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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
It seems useful to distinguish between the adjectives "liberal" and "democratic," as the two are sometimes conflated. Forcing the minority to follow the religion of the majority, per the wishes of the majority, is democratic and illiberal. This usage allows the terms to simply be descriptive without being value judgements. In this way, they can be used relatively consistently by people of different values.
>I think the word “accountable” should be reserved for people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them
This, however, seems like an unwieldy redefinition that is not at all consistent with common usage. People frequently refer to "personal accountability," using it basically synonymously with "personal responsibility."
It seems like the stated objection to the term "accountable" should also apply to the terms "responsible" and "responsibility."
Now I see that you alluded to this point in stating:
> I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
Other commenters note that the common denominator is people with power over others. The criminals are held accountable when they use their physical power to victimize others.
But fundamentally, (as Reich is very much aware) all actions that have an affect are "powerful." Defining "accountable" in terms of power that one has over others, doesn't preclude the application to things like private speech. Those who apply it there could say that more power may be vested in a blogger, than in some minor political figure.
Ultimately, I think the issue is that people disagree about what people's responsibilities are and who should hold them to account. But I don't see this being resolvable semantically.
Just as people disagree about e.g. whether "good parenting" requires parents to abstain from corporal punishment or to engage in it, but the semantic ambiguity is just an underlying value disagreement, and wouldn't be resolved by some declaration that "good parenting" means one or the other.
I largely agree. But I have a slightly different hypothesis in that, instead of misdefining democracy, totalitarians (namely those in America) are using the word--however defined--as a weapon by claiming that everything with which they disagree is an existential threat to it, democracy. Under that approach, the populace need not know what democracy is just that it is good and the other thing, whatever that might be, is bad. This type of malware is much easier to install, as it preys on ignorance and panic. Thus once installed, it is also very difficult to remove.
When you write and publish stuff online (particularly under your own name, including venerable exceptions like "Scott Alexander"), you're always 100% accountable, because people can and will stop reading you the instant you stop being interesting.
Democracy by itself is nothing special for the reasons you gave in the article. As the old saying goes, it's just two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. What we should value is LIBERAL democracy, because only this protects the rights and freedoms of everyone, including minorities.
Ultimately, the best liberal democracy is a minimal one in the sense that it allows the most individuals to chose their own path without requiring these individual personal choices to be submitted for voter denial or approval.
1. I encounter libertarians who want a constitution that strongly limits government or insist that the US constitution actually does limit government in ways that would make most of modern government illegal. They are saying that the population can vote a non-libertarian into power, but that leader would have no ability to do anything non-libertarian. This strikes me as undemocratic!
2. I have a hard time saying the US is undemocratic (or less democratic) because a majority cannot impose a state religion.
I struggle to reconcile 1 and 2. Thoughts from the crowd?
My only thought is that functioning democracies require freedom of conscience for the mechanics of democracy to work. If the government can arrest people for wrongthink, it can solidify power forever, so for democracy to survive long-term there have to be certain things (particularly related to freedom of speech and assembly) that the majority don't abrogate. Religion sort of falls under this banner.
I think you may have missed the point on charity being undemocratic. The criticism is not that donating to charity itself is undemocratic; the criticism is that the government effectively pays a third to up to half of every charitable donation through tax deductions, and that is undemocratic because it’s allowing private citizens, overwhelmingly very wealthy ones, to individually determine how the government should spend its money, generally in line with their own priorities and not the ones government would choose. If there were no tax deduction for charitable donations (as there isn’t in many countries), this argument would go away. As such, it’s an argument against the deduction, not against charitable donation.
I think you've labored harder than necessary to get to what seems a straightforward definition of orthogonal axes: totalitarian vs. liberal is about *how much* the government gets to decide about people's lives, and democracy is about *how* the government makes the decisions it is allowed to make.
Israel is currently giving a good lesson regarding your footnote 2; the proponents of the legislation to weaken the judiciary argue (accurately) that they are just making the country more democratic, finessing the fact that too much democracy is bad (tyranny of the majority, Madison's Senate as a "necessary fence" against "fickleness and passion", etc.)
The way you are using the term, I also don't think accountability should be limited to the case of a person who is vested with specific powers *by other people*. Parents are very accountable to their children before the children are capable of vesting anything. And to a certain extent people are accountable to other people generally. Not about everything, but in the sense that they are *not* free to do whatever they want without concern for the consequences to others.
Although, some use accountability more narrowly. The better term here could be *responsibility*, while accountability can focus specifically on a responsibility to *explain the reason for your actions". While I think people have some level of responsibility to other people, I don't think they have anywhere near as much accountability. As long as you aren't hurting anyone, you don't have to explain yourself. https://culture.io/resources/responsibility-vs-accountability/
“Democracy” became the word used by nearly everyone in the mass media for statements and debates about not only governance, but as shorthand for the end goals of governance. That was a significant error that has not been corrected, yet.
Democracy is not an unalloyed set of virtues, it’s a grouping of methods for governance. And it still appears to be the least bad method(s) for citizens of a state to choose as their method of governance.
The issue with using “Democracy” as an alias for the _actual_ end goals is: inarticulate debate that creates layers of confusion.
Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness. These are shorthand terms for some rather solid end goals. Human flourishing is another.
Personally I tend to consider Liberty as the most important secular end goal, at least at the level of evaluating among different buckets of end goals.
I'd say `democracy' is basically a way to decide who gets to run the country without a civil war. As in `we could have a war to decide this, but a whole lot of us would die and the side with the most supporters would probably win, so lets just do a headcount and let the side with most supporters run the show, and skip the death and destruction bit.' That's valuable in itself, but it doesn't have to come bundled with liberalism (and liberalism doesn't have to come bundled with democracy).
Meanwhile, the idea behind liberalism is `if two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for dinner, it sure sucks to be the sheep. And you never know when political coalitions might shift leaving you the sheep, so lets put in some guardrails so that not being in the majority doesn't suck too hard.' This is also valuable. But to some extent it is in tension with democracy (e.g. unelected judges overruling elected legislatures).
Every democracy is democratic in its own way. You're on sturdier ground with your point about accountability meaning that someone has given you some special or specific authority or power.
"So either you should avoid defining “democratic” this way, or you should stop assuming that more democratic = better."
I'd go with the second. The only way to make sure more democratic is always better is to define it as such. And then something like "a monarchy is not democratic" becomes an opinion instead of a statement about how that form of government works.
A useful tool I have found in reading certain works on this topic: where it says "democracy", read "American". Or "America-friendly" if that scans.
Both words have the same problem with "being used as a synonym for 好 by Americans", and I find that making a substitution that relies on that tends to clarify what is actually being said.
I think the terminology we have simply doesn't cover all the variables, probably because it's advantageous to many proselytizers and would-be leaders if the terminology is thoroughly confused.
Let's set up 2 axes here:
- to what extent are people to be told what to do or not do, punished for disobeying, etc.?
- WHO decides what people will be required to do or not do?
When we're talking about democracy, we're really talking about who, not "how much".
Democracy - The People (TM) decide.
Theocracy - The Deity, decides.
Aristocracy, Oligarchy etc. - A limited group of especially powerful people decide
Dictatorship, (Absolute) Monarchy etc - The Leader, King etc. decides.
In most cases, authority gets delegated, with varying amounts of principle/agent issues. E.g. I've never seen a Theocracy where the deity expresses Its wishes independent of Its clergy.
Some democracies have traditions of leaving individuals free to decide many things for themselves. But it's still a "democracy" if we all vote on what each of us get to eat for breakfast, or even if our elected representatives delegate that decision to a civil service bureaucracy.
It's kind of similar with accountability, except more pluralistic. Assuming the government (TM) doesn't hold a monopoly on decisions, there will be things that have results not mediated by the government. If I post offensive drivel on substack, and literally no one wants to read it, I'm held accountable by having neither an audience nor a blogging income.
The language we need here would involve something like "limited government". Government can be limited because tight control is impractical. (Slow communications, lack of reliable surveillance). They can be limited because of checks and balances. (Sure, the King is absolute - until enough nobles get mad enough to rebel, or someone assassinates him) They can be limited because everyone agrees that certain things should be matters of individual conscience. (I fear this tends to be unstable.)
Except "government" isn't the right term. If 99% of the population agrees that certain behaviour justifies murder, all the government needs to do is keep out of the way. You need not have an official theocracy for apostasy to be violently hazardous to one's health.
At any rate, I think your discussion above would be more useful if you started with the meanings you intended, not the thoroughly overloaded terminology.
> You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism ... I first noticed this during a discussion with Rob Reich ...
It's worth noting that a great many classical political philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle on, noted that democracy has a tendency to devolve into tyranny due precisely to this dynamic, and that a non-democratic regime can therefore be more free for its citizens. This sounds paradoxical only if one conflates participation in government with freedom in non-government affairs.
The framers of the US Constitution were deeply distrustful of both undemocratic governments and democratic governments, and including both democratic and undemocratic elements in the structure of the U.S. government. America is the world's oldest democracy, but it's special sauce was a norm for respect for the individual (including a Bill of Rights) that set many areas of life aside from the purview of government.
When I say "accountable," I'm talking about having recourse if someone abuses my trust. But are there people besides public officials that we reasonably repose some trust in?
In the Puritan colonies in 1700s New England, people expected they could trust other people to share their religion, and reinforce their shared social norms of obedience to God. That shared norm gets you a very different "accountability": the accountability of the scarlet letter.
Today, nobody reasonable thinks they're entitled to that kind of deep social norm matching with their neighbors. But that's a statement about our society, not a permanent statement about morality.
In today's society, "accountability" is mostly about elected officials, because they're the ones who have trust they might just get away with abusing. Other societies have done things differently.
I'm amused to note that your set of representative non-freedoms you attribute to a totalitarian system were pretty much SOP for some or most classes in the Middle Ages.
"a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom."
- Essentially everyone was required to be Catholic, and participate in Catholic rituals regularly.
- Noble heiresses married whoever the king told them to; this was generally a good source of royal/government income.
- Peasants' children were peasants, period. Nobles' heirs were assigned the job of a fighter, officer, courtier, landlord etc. (The latter could perhaps resign their title, and might get away with it if their alternate career was something deemed worthwhile, like religion. But religious careers were supposed to be assigned to younger sons. )
I don't think we can call any medieval country totalitarian - there wasn't anywhere near enough of a central government.
I think "the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism" is literally true, in the sense that democracy is two wolves and a sheep making dinner plans – it just sounds off because the connotations of democracy are halfway between "government by majority vote" and "government that aggregates preferences in an ideal utility-maximizing way". "Not regulating x is undemocratic" connotes "I think regulating x would raise total utility, so not to do it would be a coordination failure"; "regulating x is totalitarian" connotes "I think regulating x would lower total utility, so to do it would be tyranny of the majority."
Democracy is a process. I happen to think it's a good one with positive moral foundations, but democracy isn't self-justifying and can be used immorally. That's why you still need a larger moral framework within which democracy operates.
>I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government; a government where the military can overrule elected officials is less democratic than one where they can’t. I would avoid using it for discussions of the size of government
This seems a little awkward and inconsistent with common usage. Such usage would imply that voters going to the polls to choose leaders is "democratic," while the same voters also voting on ballot measures is not "democratic."
Furthermore, it seems to clash with the preferred definition of "accountable." That definition states that:
>people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them (elected officials accountable to voters...
The "accountability" of elected officials to voters seems to refer to the former performing the will of the latter, although this is left undefined.
So if "democracy" includes the selection of the officials, and "accountability" demands that the officials follow the will of the people, and majoritarianism is the net will of the people, then why does this definition of "democracy" not demand majoritarianism, which was the problem it was trying to solve?
I think Yarvin’s model of the three types of political power—monarchic, oligarchic, and democratic—captures things well. None is inherently good. Democracy unchecked by the other two is just mobocracy. The democratic urge has a natural ally against oligarchs in the monarchic power or executive authority. In this way we see that overstrong central authority is one of the main failure modes of populism (the other being anarchy).
I'm not convinced at how the terminology is wielded here. If a democratically-elected government enacts reams and reams of legislation detailing every aspect of life and, in every case, it legislates that the people can freely choose what to do, is that totalitarian? In fact, it is already the case that "nobody [can] express an idea, release a new product, or invent a new technology without government permission," since the government is sovereign and each time it DOESN'T revoke permission for something, its inaction implicitly grants it.
By reducing complex political systems to competing ideologies, you end up actually equating democracy and totalitarianism.
Democracy and accountability become tyrannical due to the flagging character of its leaders and citizens. Maybe lured by wealth and advantage over other states to the neglect of socially responsible traditions(4). Maybe a more primitive nation is forced to modernize(5). As community decreases govt. authority must increase to maintain order. Then, of course, we have the corruptive nature of power.
In short, for a society to be healthy you need:
1. A minimum number of people with the temperament, skill and position in society to be leaders to be examples of character(1)(2).
2. A culture backed by traditions, etc. that encourages character to be present, understood and valued by the masses(3).
Footnotes:
[Disclaimer: I am not assigning blame with the following but supporting relevant generalities.]
(1) “But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”
― Sebastian Junger, Freedom
(2) "The history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arises when large numbers of those who should be seers abandon spiritual authority in favour of money and political power. And contemporary history is the hideous record of what happens when political bosses, businessmen or class-conscious proletarians assume the Brahman’s function of formulating a philosophy of life; when usurers dictate policy and debate the issues of war and peace; and when the warrior’s caste duty is imposed on all and sundry, regardless of psycho-physical make-up and vocation.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
(3) "Kant argued that men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice. It is the business of society to provide the conditions for such choice and esteem for those who achieve it. ”
--Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 1987
(4) "The renovation of the Ka’ba transformed the fortunes of Mecca. It also eroded the tribal ethic. Tribal life had never been egalitarian. An individual’s moral worth was, as in most ancient societies, defined by his or her social status. Nevertheless, the ethos of the collective good ensured that the tribe took care of every member. Mecca’s growing affluence acted as an acid to this philosophy. The riches from the Ka’ba accrued to only a few families and helped create an ever more stratified society. The weak, the infirm and the dispossessed were denied not simply access to the new-found wealth but to the protection that came from the old tribal ideals too.”
--Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
(5) "The problem of adjustment is acute for both the coloniser and the colonised. For the former imperial powers, they have to get used to their new circumstances and formulate a new role for themselves in a changed world. For the new countries, they must rid themselves of the illusion that now they can go back to an idyllic past when there was a satisfying society – sometimes of natural socialism – which the white man came and destroyed. Romanticism, however natural, is fatal to progress. What has happened is irreversible, and the choice before each of us is what to make of the future, not how to re-live the past.”
--Lee Kuan Yew, The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew, 2013
I think this is overly charitable. The people saying Substack authors aren't accountable aren't using a bad definition of accountability, they're just stupid and/or lying. Anybody selling a product on a free market is necessarily accountable -- if their product is bad enough, their customers will stop buying it and they'll lose money. Claims of "lack of accountability" only make sense in a context where someone has the ability to coerce people into using their services.
“Democracy” is a really good example of the Hegelian dialectic in action. It’s not actually coherently definable; you can’t express everything the word does without contradicting yourself. You can make up your own, coherent, definition, but it will miss some facet of the real word.
So, for instance, democracy means both “people have rights” and “people have to obey a majority of their neighbors”. We call it “undemocratic” for El Salvador to lock up people without due process, and we also recognize the power by which that’s being done as “democratic”, ie, derived from a fair election.
The cheap way to talk about it is to say that democracy is “in tension” between conflicting ideals. The interesting analysis is to dig into the archaeology and figure out what we’re trying to achieve by synthesizing these multiple contradictory ideas into one thing.
> I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.
Yes; this sort of hypocrisy is quite common in political discourse. But I'll even go further and say that democracy is highly overrated as a system for solving problems, and saying that the correct to "X isn't democratic" is very often, "good." David Friedman gives the classic explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg
You can have a totalitarian democracy, sure, that doesn't make it not democratic. This is a silly way of understanding concepts- you've begun by assuming that democracy is intrinsically good or not totalitarian, which is not at all true. That's why we distinguish between democracy and liberalism. Conflating democracy and freedom is just bad political philosophy, and really an elementary error. Political theorists have made this distinction all the way since Aristotle, and the concept that democracy must be good or not totalitarian is an entirely modern imagination that has sprung out of popular political rhetoric.
I think it is a mistake to use MLK as an example of "good" change. Having racist opinions is an important personal freedom. Many racist opinions are correct, for instance; and can be important for self-protection and the protection of one's community.
Whites at the time had very real fears that when blacks moved into their community, they would be so violent as to force whites to move; I read a book about someone's experience in Baltimore when blacks were displacing whites; it simply wasn't safe for whites after a certain point. Whites were forced to flee to the suburbs, selling their homes at a loss, in order to not have their kids beaten up or themselves mugged or raped; and yet according to the dominant narrative, it is whites who are to blame for all of this, not blacks. Michelle Obama: "y'all were running away from us." Yes; for good reasons. Normally if a group moving in forces another group out, we consider the group who is forced to move out as the victim. Why does this not apply when it's blacks moving in and whites moving out? Clearly the powers that be have something against whites and favor blacks.
This isn't just a problem with definitions. It's a deep seated problem with our desire to signal our moral views that's being exacerbated by the internet.
If you really want to say X is bad then the most effective way to signal that is to demand some kind of consequence or punishment for doing X. If you say, X is bad but people should be allowed to do X there will be suspicion that you don't really think X is that bad. I fear the internet is making this pressure worse.
We created a number of technologies to limit the harm from this tendency. For instance, legal norms/rules like the 4th amendment which make it harder for the government to punish behavior without a victim to complain. Sure, we say it's about privacy and that's a nice bonus but the focus on government violation (as opposed to people secretly reading your papers) and use in prosecution suggest a substantial interest is limiting the ability of the government to punish some kinds of behavior.
As we move into a more digital interconnected world I fear we'll need new technologies to manage this issue. Principles that we regard as sacred which can be appealed to allowing expression of disapproval to come apart from calls for consequences.
On a related note, I’ve made this point when discussing communism.
Marx, and to a lesser extent most socialists, want “the market” or “the economy” to be subject to “democratic control.”
This sounds great. We replace this large, unaccountable system of “the market” with a system accountable to the government, and through the government, the people.
But in practice, this means deeply interfering in the individual choices of nearly every single person in society. This is the petty tyranny of the homeowner’s association telling you what color you can paint your house--but for every single good and service in society.
I’m not sure I agree, however, that we should simply declare that democracy and accountability are inconsistent with totalitarianism. There is a reason that philosophical liberalism insists on protecting individual agency, and that many classical liberals supported democracy primarily as a means to that end.
John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise “On Liberty” is often interpreted as attacking the supposed morality of the majority or of the democratic will, and insisting on the freedom of the individual in the face of these.
You might be able to salvage "hold criminals accountable for their actions" by noting that many crimes consist of unlawfully doing things that normally only people vested with extraordinary authority are allowed to do. Criminals take people's money without their consent, kill people, and imprison people. Government officials also do all those things, but (at least theoretically, in healthy societies) they are supposed to only do those things in lawfully delineated circumstances that promote the general welfare.
I suspect you were a bit uncharitable to Rob Reich (pun intended). I don't even have to read Reich to know that he must have been referring to tax breaks, which at least to some extent mean that effectively people are able to redirect a fraction of their taxes to causes of their choice.
It seems like a mistake to compare people’s freedom “to express an idea, release a new product, or invent a new technology” to people’s freedom to do about risky AI tech as they want.
In the former case, the impacts are smaller. Less people have a stake in it, or have a lesser stake. The acts of “expressing an idea”, “releasing a new product” or “inventing a new technology” are unlikely to hurt society and the larger populace. In situations with potential societal harm like AGI, or high stake situation like wealth redistribution, the public should have a say in it.
So I would define democracy as: a more democratic society gives people more say in things they have high stakes in. Your freedom to express your opinion has high stake to you, low stake to others. So a truly democratic society should give you the freedom to express most opinions. It matters less what others want because they have low stake in the situation.
This issue is also very well known in academic political theory, and is one of the first things discussed within the 'democracy' section of introductory textbooks. The general strategy to resolve it is to decompose a concept into multiple dimensions - for 'democracy', Swift (2019, pp. 291-305) breaks it down into 4 such dimensions: 'directness or indirectness of the decision', 'accountability of the representatives', 'equality (of opportunity) for influence' and 'scope of authority of democratic will'.
With this kind of conceptual analysis, when someone says that the government having control over more areas of people's lives is more 'democratic', they are saying that it is so on the 'scope of authority of democratic will' dimension. You can also start an evaluation of the value of democracy with much greater granularity (no longer is it simply a question of the amount of 'democracy' that is optimal, but instead the degree of each dimension of democracy that is optimal).
An implication is that it is theoretically possible to have a totalitarian democracy (which is a situation where there is large scope of democratic decision, while the government also scores highly on the other dimensions)., thus agreeing with Scott's analysis. And we also have a theoretical reason to believe that this is unstable and will likely collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship because the large scope of democratic decision allows the people to vote themselves out of democracy (because the scope of decision-making is so large that it includes modification of the democratic procedures themselves and the suppression of rights that are essential to maintaining the other dimensions of democracy).
References:
1. Swift, A. (2019). Political philosophy: a beginners' guide for students and politicians. John Wiley & Sons.
A modern liberal democracy is a carefully tuned and integrated package consisting of democratic procedures for electing officials (note that those officials usually have no legal obligation to follow their promises, but since there is always next election they have a strong incentive to act in the interest of people. Also, those who are outside suffrage are invisible to polititians, except as possibly a nuisance, hence suffrage as wide as possible is important), independent judiciary, constitutions, constitutional courts and international treaties which, not only set the rules of the game, but also guarantee basic rights of people regardless of vagaries of current elections and prevents tyrrany of the majority, free press and freedom of expression which both controls other power centers, but also ensures efficient information flow (there is a reason why many dictatorships are divorced from reality), freedom of activities of citizens unless there is a very good reason to ban some activities, which ensures effective allocation of resources, elasticity and exploration of possibilities necessary to meet future challenges, and it is also a basic human right. Take even one piece of this package and the whole system quickly degenerates into its opposite. While I agree that liberalism and democracy on one hand and totalitarianism and authoritarianism (in the strict sense) are correlated but not the same, but there is a very good reason for this correlation, and why our current ideal system is called "liberal democracy". Some people are under illusion that we can have democracy without liberalism/liberty or liberty/liberalism/libertarianism without democracy. They are sadly (and sometimes dangerously) mistaken.
I agree with the article but I want to point out that if your AI has the chance to literally kill everyone, then that has reached the point where you should probably involve a democratic process and shouldn't just go ahead unilaterally. (This of course doesn't apply to weaker AI systems.)
The practice of winning political victories by subtly and silently redefining words goes all the way back to Plato's /Politeia/ (always deliberately mistranslated as "Republic"), which begins with Socrates saying they're going to figure out what "justice" means, and ends with Socrates discovering that it means that everybody does what exactly and only what Plato tells them to, or gets killed.
I'm still bitter that when people today say "liberals", they mean authoritarian leftists.
Roussea famously said that we need to be forced to be free.
This sounds like a contradiction, but arguably not if you take a broad definition of freedom.
Freedom can mean the freedom of an individual to make their own choices, or for someone to vote and participate in a collective decision about what kind of society to live in.
Notably, the two trade off against each other. For example, if each individual has the freedom to decide how much noise to make, then the individual has lost the ability to participate in a collective decision of how noisy they want the community to be at night.
This isn’t a comment in favour of Rousseau, just explaining the way I’d explain a Rousseau-like position which might not match his actual view.
Your overall point is why the term "liberal democracy" was invented. Democracy without protections for individual rights, without a "right to privacy" (in the sense of a right to make decisions about one's private life without government interference), is as oppressive as dictatorship. Neither Orbán's "illiberal democracy" nor the CCP's "socialist democracy" achieves the goals that motivate pro-democracy activists, and they should be reminded of this regularly.
That said, even in the liberal tradition, your right to swing your fist ends at another person's face. Thoughts and speech are traditionally considered your own business, but when you take actions in the physical world with physical consequences for other people, those people get some input.
And this gets really muddy in the context of computer code, where something that looks like speech can be converted to physical actions without the involvement of another agent. It also gets murky in the context of creative AI, where speech can be generated by something that isn't a free-speech-rights-holding agent.
I tend to think that regulating this stuff is likely to be worse than not regulating it, at least at this stage. But it's not immediately obviously illiberal for democratic institutions to consider the questions: *are* these technologies infringing on individual rights? *Do* they pose unacceptable physical risks to the general public? *Is* a LLM's speech an expression of its owner's free speech rights?
As a practical matter, I think making an argument for how these questions should be answered is likely to be more valuable than arguing that they shouldn't be asked.
hey there, love your article, but i think there are a few things that need to be addressed.
1: Address counterarguments: you should address counterarguments to strengthen your points. By presenting opposing viewpoints and explaining why they may not align with your position, the article can come across as more balanced and open to discussion.
2: Streamline the writing: The article can be viewed a little to dense to follow at times due to its length and intricate ideas. Consider breaking up the longer paragraphs into smaller, more digestible chunks. anyways keep up writing the good stuff. cheers
> I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government
I disagree, somewhat. If a private army decides to set off a war with a neighbouring country without asking anyone, that seems undemocratic. Similarly if anyone uses force to just overpower the government in making a decision. It's not surprising that the term gets extended to government-y decisions (the kind that people would _expect_ (and want) to be made by the government exclusively) even if not literally made by the government itself.
On AI... Yeah, it also seems right. Under the assumption that unchecked AI progress results in the end of democracy and the transfer of all power to someone's alien creation, I think "undemocratic" fits.
Possible typo: "The only society that doesn’t leave space for the person trying to make the world better as they understand out outside of the existing governmental process is - again - totalitarianism."
This sentence is weird to me. Usually people say "as they understand it". I think the "out" is supposed to be an "it".
I believe that you will run into difficulties if you try to strip the 'punishment' sense out of accountability. I think that a sizeable number of people want the ability to blame, punish, make suffer, scapegoat and humiliate. 'Indulging my inner sadism' and 'enjoying a little cruelty' is the whole point. It just sounds so much better when called 'I want accountability'.
This comes very much to the fore when you are trying to reform an institution or organisation. Clearly, if some powerful people are 'a law unto themselves' and can violate laws and norms without reprisal, you have a setup that is ripe for the abuse of such power. But as a practical matter, abuses of power often are the result of a cover-up. And often the things being covered up are, at the bottom, tiny mistakes and peccadillos. It turns out that people involved are very frightened of what will happen to them if the accountability police get a hold of them, because they in no way trust that they will treated fairly by those that come to judge them. Instead they may feature as scapegoat of the week. Seems that their power, too, is seen as 'unaccountable'.
The money to religion analogy doesn't work, because they're not the same. Money is a state invention, with the entire system of property fully regulated and enforced by the state. There is no conceivable pristine natural state of it where every individual can just do their own thing and not bother anyone else. (Arguably, in practice, there's no such state possible for religions either, ever since universalizing ones arose, managed to impose themselves as a social requirement and made it their point to slaughter the infidels. But at least it's easy to imagine. And, now that some states are protecting it, it may not be natural anymore, but still, kinda works.)
The conceivable natural state for property relations? Commons everywhere. This, of course, far from high-modernist government controlling everything, but even further from antisocial individuals appropriating earth's resources and government assisting them and preventing you from stopping them, with violence. Even if the "appropriating resources and preventing you from stopping them, with violence" applies to government all the same, "at least they're democratically accountable" is in fact a valid argument (even if the accountability is, in practice, very poor, because in the alternative it's being compared to, it's non-existent).
Of course the problem is, all of this is motte and bailey. Democratic motte is [humans need to cooperate and peacefully resolve their differences], the bailey is [give all power to bureaucrats]. Accountability motte is [we need to update our trust in humans based on bad things/decisions they've made], the bailey is [panopticon where you cannot stray from the line even for an inch, and you have no say in setting the rules].
We need those mottes, really really need them. But of course, it's not surprising they're not convincing when they're so often used as a cover for the baileys. But bear in mind, there are many terms like this. One of them? "Freedom". We really need that one too. But with a bailey of [assholes with coercion-backed rights to resources can do anything they want and you're unable to stop them], of course people will eventually go "nah, fuck your freedom, we need to make those more democratically accountable".
I don't know the way out, but (everyone) please be aware of the problem. As the saying goes, "Knowing is half the battle."
It is worth considering the origins of the state when thinking about the term 'democracy'. Why do people allow themselves to be subject to the control of a government? Because they trade some of their freedom for the security of the state, this is the social contract. Using the freedom/security trade-off to reflect on the example of someone's freedom to give to any charity, there isn't a justification to take away this person's freedom to donate and give it to an elected government. I think there's a difference between justification of state control over different parts of people's lives and what counts as making decisions more democratic.
I think the word “democratic” is most useful in the sense of “liberal democracy”, where individuals have rights that way heavier than the votes of the majority. I’ve often heard “democracy” without protections for the rights of minorities and individuals as a “dictatorship of the majority”. It’s the role of the courts to make sure the other branches don’t overstep.
Liberal democracy is what we typically mean when we want to defend democracy, and so I think any definition of democracy that doesn’t include these is suspect. But not everyone sees/understands/agrees. I completely agree that there are bad definitions of democracy out there, and I think people who claim something is undemocratic often need to be challenged on their understanding of democracy – as you do here. Rule of the people and rule of law must mean more than just the will of the majority.
I don’t think MLK is the best example for any of this. He, and much of the rest of the civil rights movement, engaged in civil disobedience, deliberately breaking supposedly “democratically” enacted laws (spoiler: they weren’t), and getting jail time and the wrong side of billy clubs for it. They were most definitely being held accountable. Civil disobedience is not a democratic way of doing things, but may, paradoxically be necessary to enact or uphold a democracy. (Hence, the liberties.)
I am very much a proponent of liberal democracy (at least until AI throws up a better alternative), but I acknowledge that there are problems and difficult discussions to be had in a liberal democracy too. Like how much does a country owe its citizens and vice versa? (Which goes to tax law, entitlements, military service, etc.)
I think I have lamented the world’s lack of a truly anarcho-libertarian alternative in this comment section before. Just so that people could vote with their feet, if they think the compromises reached inside the liberal democracy are too expensive for them, or are too skewed towards dictatorship of the majority. (I.e. if they think taxes are too high; and/or they don’t want to contribute to x, y, z spending; etc.)
> I think the word “accountable” should be reserved for people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them (elected officials accountable to voters, managers accountable to owners, charities accountable to donors, etc)
I think this has some disadvantages in the case of governments.
Like let's take businesses as an example. It seems to me that similarly to how you feel one can talk about charities being accountable to donors, one could also reasonably talk about businesses being accountable to customers, for things like product safety and product quality.
But often, the government is offering some sort of service. In those cases, wouldn't there be some logic in talking about the government being accountable to those it offers the service to?
What you are missing in your point that totalitarianism can be construed as "democratic" (which is indeed being made by Russian and Chinese pundits) is the dimension of "time". One of the painful lessons of German history is that a democracy where elected leaders are free to do anything that a majority want them to do at that time, quickly ceases to be a democracy. "The will of the people" needs to be constrained by checks and balances - a constitution, a strong judiciary - otherwise people soon find out that their will is no longer relevant when they find they've voted a psychopath into office. (See also "the paradox of tolerance".)
So yes, it's always a balancing act, not just between majorities and minorities at any given time, but also between people and their future selves, and pure democracy is neither good nor stable. That needs to be stated explicitly, so we can discuss where to draw the boundaries, instead of engaging in buzzword tennis.
My read is that this is a pretty weak strawmaning.
In the first 3 paragraphs, you argue that one view of democracy can be that the 50.1% rule without limit on the 49.9%, conflating it with majoritarianism. I'd be very surprised if more than a small minority of people advocating for more democracy view it this way. I believe that most of the people would agree that more democracy would also mean more protection of the right of the minorities such as their freedom of opinion, speech and religion, as well as the protection of their ability to influence the political life of the state (via allowing them to vote for example). Hitler got elected democratically, the enabling act of 1933 giving his government full power was voted by the vast majority of the assembly, but it doesn't mean in any way that his power was democratic at all.
You argue that one can decide to not define democracy like that. But in the rest of your piece you completely conflate the concept of democracy with majoritarianism. Moreover you assume a democracy can be totalitarian, while the later has been defined as an opposite of the later. It seems then cheap to try to assimilate the two concepts to support your claim, I believe it'd be much saner for the sake of the discussion to create a different word for the concept you name here as 'totalitarianism'.
Some people view charity as undemocratic not because individuals are able to choose which charities gets the funding instead of the government, but because the wealth distribution is so skewed that only a handful of people are able to decide where this money goes. One can argue whether this unequal distribution of wealth is a terrible thing or not, but the critic of current's charity system (and it's funding through tax subsidies) is not focused on disabling individuals choosing where the money should go. I think Piketty for example advocates having a specific part of the budget of the state allowed to charity, and having each people choose their preference to which to redirect this money. This money would then be distributed uniformly according to each citizen's preference, not according to the preference of the richest nor according to the preference of the 50.1%. I fail to see the totalitarian aspect of it.
The use of "democracy" to sum up something that needs to be defended by stopping the people's elected representatives doing things, seems confusing. See Orban, Israel's Supreme Court, Trump, etc. I can see you might want to oppose the decisions of the people's representatives, but why use the word democracy to represent what you want, when the people having power is literally what you oppose? And why is the phrase liberal democracy used so often, when individual freedom is also something which you seem to think has, in general, gone too far?
I think democracy has, to a lot of people, come to mean rule in the name of the people by an educated elite, plus rule that aims not to hurt people, plus rule that involves people having a lot of power to tax their neighbours, and stop them doing what they want. A mixture of a state religion, niceness, conservativism, and socialism. Which is entirely defensible.
I suppose this mixture of beliefs might have come to be associated with the word democracy because the places that are ruled in this way tend to be democracies. Basically, because this mixture of beliefs is how people want to be ruled. Or at least it is for as long as things are getting better for most people, most of the time - as they have been in the West for most of the past 75 years. If this stops being the case, then you get the odd phenomenon of the majority of the elite rallying against democracy in the name of democracy.
For AI regulation we conveniently have a bunch of network-effect/exclusivity-contracts using companies — larger than some state governments — using their dominant positions to fight for complete control over a new sector. Except maybe Facebook/Meta who seem to count the (actually good) outcome of «let it split into a thousand small pieces» either as acceptable or as extremely implausible. OpenAI seems to be closely enough tied to Microsoft.
Antitrust laws exist for that, and in general applying higher standards of behavoir to things that have become larger than many state governments turned out to be a reasonable idea.
MLK… once he started building a movement, he built a movement for a specific purpose and ran it for that purpose (antitrust laws are much stronger on the power-repurposing; if anything, it's the political party that run afoul of the intent of antitrust laws, a proportional system with narrower party platforms and explicit coalitions is indeed better)
Of course the actual quality of specific call to actions might not rise to mentioning antitrust law…
(It would be nice if Khan's FTC succeeded at least at reminding people that antitrust laws exist, and exist for a reason)
> I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
Its not democracy that holds criminals accountable, it's the rule of law.
Everyone donating to their favourite charity seems like the pinnacle of democracy to me - a distribution of goods according to the distribution of preferences in the population.
Only if ones ideas of democratic are very closely tied to the winner-takes-it-all-democracy they live in would they think that outcomes of every democratic process need to be uniform.
It's probably meaningful to make a distinction between a liberal democracy and a merely electoral one. It's quite democratic for 51% to oppress 49%, but this merely shows that it's only liberal democracy we should truly value (although this doesn't make the electoral one completely meaningless - after all, it's somewhat better if 51% oppress 49% than if 25% oppress 75%).
"Democracy" can also be analysed as a set of institutionalised insurance-arrangements. Both normatively and empirically.
The insurance-theory of democracy works at two levels: the level of elite competition for power, and the level of citizen-ruler relationships.
First, democracy insures competing would-be rulers against the risk that they will be violently suppressed or killed should they lose the battle for office. In exchange for being protected in this way (plus having the right to attempt to conquer office again four-five years from now), competing would-be rulers accept that they cannot do everything they want if they win the internal power struggle in the state. (European elites in particular often had to learn the hard way that being insured against oppression if you lose is worth the price of not being able to do everything you want, unrestrained, should you win.)
Second, democracies also insure ordinary citizens against the risk that they will be violently suppressed by whichever elite that rules the state. Secret ballots at regular intervals install the fear of losing power into the heart of rulers, reducing the probability that they will use their power to suppress ordinary citizens.
The insurance-theory of democracy may at the same time explain the existence of constitutions, the rule of law/Rechstaat and special legal protection of minorities, as these aspects of a political order serves as insurance against the risk of tyranny by the majority. Killing several empirical birds with the same analytical stone, so to speak - and resolving some of the tensions Scott and/or several commentators point out.
For example: You never know if you may end up in some identifiable minority yourself one day, which provides a majority with an insurance-motivation for accepting constitutional legal safeguards against suppressing present-day minorities.
When someone wins an election by campaigning on an issue and wins (especially if they win decisively) they will often claim they have a "mandate" from the people. Let's assume for a second that the issue really was salient to voters and they really had a reasonably formed opinion about it.
So say Ron DeSantis wins by 20 points and decides that he's going to pass universal school vouchers which was a big part of his campaign. He gets the legislature to vote overwhelmingly and then signs it.
Then the Florida Supreme Court comes along and says "no, public education is a fundamental human right and taking money out of the system like this violates that right. Also, some parents will use it to indoctrinate their children or become a public health menace." Or whatever. They strike the law down.
I think we would all consider that "undemocratic" and the members of the court that did that "unaccountable" if there was no way to remove them.
You can copy paste this onto literally any issue that you can think of. Maybe you prefer things to be undemocratic and unaccountable one some issues and not others, but you understand the principal.
Of course I could probably come up with some example where you would be sympathetic to the court. Maybe Adolf Hitler comes back from the grave, runs a successful political campaign and gets a lot of votes, and decides to do the things he did before. If the Supreme Court stopped him everyone would probably say they were doing their job. We would say that despite being an election he intended to end democracy, and despite the court not being accountable to the will of the people it's accountable to higher principles that are in the peoples best interest.
I just don't know if there is a way out of value judgements on all this stuff.
C.S.Lewis wrote on this subject in 'Screwtape proposes a toast'. From the point of view of a devil of course, so not to be taken without salt:
"Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you."
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."
You get quandaries like this when you're trying too hard to preserve the taxonomy of your heuristics. It's laudable to strive toward that sort of perfection, of course. Democracy and accountability are just ideas; what you're searching for is a tidy encapsulation of all their good qualities - the ultimate steelman.
Like I said, that's an admirable pursuit, but most of the time we've got to modify our heuristics to spec, accounting for things like scope. The answer turns out to be a lot of duct tape pretty often.
This is the best commentary I've read about the current situation in Israel. I just want to acknowledge that. Scott is the best at narrowing down and clarifying exactly what the important issues are - I'm going to be sharing this one with friends and family.
Though I agree fully, one correction: "I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad"" - Nothing "recent" about it, tale as old as democracy ("Pericles - democrat or tyrant"). In my looong life, "undemocratic" was always "bad". (or is it "has been" - English tenses have been fiendishly tricky, always).
Accountability is the opposite of independence, but it’s a Russell conjugation (“we must defend the independence of the civil service, whilst fighting unaccountable bureaucrats”). It’s also a two-place predicate (“accountable to whom?”). Whether it’s good or not depends on what you’re talking about, but the arguments journalists, judges[?], or private individuals to be accountable to/dependent on the state should ring alarm bells for wanting to subvert democracy, whilst wanting congress to be unaccountable to/independent of the electorate would be an attempt to establish an oligarchy.
Democracy is government policy and/or the composition of the government matching the preferences of the population (you may need to insert some caveats about causation to avoid Gettier-casing popular dictatorships). Only a tiny fringe of people want to ban private charity, so banning private charity would be undemocratic. The alternative is, “most people would think your tie’s pretty ugly, so you wearing it is an attack on democracy.”
I don't think there is an issue with a definition of "democracy" which considers state religion voted by the majority of people to more democratic than freedom of religion. The issue is only when we assume that "more democratic" automatically means "more liberal" and vice versa. Liberalism isn't the synonym for democracy. There can be illiberal democracies and liberal dictatorships (Ataturk Turkey is a good example, I think). Such are not very stable but possible.
Likewise, "more democratic" doesn't necessary mean "better". We often need to find compromise when more democracy and some other of our values. When we are talking about "liberty" in particular, I think a good heuristic is to side with more liberty for private things and with more democracy for public/political ones. The line isn't clear cut. but it doesn't have to be. The less something is private and more political the more reasonable it is to sacrifice liberty for democracy and vice versa.
I also don't think that talks about accountability should be reserved only for some people with very special powers. Obviously, great power requires great accountability. But it's a spectrum, we do not need to cut off all the accountability when the power is just moderate.
The goal is maximum human freedom, not maximum democracy. Institutions should be subject to the safeguard of democratic control when they have direct coercive power over people's lives: in descending order of importance, the state should have elections and plebiscites; employers should have unions and/or codetermination and/or a direct co-op structure; and Internet platforms should either have user input on codes of conduct and moderation decisions (Wikimedia is a great example) or a robust set of viable competitors allowing users to vote with their feet.
Regular charity isn't coercive and shouldn't be anyone else's business, but the Gates and Chan Zuckerberg and Soros foundations do "charity" at a scale where an individual gets to effectively set public policy with moderately coercive effects on researchers, farmers, students, etc. This should be addressed, perhaps by preventing individuals from accumulating billions of dollars.
Yeah the Athenians tried unlimited democracy for a bit, but this resulted in lots of people being exiled and some being killed for basically holding the wrong opinions. Then they had a tyrant or two and when they went back to democracy it was more limited.
Most democracies since then have learned that lesson. It's the reason for Franklin said "a republic" instead of "a democracy". It's also the reason your Constitution is mostly limits.
Aren't 'populist'/'popular' and 'anti-populist'/'unpopular' (or arguably Burkian?) exactly the denotations needed for discussing policies as opposed to governance structures?
[I'd have thought someone else would say this, so maybe I'm missing something?]
At any rate these bounds on uses for 'democratic' and 'accountable' both seem straightforwardly correct to me. 'Accountable' seems interesting in relation to 'responsible'. Accountability is one mechanism of enforcing responsibility, maybe, with responsibility the actual end-value? Certainly, distinguishing means from ends helps clarify whether more of something is inherently desirable.
Here in Israel, we protestors have been fighting tooth and nail to keep our independent judiciary; and we've been doing that under the banner of "democracy" (or rather "DE-MO-KRAT-YA!!"). This on the grounds that protection of individual rights and liberties is an integral part of the concept of democracy, and that without the Court we would have no such protection. I am saddened to read that you see that usage as "Orwellian".
I think it is also the case that democracy, in the sense of people choosing their leaders, cannot really be maintained together with totalitarianism. The same unchecked power that the government uses to control individual lives can also be used to modify the election rules in their favor, and to eliminate other checks and balances on their power. Hungary seems to be a good example here.
Finally, there's a more troubling question: how much can we weigh the voters' choice in the context of totalitarian rule? I thing the Chinese government is in fact very popular in China. Controlling how people think is just not that difficult if you're allowed to punish dissent. If there was a country where the government controls speech but allows free elections, the ruling party would usually win (as long as there's no major disaster that they can't cover up). Would you still call that "democracy"?
Alas, true as presented, but it depends on the most extreme definition of democracy - essentially mob rule democracy of the wolves voting to eat the sheep kind.
No country's democracy actually works like that. It's a bit of a straw man argument. The U.S. Constitution spends a lot of words delineating the branches of government and what their specific responsibilities and limitations are. Thanks to mostly Virginia slaveowners, who really, really cared about having a national government that couldn't interfere with their way of life, we have the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments). Edge cases and changing circumstances have yielded the rest of the Amendments.
The point is that the rule of law supersedes the rule of the mob in a functioning democracy. Of course if we elect a President and Congress who declare themselves above the rule of law....
With respect to "accountability" I would make a distinction between what the word used to mean, and what it has come to mean. The old fashioned sense is that it is having to live up to the terms of an agreement: you were hired to be the dog-catcher, and have you done exactly that in an effective way? If not, you will be replaced.
In other words, accountability judged behaviour in a specific performance-related way. But now it tends to mean not just policing behaviour, but thinking and how thoughts are expressed. We are perfectly comfortable with policing behaviour, from parental control to police departments. That's the price we agree to pay for living in a society rather than as loners. But we were free inside our own heads and were shocked by the idea of 'thoughtcrime' in 1948 (yes, I did mean 1948). The outward expression of thought, speech, is increasingly restricted on the grounds that it is not only offensive to say the wrong thing, but actually violent to do so.
Does anyone think there would be reluctance on the part of those who have bought into the new orthodoxy to restrict our thoughts if they could, to make us "accountable" for them? We already see elementary schools teaching politically orthodox views rather than the three 'R's.' We watch with a mixture of concern and horror as the mayor of London hires behavioural psychologists to design his latest campaign ("Maaate") to push behaviour and speech—thought will follow—in his desired direction. It is a perfect example of the new accountability, with any incorrect utterance to be immediately corrected by the disapproval. I don't mind my behaviour being policed, as it affects other people directly. I'm willing to tolerate the speech of others that I disagree with, as long as they give me the same tolerance. But I really don't like the idea that my thoughts are to be molded into acceptable forms via "accountability."
"TESCREAL ideologies tend to advance an illiberal agenda and authoritarian tendencies, and it’s worth turning a very critical eye towards them, especially in cases where that’s demonstrably true. Clearly there are countless well-meaning people trying to use technology and reason to improve the world, but that should never come at the expense of democratic, inclusive, fair, patient, and just governance."
(1) "Reich flirted with an argument that charitable donation is inherently undemocratic: people are allowed to donate money to whatever causes they personally want, instead of giving it to the government to be distributed via the elected government’s budgeting process."
Oddly enough, this was one of the things that got up my nose when I first heard about Effective Altruism. Not that they wanted to do charity, or even do charity right, but all the self-righteousness about "the common people just give their money to whatever tugs at their heart strings or their local church, they don't even consider what is the most effective use, they should be Said And Led by Us".
I won't say it was totalitarian/authoritarian, but it flirted with the edges of "if they won't be good of their own accord, they should be *made* to be good". And then in a few years time EA went off on their own little round of wasting money and getting involved peripherally with scandals. Well, looks like it's hard to be right, doesn't it?
(2) "But once people are supposed to be “accountable” for their personal lives and ordinary decisions, you’re being totalitarian again."
I disgree mildly with this; we *do* expect ordinary people to be accountable for their actions, hence laws about "no, you can't bop Steve over the noggin and take his stuff" or "no, if you're married to Jill, you can't go off and marry Jane at the same time" or "no, even if the megacorporations are really really rich, you can't stroll into a store, load up on goods, and walk out without paying, that is still stealing and no, it doesn't matter if they have insurance and expect theft anyway". Which leads into:
"I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
I disagree more strongly with this because (a) holding even criminals accountable gives them agency; they are people, who make choices and decisions, and can be reasoned with or appealed to and rehabilitated, with punishment as the last recourse for the incorrigible (b) "punishment" strips that away and now we have only things reacting to stimuli in Brownian motion and as GKC put it better than I ever could:
"That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, “Go and sin no more,” because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment."
Accountability yes, even if it leads to punishment; punishment on its own, no.
(3) I appreciate the distinction made between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Totalitariansim need not be authoritarian, and authoritarianism need not be totalitarian. I've been accused in comments elsewhere of being authoritarian, and it's not unfounded. I am aware of channeling my Inner Saruman, and I've had to fight hard against those instincts. Again, GKC puts the temptation wonderfully: this is beautiful and orderly and prosperous, but it's wrong - there's a worm in the apple (it's a long piece so I'll attach it to this in a separate reply).
It really is a hard struggle, and I don't think people without those instincts about "rules are good and I like rules because rules make it easy to know what to do and what to avoid" realise that.
(4) "Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary."
I think people toss about the terms "totalitarian, authoritarian, democratic, free, good, bad" too easily. It's true that people are polarised now, and are using these terms to bash one another over the head. "You're a totalitarian fascist nazi, I'm a democratic caring citizen".
"When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”.
I'm smiling a little at that, because way back when "politically correct" was the "woke" of its day, the people criticising/complaining about (and people did complain, sometimes unjustifiably, rather than criticise reasonably) PC were met with "all political correctness means is being polite, that's all" with the implication that surely everyone knows to be polite if they were raised properly. and if you're objecting than you just want the liberty to be rude and mean without consequences (the same way that "critical theory is not being taught in schools, but if it is, all critical theory means is teaching kids about slavery, why are you objecting to that?" gets a run out today).
I've also found that the word "democracy" functions more and more as an incantation. Democracies came about in the West as a system for elites to influence and change governments without resorting to force or constitutional crisis in countries which already had a fairly solid rule of law in place; for literally millennia, western societies lacked democratic arrangements but maintained the rule of law (to which even Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors bowed). The key term here is "rule of law." Without it, democracy is a sham and a Chavista shitshow, with oligarchies competing to see who is more effective in lying to peasants (see, as an example, pretty much every democracy in the developing world). Democracy is just a cherry on top of well organized societies with the the rule of law. So my proposal would be to stress "rule of law" much more than we stress "democracy." Another proposal: every time you are tempted to write "dictator," write "despot" instead. It's much more correct. A dictator is a temporary leader for an emergency, all the way from Roman times to Spain's Franco. I know that's not what Webster's says, you can blame semantic shift for that and many other terrible sins on language that make discussion more difficult. The right word is "despot."
"to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that,"
Here's where my cynical side kicks in: when they do it in a way *we* like, then it's democratic; when they do it in a way the other guys like, then they need to be abolished.
Accountability is interesting in terms of freedom. If you say something your subscribers don’t like and they all unsubscribe are you being canceled? If being canceled a violation of your right to free speech?
If you own a wedding cake bakery and you make some offensive statement that alienates your potential customers, are you being canceled? Are your rights v being violated?
Note that the most famous early democracy, in Athens, was kinda totalitarian, in that the assembly could vote Socrates to death for basically having unpopular ideas.
Today's “democracies” aren't democracies in that sense; they're democratic republics. The democratic part is about how we choose the politicians who run it.
Confusing elections with democracy is a part of the problem. The Holy Roman Empire had an elective monarchy. That it was elective doesn't make it democratic. According to Aristotle, only what we now call "direct democracy" is democracy.
In Aristotelian philosophy, what we have now in most of the world would be elective aristocracy, since we choose a few select group of people we suppose are the most suited to held power.
I think the problem of "accountability" you are describing is what Nassim Taleb refers to as Skin in the Game. As a legal principle, it should be clearly stated and applied case by case in the constitution, code laws such as trade code, civil code and so on. I think the civil law system is much more suited to apply it than the common law system.
And in the specific case of the USA, the difficulty to rewrite or greatly ammend the Constitution coupled with the virtual control of the Suprem Court over it makes it more difficult to update it democratically.
If some dude was running around the streets of my town shooting people, I would not say it's "undemocratic" that he has chosen for citizens to be dead without it having been voted upon as a society. But the social contract from which gov't derives its legitimacy requires it to stop malicious actors, and if it doesn't it loses that legitimacy. The gov't has a quasi-monopoly on the socially acceptable use of force, and society votes on what private uses of force are and aren't allowed, and we only accept this because basic defense of the citizenry is a foundational obligation not up for debate.
I think AI presents the same problem. A bunch of tech dudes are out there working on a doomsday device that is going to kill and/or enslave every citizen, it's the government's job to defend us against that, to send SWAT teams into the AI developers' offices and server farms and start smashing and de-gaussing everything in sight, just as MI6 would dispatch James Bond to demolish the villain's secret underground lair. The problem with Drax's newly-invented nerve agent that will wipe out Earth's population to be replaced with his genetically superior moon colonists isn't that we didn't get to vote on this new technology.
The only reason to call it "undemocratic" is if you're trying to persuade a center-left normie and need to speak to them in the language of CNN Panel-ese. "AI is like the January 6th rioters" might be the secret code to getting something done about it.
On "accountability", I worked for many years at a county-level elected office, and people were constantly getting upset when they didn't like that official's decision, and would demand to speak to his boss. They could not wrap their heads around the fact he didn't have one, they really conceive of government as some giant single corporation where everybody except Joe Biden can be told what to do. It never occurred to them that elections were accountability, or that oaths of office were accountability-- y'know, all that "democracy" stuff.
I think accountability is a useful concept for private actors, it just looks different.
All of our actions have externalities. They have costs and benefits that accrue to people besides ourselves, even when they are not outright crimes. Society should have some mechanisms for evaluating them.
For example, in my judgment, the current trend of environmental protests that involve blocking roads and defacing works of art are harmful and counterproductive to their causes, though I could be wrong. But it does seem that a healthy society would be able to challenge those who organize such stunts and in some sense hold them "accountable" for whether these actions are having their intended effect.
Private actors should probably have a longer leash than government actors. MLK's activism would survive such an investigation, but maybe it wouldn't be so clear early on (particularly since the goal of such actions is to move public opinion). And I am finding the current trend of government officials declaring themselves above criticism to be maddening.
But I do think it's a useful concept even for private actions, even if it has been a but overused.
If you read the book "The Problem of Political Authority" by Michael Huemer the confusion around these words becomes clear
We ascribe a special moral authority to the state, state actors are allowed to do things that ordinary people can't do - why can't I hold you accountable the same way? I demand you show me your order books, report to me to get permissions etc. In fact these processes exist in voluntary businesses transactions all the time, yet for some reason we think if governments say "we say this is how it has to be" that is somehow justified - we do this because we implicitly assume we confer these special rights to a sovereign through some kind of process (e.g. democracy, social contract)
The longhouse is a kind of democracy I suppose. I mean, I think you’re getting at the public-private distinction, which itself can be democratically decided. I agree with you that some people have a bad and inflated sense of what should be public and insufficient appreciation for the private. But they’re just wrong, not undemocratic. I get that people in favor a greater private sphere want to define a kind of minimalist private bundle as predicate to true democracy, thereby calling some private bubble to be “democracy.” Something like, free speech is “democratic” even when minoritarian because we can have a meaningfully democratic decision without it. But you can turn that logic around and say, free abortions are “democratic” even if unpopular because they enable meaningful female participation in democracy. Which I suppose is find, but we haven’t clarified anything we’ve just moved the issue to what public policies or private space we see as sufficiently necessary to what we as meaningful democracy.
The best example of democracy outside the political sphere is gang rape. If, say, 80% of participants believe the activity should continue, then not only is it moral and correct (according to the worldview that democracy is good), but also opposing or resisting is immoral.
It was a mistake to replace one tyrant 3000 miles away for 3000 tyrants one mile away.
This is an important point, that helps clarify what people (should) mean when they say "we're a Republic, not a Democracy!" But I've also noted, empirically, that people who are very attached to that slogan are also very interested in replacing civil service protections with a greater role for political appointments, so that democratically elected leaders can root out the "deep state". It's interesting that protection against democracy seems to be something that people across the political spectrum are all committed to in some places but not others.
I think there's also an interesting question to be raised about whether "democracy" needs to occur through elections, or whether sortition (i.e., randomly calling people up for government duty, like in juries) should count as "democratic" in just the same way (after all, it still makes government subject to the will of the people - in fact, even more directly in many cases).
In theory, these are significant problems with democracy and accountability, but in practice, those problems are strawmen used by people who want special (usually partisan or ideological) exemptions from both. Democracies are capable of collectively deciding on the degree of individual freedom they grant, and historically have made choices in a reasonable range, though not always in the range that, say, radical libertarians or radical socialists consider acceptable. (Hence their antipathy towards democracy when it interferes with their goals--although not when it supports their goals, of course.) People with more mainstream views often also see restrictions on democracy (judicial review, for example) as a healthy counterweight to what they view as the dangers of excessive democracy; such people are invariably the first to scream, "tyranny!" when those same counterweights end up weighing against their own preferences.
"Accountability" is a bit trickier, because it's so vague as to be meaningless unless a specific monitor is identified. ("Democracy" can arguably be defined as "accountability to the voting public", for example.) In practice, though, the intended monitor is almost always obvious, and the real argument is about whether that monitor is appropriate, while those who use the term generically are implicitly thinking of themselves and their friends and allies as accountable to no one, and everybody else as accountable to them.
I feel like I agree in principle with the sentiment that, if "democratic" means "rule by the people" or "the final arbiter of authority over a jurisdiction should be the residents/citizens/whatever of the territory," I love how "democratic" it is to circumvent the Congressional appropriations process with charitable giving. I think the tax exemption for charities, in this perspective, is actually brilliant. So I'll give the example when that makes me nervous:
It really weird me out when scientists do things like, "we know that any technologically superior alien species must be peaceful, so let's broadcast our position in the galaxy as broadly as possible so they can find us." (https://xkcd.com/1377/) Or, "We're just going to solve climate change by spraying the upper atmosphere with sulphur[, probably plunging the whole planet into an ice age considering how badly we understand climate models." [Quote modified to illustrate out how sill I think this idea is] (https://gizmodo.com/make-sunsets-solar-geoengineering-sulfur-climate-change-1849931460) That's definitely a problem. Maybe some theory involving non-ergodicity and the possibility of large-scale ruin needs to be made formal? Like, "Sexual pairings are your own business (provided it's consensual)" or "You should be able to practice your religion (except if it involves sacrificing people)". We could have, "You should be free to pursue your objectives and goals in competition with others (except if it's literally going to end the world)." (I'm not saying AI will, but I understand the problem if people think it would)
Totalitarianism is seen as the opposite of democracy as it prohibits opposition parties. Very weird argument. Government is decentralized so it makes sense for certain things to be part of govt. Democracy has to do with giving people power to deliberate and is a good thing (and again is the opposite of totalitarianism).
"When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”. Here it’s painfully obvious that “accountability” is opposed to people retaining ownership of their own output, to them working for themselves instead of a megacorporation, and to them keeping control of their own lives. A society where every writer has “accountability” is totalitarian - or, if you don’t like that word for something that might lock in merely corporate rather than government control, at least it would lack a flourishing private sphere.""
It should be abundantly obvious by now that many civil libertarians turned into totalitarians the moment they got the whip hand.
As taught by Weber: "A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." So the most appropriate definition of "democracy" would be:
- A state where (almost) all adults can vote on which people get to authorize the dispensation of physical force.
This doesn't tell us what uses of government force are legitimate, i.e. it doesn't tell us whether or not using the power of the state is acceptable to restrict the number of available religions. But as long as a legitimate vote is held deciding who gets to authorize violence on behalf of the government, the nation can be considered democratic. Anything beyond that is a political question and has little to do with "democracy" per se.
I think to some extent "accountability" is a word that's become kind of a stand-in for the desire to punish people for engaging in behavior that is deemed not to be pro-social. As Arnold Kling likes to point out, people have a strong desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors (ie, reward pro-social behavior and punish those deemed...not pro-social, since anti-social doesn't seem like quite the right word here). There are good historical reasons this instinct exists, but there's also a mob mentality lurking not so far in the background here, which is, um...generally not so laudable. As such, I share Scott's reservations about its use and perception as generically good.
Complicated situations almost never have a simple optimum. I strongly feel that PARTS of government should be democratic...and other parts not, at least in the short term. Perhaps all of government should be democratic in a multi-decadal time-frame.
OTOH, when circumstances change, adaptations are needed. How should they be done? One can guarantee that only some people will see the problem...and one can nearly guarantee that those people will not agree on the proper solution.
For a specific example, social media is fracturing society, because fostering "engagement" is profitable, and the easiest way to foster engagement is to treat important topics as sporting contests. The news doesn't help with it's "tell both sides of the story" attitude to whether the sun will rise tomorrow, but social media is where the real push comes from. But who would you trust to fix the problem? The first amendment is pretty clear, and it clearly needs to be changed if you're going to address this through government. (I think that the change is that corporations should not have the RIGHT to free speech. And that those who are paid to speak on behalf of a corporate sponsor should be required to ensure that the listener was aware of who their sponsor was. But I don't think our current legal system could be altered in that direction. It clearly bends in the opposite direction.)
So though I think of myself as relatively libertarian (small "l"), I'm not opposed to some regulations to ensure certain kinds of accountability. And I'm pretty sure that our society (as a mass entity rather than as individuals) does not agree with me.
"It might sound like I’m arguing that it’s okay for small things like your private life to stay undemocratic and unaccountable, it’s only big things that change society which should be subjected to democratic scrutiny. I’m not sure I believe this." Well, I sure hope not.
This reminds me of a relevant passage from C. S. Lewis. In 1959 he published the essay "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in the Saturday Evening Post. It was a sequel of sorts to his famous "Screwtape Letters" and has Screwtape giving a speech to a graduating class of devils. In it Screwtape addresses the proper diabolical use of the word "democratic":
"Thanks to Our Father Below, the threat (of liberal democracy) was averted. Our counterattack was on two levels. On the deepest level our leaders contrived to call into full life an element which had been implicit in the movement from its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
"Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.
"Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
"You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate."
ASI is supposed to rule the whole world someday, if I understand correctly. AI development is a path toward a new government, and that will be the effective constitution of the world for a long time, maybe for the remainder of human existence. If anyone should be accountable to the people, I would think it would be the government. So at some point, the development of AI should become accountable to outside interests (outside of its developers). The stakes are higher here than with Orwell, King, or Gates.
Democracy is at its core a populist idea that can be implemented in such a way that can be self-defeating. Illiberal democracies are a good example of that. The Founders Fathers understood this which is way they saw democracy as a means, not an end by itself. The goal was the decentralization of power to prevent tyrannies. As long that's the premise, democracy can be implemented in a good way to achieve that purpose.
I think people conflate government and society. For example, thinking that the Constitution (or at least the principles behind it) tell us that we should have a religiously-neutral society, and keep religion to our private lives.
I've never been able to come up with a good analogy but I think a government is something a society has, not a way of being a society.
This really suffers from lack of steelman and lack of conceptual clarity. The points many make about "liberal democracy" are exactly on point. The contrast is not between democracy and totalitarianism. You can have democracies that are totalitarian or authoritarian or whatever. Democracy refers to the extent to which those who are governed have some say in who those are who govern or what laws are authorized. The scope of that democracy can be relatively unlimited, which may lead to totalitarianism, or it can be limited, by a constitution, a monarchy, or even just by tradition.
That some clowns day democracry means that philanthropists should be restricted in what they can do with the money is a strawman argument. There are always clowns arguing this or that; they can and should be ignored.
The problem is you're treating "democratic" as if it's a meaningful word. It isn't. It's just a another word that means 'liberal'.
This is exactly why the word 'populist' exists as a pejorative, and why things that have no obvious connection to popular will or electoral politics are frequently called 'democratic'. 'Populism' is essentially when an elected politician implements or talks about an issue that has large scale public support but which isn't liberal, even though this is far more 'democratic' in the traditional sense of the word than most of what gets called 'democratic'.
Re: “hold criminals accountable for actions”. To me this still is a consistent usage of “accountable”, if framed as:
All human beings are vested with authority to be free within the laws of the land.
Perhaps awkward in the sense that it defines freedom as a special right, rather than a natural state of being; but I feel this better maps to my intuition.
"I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way" -- I assume this is a direct reference to https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ : "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy"
If people claim to be acting in accordance to some ideal, they should be held accountable to the standards of that ideal, otherwise they are wrongly gaining status which is rightly associated with the ideal.
I find footnote 3 to be the right way to think about democratic government. I think the word "democratic" is usually used to mean representative democracy (which fit with footnote 3) and refer to the government - but we could certainly also consider if other parts of society is democratic - for example, corporations are seldom very democratic, yet they can hold a lot of power. Billionaires donating to charity is certainly a less democratic process compared to taxation and government spending on wellfare (given that the governement acts in the interest of voter). Functional government can and should regulate individuals and corporations to a reasonable extent and put checks on their power. A functional government should act in the interest of the general public, and balance interest of different groups. How much regulation? That is really a very difficult question, and ideally it would be up to the voters to pick the party most aligned with their interest.
What is needed in all this is balance - any extreme will lead to bad outcomes.
Agree with the broad strokes but disagree with the details. The idea that every person's individual actions should be subject to popular vote is both on the rise and obviously horrific.
But the concept of individual accountability even for things like "saying or believing the wrong things" clearly has a place in society. Societies should have values and ideas/actions that fall outside those values (and even if you don't agree with "should" there it doesn't matter - they do). People who transgress against those values will have that transgression held against them. Not allowing that to happen requires much more totalitarianism than just accepting that it does. Because often the "accountability" is enforced by people acting freely.
PS one thing we should consider holding substack accountable for is it's crappy commenting infrastructure
A democracy is just a society where decisions are made democratically. This includes the decision as to whether one should have freedom of religion or have a mandated state religion. Both societies, as long the decision re policy on religion is a democratic one, are perfect democracies. There is no contradiction there.
The examples of charitable donations and AI development, where terms like "undemocratic" are used but shouldn't be sufficient to win the claims of their arguments, are nonetheless legitimate cases where a person could reasonably believe that individuals or small groups have too much power that is unchecked by collective decision making. Maybe the term "undemocratic" is a bit subpar, but at least it's a concise way for those people to explain they believe that more government oversight would be an improvement. The term "less democratic" might be an improvement since it is less absolute, and certainly it should be combined with a more thorough argument about why more "democracy" in those cases would outweigh the trade-offs.
To be charitable to what I think the other Robert Reich meant, there are certain things a private citizen can do that will affect the lives of thousands of other citizen. There are benign ones like writing a book or making YouTube videos about volcanoes. But there are also things like polluting the air, enforcing the law, and declaring war. If we imagine Elon musk amassing a private army and declaring war on another country, there is a sense in which it’s undemocratic, because somebody acted unilaterally, instead of our elected representatives voting on it, and a sense in which he’s unaccountable, because we can’t vote him out of office. The same goes for vigilante justice, etc. I worry the continuum between freedom and totalitarianism is too simple a model to capture these nuances. We’d need a model in which it’s absolutely totalitarianism to mandate a state religion or ban books, but in which it’s democratic - and not in the totalitarian sense - that only elected representatives can declare war or found a police department.
People doing stuff with money (such as donating to charity, or anything, really) is democratic in so far as people have roughly the same amount of money. It's voting with the pocketbook, instead of the ballot.
Doing stuff with money becomes less and less democratic as wealth becomes more unequal, especially as corporations control vast resources controlled by tiny groups (essentially the board and CEO).
There's something 'democratic' in every citizen getting $1000 to give to any charity they personally want; the resulting distribution of resources closely matches the desires of the population, which seems like a good description of what democracy is about.
But when there are like 12 billionaires who have all the disposable income in the entire country, and what charities get funded is almost entirely a reflection of those 12 people's values and priorities and interests, then it becomes a lot clearer why the term 'undemocratic' is appropriate.
It doesn't really matter if the distribution of charitable funds is based on the personal whims of 12 totalitarian government officials, or 12 ultra-rich people who control most of the economy; the average person is equally unrepresented either way, it's therefore equally undemocratic either way.
Scott, you mistake the core problem and dissemble, your arguments are non-sequitur.
As a result, this shares more in common with propaganda pieces to rabble-rouse than something written for rational discourse. I'd suggest you return to rational thinking and logic instead of relying on sophistry to make a point. Critical theory cannot be used to prove anything, it amounts to whining and destructionism.
Earlier in the 20th century, any rational person knew that to make a rational point that would be accepted by rational people, you don't create new words; but instead you use commonly understood words with common definitions/shared meaning, to get your point across.
The only effective use of redefining words to less understood words, or appropriating existing words with opposite definitions is for lying and deception. Irrationality, destructionism, corruption, and deceit/loss. The only reason you do this is if you are trying to lie or deceive and cause some loss or harm. Its not accepted by rational people, and rationality is the only reason we've been able to build civilization up to the point we're current at.
Mises had quite a bit to say about that type of corruption of language if you read between the lines of what he had to say in his published works, which btw thoroughly refute socialism. Falsity and the cult of false beliefs is rampant because of indoctrination, usually from a young age. Few go back and critically evaluate those instilled beliefs which were accepted prior to the age of reason.
Robert Lifton explains some of the psychological grooming process from the historical perspective of a PoW in Mao's first revolution. They use sapir-whorf and distorted reflected appraisal to its fullest effect (inherent weaknesses in all humanity).
These techniques have only become more sophisticated today (i.e. this account was documented in the 50s iirc), often without needing the isolating components to drive people crazy, or break them into compliance. All that's necessary is sufficient interference in an individuals life in a small set of categories. USMC University has a book on Political Warfare which touches on this subject matter.
Similar techniques are being used in K12 schools under social emotional learning frameworks, and in the workplace under DEI frameworks to promote critical theory (and your article does to).
Please educate yourself so you don't inadvertently push false narratives as true.
Totalism is just another face of what's being pushed in its flavors of socialism these days, and its being pushed regardless of the fact that economic calculation hasn't been solved for those systems; hence its destructionism as Mises calls it, under the false belief of the masses that they are marking things better, while the leaders actually in-effect promote behavior towards destruction and slavery (in its many forms).
It comes down to proper education, very few people receive a classical education that would let you recognize the inherent and structural issues in what you have written. Most never take college Philosophy; such as logic or ethics. Please educate and reform your arguments so you don't mislead others.
I hate being the Objectivist bore here but - yes, this is exactly what Rand was warning about 40+ years ago. Democracy is the rule of the majority, the system that executed Socrates. And the demand to hold heroic and interesting people "accountable" is straight out of "Atlas Shrugged". Seriously, go read the fictional newsstorues by "Bertram Scudder"
A government that is forced to choose a state religion say by some unchangeable constitution is less powerful than a government that can enforce a state religion if it sees fit, and not enforce one if it decides otherwise.
Sitting back and not interfering with peoples lives is one of the choices a democratically elected government can make, and quite a popular choice at that.
If people vote for a totalitarian party who controls every aspect of their lives, they get it. If people vote for a libertarian party who does absolutely nothing, they get it. In either case the system is democratic. "How much should the government interfere" is another parameter to be set by the mechanism of democracy.
Charitable donations aren't undemocratic, because the democratic government chooses to allow them.
I popped in just because I was deathly curious to see how the ACT audience reacts to this article.
And I must say, I am impressed. It seems the PMC-led nonsense going on regarding "accountability" and "democracy" - which is really just thinly disguised agendas - is not shared by the majority of the commenters.
The other interesting part is the amount of space devoted to discussion of libertarian views. I have always found the entire field to be ludicrous - I continue to believe that libertarianism is entirely a product of the ahistoricity (is that a word?) and experiences of Americans, promulgated into the young and naive in other parts of the world but nonetheless a contradictory and inconsistent grouping of thinktank puffery.
Fortunately the US doesn't have a pure Democracy, it's constrained by a number of structural features, checks and balances between branches of the Fed gov., semi-sovereign states, the Bill of Rights, etc. The Republican system of representation is also intended as a check on mob rule.
No one wants a government that follows any policy that happens to be popular in the moment. What we want is a government whose policies track the long-term self interest of as many members of society as practically possible.
BUT
If we have to err, err on the side of mob rule rather than authoritarian oppression. The mob will go away in a very little while, when something else distracts it. Authoritarian regimes are much harder to get rid of than they are to get started.
Accountability is a term we should use when we talk about holding people to participate in an *accounting* for their actions. It's about requiring them to state what they did, why they did it, what they thought the outcomes would be, and what the actual outcomes were, in dialogue with other perspectives about the same events.
Then, once there is an account, other mechanisms can decide whether there should be consequences or what those consequences should be. Or if there should be consequences for refusing to participate in the accounting, etc.
What if instead of either the current system for allocation charitable donations or the system where the plan approved by majority vote is implemented, each person got to choose the allocation of an equal contribution of the total societal charitable giving. This would arguably be "maximally democratic" in the sense that each person has an equal say in the outcome, but would not be especially totalitarian.
This is a point I had to repeatedly clarify when talking about the Israeli judicial reforms.
Many of my right wing friends were making the claim that the unelected judiciary being able to nullify laws (ie judicial supremacy) is undemocratic and the democratically elected knesset should be able to overrule it.
I countered that while technically correct you don't want a plain democracy, you want a liberal democracy (defined as a democracy where certain individual rights are protected against the state and the majority). For example, there is nothing undemocratic about a country passing a law that prohibits blacks from appearing in public if the majority are in favor of such a thing. So a court which can declare a law unconstitutional is the upholder of the liberalism of a state, not the democracy of the state.
It explains how countries which are ostensibly democratic display "democratic backsliding" without changing any rights to vote. "Democratic backsliding" almost always means the degrading of personal liberty rather than the degradation of the right to vote
I think a lot of people who are upset about this post are upset because democracy is their tribe's "yeay" word. There is a contingent that wants to claim democracy as their own, so they get upset at having to be exposed to facts like that real democracy means Texans don't have to house every sob story from central America and teachers can't tell 4th graders about their piss orgies in graphic detail.
Is it just me or has there been an uptick in low value culture war insertions under recent posts? It’s gotten to the point where I am less excited than I once was to read the comment section. Would be very interested in other opinions on this, and especially Scott’s, of course.
All quite valid, and shows the questions swirling around the current phrase "illiberal democracy". But ... isn't all of this encapsulated in the phrase "tyranny of the majority"? And given that concept and associated debates were current well before the US Constitution, were actively debated during the writing of the US Constitution, were critical motivation for the US federal Bill of Rights, were mentioned in "Democracy in America", ... and discussed in the civics classes of US high schools ... are there Americans who are unclear on this concept?
Reich's rhetoric is very odd. If having a representative that I may have voted against, or a legislature that may go against my representative, decide how my charity budget is spent is more democratic than letting me decide, what does “democratic” mean? Somehow the people are no longer the people when they decide directly? I guess democracy can only be about collectives, not individuals? But why?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where 'democracy' is not a code-word for anal sex and 'election integrity' is not a code-phrase for MIGA." - Martin Luther King Jr.
The days, "democratic" just means "good for the Democratic Party." For example, the US Supreme Court is currently "undemocratic" because Democrats are in the minority on it but hold the Presidency. Meanwhile, the Israeli Supreme Court is "democratic" because Netanyahu's Republican-allied coalition holds a majority in the legislature but not on the Supreme Court. A decade from now those facts could be reversed and then the US Supreme Court will be designated as "democratic" and the Israeli Supreme Court as "undemocratic" and few will remember that it was ever different.
As Stalin said, all that matters in politics is Who? Whom?
This is an important post, and one more hint about Scott moving more and more away from current Democratic POV (or is it the opposite?).
I am from Europe, and the issue is the same here: There is a clear move from a liberty-focussed democracy to a protection-focussed democracy.
This is a long term trend, fueled mainly I think by the growth of TV media, the loss of faith in technical/standard-of-living progress and population aging. Provide a constant stream of immediate news about issues to a aging population more fearful and concerned on protecting what it earned than earning new things, lose the tech and science is an open frontier and manking will go the stars idea of the sixties and seventies, and you push for more protections thus more regulation. This push will not be resisted by the legal and judicial branches of governments, this is their purpose and reason to exist in the first place. regulating internal citizen stuff is also the easiest way for the executive, far easier than international and economic affair where it faces strong competitors (big firms or other nations).
Lately this already strong tendency has been kicked into overdrive by social media that live on outrage. Basically making the old town gossip into society shaping force.
This resulted into an ever growing over regulation, over judicialization of the developed world (not only western), the more old, the more rich, and the more female-influenced the worst.
Frankly, this has reached a tipping point imho, where you have a very unrestful young male population that indeed has objective reasons to get angry, and the others that while they benefit, are also strangled by legal overload. Basically everyone is doing illegal stuff (a direct consequence of overegulation) so your existence become insecure (even when regulations were supposed to make it more secure).
So there is a strong need for a peaceful way to remove and simplify laws. A problem imho, bacause historically the process has rarely been peaceful.
It sounds like you're conflating 'democracy' and 'representative democracy'.
>I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government
The problem with this is that a perfectly democratic society by this application could also include a world where megacorporations control every facet of our lives, a corporate tyranny would be "democratic" then.
Accountable is fixable if you just also include who they are accountable too. Should the writers be accountable to the censorship office? Randos on X? Your friend group? Awards groups not giving them prizes?
Having shared moral standards and penalties for violating those standards is a basic building block of human groups. To be specific, of course someone should be held accountable for spreading fascist ideas at a time when about 1/3rd of the US is ready to support a fascist dictator. Of course COVID misinfo should be removed when it results in the deaths of 100's of thousands. Figuring out where to draw the line between truly dangerous and destructive ideas is constantly in flux based on the Democratic choices we make as a society. The alternative is letting groups with a flexible relationship to reality define it for the rest of us.
It's an interesting context switch reading things from the 1700s where everyone begins with, "ok yes of course democracy is bad with well known problems but here's how a bit of it could work." And we've rightly peeled back some of the limits founders placed on it in the US, but a slide to infinite democracy means accepting all the harms that were well documented since roughly Plato.
A law that makes the first 10% of people alphabetically pay all taxes and surrender all land and perform all compulsory service might be overwhelmingly democratic. While an absurd example, many failure modes of democracy have this character.
So we want a system that, to a first order, lets the 51% have their way, but while doing so, protects the rights of small groups. But also, some people, say serial killers, drunk drivers, belong to small groups it's a good idea to suppress, to varying degrees.
So first order, 51% get to decide, second order, small political groups don't get to dictate policy but have some protections, but third order, these protections don't extend to every small line around groups you could conceivably draw. Easy, done.
But then... what is a legitimate law that might burden some small groups? What if some law really just comes down to a choice between shifting economic power between boilermakers or steelmakers, who should get to say, whichever industry is currently more numerous?
And what small groups have politically legitimate interests such that they deserve protection? Governments often give money to stadiums or fine arts. Suppose people don't like sports and/or fine arts object that they are being put upon by the majority. Should people who prefer books or bars or pickleball or staring at grass receive a supermajoritarian protection to make their case, or should they just have to get in line and argue it out like everybody else?
After long enough at this game you get down into the real questions like, should the Supreme Court have a strong norm for stare decisis or a strong norm for making the best decision it can in the moment?
These questions are all nontrivial of course. It's a marvel any government works at all.
>Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.
Calling it Orwellian is apt, but I don't think it's a uniquely recent trend (though it might very well be getting worse).
Orwell himself (Politics and the English Language, 1946):
"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
I'm trying to craft your argument against a referendum on AI in syllogistic form and I'm having a heck of a time getting it to make sense. Please won't you show us how it's done?
Scott, can we just decide the word totalitarian is too vague to be useful? Same with authoritarian. I use value judgement words like "brutal, nasty busybodies" for regimes I hate. It feels more straightforward and self-honest.
I find it incredibly painful that you, with all your brilliance and a million important topics to address, should even have to write/explain this. It’s a sign of how far we have fallen from the concept of inalienable human rights.
If someone has to whisper that totalitarianism is just around the corner - well, guess what: it’s already here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
It seems useful to distinguish between the adjectives "liberal" and "democratic," as the two are sometimes conflated. Forcing the minority to follow the religion of the majority, per the wishes of the majority, is democratic and illiberal. This usage allows the terms to simply be descriptive without being value judgements. In this way, they can be used relatively consistently by people of different values.
>I think the word “accountable” should be reserved for people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them
This, however, seems like an unwieldy redefinition that is not at all consistent with common usage. People frequently refer to "personal accountability," using it basically synonymously with "personal responsibility."
It seems like the stated objection to the term "accountable" should also apply to the terms "responsible" and "responsibility."
Now I see that you alluded to this point in stating:
> I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
Other commenters note that the common denominator is people with power over others. The criminals are held accountable when they use their physical power to victimize others.
But fundamentally, (as Reich is very much aware) all actions that have an affect are "powerful." Defining "accountable" in terms of power that one has over others, doesn't preclude the application to things like private speech. Those who apply it there could say that more power may be vested in a blogger, than in some minor political figure.
Ultimately, I think the issue is that people disagree about what people's responsibilities are and who should hold them to account. But I don't see this being resolvable semantically.
Just as people disagree about e.g. whether "good parenting" requires parents to abstain from corporal punishment or to engage in it, but the semantic ambiguity is just an underlying value disagreement, and wouldn't be resolved by some declaration that "good parenting" means one or the other.
I largely agree. But I have a slightly different hypothesis in that, instead of misdefining democracy, totalitarians (namely those in America) are using the word--however defined--as a weapon by claiming that everything with which they disagree is an existential threat to it, democracy. Under that approach, the populace need not know what democracy is just that it is good and the other thing, whatever that might be, is bad. This type of malware is much easier to install, as it preys on ignorance and panic. Thus once installed, it is also very difficult to remove.
Remember when Scott would steelman an argument before disagreeing with it? That was a good rule.
When you write and publish stuff online (particularly under your own name, including venerable exceptions like "Scott Alexander"), you're always 100% accountable, because people can and will stop reading you the instant you stop being interesting.
Democracy by itself is nothing special for the reasons you gave in the article. As the old saying goes, it's just two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. What we should value is LIBERAL democracy, because only this protects the rights and freedoms of everyone, including minorities.
Ultimately, the best liberal democracy is a minimal one in the sense that it allows the most individuals to chose their own path without requiring these individual personal choices to be submitted for voter denial or approval.
Where I struggle:
1. I encounter libertarians who want a constitution that strongly limits government or insist that the US constitution actually does limit government in ways that would make most of modern government illegal. They are saying that the population can vote a non-libertarian into power, but that leader would have no ability to do anything non-libertarian. This strikes me as undemocratic!
2. I have a hard time saying the US is undemocratic (or less democratic) because a majority cannot impose a state religion.
I struggle to reconcile 1 and 2. Thoughts from the crowd?
My only thought is that functioning democracies require freedom of conscience for the mechanics of democracy to work. If the government can arrest people for wrongthink, it can solidify power forever, so for democracy to survive long-term there have to be certain things (particularly related to freedom of speech and assembly) that the majority don't abrogate. Religion sort of falls under this banner.
Re MLK: read Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Very specific steps that lead up to civil disobedience including the willingness to accept punishment (jail); in other words being accountable.
I think you may have missed the point on charity being undemocratic. The criticism is not that donating to charity itself is undemocratic; the criticism is that the government effectively pays a third to up to half of every charitable donation through tax deductions, and that is undemocratic because it’s allowing private citizens, overwhelmingly very wealthy ones, to individually determine how the government should spend its money, generally in line with their own priorities and not the ones government would choose. If there were no tax deduction for charitable donations (as there isn’t in many countries), this argument would go away. As such, it’s an argument against the deduction, not against charitable donation.
I think you've labored harder than necessary to get to what seems a straightforward definition of orthogonal axes: totalitarian vs. liberal is about *how much* the government gets to decide about people's lives, and democracy is about *how* the government makes the decisions it is allowed to make.
Israel is currently giving a good lesson regarding your footnote 2; the proponents of the legislation to weaken the judiciary argue (accurately) that they are just making the country more democratic, finessing the fact that too much democracy is bad (tyranny of the majority, Madison's Senate as a "necessary fence" against "fickleness and passion", etc.)
The way you are using the term, I also don't think accountability should be limited to the case of a person who is vested with specific powers *by other people*. Parents are very accountable to their children before the children are capable of vesting anything. And to a certain extent people are accountable to other people generally. Not about everything, but in the sense that they are *not* free to do whatever they want without concern for the consequences to others.
Although, some use accountability more narrowly. The better term here could be *responsibility*, while accountability can focus specifically on a responsibility to *explain the reason for your actions". While I think people have some level of responsibility to other people, I don't think they have anywhere near as much accountability. As long as you aren't hurting anyone, you don't have to explain yourself. https://culture.io/resources/responsibility-vs-accountability/
There's some sort of relationship between these ideas and what NIMBY-esque community meetings with a lot of veto points on new building.
“Democracy” became the word used by nearly everyone in the mass media for statements and debates about not only governance, but as shorthand for the end goals of governance. That was a significant error that has not been corrected, yet.
Democracy is not an unalloyed set of virtues, it’s a grouping of methods for governance. And it still appears to be the least bad method(s) for citizens of a state to choose as their method of governance.
The issue with using “Democracy” as an alias for the _actual_ end goals is: inarticulate debate that creates layers of confusion.
Life, Liberty, the pursuit of Happiness. These are shorthand terms for some rather solid end goals. Human flourishing is another.
Personally I tend to consider Liberty as the most important secular end goal, at least at the level of evaluating among different buckets of end goals.
I'd say `democracy' is basically a way to decide who gets to run the country without a civil war. As in `we could have a war to decide this, but a whole lot of us would die and the side with the most supporters would probably win, so lets just do a headcount and let the side with most supporters run the show, and skip the death and destruction bit.' That's valuable in itself, but it doesn't have to come bundled with liberalism (and liberalism doesn't have to come bundled with democracy).
Meanwhile, the idea behind liberalism is `if two wolves and a sheep are voting on what to have for dinner, it sure sucks to be the sheep. And you never know when political coalitions might shift leaving you the sheep, so lets put in some guardrails so that not being in the majority doesn't suck too hard.' This is also valuable. But to some extent it is in tension with democracy (e.g. unelected judges overruling elected legislatures).
Every democracy is democratic in its own way. You're on sturdier ground with your point about accountability meaning that someone has given you some special or specific authority or power.
"So either you should avoid defining “democratic” this way, or you should stop assuming that more democratic = better."
I'd go with the second. The only way to make sure more democratic is always better is to define it as such. And then something like "a monarchy is not democratic" becomes an opinion instead of a statement about how that form of government works.
A useful tool I have found in reading certain works on this topic: where it says "democracy", read "American". Or "America-friendly" if that scans.
Both words have the same problem with "being used as a synonym for 好 by Americans", and I find that making a substitution that relies on that tends to clarify what is actually being said.
I think the terminology we have simply doesn't cover all the variables, probably because it's advantageous to many proselytizers and would-be leaders if the terminology is thoroughly confused.
Let's set up 2 axes here:
- to what extent are people to be told what to do or not do, punished for disobeying, etc.?
- WHO decides what people will be required to do or not do?
When we're talking about democracy, we're really talking about who, not "how much".
Democracy - The People (TM) decide.
Theocracy - The Deity, decides.
Aristocracy, Oligarchy etc. - A limited group of especially powerful people decide
Dictatorship, (Absolute) Monarchy etc - The Leader, King etc. decides.
In most cases, authority gets delegated, with varying amounts of principle/agent issues. E.g. I've never seen a Theocracy where the deity expresses Its wishes independent of Its clergy.
Some democracies have traditions of leaving individuals free to decide many things for themselves. But it's still a "democracy" if we all vote on what each of us get to eat for breakfast, or even if our elected representatives delegate that decision to a civil service bureaucracy.
It's kind of similar with accountability, except more pluralistic. Assuming the government (TM) doesn't hold a monopoly on decisions, there will be things that have results not mediated by the government. If I post offensive drivel on substack, and literally no one wants to read it, I'm held accountable by having neither an audience nor a blogging income.
The language we need here would involve something like "limited government". Government can be limited because tight control is impractical. (Slow communications, lack of reliable surveillance). They can be limited because of checks and balances. (Sure, the King is absolute - until enough nobles get mad enough to rebel, or someone assassinates him) They can be limited because everyone agrees that certain things should be matters of individual conscience. (I fear this tends to be unstable.)
Except "government" isn't the right term. If 99% of the population agrees that certain behaviour justifies murder, all the government needs to do is keep out of the way. You need not have an official theocracy for apostasy to be violently hazardous to one's health.
At any rate, I think your discussion above would be more useful if you started with the meanings you intended, not the thoroughly overloaded terminology.
> You could, in theory, define “democratic” this way, so that the more areas of life are subjected to the control of a (democratically elected) government, the more democratic your society is. But in that case, the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism ... I first noticed this during a discussion with Rob Reich ...
It's worth noting that a great many classical political philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle on, noted that democracy has a tendency to devolve into tyranny due precisely to this dynamic, and that a non-democratic regime can therefore be more free for its citizens. This sounds paradoxical only if one conflates participation in government with freedom in non-government affairs.
The framers of the US Constitution were deeply distrustful of both undemocratic governments and democratic governments, and including both democratic and undemocratic elements in the structure of the U.S. government. America is the world's oldest democracy, but it's special sauce was a norm for respect for the individual (including a Bill of Rights) that set many areas of life aside from the purview of government.
When I say "accountable," I'm talking about having recourse if someone abuses my trust. But are there people besides public officials that we reasonably repose some trust in?
In the Puritan colonies in 1700s New England, people expected they could trust other people to share their religion, and reinforce their shared social norms of obedience to God. That shared norm gets you a very different "accountability": the accountability of the scarlet letter.
Today, nobody reasonable thinks they're entitled to that kind of deep social norm matching with their neighbors. But that's a statement about our society, not a permanent statement about morality.
In today's society, "accountability" is mostly about elected officials, because they're the ones who have trust they might just get away with abusing. Other societies have done things differently.
I'm amused to note that your set of representative non-freedoms you attribute to a totalitarian system were pretty much SOP for some or most classes in the Middle Ages.
"a society where the government controls every facet of life, including what religion you practice, who you marry, and what job you work at. In this society there would be no room for human freedom."
- Essentially everyone was required to be Catholic, and participate in Catholic rituals regularly.
- Noble heiresses married whoever the king told them to; this was generally a good source of royal/government income.
- Peasants' children were peasants, period. Nobles' heirs were assigned the job of a fighter, officer, courtier, landlord etc. (The latter could perhaps resign their title, and might get away with it if their alternate career was something deemed worthwhile, like religion. But religious careers were supposed to be assigned to younger sons. )
I don't think we can call any medieval country totalitarian - there wasn't anywhere near enough of a central government.
So I find the choice of examples here amusing.
I think "the most democratic possible society is totalitarianism" is literally true, in the sense that democracy is two wolves and a sheep making dinner plans – it just sounds off because the connotations of democracy are halfway between "government by majority vote" and "government that aggregates preferences in an ideal utility-maximizing way". "Not regulating x is undemocratic" connotes "I think regulating x would raise total utility, so not to do it would be a coordination failure"; "regulating x is totalitarian" connotes "I think regulating x would lower total utility, so to do it would be tyranny of the majority."
Democracy is a process. I happen to think it's a good one with positive moral foundations, but democracy isn't self-justifying and can be used immorally. That's why you still need a larger moral framework within which democracy operates.
>I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government; a government where the military can overrule elected officials is less democratic than one where they can’t. I would avoid using it for discussions of the size of government
This seems a little awkward and inconsistent with common usage. Such usage would imply that voters going to the polls to choose leaders is "democratic," while the same voters also voting on ballot measures is not "democratic."
Furthermore, it seems to clash with the preferred definition of "accountable." That definition states that:
>people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them (elected officials accountable to voters...
The "accountability" of elected officials to voters seems to refer to the former performing the will of the latter, although this is left undefined.
So if "democracy" includes the selection of the officials, and "accountability" demands that the officials follow the will of the people, and majoritarianism is the net will of the people, then why does this definition of "democracy" not demand majoritarianism, which was the problem it was trying to solve?
I think Yarvin’s model of the three types of political power—monarchic, oligarchic, and democratic—captures things well. None is inherently good. Democracy unchecked by the other two is just mobocracy. The democratic urge has a natural ally against oligarchs in the monarchic power or executive authority. In this way we see that overstrong central authority is one of the main failure modes of populism (the other being anarchy).
I'm not convinced at how the terminology is wielded here. If a democratically-elected government enacts reams and reams of legislation detailing every aspect of life and, in every case, it legislates that the people can freely choose what to do, is that totalitarian? In fact, it is already the case that "nobody [can] express an idea, release a new product, or invent a new technology without government permission," since the government is sovereign and each time it DOESN'T revoke permission for something, its inaction implicitly grants it.
By reducing complex political systems to competing ideologies, you end up actually equating democracy and totalitarianism.
Democracy and accountability become tyrannical due to the flagging character of its leaders and citizens. Maybe lured by wealth and advantage over other states to the neglect of socially responsible traditions(4). Maybe a more primitive nation is forced to modernize(5). As community decreases govt. authority must increase to maintain order. Then, of course, we have the corruptive nature of power.
In short, for a society to be healthy you need:
1. A minimum number of people with the temperament, skill and position in society to be leaders to be examples of character(1)(2).
2. A culture backed by traditions, etc. that encourages character to be present, understood and valued by the masses(3).
Footnotes:
[Disclaimer: I am not assigning blame with the following but supporting relevant generalities.]
(1) “But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”
― Sebastian Junger, Freedom
(2) "The history of Europe during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance is largely a history of the social confusions that arises when large numbers of those who should be seers abandon spiritual authority in favour of money and political power. And contemporary history is the hideous record of what happens when political bosses, businessmen or class-conscious proletarians assume the Brahman’s function of formulating a philosophy of life; when usurers dictate policy and debate the issues of war and peace; and when the warrior’s caste duty is imposed on all and sundry, regardless of psycho-physical make-up and vocation.”
--Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, 1945
(3) "Kant argued that men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice. It is the business of society to provide the conditions for such choice and esteem for those who achieve it. ”
--Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind, 1987
(4) "The renovation of the Ka’ba transformed the fortunes of Mecca. It also eroded the tribal ethic. Tribal life had never been egalitarian. An individual’s moral worth was, as in most ancient societies, defined by his or her social status. Nevertheless, the ethos of the collective good ensured that the tribe took care of every member. Mecca’s growing affluence acted as an acid to this philosophy. The riches from the Ka’ba accrued to only a few families and helped create an ever more stratified society. The weak, the infirm and the dispossessed were denied not simply access to the new-found wealth but to the protection that came from the old tribal ideals too.”
--Kenan Malik, The Quest for a Moral Compass, 2014
(5) "The problem of adjustment is acute for both the coloniser and the colonised. For the former imperial powers, they have to get used to their new circumstances and formulate a new role for themselves in a changed world. For the new countries, they must rid themselves of the illusion that now they can go back to an idyllic past when there was a satisfying society – sometimes of natural socialism – which the white man came and destroyed. Romanticism, however natural, is fatal to progress. What has happened is irreversible, and the choice before each of us is what to make of the future, not how to re-live the past.”
--Lee Kuan Yew, The Wit and Wisdom of Lee Kuan Yew, 2013
I think this is overly charitable. The people saying Substack authors aren't accountable aren't using a bad definition of accountability, they're just stupid and/or lying. Anybody selling a product on a free market is necessarily accountable -- if their product is bad enough, their customers will stop buying it and they'll lose money. Claims of "lack of accountability" only make sense in a context where someone has the ability to coerce people into using their services.
“Democracy” is a really good example of the Hegelian dialectic in action. It’s not actually coherently definable; you can’t express everything the word does without contradicting yourself. You can make up your own, coherent, definition, but it will miss some facet of the real word.
So, for instance, democracy means both “people have rights” and “people have to obey a majority of their neighbors”. We call it “undemocratic” for El Salvador to lock up people without due process, and we also recognize the power by which that’s being done as “democratic”, ie, derived from a fair election.
The cheap way to talk about it is to say that democracy is “in tension” between conflicting ideals. The interesting analysis is to dig into the archaeology and figure out what we’re trying to achieve by synthesizing these multiple contradictory ideas into one thing.
> I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.
Yes; this sort of hypocrisy is quite common in political discourse. But I'll even go further and say that democracy is highly overrated as a system for solving problems, and saying that the correct to "X isn't democratic" is very often, "good." David Friedman gives the classic explanation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg
Sarah discusses this here as "unilateralism" and "multilateralism": https://srconstantin.github.io/2019/09/16/against-multilateralism.html
You can have a totalitarian democracy, sure, that doesn't make it not democratic. This is a silly way of understanding concepts- you've begun by assuming that democracy is intrinsically good or not totalitarian, which is not at all true. That's why we distinguish between democracy and liberalism. Conflating democracy and freedom is just bad political philosophy, and really an elementary error. Political theorists have made this distinction all the way since Aristotle, and the concept that democracy must be good or not totalitarian is an entirely modern imagination that has sprung out of popular political rhetoric.
I think it is a mistake to use MLK as an example of "good" change. Having racist opinions is an important personal freedom. Many racist opinions are correct, for instance; and can be important for self-protection and the protection of one's community.
Whites at the time had very real fears that when blacks moved into their community, they would be so violent as to force whites to move; I read a book about someone's experience in Baltimore when blacks were displacing whites; it simply wasn't safe for whites after a certain point. Whites were forced to flee to the suburbs, selling their homes at a loss, in order to not have their kids beaten up or themselves mugged or raped; and yet according to the dominant narrative, it is whites who are to blame for all of this, not blacks. Michelle Obama: "y'all were running away from us." Yes; for good reasons. Normally if a group moving in forces another group out, we consider the group who is forced to move out as the victim. Why does this not apply when it's blacks moving in and whites moving out? Clearly the powers that be have something against whites and favor blacks.
This isn't just a problem with definitions. It's a deep seated problem with our desire to signal our moral views that's being exacerbated by the internet.
If you really want to say X is bad then the most effective way to signal that is to demand some kind of consequence or punishment for doing X. If you say, X is bad but people should be allowed to do X there will be suspicion that you don't really think X is that bad. I fear the internet is making this pressure worse.
We created a number of technologies to limit the harm from this tendency. For instance, legal norms/rules like the 4th amendment which make it harder for the government to punish behavior without a victim to complain. Sure, we say it's about privacy and that's a nice bonus but the focus on government violation (as opposed to people secretly reading your papers) and use in prosecution suggest a substantial interest is limiting the ability of the government to punish some kinds of behavior.
As we move into a more digital interconnected world I fear we'll need new technologies to manage this issue. Principles that we regard as sacred which can be appealed to allowing expression of disapproval to come apart from calls for consequences.
On a related note, I’ve made this point when discussing communism.
Marx, and to a lesser extent most socialists, want “the market” or “the economy” to be subject to “democratic control.”
This sounds great. We replace this large, unaccountable system of “the market” with a system accountable to the government, and through the government, the people.
But in practice, this means deeply interfering in the individual choices of nearly every single person in society. This is the petty tyranny of the homeowner’s association telling you what color you can paint your house--but for every single good and service in society.
I’m not sure I agree, however, that we should simply declare that democracy and accountability are inconsistent with totalitarianism. There is a reason that philosophical liberalism insists on protecting individual agency, and that many classical liberals supported democracy primarily as a means to that end.
John Stuart Mill’s famous treatise “On Liberty” is often interpreted as attacking the supposed morality of the majority or of the democratic will, and insisting on the freedom of the individual in the face of these.
You might be able to salvage "hold criminals accountable for their actions" by noting that many crimes consist of unlawfully doing things that normally only people vested with extraordinary authority are allowed to do. Criminals take people's money without their consent, kill people, and imprison people. Government officials also do all those things, but (at least theoretically, in healthy societies) they are supposed to only do those things in lawfully delineated circumstances that promote the general welfare.
And Scott agrees with Alexis De Tocqueville. Which is good company to be in.
I suspect you were a bit uncharitable to Rob Reich (pun intended). I don't even have to read Reich to know that he must have been referring to tax breaks, which at least to some extent mean that effectively people are able to redirect a fraction of their taxes to causes of their choice.
It seems like a mistake to compare people’s freedom “to express an idea, release a new product, or invent a new technology” to people’s freedom to do about risky AI tech as they want.
In the former case, the impacts are smaller. Less people have a stake in it, or have a lesser stake. The acts of “expressing an idea”, “releasing a new product” or “inventing a new technology” are unlikely to hurt society and the larger populace. In situations with potential societal harm like AGI, or high stake situation like wealth redistribution, the public should have a say in it.
So I would define democracy as: a more democratic society gives people more say in things they have high stakes in. Your freedom to express your opinion has high stake to you, low stake to others. So a truly democratic society should give you the freedom to express most opinions. It matters less what others want because they have low stake in the situation.
Recent trend? "Make 1984 fiction again" T-shirts have been selling like hotcakes for years.
This issue is also very well known in academic political theory, and is one of the first things discussed within the 'democracy' section of introductory textbooks. The general strategy to resolve it is to decompose a concept into multiple dimensions - for 'democracy', Swift (2019, pp. 291-305) breaks it down into 4 such dimensions: 'directness or indirectness of the decision', 'accountability of the representatives', 'equality (of opportunity) for influence' and 'scope of authority of democratic will'.
With this kind of conceptual analysis, when someone says that the government having control over more areas of people's lives is more 'democratic', they are saying that it is so on the 'scope of authority of democratic will' dimension. You can also start an evaluation of the value of democracy with much greater granularity (no longer is it simply a question of the amount of 'democracy' that is optimal, but instead the degree of each dimension of democracy that is optimal).
An implication is that it is theoretically possible to have a totalitarian democracy (which is a situation where there is large scope of democratic decision, while the government also scores highly on the other dimensions)., thus agreeing with Scott's analysis. And we also have a theoretical reason to believe that this is unstable and will likely collapse into a totalitarian dictatorship because the large scope of democratic decision allows the people to vote themselves out of democracy (because the scope of decision-making is so large that it includes modification of the democratic procedures themselves and the suppression of rights that are essential to maintaining the other dimensions of democracy).
References:
1. Swift, A. (2019). Political philosophy: a beginners' guide for students and politicians. John Wiley & Sons.
SA discovers liberal democracy
A modern liberal democracy is a carefully tuned and integrated package consisting of democratic procedures for electing officials (note that those officials usually have no legal obligation to follow their promises, but since there is always next election they have a strong incentive to act in the interest of people. Also, those who are outside suffrage are invisible to polititians, except as possibly a nuisance, hence suffrage as wide as possible is important), independent judiciary, constitutions, constitutional courts and international treaties which, not only set the rules of the game, but also guarantee basic rights of people regardless of vagaries of current elections and prevents tyrrany of the majority, free press and freedom of expression which both controls other power centers, but also ensures efficient information flow (there is a reason why many dictatorships are divorced from reality), freedom of activities of citizens unless there is a very good reason to ban some activities, which ensures effective allocation of resources, elasticity and exploration of possibilities necessary to meet future challenges, and it is also a basic human right. Take even one piece of this package and the whole system quickly degenerates into its opposite. While I agree that liberalism and democracy on one hand and totalitarianism and authoritarianism (in the strict sense) are correlated but not the same, but there is a very good reason for this correlation, and why our current ideal system is called "liberal democracy". Some people are under illusion that we can have democracy without liberalism/liberty or liberty/liberalism/libertarianism without democracy. They are sadly (and sometimes dangerously) mistaken.
I agree with the article but I want to point out that if your AI has the chance to literally kill everyone, then that has reached the point where you should probably involve a democratic process and shouldn't just go ahead unilaterally. (This of course doesn't apply to weaker AI systems.)
The practice of winning political victories by subtly and silently redefining words goes all the way back to Plato's /Politeia/ (always deliberately mistranslated as "Republic"), which begins with Socrates saying they're going to figure out what "justice" means, and ends with Socrates discovering that it means that everybody does what exactly and only what Plato tells them to, or gets killed.
I'm still bitter that when people today say "liberals", they mean authoritarian leftists.
Roussea famously said that we need to be forced to be free.
This sounds like a contradiction, but arguably not if you take a broad definition of freedom.
Freedom can mean the freedom of an individual to make their own choices, or for someone to vote and participate in a collective decision about what kind of society to live in.
Notably, the two trade off against each other. For example, if each individual has the freedom to decide how much noise to make, then the individual has lost the ability to participate in a collective decision of how noisy they want the community to be at night.
This isn’t a comment in favour of Rousseau, just explaining the way I’d explain a Rousseau-like position which might not match his actual view.
Your overall point is why the term "liberal democracy" was invented. Democracy without protections for individual rights, without a "right to privacy" (in the sense of a right to make decisions about one's private life without government interference), is as oppressive as dictatorship. Neither Orbán's "illiberal democracy" nor the CCP's "socialist democracy" achieves the goals that motivate pro-democracy activists, and they should be reminded of this regularly.
That said, even in the liberal tradition, your right to swing your fist ends at another person's face. Thoughts and speech are traditionally considered your own business, but when you take actions in the physical world with physical consequences for other people, those people get some input.
And this gets really muddy in the context of computer code, where something that looks like speech can be converted to physical actions without the involvement of another agent. It also gets murky in the context of creative AI, where speech can be generated by something that isn't a free-speech-rights-holding agent.
I tend to think that regulating this stuff is likely to be worse than not regulating it, at least at this stage. But it's not immediately obviously illiberal for democratic institutions to consider the questions: *are* these technologies infringing on individual rights? *Do* they pose unacceptable physical risks to the general public? *Is* a LLM's speech an expression of its owner's free speech rights?
As a practical matter, I think making an argument for how these questions should be answered is likely to be more valuable than arguing that they shouldn't be asked.
hey there, love your article, but i think there are a few things that need to be addressed.
1: Address counterarguments: you should address counterarguments to strengthen your points. By presenting opposing viewpoints and explaining why they may not align with your position, the article can come across as more balanced and open to discussion.
2: Streamline the writing: The article can be viewed a little to dense to follow at times due to its length and intricate ideas. Consider breaking up the longer paragraphs into smaller, more digestible chunks. anyways keep up writing the good stuff. cheers
> I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government
I disagree, somewhat. If a private army decides to set off a war with a neighbouring country without asking anyone, that seems undemocratic. Similarly if anyone uses force to just overpower the government in making a decision. It's not surprising that the term gets extended to government-y decisions (the kind that people would _expect_ (and want) to be made by the government exclusively) even if not literally made by the government itself.
On AI... Yeah, it also seems right. Under the assumption that unchecked AI progress results in the end of democracy and the transfer of all power to someone's alien creation, I think "undemocratic" fits.
Possible typo: "The only society that doesn’t leave space for the person trying to make the world better as they understand out outside of the existing governmental process is - again - totalitarianism."
This sentence is weird to me. Usually people say "as they understand it". I think the "out" is supposed to be an "it".
This post reminds me of the discussion of democracy in
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-sadly-porn
Personally, I find TLP has grown on me over time
I believe that you will run into difficulties if you try to strip the 'punishment' sense out of accountability. I think that a sizeable number of people want the ability to blame, punish, make suffer, scapegoat and humiliate. 'Indulging my inner sadism' and 'enjoying a little cruelty' is the whole point. It just sounds so much better when called 'I want accountability'.
This comes very much to the fore when you are trying to reform an institution or organisation. Clearly, if some powerful people are 'a law unto themselves' and can violate laws and norms without reprisal, you have a setup that is ripe for the abuse of such power. But as a practical matter, abuses of power often are the result of a cover-up. And often the things being covered up are, at the bottom, tiny mistakes and peccadillos. It turns out that people involved are very frightened of what will happen to them if the accountability police get a hold of them, because they in no way trust that they will treated fairly by those that come to judge them. Instead they may feature as scapegoat of the week. Seems that their power, too, is seen as 'unaccountable'.
The money to religion analogy doesn't work, because they're not the same. Money is a state invention, with the entire system of property fully regulated and enforced by the state. There is no conceivable pristine natural state of it where every individual can just do their own thing and not bother anyone else. (Arguably, in practice, there's no such state possible for religions either, ever since universalizing ones arose, managed to impose themselves as a social requirement and made it their point to slaughter the infidels. But at least it's easy to imagine. And, now that some states are protecting it, it may not be natural anymore, but still, kinda works.)
The conceivable natural state for property relations? Commons everywhere. This, of course, far from high-modernist government controlling everything, but even further from antisocial individuals appropriating earth's resources and government assisting them and preventing you from stopping them, with violence. Even if the "appropriating resources and preventing you from stopping them, with violence" applies to government all the same, "at least they're democratically accountable" is in fact a valid argument (even if the accountability is, in practice, very poor, because in the alternative it's being compared to, it's non-existent).
Of course the problem is, all of this is motte and bailey. Democratic motte is [humans need to cooperate and peacefully resolve their differences], the bailey is [give all power to bureaucrats]. Accountability motte is [we need to update our trust in humans based on bad things/decisions they've made], the bailey is [panopticon where you cannot stray from the line even for an inch, and you have no say in setting the rules].
We need those mottes, really really need them. But of course, it's not surprising they're not convincing when they're so often used as a cover for the baileys. But bear in mind, there are many terms like this. One of them? "Freedom". We really need that one too. But with a bailey of [assholes with coercion-backed rights to resources can do anything they want and you're unable to stop them], of course people will eventually go "nah, fuck your freedom, we need to make those more democratically accountable".
I don't know the way out, but (everyone) please be aware of the problem. As the saying goes, "Knowing is half the battle."
It is worth considering the origins of the state when thinking about the term 'democracy'. Why do people allow themselves to be subject to the control of a government? Because they trade some of their freedom for the security of the state, this is the social contract. Using the freedom/security trade-off to reflect on the example of someone's freedom to give to any charity, there isn't a justification to take away this person's freedom to donate and give it to an elected government. I think there's a difference between justification of state control over different parts of people's lives and what counts as making decisions more democratic.
I think the word “democratic” is most useful in the sense of “liberal democracy”, where individuals have rights that way heavier than the votes of the majority. I’ve often heard “democracy” without protections for the rights of minorities and individuals as a “dictatorship of the majority”. It’s the role of the courts to make sure the other branches don’t overstep.
Liberal democracy is what we typically mean when we want to defend democracy, and so I think any definition of democracy that doesn’t include these is suspect. But not everyone sees/understands/agrees. I completely agree that there are bad definitions of democracy out there, and I think people who claim something is undemocratic often need to be challenged on their understanding of democracy – as you do here. Rule of the people and rule of law must mean more than just the will of the majority.
I don’t think MLK is the best example for any of this. He, and much of the rest of the civil rights movement, engaged in civil disobedience, deliberately breaking supposedly “democratically” enacted laws (spoiler: they weren’t), and getting jail time and the wrong side of billy clubs for it. They were most definitely being held accountable. Civil disobedience is not a democratic way of doing things, but may, paradoxically be necessary to enact or uphold a democracy. (Hence, the liberties.)
I am very much a proponent of liberal democracy (at least until AI throws up a better alternative), but I acknowledge that there are problems and difficult discussions to be had in a liberal democracy too. Like how much does a country owe its citizens and vice versa? (Which goes to tax law, entitlements, military service, etc.)
I think I have lamented the world’s lack of a truly anarcho-libertarian alternative in this comment section before. Just so that people could vote with their feet, if they think the compromises reached inside the liberal democracy are too expensive for them, or are too skewed towards dictatorship of the majority. (I.e. if they think taxes are too high; and/or they don’t want to contribute to x, y, z spending; etc.)
> I think the word “accountable” should be reserved for people who are being vested with specific powers being held accountable to the people who are vesting them (elected officials accountable to voters, managers accountable to owners, charities accountable to donors, etc)
I think this has some disadvantages in the case of governments.
Like let's take businesses as an example. It seems to me that similarly to how you feel one can talk about charities being accountable to donors, one could also reasonably talk about businesses being accountable to customers, for things like product safety and product quality.
But often, the government is offering some sort of service. In those cases, wouldn't there be some logic in talking about the government being accountable to those it offers the service to?
What you are missing in your point that totalitarianism can be construed as "democratic" (which is indeed being made by Russian and Chinese pundits) is the dimension of "time". One of the painful lessons of German history is that a democracy where elected leaders are free to do anything that a majority want them to do at that time, quickly ceases to be a democracy. "The will of the people" needs to be constrained by checks and balances - a constitution, a strong judiciary - otherwise people soon find out that their will is no longer relevant when they find they've voted a psychopath into office. (See also "the paradox of tolerance".)
So yes, it's always a balancing act, not just between majorities and minorities at any given time, but also between people and their future selves, and pure democracy is neither good nor stable. That needs to be stated explicitly, so we can discuss where to draw the boundaries, instead of engaging in buzzword tennis.
My read is that this is a pretty weak strawmaning.
In the first 3 paragraphs, you argue that one view of democracy can be that the 50.1% rule without limit on the 49.9%, conflating it with majoritarianism. I'd be very surprised if more than a small minority of people advocating for more democracy view it this way. I believe that most of the people would agree that more democracy would also mean more protection of the right of the minorities such as their freedom of opinion, speech and religion, as well as the protection of their ability to influence the political life of the state (via allowing them to vote for example). Hitler got elected democratically, the enabling act of 1933 giving his government full power was voted by the vast majority of the assembly, but it doesn't mean in any way that his power was democratic at all.
You argue that one can decide to not define democracy like that. But in the rest of your piece you completely conflate the concept of democracy with majoritarianism. Moreover you assume a democracy can be totalitarian, while the later has been defined as an opposite of the later. It seems then cheap to try to assimilate the two concepts to support your claim, I believe it'd be much saner for the sake of the discussion to create a different word for the concept you name here as 'totalitarianism'.
Some people view charity as undemocratic not because individuals are able to choose which charities gets the funding instead of the government, but because the wealth distribution is so skewed that only a handful of people are able to decide where this money goes. One can argue whether this unequal distribution of wealth is a terrible thing or not, but the critic of current's charity system (and it's funding through tax subsidies) is not focused on disabling individuals choosing where the money should go. I think Piketty for example advocates having a specific part of the budget of the state allowed to charity, and having each people choose their preference to which to redirect this money. This money would then be distributed uniformly according to each citizen's preference, not according to the preference of the richest nor according to the preference of the 50.1%. I fail to see the totalitarian aspect of it.
The use of "democracy" to sum up something that needs to be defended by stopping the people's elected representatives doing things, seems confusing. See Orban, Israel's Supreme Court, Trump, etc. I can see you might want to oppose the decisions of the people's representatives, but why use the word democracy to represent what you want, when the people having power is literally what you oppose? And why is the phrase liberal democracy used so often, when individual freedom is also something which you seem to think has, in general, gone too far?
I think democracy has, to a lot of people, come to mean rule in the name of the people by an educated elite, plus rule that aims not to hurt people, plus rule that involves people having a lot of power to tax their neighbours, and stop them doing what they want. A mixture of a state religion, niceness, conservativism, and socialism. Which is entirely defensible.
I suppose this mixture of beliefs might have come to be associated with the word democracy because the places that are ruled in this way tend to be democracies. Basically, because this mixture of beliefs is how people want to be ruled. Or at least it is for as long as things are getting better for most people, most of the time - as they have been in the West for most of the past 75 years. If this stops being the case, then you get the odd phenomenon of the majority of the elite rallying against democracy in the name of democracy.
“Hold criminals accountable to their victims”. To victimize someone is to be vested with unusual power.
Famous brazillian artist/journalist Milôr Fernandes has a relevant quote:
"Democracy is when I'm the boss of you, dictatorship is when you are the boss of me."
For AI regulation we conveniently have a bunch of network-effect/exclusivity-contracts using companies — larger than some state governments — using their dominant positions to fight for complete control over a new sector. Except maybe Facebook/Meta who seem to count the (actually good) outcome of «let it split into a thousand small pieces» either as acceptable or as extremely implausible. OpenAI seems to be closely enough tied to Microsoft.
Antitrust laws exist for that, and in general applying higher standards of behavoir to things that have become larger than many state governments turned out to be a reasonable idea.
MLK… once he started building a movement, he built a movement for a specific purpose and ran it for that purpose (antitrust laws are much stronger on the power-repurposing; if anything, it's the political party that run afoul of the intent of antitrust laws, a proportional system with narrower party platforms and explicit coalitions is indeed better)
Of course the actual quality of specific call to actions might not rise to mentioning antitrust law…
(It would be nice if Khan's FTC succeeded at least at reminding people that antitrust laws exist, and exist for a reason)
> I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
Its not democracy that holds criminals accountable, it's the rule of law.
Everyone donating to their favourite charity seems like the pinnacle of democracy to me - a distribution of goods according to the distribution of preferences in the population.
Only if ones ideas of democratic are very closely tied to the winner-takes-it-all-democracy they live in would they think that outcomes of every democratic process need to be uniform.
It's probably meaningful to make a distinction between a liberal democracy and a merely electoral one. It's quite democratic for 51% to oppress 49%, but this merely shows that it's only liberal democracy we should truly value (although this doesn't make the electoral one completely meaningless - after all, it's somewhat better if 51% oppress 49% than if 25% oppress 75%).
"Politics is not about uniting people. It’s about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one per cent."
—Robert Stone
"Democracy" can also be analysed as a set of institutionalised insurance-arrangements. Both normatively and empirically.
The insurance-theory of democracy works at two levels: the level of elite competition for power, and the level of citizen-ruler relationships.
First, democracy insures competing would-be rulers against the risk that they will be violently suppressed or killed should they lose the battle for office. In exchange for being protected in this way (plus having the right to attempt to conquer office again four-five years from now), competing would-be rulers accept that they cannot do everything they want if they win the internal power struggle in the state. (European elites in particular often had to learn the hard way that being insured against oppression if you lose is worth the price of not being able to do everything you want, unrestrained, should you win.)
Second, democracies also insure ordinary citizens against the risk that they will be violently suppressed by whichever elite that rules the state. Secret ballots at regular intervals install the fear of losing power into the heart of rulers, reducing the probability that they will use their power to suppress ordinary citizens.
The insurance-theory of democracy may at the same time explain the existence of constitutions, the rule of law/Rechstaat and special legal protection of minorities, as these aspects of a political order serves as insurance against the risk of tyranny by the majority. Killing several empirical birds with the same analytical stone, so to speak - and resolving some of the tensions Scott and/or several commentators point out.
For example: You never know if you may end up in some identifiable minority yourself one day, which provides a majority with an insurance-motivation for accepting constitutional legal safeguards against suppressing present-day minorities.
When someone wins an election by campaigning on an issue and wins (especially if they win decisively) they will often claim they have a "mandate" from the people. Let's assume for a second that the issue really was salient to voters and they really had a reasonably formed opinion about it.
So say Ron DeSantis wins by 20 points and decides that he's going to pass universal school vouchers which was a big part of his campaign. He gets the legislature to vote overwhelmingly and then signs it.
Then the Florida Supreme Court comes along and says "no, public education is a fundamental human right and taking money out of the system like this violates that right. Also, some parents will use it to indoctrinate their children or become a public health menace." Or whatever. They strike the law down.
I think we would all consider that "undemocratic" and the members of the court that did that "unaccountable" if there was no way to remove them.
You can copy paste this onto literally any issue that you can think of. Maybe you prefer things to be undemocratic and unaccountable one some issues and not others, but you understand the principal.
Of course I could probably come up with some example where you would be sympathetic to the court. Maybe Adolf Hitler comes back from the grave, runs a successful political campaign and gets a lot of votes, and decides to do the things he did before. If the Supreme Court stopped him everyone would probably say they were doing their job. We would say that despite being an election he intended to end democracy, and despite the court not being accountable to the will of the people it's accountable to higher principles that are in the peoples best interest.
I just don't know if there is a way out of value judgements on all this stuff.
C.S.Lewis wrote on this subject in 'Screwtape proposes a toast'. From the point of view of a devil of course, so not to be taken without salt:
"Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.
Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.
The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you."
"What I want to fix your attention on is the vast, overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence – moral, cultural, social, or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how “democracy” (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient Dictatorships, and by the same methods? You remember how one of the Greek Dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another Dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second Dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no preeminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser or better or more famous or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them all down to a level: all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus Tyrants could practise, in a sense, “democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks."
This is all just the conventional wisdom, no? It's why the term "liberal democracy" exists?
You get quandaries like this when you're trying too hard to preserve the taxonomy of your heuristics. It's laudable to strive toward that sort of perfection, of course. Democracy and accountability are just ideas; what you're searching for is a tidy encapsulation of all their good qualities - the ultimate steelman.
Like I said, that's an admirable pursuit, but most of the time we've got to modify our heuristics to spec, accounting for things like scope. The answer turns out to be a lot of duct tape pretty often.
This is the best commentary I've read about the current situation in Israel. I just want to acknowledge that. Scott is the best at narrowing down and clarifying exactly what the important issues are - I'm going to be sharing this one with friends and family.
Though I agree fully, one correction: "I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad"" - Nothing "recent" about it, tale as old as democracy ("Pericles - democrat or tyrant"). In my looong life, "undemocratic" was always "bad". (or is it "has been" - English tenses have been fiendishly tricky, always).
These aren’t difficult terms:
Accountability is the opposite of independence, but it’s a Russell conjugation (“we must defend the independence of the civil service, whilst fighting unaccountable bureaucrats”). It’s also a two-place predicate (“accountable to whom?”). Whether it’s good or not depends on what you’re talking about, but the arguments journalists, judges[?], or private individuals to be accountable to/dependent on the state should ring alarm bells for wanting to subvert democracy, whilst wanting congress to be unaccountable to/independent of the electorate would be an attempt to establish an oligarchy.
Democracy is government policy and/or the composition of the government matching the preferences of the population (you may need to insert some caveats about causation to avoid Gettier-casing popular dictatorships). Only a tiny fringe of people want to ban private charity, so banning private charity would be undemocratic. The alternative is, “most people would think your tie’s pretty ugly, so you wearing it is an attack on democracy.”
I don't think there is an issue with a definition of "democracy" which considers state religion voted by the majority of people to more democratic than freedom of religion. The issue is only when we assume that "more democratic" automatically means "more liberal" and vice versa. Liberalism isn't the synonym for democracy. There can be illiberal democracies and liberal dictatorships (Ataturk Turkey is a good example, I think). Such are not very stable but possible.
Likewise, "more democratic" doesn't necessary mean "better". We often need to find compromise when more democracy and some other of our values. When we are talking about "liberty" in particular, I think a good heuristic is to side with more liberty for private things and with more democracy for public/political ones. The line isn't clear cut. but it doesn't have to be. The less something is private and more political the more reasonable it is to sacrifice liberty for democracy and vice versa.
I also don't think that talks about accountability should be reserved only for some people with very special powers. Obviously, great power requires great accountability. But it's a spectrum, we do not need to cut off all the accountability when the power is just moderate.
The goal is maximum human freedom, not maximum democracy. Institutions should be subject to the safeguard of democratic control when they have direct coercive power over people's lives: in descending order of importance, the state should have elections and plebiscites; employers should have unions and/or codetermination and/or a direct co-op structure; and Internet platforms should either have user input on codes of conduct and moderation decisions (Wikimedia is a great example) or a robust set of viable competitors allowing users to vote with their feet.
Regular charity isn't coercive and shouldn't be anyone else's business, but the Gates and Chan Zuckerberg and Soros foundations do "charity" at a scale where an individual gets to effectively set public policy with moderately coercive effects on researchers, farmers, students, etc. This should be addressed, perhaps by preventing individuals from accumulating billions of dollars.
Yeah the Athenians tried unlimited democracy for a bit, but this resulted in lots of people being exiled and some being killed for basically holding the wrong opinions. Then they had a tyrant or two and when they went back to democracy it was more limited.
Most democracies since then have learned that lesson. It's the reason for Franklin said "a republic" instead of "a democracy". It's also the reason your Constitution is mostly limits.
Aren't 'populist'/'popular' and 'anti-populist'/'unpopular' (or arguably Burkian?) exactly the denotations needed for discussing policies as opposed to governance structures?
[I'd have thought someone else would say this, so maybe I'm missing something?]
At any rate these bounds on uses for 'democratic' and 'accountable' both seem straightforwardly correct to me. 'Accountable' seems interesting in relation to 'responsible'. Accountability is one mechanism of enforcing responsibility, maybe, with responsibility the actual end-value? Certainly, distinguishing means from ends helps clarify whether more of something is inherently desirable.
Here in Israel, we protestors have been fighting tooth and nail to keep our independent judiciary; and we've been doing that under the banner of "democracy" (or rather "DE-MO-KRAT-YA!!"). This on the grounds that protection of individual rights and liberties is an integral part of the concept of democracy, and that without the Court we would have no such protection. I am saddened to read that you see that usage as "Orwellian".
I think it is also the case that democracy, in the sense of people choosing their leaders, cannot really be maintained together with totalitarianism. The same unchecked power that the government uses to control individual lives can also be used to modify the election rules in their favor, and to eliminate other checks and balances on their power. Hungary seems to be a good example here.
Finally, there's a more troubling question: how much can we weigh the voters' choice in the context of totalitarian rule? I thing the Chinese government is in fact very popular in China. Controlling how people think is just not that difficult if you're allowed to punish dissent. If there was a country where the government controls speech but allows free elections, the ruling party would usually win (as long as there's no major disaster that they can't cover up). Would you still call that "democracy"?
Alas, true as presented, but it depends on the most extreme definition of democracy - essentially mob rule democracy of the wolves voting to eat the sheep kind.
No country's democracy actually works like that. It's a bit of a straw man argument. The U.S. Constitution spends a lot of words delineating the branches of government and what their specific responsibilities and limitations are. Thanks to mostly Virginia slaveowners, who really, really cared about having a national government that couldn't interfere with their way of life, we have the Bill of Rights (the first 10 Amendments). Edge cases and changing circumstances have yielded the rest of the Amendments.
The point is that the rule of law supersedes the rule of the mob in a functioning democracy. Of course if we elect a President and Congress who declare themselves above the rule of law....
This post could serve as a decent summary of The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Ryszard Legutko. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Demon_in_Democracy.html
With respect to "accountability" I would make a distinction between what the word used to mean, and what it has come to mean. The old fashioned sense is that it is having to live up to the terms of an agreement: you were hired to be the dog-catcher, and have you done exactly that in an effective way? If not, you will be replaced.
In other words, accountability judged behaviour in a specific performance-related way. But now it tends to mean not just policing behaviour, but thinking and how thoughts are expressed. We are perfectly comfortable with policing behaviour, from parental control to police departments. That's the price we agree to pay for living in a society rather than as loners. But we were free inside our own heads and were shocked by the idea of 'thoughtcrime' in 1948 (yes, I did mean 1948). The outward expression of thought, speech, is increasingly restricted on the grounds that it is not only offensive to say the wrong thing, but actually violent to do so.
Does anyone think there would be reluctance on the part of those who have bought into the new orthodoxy to restrict our thoughts if they could, to make us "accountable" for them? We already see elementary schools teaching politically orthodox views rather than the three 'R's.' We watch with a mixture of concern and horror as the mayor of London hires behavioural psychologists to design his latest campaign ("Maaate") to push behaviour and speech—thought will follow—in his desired direction. It is a perfect example of the new accountability, with any incorrect utterance to be immediately corrected by the disapproval. I don't mind my behaviour being policed, as it affects other people directly. I'm willing to tolerate the speech of others that I disagree with, as long as they give me the same tolerance. But I really don't like the idea that my thoughts are to be molded into acceptable forms via "accountability."
I read this right after this article:
https://washingtonspectator.org/understanding-tescreal-silicon-valleys-rightward-turn/
"TESCREAL ideologies tend to advance an illiberal agenda and authoritarian tendencies, and it’s worth turning a very critical eye towards them, especially in cases where that’s demonstrably true. Clearly there are countless well-meaning people trying to use technology and reason to improve the world, but that should never come at the expense of democratic, inclusive, fair, patient, and just governance."
Scattered thoughts at random:
(1) "Reich flirted with an argument that charitable donation is inherently undemocratic: people are allowed to donate money to whatever causes they personally want, instead of giving it to the government to be distributed via the elected government’s budgeting process."
Oddly enough, this was one of the things that got up my nose when I first heard about Effective Altruism. Not that they wanted to do charity, or even do charity right, but all the self-righteousness about "the common people just give their money to whatever tugs at their heart strings or their local church, they don't even consider what is the most effective use, they should be Said And Led by Us".
I won't say it was totalitarian/authoritarian, but it flirted with the edges of "if they won't be good of their own accord, they should be *made* to be good". And then in a few years time EA went off on their own little round of wasting money and getting involved peripherally with scandals. Well, looks like it's hard to be right, doesn't it?
(2) "But once people are supposed to be “accountable” for their personal lives and ordinary decisions, you’re being totalitarian again."
I disgree mildly with this; we *do* expect ordinary people to be accountable for their actions, hence laws about "no, you can't bop Steve over the noggin and take his stuff" or "no, if you're married to Jill, you can't go off and marry Jane at the same time" or "no, even if the megacorporations are really really rich, you can't stroll into a store, load up on goods, and walk out without paying, that is still stealing and no, it doesn't matter if they have insurance and expect theft anyway". Which leads into:
"I realize this rules out some venerable usages like “hold criminals accountable for their actions”, but I’m willing to change this to “punish criminals”.
I disagree more strongly with this because (a) holding even criminals accountable gives them agency; they are people, who make choices and decisions, and can be reasoned with or appealed to and rehabilitated, with punishment as the last recourse for the incorrigible (b) "punishment" strips that away and now we have only things reacting to stimuli in Brownian motion and as GKC put it better than I ever could:
"That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, “Go and sin no more,” because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment."
Accountability yes, even if it leads to punishment; punishment on its own, no.
(3) I appreciate the distinction made between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. Totalitariansim need not be authoritarian, and authoritarianism need not be totalitarian. I've been accused in comments elsewhere of being authoritarian, and it's not unfounded. I am aware of channeling my Inner Saruman, and I've had to fight hard against those instincts. Again, GKC puts the temptation wonderfully: this is beautiful and orderly and prosperous, but it's wrong - there's a worm in the apple (it's a long piece so I'll attach it to this in a separate reply).
It really is a hard struggle, and I don't think people without those instincts about "rules are good and I like rules because rules make it easy to know what to do and what to avoid" realise that.
(4) "Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary."
I think people toss about the terms "totalitarian, authoritarian, democratic, free, good, bad" too easily. It's true that people are polarised now, and are using these terms to bash one another over the head. "You're a totalitarian fascist nazi, I'm a democratic caring citizen".
"When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”.
I'm smiling a little at that, because way back when "politically correct" was the "woke" of its day, the people criticising/complaining about (and people did complain, sometimes unjustifiably, rather than criticise reasonably) PC were met with "all political correctness means is being polite, that's all" with the implication that surely everyone knows to be polite if they were raised properly. and if you're objecting than you just want the liberty to be rude and mean without consequences (the same way that "critical theory is not being taught in schools, but if it is, all critical theory means is teaching kids about slavery, why are you objecting to that?" gets a run out today).
I've also found that the word "democracy" functions more and more as an incantation. Democracies came about in the West as a system for elites to influence and change governments without resorting to force or constitutional crisis in countries which already had a fairly solid rule of law in place; for literally millennia, western societies lacked democratic arrangements but maintained the rule of law (to which even Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors bowed). The key term here is "rule of law." Without it, democracy is a sham and a Chavista shitshow, with oligarchies competing to see who is more effective in lying to peasants (see, as an example, pretty much every democracy in the developing world). Democracy is just a cherry on top of well organized societies with the the rule of law. So my proposal would be to stress "rule of law" much more than we stress "democracy." Another proposal: every time you are tempted to write "dictator," write "despot" instead. It's much more correct. A dictator is a temporary leader for an emergency, all the way from Roman times to Spain's Franco. I know that's not what Webster's says, you can blame semantic shift for that and many other terrible sins on language that make discussion more difficult. The right word is "despot."
"to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that,"
Here's where my cynical side kicks in: when they do it in a way *we* like, then it's democratic; when they do it in a way the other guys like, then they need to be abolished.
https://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/white-house-set-aglow-with-rainbow-pride-119490
https://www.vox.com/culture/23559583/roe-abortion-dobbs-reproductive-rights
Accountability is interesting in terms of freedom. If you say something your subscribers don’t like and they all unsubscribe are you being canceled? If being canceled a violation of your right to free speech?
If you own a wedding cake bakery and you make some offensive statement that alienates your potential customers, are you being canceled? Are your rights v being violated?
It seems the public is conflicted about this.
Good points and I agree with this.
Note that the most famous early democracy, in Athens, was kinda totalitarian, in that the assembly could vote Socrates to death for basically having unpopular ideas.
Today's “democracies” aren't democracies in that sense; they're democratic republics. The democratic part is about how we choose the politicians who run it.
So wait, what is the term for the social system that optimizes for individual autonomy regarding their own lives? Anarchy?
Yup. North Korea perfected democracy.
The weimar Republic was also democratic. We tried democratic socialism in germany after that.
Confusing elections with democracy is a part of the problem. The Holy Roman Empire had an elective monarchy. That it was elective doesn't make it democratic. According to Aristotle, only what we now call "direct democracy" is democracy.
In Aristotelian philosophy, what we have now in most of the world would be elective aristocracy, since we choose a few select group of people we suppose are the most suited to held power.
I think the problem of "accountability" you are describing is what Nassim Taleb refers to as Skin in the Game. As a legal principle, it should be clearly stated and applied case by case in the constitution, code laws such as trade code, civil code and so on. I think the civil law system is much more suited to apply it than the common law system.
And in the specific case of the USA, the difficulty to rewrite or greatly ammend the Constitution coupled with the virtual control of the Suprem Court over it makes it more difficult to update it democratically.
If some dude was running around the streets of my town shooting people, I would not say it's "undemocratic" that he has chosen for citizens to be dead without it having been voted upon as a society. But the social contract from which gov't derives its legitimacy requires it to stop malicious actors, and if it doesn't it loses that legitimacy. The gov't has a quasi-monopoly on the socially acceptable use of force, and society votes on what private uses of force are and aren't allowed, and we only accept this because basic defense of the citizenry is a foundational obligation not up for debate.
I think AI presents the same problem. A bunch of tech dudes are out there working on a doomsday device that is going to kill and/or enslave every citizen, it's the government's job to defend us against that, to send SWAT teams into the AI developers' offices and server farms and start smashing and de-gaussing everything in sight, just as MI6 would dispatch James Bond to demolish the villain's secret underground lair. The problem with Drax's newly-invented nerve agent that will wipe out Earth's population to be replaced with his genetically superior moon colonists isn't that we didn't get to vote on this new technology.
The only reason to call it "undemocratic" is if you're trying to persuade a center-left normie and need to speak to them in the language of CNN Panel-ese. "AI is like the January 6th rioters" might be the secret code to getting something done about it.
On "accountability", I worked for many years at a county-level elected office, and people were constantly getting upset when they didn't like that official's decision, and would demand to speak to his boss. They could not wrap their heads around the fact he didn't have one, they really conceive of government as some giant single corporation where everybody except Joe Biden can be told what to do. It never occurred to them that elections were accountability, or that oaths of office were accountability-- y'know, all that "democracy" stuff.
I think accountability is a useful concept for private actors, it just looks different.
All of our actions have externalities. They have costs and benefits that accrue to people besides ourselves, even when they are not outright crimes. Society should have some mechanisms for evaluating them.
For example, in my judgment, the current trend of environmental protests that involve blocking roads and defacing works of art are harmful and counterproductive to their causes, though I could be wrong. But it does seem that a healthy society would be able to challenge those who organize such stunts and in some sense hold them "accountable" for whether these actions are having their intended effect.
Private actors should probably have a longer leash than government actors. MLK's activism would survive such an investigation, but maybe it wouldn't be so clear early on (particularly since the goal of such actions is to move public opinion). And I am finding the current trend of government officials declaring themselves above criticism to be maddening.
But I do think it's a useful concept even for private actions, even if it has been a but overused.
If you read the book "The Problem of Political Authority" by Michael Huemer the confusion around these words becomes clear
We ascribe a special moral authority to the state, state actors are allowed to do things that ordinary people can't do - why can't I hold you accountable the same way? I demand you show me your order books, report to me to get permissions etc. In fact these processes exist in voluntary businesses transactions all the time, yet for some reason we think if governments say "we say this is how it has to be" that is somehow justified - we do this because we implicitly assume we confer these special rights to a sovereign through some kind of process (e.g. democracy, social contract)
The longhouse is a kind of democracy I suppose. I mean, I think you’re getting at the public-private distinction, which itself can be democratically decided. I agree with you that some people have a bad and inflated sense of what should be public and insufficient appreciation for the private. But they’re just wrong, not undemocratic. I get that people in favor a greater private sphere want to define a kind of minimalist private bundle as predicate to true democracy, thereby calling some private bubble to be “democracy.” Something like, free speech is “democratic” even when minoritarian because we can have a meaningfully democratic decision without it. But you can turn that logic around and say, free abortions are “democratic” even if unpopular because they enable meaningful female participation in democracy. Which I suppose is find, but we haven’t clarified anything we’ve just moved the issue to what public policies or private space we see as sufficiently necessary to what we as meaningful democracy.
> the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”
I don't think it's that recent...
The best example of democracy outside the political sphere is gang rape. If, say, 80% of participants believe the activity should continue, then not only is it moral and correct (according to the worldview that democracy is good), but also opposing or resisting is immoral.
It was a mistake to replace one tyrant 3000 miles away for 3000 tyrants one mile away.
This is an important point, that helps clarify what people (should) mean when they say "we're a Republic, not a Democracy!" But I've also noted, empirically, that people who are very attached to that slogan are also very interested in replacing civil service protections with a greater role for political appointments, so that democratically elected leaders can root out the "deep state". It's interesting that protection against democracy seems to be something that people across the political spectrum are all committed to in some places but not others.
I think there's also an interesting question to be raised about whether "democracy" needs to occur through elections, or whether sortition (i.e., randomly calling people up for government duty, like in juries) should count as "democratic" in just the same way (after all, it still makes government subject to the will of the people - in fact, even more directly in many cases).
In theory, these are significant problems with democracy and accountability, but in practice, those problems are strawmen used by people who want special (usually partisan or ideological) exemptions from both. Democracies are capable of collectively deciding on the degree of individual freedom they grant, and historically have made choices in a reasonable range, though not always in the range that, say, radical libertarians or radical socialists consider acceptable. (Hence their antipathy towards democracy when it interferes with their goals--although not when it supports their goals, of course.) People with more mainstream views often also see restrictions on democracy (judicial review, for example) as a healthy counterweight to what they view as the dangers of excessive democracy; such people are invariably the first to scream, "tyranny!" when those same counterweights end up weighing against their own preferences.
"Accountability" is a bit trickier, because it's so vague as to be meaningless unless a specific monitor is identified. ("Democracy" can arguably be defined as "accountability to the voting public", for example.) In practice, though, the intended monitor is almost always obvious, and the real argument is about whether that monitor is appropriate, while those who use the term generically are implicitly thinking of themselves and their friends and allies as accountable to no one, and everybody else as accountable to them.
Accountability is fine, the marketplace, natural laws, etc. make and keep all accountable for their actions.
The accountants, the Karens, the would be social and duly elected or appointed barons are
another kettle of fish.
I feel like I agree in principle with the sentiment that, if "democratic" means "rule by the people" or "the final arbiter of authority over a jurisdiction should be the residents/citizens/whatever of the territory," I love how "democratic" it is to circumvent the Congressional appropriations process with charitable giving. I think the tax exemption for charities, in this perspective, is actually brilliant. So I'll give the example when that makes me nervous:
It really weird me out when scientists do things like, "we know that any technologically superior alien species must be peaceful, so let's broadcast our position in the galaxy as broadly as possible so they can find us." (https://xkcd.com/1377/) Or, "We're just going to solve climate change by spraying the upper atmosphere with sulphur[, probably plunging the whole planet into an ice age considering how badly we understand climate models." [Quote modified to illustrate out how sill I think this idea is] (https://gizmodo.com/make-sunsets-solar-geoengineering-sulfur-climate-change-1849931460) That's definitely a problem. Maybe some theory involving non-ergodicity and the possibility of large-scale ruin needs to be made formal? Like, "Sexual pairings are your own business (provided it's consensual)" or "You should be able to practice your religion (except if it involves sacrificing people)". We could have, "You should be free to pursue your objectives and goals in competition with others (except if it's literally going to end the world)." (I'm not saying AI will, but I understand the problem if people think it would)
Totalitarianism is seen as the opposite of democracy as it prohibits opposition parties. Very weird argument. Government is decentralized so it makes sense for certain things to be part of govt. Democracy has to do with giving people power to deliberate and is a good thing (and again is the opposite of totalitarianism).
From my listening to NPR, "Democracy" means "rule by Democrats."
"When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”. Here it’s painfully obvious that “accountability” is opposed to people retaining ownership of their own output, to them working for themselves instead of a megacorporation, and to them keeping control of their own lives. A society where every writer has “accountability” is totalitarian - or, if you don’t like that word for something that might lock in merely corporate rather than government control, at least it would lack a flourishing private sphere.""
It should be abundantly obvious by now that many civil libertarians turned into totalitarians the moment they got the whip hand.
As taught by Weber: "A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." So the most appropriate definition of "democracy" would be:
- A state where (almost) all adults can vote on which people get to authorize the dispensation of physical force.
This doesn't tell us what uses of government force are legitimate, i.e. it doesn't tell us whether or not using the power of the state is acceptable to restrict the number of available religions. But as long as a legitimate vote is held deciding who gets to authorize violence on behalf of the government, the nation can be considered democratic. Anything beyond that is a political question and has little to do with "democracy" per se.
I think to some extent "accountability" is a word that's become kind of a stand-in for the desire to punish people for engaging in behavior that is deemed not to be pro-social. As Arnold Kling likes to point out, people have a strong desire to reward cooperators and punish defectors (ie, reward pro-social behavior and punish those deemed...not pro-social, since anti-social doesn't seem like quite the right word here). There are good historical reasons this instinct exists, but there's also a mob mentality lurking not so far in the background here, which is, um...generally not so laudable. As such, I share Scott's reservations about its use and perception as generically good.
Complicated situations almost never have a simple optimum. I strongly feel that PARTS of government should be democratic...and other parts not, at least in the short term. Perhaps all of government should be democratic in a multi-decadal time-frame.
OTOH, when circumstances change, adaptations are needed. How should they be done? One can guarantee that only some people will see the problem...and one can nearly guarantee that those people will not agree on the proper solution.
For a specific example, social media is fracturing society, because fostering "engagement" is profitable, and the easiest way to foster engagement is to treat important topics as sporting contests. The news doesn't help with it's "tell both sides of the story" attitude to whether the sun will rise tomorrow, but social media is where the real push comes from. But who would you trust to fix the problem? The first amendment is pretty clear, and it clearly needs to be changed if you're going to address this through government. (I think that the change is that corporations should not have the RIGHT to free speech. And that those who are paid to speak on behalf of a corporate sponsor should be required to ensure that the listener was aware of who their sponsor was. But I don't think our current legal system could be altered in that direction. It clearly bends in the opposite direction.)
So though I think of myself as relatively libertarian (small "l"), I'm not opposed to some regulations to ensure certain kinds of accountability. And I'm pretty sure that our society (as a mass entity rather than as individuals) does not agree with me.
"It might sound like I’m arguing that it’s okay for small things like your private life to stay undemocratic and unaccountable, it’s only big things that change society which should be subjected to democratic scrutiny. I’m not sure I believe this." Well, I sure hope not.
This reminds me of a relevant passage from C. S. Lewis. In 1959 he published the essay "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in the Saturday Evening Post. It was a sequel of sorts to his famous "Screwtape Letters" and has Screwtape giving a speech to a graduating class of devils. In it Screwtape addresses the proper diabolical use of the word "democratic":
https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/screwtape-proposes-a-toast-SEP.pdf
"Thanks to Our Father Below, the threat (of liberal democracy) was averted. Our counterattack was on two levels. On the deepest level our leaders contrived to call into full life an element which had been implicit in the movement from its earliest days. Hidden in the heart of this striving for Liberty there was also a deep hatred of personal freedom. That invaluable man Rousseau first revealed it. In his perfect democracy, only the state religion is permitted, slavery is restored, and the individual is told that he has really willed (though he didn’t know it) whatever the Government tells him to do. From that starting point, via Hegel (another indispensable propagandist on our side), we easily contrived both the Nazi and the Communist state. Even in England we were pretty successful. I heard the other day that in that country a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a toolshed in his own garden.
"Such was our counterattack on one level. You, who are mere beginners, will not be entrusted with work of that kind. You will be attached as Tempters to private persons. Against them, or through them, our counterattack takes a different form.
"Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
"You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate."
ASI is supposed to rule the whole world someday, if I understand correctly. AI development is a path toward a new government, and that will be the effective constitution of the world for a long time, maybe for the remainder of human existence. If anyone should be accountable to the people, I would think it would be the government. So at some point, the development of AI should become accountable to outside interests (outside of its developers). The stakes are higher here than with Orwell, King, or Gates.
Democracy is at its core a populist idea that can be implemented in such a way that can be self-defeating. Illiberal democracies are a good example of that. The Founders Fathers understood this which is way they saw democracy as a means, not an end by itself. The goal was the decentralization of power to prevent tyrannies. As long that's the premise, democracy can be implemented in a good way to achieve that purpose.
I think people conflate government and society. For example, thinking that the Constitution (or at least the principles behind it) tell us that we should have a religiously-neutral society, and keep religion to our private lives.
I've never been able to come up with a good analogy but I think a government is something a society has, not a way of being a society.
This really suffers from lack of steelman and lack of conceptual clarity. The points many make about "liberal democracy" are exactly on point. The contrast is not between democracy and totalitarianism. You can have democracies that are totalitarian or authoritarian or whatever. Democracy refers to the extent to which those who are governed have some say in who those are who govern or what laws are authorized. The scope of that democracy can be relatively unlimited, which may lead to totalitarianism, or it can be limited, by a constitution, a monarchy, or even just by tradition.
That some clowns day democracry means that philanthropists should be restricted in what they can do with the money is a strawman argument. There are always clowns arguing this or that; they can and should be ignored.
I think this piece dovetails nicely with a piece I wrote a few years ago about Skepticism and the freedom to doubt institutions: https://whitherthewest.com/2019/02/13/the-heterozygote-advantage-and-the-crisis-of-authority/
The problem is you're treating "democratic" as if it's a meaningful word. It isn't. It's just a another word that means 'liberal'.
This is exactly why the word 'populist' exists as a pejorative, and why things that have no obvious connection to popular will or electoral politics are frequently called 'democratic'. 'Populism' is essentially when an elected politician implements or talks about an issue that has large scale public support but which isn't liberal, even though this is far more 'democratic' in the traditional sense of the word than most of what gets called 'democratic'.
Re: “hold criminals accountable for actions”. To me this still is a consistent usage of “accountable”, if framed as:
All human beings are vested with authority to be free within the laws of the land.
Perhaps awkward in the sense that it defines freedom as a special right, rather than a natural state of being; but I feel this better maps to my intuition.
"I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way" -- I assume this is a direct reference to https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/ : "It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy"
If people claim to be acting in accordance to some ideal, they should be held accountable to the standards of that ideal, otherwise they are wrongly gaining status which is rightly associated with the ideal.
This reminds me of John Nerst’s April Fool’s Day post arguing for the abolition of secret ballots on the grounds that people should be “held accountable”: https://everythingstudies.com/2021/04/01/abolish-secret-ballots/
I find footnote 3 to be the right way to think about democratic government. I think the word "democratic" is usually used to mean representative democracy (which fit with footnote 3) and refer to the government - but we could certainly also consider if other parts of society is democratic - for example, corporations are seldom very democratic, yet they can hold a lot of power. Billionaires donating to charity is certainly a less democratic process compared to taxation and government spending on wellfare (given that the governement acts in the interest of voter). Functional government can and should regulate individuals and corporations to a reasonable extent and put checks on their power. A functional government should act in the interest of the general public, and balance interest of different groups. How much regulation? That is really a very difficult question, and ideally it would be up to the voters to pick the party most aligned with their interest.
What is needed in all this is balance - any extreme will lead to bad outcomes.
Agree with the broad strokes but disagree with the details. The idea that every person's individual actions should be subject to popular vote is both on the rise and obviously horrific.
But the concept of individual accountability even for things like "saying or believing the wrong things" clearly has a place in society. Societies should have values and ideas/actions that fall outside those values (and even if you don't agree with "should" there it doesn't matter - they do). People who transgress against those values will have that transgression held against them. Not allowing that to happen requires much more totalitarianism than just accepting that it does. Because often the "accountability" is enforced by people acting freely.
PS one thing we should consider holding substack accountable for is it's crappy commenting infrastructure
A democracy is just a society where decisions are made democratically. This includes the decision as to whether one should have freedom of religion or have a mandated state religion. Both societies, as long the decision re policy on religion is a democratic one, are perfect democracies. There is no contradiction there.
The examples of charitable donations and AI development, where terms like "undemocratic" are used but shouldn't be sufficient to win the claims of their arguments, are nonetheless legitimate cases where a person could reasonably believe that individuals or small groups have too much power that is unchecked by collective decision making. Maybe the term "undemocratic" is a bit subpar, but at least it's a concise way for those people to explain they believe that more government oversight would be an improvement. The term "less democratic" might be an improvement since it is less absolute, and certainly it should be combined with a more thorough argument about why more "democracy" in those cases would outweigh the trade-offs.
To be charitable to what I think the other Robert Reich meant, there are certain things a private citizen can do that will affect the lives of thousands of other citizen. There are benign ones like writing a book or making YouTube videos about volcanoes. But there are also things like polluting the air, enforcing the law, and declaring war. If we imagine Elon musk amassing a private army and declaring war on another country, there is a sense in which it’s undemocratic, because somebody acted unilaterally, instead of our elected representatives voting on it, and a sense in which he’s unaccountable, because we can’t vote him out of office. The same goes for vigilante justice, etc. I worry the continuum between freedom and totalitarianism is too simple a model to capture these nuances. We’d need a model in which it’s absolutely totalitarianism to mandate a state religion or ban books, but in which it’s democratic - and not in the totalitarian sense - that only elected representatives can declare war or found a police department.
People doing stuff with money (such as donating to charity, or anything, really) is democratic in so far as people have roughly the same amount of money. It's voting with the pocketbook, instead of the ballot.
Doing stuff with money becomes less and less democratic as wealth becomes more unequal, especially as corporations control vast resources controlled by tiny groups (essentially the board and CEO).
There's something 'democratic' in every citizen getting $1000 to give to any charity they personally want; the resulting distribution of resources closely matches the desires of the population, which seems like a good description of what democracy is about.
But when there are like 12 billionaires who have all the disposable income in the entire country, and what charities get funded is almost entirely a reflection of those 12 people's values and priorities and interests, then it becomes a lot clearer why the term 'undemocratic' is appropriate.
It doesn't really matter if the distribution of charitable funds is based on the personal whims of 12 totalitarian government officials, or 12 ultra-rich people who control most of the economy; the average person is equally unrepresented either way, it's therefore equally undemocratic either way.
Scott, you mistake the core problem and dissemble, your arguments are non-sequitur.
As a result, this shares more in common with propaganda pieces to rabble-rouse than something written for rational discourse. I'd suggest you return to rational thinking and logic instead of relying on sophistry to make a point. Critical theory cannot be used to prove anything, it amounts to whining and destructionism.
Earlier in the 20th century, any rational person knew that to make a rational point that would be accepted by rational people, you don't create new words; but instead you use commonly understood words with common definitions/shared meaning, to get your point across.
The only effective use of redefining words to less understood words, or appropriating existing words with opposite definitions is for lying and deception. Irrationality, destructionism, corruption, and deceit/loss. The only reason you do this is if you are trying to lie or deceive and cause some loss or harm. Its not accepted by rational people, and rationality is the only reason we've been able to build civilization up to the point we're current at.
Mises had quite a bit to say about that type of corruption of language if you read between the lines of what he had to say in his published works, which btw thoroughly refute socialism. Falsity and the cult of false beliefs is rampant because of indoctrination, usually from a young age. Few go back and critically evaluate those instilled beliefs which were accepted prior to the age of reason.
Robert Lifton explains some of the psychological grooming process from the historical perspective of a PoW in Mao's first revolution. They use sapir-whorf and distorted reflected appraisal to its fullest effect (inherent weaknesses in all humanity).
These techniques have only become more sophisticated today (i.e. this account was documented in the 50s iirc), often without needing the isolating components to drive people crazy, or break them into compliance. All that's necessary is sufficient interference in an individuals life in a small set of categories. USMC University has a book on Political Warfare which touches on this subject matter.
Similar techniques are being used in K12 schools under social emotional learning frameworks, and in the workplace under DEI frameworks to promote critical theory (and your article does to).
Please educate yourself so you don't inadvertently push false narratives as true.
Totalism is just another face of what's being pushed in its flavors of socialism these days, and its being pushed regardless of the fact that economic calculation hasn't been solved for those systems; hence its destructionism as Mises calls it, under the false belief of the masses that they are marking things better, while the leaders actually in-effect promote behavior towards destruction and slavery (in its many forms).
It comes down to proper education, very few people receive a classical education that would let you recognize the inherent and structural issues in what you have written. Most never take college Philosophy; such as logic or ethics. Please educate and reform your arguments so you don't mislead others.
I hate being the Objectivist bore here but - yes, this is exactly what Rand was warning about 40+ years ago. Democracy is the rule of the majority, the system that executed Socrates. And the demand to hold heroic and interesting people "accountable" is straight out of "Atlas Shrugged". Seriously, go read the fictional newsstorues by "Bertram Scudder"
A government that is forced to choose a state religion say by some unchangeable constitution is less powerful than a government that can enforce a state religion if it sees fit, and not enforce one if it decides otherwise.
Sitting back and not interfering with peoples lives is one of the choices a democratically elected government can make, and quite a popular choice at that.
If people vote for a totalitarian party who controls every aspect of their lives, they get it. If people vote for a libertarian party who does absolutely nothing, they get it. In either case the system is democratic. "How much should the government interfere" is another parameter to be set by the mechanism of democracy.
Charitable donations aren't undemocratic, because the democratic government chooses to allow them.
I popped in just because I was deathly curious to see how the ACT audience reacts to this article.
And I must say, I am impressed. It seems the PMC-led nonsense going on regarding "accountability" and "democracy" - which is really just thinly disguised agendas - is not shared by the majority of the commenters.
The other interesting part is the amount of space devoted to discussion of libertarian views. I have always found the entire field to be ludicrous - I continue to believe that libertarianism is entirely a product of the ahistoricity (is that a word?) and experiences of Americans, promulgated into the young and naive in other parts of the world but nonetheless a contradictory and inconsistent grouping of thinktank puffery.
Lots of new commenters I have never seen before. I am having fun trying to figure out what tweet or email list they came from.
Remember: Proposition 8 in California was passed democratically. It was overruled by "unaccountable" judges.
Fortunately the US doesn't have a pure Democracy, it's constrained by a number of structural features, checks and balances between branches of the Fed gov., semi-sovereign states, the Bill of Rights, etc. The Republican system of representation is also intended as a check on mob rule.
No one wants a government that follows any policy that happens to be popular in the moment. What we want is a government whose policies track the long-term self interest of as many members of society as practically possible.
BUT
If we have to err, err on the side of mob rule rather than authoritarian oppression. The mob will go away in a very little while, when something else distracts it. Authoritarian regimes are much harder to get rid of than they are to get started.
Accountability is a term we should use when we talk about holding people to participate in an *accounting* for their actions. It's about requiring them to state what they did, why they did it, what they thought the outcomes would be, and what the actual outcomes were, in dialogue with other perspectives about the same events.
Then, once there is an account, other mechanisms can decide whether there should be consequences or what those consequences should be. Or if there should be consequences for refusing to participate in the accounting, etc.
What if instead of either the current system for allocation charitable donations or the system where the plan approved by majority vote is implemented, each person got to choose the allocation of an equal contribution of the total societal charitable giving. This would arguably be "maximally democratic" in the sense that each person has an equal say in the outcome, but would not be especially totalitarian.
This is a point I had to repeatedly clarify when talking about the Israeli judicial reforms.
Many of my right wing friends were making the claim that the unelected judiciary being able to nullify laws (ie judicial supremacy) is undemocratic and the democratically elected knesset should be able to overrule it.
I countered that while technically correct you don't want a plain democracy, you want a liberal democracy (defined as a democracy where certain individual rights are protected against the state and the majority). For example, there is nothing undemocratic about a country passing a law that prohibits blacks from appearing in public if the majority are in favor of such a thing. So a court which can declare a law unconstitutional is the upholder of the liberalism of a state, not the democracy of the state.
It explains how countries which are ostensibly democratic display "democratic backsliding" without changing any rights to vote. "Democratic backsliding" almost always means the degrading of personal liberty rather than the degradation of the right to vote
I think a lot of people who are upset about this post are upset because democracy is their tribe's "yeay" word. There is a contingent that wants to claim democracy as their own, so they get upset at having to be exposed to facts like that real democracy means Texans don't have to house every sob story from central America and teachers can't tell 4th graders about their piss orgies in graphic detail.
Is it just me or has there been an uptick in low value culture war insertions under recent posts? It’s gotten to the point where I am less excited than I once was to read the comment section. Would be very interested in other opinions on this, and especially Scott’s, of course.
All quite valid, and shows the questions swirling around the current phrase "illiberal democracy". But ... isn't all of this encapsulated in the phrase "tyranny of the majority"? And given that concept and associated debates were current well before the US Constitution, were actively debated during the writing of the US Constitution, were critical motivation for the US federal Bill of Rights, were mentioned in "Democracy in America", ... and discussed in the civics classes of US high schools ... are there Americans who are unclear on this concept?
Reich's rhetoric is very odd. If having a representative that I may have voted against, or a legislature that may go against my representative, decide how my charity budget is spent is more democratic than letting me decide, what does “democratic” mean? Somehow the people are no longer the people when they decide directly? I guess democracy can only be about collectives, not individuals? But why?
"I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where 'democracy' is not a code-word for anal sex and 'election integrity' is not a code-phrase for MIGA." - Martin Luther King Jr.
The days, "democratic" just means "good for the Democratic Party." For example, the US Supreme Court is currently "undemocratic" because Democrats are in the minority on it but hold the Presidency. Meanwhile, the Israeli Supreme Court is "democratic" because Netanyahu's Republican-allied coalition holds a majority in the legislature but not on the Supreme Court. A decade from now those facts could be reversed and then the US Supreme Court will be designated as "democratic" and the Israeli Supreme Court as "undemocratic" and few will remember that it was ever different.
As Stalin said, all that matters in politics is Who? Whom?
This is an important post, and one more hint about Scott moving more and more away from current Democratic POV (or is it the opposite?).
I am from Europe, and the issue is the same here: There is a clear move from a liberty-focussed democracy to a protection-focussed democracy.
This is a long term trend, fueled mainly I think by the growth of TV media, the loss of faith in technical/standard-of-living progress and population aging. Provide a constant stream of immediate news about issues to a aging population more fearful and concerned on protecting what it earned than earning new things, lose the tech and science is an open frontier and manking will go the stars idea of the sixties and seventies, and you push for more protections thus more regulation. This push will not be resisted by the legal and judicial branches of governments, this is their purpose and reason to exist in the first place. regulating internal citizen stuff is also the easiest way for the executive, far easier than international and economic affair where it faces strong competitors (big firms or other nations).
Lately this already strong tendency has been kicked into overdrive by social media that live on outrage. Basically making the old town gossip into society shaping force.
This resulted into an ever growing over regulation, over judicialization of the developed world (not only western), the more old, the more rich, and the more female-influenced the worst.
Frankly, this has reached a tipping point imho, where you have a very unrestful young male population that indeed has objective reasons to get angry, and the others that while they benefit, are also strangled by legal overload. Basically everyone is doing illegal stuff (a direct consequence of overegulation) so your existence become insecure (even when regulations were supposed to make it more secure).
So there is a strong need for a peaceful way to remove and simplify laws. A problem imho, bacause historically the process has rarely been peaceful.
It sounds like you're conflating 'democracy' and 'representative democracy'.
>I think the word “democratic” is most useful when applied to the structure of a government
The problem with this is that a perfectly democratic society by this application could also include a world where megacorporations control every facet of our lives, a corporate tyranny would be "democratic" then.
Accountable is fixable if you just also include who they are accountable too. Should the writers be accountable to the censorship office? Randos on X? Your friend group? Awards groups not giving them prizes?
Very different levels of accountable.
Having shared moral standards and penalties for violating those standards is a basic building block of human groups. To be specific, of course someone should be held accountable for spreading fascist ideas at a time when about 1/3rd of the US is ready to support a fascist dictator. Of course COVID misinfo should be removed when it results in the deaths of 100's of thousands. Figuring out where to draw the line between truly dangerous and destructive ideas is constantly in flux based on the Democratic choices we make as a society. The alternative is letting groups with a flexible relationship to reality define it for the rest of us.
Wow. Can I have my brain cells back please? I lost a bunch through osmosis just reading this.
It's an interesting context switch reading things from the 1700s where everyone begins with, "ok yes of course democracy is bad with well known problems but here's how a bit of it could work." And we've rightly peeled back some of the limits founders placed on it in the US, but a slide to infinite democracy means accepting all the harms that were well documented since roughly Plato.
A law that makes the first 10% of people alphabetically pay all taxes and surrender all land and perform all compulsory service might be overwhelmingly democratic. While an absurd example, many failure modes of democracy have this character.
So we want a system that, to a first order, lets the 51% have their way, but while doing so, protects the rights of small groups. But also, some people, say serial killers, drunk drivers, belong to small groups it's a good idea to suppress, to varying degrees.
So first order, 51% get to decide, second order, small political groups don't get to dictate policy but have some protections, but third order, these protections don't extend to every small line around groups you could conceivably draw. Easy, done.
But then... what is a legitimate law that might burden some small groups? What if some law really just comes down to a choice between shifting economic power between boilermakers or steelmakers, who should get to say, whichever industry is currently more numerous?
And what small groups have politically legitimate interests such that they deserve protection? Governments often give money to stadiums or fine arts. Suppose people don't like sports and/or fine arts object that they are being put upon by the majority. Should people who prefer books or bars or pickleball or staring at grass receive a supermajoritarian protection to make their case, or should they just have to get in line and argue it out like everybody else?
After long enough at this game you get down into the real questions like, should the Supreme Court have a strong norm for stare decisis or a strong norm for making the best decision it can in the moment?
These questions are all nontrivial of course. It's a marvel any government works at all.
>Completely separately from the totalitarian thing, I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary.
Calling it Orwellian is apt, but I don't think it's a uniquely recent trend (though it might very well be getting worse).
Orwell himself (Politics and the English Language, 1946):
"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning."
I'm trying to craft your argument against a referendum on AI in syllogistic form and I'm having a heck of a time getting it to make sense. Please won't you show us how it's done?
Scott, can we just decide the word totalitarian is too vague to be useful? Same with authoritarian. I use value judgement words like "brutal, nasty busybodies" for regimes I hate. It feels more straightforward and self-honest.
I find it incredibly painful that you, with all your brilliance and a million important topics to address, should even have to write/explain this. It’s a sign of how far we have fallen from the concept of inalienable human rights.
If someone has to whisper that totalitarianism is just around the corner - well, guess what: it’s already here.
'Accountable' often simply means 'subject to belligerence from the shoutiest elements'.