free market is insufficient.
Great point. And dear God youre right about the globo-corps which is scary that the argument logically holds up. I hope WEF never sees your comment to fuel their fire
One World Government: The Only Truely Accountable Democracy
>multinational corporations are *more* democratic than governments when it comes to actions with a global impact because they are accountable to shareholders, employees, customers, and business partners around the world
Redefining 'democratic' as a measure of the geographic distribution of the individuals who have the capital to influence corporate decision making departs from common usage only slightly more than suggesting that current era multinationals are in any meaningful way 'accountable' to the vast majority of their customers. If your preference is corporate governance, you don't have mutilate existing terminology in order to argue in favor of it. Unless of course your goal is to make those preferences seem more socially palatable by masking them in disingenuous language.
Well, most countries are more democratic in this sense than global corporations, as they are depending on a working economy which is in turn depending on good external trade and good international relations. The big problem arises from big power imbalances when the powerful doesn't have to care if the small peers suffer as long he doesn't make most of them upset at the same time. This is true for economic actors as for states or criminal gangs.
But belonging to the strongest group lets you easily forget or oversee this. So I'm very much in favor of a multi-polar world without a single hegemony as much as I'm against any single person or group getting too rich and powerful.
Some people have been criticizing the conflation of "democracy" and "liberty" for decades. Mostly "extreme" (read as: "") libertarians, but also plenty of Tea Party Republicans.
Agreed. And I’ve done precisely that, here: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and/comment/21484458?r=da796&utm_medium=ios
As an extreme (even 'by read as "" standard') libertarian, yep, I do that.
As a cynic, I might go a little further, and observe that the only difference between the various things you can put in front of -cracy is who gets to wear the jackboots; as long as it's any kind of -cracy, someone's wearing them, that part of the word coming from the ancient Greek term meaning, approximately, "the beatings will continue until you obey".
I'd be inclined to argue that the link between liberty and democracy is almost purely correlative, not causative; the countries everyone usually cites as an example tend to be ones which have strong constitutional, traditional, or both, restraints on what any government is allowed to do, and as those erode over time, we get to see more of the violence (and totalitarianism) inherent in the system.
And, for myself, I applaud people who use "democratic" in the sense implying that the most democratic society is one in which every tiny decision down to what to eat for breakfast is subject to vote. Not for themselves - because they're usually terrible people - but rather because they do us the favor of laying bare that once you establish the principle that population makes right, you don't have really anywhere to stop but an endless series of special pleadings.
Good point... in the long run, when everyone understands that words like "democracy", "justice", and even "liberal" aren't just synonyms for "good". But I'm tempted to take Scott's view for now, as it seems tactically better in present circumstances.
Sadly, I think the right answer to a lot of real-world questions is that principles are kind of useful but they don't hold in general, so special pleadings are unavoidable.
The special pleading happens when one interest group says of something, generally the common way things are done, "That's undemocratic (because our tiny minority doesn't get its way)" and then make appeals based on the good associations the general public has with "democracy".
That the basic meaning of democracy is "the majority gets to decide", and hence too bad 1% special interest group, you don't get your way, is what is not accepted. Instead of saying "we want/need accommodation or special treatment", it's presented as "we live in a democracy and hence our voices should be heard!"
It should be noted that in the original example I had in mind, such special pleadings include "please don't kill, rob, and/or enslave us". Because if you really, *really* believe in the principle of democracy, that's all fair game for the 51%.
A lynch mob, after all, is a perfectly democratic institution.
Civilization is actually built up around the government having a monopoly on legal violence. Not doing this is actively bad and leads to sky-high homicide rates and much worse outcomes. This is one of the fundamental reasons why libertarianism does not work.
This is why pluralistic democracy with codified bills of rights work far better than other forms of government, because it gives a public level of accountability for what the government is doing and lets people make adjustments while simultaneously making certain rights much more difficult to get rid of.
Indeed, the US government is deliberately set up to prevent a so-called "tyranny of the majority", where a majority can simply trample over everyone else's rights.
Of course, this only works so long as the public agrees that the status quo is worth preserving. It would be interesting to see just how resilient the structure really is, now that both the left and the right in the US increasingly proclaim that true democracy can't be achieved until the outgroup is utterly crushed.
This is precisely why populists constantly lie about how everything is awful forever - because the truth (that things have been getting better and better) means that they're wrong. This is why you see the far left and far right claim that society is going down the drain.
Aporia just put out a good piece on this https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/three-flavors-of-american-doomerism
On the former, firstly, you are conflating libertarianism with unplanned anarchy, and secondly, since the three states of affairs which cover almost the entirety of historical experience are (a) no controls on violence, (b) warlords competing to own the monopoly on legal violence, and (c) the victor of (b) having said monopoly, this looks much more like "this was deemed challenging and thus not tried" to me.
Much like every other governmental innovation was in its day; a practically isomorphic argument could be made as to why not having an absolute monarch is actively bad and leads to much worse outcomes, and thus it's fundamentally impossible for democracy to ever work - which would have seemed very credible right before the outbreak of democracy.
As for the latter - acknowledging that it is a single data point - it having been only just over a month from having had our pluralistic democracy's goon squad stomping through my house with machine-guns in complete defiance of the Bill of Rights's notional protections against such things, I can only laugh long, bitter, and hollow.
Nice explanation on libertarianism vs. anarchy.
But I don't follow you on "the latter" - to what, exactly, do the "goon squads" refer?
Sorry to be unclear - that was a reference to recent events in my life which, to avoid cluttering up the comments here with a tangent, I'll just say are summarized here:
https://noiseinmysignal.substack.com/p/what-the-hell-happened
(And which have confirmed my extremely jaundiced views on precisely how useless democracy, even with a bill of rights, actually *is* at protecting people from arbitrary state force.)
Oh, my God! I'm appalled. Unfortunately, I can't say I'm surprised. I've seen too much from Radley Balko, PINAC, and similar sources to be at all surprised.
Or you take this as a proof how much current 'democracy with bill of rights' is just broken right now. This does not disproof the concept if it works elsewhere, perhaps this proofs that of your democracy only the facade is left.
The US was founded as a libertarian state. It didn't work at all, which is why we discarded the Articles of Confederation and created the US Constitution with a much more powerful federal state.
The Founding Fathers wanted to create a more libertarian state but quickly realized it was unworkable so had to change course.
And indeed, the US federal government was not strong enough to keep the states sticking together until after the US Civil War.
This is all basic US history, which libertarians are in denial of. Having a weak central state does not result in good outcomes.
"A weak federal government with few powers over arbitrarily powerful state governments" isn't a libertarian system by any reasonable definition of the word, especially when some of those state governments use said power to back up their maximally anti-libertarian policies. You're thinking of states'-rights conservatives.
(Some of whom may call themselves libertarians, but people can call themselves anything they like.)
You’re confusing “federalist” with “libertarian”. The Articles of Confederation may not have been perfect - what is? - but it was supplanted because some wanted the federal government to have more power, not because the Articles “didn’t work”.
I agree with the use of "accountability" in a government context, where
a) There are pre-existing promises in the constitution which the government is not supposed to break and
b) The government is at least theoretically supposed to act as an agent for the public.
I'm less happy to see "accountability" more widely generalized, e.g. to situations where someone with private power has no analogous principal/agent relationship with the public and is violating none of our (vastly excessive) set of laws.
My personal preference is to arrange our society so that the median person is as free as possible. There are cases where private entities do things that reduce the median person's freedom. One example is Amazon's use of noncompete restrictions on their former employees. I wouldn't "hold accountable" Amazon for doing this, and I wouldn't villify anyone on their legal team for trying to tie the hands of their former employees this way, but I would, in the interest of the median person's freedom, make such constraints unenforceable.
In general, I'm not a fan of concentrated power, either governmental or corporate, but I don't see the people wielding it as "needing to held accountable" - I just want to see less concentrated power in the first place, more choices left in the hands of ordinary individual people. (Yeah, some of this tends to imply more laws - yetch!, but hard to avoid - and hard to arrange so that the laws themselves don't concentrate power.)
Totally, we can even go back to Edmund Burke in 1790. There are better ways to secure our liberties than to make them all subject to a democratically elected government. The more you want to protect something, the less you should centralize its safeguards. Democratic is not synonymous with "good". The British system with a limited power hereditary monarch, church power, a parliament, and strong private property is much more robust to attacks on the civil liberties they had. The consequences of a momentary fit of populist madness are mitigated.
This is simply false. The British have far more issues with civil liberties than Americans do by any reasonable measure.
I think of democracy merely as a way to obtain routine, peaceful changes of leaders. Other than that, it is not an expression of the "will of the people." Many people use the term that way, and you are correct that it then shades into totalitarianism.
I would add that the "routine peaceful changes of leaders" model does not require that the electoral system is perfect, but it does require that people accept the results. Like Nixon in 1960, as opposed to Trump in 2020 or Gore in 2000. And at some point it requires a government with limited powers, or else sooner or later people are going to want to fight over issues of succession.
Gore did accept the results, and in fact presided over the certification of the electoral votes making Bush President.
He was better than Trump in that respect, but the Florida challenge was needlessly divisive, and for years afterward Democrats said that Bush won by 1 vote (in the Supreme Court). That helped ratchet up tribal partisanship.
Did *Gore* ever say that about one vote?
To my mind the difference between filing available legal challenges--in a legitimately razor-thin election, in which who got more votes is still up for dispute--and continuing to dispute the election after all challenges have been resolved is a difference in kind, not degree.
I agree. No comparison between Gore and Trump makes any sense. Any politician would have demanded a recount given the freakishly close nature of the Florida vote. Not to have done so would have been inexcusable to everyone who had voted for him. And campaigned for him. I find nothing wrong with what Gore did nor do i find anything wrong with what Bush did or the Supreme Court.
I don't think Gore himself did, which makes him much much better than Trump. I believe that some 3rd party commenters may have made suggestions like "split Florida's electoral votes evenly" (which would give Gore the presidency, but obviously has no legal basis or precedent at all) or had positions that in practice amounted to "recount the votes until Gore wins" or "the court that has the authority to decide this case is the one that says Gore should win."
I think if we take the standard that democracy requires not just that the loser accepts the outcome, but that no random supporters say something self-serving about how their side really won, then very few of our presidential elections have been truly democratic.
Post-election studies basically found that the election with ballots as cast was genuinely inconclusive, and Gore would have won absent racially biased voter suppression limiting ballot access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida#Post-election_studies
I say inconclusive because different permutations of different quasi-objective standards for counting give you different outcomes, and perhaps those are wrong also because the studies didn't get quite every single ballot.
Our ballot counting system, or at least the ballot counting system as applied in FL that year (with those ballot constructions and marking/counting technologies, etc) didn't have fine enough resolution to figure out who got more votes. It was a system failure, it's unsurprising and not blameworthy if it produced irrational behavior in participants.
And frankly, (obviously rigging it up post facto would be pretty skeevy, but) shouldn't we have taken that lesson going forward to implement some sort of proportionality (for divisible outcomes) or split/co-responsibility in the role (for non-divisible outcomes) in extremely close elections? I mean we fall back on randomization to pick a single winner when there are genuinely tied votes, for pete's sake.
So can we discuss election reforms instead of sniping at people caught in failures of unreformed election systems?
[EDIT - 3rd to last word read 'uninformed', I think probably it was supposed to be 'unreformed'. No offense intended to any well-read election systems, nor to any ignorant ones either.
The studies I saw did not even attempt to count the vast majority of ballots (and couldn't, given their limited resources)-- they were limited to counting machine-rejected ballots while assuming, somewhat inconsistently, that all machine-accepted ballots were tallied perfectly.
I don't see what your proposed fix buys us in return for the added complexity. Instead of Florida-style maneuvering to get a plurality, you get Florida-style maneuvering to reach or avoid the threshold for "extremely close election".
I'm not sure if this fits with what they're thinking, but I often advocate all States switching to the Maine-Nebraska system of allocating Electoral Votes. In the case of Florida 2000, they'd've only been contesting 5?-ish votes rather than the whole slate, which mightn't've been enough to swing the overall result.
Yes, sorry, you're right, those were recounts of rejected ballots. Arguably the ballots that the machines accepted didn't need separate recounting because the election was so close that an automatic recount was done a few days after the original tally? But yea I utterly mis-recorded that.
I want to clearly hedge that 1) There will always be a discontinuous threshold, it's not like we can fix that entirely, and 2) there isn't some deeply well-thought-out proposal here, what I wrote above is the full extent of it. But if we're sharing at all then we could actually share in ratios other than 1:1 to make the steps less steep and therefore weaken the incentive for expensive litigious maneuvering. Primarily I was thinking that the complexity buys greater representativeness? And if we're really lucky it militates against intense partisanship and ideological extremism? Eg it probably makes less sense to cast a 'vote against' or a 'hold your nose' vote if adding to someone else's pile doesn't reliably decrease that candidate's power, so maybe we reduce negative campaigning?
Other than the fact that we're 23 years out instead of 3, what difference is there between what Trump supporters say and what you are saying? They are saying that a different system (perhaps one that rejected more mail in ballots using the laws on record, instead of the COVID-era rules which rejected less ballots) would have resulted in Trump winning. You are saying a different system (with less racially biased voter suppression) would have resulted in Gore winning.
I was an adult in 2000 and clearly remember the gnashing of teeth from Democrats about how the election was stolen, so I'm less sympathetic to those that make a big deal about Trump's supporters now.
Trump is definitely acting differently than Gore and is behaving very inappropriately. In case that part was in doubt.
I think the thing Trump supporters claim that's especially problematic is not that the change in rules caused a change in results, but claims along the lines of, for instance, boxes of fake ballots were smuggled into election centers, Dominion voting machines were programmed to create fake votes for Biden, etc.—in other words, out-and-out election fraud.
I think I'm making an empirical claim and "they" are making a normative claim?
If you're saying that my claim sounds equally off-the-wall for lack of citation, you could just ask for the cite and I'd give you https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/ch9.htm . Note particularly the section about voter purges.
And, erm, Trump supporters attempted a coup about it, that's utterly incomparable to tooth gnashing and I stand by people who take exception to that.
"Better than Trump in that respect"??
Try to imagine Donald Trump ever having gone on the public airwaves and said this the day after 5 justices of the Supreme Court had summarily stopped all further reviews and awarded the presidency to his opponent:
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/al-gore-concedes-presidential-election
How is this not Gore being better than Trump in that respect?
I think Paul was saying that "better than Trump in that respect" is a gross understatement of how much better Gore was in this regard.
It's the backhanded semi-equivalency that grates.
Gore, immediately after the SCOTUS ruling, telling a prime-time live audience of tens of millions that he had just personally congratulated "President-elect Bush", and would do his part of certifying the election results, and that "while I strongly disagree with the court's decision, I accept it", and more....yes he was better than Trump "in that respect". In the same way that getting one's appendix removed is better than having it burst inside your gut.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/algore2000concessionspeech.html
It wasn't needlessly divisive.
Routine peaceful changes of leaders doesn't even require any democracy at all. An oligarchy could simply engage in round-robin cycling of positions, selecting their successors as members in the oligarchy.
Could, but don't. There's Singapore, and one can make arguments that it's happened in Russia and China, but this kind of succession seems to be rare enough that it's not a form of political organisation worth pursuing.
That's rather presentist. Historically, kings have succeeded their fathers without civil war fairly routinely: "The king is dead, long live the king."
TGGP said oligarchy. I agree that monarchy has been one of the classic stable configurations that lots of different cultures have landed on. But monarchy doesn't enable *routine* peaceful change of leadership.
I read that to mean "not (representative) democracies" in context, but it seems we are in agreement.
Well, not _scheduled_ but pretty routine in the grand scheme of things.
Monarchy per se doesn't solve the peaceful change of leadership, but monarch as the front end of an oligarchy can, if the oligarchs aren't required to select, e.g., "the eldest son". IIRC in the Anglo-Saxon society they could select anyone who was a son or nephew of the current king, and I wouldn't swear they couldn't range a bit further afield.
The king was often dead because he was murdered. I am not a historian but this site
https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/how-many-british-monarchs-have-been-murdered/
claims 17 british monarchs have been murdered. This does not count those who died on the battlefield. Considering that there were (according to Google) 63 english and scottish monarchs this was a dangerous (and not at all stable) job. Also, civil wars over succession were incomparably more common in monarchies than democracies: USA is now quarter of millenia old, and had just one civil war (and it was not even about succession). Monarchies or oligarchies equally stable I think are rather rare: (Tokugawa shogunate is one exception which comes to mind, and which survived for 260 years, though it was not completely peaceful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dky%C5%8D_uprising)
France has had notably more civil wars since its original republican revolution at about the same time as the US (Wikipedia lists 7). I'm not sure using the US as your example of a democracy is any less cherry-picking than using the Tokugawa shogunate as your example of a monarchy. Also, four US presidents have been assassinated in office, which a similar annual rate as British monarchs, especially considering that you are counting two simultaneous monarchies in England and Scotland up until 1707. I acknowledge that it is a much lower rate in terms of murders per office-holder.
I think you need to read a bit of Shakespeare or the history of the Roman Empire. It's true that seems to happen in places we don't pay much attention to, and where we just accept the official histories...but I have strong doubts that it's really that calm.
OTOH, the Anglo-Saxon practice where a "council of elders" (I forget the requirements) selects the next king from a limited slate of contenders USUALLY worked. It guaranteed that the current power structure was already behind the candidate, and allowed any obvious bad apples to be skipped.
"Could, but don't"? That's how Malaysia works.
That's a really interesting example that I didn't know about. Thanks!
Hence “a way” rather than “the way.”
Routine change of leaders is better when read as change of leaders plural. I.e. the whole ruling party changes not just the individual in charge.
Which is part of why Popper favored first-past-the-post over proportional representation. The former allows people to "vote the bastards out" more easily, while the latter typically results in parties forming a coalition.
Given the outcome in China that system seems extremely vulnerable to a leader getting enough of an upper hand over the other factions that they can't stop him from dismantling it.
Your semi-regular reminder that, under the original ancient Greek classification, electing leaders is a mark of oligarchy; a democracy would choose its leaders by lot (for a fixed term, so you still get a routine peaceful change of leaders).
I have lots and lots of criticisms of Al Gore but lumping his response in 2000 with Trump's in 2020 is simply nonserious. On the contrary, Gore's very-public response to the 2000 election result once it was settled is one of the most important acts of statesmanship during our lifetimes.
I agree. There is also the point that if Florida hadn’t been close, Gore wouldn’t have invented a conspiracy theory about a stolen election. In fact, he had conceded before he realized how close it was.
I think "Trump in 2020 or Gore in 2000" suggests an equivalence where none exists, roughly like "unlawful behaviors such as armed robbery or jaywalking".
Gore lost by five electoral votes and Florida by about 570 votes, and decided to work within the system (sue in courts) and eventually lost and conceded.
Trump lost by 74 electoral votes and pushed lies about "election fraud" which incited his followers to try to stop the certification of the election.
ISTM there is some value in powerful people needing to care about what large numbers of people think about their actions, how those actions affect large numbers of people, etc. This won't necessarily give you good governance, but at least it means that the president/governor/mayor has to care that his people are starving or cowering in fear of criminals or whatever, so he has some incentive to want to make things better.
I also think making democracy into some kind of moral ideal is silly. It's a tool to get as good governance as we can, since we don't know how to live without a government and don't have a supply of incorruptible angels to put in charge of it.
"there is some value in powerful people needing to care about what large numbers of people think about their actions"
In my view, this is completely overwhelmed in practice by the ability of powerful people to game the system. The more faith we put into democracy, the more degrees of freedom that officials have to just do whatever they want. Constitutional checks were more effective than voting.
Or far worse, the often horrendously corrupt U.S. 19th century elections. In a way, elections work even when corrupt and fraudulent, as long as both sides have about equal access to it.
Yes, and that is a preventive against civil war. Sufficiently large majorities are going to get their way under *any* political system, if necessary by winning a civil war.
Far better to let them win bloodlessly via an election. Other than that (not inconsiderable!) benefit, I'm not sure there's anything very good about democracy - it certainly doesn't seem to lead to wise governance or honest leaders.
If you take this point of view, there's something to be said for limiting the franchise (or weighing votes) according to "ability to make trouble". It's probably why only landowners and men were allowed to vote - penniless peasants and women don't make civil war very effectively. Or children.
Agreed! To my mind, the main advantage of democracy (largely orthogonal to whether it is classically liberal or not) is by providing a mechanism for bloodlessly transferring power. This isn't _quite_ orthogonal to classical liberalism. There has to be enough freedom of speech for the opposition to campaign, and there has to be either a tradition or an enforced law for the party defeated in the election to at least more-or-less concede, and for the bulk of the populace (or, at least, as you said, potential troublemakers) to view the result as legitimate. I _think_ that that is enough to avoid civil war over power transfer.
The very large set of stuff that commenters have been putting into the classically liberal bucket: rule of law, an independent judiciary, freedom of speech, trial by jury (oh wait, that has largely been lost to plea bargaining), freedom of religion, right to privacy (oh wait, that isn't in the constitution), freedom to bear arms, are all separable items, present in some more-or-less liberal nations and absent in others.
What? Historically many societies and nations have had routine, peaceful changes of leaders, and they have not been democracies, mostly monarchies. Whereas ever since Aristotle democracy has been agreed as the “rule of the many” phenomenon.
It can also help cut down on particularly egregious corruption, as this might annoy the voters sufficiently - you can't really get what you want through voting, but you can at least get _rid_ of people. Compared to a one-party dictatorships, it tends to result in more _varied_ rulership as well, and this is typically a good thing.
On the whole though, it's just a competition between elites as in any political system, with the electorate being wielded as tools in the competition. The system tends to mean that the losing side won't be persecuted and has a chance of getting back into power later, so this enabled a peaceful transfer of power. Without this, any potential transfer of power is a do or die situation, as the loser will be persecuted for certain, and this in turns makes a peaceful transfer a lot less likely.
There's a related trend that's becoming ever more annoying to me, where people seem to be confusing 'consultation' with 'getting my way'. If a decision, say in the city government about a zoning decision or a road use change doesn't go the way one wants, one can say 'There wasn't adequate consultation!' and have it published all over the local news.
No, actually, that the decision didn't go your way doesn't mean you weren't adequately consulted. Just as likely is that they listened to you and decided to you were wrong, or that they were going to prioritise other people's wishes.
That one's more a product of the specific veto points created by administrative laws like NEPA (the National Environmental Policy Act) and CEQA (it's extreme California state version). The courts aren't allowed to strike down a zoning decision because it's wrong (that would be substituting their policy judgment for those of the People's democratically elected representatives), but they are allowed to strike down a zoning decision because the agency failed to follow certain byzantine processes to the letter. Alleging a failure to adequately consult with a necessary stakeholder is one of the easiest ways to throw a wrench in the works.
My personal definition of "democracy" centres on how much people can choose their government and how much that government is empowered to enact their will.
So I don't think a state religion is inherently more democratic than freedom of religion. But a system that allows the government to institute a state religion if that's what people want is more democratic than one that doesn't.
A system of direct democracy that requires unanimity is both 100% democratic and guarantees freedom of religion as long as at least one person wants it.
No downsides to such a system as far as I can see.
I would wonder if a "system of direct democracy that requires unanimity" can work for very large populations. As a marriage counseling has found, it does not work for groups of two.
Except no way to vote on a budget
Sure there is, just requires that 100% of voters agree instead of 51%. It's eminently doable.
There is exactly one way I know of to get 100% of citizens of a significant-sized community to agree on every detail of what the government should and should not spend money on.
That way is to butcher citizens who disagree until all of them have changed their vote and/or been butchered.
Would exile of the dissenters work too? :-)
No roads or vaccines or houses in such a system either. One person never wants it.
Only under totalitarian democracy.
Under a 100%-unanimity-required democracy that has limited powers, things like housing and vaccines could totally exist.
Prisons then. Guess who's vetoing that one.
The idea that these things can only exist by government fiat is troubling to me. Governments limit housing and suck at providing it.
A variant of such a system was in place in the Commonwealth for more than 150 years. Its main downside was the resulting paralysis; in time, in became nearly impossible to pass any new legislation. Many historians believe that this system was one of the principal reasons why the Commonwealth lost its independence at the end of 18th century.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto
The Commonwealth also featured the Liberum Defecatio, which meant that nobles could lawfully commit slander.
So if the State is trying to impose a state religion, and 99 people vote "yes" and one person votes "no", there is freedom of religion.
That sounds great. But what about if the State is trying to get nuclear power plants built? 99 vote yes, 1 votes no, no nuclear power plants. We can argue over "are nuclear power plants safe?" but the downside is one person can hold up something. and maybe their motives aren't good: they are waiting to be bribed into changing their vote, or they are selfish about something, or they are making a bad decision.
It's tricky to balance between what is reasonable and what is unreasonable, which is why present democratic systems are as described: democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
To be clear I wasn't seriously proposing such a system. However, what if there was a clause saying the 99 could always secede with their share of the land and re-form as a state of like-minded people?
That was the system used in Poland-Lithuania. The rule of unanimity meant that nothing, however necessary, ever actually got done, especially once neighbouring countries realised they only had to bribe one single deputy to paralyse the legislature.
It seems that most of the commenters on this subthread overlook that fact that not all decisions in a democracy must be voted on. Private property, markets, etc. anyone?
What's the point of a "personal definition" of a word? Language describes the way people communicate with one another. Why use a word in a way that's different than the way it's used by almost everyone else?
Everyone has a personal definition for all but the most trivial concepts. Most people don't realize that they do until they run into someone with a different one, like with accents. Those who recognize this sometimes choose to make their definition explicit so disagreements can be more substantial than "is a sub a sandwich?"
Maybe if it's between two frigates it's part of one?
I don’t agree that it’s different to how everyone else uses the word. It’s just more clarified for edge cases.
What does it mean for the people to want something? A simple majority?
Are there any limits? Does it make sense to separate a public sphere, where we negotiate how to use shared resources, and a private sphere, where we can experiment or be different?
Kind of depends on how much the public chooses to care about an issue. If 30% of people want policy A and 5% want policy B and everyone else doesn’t really care either way, I count that as the people wanting policy A.
If it’s a contentious issue where virtually everyone has an opinion, yes, a simple majority works.
I don’t make exceptions. All limits on the powers of a legitimate government acting with the consent of their people are undemocratic.
There absolutely can be distinctions between spheres where government can let people do their own thing and spheres where societal values are enforced. But what those distinctions are is itself a matter that is open to democratic choice.
E.g. A society majority disapproves of spanking children. It doesn’t necessarily follow that spanking must be made illegal - people must also agree that this is an area where societal values trump parental discretion.
Re: spanking. Is that actually illegal now, or is it just some bureaucrat that said it would trigger taking the child away?
I think it might be illegal in some countries, but it’s not here or in the USA.
This framework has some hidden assumptions, or is incomplete. Are “policies A and B” mutually exclusive and exhaustive? Do “the people” want one or the other for purely intrinsic reasons, or as a means for pursuing some end that they might succeed or fail in accomplishing which is the actual desired outcome? Do either of the policies violate prior commitments?
But I am moving the goalposts, aren’t I?
If 30% want A, 10% want B, 50% don’t care, and 10% are diametrically opposed to both A and B for some reason, what does “the people” want?
Going further into the weeds, I think laws should be decided by some form of representative democracy. Many issues are messy and complicated, with many different possible options. Many issues are boring and arcane, with citizens mostly having no opinion or interest in forming one. But if you can form a government that retains the confidence of the people with how you handle the things they don’t have clear unified opinions on and is responsive to their concerns on the issues where they do, that’s good enough in my book.
Do you think laws should be decided by some form of representative democracy because this is an abstract principle that we know is good by some a priori argument? Or because that is what the empirical data seem to indicate? If the issue came under careful empirical study, and the results indicated that representative democracy was only mediocre at getting things right, would that change your conclusion?
“ if you can form a government that retains the confidence of the people “
Another difficult to parse concept. How do we know when the government does or doesn’t retain the confidence of the people? There are always at least a few complainers, and also at least a few fanboys. How do we draw the line?
How does it help me to figure out what “the people” want if 30% want A, 10% want B, 50% don’t care, and 10% are diametrically opposed to both A and B for some reason?
People are not a unified thing. We can at that best describe them statistically.
All of the complaints you raise are reasons why I think representative democracy is the way to go. It is a system where the people in charge are heavily incentivised to get the answers to these difficult questions right.
“ what those distinctions are is itself a matter that is open to democratic choice.”
Shouldn’t you say, what those distinctions are *ought to be* open to democratic choice? There have certainly been instances in history when those distinctions were not made democratically.
Can we know what ought to be without checking to see if it is supported by the majority? It is possible to interpret what you wrote as a sort of democratic positivism, where what is good is defined entirely by what is popular. By those criteria, when slavery was popular, it was good, and it became evil only after a sufficient number of persons were persuaded that it was evil. Or in a less extreme form, slavery was always evil, but when it was popular, the government was obligated to adopt it as a policy.
Presumably you do not mean to bite that bullet, but how do we pull it back from there? There seem to be some historical examples where popular policies were mistaken in important ways. Is there just nothing we can/should do to try to avoid that?
I guess the alternative/steelman is to think that we can know that the metaprinciple is true/obligatory independently of popular opinion, and then use popular opinion to derive the rest? But that admits that there are relevant criteria beyond popular opinion, and so does not preclude the possibility that there are more relevant principles that should affect the outcome.
No, I’m totally willing to bite the bullet of “slavery was always evil, but when it was popular government was obligated to allow it.”
If we want laws to simply reflect what is good and right, the clearly optimal governance system is to make me personally god-emperor and I can then rule on everything according to my own moral compass, which is of course the correct one.
But if we make the concession to reality that I may perhaps not be right about everything, or that there may be other people who disagree with me, or that it may be unworkable to have a system that tries to enforce standards that only the god-emperor believes in, you need a system that takes account of everyone’s views. Democracy does that the most cleanly.
Of course it’s possible for a mass of people to jointly agree to commit horrors together. But it’s also possible for a god-emperor to commit horrors. And the range of horrors that can win the support of one man is wider than the range of horrors that can win the support of the whole community.
What is the argument for biting the bullet, for saying government must do evil if that's what the people want? Government is exempt from morality? Government is merely an instrumentality, and so it can do for persons things they could not morally do themselves? These are a bit strawmanish, please supply the steelman.
The argument is that evil is in the eye of the beholder. I certainly would like to impose my own moral standards on everyone - for example, by banning the horror of murdering babies in the womb. To me, that is an evil greater than slavery ever was.
You might disagree with my morality there. Or perhaps you might object to my moral view that the stock market is evil. Or perhaps you might object to my view that emitting more carbon dioxide is the right moral choice as it will enhance the growth of plants and give us cheaper crops. Or any one of my other idiosyncratic views.
But if we aren’t going to adopt my moral standards, then whose? Yours? No thanks.
So maybe the best answer is for us to try to have a system that tries to account for everyone’s views as much as possible. We can at least agree slavery is bad? Ok, slavery is banned. Everyone else thinks we should reduce CO2 emissions? Ok, I lose on that one. Abortion is contentious? Ok, let’s have some elections and see who wins.
It’s a practical system for dealing with the reality that different people want different things.
Sure, it's more democratic. But it's not obvious that more democratic is a good thing.
Yes, the actual best solution is that I get dictatorial power to decide everything. But I’m willing to accept democracy as a second best solution.
Some egalitarian-minded people might think it is unfair or dangerous if individual people or tiny groups get a lot of power over others in society. Those individuals might get their power from non-governmental means, like running the world's largest social media website or just having a lot of money. The egalitarians might say that those people are "unaccountable" for how they run their privately owned social media sites, or the ways in which they spend their billions of dollars.
On the whole I like the lines Scott is drawing in OP, but also have some sympathy with egalitarians who want to talk about powerful private actors being "held accountable".
The American federal government spends $60 billion per year on foreign aid. I'm pretty sure that does not include Ukraine.
No idea how much Bill Gates spends on "helping the global poor" but it's not that much. It may be better targeted, although that depends on your opinion of Gates' judgement.
It depends on Gates' actual judgment, not my or anyone else's opinion of it.
Attempting to generalize that, it sounds like you're proposing we use "accountable" language for everyone with power, regardless of how they got it, rather than only for agents who have been entrusted with power by some principal?
When you say "trolley problem type logic", I think you mean externalities? That is, costs of your actions that fall on people who aren't party to those actions.
Yes! You put it much better than I could articulate myself.
Glad I could help clarify, but I think I like the agents version better. It has clear answers for who you are accountable to (the principal) and why (an implied contract).
You could tell a story where powerful people are accountable to the collective for allowing them to keep whatever powers they've got, but at that point you're back to giving the government an implied veto on everything that everyone does.
We definitely do want the government to stop people from taking certain actions (e.g. murder). And perhaps that even means not allowing people to be billionaires; I'm not sure. But I'd prefer to have a story where the government is choosing to place coercive restrictions on people in specific cases that need to be justified by strong reasons, rather than a story where everyone's a slave by default and you owe the government for doing you the favor of letting you keep your money.
Not so much a slave as a hunter-gatherer or Mad Max nomad. Government's doing you the favor of encouraging that money exist at all, reliably retain more value than the paper it's printed on (a baseline Somali shillings fell to). "Render unto Ceasar that which is Ceasar's," as the saying goes.
I'd be a lot more comfortable with billionaires existing if the business models involved, and broader distribution of wealth, seemed consistent with them having some proper personal claim to adding that much value, rather than effectively extorting a few bucks each from everyone else in the world by occupying the natural niche of a new public utility and then deliberately poisoning it.
How do we find the natural niche for a new public utility before profit-minded people do?
Go ahead and let profit-seekers find it first, prove the viability, scale it up, collect some rent and prestige for that legitimate accomplishment in making the world a better place. Only take the reins away and make it a public utility once they start to squeeze by charging more while delivering lower quality.
If the public sector grabs too quickly, that'll just end up subsidizing scammers and megalomaniacs with utopian plans which would fall apart if actually attempted.
Money does not require government - although fiat money does. As the government's power wanes, so does its money - which is what happened to Somali shillings, Confederate dollars, the Chinese empire's experiments with paper currency, etc.
Money does require government. Trade goods don't require government. Money is, in essence, a government controlled trade good. Value of that trade good is a separate thing. Government (partially) stabilize the value of the trade good "money" by demanding payment in money for services, like not stealing your stuff.
If you don't allow people to be billionaires, where does it stop?
There is no justification for taking some of a person's property, where you say "This much is OK, but any more than this is not."
It's justifiable if it is part of a reasonable system that applies to everyone, e.g. some form of progressive taxation is fine as a means to avoid billionairs aquiring too much money and power.
Such systematic rules is and should be set by a democratic elected government to defend the interest of the general public (that may not be in line with the interest of the billionaire) within reason.
Yeah it's not as if Jeff Bezos employs hundreds of thousands of people (millions, indirectly) and provides a plethora of goods faster and cheaper than otherwise possible to hundreds of millions. He's in it for himself, absolutely, but indirectly this benefits the public much more than politicians who supposedly (big if there) act in the interest of the general public. The marginal dollar Bezos keeps is much better spent than the marginal dollar he gives to the government.
Is that just a rhetorical flourish meaning that you think so little of the justifications you've heard so far that it's "as if" they didn't exist, or are you actually predicting that your philosophical opponents will be unable to articulate any justification at all?
I think that any justification devolves to "because we want it."
Whoever has the biggest guns does have an implied veto power over everything. How could it be otherwise?
Facebook only has power because users signed up for it and gave away their data. Isn't that being "entrusted with power by some principal", even if it's decentralized?
And by that token, there's also a decentralized form of accountability. We could each decide not to use Facebook any longer if we dislike what they've done with our data.
I understand that might not be the right solution when we're dealing with a company the size of Facebook, but I at least think it's worth thinking through when and why the accountability of the normal free market is insufficient.