I dislike Erdogan, I do think he is practically a dictator, and yet your comment above demonstrated very clearly why he got such support - and why Trump did, as well.
You are saying "There is no caste, no royalty, in modern Turkey; we are all descendants of Edwardian peasants". But then you set up a distinction between nice, polite, don't eat with their elbows on the table Turkish people and those 'other' Turks.
This is the same mindset that had people writing haughty pieces about Trump's fondness for well-done steak with ketchup: oh my dear how gauche, we don't do that here!
Can you not see that if you are dismissing the poor, the traditionally religious, the farmers and those at the bottom of the social ladder as the kinds of natural inferiors of the hard-working virtuous women who become doctors and then go shopping in Nisantasi, then of course the moment a guy who comes along and (figuratively) rolls up his shirt sleeves, puts his feet on the table, and cracks open a can of Dutch Gold is going to have immense appeal to them? That he can convincingly sell himself as "one of you guys"? That he'll stick it to all the toffee-nosed ponces who want to pass themselves off as natural nobility even in a classless society where the rubes and rednecks are being deliberately -and everybody knows it - kept out of power, out of influence, out of having any say or representation by people like them?
I'm peasant stock too, and I deeply resent the kind of attitude above: oh dear me yes, we nice cosmopolitan leaning types are so much better than those grubby traditionalists. I am aware of the ways, and how badly those ways can be, that traditional, peasant, lower-class people and cultures go wrong. But the cure for that isn't "stop making a show of us in front of the neighbours, I was so embarrassed when my high-class friends saw you", it's to work towards healing divisions and incorporating those people and giving them a way out that they can see, that doesn't depend on a strongman populist who will pander to them as the only alternative to Westernised liberals holding their noses when having to talk to them.
I agree that capitalism has its problems. I'm a little troubled though by your attitude which seems to discount the enormous amount of suffering that communist regimes have caused. I really do want to hear an account of communism from you that explains or contextualizes without dismissing the gulags and the famines. I'm honestly willing to convert if I can get an account that explains the above! Despite my best efforts, though, I can't find one. I've read so many memoirs by people who actually went through the gulags or the Cultural Revolution and they all describe communism as far worse than capitalism. But it sounds like you think differently. Could you explain to me why you think differently?
All that the poor have is their pride, and when they can see and hear their 'betters' saying "We don't regard you as our fellow-citizens, we think of you as an embarrassment and we wish we could be rid of you", then is it any wonder they are fodder for someone who can say "hey, I'm on your side, look I'm one of you guys too!" or can aspire to be convincing about it when he says "look, the people who hate you hate me too!" That of course does lead to ostentatious signalling, e.g. of religious affiliation. I dislike church gate electioneering by any party.
But while I disagree with a lot of populist sentiment, I *understand* why people are attracted to it, because I come out of that kind of background (a cousin by marriage, for instance, thought those awful 'crying children' paintings were art). I don't know how I came by my snobby tendencies, but there you go. Which means I do recognise the snobby tendencies in those who like to play the Lady Bountiful and resent them, and realise why other people resent them, and how that resentment can be funnelled into political support.
Because when you have nothing but your pride, and no means of expression, sometimes the last thing you can do is a resounding "Eff you" to the great and good.
It's really surprising to find out ideas which were written out in political writings in my country a decade and half ago, are in a sense very universal.
"Because when you have nothing but your pride, and no means of expression...": this is what is happening in many places, the USA including. Only a specific bandwidth of opinions manifests, and the rest do not have an outlet supported by thinkers, printing presses, publishers, etc. Yet in the USA, fortunately for the country's dwellers, the situation is milder and more "mediated" than in most parts of the world afflicted by such a discontent... due to better institutions, older institutions? hard to say
I think bringing up "this demonstrates why Trump got so much support" (not a quote, but I don't see how else to enclose it) and saying, "All that the poor have is their pride" in the same sequence is something to be extremely cautious with.
While a lot of Trump supporters self-identify as "the working poor", they were actually richer on average than Clinton voters (I haven't seen similar numbers for Biden).
I've recently seen people talking about how Biden's plans to raise taxes on households earning $400,000 is a bad idea, because those households aren't actually that rich. A lot more people see themselves as poorer than they actually are.
"We represent the oppressed common people against the elites" is very much the message the Republicans are trying to sell, but the numbers contradict it pretty flatly.
Those categories are too broad say what you want them to say. The literal "working" class can easily have a household income above 100k. For example, people working in any of the trades, small business owners, farmers, ie actual working Americans.
Thos earning below 50k could more properly be called the welfare class, while those earning more than 400k are most certainly strongly in the Democrat camp. You only have to look at the election results by ZIP code to see this is true.
Any honest analysis would admit that the elites have created a class of dependants that they use to ensure their continued power. The not-entirely-poor working class are the American regime's kulaks.
You know, when an entitled elitist, a very talented one, tries to praise somebody outside their inner clique, something "like" this (a very talented but deeply flawed) poem appears, waving a fake-respect banner, spotted with condescending. The titular peasant woman *understands* the world much better than the author opines (and possibly deeper, than the author). Think of analogies all over the world.
I usually agree with and enjoy Deiseach posts, but I'm not so sure about this one. I mean, the general sentiment, yes -- I'm quite a traditionalist, and 23andme hasn't uncovered any royalty in my recent ancestry, curse the luck -- but in this particular case, well... Maybe the commenter (wish I'd got to see the post, sounds super interesting if it's about how Turks view each other) holds his nose around Islamist rubes because they *actually stink*. So to speak. Metaphorically.
Before I start, let me reiterate that I know the problems of the peasant, traditional, small town and small-minded insular side. I'm not claiming Superior Virtue As Real Turks for them here.
The thing is, before I read all this, I didn't understand how Erdogan came to power. Now I have a better understanding. And if we want to avoid the rise of right-wing populism/potential Fascism, we had better damn well understand how it happens.
So yeah, let's take the worst case scenario: the dirty, literally smelly (and yes I do know about farmers who stink of slurry, country people who smell of woodsmoke and manual labour, and so on, from personal experience), backwards, superstitious, conservatively religious, women in headscarves and hijabs, what use is higher education, inlander peasant and working class Turks who fell for the appeal of Erdogan and Gulah. Let's say that they really *are* a problem.
How do you solve that problem? Well, even if you are a cocktail-sipping, Westernised, nice-smelling, liberal city Turk who more instinctively looks to the West for a lead in culture, thought and politics - sorry, you're still Turkish. You're not European. And those smelly inlanders *are* your fellow-citizens and closer to you than Strasbourg or Brussels. The original commenter mentioned Ataturk's pulling down of all caste distinctions and that modern Turks are all descendants of 1900s peasants.
That has to be the realisation. You [general "you", not specifically about anyone posting here] are all in this together, and you have to get on together. The smelly peasants have to put up with the effete cocktail-sippers, and vice versa. The smelly peasants have a right to representation as much as you do, and if you manipulate the system such that the only representation they can get, or feel comfortable with, are people who game the system and then hollow it out as a 'get your retaliation in first' defensive measure, then you are going to end up with strongmen populists.
Erdogan isn't Trump and Trump isn't Erdogan, they have different backgrounds, different biases, different aims and goals. But how did Trump tap in to that particular mood back in 2016 where he went from the joke candidate, where John Oliver was pleading "please run, please!", to the threat he did become where he overcame the internal party resistance, won the nomination, and then beat Hillary in a result that shocked the pundits? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87UXIH8Lzo
Could it possibly be something to do with... the rubes did notice that the nice liberal types held their noses around them because of the stink?
Give the rubes metaphorical water for a bath and maybe they'll stink less. But cutting off the taps and then complaining about the stink is all on you. Force people into a choice between "it's us (and we hold you in contempt and are hoping for the day you all disappear) or the Devil", and don't be surprised when some people go "Well all right then, I'm picking the Devil!"
"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t."
The important connection between the lower classes and the elites is missing in our Liberal society. There aren't any painter-decorators in Senates or Parliaments - actually the House of Lords is more representative of the true republic by job occupation and the forces of 'democracy' are trying to get rid of it.
What we need is blue blood with a red streak that can weigh against the biases and self serving of the middle classes. It's not just the blue collar either - there are other elites in our society that are put upon like engineers and scientists who are banned from controlling public office. People will say not so - but they are full of shit as any scan of competitors will show - at this point the CCP is a healthier republic than the United States or the UK.
In the end - head, the hands and the heart are what you need for full stack human development - that's all there is to it. You can't get to niceness, fairness and community by balancing too much into any faction's nonsense.
Trying to compress politics into a single left-right spectrum results in nonsense. (If you separate "culturally" and "economically", you have already stopped using that approximation.)
"NOTE: I'm a POC, so slow the F down before calling me a White Supremacist." I think you're good. Most of us here don't like that kind of rhetoric any more than you do.
This is just silly. Democrats don't hate America nor do they want to dismantle it. Did you miss that it's mostly Republicans flying the Confederate flag (you know, the actual flag of "wanting to dismantle the United States". Democrats are not a fan of bombing other countries. There were more drone strikes in Trump's four years than Obama's eight.
Your evolution from Obama to Hillary to Trump would be a fascinating story.
AOC and Ilhan Omar are not the Democratic party writ large.
The Democratic primary process is far more Democratic than the Republican one. In the democratic primary, state delegates are awarded proportionally. So a 40% biden and 35% Sanders, 20% Bloomberg didn't result in biden getting all of the delegates. He got something like 50% in that scenario.
In the Republican primary, by contrast, it was winner take all for a lot of states. Trump was able to build an insurmountable delegate lead quickly because he won states with a plurality (45%-40%) of the vote but got 100% of the delegates.
You are right that many minorities were super turned off by the violent protests of the summer. You will also note that Video condemned violent protests when they started and that he was widely reviled by the largely white college educated Woke class of the Democratic party.
You know who did like him?
Actual minorities in the Democratic coalition.The older religious more conservative black population said, "Let's go with a boring guy, not a firebrand who has stood up to the more loony left wing members" South Carolina put him over the top. The Democratic party is having an internal reckoning over Woke excess and it's a known problem.
The Democrats also have a platform. You can read it. In the last election, the Republican platform was literally "we support the president"
Owning the Libs is satisfying and there are a lot of them that deserve some ownage, but that's not a substitute for competent governance.
Hmm Well my hope is for a third party in the US. Seems to me there is a sane 'libertarian' center out there somewhere. Dan Carlin, Joe Rogan, the Weinsteins, Lex Fridman, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson... Scott Alexander. You don't need to agree with everyone else's ideas, just respect them as real.
Those soldiers getting murdered by the mob was one of the worst things I've seen. Most of them had to be 17 or 18 and I think they had weapons but no ammunition so it was a set up.
This was one of those events that if you described it in text or in a formal way you would be on the side of the citizens beating off an illegitimate attempt by a military organization to take over the society. It would be unpleasant but it made logical sense.
Then if you watched the footage and saw the photos you immediately realized the opposite is the truth because you saw disgusting old men beating what are obviously terrified kids to death. After watching I understood something out of the anti-Turk sentiment in Germany was recognition of something real - which is that there is something horrible and unnatural in Turkish society. It is difficult to put into words and easy to interpret as being anti-Turk which isn't right. Turks - European or no - are great - yet there is something very dark in their society. This instinct is something more like recognition of evil than bigotry - it is an axiomatic error for Liberalism to conflate the two.
I'm not German. I agree with every thing you've said but I'm getting at something different - this is not about Germans or Turkish citizens.
It wasn't the number of people killed or the stressful conditions that caused violence that give me a sense of horror - it was a sense of something else. It seems to me there is an evil of circumstance which is tragic but somebody can work their way around to understanding it.
I think there are other indescribable forms that come out of our legacy with the deep past and we sometimes see glimpses of these things in premodern texts. It would be easy to laugh it off and think these are basic instincts to be held in check by reason - but there are other frightening possibilities - you have to ask why it is thought the analytical brain is the most advanced when it's the slowest and it is clear human beings are running all sorts of processes they are not aware of. When you then look at the history of human violence and evidence of genocides in the genetic record - it prompts unsettling suggestions. These are easy to dismiss with the confidence we are running the show - it would be good if that were correct.
Hi Amy, I like your comments, but this is not other social media sites. Try to have some civility and assume others will also behave the same towards you. The goal (or at least my goal) is to have a good discussion, see the other persons side of things.
India is almost a mirror case of Turkey without military coups. For around 50 years it was ruled by liberal elites who educated themselves in Harvard, Oxford and the ilk and were explicitly secular. They were the high class, the majority religious low class almost had zero representation. Even at the state level was dominated by either explicit communists, or caste based socialists who rarely displayed any religion. The only significant right wing force was demonised for having one of it's members kill Mahathma Gandhi, the father of the nation that relegated them to the backseat for quite a while. But of course anyone who lived in India, knew that the country was still predominantly lower class Hindu, religious and nationalistic, you couldn't buy a car without having it blessed by a priest from a temple. So we eventually ended up with our strongman prime minister Modi, who is lower class and hated by most power structures when he first joined, predominantly the judiciary and to some extent the civil service. Then it seems clear, that over his second term he has gotten a lot of his people into the judiciary and so now cases the court striked against just five years are suddenly completely fine and in line with the constitution. I would say we aren't at the stage where he's proactively jailing or getting rid of his opposition. It's more like he's installing his people in the judiciary and civil services to make sure they don't get in his way. Whether we will slide into proactively hunting down the opposition, remains to be seen but needless to say the lower class is pissed and keeps getting more pissed, the more Bollywood and the media talk down to them. They could potentially excuse strong arm tactics by Modi in the name of anti-corruption or so
How did you type this whole thing without saying "antinational" or "The BJP will give you a wink and a nudge if you, in a totally understandable lapse, decide to lead a Lynch mob against a Muslim standing too near a cow"
The Lynch mob seems mostly an exaggeration, like the threat of "white-nationalism" in US. I haven't seen any sources that indicate an increase in Lynch mobs case under this govt and there certainly havent been any high profile cases to point to. Same with the cow vigilantes and the sort
Or a strict term-limit for dictators--you get X years of dictatorial power, and then a mandatory retirement to a nice south seas island somewhere far away, with armed guards whose job is both to protect you from harm and kill you if you try to retake power.
Should you? What happened to the French population, specifically of military-age young men, during the Empire? My impression is he had a pretty thorough draft, and even a brilliant general suffers losses. Even without Russia.
(I am actually not an expert, so please take the above as a genuine question; I think I know the answer, but my sources are weak enough that I wouldn't call myself confident.)
There’s a reasonably compelling argument that the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ were forced on Napoleon by European powers unhappy about the whole revolution and beheading royals bizzo.
The collective name for the wars is ’Napoleonic’ but the names of the individual wars are War of the First/Second/Third etc Coalition, i.e. whatever group of countries Britain was able to stitch together and fund to declare war against France.
The most obvious exception is Spain, which probably contributed more to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat than did the invasion of Russia.
It’s not obvious that Napoleonic France would have been anything like as expansionary had other European powers not kept trying to overturn the revolution. However, the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens seems to show poor faith and a lack of enthusiasm for peace on both sides of the Channel. So who knows. Counter-factuals and all that.
At any rate, it’s possible to construct a narrative whereby Napoleon was an enlightened, modernising ruler who would’ve been content to rule France in peace and bestow good government had reactionary crowned heads not objected to him on principle.
But then even if you accept that line of reasoning it's not clear that a leader that makes everyone else want to declare war on you is someone you want to keep around.
On the other hand, if everyone declaring war on you is a given (because for example you beheaded their cousin), then a leader preternaturally good at winning wars who is also a dab hand at creating good institutions and reforming bad ones seems as good a choice as any.
It was the French who started the War of the First Coalition. From Wikipedia: "Eight months later, following a vote of the revolutionary-led Legislative Assembly, France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792; Prussia, having allied with Austria in February, declared war on France in June 1792."
Basically, the Girondins had a paranoid conspiracy theory that Austria was colluding with the king and nobles of France to crush the revolution, and browbeat the king into declaring war on Austria. We now know that Austria was preoccupied with Poland and had no desire to help the French king. They would have been perfectly happy to see the French destroy themselves with revolution, had not France declared war on them first.
The hard part there is enforcing a term limit on a dictator who's held power for several years. My impression is China had a similar system after Deng and it worked for a few decades until Xi managed to build up enough of a power base to overstay past when is term would have ended.
Not quite; Xi inherited a truly flawed system. The patronage networks within the CCP basically meant that any president/chairman was effectively powerless for the first 1/2 to 2/3rds of his tenure.
CCP leadership is highly reliant on personal loyalty and patronage networks. New presidents were traditionally paralyzed by the substantial power that the previous generation of political leaders wielded (both directly and via their proteges still in the party).
For most presidents/chairmen, it took along time to sideline the old guard and appoint enough people loyal to them to get their agenda's rolling. Unlike US presidents, who tend to get the most done during the start of their tenure, Chinese presidents' power was mostly at the end. This, however, leads to the situation where someone is most powerful right when they're being asked to give up their power. This has an obvious failure mode that Xi exploited.
Isn't that, effectively, the Mexican model? [I am exaggerating of course but that is the direction of their presidential power, term limits, and wealthy retirement from what I understand...]
This is how dictators in the Roman Republic worked before the Second Punic War. The Senate / Consuls would give someone almost complete control of the government for 6 months, and then they were (usually) protected from prosecution for what they did in office.
Lincoln was martyred before he had to deal with the aftermath of the Civil War. If he had had to be President during Reconstruction, he might have a reputation more like that of President Grant...
I thought his Reconstruction plan was significantly different, and much milder, than the one eventually enacted? Which would give us an entirely new hypothetical, but I would still expect a rather different reputation than Grant's.
(Also, I think most of Grant's problems would have stopped him long before he became president if he hadn't been a war hero. Lincoln was a very capable politician, all else aside.)
Lincoln's kind of a weird case because he actually did do a lot of very unpopular things (conscription was a big one - conscription to put down a secession has a very bad look) and had an utterly-terrible reputation from before his inauguration (hence, y'know, the South going "not my President") up until decades after his death. He's been historically rehabilitated, partially because of martyrdom and partially because of how far outside the Overton Window the Confederacy has drifted.
I'm not saying Lincoln was bad, but he's not a great example of "adored hero goes off the rails". He was never adored except in hindsight.
This raises a key point with this theory: who in history were the near-miss dictators who turned out to be heroes?
Possible candidates:
Old Pitt the Younger (continuing down the road of dissent=sedition)
President-for-life Juarez (slightly shady tactics to win the election in '71, had a personality cult, could have been a liberal Diaz)
5-term FDR (wasn't actually at war when he ran for a third term, had a shady court-packing plan and that weird dictatorship bill Garner proposed while he was still Speaker)
President-Chairman Aung San (not her, her father who was a Burmese independence leader)
1970s Emergency Nehru (although he'd be really really old)
So looking at the root causes of 'right-wing populist' movements the best antidote could be, to take care that the elites never get so much out of touch with the populace that they think they need a populist strongman. This has many elements and dimensions: It is about checks and balances, but also about trust, and political culture.
I think one Problem is having only a few but strong political parties. The parties have their own internal hierarchies that are not always democratic and enforce compliance to their programs. And it makes it very hard to raise new topics or groups outside of these strong and slow institutions.
Another point is about a political culture being aware of the importance of trust and the mechanics of gaining and loosing trust. This is were many moderate religious politicians have advantages, as they are often more humble, and they are more likely to ideals in serving a higher good than just beeing after power or money.
Another thing would be to implement feedback loops, for the elites and governments to keep in touch with the realities an every day struggles of ordinary people.
If it is Scott as Scott puts it in the end that right-wing populists feed on unfair class differences and left-wing populists feed on unfair economic gaps and "Anti corruption campaign" is a great excuse to sweep enemies out of institutions, it should be a important concern of any working democratic state to control these factors within a corridor, that it isn't a mayor problem causing people to thing they need a strongman to fix it.
I think the US didn't do a good job controlling these factors and so Trumpism is just what results.
Looking at it like this, i would conclude either the elites wake up and address the concerns of the people that make the populist look like the lesser evil, or they will lose. Explaining the dangers, propaganda or deplatforming will not help, at least not for long.
I suspect what's more likely to happen is that the established parties will adopt more and more of the policy of the populist outsiders but retain control over government.
The clearest example of this is in the UK where the Tories became a hardline anti-EU party (not that they were ever a strongly pro-EU party) and as a result the UK's biggest populist Farage has retired and his party has collapsed. But there's examples all over Europe with mainstream parties taking tougher lines on immigration, Islam, or both.
I would argue that this is a sign of a healthy democracy. If the voters want to leave the EU, you don't want to put a new inexperienced political party whose at war with all the elite institutions in charge of the most complex and tricky bit of governing since WWII. So instead elites move closer to the strategic political ground and you get a new elite/populus coalition that can hopefully make changes without declaring war on every institution.
Brexit is again a great example. It is probably the hardest test for this kind of democracy because it's so binary, in or out, with a strong polarisation turning people against compromise positions like EEA. And yet even though the elites lost post 2019 election even the anti-brexit institutions have calmed down in a way you never got with Trump.
I mean, the obvious corollary here is that you only get populist parties when the elite lose touch in an obvious way - when something has wide popular support, but the elite universally refuse to touch it.
> But there's examples all over Europe with mainstream parties taking tougher lines on immigration, Islam, or both.
There are also a lot of examples of populists being ignored.
Also, the EU is build on free movement of labor/people, so politicians often can't make their own immigration rules. This was a major reason for Brexit in the first place.
Yes. No single organization (or small set of organizations), whether government or private companies, should be in the business of deciding what either the leader of the free world or anyone else may or may not broadcast to the world. It should be up to the readers to judge it, the platform should stay a neutral conduit that transmits anything.
The idea that there should not be a line at all is fundamentally flawed. Everyone (now) agrees that spammers should be banned. But that consensus took years to forge; there's a reason that it's nearly impossible to eradicate spam from email, and that's because it's designed around freedom of speech. But if you don't ban spammers, you don't have a communications medium that is at all functional. If you don't want spam banned from your inbox, there is probably a specialised spam-friendly webmail somewhere, or you could run your own mail server if you want.
But once you've conceded the principle that some people should be able to be banned, you now have a problem. Someone has to to decide what is and what is not banned. If Trump started spamming (putting up adverts, endlessly repeated, at the limits of how fast his computer could post) then he would clearly be banned. If he started posting links to malware, then he could clearly be banned. But I can draw a gray area on any line you like - I've been doing moderation policies since the early nineties. In the end, it's not as easy as you'd like.
My preferred solution would be that no single organisation should have that power, and that there should be many separate organisations. More like email - if you get banned from Gmail, you could use yahoo or outlook or whatever - or you could run a private server.
IMO a legitimate purpose of moderation is to keep people from seeing posts they don't want to see (e.g. spam), or to facilitate high-quality discussion in a community. What is not a legitimate purpose of moderation is to prevent people who *do* want to read something from reading it (e.g. a Trump supporter from reading Trump's posts).
For the former purpose, moderation should be done at a low level. There is a good reason for subreddits to be moderated; there is no good reason for significant sitewide moderation on reddit. On Twitter, people can avoid having to see spam if they can decide whom they follow, and whom they allow to reply to their posts. (I guess, I'm not familiar with Twitter.) Again, I see no good reason for sitewide moderation.
Indeed, as far as I know, it's allowed and common to have accounts advertising products on Twitter; it's up to other users if they follow them.
Yes, I prefer it to a Twitter playing a fake moral card. Corporations lie all the time, they have no business targeting others for lying. Twitter is exactly the same heap of crap as Trump, they have no credibility to engage in a "holier than thou" kabuki. They fit together exceedingly well, Trump could be the ghost of Twitter personified.
I expect that both the US and Western Europe is fairly resistant, not only institutionally, but also culturally, in the sense that people would tolerate a dictatorship much less. Turkey has never had a strong democratic tradition.
The United Kingdom is the longest running democracy and could decide basically anything with a simple majority (including court-packing, etc). McGann is pretty convincing regarding the risk of a tyranny of minorities when supermajorities are required (The tyranny of the supermajority: how majority rule protects minorities). The evidence for the benefits of supermajorities seems thin. I would be wary of drawing too many lessons from specific cases.
I’m not sure your evidence applies well. But there is reason for concern. It is difficult to amend the US constitution, so those who find it inconvenient simply reinterpret it. I don’t think a solution to this problem has been demonstrated, at least not unambiguously.
My point was: Scott presented an example where a country relied on simple majorities and that was bad for democracy. I presented an example of a country that relies on simple majorities and things do well. I suggested we think about the issue systematically.
Only in a very slim and deceptive technical sense is this true. The majority of the populace was not able to vote until the early 20th century. Arguably the UK wasn’t even close to actual democracy until the parliamentary reforms of the 19th century.
As far as ‘tyranny of the minority’ goes, I find the evidence for this… thin.
What people mean mostly by ‘tyranny of the minority’ is that the majority doesn’t get to implement all of its reforms at its own pace, not that the country is actually in the grip of a tyrannical minority. A good example of a real tyranny of the minority is the UK before 1833!
But the fact that this is true formally but not in practice is part of my argument that majority rule does not tend to create opression. With respect to the evidence being thin, I'm not the one proposing that an innovation in democratic practice is very promising, Scott is. The burden of proof lies with him. But there is some evidence if you want to check: Huey Li's "Dividing the Rulers" is a good book on this. The evolution of parliamentary procedure also provides practical evidence. The UK before 1833 might be a tyranny for our standards only, but it was by far the most progressive country at the time. And, as Marian points out, the House of Lords only lost their formal ability to veto legislation in 1911.
Ultimately, there is no way to prevent bad laws from being created without locking down the laws, which means preserving bad laws forever (and laws can become bad if circumstances change).
Any system of lawmaking is a balance between making it too easy and too hard.
Note that if lawmaking is too hard, people will just overthrow or otherwise avoid adhering to the system, so that can actually be more dangerous.
Different approaches have different probabilities of preventing bad laws from being created. Nothing is guaranteed, but the experience of thousands of organizations, translated into the practice of "parliamentary procedure", has found that majority rule has the best promise. Theory shows why this may be expected (McGann, "Tyranny of the Supermajority"). The balance is 50% - not as reckless as the "move fast and break things" of Silicon Valley, nor as frozen as the proponents of ever increasing supermajorities (up until unanimity).
This is not to say that some fundamental rules about the very structure of functioning of organizations (truly constitutional norms) should not be subject to supermajorities. But the default should be simple majority, and the very exceptional should be supermajoity.
I think the reason the UK is distinct is probably that it's *always* been politically majoritarian, so everything else about the country has adapted to that. In particular, I don't think British elites could ever drift quite as far from the general population as Turkish elites without completely separating from the state; especially so as until recently almost nothing was shielded from politics and there were no checks & balances or separation of powers (until the 2000s, the head of the judiciary was a political appointee who got to personally select all judges).
The only institutions shielded from the majority are the BBC and the trust-owned Guardian (for some reason, all British press barons are populist oddballs), and their far less populist than anything else in the country.
I forgot to add a conclusion, which was that if Erdogan successfully reigns in or eradicates the liberal elite and waits a century, he could probably end up with roughly the UK but with rustic Islam taking the place of Britain's populist streak.
"Tyranny of the minority" can happen in the United States if you have a House election like 2010 (where more voters voted for Democrats than for Republicans, but Republicans got a stable majority in the House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections), a Presidential election like 2016 (where more voters voted for Clinton than for Trump, but Trump got a stable electoral college victory), and a series of three consecutive Senate election cycles where Republicans win a minority of the votes but get 60 of the seats (I don't know that this *has* happened, but it would have happened over the past three cycles if there had been a couple million more votes for Republicans in the southwest in 2016 and the midwest in 2018, and a few thousand more votes for them in Georgia in 2020). The Senate and Electoral College are institutions that greatly empower some groups at the expense of others, but don't really care whether those groups are majorities or minorities, contrary to some people who think they empower minorities.
You’re complaining here about features, not bugs, in my view. A legal code that ensured a popular majority could sweep the legislature and ensure that the legislative majority could pass whatever legislation it likes is exactly what I’d like to avoid, and I would much prefer that the Senate was representative of the States themselves, and not a duplicate of the House.
It’s better, in my mind, to make sure that checks and balances are in place, that even large shifts in the electorate can only take and implement new power projection slowly, and that we have every opportunity to default to no action taken at the federal level.
These are of course the priorities of a localist. I have very little in common with people in other states, nothing really at all in common with their representatives, and I would prefer being ruled and having a voice in ruling my locality only.
I don't think this is quite on point. If I understand, you are talking about the way the system works towards requiring different types of representation to pass legislation. That is arguably a feature. The criticism is that a minority position can gain a majority and rule without the consent of the majority. While that may not have happened, with a bare majority requirement in the Senate it would have happened and is quite plausible. There is a solid case for requiring the consent of the minority but I don't know what the case is for not requiring the consent of the majority. Certainly I don't think such an outcome can be described as democratic.
That's why Kenny Easwaran gave all three conditions - a House election that gave a majority to under-50%, a series of Senate elections that gave a majority to under-50%, and a Presidential election that elected the minority candidate. He's saying that given all three - which have happened separately, although not together - you could have a minority gain total power.
The UK isn't that different: they use a first-past-the-post system, so lots of votes can be "wasted" without resulting in more seats. And in fact the party that gets the most votes often DOESN'T get to form the government over there.
I have trouble looking at Brexit and thinking "yep, making all major decisions with a simple majority is a good idea". Having a substantial bias towards the status quo seems like it would naturally favor stability in the long run, even if it leads to suboptimally slow policy-making in the short term.
In any case, my understanding is that the UK (at least until recently) was a lot more culturally homogenous than Turkey (or the US). Is that inaccurate? There seems to be a lot of evidence that basically *any* type of government is significantly more stable in proportion to the cultural homogeneity of its populace.
Very true. Would "regionally homogenous" be more accurate?
The Protestant/Catholic divide isn't trivial -- and has obviously been involved in a lot of bloodshed -- but there's a lot more cultural common ground between British Catholicism and British Protestantism than you get mixing conservative Muslim, Orthodox Christian, and European Protestant/secular cultures together, like in Turkey, and that's just considering religion.
My memory wad that Jewish participation UK society led to about as much unrest/conflict/suspicion in its time as the growing Muslim population has today, but I don't live there so I welcome correction.
I think you can write off a lot of that heterogeneity as "not politically relevant" - the only big minorities were catholics and non-conformists, but because they were neither the dominant elites nor the bulk of the population (on Great Britain itself) the elites and the masses could stamp the catholics down so thoroughly that they didn't really affect anything, and the non-conformists (and the Scots until recently) were close enough to the mainstream that they could just go along with it. They're much more like the Kurds in the Turkish analogy.
I would add that simple majorities can actually provide *more* stability in the long run. The more fragile is a decision you approve when you have a majority the more you would worry that a different majority would overturn it. If you want your decisions to be long-lasting, you wouldn't try to take advantage of a short-term disproportionate majority you have. But if you know that you have an unusually high majority now and that your opponents would need to win many more seats to revert a decision, you would be emboldened to at least try to make your long-term-not-as-majoritarian position a long term one. Then a different supermajority would form, and would act in the exact same way.
I was operating on the assumption that significant majorities form only infrequently, as has been the case in the US in my lifetime, but that obviously isn't generalizable. If large majorities frequently oscillate, then you're right that requiring a significant majority wont' necessarily improve long-term stability.
I see your argument for stability through strictly majoritarian decision making, but it strikes me as presuming a level of long-term orientation from policy makers that doesn't match observed evidence (in the US; I know we have a rather atypical system and won't presume to generalize). Here, there is significant pressure for the party in power to take all desired policy actions that are available, without regard for medium and long term consequences. Thus the push to end the filibuster to push policy through in spite of long-term Republican advantage in the senate.
"it strikes me as presuming a level of long-term orientation from policy makers that doesn't match observed evidence". I partially agree. You'd need to compare the level of long-term orientation from countries which rely more on supermajorities than the US. Let me offer the example of Brazil. We have a very long constitution, which can be amended by majorities of 2/3 in both chambers (no involvement of states). Our constitution was promulgated in 1988. We have just approved our 109th amendment.
Does that include many significant reversals (like prohibition and ending prohibition in the US)? Are party politics in Brazil pretty bipolar like the US, or multipolar? I would naïvely expect supermajorities on a specific questions (e.g. a constitutional amendment) to be easier to achieve in a multipolar environment, but I could be entirely off base.
Very multipolar. To be fair, I feel our politics swing a lot but can't think of examples of reversals in amendments like what happened with the prohibition
"I would add that simple majorities can actually provide *more* stability in the long run. The more fragile is a decision you approve when you have a majority the more you would worry that a different majority would overturn it. "
By this logic, the proponents of Brexit would not have sought Brexit in 2016, because they had only a small majority and would have been afraid that a slight reversal of fortune would have had Brexit undone in 2018. Yet here we are, with Brexit solidly in place. I think you're forgetting several forms of status quo bias, all of which make decisions harder to reverse than to implement even if the vote threshold is 50% either way. If you can get 50%+1 to make the change, the change will likely endure even if 5% change their minds next year.
As I wrote on a different comment, plebiscitary votes and parliamentary votes are very different. Mobilizing the whole population of a country will always be a rare event, so even simple majorities can expect to not be overturn easily. But that is only one aspect in which they are very different.
Yes, there is status quo bias. But it applies to measures which are perceived to be generally welfare improving. Measures perceived to be opportunistic hardly benefit from that protection. Which, if you think about it, makes the case for expected stability with simple majorities even stronger. Means we have less reason to fear huge swings (because people will concentrate on the kind of measure which does not attract great opposition).
The UK has always had strong class divisions (see everything involving Thatcher vs Miners) that arguably date back to 1066 when Normans invaded and replaced the elite but not the general population. (Even today people with Norman surnames are disproportionately wealthy).
Is that more homogenous than Turkey? I can't say, but there's always been divisions.
I'm maybe not working with a technically accurate definition of cultural homogeneity, but in the sense I intended, that is a *flabbergasting* degree of homogeneity. If I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting that a typical person has roots and shared cultural history with their neighbors going back ~1000 years?
I don't have data on the US handy, but I'd wager the average American can't say the same going back 100 years. I don't know how much cultural mixing has happened in Turkey, but I think it's safe bet it's more than Britain as you describe it.
Agree. Particularly in a country like the United States, which already has numerous structural protections (bicameralism, separate executive branch with veto, independent judicial review), imposing additional supermajority requirements seems unlikely to add much marginal benefit against majoritarian tyranny, but increases the risk of other kinds of social and structural failure (gridlock, minoritarian capture of government institutions, etc.)
The supermajority required to change the US constitution seems pretty extreme. Here in Ireland we have a referendum every decade or two, usually with a couple of proposed amendments. I think we mostly feel pretty good about having direct democracy in this form. Even if we basically kicked off abortion to the elites last time.
In Australia, changing the constitution requires a referendum with both an overall majority _and_ a majority in a majority of states (ie at least four out of six states). I was shocked when I found out that the US constitution can be changed by a simple conspiracy of politicians with no need to have a referendum at all.
Only eight out of 44 attempted referenda have passed, which seems reasonable to me as a believer in the Metropolis-Hastings Monte Carlo model of social progress.
He means that in theory, the Constitution could be amended to say "everyone has to wear red squeaky balls on their nose" if 417 politicians (2/3rds House rounded up, 2/3rds Senate) wanted it and then about a thousand or so different politicians (3/4ths state legislatures) decided to go along with it, even if literally everyone else in the country thought it was a terrible idea.
In practice, the closest thing the US ever had to a "red squeaky balls amendment" (18th) was repealed in a little under 15 years.
Ah, the fact that we do not have referenda at a federal level. True, but it is almost impossible to imagine an ammendment passing that is not massively popular. As stupid as prohibition was it was still supported by a substantial majority of the people.
That looks like selection bias to me - five hundred years ago, basically everywhere in Europe had a monarch and today most places don't. Most of the remaining ones have less power than the Queen of England, and she doesn't exactly have a lot of power in practice. I'd rather suggest that the UK still has a monarch because they've been fairly stable, not the other way around.
Good point. But remember the British temporarily got rid of their monarchy under Cromwell and eventually made the conscious decision to restore it within a settled constitutional framework with William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution. So the English (after much drama) made a stable constitutional monarchy that, in turn, helped make Britain so stable.
I suspect that's a big factor in Britain still having a monarchy - lots of countries get their first republic in a similar fashion (chaotic quasi-democratic assembly gets stamped on by authoritarian dictatorship with the support of the army), but the UK did it so early in history that there wasn't any ideological foundation or external precedent for what to do at the end. So when it all collapsed, it went back to monarchy and stayed there.
Though the nineteenth century was historically unusual in that respect - there were quite a lot of republics around until Napoleon and Bismarck smashed them all up (Genoa, Venice, the Netherlands, Hamburg, Lübeck, etc), and they came back in a big way after WWI (Germany, Poland, Soviet Union, Finland, Turkey, Czechoslovakia - and Portugal became a republic in 1910)
Do you mean that the UK wasn't democratic at some point because:
Only the nobility got a say, or
Only the propertied class got a say, or
Only those members of certain religions got a say, or
Only free people could vote, or
Only certain sexes got a say, or
the relative say of some houses of parliament was downgraded, or
only people over a certain age, or .....
What is the deviding line?
At some point in the future the consensus might say that the Brits aren't democratic now because 16 year olds can't vote, or
Oeachnly citizens (and not just residents) could vote, or
Groups of different gender/orientation/race/... didn't have a veto (three things one can see as possible in our lifetimes).
How broadly do all components have to have formal power/vote before it is democratic?
Can a country be democratic if all groups can vote but a tiny clasd of wealthy or otherwise powerful people have disproportionate influence by informal means?
The meaning of democracy is very fuzzy and a lot of loose use of the term is o ccuring in various subthreads.
I was responding to the FP's claim that: "The United Kingdom is the longest running democracy". The UK shouldn't be dated as democratic before 1832, which gives the US a 50 year head start on the UK. Before the Reform Act the UK was a a monarchy and aristocracy with very little power outside of the King and the Lords. George III was an active monarch. Victoria (1837-1901) wasn't.
In Aristotelian terms perhaps, but not in Platonic terms. In the Constitution of 1787, there was no qualification for any election. Everything was up to the states.
Actually, in Aristotelian terms the American constitution is a mixed polity with elements of a democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. And the Federalist expressly states that the regime is not a democracy. But, in 21st Century America, such nice distinctions are not part of popular discourse, and what we have now passes for democratic. Retconning it is a waste of electrons.
That's not quite it. The commons was comfortably more powerful than the lords from at least 1688, albeit rich landowners had a lot of say in who made it into the commons (and still did until the reform acts in the 1860s). Victoria lost power because the commons developed a meaningful partisan split rather than a having a dozen informal factions all calling themselves "Whigs" who could corralled into some sort of majority on an ad hoc basis. It's the partisanship that meant the monarch was stuck with whichever party was bigger and had to do what they said or be unable to legislate (including passing a budget). This sort of coalition-wrangling is still common in a lot of countries, including the US. Expanding the franchise was just a gradual arms race to control the commons (if we give X the vote, hopefully X vote for us out of gratitude).
Either democracy means "elected assembly is in charge" (with enough people to have competitive elections in each constituency) or "everyone gets a vote." If the former, the UK is the oldest large democracy, if the latter it's either Germany or hasn't happened yet (e.g. nowhere lets children vote).
Yes, but my point was that simple majority is not incompatible with stable, competent and democratic government. The UK does not rely on supermakorities (there are a few recent things that complicate this but the main point stands)
The House of Lords was the highest court in one sense, but...
(a) for most of English history didn't function as a supreme court in the simple sense. There were lots of reasons why appeal to the Lords was not possible, and (for example) the key "constitutional" cases were usually heard not in the Lords but in "lower" courts (Ship Money finally decided in the Court of the Exchequer, for example, and Middleton v Crofts in the King's Bench).
(b) most of the Lords' judicial functions were exercised by a committee (formerly of those of its members who were judges, latterly of specially-appointed judges called Lords of Appeal). So in practice the committee had numbers and a defined membership much like the US Supreme Court. And of course those members were appointed imply by the Crown (i.e. formerly by the King, latterly by the Government) with need of confirmation.
(c) packing the whole House of Lords is by no means unknown. Remember that members are also appointed simply, which can create as many peers as it wants to get votes for government policy. Off the top of my head, this was unambiguously done to pass the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and threatened as a live tactic in 1832 (Reform Act), 1910 and 1911 (Budget and Parliament Act) and 2018 (Brexit). Some people (me) would also say the entire history of the Lords post-1998 is an exercise in house-packing. I don't remember an occasion of Lords-packing for judicial reasons, mostly because of (b), but it could have been done.
> the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup”
It was an attempted coup, a weak one. I feel as if you are falling into a hapless pit where you cannot see the straightforward reading of the situation because of your own trapped priors around the left.
Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. Watch the would-be dictator speak words to a crowd. Don't litigate what the words mean that's stupid. Watch the crowd march. Watch the crowd break into a building and kill people. Think about the symbolic importance of that building.
People get confused by textual readings of speeches because they don't understand that people lie by omission, very pointedly. You struggle with this specifically, and now you are starting to encounter a wider world of betrayal and deception in government.
It's honestly heartening to see you take this project on with your usual sincerity.
> Erdogan gets described as a "right-wing populist", a term I've always had trouble understanding.
Notice that you were confused. The academic establishment has had access to these stories of dictators and would-be dictators and they were unified in declaring Trump a danger.
Trump is also a right-wing populist, and a fascist: he constructs the false narrative that it is just and necessary for him to take power.
These are terms which have a long history of use. I accept that you are attempting to educate yourself in these political fields and admire your willingness to struggle openly.
Pick another dictator and read about them. Keep on doing it until the pieces fall into place: Trumpism is a fascist movement and always has been and if you think otherwise you are not just wrong but dangerously misinformed.
When the fascists came to America Scott Alexander wrote "You Are Still Calling Wolf." You lost a lot of people with that essay and for some reason I still hope you might see that you made a mistake.
Work like this makes me hopeful for your future as a political bogger. Because I want you to understand: you don't have a future as a political blogger outside of the circle of people that care about substack, you won't make it as a commentator unless you can understand that YASCW was a failure.
The Wolf post argued only that people were exaggerating Trump's racial views, and specifically asked people not to interpret it as saying that other things about him weren't bad. The fact that everyone who argues against it points to totally different bad stuff Trump did seems like some evidence that I was right.
Re: the Capitol - if it was an attempted coup, how come once the coupers were in the Capitol, Trump asked them to stop? How come he had no plan to follow up on "a few people make it into the Capitol building and steal podiums" with actual action by the military, pro-Trump media outlets, or other players he controlled?
I think it's more like someone who mistakenly believes they deposited $1,000, shows up at the bank, yells at the cashier, throws stuff at the partition and demands $1,000. That's not a robbery. That's just someone committing assault and trespass and being very wrong about what is going on.
Just because *you* don't think the actions of the Jan 6 Capitol invaders could've resulted in Trump remaining in power doesn't mean *they* didn't think that's what they were doing or that *Trump* didn't think their actions could keep him in power.
For determining whether it was an attempted coup, I think their perceptions are more relevant than the reality of the situation.
And, if a stupid, floundering president tries to harness that shaman to keep him in power, he's attempting a coup.
The real danger, at least in current America, is that too many people shrug off floundering stupidity as incidental narcissism or whatever. This phenom led Trump to power (and led him many steps down the road of permanently hobbling our democracy) just as surely as it led Hitler to power in the early 30s.
So if you were a judge, would you sentence the Shaman to 30 years in prison for attempted murder, the same as if the Shaman tried to kill someone with a gun but missed? I think that's clearly unreasonable.
Please. At least 90% of the protestors own firearms, yet not a single firearm was brought into the Capitol by them and the only ones fired were by the police. The zip-tie guy picked those up from where the police left them. For a bunch of literal boy scouts, there was zero serious preparation for a coup attempt.
If someone were seriously attempting a coup, even if it was just one delusional person who was serious about it, why would they leave their guns at home? Try to see this from the other side. You're planning to take over at least one branch of the government and you have a stash of weapons, do you leave them all at home?
The whole "coup attempt" thing is a ridiculous story on it's face.
If you can find a photo of someone (other than police) with a rifle inside the capitol that day, I'm sure the prosecutors would be very excited to see it.
According to the government and news reports, while there were three people (of the thousands who attended the rally) arrested for having firearms outside, and a handful of people discussed bringing weapons from VA later in the event Antifa attacked the rally (but they never did), there is no evidence anyone brought a firearm inside the capitol.
Hmm, and of course now I'm unable to find that video... you could see a man, inside a building, who certainly didn't look like a policeman, holding a wooden rifle stock (presumably with the rest of the rifle attached to it, but I didn't see it for long enough...)
But point taken about "this is *not* how you do a coup !"
>The fact that everyone who argues against it points to totally different bad stuff Trump did seems like some evidence that I was right.
You need to do some long hard thinking about whether or not your own evaluation of whether or not you were 'right' is sufficient to the task of engaging with political matters. It doesn't matter what you think you said any more than it matters what Trump said to his mob. That was the moment you told your community to stand down. It cost you severely in credibility on the left.
You will not succeed if your response to criticism is always to find the arguments that say you were right all along. This isn't school and factual correctness is not sufficient, you also must show understanding of the fascist impulse.
You didn't have that understanding back in 2016, and I'm glad you're doing the reading to catch up with the rest of the educated world. But it's never smart to write about how the fascist isn't racist because you're fooled by the taco picture.
You fell for the con: you constructed the reasonable argument for them.
> how come once the coupers were in the Capitol, Trump asked them to stop?
I will translate the subtext of Trump's message for you: he validated the fascist lie (the election was stolen and you are correct to be where you are) and said it was time to go home. This, like "Stand back and stand by," was a message designed to be heard two different ways. His supporters hear "mission accomplished" and the rubes on the sidelines (you) hear "be peaceful" because it's easier to believe that there was a simple explanation for Trump's fascistic rhetoric than that Trumpism is fascistic.
The most fascinating part of 2016-2020 for me was the understanding that there are people who just cannot perceive the fascists. A giant blind spot.
>How come he had no plan to follow up on "a few people make it into the Capitol building and steal podiums" with actual action by the military, pro-Trump media outlets, or other players he controlled?
I said it was a weak coup attempt. But it was an attempt to interfere with the transfer of power through the use of force, powered by a fascist lie about the invalidity of the elections.
"Coup" still seems like the wrong word IMO. The right word seems to be much more like "terrorist attack". Terrorists want to send a message, not necessarily take the reins of governance. The people who entered the Capitol were dangerous and they were minutes or seconds away from actually taking members of Congress and harming them. If such a thing had occurred, I don't think Trump would have taken the opportunity to establish a military order and remain in office; I think in all likelihood he would have been impeached and removed. Cheering on terrorists is pretty bad and worthy of impeachment, but still "coup" just doesn't seem accurate.
I think the right word is "riot", although you might want to note that it was a specifically political riot. Terrorism is typically committed by smaller cells, even if they are part of larger groups, rather than big mobs on the street.
In the paranoid fever dreams of the modern Left, it doesn't matter what you said. All that matters it the secret message they imbue your speech with and hold you responsible for. No one can say anything true if it would be politically unfavorable to the Left- that would be tacit support for fascism. Therefore all criticism of the Left or defense in nay way of anything on the Right must be silenced. That is the only way they think fascism can be avoided- total state control of all speech.
He didn’t ask them to stop until it was clear the VP, Pelosi were gone and the NG was somehow said to be activated on the MSM without his authority. Someone in the deep state said “enough” already.
Wasn’t the argument that Trump was a fascist, but an ineffective one, because he wasn’t skilled at It? doesn’t mean he or his minions didn’t think a hail mary wasn’t worth trying.
Re-read The Banality of Evil. You seem to keep looking for laser-focused efficiencies as the only evidence you'll accept that shit is serious. Goofy Hitler and his silly brown-shirts is the parallel here. I'm actually kind of amazed by the sloppiness (and lack of imagination) of your reasoning here. "Once they were in capitol" Trump asked them to stop?? I'm not going to do your work of walking you through the timeline of the day, or the specificity of Trump's comments (or, more to the point, lack thereof), or his comments and actions from well before the election onward. I just suggest you do your due diligence before parroting such a cynical rightwing refrain. You're way off target here this time, Scott. In your post, you noted the complexities of events like coups -- how they're not just the result of one thing. This is no different.
I am giving Sa Matra the last word here and will not be further replying to this thread after the one reply I already made. I will also be deleting anyone else who replies, since otherwise I can already predict this is going to completely take over from discussion of Erdogan and become terrible. If you want to discuss this, take it to datasecretslox
That's pretty hilarious, Scott. Your definition of "terrible" is that you're getting hammered because people take issue with your facile conclusions about THE WHOLE REASON YOU CLAIMED TO BE INTERESTED IN ERDOGAN -- how his history might be applicable here!
But, I guess, like Erdogan, you're just haplessly being forced toward totalitarianism?
I think one thing that confuses people about the Capitol attack being part of a coup is that the attackers didn't seem to have a plan to seize control of government themselves. (Though some seemed to have assassination on their minds. Of course, erecting a gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence" is "just trolling", but that has the usual option for opportunistic conversion to actually very serious all along.) But Republicans in Congress overtly put forward several plans for unconstitutionally throwing out entire states' elections (appoint an electoral commission, empower state legislatures to throw out their own state's election, just do it themselves). That was the coup. The attack on the Capitol was meant to thwart the ordinary operation of government and justify the coup. People are angry, therefore something must be done.
(Not enough emphasis was put on the "that's not constitutional" aspect of those plans relative to the "they don't have the votes" aspect. While Republicans were following the procedure in the Electoral Count Act, that's legislation. To the extent that legislation just allows Congress to ignore the states' election and choose which candidate with electoral votes wins, it's not constitutional.)
Trump's specialty is chaos, which has arguably worked for him throughout his life. And he clearly hoped it would work one last time -- and he was especially desperate fearing prison, etc. And his chickenshit GOP enablers played along.
Trump hoped that there would be so much confusion about election integrity that the results would have to be nullified. He talked openly about new, replacement elections -- and he even talked about "his" Supreme Court stepping in. Whether he even knew enough to call it a "coup," that was clearly what he was attempting.
Someone upthread mentioned trapped priors with regard to Scott on this topic. Seeing his blatant defensiveness, I'm inclined to agree. The problem is he is contributing with his platform to the minimization of the current real threats to our democracy.
"Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. "
The nice thing about looking at someone's actual words is that there's a limit to how much you can distort them, either on purpose or through motivated reasoning.
"Watch what they do" lets you paint someone's actions as arbitrarily evil in an unfalsifiable way.
Roger Griffin, emeritus professor in modern history, Oxford Brookes University
> Trump’s role models include leaders like Erdogan and Putin who are not exactly fascists, but something more: authoritarians, or strongman rulers who also use virility as a tool of domination.
> I also favor authoritarian over fascist as a description for Trump because the former captures how autocratic power works today. In the 21st century, fascist takeovers have been replaced by rulers who come to power through elections and then, over time, extinguish freedom.
Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy, Yale University
> When I think about fascism, I think about it as applied to different things. There’s a fascist regime. We do not have a fascist regime. Then there’s the question of, “Is Trumpism a fascist social and political movement?” I think you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement — which is not to say that Trump is a fascist. Trumpism involves a cult of the leader, and Trump embodies that. I certainly think he’s using fascist political tactics. I think there’s no question about that. He is calling for national restoration in the face of humiliations brought on by immigrants, liberals, liberal minorities, and leftists. He’s certainly playing the fascist playbook.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history, New York University
> By not calling him fascist, and concentrating on the way he perverts democracy, we see Trump in a different context. We don’t see him as Hitler or Mussolini. We see him in a different rogues’ gallery. And the rogues’ gallery is made up of a whole load of dictators throughout history, including Putin and Erdogan and Orbán and Assad today, who have abused constitutionalism and democracy to rationalize their abuse of power and their crimes against humanity.
Matthew Feldman, director, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right
> Four months ago, I warned that Trump was descending into naked authoritarianism. Low-information commentators seek to reassure rather than dig deeply, telling readers to look on the bright side. That the US is an exceptional country.
> It is not.
Sheri Berman, professor of political science, Barnard College, Columbia University
> And, of course, Trump is undermining various norms and institutions of democracy. But this doesn’t make him a fascist, which means much more than these things. Indeed, I almost think calling Trump “fascist” gives him too much “credit” — he isn’t strategic enough, ideological enough, or ambitious enough. And as bad as things are today, we are still not in 1930s Germany.
...
> As for Trump overall, I would still prefer referring to him as an illiberal populist or right-wing populist. He has a lot in common with the right-wing populists roaming around Europe today.
So technically not a fascist, but definitely comparable to Erdogan.
I typically go for a Berlusconi comparison (although he managed to stay in power longer), Scott Sumner has recently pointed to Obrador*, there are lots of possible comparisons. Erdogan seems too competent in my book (he actually held an elected position as mayor and rose up from that), but I can see there being some similarities. I definitely think Trump has authoritarian instincts and would like to be able to haul his opponents into court.
"Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. Watch the would-be dictator speak words to a crowd. Don't litigate what the words mean that's stupid."
Why do you think deliberately excluding information would improve your conclusions? If I specifically warn a teenager to NOT do something stupid, and he does the stupid thing just to spite me, does that mean I planned for the stupid thing to happen? That's why you'd have to conclude if you ignored my words and only watched what people did.
On January 6, Trump gave a speech to his supporters. He said: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." The march to the Capitol wasn't spontaneous, nor was it caused by Trump's speech. Rather, the Trump supporters gathered in Washington DC on that day specifically to protest Congress' certification of the electoral votes.
At 2:38 pm, after the protesters breached the Capitol building, he tweeted out "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" At 3:13 pm, he tweeted "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!".
At 4:17 pm, he tweeted a video in which he said "I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
At 6:01 pm, he tweeted "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
So in summary, Trump called for peace at least 5 times on January 6, including before any violence took place. If this is a coup, Trump seems like the least enthusiastic coup plotter of all time.
"Watch the crowd break into a building and kill people."
"Though law enforcement officials initially said Officer Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, police sources and investigators are at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official."
If you're interested in how countries lapse into dictatorship let me highly recommend "How Democracies Die" as a systematic overview on that theme. And also "Wars, Guns, and Votes" though that's a lot less relevant to the US.
Surely the main lesson is the danger of religion in politics?
More broadly, I suppose, it's due to religion being an old institution that winds up being central to 'low cultural class' aka cultural conservatism. But even so, this seems to be a story where Ataturk and the Turkish Army were terrified of Islamism destroying somewhat-liberal Turkey, to the point of staging multiple coups to avoid it, and when they let down their guard once they got an Islamist dictatorship.
The pattern that I find interesting here is that of someone who may not have wanted to be a dictator at first, but found that, because of the nature of the regime he was trying to reform, he was continually pushed toward dictatorship as a way to either accomplish his more modest reform or avoid being deposed.
I think one of the most important ways we can make our country less likely to end up with a dictator is to make sure that we don't have those same kinds of incentives. It's one thing I've been very uneasy about w.r.t. prosecuting Trump after he leaves power--you don't want to establish the pattern than once a president makes the wrong enemies in office, losing the next election means he goes to prison, because that sets up some very bad incentives. OTOH, you also don't want to let presidents get away with corruption or other crimes. It's not obvious to me how to resolve that conflict.
The whole situation seems like a good argument against a Presidential system at all, and the way it puts far too much power into the hands of one individual.
Prime Ministers are less powerful and more easily removed than Presidents, and that's a great thing.
There definitely were a lot of journalists who'd love to find the story that ends his presidency, and politicians who wanted to impeach him. So by a broad definition it's true that they are out to get him. But then, neither of those are unusual (which president didn't have reporters who'd love to get that story) or imply wrongdoing on the part of Trump's enemies.
Degree of honesty seems important here: how many of those journalists were in any way scrupulous, and how many were just hunting for any muck they could find, making it up when they couldn't? This extends to other institutions as well, of course. In short: "out to get" can have the connotation of "not playing fair".
Somewhat separately: what proportion of institutional figures are "out to get" someone? Very different when it's a few dedicated individuals as opposed to (what feels like) most.
Honest question: what do you think are the most clear-cut examples of journalists making things up to libel Trump? I can think of many instances of half truths, exaggerations, out-of-context quotes, etc, but is there a case of a clearly deliberate lie from a mainstream American newspaper?
I'm having trouble tracing an obvious line between Erdogan's Islam and his dictatorship. I could equally well imagine him getting in power, using democratic mechanisms to implement Islamic policy, but maintaining the democratic structure of the country.
Your review makes it sound as if the system was set up to distil the most conservative, traditional, anti-State version of Islam possible. If parents who wanted to send their kids to a religious rather than secular school only had the choice of "practically a junior seminary", the students couldn't get into good colleges, their qualifications meant they weren't fitted for any kind of white-collar job - then is it any surprise that over the generations this creates clerics and devotees who are staunch believers who don't fall away from their faith because they can depict themselves as being persecuted and treated as second-class citizens, and whose aim once in power is to get rid of the persecuting elements and set up "Islamic values" in society and governance?
Strongly agree with Deiseach here. Religious folks fear French or Turkish style laicite happening in the US. I think this is why Christians have done things since the 90s like setting up their own movie ratings websites, colleges, Fox News, and institutions like the Federalist Society (have you heard progressive conspiracy theories about FS?). It reminds me of that quote from one SSC essay, "Conservatives literally begged for progressives to be more tolerant of conservative voices... but when conservatives left mainstream institutions to set up their own parallel institutions, the progressives said, 'No wait, you can't do that; come back here so we can keep stomping you.'"
In this essay, "Muslims, including the Gulenists, understood his ascendancy as their only route to fair political representation." In the American case, the failure mode is that a fair equilibrium is never reached, and conservatives ever more believe themselves to be in the Muslim/Gulenist situation.
When the anti-Gulenist countercoup happened, I picked up some Gulenist literature to figure out what it was all about. And, granted this is the way that they present themselves, it seemed to me they were largely about highly competent Islam, Islam which supports civilization and the common good and works and plays well with others. To do this, they really emphasize gaining the skills necessary to thrive in modern society and achieve high places (and defend Islam from persecution), so that society will have a place for devout, intelligent Muslims. If anyone is out there from a Gulenist school, I would love to hear more.
Okay, I am really sorry, but I am down a rabbit hole but have to share.
There's a webpage of concerned citizens worried about Gulenism in US charter schools, and they have a conspiracy story about these insidious philanthropists!
In The Netherlands, the Gülen movement puts great pressure on people during meetings to donate large sums of money. So they seem to be quite competent at extracting money from their followers as well.
I remember there was some controversy about Erdogan coming over to the Netherlands to campaign with Turkish nationals, which rubbed the Dutch the wrong way on several levels. I remember thinking it would be so weird if Hillary Clinton came to campaign for support from American expats. (There were something like 50K American expats in NL in 2016, but I’m pretty sure 99% of us were Democrats anyway.)
It wasn't Erdoğan, but his Ministers who wanted to visit. They had called for large scale demonstrations by Dutch Turks in The Netherlands, which pissed off the Dutch government, who didn't want large scale demonstrations about a foreign conflict. Note that it's even illegal by Turkish law for them to campaign abroad.
So the Dutch government told off the Turkish government, but was willing to negotiate, allowing more limited campaigning. Then the Turks started to threaten with sanctions and such, which made the Dutch unwilling to negotiate further. Then the Turks decided to just have a Minister visit anyway, but the Dutch refused to let the Turkish plane land.
Then the Turks sent their Minister of Family and Social Policies, who was touring Germany, to The Netherlands by motorcade. This motorcade was then intercepted by the police, but the car with the Minister managed to drive away. She headed for the Turkish consulate, but was cut off just in front of the building by a heavily armed elite police tactical unit. The Minister then refused to leave her car, until midnight, when the police sent in a flatbed to hoist the car on, to drive it back to Germany.
Then the Minister left the car and demanded to be let into the consulate, but was told that they could either go back to Germany or be arrested. She went back to Germany.
Then Erdoğan called the Dutch "fascists", "remnants of Nazism" and accused them of mass murder in Srebrenica. He also attacked Europeans in general, calling on the Turkish Diaspora to out-breed the locals and said that Europeans wouldn't be safe in Turkey.
Then I left some stuff out like protesters in Turkey stabbing oranges with knives and burning the French flag (apparently thinking that the conflict was with French President François Hollande due to his name). And there was an incident where the police department of the town of Rotterdam in New York State was harassed.
It would make for a pretty good H/Bollywood movie...
I could see a version of this system (not saying this is how it is in Turkey, I don't know) where it just serves as a high-pass filter for religious extremism. The vast majority of people who aren't at some threshold of extremism basically disengage from it and the only ones who don't are the people most likely to be extreme.
> Surely the main lesson is the danger of religion in politics?
You could equally well argue the opposite. The Turkish elites tried to squash religion out of public life for a century, in a country that was still fairly religious, and it's not surprising that eventually the populace rebelled against this.
But the populace didn't rebel against this, as far as I can tell from the summary above? Erdogan didn't succeed in democratic politics until he hid his religion a lot, giving a very toned-down version that the populace was more comfortable with, and most of his popular support came from successful implementation of secular economic policies.
Am I missing something where the populace rebelled in favor of religious extremism in this story?
Yea I'm with you. Seems like Erdogan just took advantages of circumstance (people wanting to join EU, booming economy, military/deep state suspicion) and managed to get some results. And he (and Gulen I guess) just happened to be religious.
I think religion was far more important than you give it credit for. I believe religion gave Erdogan a fascistic sense of divine right: the sacred ends would justify any means.
A driven person born into a slum would understand power and violence, the gulenist apparatus gave him a path and a code to follow, and the circumstances presented him with with the unlikely opportunities to learn how to manipulate the system that was built to suppress people precisely like him.
Politicized religion built the ladder for him to climb. A secular strong man would not have had such solid footholds.
Imagine if Christians had comparable political ambitions in America as islamists do in Turkey, and that US had rabidly atheistic institutions in response. Even a preacher-Trump would be far more dangerous than the present one, especially if there was a competent, connected and powerful organization with a clear objective backing his ascendancy.
Now imagine that he also had the grit and savvy of someone bootstrapped from violence and hardship. Scary.
I'd say one important takeaway is that political instability tends to breed instability, and vice versa. Also, having a large gulf between elite and mass opinion/ideology seems like an important ingredient for despotism.
Scott already said that religion didn't have to lead to dictatorship. The converse also holds: religion is just one of many ideologies a leader can draw on while implementing a dictatorship. Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela, for instance, drew on socialism.
"And as the work of titans like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and so on" Thomas Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was written, he basically missed the late 80s.
I don't know why 19 exactly, except that it's long enough for the last generation to conceive a kid and raise them to adulthood, but if we were ever going to have a system where we regularly scrap and rewrite the constitution, I like the idea of it happening on a cadence that is relatively prime to all the term limits of all the elected officials.
You mention that there's no equivalent to "we need to join the EU" as a reason to restructure all of our institutions, but...well...if there really is some goal everyone in the country has in common, isn't it pretty easy to use it to justify this sort of thing? Eisenhower's goodbye speech is all about the way US institutions changed in order to better fight the Cold War, and it occurs to me that if we get serious about a great power confrontation with China we would essentially have some kind of similar thing.
("We need to fight climate change" feels like an abortive attempt to create this sort of story. Not that climate change isn't a real problem, but in the late '80s/early '90s it felt like it was picking up enough power to be a reason to restructure institutions; for whatever reason it ran out of unifying ability by the mid-'90s, though. The rise of Green parties in 2010s Europe shows how *little* power the green movement has -- Turkey never needed a Join-EU Party, or 1950s America an Anti-Communist Party, after all).
That's not quite what I'm saying -- I think there was less energy in the fight against the fight against climate change, if that makes sense. The Montreal Protocol was ratified by *every* member of the UN in 1988, and Kyoto seems like it was much more ambitious than the Paris agreement (by setting some specific targets, for instance). The Kyoto agreement seemed uncontroversial when it was drafted in 1992 -- basically every country signed it and this doesn't really seem to have been controversial in most places -- but by 1997 the US Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution *against* it unanimously. At some point in the mid-1990s, a very powerful anti-green movement emerged, such that environmentalist politics could no longer hope to be all-unifying.
The people who wrote the Kyoto Protocol seemed to have envisioned huge changes in institutions around the world and not to have expected to encounter very much resistance to their ideas -- which is analogizable to the pro-EU forces in Turkey in the 2000s, I think.
There probably is more energy in the fight against climate change today, as shown by all those Green parties growing in central Europe, but I think this is now because they have opponents who didn't really exist 30 years ago.
Sounds like there's more energy in the fight on both sides, which makes sense. The harder you push people, the harder they push back.
The 1990s anti climate change agenda was more like "Hey, maybe let's install some solar panels or something when it's convenient" whereas the 2020s climate change agenda is a bit closer to the "eat the bugs, live in the pod" meme.
Also, a lot of my thinking here is informed by your post about 1990s environmentalism -- I think you were tracking the transition of a movement from one that didn't really have enemies to a more confrontational one that realized that it did, in fact, have enemies.
The "need to join the EU" wasn't just an arbitrary cause every Turk had in common. (Did they actually?) The EU specifically demanded more democracy, which meant reducing the power of the military. An arbitrary goal is not equivalent to this, if it doesn't provide a specific excuse to restructure the institutions.
I went to Turkey once, and the very first thing the very first Turkish person we befriended did was take us to a rooftop hotel bar in Nisantasi. I have rarely felt closer to the jet-set (which I am not). Still, we owe that guy one for showing us the best spot to drink raki while taking in an amazing view of the city.
I enjoy your exploration of politics. I have to strongly disagree with your object policy recommendations though.
America has a real lack of government capacity. Just about nothing it does is done well or effectively. Your recommendations (less direct control by the president over the bureaucracy and more supermajoritarian checks) is going to exacerbate this primary issue.
Also, I am left wondering if perhaps democracy is less valuable than we are led to believe from this book review. The object level "is turkey better off today as a dictatorship" is left unargued. The bits we get hint perhaps it is better off.
I'm a huge fan of federalism as a solution here, but I also worry about how federalism works in the modern age.
Example: California's net neutrality laws and emissions laws. I'm broadly in favor of the policies, there, and wouldn't mind seeing them happen at the federal level; nevertheless, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the degree to which California can effectively impose policy on the rest of the country.
Also, given how little people actually move (see the famous study about how far the average person lives from their mother), I'm not sure how easy foot voting really is.
I mean, yes, I'm all for breaking up California (and Texas, both for fairness and because it poses similar dominance problems, such as the way it determines what's in grade school textbooks).
But that doesn't change the problems posed by a highly interconnected economy. Modern economic systems give local governments strong, legitimate motivation to attempt to regulate trans-state (not to mention trans-national) organizations in ways that will inherently impact other localities. See: marijuana, laws requiring businesses to store personal data locally, efforts to tax digital advertising spending, and net neutrality and environmental things as mentioned above.
I hadn't considered the confounder of mothers moving to where their adult children are; that's an excellent point.
Yes, I agree that there's a tradeoff between "resistant to dictatorship" and "able to get anything done", and that possibly suggestions which are good at achieving dictatorship-resistance are nevertheless bad on net.
Now that just begs for a list of policy recommendations that increase resistance to dictatorship and increases state capacity. I wonder if there are any?
I don't think that's quite right- there are things that would fit but most of them are either obviously desirable already or difficult to actually achieve. Basically we want things that make it easier for the government to do good things than bad things.
The obvious route is things that make the population more intelligent, ethical, and informed. As expected, that's all stuff we already want to do and don't have great ideas about how to do better.
Although a PM with a strong majority has more actual power to make huge changes than does a president.
Moreover, in parliamentary systems with 3-5 significant parties like Canada a PM can get a large majority in parliament with under 30% (theoretically under 10%) of the national vote.
Perhaps parliamentarism combined with cabinet government. Historically, the UK PM was quite weak and a lot of power resided with the heads of government departments (secretaries of state). The PM's job is largely to manage secretaries of state and oversee the civil service.
Robert Mugabe was the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987, at which point the position of Prime Minister was abolished and Mugabe became President of Zimbabwe for 30 years until a coup ousted him.
As some have pointed out, there have been dictatorial prime ministers. But I don't see that as undermining my case that parliamentarism increases resistance to dictatorship and increases state capacity.
First, I do not equate having a prime minister with being parliamentary. Parliamentarism is about primacy of the parliament, having a prime minister does not secure that. In the cases mentioned below, a lack of parliamentary primacy allowed for dictatorship.
Second, even if we find cases where a truly parliamentary regime became a dictatorship, it does not mean that, ex ante, parliamentary regimes do not increase resistance to dictatorship.
Having some positions in the executive branch (especially independent agencies) be elected instead of appointed by the president.
This increases resistance to dictatorship because there are multiple independent sources of power. It might increase state capacity. The post office (or EPA or FCC or ...) might work better if the election that determined its leader was separated from other political issues.
This exists on the state level. I don't know if there are studies looking at whether this makes the state more or less effective.
Garett Jones's "10% Less Democacy" is probably the best book on the promise of independent agencies. Indeed I think they improve resistance to dictatorship and state capacity, but only when they are independent of the executive, not of parliament. I would doubt that popular elections of heads of agencies would help, but do not know studies.
I'll take a look at it, but I should warn you that I'm starting out skeptical. I'm not particularly fond of independent agencies in general. They are not democratic, they are probably unconstitutional (part of the executive branch that can write regulations and levy fines?), and they seem to be a ratchet that continually increases the power of the federal government. Having independent elections would be a way to potentially fix a problematic part of government without removing what good they do.
What makes you think that? It doesn't pass a sanity check. If we look at this map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism#/media/File:Map_of_unitary_and_federal_states.svg), we will see that there does not seem to be any relationship between being federal and being more democratic and developed. Historically, the association also seems to be missing. It also is hard to define (how much power will be pushed to the local level? If too much you will have secession and this is not associated with better outcomes).
2. Federalism is not sufficient for economic development. A corrupt dictatorship without property rights federating will not fix the underlying problems.
3. There are different levels of federalism. Many places on that map are nominally federal, but the bulk of political power still resides in the central government. For example, that is my understanding of Australia, Russia, India, and Germany. Even the US is much less federal than it once was. By "federalism" I'm thinking the US pre-1920s or Switzerland.
4. Dictatorship resistance is probably a tail risk with high downside and thus will not be weighted properly in this kind of analysis (how many democratic countries have become dictatorships?).
2. OK, not sufficient, but do we have any evidence it actually helps? I don't see it.
3. I agree, and that was my point on it being hard to define. If we are going to defend a policy, surely we would want the people that are inclined to listen to us to make similar measures, right? The fact that the cause of federalism arrives at such different outcomes should count against it as a cause.
4. I'm sorry but I'm not sure I understood the argument.
The relevant definition of federalism here is probably something like:
Local political elites determine their own platforms, rather than reflecting the will of a national organization.
I like federalism, but mostly for a different reason: Smaller organizations can be more responsive to a particular individual.
I don't know if federalism leads to better state capacity or not.
I do think that federalism increases the resistance to becoming a dictatorship. But dictatorship is only one way for a government to be not democratic. Federal systems should be more worried about local democratic erosion than a single person taking over everything.
Federal systems can also be formed by an alliance between small monarchies (UAE, Malaysia) or from the disintegration of an authoritarian government (Somalia, Iraq, Holy Roman Empire). These seem less relevant to the question of how to protect an existing democracy from becoming a dictatorship.
There doesn't have to be. The single best method of coup prevention is genuine federalism. Having legitimate alternatives to the national government not only makes it harder to concentrate power there, but gives people an alternative they can rally to. If there was a right wing coup in America, California would tell them to fuck off. And if the coup was left wing, Texas would do the same.
It also makes it easier to get things done, since you have a bunch of smaller polities. It makes things harder to do the same everywhere, but frankly, that's a feature, not a bug, because conditions vary.
In the context of the US, you vest as much power as possible in state governors, who are by far the most accountable actors in the system.
* One senator per state who serves at the pleasure of his governor
* Allow a vote of 1/3 of the senate to annul federal laws or regulations
* Only flag officers, governors, and cabinet level officers can be president
* Limit the ability of the federal government to tax directly and/or convert federal spending programs into state level block grants that give governors a lot of discretion
* Limit the ability of federal courts to overturn state courts
Didn't South Carolina, Georgia, Misissippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama all try telling the federal government to fuck off once...?
And that was when the US barely had a standing army, and the sort of weapons you could find on most farms.
Slightly OT, I guess, but it seems to me that one of the sneaky advantages to federalism is that you encourage/allow for the development of different governing models, all of which are operating under a similar socio-economic framework.
As things stand, I don't think anyone really knows what the optimal approach is to addressing most policy challenges, and the only way (that I know of) to inch closer to some understanding of what would be optimal is to experiment. In a federal model in the US, you'd have 50 such real-life 'experiments' being conducted simultaneously, which would accelerate the process of understanding what kinds of policy responses work, and which do not.
In the long run, all/most states would appropriate the best policies and approaches to constructing policy from each other, and we'd have an easier time, in aggregate, of moving in the right direction.
Italian constitutional order tries its best to prevent future Mussolinis coming to power. Italian governments are, as a consequence, very weak and unstable and this weakness is exploited by, among others, various Mafiosi.
To get anything done, Italy has strong devolution of powers to regions.
(As italian) I disagree on the diagnosis. It always felt to me more a problem of party culture, with party members which are more than happy to backstab their own party secretary to score personal points. Put the italian constitution in germany and I do not expect things to get significantly worse for the CDU.
Weirdly enough the effect of the extreme de jure weakness of the gobernment is to give the executive enormous control over the legislation. Often (and even with electoral laws) the prime minister basically threaten to dissolve the government if the law does not get approved, with the result that crucial legislation de facto passes by decree
I don't see evidence for this trade-off, quite the contrary. If we look at countries which are generally able to get things done, they are the ones that are perceived as being the most resistant to dictatorship. Dictatorships usually do not get things done, this is a myth. See the twenty leaders in state capacity here: https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/206199.php Very democratic countries are over-represented.
Interestingly, though, your plot has the USA as the fifth highest on the "State Capacity" ranking, ahead of countries like New Zealand, where they don't have coronavirus, Germany, where they don't have delays, and Singapore, where they don't have crime.
Either it's measuring something different to our intuitive idea of state capacity, or else Americans are just loud whiners who complain loudly all over the internet about the problems in their own country without the least bit of awareness of how their own country compares to others.
Surely I am not suggesting that this rank is perfect (but I would never use one single indicator, coronavirus cases, as the final measure of state capacity). By the way, the US is vaccinating much better than Germany, for example. I don't know how the index was created. With respect to Americans perceptions of their own state capacity, of course it can and will be biased (as will perceptions in every country). It so happens that people pay a lot more attention to things Americans say.
Anyway, my only point, which I believe stands, is that we have no evidence of trade-off between resistance to tyranny and state capacity. Incidentally, I just learned yesterday of an interesting paper which shows that UK investments in transport infrastructure rose significantly after the Glorious Revolution which limited the power of the King. Available here: https://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/workingpapers/2012-13/bogart-06.pdf
Resident New Zealander here once again piping up to point out that our response to the Coronavirus was Extremely Unusual by the standards of New Zealand government action. On every other problem we face - housing, climate change, child poverty, productivity, healthcare - the government's par for the course is to do move very slowly and get nowhere.
Another NZer (and recovering bureaucrat) here to observe that I believe this somewhat misrepresents the problem. The New Zealand government spends a great deal of money on all of the problems identified. Each of these problems has small armies of officials busily briefing each other, creating initiatives and coming up with interventions (which are in fact implemented). What looks like inaction, however, is that none of these things work (KiwiBuild being a public example of the general problem). The exception had been climate change, for which the emissions trading scheme would have been a good second best to a carbon tax. Now, we’re going to take the same approach to climate change as for all the other issues you identify.
Fair comment actually, failure to act at all is not the problem we face. I'm curious about your comment that climate change is going to end up like the other issues? I was looking fairly favourably on recent progress, with the first genuinely capped carbon unit auction taking place. I will likely write a submission on the CCC's report soon, so I would value your perspective
I think you need to distinguish between "How hard is it to do ordinary things" and "How hard is it to change the rules?"
To get things done, you want a simple majority to be able to do "ordinary" things like building roads or changing the health care system. The fact that an effective supermajority has been needed in the US to do some of these things has led to some real problems like an ugly compromise of a health care system that nobody can be blamed for because nobody was responsible for it.
Allowing a simple majority to make changes to the rules of the game, though, is a real problem, and that seems to be what happened in Turkey, because the rules of the game hadn't been well thought out enough in advance.
I mean, what is "changing the rules"? The one key breakthrough Erdogan appears to have made was Ergenekon, which required more than his majority in Parliament (it required control of the courts, for starters). Scott doesn't give any examples of Erdogan making significant changes to the Turkish constitution, he merely notes that it was easy to do so.
Paul Kagame in Rwanda is a great example of a dictator who is really a dictator and bad.... but also like, pretty good at what he does? If you compare Rwanda to Burundi he's clearly been fantastic, even if he basically just gives young criminals a gun and says 'go over the border and fight in Sudan or whatever, bye, good luck'
I honestly don't know about that specific example, but in these kinds of things, we should look for general relationships, not iron laws, right? And the general evidence shows that parliamentary democracies tend to have much better state capacity than dictatorships.
No it's not better off at all! Every young person I know (let's say aged 16-25) says how they envy me (39) and wanted to be young in the years when I was young, before Erdoğan. Except for technology becoming better which is not something related to Erdoğan, everything got considerably worse.
That's interesting. I suppose it's hard to get data on that in the current political climate.
Where do you live?
I'm conscious of how capable we all are at forming bubbles with likeminded individuals (see Scott's post from 2016 noting that he knew literally not a single Trump voter).
I now live in Western Europe, but those young people I know are in Turkey, in different big cities. How can anybody think Turkey's better off now under Erdoğan? I don't think this is a matter of bubbles. I think the problem here is, people still vote for Erdoğan while full well knowing they're worse off. I've seen countless street interviews when somebody is ranting for 3 minutes straight about how everything is worse, they don't have any money in their pockets, they haven't eaten protein in weeks, but then saying they'll keep on voting for Erdoğan because he's a devout Muslim, or he's battling against crusaders so everybody needs to do their part by powering through poverty or something. I know some Erdoğan voters as well, and their point is things would've been much better by Erdoğan's work but there are a lot of outside forces that are trying to take him down which is causing the current misery.
I mean leaving aside the bubble issue, unemployment and especially young unemployment was sky high, even before the pandemic. Every day I see some news of suicides out of poverty. Young generation has lost interest in the one single biggest class hopping mechanism of Turkey since a century: higher education, since now for a decent job you need connections and not competence. Violence against women is at a historic high (more than a woman a day on average killed by a relative/spouse). Rule of law is at a historic low. Abortion, while legal on paper, is made exceptionally difficult. Child abuse by religious organizations had always been a problem, but now since they're actively being protected by the government they're going crazy at it. Since they lost all the big municipalities, they're handing over all the rights, resources and properties of municipalities to central government (such as the right to choose officials, like the person to run the public transport system of a city etc. you'd think a mayor should have a say in that but not anymore).
I can go on until tomorrow morning but there's one thing that's evident: Dictatorship of Erdoğan has been a net negative for the country. There's no doubt about that.
Thanks. I'm certainly not suggesting Erdoğan's is anything other than bad.
Everyone agrees things are worse, but his supporters think that things are getting worse because of outside forces. That makes intuitive sense.
Among the young you mention, to what extent do you think they fall into Erdoğan's camp? Do you think there is a substantial opposition to him left in Turkey?
The young that I personally know are all opposition. The few Erdoğan supporters I personally know are all over middle age.
I think there is a substantial opposition and it's growing, I see online some guys having fervent Erdoğan supporter posts just a few years ago becoming bitter and turning against him. Also, his demographic skews older and opposition younger (and 2/3 of Turkey's population is below 40) so as more young people are over voting age the more support is coming to opposition. I'm hopeful next elections he'll lose, but the process will be long and difficult and (probably but hopefully not) bloody. I don't believe he'll leave the post without some fight or chaos.
I'm not sure how to get from the description of Erdogan's path to Scott's three suggestions- they don't seem particularly well-aimed at the problems. For example:
1. Constitutional amendment against court packing - While this isn't necessarily a BAD idea, it doesn't seem central- Erdogan got a lot of power through non-court means, and it seems likely he could have used alternate routes, as you bring up in #2. This seems shoe-horned in as it relates to current domestic US political disputes. In addition, "court-packing" in the US sense is highly legislative-branch, not just executive, so this seems more about preventing majoritarian rule than it does preventing *executive* rule.
2. Stronger protections separating investigation of tax fraud (IRS?) and corruption (FBI?) from the executive. - Almost certainly a good thing, the Imperial Presidency is a real problem, and straightforwardly if we're worrying about executive power, than making the executive less powerful is an obvious good.
3. More things that might be used to hack the checks-and-balances system requiring 2/3 majorities instead of simple majorities - again, this gap between majority power and executive power. What we want to prevent is the majority from instituting sweeping changes that centralize power to one or a few people, and insulate their changes from future political will changing. Raw anti-majoritarian rules seems like a very blunt instrument to achieve this, especially considering the examples from other countries that already have a great deal less minority-veto-style rules than the US, without increased dictatorship outcomes.
A constitutional amendment against court packing also needs to decide whether it counts as "court packing" for the legislature to hold a seat open and then give a new president three appointments in a single term.
I think there's a simple problem and a complex problem. The simple problem is that the law allows for congress to appoint lots of justices, so you could imagine control of both houses of congress + the white house to always lead to adding justices until your side had the majority. That would be bad, so it makes sense to forbid it.
The hard problem is that there are dozens of different ways that the major players can follow the written rules while violating the spirit of the rules, what anyone considers fair, etc., to get an advantage, and we really want major players to refuse to do that. Consider Trump's attempts to get various state legislators, state election officials, congressmen, and the vice president to somehow override the results of the election to keep him in power. Those attempts failed because the major players were unwilling to follow the written law while throwing out an election result. But they arguably had the legal power to do so. I think it's impossible to close off all the ways that people can do this sort of thing, and there's always a temptation to do it. McConnell grabbed that chance when it came his way, and put an extra Republican on the court. In so doing, presumably he also established the new norm that no president will ever manage to get a new supreme court justice appointed when the other party holds the senate. If Trump had managed to convince a state legislature or two to override their voters' decisions, that, too, would have become a new norm, used from then on to ensure that critical states in close elections always sent electors from the party that controlled their state legislature. And so on.
What we need is not so much laws against specific norm violations as political incentives against norm violations. We should probably explicitly close the loopholes for court packing and state legislatures overriding their voters, but we'll never close *all* the loopholes. And whenever one is used, it undermines the legitimacy of the whole system and creates more incentives for future norm violations.
"you could imagine control of both houses of congress + the white house to always lead to adding justices until your side had the majority. That would be bad, so it makes sense to forbid it."
I'm not so sure that it's bad. It seems to me that there's a natural steady state here - if the Presidency and Senate are of the same party, then the President appoints justices until their party has a majority; if the Presidency and the Senate are of different parties, then the Court shrinks due to attrition. My guess is that the steady state would be a court containing 20-30 justices, with the precise number fluctuating gradually over the years, and the court reflecting a sort of time average of partisan control of the Senate and Presidency.
It's not obvious what is actually *bad* about this, rather than just "unseemly".
This seems a reasonable observation: one equilibrium is disrupted, and the system will eventually settle on a new one. My concern is that predicting what the new equilibrium would look like is difficult to predict, and could easily be less salubrious than you propose.
By the time you're concerned about "This party's judges" versus "That party's judges", the battle is already mostly lost. The goal should be to create sufficiently non-partisan judicial institutions that it doesn't matter which party appoints a particular judge, because judges are seen as being above and beyond politics.
I feel like many countries do this better than the US.
The US system has major systemic weaknesses, and loopholes are potential escapes. It doesn't help to close the loopholes without fixing the systemic problems.
Given lifetime appointments, a political coalition could potentially appoint a Court majority that could complete block the other party from advancing its agenda for 4-5 decades even with strong democratic mandates. Rule by five judges with no accountability to voters would essentially mean the US is no longer a democracy. It's important that congress can check this power even if this looks like a "loophole."
There are a lot of other examples--it's important that the president ultimately has the power to get executive branch appointees without congress, or an opposition congress has every incentive and ability to just sabotage government. Loopholes make the system more resilient by offering ways out of crises that aren't just "become a dictator."
Note that this is a criticism that a lot of social conservatives had about the court over the last several decades--all kinds of liberal reforms were carried out by judicial order, completely insulated from any kind of democratic accountability. And indeed, I'd say this was a previous defection that led to the new norm that everyone does whatever they have to do to put their people on the supreme court.
But the Court is not actually totally insulated from democratic accountability--because the threat of court packing exists! It's a real threat that prevents the courts from going overboard in thwarting popular rule. FDR used it. Social conservatives could use it except most of the rulings they dislike are popular.
Sure, if you count that as a solution, then there's also a "solution" to court packing where you declare that the court shall always consist of seven members of the Socialist party.
My point is that if "packing" is said to be a problem, then surely the problem isn't just the change in numbers of people on the court - the problem is presumably something about the illegitimate way in which substantive political views can be represented on the court. Just making an amendment fixing the number does nothing to address whatever partisan trickery there can be that gets one political faction represented in an unfair way.
There was a proposal Buttigieg was discussing that would address this, where 5 justices would be selected by the majority party in the senate, 5 by the next largest party, and 5 more would be selected from the appeals courts by the unanimous consent of the 10 chosen beforehand.
But a simple amendment that just says "the Supreme Court shall always have nine justices" leaves open Mitch McConnell's plan to say that only Republicans can appoint justices to the court.
I mean, what you see as illegitimate (because, I assume, you think the President should be empowered to force a selection of one of his nominees before his term ends) I see as intentional (the President cannot reform the Supreme Court without consent of the Senate).
If it was up to me I’d probably rework the process so that the President submits a slate of candidates which the Senate considers and votes on simultaneously, reducing the risk of no candidate being chosen—but I’d retain the opportunity for the Senate to decline accepting any for whatever reason.
The amendment would need to prevent what McConnell did to get the vote of Democrat's, and prevent enlarging the size of the court or instituting age limits to get the vote of Republicans. To do the first I would put in a rule that a vote on a new justice needs to occur within three months or they are automatically accepted. If after 9 months the Senate still has not said yes on any candidate, the existing justices must select a new member ala the Buttigieg plan.
I would agree, if we're going to do a constitutional amendment to protect the Judicial Branch from shenanigans by the other two branches it makes sense to close all the loopholes that have already been thought of.
The ship has sailed on the Supreme Court, at least for me and, I assume, a lot of my fellow Democrats. As far as I'm concerned, we should follow the McConnell rule, which, in my phrasing would be: "If you have to power to seize an advantage by violating a longstanding custom, screw the custom."
That won't be happening this time around, but that's only because we didn't win enough seats and have to rely on squishy moderates. If (when?) the pendulum swings far enough back towards us, I fully expect the Court to be resized, in accordance with the new norms. (I certainly won't vote for a Dem who refuses to do so.)
And I think it's disingenuous as hell to wait until after your party steals a court seat to complain about norms and customs. McConnell and the rest of the Senate had two chances at this. Once with Garland, to do the clearly right and customary thing, and once with Barrett, to uphold their bullsh*t new norm. They refused to do either, because it was never about anything other than using the power then available to control the judiciary. To complain if the other side does likewise - or even talks about doing likewise - is ridiculous.
The conservative response to this tends to be two-fold:
1) The Garland/Barrett distinction is that in one case the Senatorial party was opposite the presidential party, and in the other case the parties were aligned, and that not confirming in the first case and confirming in the second is the historical norm. See Ted Cruz's arguments during Barrett's confirmation hearings: late-term SC vacancies are normal, they've happened dozens of times throughout American history, and almost always concordant parties lead to confirmation and discordant parties lead to no confirmation.
2) Democrats have been violating Supreme court nomination/confirmation norms whenever it pleased them to decades (the typical list is something like: Bork, Thomas, Estrada, Alito, Kavanaugh) with Republicans never doing it first, so trying to pretend that Republicans are suddenly starting a defect/defect cycle on this front is laughable.
Which is not to say that conservatives are necessarily right on this front, but if both sides have their danders up in righteous anger about how The Other Side Is Defecting So Now We Get To Defect However We Want madness will be here shortly.
My preferred solution is that neither side gets license to defect in any new ways; all old ways are fair game. So a Dem Senate can hold positions vacant, or not, as they see fit (Garland/Barret precedent) and Reps can do radical character assassinations on one person's say-so (Kavanaugh precedent) but no one gets to add new seats, institute mandatory retirement, etc. because those specific defections have not happened yet.
> even though Erdogan got only 33% of the vote, he ended up with 67% of the seats in Parliament
Based on this, a good take-away might be that we shouldn't have systems that grant a minority of voters supermajority powers. The policy solution would be strive to have policies that more closely align vote totals with power/representation in government bodies.
Possibly because the "super obvious and important point" isn't the case in many (most?) of the world's democracies, including many highly functional ones. In a Parliamentary system with first past the post voting, it's possible to have a majority in Parliament without a majority of the votes. In fact, it's normal. No UK party has won a majority of the popular vote since 1935, yet hung parliaments (where no party has a majority of Parliament) are rare, the last three times being 2017, 2010, and 1974. In the 2015 Canadian election, the Liberal Party won 54% of seats with 39% of the vote. Nobody would say that Canada or the UK are not functional democracies.
For point #2, the trick is to vastly simplify the tax code and get rid of most Federal criminal statutes. There's no reason we need a Federal minimum wage or EEOC. Let the States handle it.
In this nutshell you've summed up the Trumpian/GOP philosophy of power: throw so much constant shit into the air that most people no longer have any idea where the shit is coming from.
The added advantage of this strategy is that popular disgust tends to support the GOP mission of gridlock, with no hopes for progress. They are just fine when the majority wants to "drown government in a bathtub," as long as they can convince their rabid, gerrymandered base to keep them in their individual seats of power. It' survival of the fittest, and they love the challenge. Democracy, meh, not so much. That's why their number one goal currently (and historically) is to destroy voting rights.
This type of thing is what convinced me that immunity for government officials while they are doing their jobs is a good thing, even though Trump tried to use it for bad things. It's overall good for it to be very hard to arrest people who are currently serving in the government and it's worth having some bad people in the government for that.
I'm agnostic about whether you should be allowed to arrest them for things that are very unrelated to doing their job, like if you're the president and also you break into someone's house and take their TV.
You mention trying to isolate the FBI/IRS/etc, who investigate things like corruption, from executive authority, but isn't the alternative for them to become independent power structures, ala Turkey's military, with ipso facto veto power over the government via corruption/tax fraud/whatever charges?
Not sure. The military seems like naturally more of a scary powerful force than the IRS; I don't know if you get these kinds of problems if you don't have tanks and bombers.
I think for many average citizens, a weaponized IRS is in many ways scarrier than the military because they can more readily imagine the IRS swooping in and destroying their lives than they can imagine the 82nd airborne dropping a squad in to destroy their happy suburban existence ...
Maybe more scary than IRS. But naturally more scary than intelligence agencies (FBI)? Consider the scariness of intelligence agencies broadly. Clear uncontroversial examples include the secret police under Stalin, or in eastern Germany. More controversially, I've heard that FBI under its founder, J Edgar Hoover had a lot of political power due to copious blackmail material, against other elites, in its possession
There is already a strong norm against politically motivated tax audits. Back in 2013, the IRS went after various right wing nonprofits for violating arcane tax laws related to political activism. The Republicans made a huge deal out of it, holding several Congressional hearings, demanding that government officials be sent to jail, and convincing the FBI to investigate.
The norm was strong in what sense? In the sense that the Democrats could not quite sweep it all under the rug? Certainly not in the sense that violation of the norm seemed unthinkable - if it had been just a few cases, no one would have noticed. So the IRS had to feel at least somewhat comfortable with the idea of punishing the regime's enemies .
I have a vague memory that Nixon tried something similar. Persons on his enemies list were much more likely to get audited.
It was strong in the sense that the object-level question of whether these groups had, in fact, broken the law was never even discussed. Instead, the question was just whether or not they had been singled out because they were aligned with conservatives. Essentially, because they were aligned with a political side, they were essentially rendered immune from investigation by the IRS.
I think saying they were rendered essentially immune to investigation by the IRS is a significant mischaracterization. The controversy concerned delays in granting 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status and higher demands for documentation from particular groups in a way that could be considered discriminatory and unreasonable. Assuming that the organizations concerned eventually received confirmation of their tax status, they still had to follow the rules. All groups that seek such tax status have to jump through some hoops, but some had to jump through more than others. None are immune from investigation, unless the IRS feels too embarrassed to stir things up again.
Note how the IRS recently went after Derek Chauvin and his wife, right after the George Floyd killing. Regardless of whether they deserve it seems highly unlikely that's a coincidence, no? And if so, is that not proof of politically motivated (or values motivated) IRS action? But if we know it happened in that high profile case, shouldn't we expect there are lots of other cases we never hear about?
It doesn't even need to become an independent power structure to cause problems, which is what makes this an almost impossibly hard problem in countries like Turkey.
Scott slightly undersold the key point here: in most countries, ALMOST EVERYONE IS CORRUPT [I miss italics]. So you never need to frame anyone if you don't want to, you just investigate and prosecute them honestly.
Even with an honest, independent anti-corruption agency, it's not that hard to just dig up some corruption (as a private citizen, hire PIs or have the equivalent of opposition researchers). You then hand your dossier over to the independent anti-corruption agency (preferably with much fanfare), and then they either prosecute (bye-bye enemy), or they don't (which makes them look and arguably be not very independent).
Having a strong social norm against totally endemic corruption is probably the strongest advantage the US, Germany, the UK etc have as countries. It's an almost impossible hole to dig yourself out of because everyone keeps nicking all the shovels (just kidding). More seriously, if everyone looks around and sees everyone else is corrupt, they'll be corrupt too, because there's no social norm against corruption and that seems to be the only thing that can prevent it.
I suspect the random stroke of luck Northwest Europe hit was probably Calvinism, because "everyone is irredeemably evil other than our little group of people who magically aren't, and this is inevitable and proper" lets them disregard social norms in favour of radically different ones and group-select their way into power, thereby boot-strapping an anti-corruption norm that these countries didn't have 500 years ago.
Also, and obviously this is a while ago now, but this very system created the incentives that led to Caesar overthrowing the Republic. Couldn't be prosecuted when holding imperium, couldn't afford to surrender imperium as he would face politically-motivated (although not necessarily unjust) prosecution.
Really interesting book review; I am curious if you have any thoughts on the role of the Gulen movement within the modern opposition to Erdogan, and its (presumably uneasy) relationship with the liberal wing of the opposition. Presumably, Erdogan turning on Gulen would have created interesting new dynamics.
On a less interesting tangent, the notion of elite-controlled institutions has always seemed a tad tautological to me, and maybe someone could clarify.
Institutions empower individuals; power being central to the concept of elite status, how could their leaders not be in turn considered part of the elite?
A populist uprising would presumably elevate new individuals into leadership positions, but are there useful reasons to refrain from referring to this new ruling class as the Elite?
One weird parallel that may be worth exploring: In the US, it seems like a particular ideology had largely taken over elite education, and used that to acquire a lot of cultural power as a result. There's not a single leader like with Gullen, but there's still a certain parallel there. For example, I'd say that today's public debate on free speech, hate speech, deplatforming, etc., is very heavily shaped by the teachings of that ideology, as taught to the generation of people who are currently rising into positions of power in media, industry, academia, and government.
I'm neither an expert on the Gulen movement, nor on 'cancel culture' or however you'd prefer naming that side of analogy. Having said that, I am not convinced we can meaningfully compare ongoing shifts in our norms of discourse with the action of a concrete political organization with explicit membership.
I think it depends on whether there gets to be a new ruling *class*, or if it's actually a set of people that get refreshed from outside their immediate social circles. For instance, if the members of the legislature are chosen by lottery from the entire population, then they really won't be representatives of an elite class.
I have a hazy understanding that Erdogan has been undertaking a sometimes-bizarre campaign against Gulen and anybody ever associated with him. Is this right?
I'm imagining myself at a dinner party:
> Person: I just read this book about Erdogan's rise to power in Turkey.
> Me: Oh, that sounds really interesting. Wasn't there some thing where he tried to get an NBA player arrested for saying something nice about Gullen?
> Person: I don't think the book covered that...
> Me: I am out of useful things to say about this topic.
I'm writing as a liberal Turk. There is no relation with the Gülen movement. They are universally hated. Their power base is quite literally the deep state which to a large extent has been decimated over the last 5 years. The movement doesn't have popular support. To the extent it did in the past, if was within religious circles which align with AKP nowadays.
I don't know what is going on behind the scenes or the details of extradition treaties but I think the rule of law should be followed. If our government demands extradition and provides incriminating solid evidence, there should be extradition(?). I'm not sure why that hasn't happened though.
What do you think about Erdoğan's allegations that Gülenists were behind the 2016 coup attempt? As a not-well-informed outsider, it seemed nonsense, as the military has traditionally been Kemalist/secularist, while Gülenists are soft Islamists much like Erdoğan. This would suggest that the crackdown on Gülenists after the coup was totally misdirected (potentially leaving open the possibility of another Kemalist coup attempt). However, I assume Erdoğan is smarter than to make a mistake like that.
Also, how did Gülenists become associated with the deep state? Again, I thought the deep state was associated mainly with traditional secularist politics, though I may be totally wrong about that.
Haha you are a little bit ill-informed though who can blame you for not being able to keep up with the machinations of our deep state.
So you're right that the Deep State traditionally was Kemalist. Though the ultra nationalists also were represented. AKP when it came to power, wanted to increase their representation in the military, media, business, judiciary, police etc. To do so they allied with Gülenists. Together they nepotistically promoted their own supporters. They used various reforms as justification as alluded in the post. Gülenists were especially experienced in placing and supporting the promotion of their own. Though I must admit I'm not knowledgeable about their origin story. They used sham prosecutions like the Ergenekon trial to try to get rid of Kemalists and seculars as much as possible.
This alliance somehow broke early in 2010s. I don't know why. Maybe they stopped needing each other. Gülenists attemted a "judicial coup". They leaked phone recordings of Erdoğan, his family, top AKP officials and many businessmen engaging in blatant corruption. And launched a corruption investigation. Miraculously AKP survived the scandal. The prosecutor was fired and nothing happened. And then they started purging the ranks of the police and judiciary and military from Gülenists. They also won the next elections.
The coup came after the purge started. There were definitely Gülenist generals. Also the coup was led by a small clique in the military. The entire military was not involved. In fact, I think some army commanders also moved to stop it. The Chief of Staff was kidnapped etc.
But I share your skepticism wrt the coup because it was very incompetently executed. Still, I think its not out of the question that this was an authentic but incompetent coup attempt by Gülenists. Or maybe it was a false flag operation. Maybe history will tell. I don't think it is apparent one way or the other.
One thing to note is, that coups in Turkish history are not all the same in the sense that some of them were directed by the Chief of Staff and the entire military was involved. Some were directed by a clique of junior officers (the first one at least). We've also had a couple of coups that were led by junior officers that failed.
My vague impression is that the US has been hosting Imam Gulen in Poconos for a couple of decades because the CIA sees the Gulenist movement as a potential pro-American government of Turkey that could be air-dropped into place.
Control of The Straits has been seen as a central strategic necessity for at least 1700 years and maybe back to the time of Pericles (whose strategy against Sparta was for Athens to hole up behind its Long Walls and feed on grain from the shores of the Black Sea). The US has generally been OK with the government of Turkey since at least 1946, but I presume the US has contingency plans in case the Ankara government becomes highly unsatisfactory.
The FBI was investigating in the mid-2010s how the Gulen organization skims from the tax-payer supported budgets of its ~150 charter schools in America. But then the whole topic seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the CIA had a little talk with the FBI about how in the Big Picture, a little local graft from American property taxpayers is a small price to pay for potential control of the Bosporus?
I wrote about the Gulen movement in 2014 in "The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos:"
Could be. I don't want to go deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but definitely some shady stuff is going on. Now that US shifts away from Cold War 1 to 2, I wonder what that will do to Turkey's strategic relevance.
I read your article. The significance of test prep centers seems a little funny. But they genuinely were the most common and successful test prep centers. I took some tests there back in the day and so did many of my secular and atheist friends, some even outright attended classes. And I have stories of their interactions with teachers. They were not intrusive and nothing happened, but they were invited to gatherings etc., one can imagine a different outcome for students who came from poorer and more conservative backgrounds.
What's your take on the Macron vs Erdogan conflict about the coranic schools ? Any relation to Gulen ? (P.S.: It takes some balls to basically end the separation of church and state, in France of all countries !)
Pretty much. Kemalists still hold some implicit power in the sense that the educated and wealthy tend to be overwhelmingly secular and Kemalist. But that part of the population has been shut out of explicit power structures. Only Erdoğan, his inner circle and factions within his coalition hold explicit power.
>Institutions empower individuals; power being central to the concept of elite status, how could their leaders not be in turn considered part of the elite?
"The elite" that populists oppose is usually not *everyone* in power, but rather a specific demographic or cultural group that holds a disproportionate and (they would say) unfair amount of power. In Turkey (as described here), the populists were conservative religious Turks opposed to the "liberal cosmopolitan secular Europeanized Turks sipping cocktails in Nisintasi hotels" who they thought had too much power over them. Likewise, the populists who supported Trump weren't opposed to the idea of some people having strong political power so much as they were opposed to that power being disproportionately held by the educated, secular, liberal, pro-social-justice members of the cultural middle class (in Fussell's terms).
That’s fair, I appreciate that aspect of it. Is it the ‘disproportionate’ aspect of it, or the ‘cultural middle class’ which makes the elites jarring in many circles? If it’s the former, then I assume the newly-empowered populist would over time become entrenched and networked as the new ‘elite’, but would your definition still hold if they don’t adopt a liberal outlook? If it’s the latter, then I’m not sure ‘Elite’ is that useful of a category, except in a derogatory sense.
I agree with you that defining the "elite" as the people who control the institutions and then decrying the fact that elites control the institutions is silly.
I think the issue with class comes about when institutional control becomes hereditary. That is, if the Harvard faculty and NYT editorial board and Hollywood stars are all the children of meat packers and line cooks, then I don't think there's an issue. If they're all the sons of NYT editors and Harvard grads and Hollywood directors, then things can get sclerotic.
I don't think turnover among the elites solves everything, but I think it makes problems less acute.
I think it makes sense to frame the argument around the notion social mobility, but that seems to yield fairly different attitudes and prescription than the rationalist critique of the Elites, so I feel like we might be missing something.
If we care about social mobility, then education, redistribution, access to care and services, and some form of affirmative action all probably should be on the table.
If we frame this around the cabal, the cathedral, the octopus, and the latest allegory for Them, I’m not sure any of the above are that relevant.
The relevant distinction is that taking control of industry frequently triggers civil war. This in turn frequently leads to dictatorship either as the left-wing government starts abandoning scruples to put down a rebellion or the right-wing faction wins and decides democracy threatens property. So real danger, different dynamic. Przeworski wrote a good book on this that I hope is more blackpilled than fully accurate, but that’s hope in the theological virtue sense.
(Arguably a different set of dynamics open up when left-wing parties realize this, stop making impossible bids for power, and then no longer exercise a disciplining effect on property elites.)
People are probably more familiar with the Hayek argument that a democratic government adopting central planning would slide into dictatorship. This doesn’t really seem to have as much basis and I can’t really think of any examples maybe outside the very heavily confounded examples of some Central European countries ~’45-50.
That said, I’m not sure the dynamic you mention for right-populism is quite right either, because I’m skeptical of the whole cultural theory of class on which it’s based. The only sense in which snobs (independent of actual, economic class) dominate slobs is by sneering at them, but slobs also sneer at snobs, so this feels more like a case of subcultural emnity than real power. (Credentialism certainly is real and non-reciprocal, but that’s why you want to incorporate it into your theory of economic class.)
An alternative explanation is simply that if by “cultural upper class” what you actually mean is “people with culturally liberal values” and by “culturally lower class” you mean “people with culturally conservative values,” then the latter are almost definitionally more sympathetic towards Decisions Made By A Cool Tough Leader Guy rather than Decisions Made By Endless Meetings, and visa-versa.
I remember in June 2016, being so happy about the state of my life, and the state of the world. I flew to the UK for a conference, and when I landed, I checked my phone and saw breaking news about a shooting in progress at a gay bar in Orlando. A few days later, during the conference, it looked like Turkey was undergoing one of its coups to remove the Islamist presence and restore its version of secularist democracy. But by the time I was leaving, it became clear that the coup was just enabling Erdogan to purge his opponents. But at least Brexit was about to go down in flames - or so I thought, as I boarded my plane back home.
Was there ever a consensus that there had been a real coup attempt? By the end of things, it was starting to seem like it might have been a honeypot by Erdogan to purge his enemies.
The book made it sound pretty real - Erdogan might have been assassinated if he'd been in the expected place, the military deployed tanks and jets, etc.
the jets were deployed, Erdoğan's plane was flying with its transponder open for hours, it was even possible to track him in flightradar, but none of the F16s actually tried to shoot it down. It's a weird issue, and even though I thought and read a lot about it I cannot come to a conclusion. In my long comment somewhere I gave more details.
I was watching it on TV that night, and it was intense. It was also fairly close to the William Wallace scenario, but coming out *for* Erdogan - there was insane footage of ordinary people dragging soldiers out of tanks on a bridge and beating them up while fighter jets flew overhead.
I can't find the footage from the night itself, but this is the people who mobbed the tanks still milling around with them and some rifles in the aftermath:
I also remember Erdogan seemingly standing on a random suburban porch urging people to take to the streets and fight the soldiers. It was heavy stuff.
Weirdly, I was also in Istanbul when the Ergenekon arrests were taking off (just coincidentally sightseeing) - there were big protests in Taksim Square, and a lot of gendarmerie troops loitering around outside their bases. I assumed that was a coup attempt, but then nothing happened.
America military bases are usually out in the boonies where there's plenty of room to practice shooting weapons. My impression from the few Turkish cities I've been to is that Turkish Army basis are typically in the middle of the city, next to the radio station.
The theory I read at the time - I can't remember exactly where, so take this with as much salt as you like - was that it was a real coup in preparation that got put into action prematurely, possibly when some of the participants were under pressure from the government and decided to go for it.
The most telling data point that shows the difference between the US and Turkey (or any other country that would be privy to democratic dictatorship) is that Trump's Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, was sued many times and then simply stopped tampering with mail delivery. How did he just ... stop?? I'm still baffled. I guess the Rule of Law is a more powerful force than we thought.
Knowing that a legal system (or other parallel forms of power) can eventually be brought to bear on bad actors/actions is a very strong long term deterrent. Sure, a leader of an organization can make an immediate change, but if it gets overruled by the courts, or a new law, or the police/FBI, then it makes more sense to follow the rules even in the short term.
Anyone know more about the military's structure during this time period? ~100 years is a reasonably long time to maintain what looks like a consistent set of values. How were they not taken over by would-be dictators who used the coups-are-okay constitutional clause to go about it? Did they just get lucky for a while or is there a structural difference that made them more successful than Myanmar?
Institutional traditions. In the cadet school they learn from a very young age they're the protector of a "secular, democratic, state of law". The same cadets in turn get to run the cadet schools when they're grownups. So even the worst of the coups ended with a transition to civilian governments via fair elections in a year or 2.
Well that, and sometimes an update to the constitution as well. The country was going too right wing and there came the 1960 coup. The 1961 constitution was by far the most progressive we ever had, and that empowered the left, especially the labor movement a lot so there came the 1971 memorandum which didn't change the constitution but pulled the strings rightward. That wasn't enough though, so there was the more right wing 1980 coup and the 1981 constitution which is actually a huge step down from the 1961 one, but made the country somewhat easier to run. So the memorandums of 1971, 1979, 1997 and 2007 were each a military vote of no confidence (only the 2007 one was ignored). So was the coup attempt of 1969, the military stopped when the government took back their constitution change and resigned.
Interesting. So any general leading a coup who decided "Actually I think I'll just make _myself_ President" would immediately get taken out by the rest of the army, because that's Just Not What We Do Around Here.
That's what happened until now, the worst was the 1980 coup. The coup leader became the president, but in the 1981 constitution presidency is more of a ceremonial position so he didn't keep holding considerable amount of power and stepped down when his term ended without having a say in who'll get elected president next after him.
There had been a couple of coup attempts that were stopped or didn't gain any supporters inside the military since they thought the general leading it was a type prone to declaring himself supreme president for life or something. The indoctrination is unwavering commitment to the secular democratic state of law (because it's both a gift and a responsibility left directly by Atatürk, and there's no betraying him), so very few have such thoughts and those don't find much support (or get taken out by the rest).
I was wondering this myself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is similar to America's elite: you don't need to be come a dictator, to rule by orders, if the culture just naturally drifts your way, as Scott was saying. Remember that the military is staffed by Western style educated elites.
The Gulenists took over many of the police departments in Turkey by having the best test prep centers for passing the police hiring exam (it was almost as if they got a copy of the test beforehand).
The Gulenists didn't make as much progress at infiltrating the military, which had a strongly anti-Islamist culture.
Now that I think about it, the Turkish example seems pretty relevant to the Biden Administration's attempts to change the culture of the military.
> This has made me a lot less optimistic about the kind of dictator-prevention strategy where everyone has lots of guns and then if a dictator comes to power you rush out into the streets shouting FREEEEEDOM!, William-Wallace-style, shooting everything in sight. If there's a military coup or something, this might work. But if every day your institutions are just a tiny bit less legitimate than the day before, when do you rush out into the street? One of the most important steps on the way to Erdogan's total control was his court-packing, accomplished under the guise of EU-bid modernization. But if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court at some point, are the people with guns going to rush out into the street shouting FREEEEEDOM? No - realistically even the people who really hate the Democrats and think they're bad and wrong are going to stop short of armed revolution, because that alone isn't quite Stalin-level obvious evil. Erdogan demonstrates that you can become a dictator through a few dozen things like that chained together, without any obvious single point where everyone wakes up and notices. There is no fire alarm for dictatorship.
I agree with the object level message here but I have to wonder: if you lived through the same year that I did last year, how did you not already conclude this? Millions of people have had their jobs and lives taken from them through an active act of the government. Americans already have millions of guns. This is the single most oppressive thing that most Americans have and will ever live through. How many guerrilla actions were there to stop the lockdowns? Zero. There were zero.
The obvious conclusion from this is that Americans do not have the balls to take decisive action and use those guns to stop tyranny, even when it announces itself ahead of time. So yeah, the American guns aren't really doing shit to keep us safe from dictators
Is your point that once-in-a-century pandemics are good opportunities for governments to restrict freedoms? Because, sure. But that also means you have to wait around a while if you want to use one in order to launch yourself as a dictator.
What, you just convince a bunch of Italians and Spaniards to keel over an die? Or are you proposing deploying a bioweapon? Either way, this seems like its getting very complicated.
I'm a bad person to talk about this because I am mostly pro-lockdown, but a few thoughts:
1. I feel like there's a distinction between bad policy and change in the form of government. Even if the lockdown was bad policy, we've had lots of bad policy over the past two hundred years and we're used to it. That's different from eg dissolving Congress, suspending habeus corpus, etc, which seem like more obvious dictatorship fire alarms.
2. Most people interpreted the lockdown was an attempt to stop a pandemic and not an attempt to seize power, and I think we rightly use "looks like an attempt by some specific faction to seize power" as an important criterion for dictatorship.
3. The thing that struck me most about the lockdown was how easy it was to violate if you wanted. Sure, restaurants and stuff were closed, but if you wanted to go visit friends or refuse to wear a mask or something nobody could really stop you. I think if we'd gone for a Chinese-style lockdown where it was actually enforced, there would have been a lot more anger.
Broadly pro-Lockdown too here, but: you yourself say that a likely form that a slide to dictatorship would take would be "zombified institutions" which would still look like they were in place even though they'd have become puppets of the executive branch. So why would you still rely on "seeing Congress dissolved or habeas corpus suspended" as the real fire alarms?
Interesting side-fact: regardless of the situation in the US, I am told that France applied COVID restrictions to its own Parliament, such that the elected lawmakers were *forbidden* from meeting at full quorum for votes. This was used to pass unpopular laws that would probably have generated more debate if everyone who wanted to attend had been allowed to attend. That seems pretty bad, surely?
"I think if we'd gone for a Chinese-style lockdown where it was actually enforced, there would have been a lot more anger."
Agreed, but that's the only sort of lockdown that makes a difference when it comes to spreading COVID. It doesn't take a lockdown to make the people who prioritize health over sociability (crudely speaking) to stop hanging out in bars; all it takes for that is newspaper headlines. And it doesn't matter if the people who prioritize sociability over health are hanging around in bars or in private house parties, except that the bars probably have ventilation systems, etc, which are sized for that. The only sort of lockdown that would actually make a real difference, is the sort with actual locks, e.g. on the jail cells you throw people in when you catch them throwing house parties.
You can have lockdowns that don't work, or you can have lockdowns that are angrifying and divisive for any population accustomed to individual liberty, but it's going to be one or the other. Or, as we actually managed in e.g. California, both. Which of these options were you in favor of?
> Agreed, but that's the only sort of lockdown that makes a difference when it comes to spreading COVID. It doesn't take a lockdown to make the people who prioritize health over sociability (crudely speaking) to stop hanging out in bars; all it takes for that is newspaper headlines.
I don't think this is true. There's always been a correlation between the severity of local regulations and local conditions (which I think is what you mean here?), which makes teasing out causality (people's behaviors) difficult. However, in the US, compliance with state/local regulations qua state/local regulations was higher early on during the pandemic only to deteriorate over time to the point where, now, once you account for local conditions, the actual regs have no effect on behavior.
So at least at some point, the regulations themselves made a difference, even if they don't seem to anymore.
< How many guerrilla actions were there to stop the lockdowns? Zero. There were zero. >
Michigan's state capitol was stormed by armed anti-lockdown protesters, and then there was a plot to kidnap the governor. Anti-lockdown protestors in Idaho were also able to force their way into the state capitol. And if we count pro-Trump as anti-lockdown, we might be able to find some more examples.
These guerilla actions were not effective at stopping the lockdowns, but they did exist.
Guerrillas are normally supposed to attack vulnerable parts of the security forces and then retreat before a response can be mobilized. Storming a capitol is something you do when you've built up a large enough conventional force to hold it. Kidnapping is admittedly a tactic used by political movements which don't have good chance of a Maoist peasant revolution and instead adapt "foco theory" for urban terrorists.
That's because they were a kind of guerrilla action (similar to the Capitol one). Real coups/revolutions involve people storming things, as well as a lot of planning, organisation, political intrigue etc. This is the equivalent of if the October Revolution had consisting solely of storming the Winter Palace, then just being in the Winter Palace for a bit and going home. Or if you kidnapped a federal judge, drove them out to the woods and made them administer the presidential oath to you at gunpoint, then sat there wondering when someone would show up to give you the nuclear codes.
Guerrillas aren't supposed to mill around after they strike until they get arrested. They're supposed to retain their own capacity to continue the fight, gradually bleeding out their conventional opponent. You might frame them as analogous to the Bolshevik revolution, which was closer to a coup than something like Mao's guerrilla war. But then I guess the Beer Hall Putsch would be closer still.
Did the book provide any insights regarding effectively integrating/deescalating political blocks with goals/policy preferences outside the bounds of other political blocks?
From your description, the Islamic faction in Turkey posed this problem for some time: a significant block attempting to participate in the democratic system to pursue fundamentally ends other power blocks considered intolerable, or incompatible with democracy.
Germany is currently dealing with the AfD, which is large enough to be a significant political faction, but is essentially under investigation as an extremist group. From a democratic perspective, that's a tricky position. It feels like some factions within US politics are headed the same way, and we're in the position of labeling explicitly political groups as terrorists.
Yeah, it's interesting the way this ends up with some policies being plausibly described as either ways to protect democracy or ways to undermine democracy, depending on your point of view. Extensive surveillance and infiltration of an upstart political movement that's challenging the ruling party is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect to see from someone undermining democracy, but it's also justified as being intended to protect democracy.
I need to find a good book looking at the political science of the IRA and Sinn Fein. From my limited knowledge, it seems like that history might offer useful insights into this problem.
That's because "democracy" is a load-bearing word in all of this, and you have to work out what you mean by it and then delve into the object level to work out which groups are defending it and which groups are attacking it - sort of how in WWII guns and tanks were both pro- and anti- democracy depending on who used them:
If democracy = "person majority wants to be in charge is" then that's probably Erdogan (or was until very recently) but it's very hard to know. So the army using these methods against him is anti-democratic, but him using them against the army is pro-democratic. Also this gets weird later on when he can control the media and civil society to boost his popularity. Also it possibly makes Nazi Germany a democracy at various points, which means it's wrong as a definition because 99% of people who use the word "democracy" are trying to describe a category which excludes Hitler.
If democracy = "regular one-person one-vote elections where anyone can be a candidate decide who's in charge" then any faction who are explicitly or covertly trying to end or rig (narrowly defined) elections is anti-democratic. This can create paradoxes if the party who would win the elections would go on to end or rig them. This seems to have been Turkey's repeated experience with its Islamists.
If democracy = "[multiple independent news sources and/or freedom of civic participation and/or values compatible with respect for human rights etc]" then you need a rigorous definition, and anyone who's opposed to them is anti-democratic, and suppressing them is pro-democratic. The problem is you can epistemically game what goes into this such that you have carte blanche to suppress anyone you don't like as a threat to democracy.
People will always publically justify things they do as being to protect/gain what Siskind/Yudkowsky call "applause lights" - and democracy certainly is one of those.
That doesn't mean they're telling the truth. They could be deluded, or their spin department could just be feeding them the lies that they calculate will get the best reaction. Complete inversion of what a word means isn't even *that* uncommon.
Background: I am an American who lived in a medium sized town in the Turkish "heartland" for a year. Confidence in the stylized portrayal of Turkish politics below: ~65%.
I think one thing this review under-emphasizes is the extent to which an islamic-friendly government is extremely popular among a majority of Turks, though extremely unpopular with the majority of turks you are likely to meet or hear from.
Turkish sentiment is strongly divided between cities on the Western, Mediterranean-facing Coast (Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, etc.) that are much more "liberal" "secular" "Western," and in Turkish terms, "republican" etc. vs. those cities in the Turkish interior and along the Black Sea which tend to be more "traditional" and thus "islamic" (of course cities in the heartland have pockets of liberal voters and cities along the coast have “islamic" suburbs or neighborhoods but this works as a generalization).
Westerners typically interact with and valorize the Turkey of the Mediterranean (and who can blame them! It’s great!), with maybe the occasional stop in Cappadochia or Pamukkele (both beautiful and amazing). The preferred politics of the interior, though, has essentially always included some form of Islamicly-informed government in much the same way that the American "heartland" was thought to consistently prefer some form of Christian or evangelical inflected government from the 80s-mid-2000s . As I understand it, a majority of the population lives in the "heartland" and so it requires no anti-democratic impulse to think that their preferences should have some representation in public policy.
The preferred politics of the Turkish interior, however, have also been basically outlawed for most of post-Ottoman Turkish history, with the military, as the review points out, frequently interposing itself against democracy in the name of preventing even mildly islamic changes or parties. For context, the government currently claims that an implausible 99%+ of turks are muslims. But even independent polls show ~80% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Turkey#Religious_statistics). For all that, Erbakan, for example, seems unlikely to have advocated for or succeeded in turning Turkey into a caliphate or ruling by sharia. And if he had banned alcohol or other similarly “red meat” items for muslim conservatives....well so did America in the 20s (due largely, I might add, to a religiously-inflected moral crusade). To say that the military did the right thing by preventing every and all expression of islamic morality in politics is to believe that General Pershing should have ordered Harding or Coolidge out of the White House in order to enact the moral priorities of flapper-era New York. Certainly many of the priorities of muslim Turkish politicians of the mid-2000s (pre Ergenkon/2016) seem no less totalitarian than French treatment of similar issues in public schools. If liberalism is a big tent, surely it can include a country which is a democracy with some laws reflecting the islamic faith of the vast majority of its populace. The Turkish military, however, was willing to try and depose or undermine even peak center-right technocrat Erdogan, reducing his incentive to stay within the bounds of typical politics, hence Ergenkon (I also think the review underrates Turkey’s “arab spring” moment with the gezi park/taksim square protests of 2013 but I won’t address that here, unsure what the book’s view on that is).
Erdogan has ended up a tyrant, no doubt, but I think the review is perhaps too open to the idea that Turkey was much of a democracy before Erdogan despite the fact that the moral preferences of a majority of the electorate were all-but-excluded from the political sphere by force. To be sure, many of the institutions we associate with democracy were more vibrant pre-Erdogan (particularly the press and the judiciary [the military was also more "vibrant" but not in a democratic way]). But the reason those institutions were targeted for hollowing-out by Erdogan was in part due to the reality of constant coup-threat which those same “democratic” institutions supported. This is a tragedy because I can easily imagine a world in which Turkey looks like a successful, if morally conservative, democracy (in much the same way America scans as conservative to Euros), rather than the dictatorship it has become.
Anyways, enjoyed the review and think it captured many of these points, but wanted to emphasize just how unrepresentative the previous governance of Turkey seemed to have been to the Turkish interior.
This isn't interesting. Think. Where did gastarbeiters of Turkish extraction come from? Istanbul? Izmir? No, mostly they came from poor inner Anatolia farming villages, because that's where one recruits cheap low-skill labor force. Sarrazin's book should have the data.
Sarrazin may or may be not right in this point, but I want to point out he is massively criticized for distorting (eg cherry-picking, unsubstantiated conclusions) data by those he cited. It's wise to never use him except as pointer to the original research.
By all means, read the original research if you have the time, but in such a highly charged and political polemic, it's a given that he would be criticized for that whether it was true that he distorted sources or not (and what would constitute distortion in the first place? are people who insist on smothering hate-facts in "context" fighting distortion or engaging in distortion?) so the mere fact that such criticism exists provide little evidence. It's not like e.g. highly reputed German journalists haven't been caught fabricating material out of whole cloth, for example. One may consider such a situation of epistemological warfare unfortunate - I do - but it is what it is.
Sarrazin as a source weakens an argument (when it's not directed against him, of course). The criticism I mentioned was *from the researchers* he cited, and *for bad science reasons*, not from the various other directions he got flak from. E.g. M. Blume: "he copied this table from my book but 'strategically truncated'" (not verbatim except "strategisch gekürzt") to make his point. Even in points where Sarrazin is right (as he is, incidentally, with the Anatolian origin of the migrants), his mixture of motivated reasoning, sloppiness, and domain specific ignorance has a halo effect that'll taint the overall argumentation that uses him as a source. Because of that halo effect it is better to always cite his source (ie, use him as a list of pointer *only*). A whataboutism about media failures and culture war does not salvage that.
I'll amend that to "Sarrazin's book should have pointers to data" on the strength of my looking into this single "strategisch gekurzt" incident (https://scilogs.spektrum.de/natur-des-glaubens/die-demografische-traditionalismusfalle-und-warum-thilo-sarrazin-schummeln-musste-n-tv-4/). I found the place in question in Sarrazin's book, parsed the German as well as I could, and skimmed Blume's paper. I must say that while Sarrazin did omit many entries from Blume's table for both high- and low-fertility minor denominations without saying so (which is indeed sloppy), Blume's own protestations in Spektrum about Sarrazin drawing unwarranted conclusions from his data about connections between high religiosity and fertility ring hollow, because Blume himself writes in that article in the discussion of this same data that yes, there are a few of these highly religious but low-fertility denominations, of which celibate Shakers are the most extreme example, but these "contradictions [are] short-lived variants in religious competition". It is at least somewhat inconsistent of him to then bring up low-fertility New-Apostolic and Jehova's Witnesses as counter-examples to Sarrazin's ostensibly unwarranted conclusions in Spektrum.
> Germany has a lot of migrants who were eligible to vote in the Turkish elections…
They migrated in the 60es and 70es and often maintain a view of a Turkey of that time, and partly their offspring do, too. These voters are not well integrated into the contemporary German (or Belgian, or generally Western big-city) world. Pockets of Anatolya of the past, so to speak, ie in a broad generalization.
I dont think any significantly large society has survived on secular liberalism. At some point, the secularism becomes so dogmatic, you can't distinguish it from a religion.
There is a thread of logic, often only implicit, that runs through all these discussions about populace vs elites: whether is life winner-take-all or percentage-of-the-pot. In the first worldview the elites are the best of us, so they should win. Much as in baseball where the margin of greatness is small (think .300 hitter vs .250 hitter), being just a little bit better means you win all the competitions and get to decide everything in your sphere of influence and everyone else gets the scraps.
In the second worldview, everybody sucks, and the elites are just a *little* less clueless than the rest and "sucking slightly less" is a less hubris-inducing framing for their "superiority". An elite might make slightly better decisions on average than a pleb, and while that matters it isn't consistent or comprehensive enough to be a knock-down argument to always listen to the elite and never the plebs.
And one is not necessarily correct and the other wrong: there are certain situations where the first clearly applies. I already gave the example of baseball but your point from the comment highlights a couple of weeks ago comes to mind, the one about the taking the kid who's almost smart enough to cure cancer to the point where he's exactly smart enough to cure cancer, and how a fair bit of progress is driven this way.
But politics seems to be more the second kind of thing. I find Liberal arguments to be, on average, more correct than Conservative ones. The Liberals are really better, and this matters. But it's not consistent or comprehensive enough to be a knock-down argument for always listening to the Liberals and never the Conservatives.
And my beef is not that people disagree with that assessment, it's that the dichotomy *never comes up*. We talk about class, status, economic inequality, etc, using arguments that are clearly from one of those two frames, without ever talking about whether or not such framing applies in a given instance. And it seems to me like this is an important question, and maybe the *most* important question, for talking about how to talk about this stuff: do the winners deserve everything, or just slightly more than the not-quite winners?
For example, you might think the elites are mainly good at getting/keeping power rather than governing, and I think you could make a pretty fair case in that direction for US political elites. There's no question that senators, presidents, governors, etc., tend to be smarter and better-educated than the voters, but I'm not sure the quality of the decisions they end up making reflects that. Hell, think of the many places that have impending public-sector pension crises--the problem there isn't that past political leaders weren't smart enough, but rather that they had bad incentives.
You might think the elites are great at winning meme-wars and academic politics, but probably aren't that great at actually making decisions about real stuff. For example, I think I'd rather have the Ottomwa, Iowa sewer commission making important decisions about practical things than the faculty of the Black or Gender Studies department at a top university--I think those folks are mostly good at slinging words and infighting, but would make a mess if given any actual power. Would you like to have the state legislature where you live taken over for the next decade by the faculty of the local state university's sociology department? How do you think that would work out?
You might think we've over-concentrated power, so that even though the elites are on average smarter and better educated and better informed than the public, they're also put in the position to make decisions over stuff they don't understand, with little or no effective feedback that will prevent them from just wrecking important things without even noticing it.
That is an interesting perspective and surely much of it is to a degree obviously true, but I'm not sure it actually addresses my core point. My questions are this: given the elite CEO Alice who is unquestionable very smart and well educated and her secretary Amy who is not so much, what percentage chance do you give that on any given policy question Alice will give a significantly better answer than Amy? And what percentage of the rewards of civilization should flow to Alice instead of Amy because of it?
Because there's a lot that feeds in to this question. There are domains like most academic questions where Alice will obviously give a much better answer (~100%) but almost no one cares. There are domains like business where Alice will give a much better answer and people very much care and pay Alice 200x what Amy makes because of it, because Alice making a good strategic decision vs a bad one can generate a great deal of value or sink the company. And there are domains where there is basically zero reason to privilege Alice's answer over Amy's, like say we asked them the secret to a lasting marriage. There is no prima facie reason to think Alice would give a better answer, and she may in fact be at a disadvantage. So in the 2x2 matrix of important/unimportant and brains-matter-a-lot/not-so-much, where does politics lie? Like yes, there are technical questions in politics, like how much money the Fed should "print", and Alice will probably be more right than Amy and significantly so. But a lot of policy boils down to satisfying competing preferences in a mutually palatable way, and I think I differ from a good chunk of the crowd in these parts about what quadrant I put that in, or maybe even just how deep in a given quadrant I place it.
> If there's a general moral here, it's that having the "good guys" oppress and censor the "bad guys" is fun while it lasts, but it's hard to know whether you're building up a karmic debt, or when you're going to have to pay the piper.
Wondering whether most people who saw Erdogan as the "good guy" fighting for them against the "bad guys" regret the current state, or are just happy that their good guy implements their idea of how things should be to an ever higher degree. Do people get "tired of winning"?
I suspect that "I support having a system that properly selects the right leaders and policies" is generally less popular than "I support having the right leaders and policies" because the former is a derivative of the latter. There are values-based arguments for liberal democracy itself, but I think a lot of people view it as a means to an end, and are happy to get the same result another way if they have a clear idea what "the right leaders and policies are." Where the gulf is as wide as Islam vs Kemalism, I'd guess people are less likely to support the process over the result. That may be really uncharitable, though, and I don't have a good grasp on where most people stand.
The pro-Erdogan bits are the ones about him being a competent leader (at least as mayor of Istanbul and early caretaker of the economy), him being sympathetic as a representative of a persecuted movement, and a lot of his early shift to dictatorship being self-defense coup-prevention measures.
Oh, I see. Values dissonance, then; I judged the latter two to be baldly negative (possibly because I don't see it as admirable to be persecuted if it's happening because your movement is Islamist and thus illiberal; the Mafia is also notably a persecuted movement), and interpreted the first one as less of "Erdogan is competent!" and more of "my GOD, the guy before Erdogan was incompetent and corrupt! Even Erdogan could do better than this!".
However, the mafia are not elected to their positions. Regardless of who you agree with politically, the military coups seem to be unambiguously anti-democratic.
I am not in this instance (or actually in almost any instance) trying to defend military coups. I think it's possible for military juntas to be immoral *at the same time* as a number of persecuted movements are also unsympathetic. The Muslim Brotherhood and military junta of Egypt spring to mind as another example—I can't say I have any sympathy for the leaders of the Brotherhood, even as I deplore the current dictatorial rule of Egypt.
Isn't the problem with this that while they're obviously both awful, it's difficult not to pick a side when you live there. If the only viable options are "the military rules the country" and "Islamists win elections and seize total control over society" then not picking a side is essentially quietism.
"Islamist" in Erdogan's case means what exactly? He supports a somewhat Islamic inflected society, that doesn't necessarily make one illiberal. I find it weird that people keep calling Gulenism "Islamist" and yet we call the Taliban "Islamist" too. Shouldn't we call Erdogan just "Islamic", the closer to the way one might call George Bush "Christian" than not.
The best analogy is Bernie Sanders and Mao are both "Socialist." Bush was a Christian personally (as is Biden), and he'd be the first to admit his policies were Christian-influenced. But if he'd tried to be as politically Christian ("Christianist") as Erdogan is Islamist, people would massively freak out. That's an American/French/Turkish cultural thing though; Germany is governed by an explicitly Christian party, and the UK has a state church where bishops sit in the legislature, and hardly anyone bats an eyelid.
A number of recent posts have touched on the sort of right-wing, social-class-centered populism mentioned near the end of this one. I want to propose an alternative mental framework for thinking about this.
There is a named concept called the Just World Hypothesis - which is the hypothesis that the world is, more often than not, "just" - meaning, people in general tend to be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior. If one strongly believes in the Just World Hypothesis, then one can make inferences in the other direction - that if a person has been rewarded, they must have been behaving well. Conversely, if someone strongly believes the JWH is false, then they will infer the opposite; that the person's rewards were acquired through theft, deception, etc. In other words, intuitive, unexamined beliefs people have regarding the JWH are the drivers of their responses to political questions.
One can easily map this onto leftist politics by applying it to wealth; the idea is that any given individual has an intuition about whether they believe in the . A proponent of, let's call it the Just Wealth Hypothesis, is likely to believe that progressive taxation and welfare programs are unjust; they ask, why should we tax the more productive people at a higher rate? Why should we reward poor people for not going out and getting a job? Meanwhile, someone with the opposite feeling would believe that richer individuals got their wealth via unethical behavior - exploitation, I believe the Marxists call it - and deserve to have it redistributed to at least some degree. What we call left wing "populism", in other words, is a believe that holders of extreme wealth - you might call their position "elite" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their wealth.
I think the way to map this onto "right wing populism" is to apply the JWH to *credentials* and *status* instead of wealth. A Just Credentials Hypothesis proponent would tend to believe that the cultural and intellectual "elites" got that way by working hard in school and acquiring more knowledge than others in their field; an opponent would believe that they got that way via connections and deception. As a result, when an Expert In The Field makes a policy recommendation based on their expertise - e.g. that restaurants should be closed to prevent covid transmission, or coal power plants should be closed down to prevent catastrophic climate change - people react to that recommendation based on their intuitive beliefs about the legitimacy of that person's credentials. What we call right wing "populism", in other words, is a belief that holders of extreme credentials - again, "elites" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their credentials.
Imagine an individual who is an extreme Just World supporter when it comes to wealth, and a extreme Just World opponent when it comes to credentials - has that person ever had a better presidential candidate than Donald Trump?
Either of these forms of populism has a danger, and a tendency towards dictatorship. For left wing populism, once you tear down capitalist economic structures and eliminate the economic elite, the only available alternative is a command economy managed by the state. This has been well covered. What is the equivalent for right wing populism? What do you end up with, if you eliminate credentials; who do people listen to, if not the experts? I think we're learning the answer to this, in the era of social media, alternative medicine and qanon: when expertise and credentials are discredited, what fills the void is *charisma*. The ideas that sound right, or feel good to hear, or have the most Likes, or come from people who you have come to trust for other reasons, become the Truth. And this is a powerful force for the sort of hollowing out of institutions, and slide into dictatorship, that Scott describes happening in Turkey.
I think it's something simpler: we in the West like the appearance of democracy. If some foreign government isn't living up to our standards, and it's weak enough not to be a threat, and we're not distracted by something else, we may even intervene to force that government to become democratic.
So if you want to be a dictator or anything near to it, you have to work within those limits. You're setting up a democracy, look! You have a parliament and elections and a constitution and a president and everything! Yes, you may be voted into power with 98% of the vote in every election, but that just shows how much your people love you!
"Democracy" is treated as a kind of magic word that will make everything better. I wonder exactly how much hollowing-out Erdogan had to do, or if those institutions were a little hollow to begin with?
>I think the way to map this onto "right wing populism" is to apply the JWH to *credentials* and *status* instead of wealth. A Just Credentials Hypothesis proponent would tend to believe that the cultural and intellectual "elites" got that way by working hard in school and acquiring more knowledge than others in their field; an opponent would believe that they got that way via connections and deception. As a result, when an Expert In The Field makes a policy recommendation based on their expertise - e.g. that restaurants should be closed to prevent covid transmission, or coal power plants should be closed down to prevent catastrophic climate change - people react to that recommendation based on their intuitive beliefs about the legitimacy of that person's credentials. What we call right wing "populism", in other words, is a belief that holders of extreme credentials - again, "elites" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their credentials.
There's something to this, but I don't think the word "credentials" is right here. It's power and influence that's the issue, not credentials. Credentials don't of themselves give you any power, the powerful are a tiny subset of the credentialed.
To get power, you obtain some minimum set of credentials and then start aligning yourself with power by demonstrating your willingness to do whatever power asks of you. Once power is assured of your loyalty it will let you into the club. 99% of those with credentials, though, will never get power because they'll never do what it takes to obtain it.
Came here to say something similar — this is a clearer and more succinct way of getting at what I was going to say.
Will add one attempted steelmanning of the moral framework for left and right wing populism:
•"Left wing populism" = Corrupt elites have seized the means of production and are exploiting people. We need to remove them from power and redistribute wealth, since that is the fair thing to do and also ensures that everyone has a chance to succeed.
•"Right wing populism" = Corrupt elites have seized cultural control of society and are repressing our values and way of life while rigging the system in their favor. We need to remove them from power and make sure that [our ethnic/religious/etc identity group] is treated with respect and given the opportunity to compete.
I wanted to chime in on populism; there's a definition of what it is that I found useful.
In this view, populism isn't promising people what they want, or telling them you're the best party for them. Democrats will tell you that Republicans would introduce bans on gay marriage, so if you want gay marriage you should vote Democrat. Republicans will tell you Democrats will raise taxes, so if you want less taxes you should vote Republican. Each of them wants to convince you they're the best party for you.
Populists are different in that they claim they are the only ones representing the people. On this definition, promising everyone free beer isn't populist, but telling them you're the only one who cares for them and all other politicians or parties just are in it for the money (or for the power, or for some sinister goal) definitely is.
Thus, in a way, "We are the 99%" is the ultimate embodiment of populism; regardless of what the movement was and what it wanted, the slogan implies that they and only they represent the people, or at least the real people.
On this count, Erdogan is a populist if he claims that his opponents are all corrupt and he's the only one who really cares for the people; I don't know that much about him, but that's certainly the claim that is used in countries like Russia (and by populist opposition e.g. in Europe). Where a non-populist might consider (or at least call) her opponents less clever than herself, or less able, or misguided, or just representing a different constituency, the populist doesn't have this option. Since the populist is the true representative of the people, she has to assume there actually is "the people"; that it is relatively uniform so that it can be represented by a single party or individual; and that anyone else shows, at best, a total lack of knowledge; more often, great disloyalty. And disloyal people must be the enemy.
This, as far as I understand, worries many people who use the term "populist" in this way. A populist can't just peacefully coexist with others, not in the long term. This doesn't mean populists will go and kill all who dissent; but they will certainly do everything they can to marginalize them. Sounds pretty much like Erdogan, I guess.
Butting in here, but the "sipping cocktails in the hotels" caused me to look up the area, and Google tells me:
"Nişantaşı is an upscale residential area that's popular for its fashion boutiques selling international and prominent local labels. Art nouveau buildings house trendy restaurants serving Turkish and global cuisine."
While Wikipedia says:
"A popular shopping and residential district, it is one of Istanbul's most exclusive neighbourhoods. The area includes fashion shops, department stores, cafés, pubs, restaurants and night clubs. Abdi İpekçi Street, Turkey's most expensive shopping street in terms of lease prices, stretches from the neighbourhoods of Maçka and Teşvikiye to the center of Nişantaşı. ...Nişantaşı today is an elite shopping district and an affluent, secular residential area which is home to many creative types. The quarter forms the background to several novels by Nobel laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who is a local resident. Nişantaşı has the largest community of foreign residents in Istanbul after Taksim and Cihangir."
So the implication is along the lines of "New York values" or the equivalent for every other large city, e.g. in Ireland the idea of Dublin 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_4
Weird that Nişantaşı, Dublin 4, New York, etc. are all known for being connected to global culture or stuff like that. The way that far-rightists call lefties "globalists" suddenly makes a whole lot more sense to me now.
I think I only noticed this explanation for why far-rightists call lefties "globalists" (i.e. because leftism generally involves being connected to global culture instead of local culture, etc) because the author brought Nişantaşı up. (I knew about the phenomenon of the word "globalists" as a derogatory term for a much longer time.)
Also:
> "Globalists" are the enemies of leftists too....
Leftists lionize local cultures too vs global consumerism : for instance I was at a protest this week-end that could certainly be called "leftist", and there was someone carrying a big photograph of (IIRC) a Native South American elder with some wise saying that I forgot what it was about exactly (the carrier might have been a descendant).
OK, at this point, I have to confess that I am now well and truly confused about the meaning of the word "globalist". Congratulations. I think we should take this discussion to an even-numbered open thread at this point because it's veered so far off the original topic (how Erdogan gradually became the quasi-dictator of Turkey).
I hadn't thought about it this way before. I figured "populist" was more-or-less "arguing for policies that *sound* good but are disastrous, but they sound so good you'll get people to go along with them."
There are lots of things like this in a modern complex society. Keeping the world functioning requires spending energy on some non-obvious things and purposefully not eating seed corn.
But I really like your definition. It might be way better than mine.
People definitely do use it to mean that as well, but I think they're using it in two different ways. Although it gets conflated, because people attack "elites-vs-masses" populists by saying their policies are "eating-your-seed-corn" populist.
Thanks for the populism explainer! I feel much less confused now.
(In another top-level comment, jon37 proposed another mental framework for defining "populism" based on the idea of beliefs in the/in the opposite of the Just World Hypothesis. I think this might also be valuable, but this one feels a lot clearer to me.)
As for court packing I’m not sure why you’re concerned about that. If you have 2/3 majority in the legislature just impeach the SCOTUS judges you don’t like on trumped up bribery charges. Or have them die in a convenient accident.
If the Democrats couldn't successfully impeach Trump, there's no way they can do it to a SCOTUS justice. And murdering a political opponent is much further outside of The Way We Do Things than passing a law changing the size of the SCOTUS.
If you're depending on the Army to arrange a coup every so often in order to maintain the vision of the Great Leader from beyond the grave, exactly how democratic a country are you to start off with?
I'm one of those opposed to the EU letting Turkey become a member, because I have grave doubts about what really is under the surface of the "we're a Western liberal democracy, honest!" and this account of the book describes exactly why I'm dubious about that.
However Ataturk dealt with The Problem Of Islamism (or Islamic Extremism) seems to be exactly the wrong way to go about it; he wanted to weaken Islam as a force and drag Turkey into the modern, Western world. To break the power of religion, he tried to crush it. But that's not how it works - persecution strengthens the committed believers. If they know that sending their kid to a religious school is torpedoing their chances in life, but they still do it, then their faith and the values they take out of that is more important to them than worldly success. Ensuring that kids who do attend the religious schools come out the end with their only realistic career option being "the clergy" is creating a stick to beat your own back with - is anyone surprised people on such a track were deeply committed, conservative, and anti-the State?
How you weaken religious influence in society is by honey, not vinegar. Let the parents have their religious schools, we just want to ensure that the same curriculum is taught in all schools. Don't give believers the everyday example of 'the State is crushing us', allow moderate to liberal seminaries (apologies for not using the correct terms) to be established. Don't ban headscarves or hijabs, but if a girl wants to stop wearing a headscarf, we will of course defend her right to make that choice. And so on. Allow the forces of secular society to dissolve the zealousness like pearls in vinegar. The example in the West is the smart kid who goes off to college and falls away from his family background of simple piety. If the smart kids from the boondocks are funnelled into religious schools and not allowed anything else, they will use that ability to defend Islam. If the smart kid from the farm or the small village or the hinterland can go off to college in the Big City to study engineering, there is a much greater chance they will end up secular or at the very least with the liberal version of Islam like liberal Christianity in the West.
I always suspected Erdogan was a strongman, not a centrist/liberal politician, especially in light of the 'conspiracy' that had him cracking down on all his enemies. This review explains why and how he came to that position, but it doesn't convince me that yes indeed the EU should admit Turkey. The underlying system, where the army as guardian of the secular democratic Westernised version of Turkey creates and maintains the very conservative Islamism they are fighting, is not robust enough to pass as a democracy and until Turkey fixes that, I don't want them here.
See Macron vs Erdogan on coranic schools. I'm not certain that abolishing the separation of church and state was the best way to go about it however...
(I would have threatened to close all the mosques if the muslims didn't get their shit together.)
I know I must be the millionth person to ever point this out, but why do you always put commas and periods outside quotes? It's not correct--they go "inside," like "this." (Even when it doesn't "make sense.") I know I can't be the only person to mention this, and I'm new to reading this, but it's bothered me since I started reading a month or two ago. What's the deal?
Perhaps the corrosive effects of attending medical school in the People's Republic of Cork permanently affected Scott's style so that now he writes in the version on this side of the Atlantic? 😁
I'm British, and I was taught to "put them inside the quotation marks." I think this is universal here, because putting them outside looks bizarre and disconcerting to me even though it's clearly more logical in a lot of cases.
Nope, this is non-controversial in American grammar. That you were raised to do something doesn't make it right. There is perhaps an argument that pedantic enforcement of grammar "rules" is silly, but that's distinct from the factual matter that among American grammarians, there is 'correct' usage.
If "American grammarians", as a group, are this prescriptivistic, I think American grammarians have more serious problems than Scott's orthography does. Yet somehow I suspect they aren't really.
I suspect this is due to Scott's philosophical training. Philosophers adhere to the "punctuation outside the quotes" convention. Or more accurately, whether the punctuation is outside or inside depends on whether the punctuation mark is really part of what's being quoted, which in most cases it is not.
Just pulling a philosophy book off my shelf, and picking a random page. (Literally, that's what I just did.) From David Lewis's paper "Desire as Belief II", the second paragraph:
In the first place, Hume's "passions" are sometimes none too passionate. He speaks of some passions as "calm". We would do best to speak of all "passion", calm and otherwise, as "desire".
David Lewis is generally considered a paragon of style in analytic philosophy.
Pulling another book off my shelf and opening it at random, here's the first sentence of Donald Davidson's "Locating Literary Language":
Literature poses a problem for philosophy of language, for it directly challenges any theory of meaning that makes the assertorical or truth-seeking uses of language primary and pretends that other linguistic performances are in some sense "etiolated" or "parasitical".
One more example, pulling Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity off the shelf, and opening to a random page, this time page 57:
But then, suppose we say counterfactually 'suppose Aristotle had never gone into philosophy at all', we need not mean 'suppose a man who studied with Plato, had never gone into philosophy at all', which might seem like a contradiction.
Kripke uses single quotes for some reason, so he is unusual in that regard. But his placement of the commas outside the quotation marks is typical for philosophers.
I might have the wrong kind of philosophy books. But I grabbed three books off my own shelf to see. Two put periods and commas inside the quotes, one puts them outside.
Inside: C.D.C. Reeve's translation of Aristotle's Politics, Hackett, 1998, see pg. 92.
Inside: Alvin Goldman's Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986, see pg. 114.
Outside: A.V. Miller's translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977, see pg. 48.
Correctness standards are a matter of convention and can be changed if people agree to change it. I agree with putting material that is not in the original text outside of the quotation marks. Probably because I'm a computer programmer? It just seems very obvious to me that the convention in this case needs to be changed.
Hah I've always wondered if coding is what taught me this too. I remember as a kid I was very adamant that punctuation go inside quotes (as I was taught), but at some point I began to see the purpose of quotation marks as expressing some kind of literal-ness, and therefore to modify the quoted contents is debasement.
Yeah, I think I'm where you used to be. The regularity with which I've had to edit writing to go against the 'intuitive' placement (that is, the literalness) has made me adamant about it too. Or, for a long time, I used the intuitive convention, only to have to make myself come around to the standard one.
I changed to putting them inside, but for a long time I put them outside (and sometimes, in ambiguous situations, I still do.) Because it's Logical. Also I write a lot of code and no self-respecting computer language would accept commas on the inside of brackets.
I was taught to always put commas and periods inside quotes regardless of whether it makes sense, but that's a stupid rule and shame on the person who invented it.
I see the differences as mathematical *parsing* based ('logical' style, evaluating inside -> out), versus typographical, i.e. *aesthetics* based (that looks just slightly better). Naturally each subculture uses what suits their needs and preferences; there is no One True Style. So I used to let the editors decide; if they want to change, it's their brain cycles...
As a programmer, I greatly prefer a syntax where we can treat the internals of a delimited string like a black box and expect the sentence terminator to come after it. Even if it is non-standard for prose!
"If Stalin wanted your head, he would have his goons cut your head off. If Erdogan wants you dead, he will have a corruption investigator arrest you, bring you to court, charge you with plausible-sounding corruption allegations, give you a trial by jury that seems to observe the proper formalities, and sentence you to death by decapitation. To an outside observer, it will look a lot like how genuine corruption trials work in genuinely democratic nations. You'd have to be really well-informed to spot the irregularities - and the media sources that should be informing you all seem very helpful and educational but are all secretly zombies controlled by Erdogan supporters."
This sounds exactly like Putin, too. (Though I guess Putin will also have his goons poison you, sometimes, but in a plausibly deniable way.)
""Anti corruption campaign" seems to be a code word for "arresting the enemies of people in power", whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China. I'm not sure what to do about it without leaving corruption in place, but, uh, maybe we should leave corruption in place."
On the other hand, Navalny's whole thing is the Anti-Corruption Foundation; he has gained influence against the Russian government by making YouTube documentaries with detailed allegations of corruption by people in power. Possibly "corruption" is just a thing people care about in a nonpartisan way in countries that have a lot of it, and as such it can be used symmetrically by those in power and those outside of it (except to the extent that power makes it easier to do *any* kind of thing)?
>Although these looked good on paper, the end result was to destroy previous Turkish institutions with strong traditions and independent power bases, and replace them with new ones that Erdogan could pack with his supporters.
I'm assuming based on the wording that this is an instance of the recurring 'cultural evolution' framework. If so, it's a good demonstration that the framework *desperately* needs an injection of rigor regarding the time scales - if things that are a century old can either be "strong tradition" or "top-down planning" depending on how you feel like framing things, it's lost all explanatory power along with the predictive.
"The FP was shut down, and Erdogan was personally banned from politics for the crime of "reading an incendiary poem". The Islamists appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France, home of laicite and enforced secularism, which ruled that none of this seemed like a human rights violation to them."
and
"Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, causing him to lose faith in the European conception of liberalism as relevant to his pro-Islam project."
I wish the European conception of liberalism had made a better showing here. It's probably naïve to think that would've prevented this but.
Europeans aren't really liberal. The French ban public religion. The Germans ban Nazis. And pretty much everybody but the Czechs ban effective gun ownership (and even they aren't too good on it). But they really like the process of voting.
I don't know of any country with such an absolutist vision of free speech as the US. They're the outlier, and I don't believe that they get to define what's "really liberal".
As for the "poem", here's an abstract (from Erdogan's wikipedia page): "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
Another poster (search "poem") says that this religious jingoism was combined with more overt hate speech in the same speech "later in the speech, he was calling for the pious to battle the infidel"
> This warrants checking out the affair in more details.
I'm not saying that we should have the same sentences for the sake offences in the West, but it wasn't so far out that the country could be condemned for human rights violations.
"28 March 2018 – 2020 Michael Rakowitz The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist A recreation of a sculpture of a lamassu (a winged bull and protective deity) that stood at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh from 700 B.C. It was destroyed in 2015 by Isis, along with other artefacts in the Mosul Museum. Rakowitz's recreation is made of empty Iraqi date syrup cans, representing the destruction of the country's date industry"
"Heather Phillipson The End A dollop of whipped cream with an assortment of toppings: a cherry, a fly, and a drone. The drone will film passers-by and display them on an attached screen". Uh-huh, yeah that is sure better than stuffy old Neo-Classical art! https://www.galleriesnow.net/shows/heather-phillipson-the-end/
I would rather have the lamassu, but the fact that the artist had to slap on a political message about the destruction of the date industry, instead of simply making a work of art with classical and historical references, because that would be 'popular' instead of 'elite' is, I think, exactly the wrong message to take away from this.
I'm not convinced fourth-plinth style public art is reflective of elite tastes - it's generally fairly gimmicky and silly, and a worse version of the sort of thing that sits in publicly subsidised art galleries. It's more a reflection of some GLA bureaucrat being told their job it to "find art" and going for something that "seems modern" and "has a message." The fairer comparison would be this sort of thing: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/best-artists-to-invest-in?image=5d13ad8771e2a00286ae6f9c vs "the Mona Lisa but with more urns and cherubs."
On reflection, I find your discussion of right-wing populism jarring, mostly because of your apparent defeatism toward/respect for the elites. On the contrary, it seems to me that if a specific elite will entrench itself so solidly in all the levers of power that it can defy democracy and fuck over the will of the majority (leaving entirely aside the ability to propagandize their values etc.), the only moral and democratic thing to do is to become or support a right-wing populist every now and then so that you can drag every last one of these elite members out in the street and shoot them. Nothing seems more important than to defeat and uproot this anti-democratic elite, especially since you've already outlined mechanisms whereby they convince themselves that their insular values represent real moral superiority which should be allowed to reign above democracy.
It seems baffling to me that you and everyone wouldn't agree that the obvious solution to this is to convince the dean of Harvard et al. to abdicate peacefully and become bean farmers while they're replaced by yokels from Nebraska every 20 years or so, on the understanding that the alternative and its consequences will be much, much worse. (Once the wheel has turned enough and the formed deans have been thoroughly yokelized, their distant descendants can once again have a turn at the steering-oar.)
Only if you think democracy is a really super-important value *because* it gives people what they want, or is good in itself. Many people support democracy because they see it as a guarantee of liberalism (either in the rule of law and free speech sense, or the culturally liberal pro gay and feminism, anti harsh criminal punishment sense, don't mean 'liberal' in the sense of 'views of the US Democrat party or anything economic.) I can't speak for Scott, but people who support it for that reason aren't going to be keen on what would inevitably be a super anti-liberal movement (especially on the cultural rather than rule of law reading of "liberal".)
Sure, but those people you speak of aren't in any material way different from Erdogan and his Islamists; they want, to use the phrase herr_mannelig quotes above, to ride the train of democracy to their stop and then get off. They're not actually democrats in any meaningful sense: in fact, they're *enemies* of democracy as soon as they get enough sway.
Elites are elites because they are well-educated, rich, and have lots of connections. It doesn't take a conspiracy to have well-educated, rich, well-connected people rise to the top of things. That's just what's going to happen unless you try really hard to prevent it.
If the dean of Harvard doesn't abdicate peacefully, then you have to use force, and yeah, that's part of why I think all these right-wing populists keep becoming dictators. It doesn't go well! The alternative - having annoying snobs in charge of Harvard all the time - has its disadvantages but beats authoritarianism.
Right, so far I follow you. What I'm saying is, I don't understand *why* you believe that one should not try really hard to prevent it, or why the soft authoritarianism of the elite (which, make no mistake, is plenty authoritarian) is better than the overt authoritarianism of "flaily guy making slightly ludicrous demands", instead of worse. At least most people can automatically peg Trump as kind of a dunkass; one of the terrible dangers of radical-chic elites is that they can be completely insane but yet respected as thought leaders, ideological trailblazers. The Fabian Society, memorably fought by both Orwell and Chesterton from opposite sides of the railing, is an excellent example of this which is perhaps better detached from the conditions of contemporary America so that it can be more dispassionately examined.
(Incidentally, I thought commenter Sa-Matra came off as a real p... as considerably rude and condescending, in disagreeing with you earlier, and I hope I do not come off the same way. If I do, please tell me so, and I'll try to modulate my expression.)
> Elites are elites because they are well-educated, rich, and have lots of connections
Really just the third of those, though.
Being merely "rich" doesn't get you close to the levers of power, unless you're Bezos-level. And being "well educated" certainly doesn't get you anywhere near them; if anything it's a liability to have anything beyond a Bachelor's.
"Well-educated" is where you get a lot of the connections; although scraping through an MA at Harvard makes you better-educated than doing a ground-breaking PhD thesis at Podunk State.
The elites are the brain, the lower classes are the hands. As you go up the systems become more formalized. As you go down the systems become tacit.
The whole left/right/liberal thing papers over these being different forms of cognition with strengths and weaknesses - they never were symmetric. The left conjures up dialectical arguments, the right can just use recognition which is faster. You never hear of a sudden left wing takeover. Communist revolutionary leaders are always from the middle class. Right wing intellectuals are rare. Just three of a list of quirks that are explained by the formal - tacit model.
Here is the problem - that it is possible for all the faction elites to be wrong without the ability to use reverse gear because they are in the formal realm - which is a very tiny space compared to the tacit. Having a problem in the tacit realm is difficult because it's going to be very hard to model or it would exist already in the formal realm. It's also going to be more serious because of where it comes from - if the grass dies off it's bye bye for the rabbits and foxes.
Meta - I'm pretty certain the tech stag hypothesis solutions are in the tacit world because the formal space is not large and they should have been discovered. I think the only important problem for the 21st is what Polanyi called the Tacit Dimension - it looks like Silicon Valley has slammed into a wall without this.
I can allow it - a brief look suggest the whole affair was highly unusual. I salute them both on the grounds of human decency. I don't have deep knowledge here but the factions seem to have acquitted themselves in peculiarly responsible ways. It's hard to imagine any of that going on in the United States without large numbers of people being put to death or experiencing long imprisonment.
My guess is that in the 3 Faction Model the left and right factions happened to coincide perfectly - in the Liu Cixin three body physical model for political events this is like a complete lunar eclipse.
Without knowing the history in any depth we can see what happened as consistent with the tacit/formal model - first the Right moves out of nowhere using its classic recognition power move, then the Left responds separately using Voice. Then the factions calculate and discover probably to everybody's surprise that their interests are the same or balanced on this occasion - what is left out of the historical explanation is probably that there is a silent loser from this arrangement - which is the 3rd faction called Liberalism. I'm certain if they had been stronger in Portugal at the time there would have been widespread violence.
Ancient texts are often more advanced than modern metacognition. There is a misconception with moderns that newer products and services are better because they are newer - this has generally been accurate thanks to the industrial revolutions. The problem with this view is that a basic evolutionary analysis should tell us many of the oldest sociopolitical technologies have to be state of the art for the same reason the nth version of an iPhone isn't a rotary phone.
That doesn't mean old texts ought to be taken literally but you'd be a fool not to read them if you do any meta analysis. One way to interpret this is our core software does not necessarily exist in formalist descriptions - literacy is a modern development - it might reside in other forms of information on another layer - even non-living like architecture - and most information communicated across generations must be implicit or tacit.
These people trying to knock down Chesterton's fence with sexual politics are likely going to meet a bitter end because this has happened before and not one time did it take hold - that western populations have stopped making copies of themselves is an ominous signal.
Something I've lately begun to think of as interesting (post Scott's recent posts on meritocracy) is how there were points in history where it was fairly obvious that the elites had got there because of being more powerful on some level than others (European nobles). But rather than trying to change that situation, another solution tried at the time was the idea of 'noblesse oblige' - that the elites deserved to be on top but that they in turn were obliged to do more to look after the people beneath them. I wonder what modern conceptions of 'live with elites' rather than 'replace elites' strategies might look like?
I think something like that existed in the past in many Western countries—the cultural elites agreeing that ordinary citizens' mores were disgusting, bigoted and stupid, but letting them have their way, cultural conservatism going unchallenged in politics while the elites traded and lived by their own ideas in their own cliques, untouched by the common man. The mid-late Sixties could be read as this consensus collapsing, the students—the new generation of the elite—effectively crying "why *shouldn't* we rule the peasants and tell them to shut up?! We're the ones who know how to make everything great again!".
> The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in...
The comfortable situation, in a well-functioning democracy, has different competing groups of "elites" (massive air quotes from me) constantly engaged in jockeying for the support of the hoi polloi.
The US, like pre-Erdogan Turkey, seems to be trending more towards a situation where everyone with power is coming towards an arrangement where they stop fighting each other and start singing from the same mutually beneficial hymn book. All power lining up together in the service of obtaining more power for power.
Presumably the end result is a party with the elite-supported bits of both sides (e.g. Bloomberg, or the Clegg wing of the Lib Dems), and a hoi poloi-supported party of the bits they like from both sides (which I suspect wouldn't be functional, as it's hard to have a political movement without elites).
Noblesse oblige is a complete non sequitur in a society that abandoned the concept of virtue, and replaced it with an awkward blend of self-depreciation (confusingly called virtue signalling) and raw struggle for status.
Turns out, all those old people lamenting what happened with the moral fabric of society had a point.
I think the actual problem isn't that we've abandoned virtue. Rather, we've abandoned the idea that anyone could be doing thing for virtuous reasons. If you assume people are doing things not out of cynical self interest but because they just think its the right thing to do, you're laughed at and scorned. You're being naive. A fool.
This leads us down a destructive, antisocial path. It leads to a "conflict theory" mindset. Its the thing I like the least about modern discourse, including on this site and its predecessor.
I agree with your conclusion that an Erdogan-style situation in the US is very unlikely, but I'd go even farther and disagree with your points 1 and 3 about how to defend against Erdogan-style maneuvers in the US.
About 1: Turkish courts don't use jury trials, even in criminal cases. A jury of Americans is going to be much harder to convince to unanimously convict someone who has a defense attorney presenting their side of the story in an adversarial setting than a panel of judges responding to a public prosecutor in an inquisitorial trial. Which is not to say that the US never puts innocent people in jail, but it's just not a viable route for a potential dictator to go after wealthy, powerful, or prominent opponents, who can afford adequate representation.
Without the threat of being able to arbitrarily jail opponents, court-packing becomes much less threatening. But also, courts are already the least-democratic branch of the US government, and the danger of making it harder for the more-democratic branches to reform the courts is that it creates pressure which only a populist, strongman dictator type can release. Which leads to my next point...
About 3: Creating a higher burden for changes to the system seems like a good idea, but an overly-rigid system that was too hard to reform was exactly the situation that Erdogan was able to exploit and turn into an excuse for just breaking the system.
Erdogan was part of a "correction" (in the sense of a stock market correction, not of being correct) in Turkish politics, a rebalancing of Kemalism and Islamism that had been building since Ataturk first put his reforms into place. There was a potential energy there - a repressed population - that I don't think exists in the US.
The obvious way to prevent something like that from leading to a dictatorship is simply to work on ways to democratize society in ways that enfranchise currently-disenfranchised populations without the intervention of a populist potential dictator. The nature of this dynamic is that any attempt to suppress the disenfranchised population further only adds to the pressure and makes it more likely that when the "correction" occurs it leads to an Erdogan (or Robespierre, or worse). In other words, if the military had backed off and allowed Islamists to hold office as such, Erdogan not only wouldn't have needed to do his purges - he wouldn't have been able to: there would have been no justification for it, and all the liberals who "sat out" his conflict with the military would have been up in arms against him.
I think the only analogue in the US is the current set of attempts at voter suppression - but as bad as I think that is, it's not clear to me that it would be bad enough to provide cover for a dictator to rise. Certainly the current Democratic attempt to fight back - H.R. 1 - doesn't seem particularly ambitious or threatening. I'm not convinced there's any analogous dynamic or set of forces in the US that a populist dictator could exploit; there's no population in the US that is systematically banned from participation in public life by the structure of the government itself the way that religious Muslims in Turkey were banned from participation in politics (and higher education) in Turkey before Erdogan. But just to be safe, I'd support measures that guarantee access to voting for historically disenfranchised groups in the US.
On a separate topic - Bernie Sanders is a clear example of a left-wing populist. Sanders and Trump were even compared in the 2016 election on the grounds of both being anti-establishment populist leaders in their respective wings. I'm not sure why people might find the idea of a left-wing populist inherently less threatening... maybe it's the mittens.
I agree with your first points, but that does not mean that the US doesn't have its own kind of underrepresented interests and needs that can fuel populists. In fact the way Trumpism has developed seems to me like proof that there is something wrong and building up for quite some time. It may not be obvious for you and I cant just name it too, but this is a warning, that should be taken serious and is worth investigating even if it didn't build up long enough by now to cause a dictator.
I suspect (although in fairness, I can't think of any examples) you could get very creative with who's on the jury and what they see if you've got a complete lock on the judiciary. A lot of these require explicit corruption (not just strong judicial sympathy), but your degrees of freedom are (in order of increasing ludicrousness):
Venue: Republicans could try Democrats in a federal court in West Virginia, Democrats could try Republicans in San Francisco
Jury selection: striking jurors without cause isn't in the Constitution, so you'd just need congress and the courts; if you control the judge, you can strike all the jurors you want with cause and not let the defence strike any. You could also manipulate either the panel (who gets a letter telling them to show up) or the ballot (who gets drawn randomly from the panel)
Disclosure: relies almost entirely on the US Attorney being honest
Evidence: it wouldn't be hard to fabricate really damning evidence (e.g. fake bank statements showing corrupt payments)
Representation: say they've refused to leave their cell for trial (people do this, and it's not unheard of in the UK for the prison to say they've done this when it's not clear that they have), and appoint someone sympathetic or simply incompetent as their public defender. If their real lawyer shows up, say they're not on the court record and there's no way to prove their really the defendant's lawyer.
Dictatorships can come about in any number of ways and the steps will all look different. The common element, as far as I can tell, is an escalation of the culture war to the point where
1. We need to band together and be loyal to each other to the point of excluding anyone who defects from loyalty even if they are making valid critiques. In other words, people and "sides" are seen as either "for us or against us".
2. The other side is seen as so bad that cheating, violating norms, and demonizing rhetoric on your side is seen as justified against their threat.
3. The other side is demonized to the point where they can no longer be worked with, but must be kept from power/restricted from the table entirely and attempt to skirt the system/apply standards of evidence, rules, or interpretation self-servingly in ways that consolidate power to your side or bar it or it's use from the other side are seen as justified.
4. A leader rises who both feeds off of and fans the flames those things; entering into a collusive relationship with his followers of blame, self-righteousness, indignation, and self-victimization.
The tactical maneuvers a dictator makes or the specific obstacles in his way are important in one sense(the more obstacles the better, the more tactful the dictator the more likely they are to succeed), but approaching the problem from that standpoint misses the big picture which is that the rise of a dictatorship is primarily not a political but a MORAL cultural event. The dictator themselves, in some sense, fills a need, a spot, or a hole that a "side" of a culture war creates for themselves of a "champion". Their power comes from their willingness to be a dark mirror of the hate, anger, and repressed conscience towards the other side. The mob fashions the dictator as much as the dictator fashions the mob and they do it by the shared moral collusion of the demonization of the "bad guys".
This book explains what I'm talking about in the context of the Israel-Palestinean conflict, as well as a personal/familial manifestation of the same problem. I'd be super interested to see your thoughts on it at some point.
About Attaturk, a "small" detail is left out: to make the "modern Turkey" a nation-state, he went through a process of power consolidation followed with ethnic cleansing of Armernians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds (perhaps others), some of the first and biggest genocides of the 20th century:
Though it's true that Atatürk's state was reliant on a constructed idea of Turkish identity and continued policies of Turkification, all these happened under the Ottomans, before the Turkish republic was established. In some respects the Ottoman idea of Islamic identity – that had such fatal consequences for Christian minorities – flowed into the Republic-era idea of Turkish identity.
Those attrocities though did not just happen in some distant Ottoman past, e.g. in the 19th century or something.
They happened as part of the turkist nationalist project, in the 10 years immediately preceeding (and following) the establishment of the Turkish republiic and with members of CUP, Kemalists, and so on leading this.
The bigger point is that Ataturk was part of the Young Turks (who were definitely responsible for the genocides), and although he wasn't in their top leadership Kemalism is to some extent an extension of the same project.
There is a good deal of debate as to whether Ataturk was personally responsible, or other leaders did it shortly before he took over and he just benefitted. I do not personally know which theory is correct; Turkey wants to push the latter argument hard, while various anti-Turkish/anti-Kemalist groups push the former.
Well, there is the case of the Dersim rebellion, in which tens of thousands were killed and atrocities were committed (mass executions, rape, pregnant women eviscerated, among others). There are dark spots on his record. Forgng a nation-state out of disparate parts following decades of murderous conflict is going to have its ambiguities.
It occurred to me, and I don't know if it's a damage caused by the time you had with NYT, or you're building a base so you must not be populist, so you're going too far. Populist is a person who stands for nothing, promises abstract concepts, or things we all ought to take for granted, usually ending up destroying them, since those things ought to be taken for granted in an evolved civil society. Freedom of speech, of prosecution, Rule of Law, basically the US constitution, or the one of every EU member state. After four years, you can't ask populist about his achievements, or has he achieved anything of promised, since there's nothing to hold him accountable for. That's a populist, on the left, on the right, in the center. Whether a populist wants it or not, the successful one will end up as a dictator, even if he started in a democracy.
The neutral intended definition of "populist" is basically just someone who claims to be the legitimate representation of the people's will and thereby an opponent of the corrupt elite who currently hold power, live apart from the people and frustrate the people's desires. Of course it is partly just a term of abuse.
It's helpful to look at this story in the context of other countries where there was forced and rapid modernisation. (I'm not sure it has very much relevance to the US, but then I'm not a USian). There were countries where the process was managed well (Japan and Korea for example, where, critically, old traditions and practices largely survived) and other countries (Iran is a good example) where the process was badly handled and eventually rebounded against the originators. Iran is an example of where top-down high-speed development was largely in the hands of urban elites and worked very much against the interests of ordinary people. Egypt and Algeria have followed variants of the same path, and much of the Arab Spring was about the final rejection of the corrupt elites who had forced modernisation and westernisation on Arab countries. (Tunisia, where the movement started, now has a government largely controlled by the Islamists). Turkey is an example, as Iran was, of a society which has an indigenous moral and legal tradition to fall back on when top-down westernisation and modernisation has clearly failed. Political Islam (of which Erdogan is a practitioner, and which also explains why the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt's first free elections) provides an alternative, indigenous and most of all untried model when everything else has failed. It also provides a political framework and ideology around which you can base political parties with mass appeal. So in a way this isn't very surprising.
Two other points about Turkey: history is a factor, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its dismemberment by the western powers is still a bitter memory. I suppose you'd call it making Turkey great again ....The other is national pride: Turkey was a major NATO ally during the Cold War, but its status has slipped a lot since. Not being member of the EU (which doesn't want a border with Syria, thank you) hurts a lot. It's not surprising that Turkey is financing Islamist schools in Europe as part of its soft power strategy.
Another great post. Scott, you wrote, "I want to go into some of this in more depth, because I think this is the main reason why Erdogan's example doesn't generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws."
I am reminded of the anecdote of the German professor who explained to American college students after WW2 that of course German fascism sounded silly to them, because German fascism played on idiosyncratic elements of 1930s German society, culture, and national character - with the professor concluding with the admonition that if fascism came to America, it would be in an idiosyncratically American way.
Similarly, we should probably expect that almost all examples of a decline and fall of a liberal democracy will have many idiosyncratic elements unlikely to apply elsewhere, and we should probably focus on extracting very general, high-level conclusions/principles.
In this case, I suggest that among those principles is this: that when a state uses unvirtuous means to accomplish virtuous ends, the impact of the means on future society is usually much larger than the original ends. We see this in Republican Rome, where the road to Not-Republican Rome is littered with the bodies of populist politicians murdered in public by conservative Senators who thought their ideas were freaky, and which by no coincidence introduced a new form of political argument, Having The Most Thugs With You At The Time Of The Vote. We also see this recently in Egypt, where the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood freaked enough people out that they happily supported a military coup to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, which then of course did not lead to a new election.
What strikes me about the general character of this story of Turkish politics is that it was never all that democratic. The military, much like it does in Thailand, plays a "reserve" role in policing the bounds of acceptable political discourse all throughout this story. The people it's keeping out of the public sphere are people we probably don't approve of, i.e. Islamists, but that's an appeal to virtuous ends. The means by which they were kept from power had the actual effect of, among other things, teaching a young Erdogan (along with presumably millions of other Turks) that obedience to democratic principles was less important than virtuous outcomes.
Lo and behold, it turns out that that's a really uncomfortable principle once the person in the control room has a different definition of what a virtuous outcome looks like.
I understand the argument more like: Don't ever exclude any group or popular opinion from discourse. Always oppose it on a level you would consider fair if you are dealed alike.
1. Scott's discussion of (natural?) elites being able to govern with a naturally soft touch is very Curtis Yarvin-inflected. Is this a response to being featured on Yarvin's Substack?
2. The 2012 "well-rounded" changes to Turkish university admissions--have they been studied as a natural experiment in economics? Did the shift to "well-roundedness" even give less weight to cognitive ability? (Imagine if Turkey had switched from whatever exams the Gulenist cram schools prepped applicants for to the eight-legged essay competition of Imperial China, or a "why BLM is the greatest" essay contest, or an English-language spelling bee, or a simple recitation contest for Koranic verses or digits of pi, the change would be slight: these are all cognitively loaded competitions.)
> Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.
What?! Scott, this strikes me as exactly the wrong lesson to learn. Turkey has an actual, honest to goodness Deep State! They literally invented the term! This isn't a wild conspiracy—everybody *knows* there was one. The reason ideas about the Deep State were floating around, just like ideas about attempted coups were, and the reason they seemed vaguely credible, is because *they were real* and *they are credible*! You are inadvertently suggesting that we should just, like, learn to stop worrying and love the shadowy cabal. No thanks.
About your final point: I think it would benefit from some discussion of heterodox elites and institutions. For example, the Federalist Society was founded by and for elites, and is chock full of them, but it couldn't be more out of step with the Times-Harvard-Beltway consensus. It represents a different strain of legal thinking which the society was founded to foster. It seems to me that one of the ways to protect democracy is to encourage the formation and sustenance of such institutions. Besides forming the individuals who belong to them, these institutions coordinate them, in other words, help them to act. This enables a bulwark against the complete domination of society by a single party or entity. Erdogan's purges look to me like a particularly poignant subversion of this: hollowing out every other institution, until the only thing left is him and his party. It should really, really concern us if seemingly every semi-official institution in our country, from the top schools to the top newspapers to the top thinktanks, march in nearly complete uniformity: it raises the question whether they, and the people in them, can act of their own will at all. It should also concern us when institutions like churches and private schools decline, or are targeted either to be co-opted or marginalized; what, if anything, is replacing them?
One last thing: I haven't read the book, but it looks to me like, before Erdogan took over, political parties were absorbing all the functions which might otherwise have been done by nonpolitical institutions. For example, where are the imams? Why is it that the *only way* for Muslims to resist militant secularism was to win elections? Even attending a religious school was career suicide. It looks to me like this was partly a mess of the military's own making: it made sure these people had no way to live their lives like they wanted without first taking over the country. It rather parallels your explanation of why Erdogan kept seizing more power, and it seems to me like the only stable alternative is a devolution of power.
You don't have to call what Turkey has a 'Deep State', because you can name the actual physical people you're talking about and show evidence of the actual tangible things they did.
I think the admonition here is against using a term like 'Deep State' to refer to a nebulous, faceless, undefined entity that is not directly empirically attached to specific persons and actions that are publicly verifiable.
We can't name the actual physical people we are talking about any more than we can name e.g. the actual physical people who make up the US Congress. There are too many of them, the audience's eyes will glaze over before we get to the end of the list, and really they'll get annoyed and stop reading if we just use cumbersome constructions like "the set of people empowered by the U.S. Constitution to vote on legislation to be presented to the President for his signatures, see footnotes 1-5 for evidence that such a body exists".
For effective communication, we actually do have to use collective terms like "Congress" and "The Deep State".
I will repeat my usual comment that you are making a fundamental mistake by treating the left/right political spectrum as a useful way of orienting oneself in politics-space. Especially your apparently idiosyncratic version of it which considers "right-wing populism" to be a confusing concept rather than a commonplace thing to watch out for! (See also Sa Matra's comment, which is a little harsh, but I think points in roughly the right direction.)
Also, I think you may have drawn the wrong conclusion from the corruption / tax evasion thing? The corruption thing worked in Turkey because corruption was endemic there. That wouldn't work here via the means of corruption trials because the US is a much less corrupt country. The dangerous thing to my mind isn't corruption prosecution; it's selective enforcement, and, in particular, having laws that are so out of sync with reality that selective enforcement is possible -- laws that aren't consistently enforced, so violation can become endemic, but can be used to persecute someone in a pinch. And of course the US does have a big problem with that! So if you were to see the same sort of purge in the US, it wouldn't be effected using corruption laws, but perhaps using some other other laws that have fallen into a similar status.
Yes, the purge component is very important imho, the coup are often not from an external group, it's one branch of the elite becoming ultra dominant, and a common tactic is gaining popular support exposing the vices of the other elites. In short, a purge.... Want to have a US example? Metoo in Hollywood seems to fit the bill very well, even if it does not seems to have (yet?) wide reaching political effects... It's milieu purge, not a state one, but the mechanics are the same...
Do something to watch out for are laws so vague or so extreme that most people break them. When it's mostly elites breaking them it's even better because you get natural public outrage. Corruption fit this, so does puritan sex and substance abuse laws...
I feel like this post is too accepting of Erdoganist framing of Gulen's network of schools as a vast shadowy conspiracy, rather than as what it appears to be - an influential network of private educational institutions. Given that people have already had their lives ruined or ended by Erdogan's persecution, you should be more careful before supporting that persecution.
Kanter's father was fired and imprisoned in Erdogan's purges because of Kanter's support for Gulen, despite said father having publicly disowned him. There's a human cost to Erdogan's actions.
Yeah, it occurred to me that in Scott's description that you could pretty much substitute in the Ivy League for Gulenist schools if you were making the American analogy - 8 of the 9 Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale Law. Credential-mediated consolidation of status and capital into small networks of elites is observed in nearly every society and institution throughout history. I'm not terribly familiar with the specifics of Turkey and Gulenism, but I'd need a pretty high threshold to buy into the conspiratorial thinking around it, particularly given Erdogan's obvious credibility issues.
Has someone coined a Hanlon's-like razor for credentialism? "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by elite capture."
The distinction between Gülenist schools and say Harvard Law is that, Gülenist movement stole the questions and answers of national examinations and leaked it to their students every year. Their judges and prosecutors literally forged evidence, launched bogus investigations and held sham trials. It is a genuinely true conspiracy. The secular Turks hated Gülen long before, when he was an ally to Erdoğan for these reasons. Btw, I'm a liberal Turk and I can say that there is a reason they are universally hated in Turkey.
Now I'm wondering how inevitable is elite capture. Is it possible for there to be two simultaneously competing sets of elites (e.g. Ivy League and a competing group/system)?
There is also a newspaper interview from 1996 (which I can't find at the moment) where he is quoted as saying "Democracy is like a train ride: when you reach your stop, you get off". I believe the phrase is also quoted here: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/02/04/getting-off-the-train
For those who listened, the warning bells were deafening.
"Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better."
Weren't the ideas about Deep States and attempted coups basically true, at least in the case of Turkey?
"When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good""
An obvious solution presents itself in separating art and state.
Can you do that? If you want a new courthouse you have to build it in some sort of style. You want public spaces to have some manner of aesthetic merit, and that involves artists. You need to decide what music shall accompany any ceremonial occasion.
This reminds me a fair bit of Dan Carlin's take on the Brexit vote, a show called "Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger". The thesis of that show boils down to "if you live in a society in which people have the right to vote, and you ignore too many of their needs for too long, they will kill you."
That feels like the sort of dynamic in play here - years of using military coups, exiling their leaders from politics, and stigmatization made the Islamists into a serious "gangrenous finger" that eventually erupted into something worse than it otherwise might have, if not left to fester.
To some degree it seems like it doesn't matter what the specific details of the rift are over, the fact that it was Islamists in this case feels immaterial, and of course the outcome was very different in an absolute sense - Brexit is not exactly the complete breakdown of democracy and the rise of a dictatorship - but it feels like two separate manifestations of a similar underlying mechanism.
It's very odd to me to see (as one very often does) Brexit discussed as a self-evident failure of democracy or plain disaster, as you do here. Isn't it possible that it's merely *legitimate* to not want to be in the EU, even if you might have wanted to be in it yourself? Can one not imagine a majority of a nation sincerely wanting out, and this majority getting what they want *not* being catastrophic, *even if* there is a considerable economic downside?
I think this is a problem of your own perceptions and preconceptions rather than of the political system.
Can one not imagine a majority of a nation wanting to remain in the EU, but some of them voting to get out as an expressive act, and the minority getting what they want *being* catastrophic, *even if* there was a formal electoral majority?
One can indeed imagine this scenario, and many people do seem to be imagining it with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to flotsam. However, it's worth noting that it doesn't actually seem to correspond to reality at all. But more crucially, being able to imagine this counterfactual doesn't go the shortest bit of the way toward answering my question, which is about why the disaster-interpretation is so frequently *assumed*, as though it were obviously true, as though nothing else could possibly be hypothesized.
My explanation is that any drastic change has the potential to be disastrous.
I will say that after the results of all the covid precautions turned out not to be so disastrous, I've softened up quite a bit on doing drastic things like pulling out of the EU.
I'll admit that I'm stumped here. Once again, your comment does not actually appear to respond to anything I wrote. Your explanation for what? For why people constantly assume the disaster-interpretation is possibly true? Are you arguing that the reason people speak as though blinded to any other possibility than Brexit being disastrous is that any drastic change has the *potential* to be disastrous? I.e., because Brexit could conceivably be disastrous, therefore many people are insistent on not even considering other possible outcomes?
If that's the case, one of us has a serious problem with logic, because that looks like an obvious non-sequitur to me. Not just a fallacy, but a fully incoherent argument. A does not appear to lead or point to B in any way in this syllogism.
Also, even if I'm the one in the wrong here, and your reasoning makes perfect sense, it still doesn't appear to justify or elucidate why you posed the scenario in your *previous* post in any way. Something is very wrong here. I feel like one of us must be on acid or the like.
I think this was a direct response. You asked why the disaster interpretation is frequently assumed. I answered by saying that *any* drastic sudden change seems like a potential disaster - it's why I don't support immediately firing all health insurance employees and switching to Medicare immediately, and why I don't support immediately opening the borders, and why I don't support anything else sudden and drastic like that.
However, as I said, the year of covid made it clear to me that drastic sudden changes might *not* be disastrous, so that something like Brexit or Medicare-for-all could turn out to be fine and shouldn't just be so immediately ruled out of my thoughts.
Not to mention we've already seen a positive outcome of Brexit for the UK in the clearly better vaccination program when compared to the EU. I never particularly picked a side in the Brexit issue, I mainly just thought the UK was economically hobbling itself for nationalistic reasons. But that's certainly their choice, and the Brexiteers have already been somewhat vindicated in that choice. Localized decision making can often provide better results when needing to coordinate an emergency response.
"I mainly just thought the UK was economically hobbling itself for nationalistic reasons. But that's certainly their choice"—precisely. One cannot in a democratic system say that economic concerns are *per definition* more important than whatever cultural ones people might actually care more about, and that democracy has failed of those people actually get what they want. Whether you or I or Retsam agree with the evaluation seems to me to be obviously irrelevant compared to what the majority of people prefer—even if one of us happens to be the Prime Minister (which I trust that we do not).
If you consider democracy to have intrinsic value, then *per definitionem* it's always a good thing if the majority get the policy it wants, and it makes no sense to discuss if a democratic outcome is a failure.
Some of us, instead, support democracy because it leads to relatively better outcomes than dictatorship (by metrics other than "what the majority wants"). Then it makes sense to discuss whether a particular democratic outcome is a disaster.
We've also seen all the "catastrophic" Brexit predictions already fail. I seem to recall a lot of predictions of famines and shortages when Brexit kicked in, but that happened a couple of months ago and I haven't heard anything about it since.
In the end, Brexit will wind up like any other controversial Government project -- less good than its supporters predicted, and less bad than its opponents predicted. There will be upsides and downsides.
It's true that there were some people saying there would be very serious immediate impacts of Brexit and that this didn't really happen. (I even made modest stockpiles of long-lasting food just in case.)
But significant reductions in quality of life over the next decade compared to what they would have been have certainly not been refuted. (Unfortunately we probably won't see it in the statistics because Brexit wasn't the biggest problem the UK faced in 2020/2021...)
It's pretty questionable whether "significant reductions in quality of life over the next decade, compared to a hypothetical that I made up" is even a meaningful category of drawback. I think it's pretty inarguable that the modal Brexit voter won't slot this in the category of "disaster", though. (I've also personally seen less rhetoric about reductions than about a *slowing of the rate of increase* of QoL, even less disastrous, but I won't pretend to have full overview of available doomsaying.)
"a hypothetical that I made up" is a pretty uncharitable way of putting it. Economists do make forecasts of economic growth among other things, and their forecasts in the event of Leave were worse than their forecasts in the event of Remain. (There's more to life than economic growth but it is pretty important.)
You never know for sure whether a conditional forecast whose conditions weren't met was correct or not, but you can do a lot better than nothing, for example seeing whether trends changed around 2020, or trying to tell if the UK outperformed or underperformed against countries that remained in the EU.
As for where the "modal Brexit voter" slots things, they'd probably be right to avoid the word "disaster" because it's a very emotive word whose meanings mean different things to different people. One should instead talk about whether things are measurably better or worse than they would otherwise have been.
I'm more "concerned" about longer-term issues : how is the UK going to deal with the now likely split of Scotland from the Kingdom ? (Especially if Scotland applies to be back in the EU.) Especially about the offshore oil... and I think that there's a nuclear submarine base there ?
Is the vaccination programme an "outcome of Brexit" or just "something that happened after Brexit"? I might be missing something, but I don't see any clear logic that not being in the EU made it easier for the UK to have a good vaccination programme.
I think the assumption is that if the UK had been an EU member, it would most likely have done what most other EU members ended up doing: purchased vaccines through the EU, waited for the EMA to approve vaccines and so on – in which case its vaccine rollout would presumably have been considerably slower (say at 12% like Germany instead of the current 41%).
It strikes me as remarkable that the EU has performed worse on a per-capita basis than Europe as a whole on such an important issue. I wonder what the political repercussions will be.
I suppose this could be viewed as a positive outcome, but I have read that the reason for the lower levels of vaccination in Europe is due to demands for resource equity in terms of vaccine distribution to member states. Germany (like the UK) could have used its superior wealth to procure a far greater amount of vaccines but (I think VdL said) such a move would undermine the essential spirit of cooperation in the EU. The newly independent UK no longer has to spare a thought for the poorer partners in the EU so was in a position to enact a national resource protectionism by (unofficially) demanding that AZ renege on non-UK contracts. Whether the European concerns surrounding AZ vaccine clot causing side-effects are the EU's way of punishing AZ is another matter.
All the EU countries, including the poorer ones, could have used their wealth to acquire more vaccines, whether together or by nation. The EU pays something like €2 for the AstraZeneca vaccine, and maybe €15 for the more expensive ones, per dose. That's pocket change even for the poorer EU members, especially compared to the economic cost of the slow vaccine rollout and longer lockdowns. The EU's approach of nickeling-and-diming is massively stupid.
On the one hand, yes, I acknowledge my views on Brexit are almost entirely reflective of the opinions I've been exposed to and not one that I've particularly formed myself, I'm not really qualified.
But I do think "it's not a disaster because the majority wanted it" is probably not a great argument in light of the incredible narrowness of the vote (51.89% is a majority, but only just barely). An outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry, and causes considerable economic upheaval seems fairly fair to call a disaster, even if you agree with the 52%.
To Scott's point about "it's probably a good thing that the Constitution is relatively hard to change", leaving the EU is probably not something that should have been done on a simple majority vote.
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Tangentially, though I do largely agree that people (especially non-Brits) are very quick to just assume "leaving EU must be bad", I kind of feel that people take sort of an "end of history" viewpoint where they assume that unification is *necessarily* a good thing and division is *necessarily* a bad thing, which seems to be driven more by preconceptions about what the "correct trajectory for human society" is.
But even with sympathy towards that general position, I still don't know that I could stretch to call Brexit, as it actually happened, a good thing.
Let me say first that your position here reads as much more nuanced and as such more understandable to me. However, your argument seems to me to be orthogonal to my original concern—I don't mean to accuse you of moving goalposts, I think this is a simple misunderstanding (my fault, no doubt).
What really surprised me was that you appeared to *take it for granted* that Brexit was a disaster, something that did not in fact need defending or explaining. In this instance you motivate why it might be fair to call it a disaster; in your previous post you just assumed nobody would even argue. This is far from the first time I've seen this, but I always find it startling. This is really my key point: that is a dangerous way to proceed, lazy thinking at best. By such shortcuts, you effectively block yourself off from understanding the other side.
Nevertheless, I am prepared to engage with your specifics also:
"An outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry, and causes considerable economic upheaval seems fairly fair to call a disaster, even if you agree with the 52%."
I don't understand how. Do you actually believe in democracy? If the level of anger of the losing side is a pertinent factor, should abortion be illegal in America? Should even an abortion advocate regard Roe v. Wade as a disaster? If Trump lost by a small margin, should Biden be kept out of office (or indeed, vice versa: Hillary for Trump, Trump for Biden)? I don't register either of those as disastrous, but your principle suggests otherwise.
I'll put my own cards on the table for the avoidance of doubt: I believe in democracy the way Socrates believed in democracy, who drank hemlock because people voted for it. The system itself is far more important than any given outcome of the system being dangerous or obviously foolish to any given observer. You have to absolutely hold the process more sacred than any of your own values, otherwise the system will always tend toward its own destruction, and dissolution into one of these Turkish-style dictatorships.
"[L]eaving the EU is probably not something that should have been done on a simple majority vote."
I think it's key to recognize in this context that the UK never *joined* the EU in the first place. They joined a much, much more lightweight trade union which metamorphosized (many EU skeptics would no doubt say metastasized) into the EU. That metamorphosis was basically enabled by the entrenched elites of the UK nodding along with various things which the populace, as far as anyone can judge, never really approved of. As such, it seems to me—a value judgment, admittedly—that even a simple majority vote to leave has much more moral force than inertia. You might have had a point if the people had voted to join the EU such as it currently is in the first place, but even then, surely *that* vote would have had to be held to the higher standard you espouse to be legitimate, as well? We can assume that in that case the UK would never have joined, the result of the Brexit vote being what it was.
> They joined a much, much more lightweight trade union which metamorphosized (many EU skeptics would no doubt say metastasized) into the EU.
The EU constitution was actually an attempt to fix this poor democratic legitimacy of the new course of the EU, but this backfired when several countries held a referendum that rejected the constitution.
Of course, the rules in the constitution were then just passed as regular treaties, without referendums and with a simple majority vote.
"I don't understand how. Do you actually believe in democracy? If the level of anger of the losing side is a pertinent factor, should abortion be illegal in America? Should even an abortion advocate regard Roe v. Wade as a disaster? If Trump lost by a small margin, should Biden be kept out of office (or indeed, vice versa: Hillary for Trump, Trump for Biden)? I don't register either of those as disastrous, but your principle suggests otherwise."
Are you you saying you don't view the last election as somewhat disastrous? Surely the outcome in which angry protesters storm the capital is not considered a good outcome. I believe in Democracy, but the last election is not exactly what I'd hold up as a shining example of Democracy's finest hour.
Maybe it was an unavoidable disaster - I'm not saying the incumbent should get a "status quo advantage" or anything like that, but I do think the combination of "a narrow margin of victory and bitter anger on both sides" is evidence of our system not working very well, and we should be looking for how to fix it. (I mean, "the two party system isn't producing optimal outcomes" is hardly a deep cut critique of the American system)
But, while presidential elections shouldn't have a bias towards status quo: that's a very normal thing for democracies to do. Surely you aren't suggesting that it's undemocratic to require a 2/3rds vote to make a major upending of the status quo - it's common all throughout the American system and elsewhere.
You can argue that it's not *really* a major upending of the status quo. I'm not really confident enough to firmly dispute that, but it sure seems like one to me.
"Are you you saying you don't view the last election as somewhat disastrous?" Pretty much, yeah. I wouldn't register that as higher than "a bit hinky". Nobody was assassinated, there were no *attempted* assassinations, nobody even got brutally assaulted with a cane on the Senate floor. The attempted coup, if indeed it could be called that, was feeble, feckless, and dissolved into directionless milling about almost at once; I came off with the distinct impression of a dog unexpectedly catching its tail when chasing it. It seemed like nobody had expected to actually get into Congress and they were hoping to smash themselves with heroic futility against a wall of riot cops for some reason. And that wasn't even part of the election itself, which saw no more disruption than a few placid recounts. None of it even reached my threshold for disorderly, let alone catastrophic.
"I do think the combination of "a narrow margin of victory and bitter anger on both sides" is evidence of our system not working very well, and we should be looking for how to fix it."
I guess that's fair enough, but I respectfully disagree. I think it's evidence of the American public itself becoming electorally divided, which isn't the system's fault and isn't something you can devise a system to prevent—or, rather, you can, but it isn't *desirable* to create a system which suppresses that type of deep-seated ideological disagreement, because it necessarily has to be very repressive of at least one of the ideologies, which is bad. (I think there's a framework in which one can see the Civil War and subsequent political order as doing just that, and that the present division in America is just the chickens coming home to roost over the fact that the North wouldn't allow the Union to split last time, when the "correct" solution would have been to realize that differences were irreconcilable and accept the division of the nation.)
"Surely you aren't suggesting that it's undemocratic to require a 2/3rds vote to make a major upending of the status quo"
Yes I am. The various arguments in favor of such safeguards are all undemocratic, often explicitly undemocratic in defense of some other principle of governance considered crucial, vide the frequent if normally disingenuous refrain "we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic!". But in particular, I'm arguing in this instance of Brexit that the status quo of "being in the EU" was sneaked up on the electorate by degrees in such a way that they never had a chance to adopt it by 2/3 majority in the first place, so how could 2/3 majority reasonably be required to abolish it? That sort of thing only incentivizes minority-viewpoint elites to subvert the mechanisms of representativity in order to be able to thwart the actual popular will. This is a sort of idea which I feel like I only ever see applied selectively, in defense of specific policies which the writer/speaker likes but knows that the general public don't like.
"outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry"
I think you overestimate the passion of the folk. There were some very angry Remainers out there, but lots of people were lukewarm about the EU membership even if they voted Remain for pragmatic reason. 48 per cent of genuinely mad people would have looked a lot different.
But haven't they had fair elections in Turkey throughout the Erdogen era? And if Turkey happens to be a democracy with a super-powerful executive, why should that be considered inherently wrong?
The inherent wrongness with Erdogan is not winning elections with a large majority, it's everything else horrible that he's done. He's thrown tens of thousands of political opponents in jail, committed ethnic cleansing against minority groups, persecuted academics and journalists, curtailed free speech, committed war crimes in Syria, attacked gay rights, and many other issues.
It seems like that's a good outline for a majority-resistant constitution. In general, there are things majoritarian systems tend to safeguard poorly (ensuring minority rights, or forbidding the use of state power to suppress opposition). You may want some of those protections and ideals enshrined somewhere, along with a powerful body to enforce it. Just have to generalize all those bad acts enough that people can see the wisdom of banning them in some way.
But I guess if Erdogan hollowed out the judiciary too... it's hard to enforce any checks and balances anyway. And every leader invokes "exigency" when systems are inflexible.
I don't know what the best system is for ensuring majority rule while also protecting minority concerns, but I respect the authors of the Federalist Papers for having thought so much about all of these issues. Their foresight into the real practical problems of a mode of governance they didn't yet live under was pretty uncanny.
Well . . . he's the popularly elected leader of the country. It would probably be more accurate to say that "Turkey" did all those things. People tend to forget that "democracy" is a process for making decisions, not a set of liberal policies.
If Turks don't want gays to have rights is Erdogan supposed to go against the will of his people? Is it "undemocratic" for him to do what they want?
In America "Democracy" is virtually a religion. This creates cognitive dissonance whenever the people choose some politically incorrect outcome. "Democracy" therefore has to be redefined as "the will of the people, as long as they choose correctly (as defined by the ruling technocratic elite 'experts')."
Sure, attacks of Erdogan, or any other leader, are going to be at risk of the Great Man theory history. Perhaps of Erdogan had never existed, a similar person would have made all the same decisions. However, Erdogan is still personally morally culpable for those decisions, since he made them. A Hitler-equivalent would probably have done many of the same decisions as Hitler, but Hitler was still horribly evil.
Also, I don't know enough about Turkish politics to really say whether the elections have been fair elections, but certainly many other dictators throughout history have manipulated the polling so that they get elected even when the majority of the population is against them.
But after 1933, Hitler really was a dictator who didn't have to face an election. It's hard to believe Germans would have elected a guy running on a "let's invade Russia, fight a world war on two fronts, and kill all the Jews" platform. But you never know.
In any event, the danger with an "elected strongman" system is that the strongman is so strong that he just cancels the next election and no one can do anything about it.
I agree on some counts: attacking gay rights or committing war crimes in Syria are not anti-democratic (except under some expanded definitions of democracy that I don't find useful). However, jailing political opponents (so that the opposition parties can't retain talented politicians), or curtailing free press to such an extent that opposition parties have drastically less opportunity to convince the electorate than the governing party, can make a system non-democratic, even if the votes are fairly counted.
And that's assuming that the votes are actually fairly counted. There seem to have been allegations of ballot stuffing, though the election results are not grossly out of line with the opinion polls.
Fair elections seems generous to me. To take one example, Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated the AKP candidate to become Istanbul mayor in 2019. Erdoğan's government demanded a recount, and then declared his election invalid and removed him from office. Another election was held, which he won by a much wider margin.
This post demonstrates my exact concerns with your "A Modest Proposal for Republicans"[0] - it's a roadmap for building basically Erdogan's party. Obviously there's a bunch of other things mixed in there, since Erdogan hasn't set up prediction markets, but the thrust is basically the same. (I haven't read the book, and I'm not that caught up on Turkish politics, so this is basically based on this review.) His hollowing-out of the existing political system is *exactly* what you'd get from the "War On Experts" point, since whoever takes over with the power to replace the institutions is going to want to replace them in their image, not with prediction markets. The "War On College" is basically what Erdogan did with the Gulen schools and some of his other reforms, particularly around scientists and professors. The "War On The Upper-Class Media" would result in the lowering of the freedom of the press, and if you think that it would only allow the lower-class media to exist while continuing to allow the upper-class media to exist, you're kidding yourself. And as for the "War On Wokeness," that's Erdogan's repudiation of EU liberalness and his assaults on groups like the Kurds, the Yazidis, and other minorities.
Sorry if this post was getting too close to modern politics, but I feel like ignoring this is dangerous.
Side note, my autocorrect wants to replace Erdogan with Underdog. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
My point wasn't that right-wing populism is good, my point was that if right-wing populism is based on opposition to classism, you can just have actual opposition to classism, and maybe even effectively fight classism, instead of pursuing the vague generic right-wing populist package.
Or a bunch of right-wing populists claim they're going to fight classism and use it to hollow out the institutions that support democracy like Erdogan did.
My point was that if a party based their message on those things, the result isn't going to be good, and it's going to be worse than the current Republican party. The core of your proposed platform is a bunch of wars against the existing system, and that's going to lead to dictators, even if you think the existing systems aren't great. Turkey's systems pre-Erdogan certainly weren't great, but they were better than his new replacements.
And well, you can say that you don't actually support this proposed party, you just think it would make American politics interesting or better, but I'd be pretty worried if Scott-of-Turkey-in-the-90s made an equivalent post about Erdogan's platform.
"The core of your proposed platform is a bunch of wars against the existing system, and that's going to lead to dictators . . ."
That's quite the false dichotomy -- "status quo or dictatorship." Of course you can reform a system democratically. In fact, that's what Democracy is supposed to be for.
I don't think gbear is arguing that status quo or dictatorship is inevitable, just that the specific changes Scott proposed moved things more in the dictatorship direction.
If you frame your reforms around "wars" against certain things you dislike, that's not exactly encouraging democracy. The "war against drugs" has been essentially unilateral, and real wars don't usually involve the opposing country voting on it. The platform laid out in that post is much more antagonistic and conflict-theory based than is healthy for a political platform that is going to wind up with reasonable reform.
Huh, I really like Scott's modest proposal post. (It could make me republican... I'm an independent, former democrat.) I also read the 'stop calling wolf' post for the first time. Great stuff! I've been totally feed up with the 'all trump voters are racist' for years. (Oh I live in Trump country, so 'all these racists' are my friends and neighbors. I often think we need some definition of 'racist', that we can agree on.)
I definitely don’t think that all Trump voters are racist. I’m not a fan of his at all, but you definitely can be without being racist, at least for some definitions of “racist.” But similarly, a person could vote for Erdogan without hating the Kurds (or the free press, or any of the other groups or things that he has suppressed), but that vote indirectly caused those things to be attacked. Trump caused a lot less harm than Erdogan in my opinion, and some would even say that he helped the country, but part of that was ineffectiveness or being restrained by the American system in ways that Erdogan wasn’t.
My problem with the modest Republican post is that the party that it advocates for is one that tears down the system when it gets in the way. Getting rid of experts means that we’re left with a system where the political leader just makes all the decisions. This post shows how bad that would be.
The problem is anyone can find an "expert" to say what he wants said. I have to cringe every time a journalist writes "According to Experts . . ." and then cites some guy at a university who coincidentally holds the same opinion as the journalist.
One thing you didn't mention was that in 2017, Erdogan changed the constitution, abolishing the post of prime minister (the leader of the majority party in the legislature and answerable to the legislature) and adopted an American-style elected presidency instead, the better to consolidate and exercise his power.
If you're drawing lessons to learn for America, this might be one.
What a phenomenal section on right wing populism. This is exactly how the right wing government in India is targeting the elites, for instance.
I do believe that the left-wing elite rising naturally to the top is a very Western hemisphere phenomenon, however. The intellectual and cultural elite in India seems to be uniformly distributed amongst the Right and Left, for instance.
Even more specifically : a USA phenomenon ? (Note that in Europe, Democrats would probably be considered a centrist or maybe even a right-wing party - you see expressions like "rightist ultraliberals" coming from leftists for instance...)
Art is a great example where left-wing populism is following the same pattern you describe for right-wing populists. Look up Soviet Realism and compare it to art in Germany 1933-45. Both have the principle that the art is "to be comprehensible to the average man".
Have you read Paul Hoover's "Poems We Can Understand?"
I think it's kind of funny, but if I read too much postmodern poetry in a row, I tend to get sympathetic to the more literal reading.
Being completely adrift is fun in doses.
Though weirdly nobody has demanded rock lyrics make any kind of sense since maybe the Beatles, so I guess the masses and me are a little inconsistent on this one.
As someone fairly familiar with Turkey: You'll get roughly the right cultural context of sipping drinks Nişantaşı hotels if you think of Georgetown Cocktail Parties. It's a trendy wealthy neighborhood with all kinds of elite clubs/restaurants/etc.
It has the added bonus that sipping cocktails in a bar is European and foreign. A salt of the Earth Turk would drink in a cafe or lounge, probably beer or watered down raki or some other spirit. Probably while drinking tea and smoking and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Turkey's drinking culture (which is a real thing that exists) most closely resembles that of Eastern Europe.
Think of it a bit like the good old boy at the bar sipping a Budweiser vs the smartly dressed man at the hotel bar sipping an expensive cocktail. Even for people who don't mind drink, there's a strong culture and class divide. (By the way, raki turns milky white when you mix it with water. There's an old joke that you can still go to heaven if you only drink raki: God will think it's milk.)
More broadly, I see warnings against "right wing populism" coming from two sources. Firstly, the media and academic elites are increasingly leftist and so feel more threatened by the right. Secondly, left wing populism is simply not succeeding right now. Is Sanders more influential than Trump? Personally I think this is due to political demographics. Populism appeals mostly to the lower classes. These people are traditionally in the left wing voter base. So left wing populism simply pulls the existing left wing coalition further left while right wing population causes defections of formerly left voters to the right and creates a huge coalition.
Also I know a fair bit about Turkey. And the right wing populist governments in eastern Europe that I see as part of a broader movement in the region. (Sorry EU, Turkey counts as part of "the region.") AMA.
I sometimes bucket the US and Turkey together as each having politics shaped by an extreme urban-rural divide. Is that fair, or too reductive? Any key differences that might gloss over?
And, half joking, but would Istanbul secede from Turkey if it meant it could join the EU?
In addition to the urban/rural divide, there's the planned urban / slum divide inside urban areas. Also some regions of the country having more of a certain ethnicity or religion than others, in big urban centers some neighborhoods also having similar ethnicity/religion divides. Some of them USA also has, but some of them I think are unique to Turkey. There're also USA specific stuff that doesn't apply to Turkey.
The divide isn't really urban-rural. Istanbul has voted right wing in every election since 1990 with one exception. And not all those rural peasants in Erdogan's coalition are Islamists: a fair number were former Communist strongholds. Erdrogan has effectively welded a super-coalition of the former supporters of the Communists, non-Kemalist Social Democrats, Islamists, moderate business parties, and non-Kemalist nationalists. This means it's basically southern/western coastal Turkey and European Turkey, the old Kemalist strongholds, vs everyone else. With the Kurds in the southwest as a third party who have somewhat managed to build a genuine pan-minority party. They hate both sides.
The asterisk next to democratic is key here. Ataturk's Turkey had a contradiction at its core. It was based on a liberal order that was committed to illiberal means to stay in power. And not just in the sense of keeping free and fair elections. Certain policy prescriptions and political tenets were also sacrosanct. These ideas were popular among certain classes and populations but those populations were a minority, not a majority, and a privileged minority at that. I'd say the divide was less urban-rural and more apartments vs slums or suburbs vs farms.
Imagine if the American Democrats had set up a government and every American institution and every major industry such that anyone to the left of (say) Klobuchar or the right of (say) Romney would never reach a position of importance. If they did, they'd get a nice note saying to step down or face a coup. Then combine this with outright discrimination against people who didn't toe the line enough. These people then go to the European Union, which is supposed to be the gold standard for liberal democracy, and the EU basically says, "Yes, the government is harming you, but you're the majority so it's not structural discrimination." (That's not me interpolating American politics. That was key to the ruling.) Mix in a huge dollup of corruption and that's Turkish democracy pre-Erdogan.
It's not that Turkey was a dictatorship. Far from it. People didn't disappear in the night and elections were largely fair. Or as fair as they can be with the regular threat of coups. But you might expect everyone who isn't left to center left to moderate center right would feel pretty upset at this state of affairs. Erdogan rose to power on promises of competence, being free of corruption, to be moderate, and to give concessions to the other outsiders. More importantly, his promise to dismantle the Kemalist deep state (again, not drawing that term from American politics) was credible. Because he would have to in order to survive. So anyone who wanted to see that happen either sat on the sidelines or supported him even if they disagreed with his politics. (Also, there were no trusted neutral gatekeepers. They were all considered subverted, even among the people farther to the left.)
As for Istanbul seceding: Probably not. Maybe some specific neighborhoods would. But overall the city is in Erdogan's coalition.
Sorry, I'm not as familiar with municipal politics. (Which is what I assume you're talking about, since Erdogan won Istanbul in 2018.) Mind giving some reading links?
I don't have any English sources from the top of my head, but the short version is that for the first time in 20 years the opposition became immune to Erdoğan's divide and rule tactics (in the opposition there's a Turkish nationalist group and a Kurdish nationalist group and when Erdoğan plays them against each other one of the two votes for Erdoğan or at least boycotts the election) for a variety of reasons, the primary being main opposition party's awakening to this empasse and spending their effort not to oppose but to broker between those groups.
It may seem like a small deal being a municipality, but the municipality of İstanbul is actually one of the biggest economic entities of Turkey. Through corruption, many groups close to Erdoğan were being fed. Ever since the municipality changed hands, a handful of TV channels and newspapers cheering Erdoğan went bankrupt.
The downside of a dictatorship of this kind is, it's economically not sustainable. Erdoğan needs to feed all the media to cheer for him, it's like a huge party-state-corruption-industrial complex and there's not much left to loot so he's able to keep less of his allies loyal.
Turkish is fine. I'm by no means fluent but I've picked up a bit. I'm not Turkish (either nationally or ethnically) but I've been dealing with Turkey for the better part of a decade so I'm at least smarter than the average bear.
Yeah, Istanbul municipals are very important. And Erdogan's been having economic issues lately. We'll see what happens in 2024. Three years is a long time to recover and you'll need more than Istanbul to break that big coalition. Still, I'm pretty sure a lot of people who were on board for breaking the status quo aren't on board for the AKP becoming the new status quo for a century like the Kemalists had.
Back in 2013, I tried to come up with an analogy to explain Turkish political history since the Young Turks to Americans, but it wound up sounding crazy:
It’s extraordinarily difficult to come up with an analogy to American history that would shed some light on Turkish politics since the beginning of the 20th century.
All right, try this: Imagine that in 1908 the most advanced thinkers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greenwich Village take over the US Army. They eventually move the capital to Omaha and rename the country the Midwestern Republic. Yet the four times the country elects somebody a little more Christian than a Unitarian Universalist, the Army stages a coup.
Finally, the Midwesterners stare down the Army. To rub in their long-thwarted dominance, the Midwestern Christian Party then orders all the bars in New York City to close at 10PM, driving New Yorkers into Times Square to protest.
As with all analogies some stuff is missing but good stuff. 1960 coup was because the prime minister at the time attempted to collect judiciary powers as well, uniting all 3 powers under himself. 1980 coup was to prevent a civil war because right wing and left wing militias were routinely having firefights on the street (which was also in line with the US policy of a "green belt", so while some rightists and nearly all leftist ended up in prison, Islamists were more or less free to roam). One of the memorandum was because the parliament was not electing a president, one when the labor movement was becoming powerful, and only the 1997 memorandum and the ignored 2007 e-memorandum that was against the Islamists. So not simple as 4 times the country elects a Christian the army stages a coup.
Yeah, I didn't even want to get into the whole thing about Ataturk's weirdness. To extend your metaphor: imagine that the US lost World War 2 and was under German occupation. A liberal officer gets assigned to dismantle gets sent out east to force some old American units to disband. But the units are full of god, guns and country Republicans who are on the point of mutiny. They're rather run to the hills and fight than give up.
The officer sides with them and starts a rebellion. He even gets the Evangelical Communion to declare it a holy war. They're assisted by religious and nationalist militias. Oh, also they're getting guns from the Soviet Union (China, I guess?) for reasons.
They win the war. The liberal officer then declares a republic, dissolves most religious organizations, kicks them out of government, and declares an aggressively secular, left wing republic.
Oh, and as an added bonus, this whole thing kind of creates a sovereign Canada on accident.
One of the problems is that the "Populism" label gets a very peculiar definition in this country. For example, the left is founded largely on appealing to two groups that are predominantly lower income and non-college educated: i.e., Blacks and Hispanics. Yet, "populism" is somehow defined as whatever appeals to non-college white voters. And these voters are uniformly considered to be dangerous and suspect by the white elites.
It's a very peculiar dynamic, really. Is there any other country where the elites of one race are in coalition with the other races, to keep down the lower income members of the elite's own race?
> It's a very peculiar dynamic, really. Is there any other country where the elites of one race are in coalition with the other races, to keep down the lower income members of the elite's own race?
There are many examples from colonial history where the native elites come to an agreement with the colonising outsiders that winds up beneficial for everyone except the native non-elites.
Many Western European countries with a newly imported ethnic underclass have something similar going on, with low-status anti-immigration political parties rising up as a new opposition against the established powers. Off the top of my head some examples are Perussuomalaiset in Finland, Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden, Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, UKIP in the UK, FPÖ in Austria & Front National in France.
But I wouldn't consider it as a coalition between the elite and the ethnic underclass. I think the ethnic underclass doesn't have much political power and it's just that the elites for whatever reason like to see themselves as their protectors, same as with certain other groups that have become culturally and politically relevant during the last few decades. If there is a target market for that type of politics, I think it's not so much the ethnic underclass itself as those parts of the middle class that also aspire to being their protectors.
Trump actually did get more support from non-white voters than most prior post-war Republican candidates (GWB in 2004 being an exception someone here pointed out to me), even as he lost while many of them won.
My impression is that Turkey varies dramatically in culture from west to east (although there has been much migration from inland Anatolia to Istanbul). For example, Mustafa Kemal came from Salonika, which was so far west in Europe that it's now part of Greece. Erdogan's parents came from the Rize Province in eastern Anatolia.
I visited Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera, a Santa Barbara-like upscale beach town that was Herodotus's hometown when it was named Hallicarnasus, and is now 3 miles from the Greek Island of Kos. The women dressed like Mrs. Kennedy in 1962: restrained but chic. I saw very few hijabs.
Istanbul is more of a mix due to the city being a huge economic magnet for Anatolian peasants.
My impression isn't east to west. It's basically who benefited from the Kemalist social democratic order and who didn't. And the coastal regions tended to benefit or at least have a higher proportion of people who benefited. The people who got new houses vs the people living in the old ones, the people who work in a new industry vs still working in the old style, and so on. You'll find both in every province but the more heavy the investment was the more things changed there.
I've generally approached "populism" with the feeling of the average person voting to get what they want directly rather then to establish good systems in which they might thrive.
A right-wing populist would run on eg. mandatory religious education in schools whereas a left-wing populist would run on more direct cash payments to people.
In contrast, a non-populist right-wing leader might work towards simplifying zoning requirements for churches or a more equal tax policy, and a non-populist left-wing leader might work towards providing better schools.
By 'Medieval Turkey' you mean Early Modern Turkey. Medieval Turkey was ruled by some combination of the Byzantine Empire, Seljuks, and the Sultanate of Rum (as well as other smaller polities).
"This was a remarkable set of people and things to find in the same car! I can’t quite follow all of the threads of what later became known as the Susurluk scandal, but they apparently involved drug smuggling, terrorism, human rights abuses, several assassinations, Iranian spies, a coup against the government of Azerbaijan, and "a number of Susurluk investigators [dying] in suspicious car accidents curiously similar to the Susurluk car crash itself"."
As Steve Sailer has quipped: "Turkish politics are Byzantine."
Is there a good summary out there of how actively bad Erdogan is now that he's consolidated power? Like I get that he's jailed a few hundred journalists but there are a lot of dictators and semi-dictators out there and I'd like to know where is on the scale from Franco to Kim Jong Un.
Saddam makes a great compare and contrast with Erdogan. Saddam was more the traditional template of how one might dismantle democracy. He also came from a tough lower class background, but was much more direct in seizing power.
I may be misremembering a few details, but as I recall, he had the military lead a tortured prisoner to the front of parliament. The prisoner began "confessing" by naming co-conspirators in the chamber, who were summarily dragged out and shot. During this process Saddam cooly smokes a cigar, while realization hits the faces of the remaining parliamentarians, who begin desperately chanting "long live Saddam!" to beg for their lives. Conveniently enough, this was all filmed, so you can watch it on YouTube if you really want to be traumatized or something.
I know that the traditional picture of tyranny doesn't update as many priors, but it's just an interesting reminder that while some evil is banal, some of it the more flashy kind, so don't over-correct. Guarding against the more instant tyrannies would probably require different structures, though I'm not sure which ones, and I'm similarly unsure guns in the street would be enough. Throughout his life, Saddam was pretty good at violence.
If you want other humbling accounts on drifts between liberal and illiberalism, I'd recommend the long history of Persia, which would oscillate between (relative) progressivism and authoritarianism for stretches of hundreds of years at a time. Reading Persian history is like reading the Foundation, with Hari Seldon reminding you that history and social reordering occurs over scores of generations, and not necessarily in our lifetime.
Convenient, how every cause is dissected except the key turning point of letting the Islamists enter the arena because 'otherwise the children-eating-communists will legitimately win the elections'. Much as, oh help me out, yes it's called Weimar in the 30s. Or, ahem, operation Condor and the majority of Latin American dictators.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, right wing dictators rise to crush majority far left movements? Who would have thought!
"The third big difference is that it's really hard to change the US Constitution."
I disagree with the emphasis on the written constitution, for reasons that I'll elucidate in a separate comment, but isn't it worth considering in this regard that Turkey, as a Near/Middle Eastern Muslim-majority nation, differs substantially from the US in its ethnic and religious composition? That seems like a quite important difference to consider, whatever its application (or perhaps lack thereof) to the particulars of governance in this case. The most comparable nations to the US would be firstly its fellow Anglosphere countries, followed by WEIRD countries generally. The most comparable nations to Turkey would seem to me to be its neighboring countries in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, as well as perhaps similarly middle income countries in Latin America. (E.g. Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.) So, a comparison between, say, Turkey and Egypt, Russia, or Mexico would strike me as more informative than one between Turkey and the US. (Or, conversely, a comparison between the US and Canada, the UK, or New Zealand---the latter of which was done in David Hackett Fischer's book Fairness and Freedom, which I have not yet read.)
But, even though Liberia had three branches of government, a bicameral legislature, and formal legal protection of civil liberties, its subsequent political history has differed substantially from that of the US.
Well, this is important and clearly haven't been mentioned here enough. To recap, "right-wing populism" was invented by elitists who wanted to claim their philosophy can't possibly go wrong. It's just a dishonest way of grouping original Populists (whose demands and policies were by then, and still are, clearly vindicated in any way possible) with literally hitler.
As for anti-elitism in practice, I can only gesture towards "The Consequences of Radical Reform". The problem with Erdogans of the world is not that they're against the current elites, it's... all the other stuff, including the fact that they're not actually anti-elitist, in that they're not against the idea of elites, as long as it's them on top. To somehow couple that other stuff with (honestly pretty uncontroversial) anti-elitism is to fall into an epistemic trap set up by elites to justify their own (honestly perfectly authoritarian) power.
>"required prostitutes to wear hijabs... the sort of measures he took to drag Turkey, kicking and screaming, into secular modernity..."
This is an odd thing to hear from a libertarian; requiring or banning forms of clothing / religious expression might be secular, and superficially *look* modern, but it's hardly free, liberal democracy
If there's one thing Atatürk & successors didn't have it was a libertarian outlook. Besides the headscarves, fezzes were also banned, to be replaced with Western dress. They changed the writing system and swapped out many Ottoman words with Arabic or Persian origins for Turkic ones. Many industries were nationalized. The idea here was that it might not be free, at least at first, but you can't have a liberal democracy in a country where almost everyone was an illiterate peasant. They had to have Western values first.
I think the confusion is in saying that a government "requiring prostitutes to wear hijabs" and the other policies of Ataturk are part of "secular modernity" - you were taking as granted Ataturk's framing that his actions brought about "secular modernity" even when his policies were often horrible in many ways.
Ah, I apologize, it turns out that I've forgotten my timeline of Turkish history, and thought that the Armenian genocide was under him, but it was under the Ottomans prior to him. He wasn't great to them, but at least didn't commit genocide, so I retract my above statement that his policies were often horrible
No problem, it's a common misconception. Horrible stuff like the Armenian Genocide was one of the reasons he got away from CUP and went his way. He has his share of horrible stuff for example against the few Turkish communists that existed back then, but he was a pragmatic man in a difficult time so I cannot judge him too hard for those ones.
the anecdote is an urban myth created by the Islamists for propaganda, and turning a backwards country to a modern one in 10 years requires that kind of attitude. It wasn't banned from civic life, it was only banned from public service. Not only hijab was banned but any kind of religious attire or symbolism. This is a pro liberty move.
>requiring or banning forms of clothing / religious expression might be secular, and superficially *look* modern, but it's hardly free, liberal democracy
Then it's a good thing that the word 'secular' appears in the passage you quote, but the words 'free' and 'liberal' do not.
'What does it mean to condemn a party in a democracy for being "populist"? Isn't that the whole point of democracy? Isn't any party that wins necessarily going to be populist? Isn't a non-populist party winning a sign something went wrong?'
That's not what it means. "Populism" means attempting to make yourself a spokesman for the "good" "people" against the "corrupt" "elite". It therefore tends to want to bypass or tear down regular institutions (as these are controlled by "the elite"). Populism leans directly on the masses without the moderating institutions that have been put there for a reason. Whether Erdogan, Chavez or Trump, it's the same method.
Romantic fantasies, Braveheart and Les Miz aside, revolutions don't happen when the 99% get fed up and overthow the 1%, as long as the 1% are united, because the 1% will do whatever it takes to hang onto power.
Rather, changes happen when the 1% are divided amongst themselves, usually because they cannot decide on how to respond to a foreign threat or how to divvy up the spoils.
I'm an engineer, not a PolSci major but I'm Turkish who's quite into politics and had to immigrate after the Gezi protests so I regard myself kind of an expert on this subject. I'll add here my comments as I read the post:
1- Erdoğan has never ever rose to power on credible promises. This is a very characteristic flaw of people who one time believed in him or thought he was pliable enough for their vision. Very early in his political career he authored a play named "MasKomYah" which stands for Masonic Communist Jews whom he blames for everything wrong with everything, that's the kind of person he always was. He's always been in the fundamentalist islamic party. Just before that party (headlining the governing coalition at the time) was closed by court because they wanted to replace the secular republic with sharia, he infamously said: "Democracy is a tram, we'll get off it when it takes us where we want to be". After that, he splintered off that fundamentalist party and started his own party, after realizing being a fundamentalist on the outside will prevent him from riding the tram. There was a strange coalition in that party.
At the core of the party were discontents from the previous fundamentalist party (the majority of them were expelled before the next elections because they voted "no" when the Americans wanted to attack Iraq via Turkey). One thing they shared was that their image was pious but not fundamentalist.
The second clique were the liberals (liberal not in the American sense meaning progressive, but liberal as in believing in the neoliberal economic model). The constituency was small enough to be ignored, but their main function was to create consent both among Turkish intelligentsia and Western.
The third was the Fethullah Gulen movement. More on that later. There were other smaller cliques that formed the early AKP. Now, the error Mr. Çağaptay has here is the error everybody who at one point falled for AKP. For the liberals, AKP was great until 2008 and evil afterwards. For the intersectionalists it was 2013. For Gulenists it was 2015. As Erdoğan concentrated more power in his hands, he stopped needing those cliques so dropped them one by one like the stages of a rocket ship to Moon. Each of those think that Erdoğan was good until the drop-off date of their stage and evil afterwards. At least a third of the voters and more than half of the intelligentsia knew what he was all along. This is kind of a sensitive nerve ending to those who never fell for him when somebody says he was good in the beginning thus my rant.
2- Imam Hatip graduates being stigmatized: This was actually quite close to how other European systems work. Imam Hatips were formally trade schools like the ones you learn carpentry or auto repairs. Those have some extra points when they want to enter universities related to their field (so Imam Hatip graduate would have extra points towards Theology major, Electric Repair graduate towards Electrical Engineering and so on, and subtracted points from everything else).
3- 650000 arrestees in 1980, the overwhelming majority were left wing of differing colors from more nationalist center left to outright communists. Along with Erbakan, all other party leaders regardless of affiliation at the time were banned from politics and all current parties were also banned so when it was time for elections all parties were brand new.
The pre-coup vs secret versions of parties is also a bit different story. When the junta decided to hold elections they created some template parties (one center left, one liberal etc) and put some retired military men at their helms. But also secret resistance parties that are affiliated to precoup versions of them sprung up. So it was junta parties vs precoup secret parties. Since all the precoup parties were banned they had different names and logos.
Also, between this (I think 1983) and Erdoğan becoming mayor of İstanbul (1994 I guess) there's quite some time so not immediately after the post coup power vacuum. The event that led to Erdoğan's mayoral success was that every party in 1994 had at least 1 splinter party except the Islamists. So the center right vote got divided in 2, the center left got divided in 2, extremes had very little vote and Erdoğan won İstanbul with like 23% of the votes or something. The "elite westernized pawn sipping drink" is a PR move actually, to rally ignorant masses against a perceived "high class" who actually make less money than them.
4- Communist mayor of İstanbul: He was literally from the Social Democratic Party. The only communist mayor anywhere in Turkey who wasn't promptly killed by the anti communist army in the entire history is one of the smallest towns in Eastern Turkey who won it 6 years ago. That's not my party so I don't want to defend them but the story here is very one sided. The bribe, still being a horrible thing, was less than a thousandth of the corruption by the ones before or after him. The workers were only able to strike because when workers in cities run by non-social democrat mayors tried to strike they were beaten by cops and got their contracts terminated. The explosion was not on the streets but at a landfill.
5- The "recalibration" at Sincan: Just before this, at a community center in Sincan Islamist militias were doing something you can call a show-training with pump action shotguns at a night they called "the Jerusalem night". They said their aim was to liberate Jerusalem. The local mayor from RP was sympathetic so this became the straw that broke the camel's back and the "recalibration" happened. I'm not disputing anything here, just adding some color.
6- The 8-year school: Before, it was 5 years primary education, 3 years secondary (middle school) and 3 years tertiary (high school) with only 5 years of primary education being compulsory and the rest optional. The trade schools (including İmam Hatips) started at 6th grade. The military thought, by lengthening mandatory primary school to 8 years and making trade schools (including İmam Hatips) just 3 years, they'll make the islamists miss 3 crucial years when the students are more pliable to be radicalized at a younger age. From an educational viewpoint this is a bad move. For example I graduated from primary education when it was 5 years and by a centralized examination got a place in a good high school with a mandatory English prep class before the 6th grade began and that's how I learnt English. People a few years younger than me had to wait until 9th grade for the full year with language education and a foreign language is MUCH easier to learn when you're younger so that hurt the top end of the human capital considerably. Just a side note.
7- The poem. He was not sentenced for reading that poem. Later in that speech he was inciting the pious to battle the infidels. It was hate speech that caused the sentence. I can see it's still not good to sentence people because of their speech, but if he died in that prison many would be alive today. Is it morally justifiable to put a young Hitler to prison for life after a speech? Maybe so, maybe not, but that's a tough decision and those are not as clear cut as you westerners tend to see.
8- The economic boom: God, that guy was lucky. After the 1998 economic crisis, a technocrat economist (Derviş from World Bank) was brought in 2001, he put in place a disciplined austerity program that really turned things around, then the USA started printing money and decreasing interest rates to stimulate economy and all those cheap dollars started flowing in to a recently reorganized economy. Just then, the 67% of seats wıth 33% of the votes thing happened. I think we really are cursed.
9- Susurluk scandal: It's normal you can't follow all the threads, because even after years thinking about it I still can't and whoever says they do are just believing in a crazy theory. There are so many loose threads it's virtually unfollowable. But even though the details are unfollowable the main things are pretty straightforward. The gray wolves and the mafia are one and the same, they have a lot of connections inside police, western countries have a neverending need for heroine while Afghanistan has a neverending source of heroine ingredients and Turkey is conveniently on the way, this also ties to the PKK insurgency in the East and clandestine NATO plans in case a NATO country goes communist. It just hurts my head to think of all the crooked shit that went on and still going on.
9- Susurluk scandal: It's normal you can't follow all the threads, because even after years thinking about it I still can't and whoever says they do are just believing in a crazy theory. There are so many loose threads it's virtually unfollowable. But even though the details are unfollowable the main things are pretty straightforward. The gray wolves and the mafia are one and the same, they have a lot of connections inside police, western countries have a neverending need for heroine while Afghanistan has a neverending source of heroine ingredients and Turkey is conveniently on the way, this also ties to the PKK insurgency in the East and clandestine NATO plans in case a NATO country goes communist. It just hurts my head to think of all the crooked shit that went on and still going on.
10- After this point, the book becomes more objective. As I said, my working theory is that whoever's clique (or the clique they believe in) got dumped off the AKP bandwagon, started seeing things clearer.
11- Re:Ergenekon trials and media. If a media conglomerate didn't toe the Erdoğan line, suddenly they received a tax bill of a few hundred millions that were miscalculated the years before. They either have to sell the newspaper/TV channel to cover the bill or to become an Erdoğan mouthpiece, which made the bill disappear. Later, the tactic was to give extremely lucrative deals to build airports or highways to companies of Erdoğan's relatives and in turn they had to buy and run at a loss a media corporation. At the moment, there're next to none independent/opposition newspapers / TV channels compared to Erdoğan mouthpieces. There have been days 20 25 newspapers had the exact same headline on the same day.
12- Rise of Gülenists: Really crazy story. There has always been a lot of underground religious organizations or cults like them, and from time to time by promising a certain amount of votes from their devotees they gain some mid level government posts. When many groups wanted to be in the health system or security, Gülenists wanted some posts in the government organization that organizes the centralized examinations. They prepare under strict security exams like the SAT equivalent of Turkey, or exams to enter the military, police etc. Turns out when you hold that with some devotees, and play the long game you can suddenly put thousands in all organizations of the state.
13- Kurds (and the nationalist Turks): Erdoğan has always masterfully played this to his advantage. When one seemed strong he pounded on the other one. Turns out when you have control of the entire media, you can spin things in such a way that your base never questions when you're pro Kurdish one year and ultra nationalist the next back and forth.
14- The 2016 coup: I still cannot understand this. There was either some collusion (but that doesn't make much sense), or the planning of the coup was worse than a 5-year old would come up with (which also doesn't make much sense). My money is on some part of the Gülenists selling some other part by starting a half assed thing and disappearing but that also doesn't make much sense. For example if they wanted to kill Erdoğan, his huge airplane was flying for hours with its transponder open (it was possıble to track it from flightradar etc) and the Gülenists had a lot of F16s flying but couldn't find and shoot at his plane. If they wanted to stop channels of communication and make propaganda, they should've cut off internet and took over the Turksat building with all the satellite TV uplinks instead of going for the low-rating state TV. If they wanted to collect a lot of top officials they should've started just before dawn (like all other successful Turkish coups) and not at evening rush hour. Putting tanks on the Bosphorus bridge doesn't give one ANY tactical advantage but creates a lot of buzz. Everything seems like a photo op the more you think about it, but on the other hand the most important question is why would they do it? And that has no answer. Were they that stupid? Maybe.
15- Something very Turkish which I've not seen here in Europe and my short time as tourist in USA: In Turkey, the rules are impossible to follow. They are deliberately contradicting and the most nonsense ones are deliberately not enforced, but not removed also. So when somebody you don't like happens to break a rule you can break his back. I had this epiphany 10 years ago when driving from İstanbul to my hometown. On the highway the speed limit was 110 km/h. Then suddenly it drops to 30 km/h for 100 meters, and back to 110 km/h. There's nothing there. Nobody EVER drops to 30 km/h. But when the local police has to reach a yearly quota of fines or something, they suddenly ticket 100 cars there in a row and call it a year. That's not just some funny example of Mediterranean corruption but that's how everything in Erdoğan's state works. That specific example is at least not a discriminatory practice, but when it comes to serious matters it only matters who they want to screw, and they're sure to find something because there's always something. When in 2019 AKP lost the İstanbul mayor elections, they scrapped the election (for no reason at all) and since they saw the Kurds voted en masse to the opposition, they wanted to appeal to them so on the state TV channel they got the brother of Öcalan, leader of PKK, read a letter from his brother calling Kurds to at least protest the elections and not vote for anybody. Now, when they do it there's no court rulings. Just today, they annuled an opposition parliamantery from his seat because he retweeted some news and the news outlet later changed its header to something pro-Kurdish.
Another example, my father was trying to get a hospital built. Now hospitals have a hell lot of building codes, much more than ordinary buildings and of course this is for good measure. But in Turkey it's physically impossible to follow all the rules since they contradict. If you make the doors exactly like the document says, then it's impossible for the corridors to be how the documents says so. If you get your hospital plan drawn at any company other than the ones who're related to Gül's (Erdoğan's one time 2nd in command, now they're sour) son-in-law, it would get denied. If you get the right company to draw your plans, suddenly they're ok.
16- About the high class and low class thing: The teacher child of a teacher parent who's living from paycheck to paycheck as a modern human being: high class elitist sipping drink in a Nişantaşı hotel. The owner of a contracting firm owning 5 SUVs, crass furnitures with gold engravings and fake diamonds on them but doesn't brush his teeth: poor honest nationalist Anatolian Muslim. Yes, class and wealth are not the same thing but at the moment it's also correlated the wrong way! Premarital sex is elitist white Turk but child brides are totally a-ok. Now the cultural "elite (not a cultural 1% elite, a roughly 30% elite)" has either immigrated to Europe, or is so poor that they lost their culture too since they're literally too hungry to think about things meanwhile many Erdoğan supporting primary school dropout grocer-turned-into-construction firm owners are swimming in it. Erdoğan is a subtle Pol Pot. Ok I ranted a lot on this.
To be less emotional and more rational about the above, when the populist takes over the government and cultural elite is against it, over time with enough money populists buy some of the cultural elites to blow their horn, threaten others to do the same, crush others who are too vocally against and ignore the rest since they don't have any TV channel or anything to air them.
17- How to prevent this in the West: Well, for one you don't have a West of your own with their open or subtle support or hindrance that'll nudge the natural processes towards a local minima. When Erdoğan was in his first years, there was unimaginable-before amounts of money from West flowing to NGOs preaching how democratic Erdoğan was and after years of fundamentalist parties we finally found a German-style Muslim-Democrat conservative liberal party. It was so evident that it was all bullshit, but a lot of the out of touch cultural elites took it line hook and sinker. Now all are trying to hide those days, but many progressive liberal types of today were ardent supporters of Erdoğan back then, calling his opposition "old fashioned fascist military boot lickers" or something. If let's say there was a very powerful civilization on Mars who paid a lot for pro-Trump propaganda by the finest cultural elite, it would be much easier for him to fabricate consent. Also, Trump is a guy that knows no subtlety. He cannot play the long game. If by chance the crazy power hungry surprise president was a more intelligent and subtle version of Trump, it would've been riskier.
But a structural safeguard against an Erdoğan-like scenario is fiercer protection of all independent institutions. Congress (and Senate) and President can be highly coupled since they're elected by similar methods, so Judiciary has to be more powerful and more independent. In fact, president or congress or senate should have no say in who gets to be appointed a high judge or whatever you call it. This actually should go for all other institutions. Like from the FCC to FDA to FAA, they should have more independence in what they do and should only answer to the courts for any mismanagement etc. The rule that should be painfully inflicted to all of these institutions, including the judiciary, should be complete transparency. Democratic countries, even faulty democracies like old Turkey in fact have a lot of redundancy in their institutions so that even if one is infiltrated or hollowed out, others can still make the whole thing work. When a critical mass of them are infiltrated or hollowed out though, you have an Erdoğan situation. So that's why I'm listing all possible institutions. You can never know which one will play which role so all shall be 100% transparent and 100% independent.
18- One last thing: The last 20 years really thought me what power is. Power really resides where people think it resides. Any office, or any institution has no intrinsic power whatsoever, even the ones like military who has actual physical power. There's no divine power or magical whatever or computer game logic that says the election is done thus and the senate works like thus etc. There are laws, and then there are meta-laws that govern how those laws are to be applied and which institution will oversee it. And there are even more meta-meta-laws that govern how that institution will work and so on. But there's no end point to it. Small example: When a court makes a decision, one can take it to the higher court. When the higher court overturns that decision the lower court has to agree. Well what governs this? Let's say an Erdoğan-sided court unlawfully punished a dissident. The higher court, still has a judge with some conscience, overturned the decision. The lower court ignores this. Now what happened to the iron law of higher court overturning decisions? If the board of judges who's to oversee this turns a blind eye, all the carefully constructed system is just as strong as wet toilet paper. So what shall happen? Media going crazy? What if the media is just sycophants? A public outrage? That's usually the last in the chain. Well if they believe the power is with them and with the righteous higher court they'll be able to do something. Otherwise, most of them will just stay home fearing for their life or their livelihood since police brutality isn't necessary to destroy an ordinary person, a big enough fine will bankrupt a lot of individuals. If only a minority believes the power is with the righteous judge, there'll only be a small commotion which government leaning media will soon spin as terrorists trying to unstabilize the country, and blame the falling value of the lira on them as well taking the attention away from the poorly run economics. I don't want to finish this pessimistic, but that's how things are. No matter how good you design a system to run human beings, the power will be where people somehow believe the power is. When some institutions or individuals ignore your carefully constructed system, if the people believe those individuals have the power in the end it's a losing battle. So as I said before, it should be a system with many moving parts independent from each other, each answering only to themselves and another independent institution, in the meanwhile all being transparent. Also the laws about media should be very specific about a lot of things but too long to list here.
PS: Sorry for any faults in my English, it's not my native language and in a comment this long I probably had more than a few screwups.
it took some time and nobody commented until you so I was a bit sorry to see I've wasted my time to produce something crappy. Thanks for the appreciation :D
Emrah, I found your comments well reasoned and interesting as well. I lived in İstanbul and Bursa for several years and became very invested in understanding Turkey's politics, until I realized how truly difficult it is to keep up and how many bad analyses of Turkish society are produced by foreign observers on a daily basis. Anyway, I like to think there is hope for a shift in the future with younger politicians like Ekrem İmamoğlu, though I haven't been following things closely enough to understand how AKP's hold on power is evolving or what kind of plans, if any, Erdoğan may be making for his succession (he is getting old after all, and the constant intrigue and paranoia must take its toll on his health).
Thank you for your reply. It indeed is difficult to keep track of Turkish politics. It's one part Byzantine one part nomad horde politics mixed with chronically underreporting and underrecording and a shock therapy switch to modernity that causes all the chaos.
Now, with vote base eroding Erdoğan is trying to polarize through the Kurds again. This time Erdoğan is a hardline nationalist cracking down on Kurds trying to pry away the secularist nationalists from the opposition alliance.
On the long run though, the succession is more than bleak. If he's not toppled before, when he dies it'll be time of warlords. One of his sons is a weird case and he's kept abroad since ever. At one point early in Erdoğan's career this eldest son killed somebody and needed a cover, he might be an unstable person. The young son is such an idiot Erdoğan keeps him busy with archery tournaments etc and away from any serious business since he'll destroy Erdoğan's dynasty in short time. His proteges are his 2 sons in law (son in laws? sons in law?). One he made the minister of economics but he screwed up big time so he interestingly disappeared a few months ago. Literally disappeared! There are rumors he's abroad. The other son-in-law is an engineer and a prominent businessman in the Turkish military-industrial complex. He seems to be a composed person, but he hasn't been into politics yet. There's also the minister of internal affairs who's making the police loyal to himself in person, so he's wielding a lot of power and during a succession he might try to become a king rather than a kingmaker.
I hope we can beat him in an election before he dies so he can spend some years in prison, although he'll probably flee.
I've done a little business in Turkey and I'm aware of how ignorant I am. Your detailed comments made me less ignorant. Thanks very much and I really appreciate it!
This is a phenomenal comment chain, thanks for posting it. Also your English was good enough that your final line almost reads like a humblebrag - certainly it seems better than mine.
Anyway I have two questions really. Can I know which group or party you were supporting during the Erodogan years ? Everyone I speak to about Erodogan seems to have wildly different opinions and it would be nice to know what bias you're coming in with.
Secondly can I ask if you feel like Erodogan actually made some significant positive changes to the country ?
The reason I ask is because my mum and her friends consider Turkey to be heaven on earth and they fully intend to retire there. Everyone they spoke to while on their various holiday's, even extended family who have no reason to lie, gave worshipful accounts of Erodogan and how he managed to turn the country around. My mum couldn't stop talking about how clean, energetic and just flat out nice everyone and everything in Turkey was. She said it felt like a country ascending and she wants to be part of it. Naturally i'm alot more skeptical and im spending an inordinate amount of time arguing with her about this but its hard because neither me, my mother or her friends are turkish and its hard to balance out all the contradicting reports.
1- I've been voting age for 20 years, and mainly supported the main opposition party (the secular CHP) with some twists. In 2007 I went to a liberal independent as a reaction to cause some change within CHP. CHP changed a bit but didn't improve much, but at that point I stopped being idealist and started supporting whichever party is the biggest contender against AKP in that specific election. If I had to vote for Mephistopheles himself if he's running against AKP, I'd start explaining what a good dude he was. In the last few years though, the opposition in general and CHP in specific has been on a better path. They leave aside (most of the) differences to form a united front against AKP, and CHP stopped worrying about its own votes and focused on the vote that's against AKP. This also includes having a softer approach to religious issues a well. For example Ekrem İmamoğlu, the new mayor of İstanbul from CHP is from a quite religious family background and Mansur Yavaş, the new mayor of Ankara again from CHP is a former right wing mayor of a small town who happens to have left wing economic policies. So embracing the whole spectrum of population seems to be working for the opposition for now and they're whom I support.
2- Erdoğan himself didn't make a lot of significant positive changes (maybe a wide battle against smoking is one of the most positive ones) but world has progressed a lot in the last 20 years and that trickled to Turkey as well. Turkey has regressed a lot for an ordinary Turkish citizen in social or economic issues, but to a foreigner these don't matter much. For example when I was a university student 20 years ago, with my meager stipend I was able to comfortably live, be able to get drunk, saving some to buy an electric guitar and in the summer a non fancy but nice vacation. Now students are barely feeding themselves, an engineer with a decent job cannot buy that electric guitar or go on vacations. Many green public spaces are now shopping malls or gated apartment buildings, the quality of public education has plummeted. On public TV there were gay characters or premarital sexual relations, or people having a cup of wine with their meal. Now rainbow pattern is banned on children's toys or clothing for fear that it'll turn them gay, a statue with a woman's figure is blurred from the screen, and even the mention of alcoholic drinks are beeped. I'm sure the moment AKP is out these'll change suddenly, but a whole generation has grew up in this environment. But those are actually not impacting a foreigner living in Turkey.
I can say that Turkey's still a great country to live in, especially if your income is in dollars/euros. Especially in the southwest coast there are a lot of European retirees. All the signs etc are in English, some municipalities even send the water bill etc multilingual, there was a German lady who became the town leader, the Russians in Antalya have their own amateur soccer team etc. The Turkish people are a clean bunch (my European friends think I'm OCD but that stuff is just normal in Turkish culture). Also they're nice, especially towards foreigners. I mean calling the people from my country nice seems like calling everybody else non-nice so I don't want to go there, but I wouldn't think retiring in Turkey would be a bad idea.
What concerns me in this situation is that the people your mum and her friends are in touch are people who worship Erdoğan, so I'm not sure how much a good company that is. That's the only red flag here, but that's a big one.
I would still like to live in Turkey again, and plan to do so. I like the culture more than American culture, frankly, even though having lived in many countries I'm aware that every culture has very deep flaws and traumas unique to it.
I appreciate your analysis of the future (in the comment above the one I'm replying to). As a casual observer I can't help but think İmamoğlu looks like a future president of a politically and economically more robust Turkey - but I'm also aware that I don't follow things closely anymore. He has charisma and excellent PR but that doesn't make him a great leader per se. And of course it remains an open question whether big electoral outcomes can happen to unseat AKP - of course İmamoğlu's victory over Yıldırım and other examples are encouraging, but the highest level of electoral politics, and the possibility of an actual change of regime, raises the stakes considerably.
It's tragic that almost all young people, regardless of their family backgrounds and political views, want to leave Turkey these days for the EU, Canada, or US. I understand that the pandemic, as it has in many places, has only served to make the economic situation more acute and cause further loss of hope amongst the young people who should be Turkey's ticket to a brighter future.
Well it's really unfortunate that it's not possible to know beforehand how a leader will be once he has the seat. I hope he doesn't do a head heel turn, but he seems decent enough to not do that. To be honest, he's too light on AKP to my taste, but if he were a hardliner he wouldn't have so many people voting for him so I'll probably have to swallow that and live with it, especially when the alternative is a fundamentalist cleptocrat dictator.
What's more tragic about the young people is that, Turkey has always had economic troubles and was never a rich country like the Western economies. The real reason why all the young people want to leave now is the loss of meritocracy everywhere. Back then the country was not rich, but the child of a poor family always knew if they were smart and studied well and did decent in the centralized exams, they'd at least have a decent career for them. Not a very rich one, but one that'll keep them employed with a roof over their head and no shortage of food and more than enough ways to socialize. Now, either the exams are rigged or there's this "interview" part added whose only function is to filter the party members or their relatives. Now, it's nearly impossible to land a job as a civil servant unless you know somebody who knows somebody. So it's not the economy per se, but the loss of equality of chances that's making everybody move away. I immigrated to EU 8 years ago as well, and dozens of friends did after me. I hope there'll still be a country for me to migrate back to and we get rid of these pests.
I'm sort of Russian (my parents moved us to the US when I was a teenager), so I have some gestalt for late Soviet / early Russian laws, without any clear distinction of what they were specifically or when they were active. So, I'm pretty sure the things I'm going to say have been true at some point in the past ~40 years, but I'm less certain of what the system looks like now. The thing about the rules system being designed so that it's impossible to follow rings very true. In addition to providing plausible excuses for blackmailing anyone, this is an excellent way to feed corruption (e.g. if a building inspector wants money, they can just threaten to examine your building according to the letter of the law). Civil engineers in the US, to my knowledge, do not have this kind of power :)
I'm curious if the car-stopping (on the random stop in the middle of the highway that has a reduced speed limit) is actually as egalitarian as you casually suggest? In the Russia of my childhood (early 90s) it certainly wouldn't have been, because the more expensive cars would have people you didn't want to cross, but that might've settled down since.
Worse, it's not organic free-range corruption but industrial corruption. Since it's known being a building inspector nets you with corruption money, it needs not be in the form of bribes but only having your inspecting fee high. This way there's no need for the inspector to launder the money. He just approves projects coming from the "correct" project office and rejects the rest. The "correct" project office donates money to the "correct" foundations who have a relative of the inspector on its board of trustees or whatever with a salary. The higher-ups own the entire operations of the foundation be it promoting medieval archery or building student housing. So it's very similar but a bit different (and I believe more structured) way of corruption than the plain old official/inspector/police-requires-bribes kind of post Warsaw pact corruption (which Turkey also had but in smaller quantities before Erdoğan). It's like a huge machine oiling itself and the entire political/PR machine of Erdoğan and it has a fractal quality to it so what's at the nation-level is the same at a village-level albeit small scale.
The car-stopping would indeed be mostly egalitarian if the reason is the local police trying to fill their ticketing quota. Of course somebody related to the party circles (a second/third cousin somewhat removed of the town's party leader) would just wave and go on. Since they have the expensive cars it correlates, but the causation is the connection (and not the money) getting you a free pass, although the same connection also gets you money so the result is the same.
Re #14, my impression at the time (as an outsider who doesn't follow Turkish politics too closely) was that it seemed like a fake coup, organized by Erdogan to give him an excuse to reduce the military's power so they couldn't launch a real one. Is that plausible?
Re #15, it's not that egregious here, and certainly not that malicious. But there's stories of cops talking to people riding along to point out how ridiculous traffic laws are, and betting they can't point to a car who can go a single block without breaking some rule of the road somewhere. See also https://www.amazon.ca/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
14: Plausible, but what was in it for the guys who actually tried to coup and died trying? Somebody somehow must have convinced them but how? It could've been some part of the Gülen movement making a deal with Erdoğan and then selling out the rest by starting a (very intentionally badly planned) coup which would out them all. That's the theory convinces me the most but as I said, none of the theories really fits 100% and I don't have my own that I believe completely works.
15: I think whenever it's politically safer to put more laws that restrict stuff and not remove laws that restrict stuff, this situation arises. In my opinion what's different in Turkey is that, this law of nature is somehow a very foundational part of the underlying system and being actively weaponized to rule arbitrarily but make it look like everything is quite lawful.
Mr. Cagaptay is known to have ties with the older authoritarian regime that the Turkey had. It is no surprise that he supports some wrong doings of Erdogan. To be honest, looking at those researchers will not completely tell you what is going on in Turkey because they are extremely biased. It is only a representation of how a small group of people see rte and his regime.
Scott, it reads like a really deep and fascinating analysis, except for the Stalin part. If you spend 15 min reading about Stalin's methods online, it would be nearly exactly the prescription Erdogan followed:
- take control of the existing institutions by staffing them with his loyalists (conveniently, staffing was his official job to begin with)
- slowly push away your opponents' supporters, including by trumped up charges
- use existing legal systems to begin with for show trials
- eventually streamline the legal system to speed up the process (hello, Troika!)
There was no need for extrajudicial action on the home turf, after all, he controlled everything there. Only those outside his reach ended up with an ax in the head.
Putin simply adapted Stalin's recipe to the modern times, replacing the charge "enemy of the people" with "corruption". A big added bonus was that the charge was always correct: it is impossible to do business in Russia without bribery and tax evasion. Only lately the tried and true "agent of a foreign power" hammer was brought back.
Erdogan followed the playbook of their northern neighbor, adapting it to the local situation. The most impressive feat, of course, was to take control of the military. Most dictators either come from the military background and enjoy its support, or operate in an environment where the military is not strong enough to take control. Erdogan used "democratization" as a leverage, and the Turkish military didn't realize what hit it until it was too late.
This. Scott's ignorance of how the soviet union worked is puzzling. In contrast with fascist countries where people were indeed just disappeared, Stalin's purges are notorious for having massive trials where not only a guilt verdict was important, but the soviets deemed specially important for the suspect to provide a confession, hence all the torturing.
You are ignorant if you think that any but a vanishingly tiny fraction of the millions of people purged under Stalin went through "massive trials". To begin with, it would never work logistically. Most of them were indeed just arrested, sometimes interrogated with liberal use of third degree methods (I suspect e.g. most peasants accused of picking up ears of wheat, a crime by the notorious law of 7/8, weren't given the honor), tried and sentenced in absentia whether they confessed or not, given an extract from a troika protocol to read and sign, and then they were happily on their way to log taiga and mine gold in Siberia, if not executed. Solzhenitsyn and many other memoirists describe how this process worked. Massive show trials were important, but they were PR events designed to build support for Stalin and his policies and undermine the support of his enemies. That's why they were so carefully staged, complete with tearful confessions from the stand. Important people who didn't break down and agree to confess from the stand, like the geneticist and botanist Nikolai Vavilov for instance, weren't tried publicly.
The EU is a project led by Germany and France, which is possible because they are the largest two countries by population, having 80 and 60 million people, respectively. The EU is nominally democratic, so the leadership of these two countries has to be legitimized by them having the largest populations.
In reality, the expansion of the EU is/was about conditioning the new nations to adopt EU rules and mores. For this reality to work with the pretension of EU democracy, it is crucial that new EU states are smaller than Germany and France, so they can be kept out of the driver's seat.
Yet Turkey has 80 million people. So if they were let into the EU, they could immediately appeal to the democratic pretensions to be given equal power to Germany and more power than France, which would be a huge threat to the EU.
However, I disagree that the EU intended to keep Turkey out. The Europhiles truly believe in that the expansion of the EU is a way to bring peace and prosperity to other nations. The dynamic in the EU is that the deep state in the EU is full of Europhiles and that they cooperate with friendly politicians to bribe/coerce/threaten those who are more skeptical. The result is that they get their way much more than what the EU populace would support if the EU would be truly democratic.
The EU has a huge set of rules for prospective EU states, requiring them to adapt their laws to meet EU regulations, and to improve their institutions, at least on paper. The EU has often accepted imperfect compliance, because of their belief in the benefits of expansion, but the consequences of this seemed limited for smaller nations (although, Greece managed to cause a significant crisis).
However, Turkey was never going to get this amount of leeway. However, I've seen no evidence that extra rules were created for Turkey. It is clear that many EU citizens and politicians thought that Turkey was a danger to the EU and spoke out against it, which probably resulted in a feeling in Turkey that they wouldn't be accepted.
However, ultimately, the only way for Turkey to put the EU on the spot was to adhere to the EU rules and (proper) institutional reforms. By not doing so, it was Turkey that effectively stalled the accession process.
Note that Erdogan didn't merely benefit from the EU accession process by using it as a casus belli for transforming his institutions, but also profited from pre-accession support in the form of hundreds of millions a year, money they are still getting. So Erdogan's economic wonder can be partially attributed to an influx of this money.
"The dynamic in the EU is that the deep state in the EU is full of Europhiles and that they cooperate with friendly politicians to bribe/coerce/threaten those who are more skeptical. The result is that they get their way much more than what the EU populace would support if the EU would be truly democratic."—One recalls Macron's "no, we would never stage a referendum on EU membership, Leave would get 60-70%".
BTW, I don't think that Erdogan was ever willing to actually adhere to the EU rules. I think that he very smartly managed to pretend that he was not stalling (helped by control over many newspapers), which got the liberal Turks angry and dejected at the supposed unwillingness of the EU to let Turkey in, thereby convincing them to keep supporting Erdogan, rather than a party who actually wanted to seriously try to enter the EU.
Yes, Turkey joining would be as large a population change as the 2004 accessions of the mostly former communist countries but as a single nation rather than ten.
I think this is 100% right. The EU's concern about military coups was also more pragmatic than just "coups are bad": if a member state had a coup in the modern post-Maastricht EU, and the EU wanted to keep that country on side (Turkey is, or was until recently, a seriously important part of NATO), the whole system would break down. The EU can more-or-less shut down a member state for having a coup if all the others agree, but not without a lot of awkwardness. If they wanted to side with the coup, they'd be faced with having to waive immunity so that the whole Turkish delegation to the European Parliament being arrested.
Towards the end of part IV I was thinking "this sounds like a good argument in favor of incremental change over sudden shocks". Don't burn down a system, improve it a piece at a time.
For some reason this put me in mind of the American Revolution vs the French Revolution - one of the reasons we had a better time of it overall is that we already had local governance that could be severed from the overseas monarchy and continue operating while we stitched together a new national government. instead of having to burn the whole system down and start fresh. Which, is still a pretty large system shock, but we lucked into having leadership (Washington in particular) that genuinely didn't seek power for its own sake.
I think that putting the label of "Revolution" on something that would be more accurately described as "The American Secession" is a huge historical mistake.
>There were four such coups between 1960 and 2000 - including "coups by memo", where the military would say "let's pretend we just held a coup" and the civilian government, unwilling to risk a real coup, would resign en masse.
That's a coup every 15 years. That's less than two presidents! It's hard to imagine the government being able to change quickly enough that it goes from "basically alright" to "tanks in the streets" in the amount of time it took the US to go through Bush and Obama. Which makes me feel that at least part of the problem is that the military in Turkey is *really eager* to throw coups.
> It's hard to imagine the government being able to change quickly enough that it goes from "basically alright" to "tanks in the streets"
I don’t really know the Turkey situation, but in the abstract it’s much less hard to imagine changing from “barely tolerable, let’s hope we don’t need the tanks this time” to “tanks in the street”.
So, this is actually off-topic, but I've noticed it a couple of times that Scott's called himself a "libertarian" but last I recall he was "definitely not a libertarian, even if they're object level right about certain things"... what happened, when did this change?
Yeah, I'm inconsistent about this. I think of myself as left-to-libertarian-to-liberal. I am definitely not a "government cannot do anything except prevent fraud or force" minarchist libertarian, but I am at least kind of a "government should try to do fewer things and leave decisions to individual choice" libertarian.
Not quite the same question but Alexander has said in the past that he strongly supports a universal basic income as one of the things the state should be doing.
I think there has been discussion previously about how your style often makes it hard to distinguish summary from commentary in your book reviews. A succinct example: when you write something like
it reads like “probably forged” is your own inference, but I suspect it is in fact part of your summary of what the author said himself.
In practice my guess is that you actually do a very clean separation where everything before a certain point is summary and everything after is commentary, but you don’t make that clear and therefore I read more of the summary as being your personal opinion than you may have intended unless I am very careful to prime myself against it.
I'm not sure how to fix this. The author didn't use exactly these words. He presented some evidence which I think a reasonable person would interpret as sufficient to show forgery. So it's partly the author interpreting reality and partly me interpreting the author.
I lived in Turkey through many of the worst years of its recent history - the war in Syria, the renewal of conflict in the Kurdish region, Islamic State terror attacks in İstanbul, the failed 2016 coup, the crash of the lira.
There is a deep culture of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking, that's not unnatural given everything that's happened to Turkey (there's a saying that Turkey has more newsworthy things happen in a week than most countries have in a year - it's true) and in the neighboring Middle East in the past decades.
There's also this thing that's pervasive but easy to miss if you're a foreigner, especially one who's passing through: the subtle ways in which one's ethnic, religious, and political identities take on a burdensome importance in everyday interactions. In other words, in every small affair of life, there's an assessment and awareness of the political orientations and backgrounds of one's interlocutors, though it's rarely broached head on unless it's a drunken altercation or late night taxi ride. It's just this thing, almost imperceptible from the outside but crushingly heavy to actually be immersed in. But it is taking place in the context of bitter zero sum struggles for power in which people at being killed, unjustly imprisoned, tortured, and any other affront to dignity you can name.
I've been back in the US since 2017, and I often say that I feel the US is moving in exactly the direction Turkey was moving in then: the increasing burden of ethnic and racial identity in every facet of life, the fear and paranoia, the circumscription of acceptable topics of conversation (I was baffled when I returned why everyone only ever talks about fucking Netflix shows and Marvel movies), and the mental health toll all of this takes on average people (coupled with overdosing on social media technologies which make everything seem more immediate and threatening than it is).
Anyway, I think your analysis based on this book is good, and I think as you said it's not easy to draw parallels too directly between the US and Turkey. The contexts are so different, the milieu and relative power of each country economically, militarily, etc. But almost in a sense of social aesthetics and base political emotions, I feel there is indeed a parallel to be drawn and it's a dark one.
I forget what the norm is now about comments that just express approval or appreciation, but I thought this was a really insightful post and I appreciate it.
Thanks for these excellent reflections. I've been to Turkey a couple of times, and thought it was a beautiful country, but I am anxious about returning under the current state of affairs there. And I certainly don't want the US going down that path.
So, my understanding from the last few years isn't that this is getting worse in the US per se, but that your ethnic background played a burdensome role in everyday interactions in a way that the white majority could just ignore, and in the last few years social media and the great awokening have made (white) people aware of that in a way that's uncomfortable, hence the pushback against wokism and pc. Probably you'd disagree, but that's the other side's narrative as I understand it.
There's no doubt that there's a lot of truth to that. However, I do think that many people in racial and ethnic minority categories in this country would say that this aspect of their identities has become more burdensome in the past 20 years and particularly in the past couple of years. There are huge pluralities of views within every minority community and this is something that's being denied or discarded in favor of certain absolutist framings. I think it's the view of all ideas as necessarily in service of power or in service of the oppressed, with those classifications being strictly linked to ethnicity, that is at the root of the growing paranoia, mistrust, and even ethic hatred that we are seeing. I also think a very tenuous consensus is being manufactured at a certain level, to turn areas of extreme complexity into narratives that deflect attention away from other dynamics of power. I think you can mark a point in a lot of countries' histories where natural and legitimate tensions between different ethnic groups, based on large historical processes, have been stoked beyond reason or usefulness by agenda-driven politicians, interest groups, and the intellectual elites who create the ideological frameworks they use. Most countries have dark histories of oppression and systemic violence and there's a broad spectrum of how they deal with them. I only know that the US is heading in a direction where things like ethnic-based paramilitaries and political parties look like a conceivable eventuality, and where institutions and entire regions are re-segregated. I view that as an inorganic and ahistorical balkanizing that will not lead to good outcomes.
I really disagree with you here. I doubt very strongly that it's more burdensome in 2020 than in 2000. Of course, all I have are my priors, I wonder if there are surveys?
One other point: what do you mean by re-segregated? That implies desegregation, which I don't think has ever really been successfully done. Do you disagree on this point, or do you mean something else?
Well, there has evidently been lots of desegregation in schools, universities, government facilities, and businesses, and at least some undeniable progress in neighborhoods and cities. I have been seeing an awful lot of initiatives lately that support separating students, colleagues, and residents by race, as well as the expression of ideologies espousing immutable and irreconcilable differences between Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. But more broadly, I did not mean for my initial or subsequent comment to be about Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, Trumpism, or any other touchstone culture wars topic. It was my personal observation of a psychological parallel, based on my cumulative reading and experience of being American (in a very diverse part of America) and having lived in Turkey and in other societies divided by ethnic, racial, religious and other forms of conflict.
I'll respectfully decline to continue discussing this topic. It's rarely fruitful and pushing back on your line of thinking would betray a level of interest in the subject of race that I don't actually possess.
I view the process known as balkanization itself as inorganic and ahistorical, as it involves elite interests using the wedge of identitarian rhetoric to pry apart cultures that are cosmopolitan and deeply intertwined in their ethnic composition, for the purpose of political projects that benefit said elites and justify the expansion of their power.
"There is no fire alarm for dictatorship." From my perspective, Gezi Park was a very loud fire alarm. Erdoğan violently put down peaceful protests and then put down the protests against that violence. It just failed.
I suppose if "every group" is supposed to mean "every political party," then sure. I was interpreting it closer to "every demographic." That said, while there are two parties in power, there aren't only 2 parties, and I know supporters of the Green Party feel frustrated (as I'm sure do Libertarians and supporters of smaller parties I'm forgetting about) about how impossible it is for their parties to gain real power (beyond a few rare congresspeople).
Hi Scott, I've posted a comment that may be taken as a bit harsh, so I came back to try posting a nicer comment.
Regarding populism seeming like it should be default in a democracy: populism is defined by a discourse that proposes that there is an opposition between the elite and the people, the populist branding himself as a defendant of the latter. One would expect this person to lose the votes of said elite. Therefore the default in a democracy should be the conciliator, the one whose main discourse is that he will work for the betterment of everybody. Biden is a great example. Even Reagan would not be taken as a populist, silent majority aside, trickle down economics is a hallmark of class conciliation.
The Erdogan case of blaming some urban centered foreign-aligned well educated elite that dominates the media and academia, condemns corruption in the state, emphasizes a return to roots (Islam in his view) is absolutely general to right-wing populism. Comparing to cases of populism in Latin America and Central Europe (e.g. Hungary and Poland) right-wing populism that is culture war based is the norm. From what I gather the only thing very distinct in Turkey is the role of the armed forces.
Regarding the elites naturally rising to the top: your right there with Marx on it. As long as the elites maintain control of the means of production they will maintaining power and a network of connections that guarantee their influence. Which, of course, is why they seem to have a light handle on power, the game is already rigged for them, no need to make an effort.
"Erdogan was able to change the Turkish Constitution with a simple majority. Nobody took it too seriously, because the Constitution was just whatever the last group of military-coup-pulling generals said it was. The US Constitution requires a lot more work. And as the work of titans like George Washington and James Madison and so on, it has an aura of sacredness that makes it hard to add "PS: I can do whatever I want" to the end without a lot of people feeling violated. I know this has caused a lot of problems, but after seeing the ease with which Erdogan swept aside any part of the Turkish Constitution he didn't like, I have a new respect for it."
I'm personally quite skeptical of this thesis, for a couple of reasons (though to be clear it's been propounded by many other people than Scott).
Firstly, I don't think that the US' history of continuous democratic governance is all *that* unique and thus requiring of a novel explanation. It's pretty similar to other Anglosphere countries (Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand) in particular and other European ones in general. Insofar as there's a difference in the duration of democratic governance between e.g. the US and Sweden, it seems like it's simply because the start date of democracy was earlier in the US, rather than being the result of some significant difference in the operation/design of the governments.
And, as a corollary of this, many of these nations differ from the US in that e.g. they espouse parliamentary sovereignty or lack written constitutions (as in the case of the UK), especially ones with the same symbolic importance/difficulty to change as that of the US.
Secondly, many key civil liberties (e.g. freedom of speech and habeas corpus) nominally guaranteed by the US constitution have in fact been shamelessly violated in practice, especially during wartime, as in the Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR administrations. Not only in wartime, however, as the 14th and 15th amendment's guarantees of equal protection under the laws and the right to vote were ignored for nearly a century following the Civil War/Reconstruction w.r.t. blacks in the southern states. While there are several notable such cases of political power overriding nominal law to trample civil liberties/rights, I'm not sure if there are many or any identifiable converse cases in which the holders of such power refrained from abuses they wanted to commit because of their theoretical illegality.
Thus, I don't see a particularly strong connection between written, hard-to-change constitutions and robust civil liberties. Such constitutions can fail to protect civil liberties, and these liberties can be protected without such constitutions.
"I'm not sure if there are many or any identifiable converse cases in which the holders of such power refrained from abuses they wanted to commit because of their theoretical illegality. "
You mention Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, but is anyone knowledgeable about the legality of more recent stuff, like Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons and drone strikes?
For example, on Guantanamo, the way I read Wikipedia, Bush challenged that habeas corpus did not apply in Guantanamo, the US supreme court overruled the government twice, Bush's government passed legislation that retroactively made it legal, which was again decided against by the US supreme court. Since then, some prisoners have been freed or transferred, but nothing has changed about the general circumstances of the said facility operating.
On the other two points, I am more fuzzy. Having read some Benjamin Franklin lately, I am less sure if such things were intended, but I surmise it is possible that the practical powers of the US government do include, for example, operating secret prisons in Poland for purpose of torture? There was some noise in report, but nobody seems to have got charged with anything. ECHR ordered some signatory countries to pay damages to victims.
Anyway, I think commenter Emrah Dincer above presented the correct realist conclusion: "Power really resides where people think it resides." One could put the governments and judicial systems would make fine characters in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The printed letter in the books of law have got nothing in them to stop those in power doing whatever they please if enough people think those in power have the power to do so. People might even cheer, if the things those in power do are perceived as an attack to the perceived outgroup.
Proposition 1: "Elites have enough advantages ... that in the natural course of events, they always come out on top."
Proposition 2: "Trying to come up with a system where elites don't come out on top is an almost futile task, one where you will constantly be pumping against entropy."
Proposition 2 is a corollary of Robert Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy The law was articulated in Michels's 1911 book: "Political Parties". "Who says organization, says oligarchy". He also stated Scott's corollary: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
Proposition 1 is also a corollary of the Iron Law. It is also almost a tautology. But, there is a caveat. When we are discussing the subject of political regimes that govern a state and not subsidiary organizations like unions, schools, businesses, etc. we can observe that every regime creates the elites who run it. We can also observe that as long as the regime can pay the soldiers it will stay in power and continue the power of its elite.
A quick look at American history shows three regimes. The first was the Planter's Republic from 1787 to 1861. During the first 48 years of the Republic, the President was, except for the single terms of the 2 Adams, a slave owning planter. The cataclysm that destroyed that regime is called the Civil War. The second regime was the Republican regime run by northern white protestant industrialists. That regime went bankrupt in the Great Depression. The successor regime, still in place is rooted in the global financial system centered on Wall Street, the Federal Bureaucracy, and the Communications Media .
The current regime will sooner or later collapse too. It is a human institution run by humans. I think the 1.9 T$ is a warning. The need to print ever larger quantities of money to buy off the proles is a fatal disease.
Here's a sample excerpt from The Origins of Political Order on the competition/cooperation between various elite groups in the quest for political power up to the French Revolution:
"The state emerged in Europe when certain noble houses achieved a first-mover advantage in becoming more powerful than the others—the Capetians in France, the Árpáds in Hungary, the Rurik dynasty in Russia, the Norman royal house [in England] after the conquest. Their rise was due to some complex combination of favorable geography, good leadership, organizational competence, and the ability to command legitimacy. Legitimacy may have been the source of the ruler’s initial advantage, as in the case of István leading the Magyars to Christianity, or it may have followed upon the military success of a prince in vanquishing rival warlords and bringing about peace and security for the society as a whole.
The upper nobility might well be described as residual warlords who possessed their own land, armies of retainers, and resources. This group effectively governed their own territories, which could be handed down to descendants or traded for other assets.
The gentry were lesser elites with social status but who did not necessarily possess significant land or resources. They were more numerous than the nobility and distinctly subordinate to them.
The Third Estate consisted of tradesmen, merchants, free serfs, and others who inhabited towns and cities and lived outside of the manorial economy and feudal legal system.
In addition to these four groups, there was the peasantry, which constituted the vast bulk of the population. The peasantry was not, however, a significant political actor until it emerged as such in certain parts of northern Europe in the eighteenth century. Dispersed, indigent, and poorly educated peasants could seldom achieve significant collective action. Agrarian societies from China to Turkey to France saw the periodic outbreak of violent peasant rebellions, and all were eventually suppressed, often with great savagery. Those revolts affected the behavior and calculations of other actors, for example by inducing caution on the part of the state when considering raising agricultural taxes. On other occasions, peasant uprisings could help overturn a Chinese dynasty. But the peasantry could seldom act as a corporate group or force long-term institutional change that would take its interests into account.
The relationships among these five groups were illustrated in Figure 1. Except for the peasantry, these social groups were mobilized to a greater or lesser extent and thus could behave as political actors and struggle for power. The state could try to expand its dominion, while the groups outside the state sought to protect and enlarge their existing privileges against the state and against one another. The outcome of these struggles depended largely on the collective action that any of these major actors could achieve. The need for solidarity extended to the state itself. State weakness could be the result of internal cleavages within the ruling dynasty, organizational failures, a loss of belief in the ruling house’s legitimacy on the part of its retainers, or even the simple failure of a king to produce an heir. In addition, any number of alliances were possible among these different groups—between the king and gentry, between the king and the Third Estate, between the upper nobility and the gentry, between the gentry and the Third Estate, and so on.
In the cases where absolutism emerged, whether of a strong or weak variety, there were inevitably collective action failures on the part of groups resisting the state (see Figure 6). Where accountability was imposed, the state was relatively weak in relationship to the other political groups. Parliamentary government emerged when there was a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that could defend its interests."
It seems odd to describe Hugo Capet as having achieved a first-mover advantage when the Merovingians had already ruled France for centuries until they were deposed by their erstwhile servants the Carolingians, who ruled until they ran out of direct lineal Carolingians and Hugo was elected by the nobility to replace the last one. That transition seems to me to be of a distinctly different nature than e.g. William conquering England.
Did someone mention Hugh Capet? A name I recognise! From the "Purgatorio" of Dante's "Divine Comedy":
Dante combines two Hughs--Hugh Capet the Great (d. 956) and his son, Hugh (ruled 987-96)--into this composite "Hugh Capet," root of the medieval French dynasty of Capetian rulers. Of humble origins himself, according to Dante's version, Hugh Capet laments the corruption of his ruling descendants as they acquired power and privilege over the centuries. He prophesies events of particular interest to Dante: the coup d'état in Florence plotted by Pope Boniface VIII and staged by the Black Guelphs with the help of the French prince, Charles of Valois; and the abduction and humiliation of Boniface at the hands of forces controlled by King Philip IV (Philip the Fair) of France (20.85-90). Like Pope Adrian V, Hugh Capet lies prostrate on the floor of the fifth terrace to expiate the sin of avarice.
And he: 'I will tell you, not for any comfort
I await from there, but for the grace that shines
in you, reflected even short of death.
'I was the root of the evil tree
that casts its shadow over all the Christian lands
so that good fruit is rarely gathered there.
'If Douai, Lille, Ghent, and Bruges
but had the power, there would soon be vengeance--
and this I beg of Him who judges all.
'On earth I was known as Hugh Capet.
Of me were born the Philips and the Louis
who lately have been rulers over France.
'I was the son of a butcher of Paris.
When the ancient line of kings had all died out,
except for one, a gray-robed monk,
'I found the reins to govern all the kingdom
firm in my hands, and soon had in possession
such power and so very many friends
'that to the widowed crown
my son's head was put forward.
His issue is entombed as consecrated bones.
'As long as the great dowry of Provence
had not yet stripped my house of feeling shame,
it counted little, but at least it did no harm.
'Then, with fraud and pillage, the rape began
and afterwards, to make amends,
my heirs took Ponthieu, Normandy, and Gascony.
'Charles came into Italy and, to make amends,
made Conradin a victim and then,
to make amends, drove Thomas back to Heaven.
'I see a time, not very long from now,
that brings another Charles away from France
to make himself and then his kin more known.
'He comes alone, armed only with the lance
that Judas used to joust. And with one thrust
he bursts the swollen paunch of Florence.
'From this he shall acquire, not land,
but sin and shame, so much the heavier for him
the lighter he considers such disgrace.
'Still another Charles: once led, a prisoner,
from his own ship, I see him sell his daughter
after haggling, as pirates do for female slaves.
'O avarice, what more harm can you do us,
since our blood is so attached to you
it has no care for its own flesh?
'That past and future evil may seem less,
I see the fleur-de-lis proceed into Anagni
and, in His vicar, make a prisoner of Christ.
'I see Him mocked a second time.
I see renewed the vinegar and gall--
between two living thieves I see Him slain.
'I see that this new Pilate is so brutal
this does not sate him, and, unsanctioned,
I see him spread his greedy sails against the Temple.
Piggybacking to recommend Jan-Werner Muller's book "What is Populism?" It's easily-digestible and does a pretty darn good job of answering its titular question, especially when "populist" can sometimes feel more like a buzzword than an actual classification. https://www.amazon.com/What-Populism-Jan-Werner-M%C3%BCller/dp/0812248988
"He proposed a series of amendments which would bring the Turkish government more in line with international best practices. Although these looked good on paper, the end result was to destroy previous Turkish institutions with strong traditions and independent power bases, and replace them with new ones that Erdogan could pack with his supporters."
"This makes me a little more concerned about things like QAnon than I had been previously - if Trump had arrested various prominent Democrats for their role in a Deep State pedophile ring, that would be pretty similar to the tactic Erdogan used to seize ultimate power. On the other hand, the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup” and we need lots of “domestic terror laws” and a grand attempt to uncover the complicity of the mainstream Republican establishment and bring them to justice - that also feels a little too Erdoganesqe for comfort."
Nice attempt at balance. Still, I can't help noticing that, er, Trump *didn't* arrest various prominent Democrats for, you know, anything. Perhaps he would have, if he had appointed a more compliant AG than Barr. But then, he did appoint Barr.
Perhaps the noise about “domestic terror laws” will turn out to be as much nothing. If so, feel free to press me for an apology, but I am not optimistic.
On the other hand, the FBI did prosecute Flynn, Stone, Cohen, Papadopoulos and others - with Trump being sitting President. If anybody was looking for a diametrical opposite of an authoritarian strongman using the state to punish his political opposite, they wouldn't find a much better candidate than Trump. And yet somehow "but Trump also could!" is rolled out as a serious "balance" argument.
In truth, QAnon gets all this free PR from the press because QAnon is the only thing they have. Remove it, and the whole "authoritarian strongman" thing becomes obviously ridiculous. But if you take QAnon feverish fantasies as a potential "fact", you can do some balancing act, pretending it's the same as actions of actual Congressmen and government officers.
> But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly.
I think there's a missing step here, it's the one where all the People With Power (I don't like the term "elites" as I think it sounds too cool and gives these people more respect than they deserve) are _all_ strongly out of alignment with the majority of the population on an important issue. This is a situation that shouldn't really arise in a correctly-functioning democracy, but sometimes it does, because principal-agent problems are a thing.
In Turkey, the issue was the role of Islam in the state. In the US, it was illegal immigration. When both Hilary Clinton and Jeb Bush are opposed to taking action against illegal immigration, and the population is for it, then it creates an unstable situation likely to lead to a "populist" uprising.
The situation in the US, or Turkey for that matter, is far from resolved. Four years of Trump produced no meaningful action on illegal immigration, because it turns out that the President has less power than people thought, but the unstable balance remains.
Re: Trump and illegal immigration, I don't think it shows that the President has less power than people thought, I think it shows that he didn't really care. Real action on illegal immigration is simple. Make e-Verify mandatory and back it with robust enforcement. If there are no jobs, no one is coming.
Not only did Trump not do this, he didn't talk about it. Instead, he did theatre. I think that's deliberate, but I am, to say the least, not a fan.
Haven't got time for a long comment but agree with Tiago- c.f. UK. It seems to me that barriers to dictatorship are rarely formal. They're to do with the percentage of the population who wants one, or who can be hammered into a coalition that wants one. I'm sure the constitutional structure has an effect at the margin, but I think overemphasizing constitutional structure as a bulwark against dictatorship is one of the reasons why the US has a particularly screwy constitution.
Consider that unwieldy structures might prevent evil for a time, but also might be more likely to make people go "screw it, let's just throw the whole thing out so we can get stuff done".
I see little reason the liberals should gracefully give up the courts to the right, given the right's very recent less than graceful history on that front. The real solution to the supreme court is probably to reduce its power, not pack it or stop it from being packed.
I seem to recall Scott wrote an anti-libertarian faq, so it's a bit surprising to see he now identifies as libertarian.
Any speculation on why the EU didn't vwant Turkey?
Also, what's this thing about "the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban"? Presumably this is Erdogan's headscarf ban, so this would mean the EU agreed with Erdogan and this caused him to lose faith in them? Something here doesn't make sense.
I'm startled to hear about these "Gulenists" which held high posts in "a surprising number of countries". Are they still around? Is this sort of thing common?
...like, I feel like the moral I'm taking from this story is not "Erdogan slowly became a dictator through gradually taking over important institutions" so much as "there's a shadowy multinational group which has the power to topple major governments, and they showed up in Chapter Four and did most of the actual work and then vanished again". Is there a different book we should be reading which covers how the shadowy multinational group works?
The headscarf ban was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which ist n o t an EU institution, but an emanation of the Council of Europe, a larger organisation. Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Switzerland, Norway, and many others are members of the CoE while remaining outside of the EU (and of course now this is also true of the United Kingdom).
The headscarf ban is n o t Erdogan's policy. On the contrary, it is a symbol of top-down enforced secularism.
Thanks, that helps, but I still find I'm confused. Erdogan runs Turkey; if he wants to not have a headscarf ban, can't he just say "okay guys Turkey no longer has a headscarf ban"? Why does he care what the European Council of Human Rights thinks?
He wrote "A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto" about a year or so after the Anti-Libertarian FAQ, and when he reposted the Anti-Libertarian FAQ in 2017 he wrote "It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only."
On the other hand, the US Constitution is interpreted loosely enough that it can effectively be changed by a Supreme Court ruling. The 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection was weakened enough to allow racial segregation by Plessy v. Ferguson, then strengthened again by Brown v. Board of Education and related cases, followed by the ruling in Regents v. Bakke that racial discrimination was constitutional for some purposes; it was later extended by decisions such as Reed v. Reed (prohibiting legal gender discrimination) and Obergefell v. Hodges to forms of discrimination that the amendment's authors never considered (although IMO these decisions were correct and consistent with the amendment). Griswold v. Connecticut (overturning a ban on contraception) established a constitutional right to privacy which was not specified in the constitution but instead was based on the idea that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance"; this was extended by Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. The Bill of Rights originally bound only the federal government, but the court gradually decided that the 14th Amendment's provision that "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" had extended it to the state governments in various rulings from around the beginning of the 20th century onward (starting with Gitlow v. New York, regarding freedom of the press). In Wickard v. Filburn, the Court (under pressure from FDR's threat to pack it!) overturned the previously fundamental principle of federalism and strict limitations on the federal government's authority by interpreting the Interstate Commerce Clause (I.8: "The Congress shall have Power ... [t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes") to mean that the federal government could regulate more or less any economic activity with any effect on interstate commerce.
If the Constitution's text is difficult to change but the Supreme Court can interpret it in widely varying ways, that doesn't mean the Constitution's legal effects can't be changed, it means that the easiest way to change it is by appointing Supreme Court justices willing to reinterpret it.
This. It was weird to read Scott reel off "muh Constitution" civics noise. I guess he didn't read Moldbug carefully when he wrote the Planet-Sized Nutshell, because Moldbug describes and explains what happened to the American Constitution in much detail, quoting and citing many primary and secondary (i.e. primary history written by respectable academic historians) sources, and at great length (though with him, that's a given lol).
The advantage of approval voting is that it allows a charismatic milquetoast centrist to get elected.
The disadvantage of approval voting is that I'm not sure it allows anyone except a charismatic milquetoast centrist to get elected.
I'd like to see approval voting tried in earnest in meaningful elections in some nontrivial place for a few decades, to see how the political strategy landscape adapts to it, before adopting it on a wider scale. What kind of people would actually win elections? Once someone not-obviously-terrible got into power would they be practically impossible to dislodge? Would this actually be a good thing?
This is perhaps a non charitable interpretation, but those objections sound like the disadvantage is that it makes minority rule less of a possibility.
>Once someone not-obviously-terrible got into power would they be practically impossible to dislodge?
In current systems, are they not similarly impossible to dislodge?
But I agree, we need to see how it changes the political landscape. I think we could be surprised by how not-terrible a candidate can be under a different system.
I kind of like the idea of the head of state being a charismatic milquetoast centrist whose job it is to stare vaguely at the mess in Congress and try to get the parties to work together, occasionally handling crises via boring centrist means that both parties can agree upon, but usually doing nothing in particular.
Regarding the question of whether the type of "populism" coming from people like Erdogan is an inherently "right-wing" phenomenon, you'd be straightened out by reading a good book about Hugo Chavez' Venezuela. As far as I'm aware, that book hasn't been written yet, but when it does I think you'll find it to be an eerily similar story with many of the same tricks for subverting institutions.
It sounds like Erdogan, although gifted, was similar to most Turks: a working class Muslim, with roots in the hinterland of the country. And it sounds like he was a politician who rose through the ranks in the expected way until becoming prime minister/president. Whereas the natural American comparison, Trump, was a billionaire and a household name before he announced he was running for president.
I think this implies the pool of potential Erdogans in Turkey is much larger than is the pool of potential right wing populist U.S. presidents. The American Erdogan couldn't conceivably be a Republican politician who steadily rose from local to state/nationwide office, since that was exactly the type Trump, the only person resembling a right wing populist leader we have had to date, contrasted himself with in order to become the Republican nominee. And Trump being able to in large part self fund his 2016 campaign was important too, because he didn't have to rely on the Party as much and could therefore deviate from its orthodoxy. So basically just keep your eye on very prominent American billionaires.
"Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, ..."
This sentence mangles a lot of history. The Medieval period ends in the late 15th century. The Ottoman dynasty begins in 1299. Their home base was in western Anatolia between Ankara and Constantinople. They were quite expansionist from the 14th Century onward. They captured Bursa on the Sea of Marmara southwest of Constantinople and made it their capital in 1325. From there they expanded into the Balkans. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 ends the Byzantine Empire. Some see this moment as the end of the Middle Ages.
The Ottomans expanded east and west from Constantinople after that. By the middle of the 16th Century, they rule not just Anatolia and the Balkans but, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and the Hijaz. They claim the Caliphate in 1517 after the conquest of Egypt. The Ottomans are an empire and a caliphate, but none of this is Medieval.
The Ottomans ruled a multinational empire. Its peoples were organized into millets, under which different national/confessional groups lived under their own personal laws. Greeks were under the Orthodox Church, Armenians under the Armenian Church, Muslims under Shariah, Jews under Halakah, etc. Like any pre-modern imperial state, the relationship between the central government and the peoples in the territories was pretty loose.
The language of administration was Ottoman Turkish which was more Persian and Arabic than Turkish and was written in the Perso Arabic script. It was rarely spoken. It was not a literary language either. People spoke their national languages at home.
The modern nation of Turkey is a creation of the post-Ottoman Turkish governments. They rearranged the ethnic map of Anatolia by population exchanges with Greece and the Armenian Genocide. They created the Turkish language, so much so, that they have had to translate speeches Ataturk made in the 1920s so that they are intelligible to modern Turks.
Erdogan’s story reminds me of the rise of Chavez and then Maduro in Venezuela. They also systematically stacked institutions with their loyalists, notably their supreme court, military, and intelligence services. And they also made claims of coup attempts against them to their benefit, although I don’t know whether those were supported by evidence (setting aside the National Assembly’s formation of a rival presidency after the dictatorship was already established). I am not sure that your closing comments about left- and right-wing populism fit well against the Venezuelan example, as it seems the populism-to-dictatorship process was similar in many respects, but from the opposite political direction.
Matt A has probably the best comment but it's buried at a sub level comment so I wanted to signal boost him:
"From above, Scott quoted:
> even though Erdogan got only 33% of the vote, he ended up with 67% of the seats in Parliament
Based on this, a good take-away might be that we shouldn't have systems that grant a minority of voters supermajority powers. The policy solution would be strive to have policies that more closely align vote totals with power/representation in government bodies."
It seems like the obvious places to look next for readings on the topic would be Orban's Hungary (which is often claimed, I don't know how reliably, to have started the same process) and Putin's Russia (which, again as I understand, briefly flirted with being a democracy before just being a Putinocracy). I'm not sure what other countries you'd want to look at; most countries that were democratic before becoming dictatorships were democratic for only a very brief period, and I can't think of any better cases to look at if you're worried about the U.S.
All the countries you've mentioned are still theoretically democracies, though, and all those people could theoretically be removed from power peacefully by the ballot box, unlike true dictatorships like China. Even in Russia it seems like Putin wins the actual elections fair and square, even if he does feel the need to murder anyone who might theoretically be a threat.
Singapore is another weird example. As far as I can tell it's a perfectly functional democracy set up with good-faith democratic institutions... it's just that the People's Action Party has never been out of power since the founding of the country in 1959. (Then again, the Democrats haven't been out of power in New Orleans since 1872, and they don't seem to be doing such a good job of running the city as the People's Action Party.)
Yeah, most countries that ever have been democracies claim to still be democracies, along with many countries that have never been democracies. (DPRK, anyone?)
But also, democracies are really, really resilient. It's definitely important that they don't go bad, but it's hard to find examples of them doing so where the country was actually democratic for a significant period first.
"fair and square" is a bit ridiculous, especially with your following caveat. But yeah, if Putin loses the majority of the population (which could happen any day now, or drag for another decade or two...) then he'll have to cede power or "officially" become a dictatorship (and considering the number of corpses in the closets, starting with the false flag "terrorist" attacks that helped his first election, he'll only leave dead...)
He regularly describes himself as a "left-libertarian". He occasionally shortens that to "liberal" or "libertarian." I don't think this is the first time he's shortened it to 'libertarian' without first prefixing it with 'left-' earlier in the article, but that's about a 70% 'don't think', not a 95%.
1. Not sure how appropriate the "fighting against entropy" example is to Turkey, considering ita regular coups to keep it a secular democracy. Seems like the secularists are the ones fighting against entropy.
2. Seeing parallels with Hong Kong here, though the specifics are obviously different (and HK isn't exactly a democracy). Court-packing is the one that stands out the most, cf. the sentences for a taxi driver driving into a crowd of protesters and a girl throwing an egg. Another is mass arrests of the opposition, though under "national security" rather than corruption (which Mainland China uses as well). Of course, the most important difference is that it's under PRC rule, which means democracy is an uphill battle, since the HK constitution favors Beijing.
I wrote a lot about the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey (I was a journalist at the time) and I eventually came to the likely conclusion that it was a false flag.
The official story is that a mysterious cabal known as the Peace at Home Council (whose members are still unknown, five years after the fact) used a small cadre of generals (who were all Erdogan opponents) who launched an incredibly disorganized and ineffective coup attempt that was easily squashed (despite previous military coups being tremendous successes), all while acting as the agents of the sinister and all-powerful Gulen (who had a high-profile falling out with Erdogan several years prior.)
In response, Erdogan accused all levels of Turkish society, from the police to the journalists to the teachers to the hospital administrators, of being secret infested with Gulenist agents who were somehow involved in the coup and therefore needed to be thrown in jail. Of course, this list of targets for arrest included almost every anti-Erdogan voice in a position of power that could conceivably be reached.
None of this scans to me as the presence of a massive, well-organized conspiracy... if they were so pervasive why was their coup attempt such a pathetic failure? Far more likely is that Erdogan got some patsy generals to take the fall so he could round up all his enemies and throw them in prison.
At the time I too felt that this was more of a staged attempt by Erdogan which gave him the excuse he needed to crush his opposition. As you say, previous military coups had been successful but this time round they couldn't manage it? And by a strange coincidence, everyone who needed to be rounded up as an enemy of the people was an enemy of Erdogan? It all seemed way too convenient, along with a Sinister Islamist Extremist Movement to be the fall-guys.
The answer is obviously yes. If instead of a sleepy Biden we get somebody energetic and eloquent, of FDR mold, it wouldn't even be hard. They'd own the academia, the media, the entertainment industry, the big business (most of it), the internet infrastructure... I struggle to identify one important institution they wouldn't own at least a majority. Most (like academia, education and press) they'd own overwhelmingly. Courts may be a bit of an impediment, but well-placed SCOTUS packing combined with a series of federal judge appointments would solve this issue very quickly.
Everything else is basically ready - we have information delivery field itching for "fighting misinformation" (i.e. censorship, which will be directed by "experts" - guess who gets to appoint those), we have an established tradition of kicking people out of offices for wrongthink, we have semi-legitimized political violence - from the right people doing it, of course!, we have military in the thousands in the capital without anybody giving a whistle, we have at least half of the country believing that unless drastic measures are taken armed insurrection is imminent, we have the same half of the country believing foreign nefatious forces are controlling their opponents, we have FBI and intelligence services actively participating in politics and more than ready and willing to deliver "process crimes" against literally anybody, and now we have the top miliraty brass slowly but surely joining them too. And having active infrastructure to spy on literally anybody, maybe they don't even need to fabricate much to deal with their opposition... And if a random judge would object, there's always administrative state which can ruin anybody's life without the need for criminal law per se. And yes, of course, we have a religion to go with it, from soft-woke moderates who just want to tell people what to wear, what to eat, which books to read and so on, to hardcore CRT imams who are itching for full-blown racial discrimination laws and trillions-wide reparations budget that they would control.
If somebody who is really energetic, charismatic - and, say, has a good luck to preside over an economic boom, which frequently follows economic contraction (say, caused by a pandemic and lockdowns?) - which exactly institution is going to stop them?
> Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.
Right until the moment the coup actually happens, and then oopsie... I guess we'd be more vigilant in our next democracy, whenever that happens?
Interesting, but I don't think the powers that be would be willing to accept the "bad optics" of installing a dictator for life. What's the use, when you can keep the power in the same hands while swapping out the figurehead every four to eight years?
Well, technically Putin is not a dictator for life. He has been President, then Prime Minister, then President, then Prime Minister, then President again, then when his completely legit terms were nearing the end, by a miraculous coincidence Russia decided to change their constitution and reset the terms counter - of course, for ever President, not just Putin, who by another miraculous coincidence happened to be the President then... so all this talk about "dictator for life" is just the lack of imagination. And of course, he won completely honest elections each time - despite widespread conspiracy theories about it, there's no evidence recognized by a Russian court that there ever has been any election irregularities in Russia, at least none that could have influenced the election results.
So, you don't even need to swap anybody, just be a bit more imaginative.
This sounds snooty lit-crit of me to write, but I do need to call out Scott's diction:
"If he'd died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice [...] Young Erdogan decided that supporting Erbakan's crusade..."
"Crusade"? Seriously? Given who and what we're talking about, there's a much more apposite word that begins with J.
However, "crusade" has largely fossilized and lost its original meaning (nobody called a "crusader" today is suspected of mounting a horse and galloping to liberate Jerusalem), the J-word is very much alive and colloquially means a very specific very violent movements - which as far as I know Erdogan is not affiliated with, despite common religion.
He's indirectly affiliated with it, considering the Macron/Erdogan spat over coranic schools.
Also, the correct term is "Mujahideen" - "Jihadist" is a western neologism designed to separate the "bad guys" from the "good guys", even though they're basically the same guys.
My point is that mujaheddin *was* the term used before 2001 in *English* to refer to them ! (<= this one was the spelling that my *English* dictionary corrected me to, the previous one was from Wikipedia)
I think before 2001 the militant radical Islam was considered a regional issue of low concern for the West, and thus did not need a popular term to describe it. Once that changed, the terminology got "popularized", just as for example many diseases and health conditions that are common among the populace have popular names beside scientific names (flu, cold, heartburn, rash, etc.)
While it was certainly of lower concern, it was still a pretty important one in the proxy war that the two western blocs carried in Muslim countries. Your theory doesn't explain why, instead of the original English term having been simplified to something like "mugdin", a brand new term was created.
> Businessmen and tycoons who Erdogan needed swept aside got accused of tax fraud, or sometimes just audited with such a fine-toothed comb
How about that time when IRS turned out to be engaged in political persecution, and then their hard drives had mysteriously suffered an epidemic of crashes? Can anybody remind me whose tax returns were just recognized by SCOTUS as fair game for fishing expeditions?
> I wonder if we should trade off our ability to catch corrupt officials and tax evaders, in favor of very high burdens of proof for those specific misdeeds.
Ah, but the funny thing you don't even need to find the tax fraud. Any false statement, even the most trivial, would do. Any violation of a myriad of process rules (like speaking with a wrong person at a wrong time - hello "witness intimidation"!, or losing any paper - hello "destruction of evidence"!) would do. In a pinch, there's always RICO where no proof of the specific crime is needed. In the worst case, the process itself is a punishment - how much does it cost to keep a lawyer involved for years? How much would it cost to your family to do the same? To your business partners? To everybody you hold dear? What if we also apply 4am searches, civil forfeiture, account lockdowns, travel restrictions, redflagging and other niceties?
Just raising burden of proof wouldn't be nearly enough - about 95% of cases in the US don't need any burden of proof at all because they never even see the court. The state has a lot of ways to play dirty.
Yes, of course. Using security apparatus - including the administrative state - against political enemies doesn't seem to be something that never happens in the US. In the recent case there also wasn't any serious punishment to the perpetrators, and while Nixon actions are more or less universally considered to be villainy, I feel like IRS actions are seen differently depending on politics and there's no barrier to repeat it as soon as opportunity and need arises. While somebody who the Deep State considers to be an enemy (like Trump) would have very hard time pulling it off, somebody who is aligned with its goals would have no resistance at all to doing it at any time.
And of course comparing Kennedy and Nixon is very illustrative here. If Kennedy hasn't been a victim of an assassin and if he wasn't a Democrat, his actions and personal behaviour should have been seen way worse than Nixon's - but he's a Democrat and Nixon is a Republican, so all political historians agree that Kennedy is a saint and a martyr and Nixon is a devil incarnate.
> Just raising burden of proof wouldn't be nearly enough - about 95% of cases in the US don't need any burden of proof at all because they never even see the court.
Burden of proof still matters. What plea bargain defendants are willing to accept, if any, depends on what their chances are like if they choose to go to trial, I presume.
I suspect most defendants pleading out are not very good in evaluating chances over burden of proof, since they aren't the lawyers and they don't know which kind of proof the police might have. They will also be assisted by a public defendant that has 20 cases running simultaneously, so for her the incentive to plead out in any case where it looks remotely plausible is overwhelming. The calculus would probably go as "go to the court with 15 charges after which anything could happen, maybe you win, maybe you get 15 years in jail, or plead out on one count and get 6 months and we're done right now". Even if the defendant were a perfectly rational human with outstanding capability in rational estimation of chances (which most aren't) they don't have proper information to make informed decision substantially depending on burden of proof - and pretty much everybody else in the process will be pressuring them to plead out. So I don't think changing burden of proof alone would change _that_ much - unless the change is so radical it's obvious without any special education and long calculation of chances. I.e. if you make it "pretty much impossible to prove" - yes, that may change things, but that won't happen.
If we are talking about political persecutions targeting important people (politicians, businessmen etc.), they will be able to afford to have a lawyer advise them.
For the big boys, maybe, though as we learn from Gen. Flynn's example, sometimes it doesn't help - the State has much more money and many more lawyers than you do, and the clock doesn't work in your favor. Eventually your money runs out and you're forced to cut your losses. To discourage and neutralize more low-level supporters, even that wouldn't be necessary - most middle-class people couldn't afford even a small pressure from the State.
Most defendants pleading out are *guilty*. Making it substantially harder to convict guilty people, will enable guilty people (even ones with overworked public defenders) to negotiate better deals with less punishment. Which, in turn, will make crime a more attractive proposition.
Most everyone else, *wants* criminals to be harshly punished, on the theory that punishing criminals makes for less crime and crime is bad. If they see criminals getting slap-on-the-wrist plea bargains because actually convicting them is too hard, and they can't do anything about the "hard to convict people" part, they're going to ratchet up the sentences so that even after the plea bargains the punishments will seem fair to them. That's how we get three-strikes laws with mandatory life in prison for any felony. Or to make it even easier, we can go with the old English system where basically every crime the law noticed was an automatic death sentence, and the real action was in the private negotiations with the prosecutor.
If some poor schmuck, even an innocent one, winds up accused of e.g. car theft, they are going to have two choices. They can plead guilty and sit in jail for however long the people feel is appropriate for car theft, or they can demand a trial and if convicted spend *more* time in jail for having wasted the court's time. The harder it is to convict the actually guilty, the greater the extra penalty will be for making the court go through all that trouble. That's the one knob you actually get to turn.
Fascinating stuff! Aspects I'd like to understand better:
- The Gulenists. The post makes them sound like a cross between Scientology and the Mafia but I'm hesitant to accept that framing since it tracks so closely with the story Erdogan is pushing. One could, if motivated, tell a similar story about Catholics in the US-- minority religious sect (though 20% to the Gulenists' <2%), heavily involved in certain kinds of educational institutions, clear majority on the Supreme Court-- but (almost) no one's suggesting a conspiracy there. Is there a version of this where they're just a socially conservative faction that's unusually effective at education and networking? (And if so, what accounts for their falling-out with Erdogan?)
- The Europhiles. Normally I think Europhile = neoliberal = arch-nemesis of right-wing populism. How did they end up in Erdogan's coalition? For that matter, who was *out* of Erdogan's coalition? Scott's post mentions Europhiles, Islamists, the center-right-- who's left? The military? Socialists maybe? (Are they big in Turkey?) How did Erdogan hold such an overwhelming and broad coalition together?
- Scott's theory of light-touch populism being impossible. It's interesting and helpful for understanding current politics, but I worry that there's a hidden assumption driving the broader conclusions Scott draws. His model unduly privileges the idea of high-state-capacity, centralized, bureaucratic government as being "normal" when historically it's not. It's particularly jarring when he describes the managerial practices of the elites as "all the organic processes of civil society". From where I stand they're more like vampires puppeteering the corpses of those organic processes (local government and press, neighbor / kin relationships, churches, etc.). I'd like to see how Scott's typology might change if we stop holding the modern administrative state constant.
Indeed, historically it's not normal. But are you seriously interested to go "back" to pre-civilized times ? Bureaucracy is a pre-requisite for civilization, in particular for the modern nation-states. (It's possible that the Internet allows for a radically different method of gathering and processing information and then acting on it, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially for the acting part...)
And one more thing - changing US constitution also requires a simple majority. You just need to know where to place that majority - specifically, in the SCOTUS. SCOTUS has been able to turn Interstate Commerce Clause into "Congress can regulate whatever they like, as long as it can be sold", find various "rights" that never existed before in "penumbras" of constitutional texts, enable Congress to force people to perform any action by levying punitive taxes on not doing the thing, legitimize forcible transfer of property from one person to another as long as the state thinks the new owner would be more economically productive, and do many other things like that. And once you have the "living Constitution" proponents in the majority, there's literally nothing that one can't find in its penumbras. The text on paper remains the same, but who cares? It's just words, and US legal system has no real connection to these words beyond what SCOTUS allows to exist by their actions. And by now, this connection is so tenuous that "unconstitutional" has long become just a meaningless pejorative and SCOTUS is just one of many partisan institutions, routinely used in partisan political struggle. Just like the Koran stays the same, but it's the ruler that defines whether for specific country it means hijabs or no hijabs, the SCOTUS can decide for the US - and in appropriate circumstances, with the right majority, can decide hijabs - or masks - are now mandated and it's fully constitutional.
Obvious caveat: I am aware that there is a reasonable case to made that the written language of US constitution sets some limits on what interpretations are possible, so I am not agreeing.
However.
This whole framing "who is able to interpret the written book of law and make their interpretation stick no matter how twisted the interpretation is, and what role the living tradition plays on the matter anyway" reminds me quite much about one earlier debacle from some centuries ago, which started with one monk called Martin Luther in Wittenberg.
Thus, maybe there is something to be said for the Bible's feature that the text does not clearly and unambiguously specify any mortal person or Earthly institution as the ultimate authority concerning the matters of contention. (Okay, I am obviously referring to the the NT, which is very not much like a codified legal text, but a collection of teachings and events attributed to Jesus, some letters concerning the management of the church and a prophetic revelation about apocalypse; the OT specifies some procedures regarding high priests and kings in Israel, but understandably these are not considered applicable in this context.) Thus despite the obvious tendency of ruling and rule-making hierarchies to appear, such haphazard structure enables possibility some chance for a challenge and competition that can be viewed as legitimate by enough people for it to matter, especially so if the decisions by any hierarchy veer too far from the common sense interpretation of codified law and there is widespread access to the written texts.
The Indian right's weaponization of 'anti-corruption' movements to both defeat their political opponents and convince MPs to switch parties under threat of endless raids and prosecution is another piece of evidence that this sort of rhetoric is not to be trusted. I'm very convinced that it's worth increasing the likelihood that individual acts of corruption go unpunished in order to make the facade of eradicating it less easy to use as a coercive weapon, not least because these so-called reformers almost always end up being just as corrupt as their predecessors. Corruption is a symptom of weak institutions, and it cannot actually be rooted out through campaigns that target particular individuals instead of the structures and incentives that surround them. In fact, I would even make a stronger claim: 'high corruption' is the natural state of human society, and the few countries that have low corruption all became rich before they got rid of it. Nobody gets rich by eradicating corruption *first* -- rather, you want to ensure that your corrupt plutocrats are interested in growing the pie so that the value of their cut increases rather than just commandeering more and more of a fixed or shrinking pie.
This is not a right-wing/left-wing thing. It is simply an elites/masses thing. The dynamic you (I think correctly) describe is one in which a right-wing person who comes to power cannot rely on the unthinking loyalty of other elites in society in the same way as the left-winger does. But this is only because you have posited a left-wing cultural/academic elite. If you have a right-wing elite (I'm British - there are people old enough to recall a right-wing cultural/academic elite in this country) then the same dynamic would appear with an outside left-winger coming to power. That is precisely the dynamic one sees in Communist revolutions: the revolutionaries seize political power, but they cannot rely on the loyalty of the leadership of the armed forces, the police, the courts, the media, big business, the professions, universities, etc, and so these organisations need to be purged.
To put it another way, consider the difference between a Jedi and a non-Jedi coming to power in a modern Western country. The norm is non-Jedis, and they can rely on the unthinking support of non-Jedis running the other institutions. But when a Jedi comes to power (on the wave of popular protest against traditional left- and right-wing parties) and tries to set up a main Jedi Temple in the capital, and compulsory Jedi training for children, and Jedi warriors in the armed forces - well, you can imagine the kinds of pushback and foot-dragging and legal challenges that would ensue. So the Jedi finds it a good idea to find ways to install Jedis at the top of these institutions. Nothing right-wing or left-wing about it.
The upshot is that any society is most at risk of revolution from groups which are a combination of (a) popular and (b) not permitted elite representation. A big prudential reason for universities, arts organisations, media etc allowing right-wing views to be represented at high levels is to reduce the possibility of them being forcibly re-made should a right-winger come to power. (And vice versa in societies with right-wing institutions.)
Finally, just an observation, but while "“Take government control of industries” was a left-wing idea a few years, it sounds more and more right-wing as time goes on.
The issue is basing your definition of "left-wing" and "right-wing" on specific political parties, like these couldn't radically change in such a short amount of time as half a century.
'The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process'
I'm not sure that's the lesson here. The Republic of Turkey's secular institutions -- good or bad -- were installed inorganically by a dictatorship (Ataturk's). They then produced a (frequently authoritarian) elite often ruthlessly loyal to those institutions, and counter-elites hostile to them.
Erdogan has basically just gone about the same thing in reverse. The old secular elites still exist in the background -- either submitting to Erdogan or marginalised -- but he has gone about bringing down their institutions and recreating them to form a new elite loyal to his vision of society. How this will play out over the long term is yet to be decided.
So perhaps the real lesson is that regimes tend to be authoritarian until they have brought the elite and society to heel, then they may ease off after reaching a certain point of stability and security?
Also, at the end of the day the institutions in nearly all countries which select the elite are universities, and arguably these are quite 'inorganic': in the digital world there is no practical need for their credentials to have the power they have, but it serves the status quo for there to be defined routes to intellectual, elite and ultimately political legitimacy. And when it comes to choosing who should have credentials conferred upon them, the top schools often place a heavy emphasis on factors aside from raw merit.
Interestingly this mirrors something you touch on briefly in your article: in Turkey the university system was effectively rigged (inorganically) to keep out religious conservatives -- excluding them from an elite they otherwise had the ability to be a part of, and making them hostile to it. Could there be parallels with the US and the west at the moment?
Damn, I thought all the accusation against Kaczyński and PiS in Poland were absurd - not only because the opposition screamed "end of democracy is nigh" as soon as PiS got into power postion, and because the accusation under the previous rule were so obviously fake - but after this review I am not so sure.
"As a libertarian" Is this just meant to be provocative? I've yet to come across any coherent account of libertarianism that wasn't at bottom contrary in practice to the ends desired by the promoter. Don't you mean something along the lines of, "As someone who only favors government laws, policies, and regulations that I suspect, given whatever limited domain-specific understanding I have, are one the whole beneficial?" What do you mean by "libertarian" and should other people understand the term to mean what you mean?
Scott posted "A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto" on his old blog SSC back in 2013. He also posted "The Non-Libertarian FAQ" about a year or so before that which was arguments against Libertarianism, although when he reposted it in 2017 he said "It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas." So yes, as far as I know, Scott identifies as at least libertarian-ish.
Thanks for the links. IMO, it appears that he's just being provocative in the blunt statement in the piece. I mean, I also don't like "too much" regulation or social control, I like just the right amount of regulation and social control, not more, and not less.
And since we're born into the state of nature naked and with no regulation or social control, a reasonable default stance is that society should not introduce such "regulations", except when they would be useful, in which case we should have them. So I guess I am a "libertarian" like Scott, in that my position is that people who want regulation and social control solely for the sake of regulation and social control, even though it impoverishes society and makes people less happy, are ideological adversaries.
I support the good and deplore the bad, so I join with Scott in embracing our collective libertarianness and denouncing those who believe society should be directed toward the general promotion of misery and unhappiness. I sometimes forget who those people are though, perhaps the Rothchilds, maybe critical race theorists, or the Chinese, possibly muggles, mayhaps anti-smokers? Maybe abortionists, pedophiles, satanists, fornicators, communists, I dunno, I forget, but I'm pretty sure they're up to no good and could use a dose of good ole libertarianism to set them straight.
(This initially posted twice, so I tried to delete one, and it appears to have deleted both copies, so this is a second attempt to post the same thing.)
There's plenty of people who are well-intentioned with a policy that nonetheless has unintended bad consequences. A lot of libertarian critique of regulation focuses on just that, how well-intentioned policies can have bad outcomes.
Of course, there's also the libertarian critique that politicians are just as self-interested as CEOs, and political self-interest might not align with the populace (see public choice theory).
There are plenty of people who are well-intentioned about not having a policy, with bad consequences. I think things like meat inspection, dental licensing, widespread access to healthcare, and antitrust law are good, though they likely have some bad outcomes. One approach to policy preferences is to evaluate policies on a case by case basis and decide, through some democratic process, whether they are more beneficial than harmful. Sure, it's a suboptimal mess, but it's pretty much the only option in the real world. To me Scott's use of "libertarian" is just stating a bias that caution is warranted and there are often unforeseen consequences. That's true, but there are also often harms that can and should be addressed.
The Myth of the Rational Voter provides a solid critique of democratic approaches to decision-making. Voters have consistent biases, such as anti-market, anti-foreign, make work, and pessimism biases, and these biases lead to voting for bad policies. And given the incentives involved in voting, where expending a lot of effort to become informed and reduce your biases still leads to your vote counting just as much as your ignorant neighbor (which is a less than a one in a million chance at your vote being decisive), it doesn't pay to become informed.
For another good take on why we shouldn't expect good results from political decision-making, see David Friedman discussing market failure, and why it's an exception in private markets but common in politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vht--IPjikg
Not sure if "And since we're born into the state of nature naked and with no regulation or social control" is part of the satire, but we aren't : humans are social animals, there's a reason why exile was often used as a punishment close to being a death sentence.
As far as I understand it, populism used to be associated with left-wing economic policies that would have some immediate effect on poorer workers (e.g. protectionism, enforced wage increases) while cutting against mainstream economic theory about what's best for the whole economy.
(I guess that the lesson is that fundamentally, left-wing parties are concerned about the power of the working class, and any specific policies about protectionism and immigration are contingent on the situation.)
I don't know if the argument extends from food safety to corruption, but it is plausible that prosecuting low-level corruption is more expensive than ignoring it when a country is still low-income or middle-income. The argument about limited police resources is definitely relevant.
Alternatively, perhaps we should adopt the heuristic that corruption in such countries is too rampant to actually stamp out, and therefore most corruption investigations are themselves corrupt. Maybe that just squeezes the excuse to some other crime instead, though.
Re: populism. Populist leftism definitely exists. The first image on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism is an OWS sign. Bernie and AOC are probably the most notable American leftist populists. Yes, they aren their supporters tend to be educated and work in influential knowledge professions, but I think what matters more is the group's own perception, and in particular their rhetoric. They try to position themselves as defenders of the poor against the exploitative rich, and use similar language as right-wing populists, just with different groups as the "people" and the "elite."
There was a clear pattern to the repression of the Islamist movement in Turkey. The army and the judiciary felt that they did not have the backing to totally eradicate them (like they did to the communists), but kept picking the most egregious examples and pruning them with political bans and jail time. This has created an environment of artificial selection in the Islamist movement where the most cunning, skilful and politically savvy individuals easily rose up to the top, as the less savvy people around them were taken out by the military. Such people had no qualms with breaking the rules, since the rules were obviously rigged against them and wielded non-charitably. This is the environment that formed Erdogan's political personality and made him thrive.
This situation has a clear parallel to the contemporary Western countries where it is becoming increasingly acceptable to censor and ostracise (but never entirely eradicate) political actors who do have popular backing. Trump and the new wave of "counter-domestic terrorism" rhetoric is the prime example but this is far from unique. Such weak but unfair and unpopular repression risks breeding leaders who have the moral conviction and the political savvy to really burn it all.
Both this deep review by Astral Codex Ten and selden's a-must comment somewhere in the threads are well worth reading: multiple analogies (in the USA and in Europe) come to mind despite the disclaimer.
An advantageous and unique geopolitical location of Turkey, poised on the map to rule as a trading and military power, is curbed by the inner squabbles and frequent rotations of elites... Hard to say, for the best or the worst, as the male-populist democracy is defended by feared Islamic fundamentalists by non-democratic means, and the Western and EU- style democracy is defended by all-male multiple military coups, supported by women's liberation movements...
What a puzzle, what an invitation to think outside boxes... Erdogan's predicament on a personal level is well-analyzed in this balanced article and well-complemented in the selden's comment.
Off-topic, I only run into this blog due to the NYT scandal, the moral of which is "never talk to reporters" :( of NYT: it is an outrageous bridge of professional ethics, what they have done tp Astral, and in combination with their recent gang-style jumping of a distinguished reporter, ousted after being provoked by his bored entitled charges on a Peruvian trip, and other mini-elite rotations of their own, NYT as a venerable newspaper is losing readers' respect, actually re-directing to a freer to self-express bloggers.
In a broader sense, NYT is getting rid of "competition" both in their inner bickerings and online, because nobody in their opinion can have a voice but the outlets aligned with their own wildly swinging "party line" at each given instant. This sucks!
Henrichs The Weirdest People in the World kind of kills modernization theory and Inglehart, and thus partly the thrive/survive model. The new interesting question becomes how to make a culture weird and abolish kinintensive institutions. Japan did it throught the Meijirestauration, and China came a long way though obviously not all the way to democratic ideals. MENA-countries may be the furthest from Weird, and the question becomes why - is it Islam and the Ok for cousin marriages? Anyhow, Turkey seems like the perfect case study, telling us something about what will happen if we try to force Weird:ness on an islamic/kinintensive/nepotistic population. The constant corruotion errode the Proto-weird elites, which by the way is less weird than embedded in informal contacts and nepotism, ie kinintensive structures. And the authoritarian ubdercurrent is there to be channeled through Erdogan when time comes to scale back the Weirdness.
I have to admit that when Scott declares himself a Libertarian, I don’t know what he is talking about anymore than what today is a conservative.
In anycase, in the political sphere, In the 2020 presidential election, the Libertarian Party candidate, Jo Jorgensen, gained 1.2 percent of the vote, less than half the party’s 2016 election result.
I find myself agreeing with that I don't know what declaration of being a libertarian practically means today either, both in general and in author's case in particular. Anyhow, the linked posts and comments therein may tell something about what kind of discussion about the matter there had been had in past, however.
Great post, thanks. My only solution (to no dictator here in US) is to make the congress take back the power they have given up to the president. I don't know how to do that.
What does suggestion number 3 mean? Hacking the 2/3 majority sounds like getting around it. Are you in favor of further gutting of the filibuster?
Dystopian vision of US. Gulen schools = Elite colleges and uni's. Control of media and message is already going on. All we need is populist president from the left to pick up the reins and run with it. (I couldn't read all the replies and still get out into the sun today.)
A quibble on where the lines get drawn between you, the elite, and me, the hoi polloi. I strongly suspect terms such as elites and the populace are bankrupt shells, standing in for little else than attempts at in-group/out-group distinctions. Witness the example of "Passion of the Christ" as an anti-elite production, but one clearly produced by people who are elites. And me? I used the term hoi polloi and I work in the media, so I'm a cultural elite. But I went to a public college, so I'm a man of the people? In a coastal state? Elite! But one in the mid-Atlantic that's won numerous national championships in revenue-producing sports, so back into the unwashed masses? I dunno, but in the US at least (your mileage may vary in other countries), when you scratch the anti-elites, it's easy to see a whole lot of eliteness right underneath the signifiers of populism. What does it all mean? I've been coming to the hypothesis that any anti-elite movement in the US that claims to be punching up can easily be seen as punching down without having to contort one's self into too painful of a position. Secondary hypothesis: We have it pretty good in my country. So good that you can't create any movement with enough power to demand attention that is not arguably elite along some metric.
"Populist" just tends to mean "widely popular democratically elected official the media/academic and/or business corporate elite don't like." They've only succeeded in making it pejorative the last few years.
Both of these recommendations sound good, but they don't apply to this particular example.
1. Erdogan rose to power as prime minister, not president. Turkey's president had effectively no power before a referendum in 2017 changed Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Conveniently, this was shortly after Erdogan found himself term-limited as prime minister.
2. Turkey is a multiparty system and typically has 4 parties represented in parliament. Most democratic governments in Turkey from the 1960s-2002 were led by a coalition.
"I think this is the main reason why Erdogan's example doesn't generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws. Erdogan rose to power on credible promises to help people disenfranchised by the old system; by the time he turned the tables and started disenfranchising others in turn, it was too late to root him out. "
I don't think this is really Turkey-specific; in fact, I think this is the most common path to dictatorship in the modern era. Certainly if you dive down into the details you'll find "Turkey's unique flaws", which aren't exactly the same as Venezuela's unique flaws, Cuba's unique flaws, Egypt's unique flaws, Rhodesia's unique flaws, etc, etc. But there's generally a large number of (usually poor) effectively disenfranchised people who feel they are getting a raw deal from the present regime, and there's a Chavez or a Castro or a Nasser or a Mugabe (etc, etc) who aside from personal ambition also sincerely wants to help those people.
And I suspect *doesn't* specifically want to be a dictator, but the reason the people he's trying to help are poor and disenfranchised isn't just because the top people in the old regime were Evil Oppressors. So when he sweeps away the old regime and things don't automatically get better, when he tries to implement reforms and finds that the remaining power centers in the nation are opposing him, well, the poor oppressed people need to be helped and if anyone is getting in the way of that, well, *those* people need to be disenfranchised. And it's easy to make yourself believe it is *good* to disenfranchise those people, because they are the Obstructionist Deep State (or whatever).
So the lesson shouldn't be "It won't happen that way here because that was a Turkey-specific thing". The only Turkey-specific thing about it was that the specific set of poor disenfranchised people the proto-dictator was trying to help (or cynically use to climb his way to power) were Islamists. In the United States, it won't be Islamists. But the rest of it, will probably look a lot like Erdogan in Turkey.
also,
"In this model, left-wing populism would be someone trying the same thing, except using economic rather than cultural class war. I don’t know enough about this to have a good feeling for whether it has exactly the same pathologies or subtly different ones."
I think in this model, left-wing populism is going to manifest as communism, or if that's a dirty word as some communism-adjacent form of socialism. The elites, as you note, find themselves at the top of everything, which means they're at the top of the economy. And first in line to claim the economic benefits, e.g. yachts and private jets and mansions. This may still be the best possible outcome for everyone, because "Elites manage the economy as efficiently as possible and then selflessly give it all away" isn't a thing humans are going to do. But when there's a big enough economic downturn and the Elite are conspicuously not going hungry, it's going to be real popular to say that the Elites owning all the factories and deciding how much to pay the workers, the Elites owning all the apartment buildings and deciding what rent to charge, is part of the problem and so the popular will is to take (operational control of) those things away from the Elites and give it to, well, there will have to be some centralized committee representing the people en masse.
So if you're looking for what form the pathologies will take, I think the pathologies of communism, "Bolivaran socialism", etc, are farily well documented. They aren't identical to the pathologies of right-wing populism, but some of them look pretty close.
> "Anti corruption campaign" seems to be a code word for "arresting the enemies of people in power", whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China. I'm not sure what to do about it without leaving corruption in place, but, uh, maybe we should leave corruption in place. Hard to say.
This is wrong, but only because of a lack in perspective. People who live in non corrupt countries are really bad at simulating how everyday corruption is in some parts of the world and just how damaging that is to society. There are countries where it is common and expected to bribe teachers for your kids grades, bribe government officials to not interfere in your business... the list goes on and on. It also infects everyone. Not bribing people puts you at a significant disadvantage, but bribing people then makes you forever guilty of bribery if you ever upset the wrong person. This actively suppresses any kind of dissent. It also results in a less equal, less fair more paralyzed society and sinks trust in any kind of public institution.
So - if you have a society past the "total societal corruption threshold" (Turkey, China, India... etc) then anti-corruption campaigns are bad because everyone is corrupt and the campaign will only go after whomever the people in power want to go after.
But, in countries that aren't past that point, anti-corruption campaigns are good because we need to get rid of corrupt people. Both because corruption is bad, and because we really, really want to avoid having our society slip past the total societal corruption threshold.
It gets even worse : in my experience a lot of people in these countries don't believe that it's even possible to have it otherwise, and when you give examples where you *didn't* have to use bribes to do X, they don't believe you.
I'm surprised by the lack of commentary here about the role of the military in the Turkey example vs. the U.S. and West generally.
Clearly in the U.S. the military has an enviable nonpartisan reputation - and consistent track record of not interfering with the election process. That contrasts with a significant number of countries that have experienced a Turkey-style drift toward authoritarianism.
It was notable that Trump rather desperately switched out a significant number of Pentagon and Intelligence nominees in the weeks immediately preceding the election and inauguration. FWIW I'd argue several of those 'acting' (not approved by Senate) changes bolster the case that he DID think a post-election coup was possible.
And yet it failed. Despite some questionable delays in approving National Guard support for the Capitol, there were several important signals sent by the Joint Chiefs indicating that they would not play ball. It sure would be interesting to have access to the Pentagon email servers for the month of Jan - to confirm or deny what those political appointees were really doing.
That's definitely possible - alternate explanation being that he anticipated a contested election, and wanted to lessen the chances of being removed from office by the military.
Point being that in many undemocratic power transfers the military effectively has veto powers, yet we in America seem to be reasonably distant from that reality despite Trump's recent attempts to politicize the institution.
I think the left-wing populism equivalent of having to crush the natural processes of the elite culture and politics is the basic premise of the "I, Pencil" documentary. The emergent order of the modern economy is far too complex to centrally plan and every heavy handed state intervention is crushing that emergent order and coded price information. I think the parallels are in fact quite extensive -- think of it from the perspective of your own writing on the cost dilemma regarding health care or higher education.
This book review resonated with me a lot. Probably, because I live in a dictatorship which somewhat tries to resemble democracy. I'll have to reflex a bit about it all, there seems to be some interesting insights between the lines. For now, I'd like to point this:
"I wonder if we should trade off our ability to catch corrupt officials and tax evaders, in favor of very high burdens of proof for those specific misdeeds."
This resembles 10% barrier, invented to prevent fundamentalists from holding power and which allowed Erdogan to get a majority with only 30% votes. Such ideas may work for a while but when they fail, they fail hard and right into tyrrany.
I mean, in my country we've implemented exactly this. One can make a full scale investigation with documental proofs and videos made from drone, showing huge palace, costing approximately billion of dollars, given as a bribe to the president of the country, post it on youtube, get tens of millions of views and still it's not enough proof to even start an official investigation of the matter.
And then the leader of non-govermental non-profit organisation which made the investigation will be jailed for obviously fake crimes. In modern Russia corruption investigates you.
So, maybe making its easier for the officials to get away from societal control is a bad idea? If the goverment controls the court, no amount of burden of proof is high enough for them. And if corruption is easier to conduct, it seems to be easier for the goverment to take over the justice system.
Maybe I missed the part where you talk about this, but America doesn’t legislate purely by simple majority or supermajority. I don’t know if those aspects of Turkish or British government translate.
In America, bills and resolutions are enrolled by simple majority of both houses, tax increases are 3/5 majority and must come from the House of Representatives, vetos (by a roughly simple majority directly elected president) can be overriden by s 2/3 majority, constitutional amendments are 2/3 majority plus the States’ ratification.
The principle is that neither pure strategy is enough. If you always need supermajorities then you have long periods of gridlock punctuated by massive winner-take-all tornados of laws. If it’s all simple majority then the whole government is fragile.
This is precisely the problem with the modern veto. The modern veto can be wielded like the Turkish “soft coup” - by email from an office and takes 3/5 of the votes to override. This is very recent history - only the last few decades - but it converts all those simple majority rules into 3/5 majority rules. Effectively we have 100 mini presidents! That’s not how the system was designed. (There’s also the so-called Hastert Rule, which is overtly minoritarian. And gerrymandering! If a system works, you can break it by changing how it measures the world.)
I think the modern veto is one of the major sources of governing partisanship. If you can break with your party line to get tangible wins that your constituents care about, then you have an incentive to work across the aisle. Without that, you’re basically only ever thinking about how to keep your bloc in line so you can vote on your shared priorities.
Yes, and I think Scott needs to get a bit more educated about what's been happening with our courts recently (as well as historically) before so casually aligning himself against the anti-democratic-sounding term, "court-packing."
Ugh. Another hot mess, typical of today's libertarian disconnection with American democratic politics.
Way too many false equivalencies to unpack here, along with naïve justifications for courting disaster (maybe we just shouldn't worry about corruption because the term tends to get hijacked by demagogues??)
I'll just point out a primary misunderstanding about our democracy, which Scott says is "populist" by default definition.
No, we are designed as a democratic republic. where SOME of us become policy experts, politicians, leaders, etc, so that the rest of us can pursue full and happy lives. The idea that our representatives should be sticking their fingers in the air on a minute-to-minute basis (thanks Twitter) to determine policy is warped. We are indeed living through such a low point currently, where demagogues like Trump, Cruz, Graham, etc have totally abandoned any interest or pretense in governing by principles or rational analyses. Their ONLY methodological interest in "serving the people" has become a machine-like tweaking of volatile groups who might keep them in power. They are empty shells when it comes to the job of improving society and people's lives. Just look at their entire focus now: limiting voting (after Roberts famously declared we'd outgrown the Voting Rights Act).
I do agree that our Constitution is an impressively stubborn document. But I don't think Scott grasps the magnitude of the growing insidious cultural resistance to it. Yes, it's exasperatingly sluggish (just ask African Americans how quickly Reconstruction succeeded), but the more popular it is to disparage its effectiveness (e.g. via simplistic, smug "none of the above" posturing) the more it is genuinely put at risk.
We are perilously close to a breaking point where too many people are throwing their hands up declaring "the system is broken" -- and with false equivalencies such as the many abounding above, you are playing directly into the hands of the chaos agents who are intent in moving us toward authoritarianism. Make no mistake: there certainly is a point of no return, and we may well be the generation responsible for passing that point.
1: "false equivalency" is a nonsense accusation. Analogies aren't true or false.
2: vague claims of "many" "abounding" "false equivalencies" is just a fancy way of saying "I didn't like it". If you don't like an argument, it's on you to point out which one and why you think it doesn't work
So, how to dismantle this type of regime? What are the examples of (preferably right-wing) populist governments, bordering on dictatorships, which have been dethroned by something other than military coup?
This is a very accurate description of Erdogan's dictatorship, and yet I think that Scott got the main point completely wrong: that any of this is specific to Turkey.
Of course, it is specific in *some* sense. The parties are called differently in other countries, the allies are aligned a bit different. And yet, the same story repeats again and again in dozens of countries. The following story applies with just minor modifications to
Turkey, Erdogan (since 2002)
Simbabwe, Mugabe (1980-2017)
Russia, Putin (since 1999)
Algeria, Bouteflika (1999-2019)
Ethiopia, Abiy (since 2018)
Nigeria, Obasanjo (1999-2007)
Tanzania, Magufuli (2015-2021)
and many, many more. If we focus on the methods and leave out the initial phase, it also tells the stories of Orban in Hungary, Kaczinskis/Duda in Poland, Sisi in Egypt.... You get the point.
And so goes the story:
The old government and elites are widely distrusted, with good reason. They are corrupt, or even violent and oppressive. A young man of integrity, somewhat an outsider, comes to power (sometimes by election, sometimes in other ways). Often he already has a record as a succesful local politician. In any case, his main point is his integrity, and he promises to clean up the country. He fights corruption, follows a policy of conciliation towards oppressed groups, is popular in large parts (though maybe not all) of the people, and gets international praise. He does a lot of things right, people support him, the economy booms.
However, he finds that the old elites are in his way, and are still damaging his country badly. The fight against corruption is difficult when the old networks protect each other. He becomes more aggressive in seizing them: running trials against oligarchs, replacing old judges with uncorrupted ones, cutting the independence of the military, reaching out for the media. This is not a single coup, but takes years, or even a decade. (The details here depend on the country. The military is not always a thread. The point is that he fills influential positions with loyal supporters.)
Sooner or later, some of his allies start to disagree with his methods. They also start to become his oppponents, later his enemies. He fights them so that he can bring his country on course. Eventually there is a (presumed or real) coup or even assasination attempt against him, which involves some former allies. He answers with force. Further cleansings in his own party, to remove traitors. Institutions associated with the coup are banned. He is still popular, and the coup is condemned by the people, although they don't exactly approve the violence he uses. Influential positions are now controlled by him.
At some point, things like economic crises happen. It doesn't really matter whether it is the dictator's fault or not. Now further allies turn away from him, but he has become paranoid and sees/treats them as traitors. Now loyalty is the only coin that counts. Ironically, he has re-introduced all the old problems: corruption, oppression, violence.
Probably not all of them started with good intentions. But some definitely did. Mugabe was the democratic hope for a whole continent. Obasanjo is co-founder of Transparency International. (It is harsh to put him in this list. When his attempts to seize permanent power failed, he withdrew without violence. But he did try.) And pretty much all of them used the same method: stay within the legal system, but place loyal people in all positions of power. Usually this involves controlling the media. Sometimes this involves banning parties, changing constitutions etc, but theses things were usually *after* they had gained complete control.
I recognize the pattern and agree that this is real, but you can definitely think of way more examples than I have. (I can add Nasser, I suppose, but he came to power via an honest coup, not an election.)
Are there any book recommendations you can share with me? I'd like to gain your knowledge of recent history.
I find this hard to answer, since I mostly haven't used books, but rather I have read consistently the international parts of news sites. So I can't offer one book which covers all. But a very prototypical case is Robert Mugabe, on which the following book seems very good:
"Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future" by Martin Meredith.
Going beyond this, this book promises a lot of insights into African politics:
"Dictators and Democracy in African Development: The Political Economy of Good Governance in Nigeria" by Carl LeVan. This might end up on my own read list.
As an afterthought, Xi Jinping in China also fits this pattern so far. It's a bit harder to tell since we don't hear a lot of interna from the communist party. Before him, obviously there was already "dictatorship" by the communist party, but that was different. There wasn't a single dominating person. Other than his predecessors, Xi
- has started an anti-corruption campaign that is actually successful. Really, it works well, he is generally acclaimed for it, even by initial sceptics. But it also happened to sweep away his most dangerous rivals (like the "gang of four"). A lot of new people came into powerful positions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were quite loyal to Xi.
- has gained much more personal power over the military (chairman of the Central Military Commission) and the communist party (chairman of the National Security Commission of the Chinese Communist Party).
- has successfully removed the term limits for leadership in China.
- has established a cult around his own person, not just around the country or the party.
At the same time, I totally believe him that he does all this to the Greater Good Of China, that he sees himself as the best man for this position, and that he believes he knows best what is good for china. He gracefully shares his Thoughts with us, and they have been incorporated into the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.
So far it worked out well. (As it did in the first decade of Erdogan or Mugabe or Putin.) But on the long run, dictators can easily become a single point of failure. If they get something wrong, it might not be easy to convince them otherwise, especially if they have found that allies with slightly different political opinions end up being their enemies. Perhaps Xi will do better. But if we look for the one person in the world who poses the largest thread for the Great Revival Of The Chinese Nation, then it's probably him.
Obasanjo was in the list, but he did accept when his attempt for permanent presidency failed, and retired. I think this was really noble.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia looked for a while like she would use her power to take influence on judges. It looks a bit like she actually tried but realised that it's wrong, and did not do it again, and she had a really strong positive impact to her country.
The really hard part seems to be to let go of power. I know German history well, and even the great post-war political heroes (Adenauer, Kohl) would not go until they are absolutely forced to, and stayed bitter about it. Merkel seems to be the first to actually go volunatrily. (You could count Willy Brandt, but he rather resigned for personal disappointments.)
The bad news: Apparently there were less than 10 in the modern era.
The good news: There are (very few) examples of really bad guys like Julius Nyrere who apparently realized that they had ruined their country, stepped down, and tried to help clean up the mess.
Well, everything in this is just wrong about Putin. He wasn't neither particularly young nor an outsider. He has never fought corruption. He was an old failed power's appointee. He never won competitive elections. He was just more or less successful in following the right-wing trend after the years of economic troubles during perestroika and 90s. There was never a coup against him.
There's no allies that turn away from him and are of any political significance. There's nothing ironical about him, it was all clear and boring from start.
It is correct that there was no coup against Putin, and that he doesn't have a large record of early allies who turned against him. Though by now, he has exchanged a lot of local governors, and the analyses that I have read claim that the replaced governers were probably chosen because they lacked personal loyality to Putin.
When he first became premier in 1999 (and president one year later), he was 47, which was considered very young for the office, and he was almost unknown to the public, and not even famous in the political class. He did not have to win elections right at the beginning, but a good part of his power in his early years came from being very popular. Whether it was his merits or not, Russian economy was really successful at this time (especially compared to the post-communist chaos that also persisted under Yelzin), and the Russian public attributed this success to him. Elections like 2000 or 2004 may not have been 100% trustworthy, but there was very strong support from the people, at least for another decade.
In his methods, he fits the picture very well. He did use legal allegiations to bring down his rivals, like Khodorkovsky. He established loyal supporters in all important positions of society. He installed new oligarchs who owned him personally. (He did not remove all of the old ones, but the ones that were most against him.) He installed loyal supporters in the media, in courts, and since 2013 also local governors. I find it fair to say that loyalty is the only coin that counts for him nowadays. And Russian economy has stopped doing well some time ago, too.
well, it's an example of how all this makes sense until you actually observe the whole context. Putin wasn't particularly old, but his competitors and other prominent figures were even younger. His propaganda changed this narrative backwards - like he was the only person to hope for etc, added some strongman rhetorics, but at the time he was a most cautious pussy ever, never getting any competitive elections despite popularity claims. His legal allegations against Khodorkovsky were ridiculously weak. At the same time he appointed many high-profile opposition members to governor and ministerial positions, further dividing opposition while exploiting its expertise. Also some of very loyal old friends were easily disregarded. And all that for a reason - he's a special services person who recruits and plays with them as assets and expects them to do the same. It's not some commonplace loyalty concept, it's the system rules and methods of people control through getting compromising information, secret killing threats, paybacks etc.
There are serious parallels with the anti-corruption Car Wash operation activities in Brazil, which have been described as a political project, and culminated with the downfall of the populist center-left Workers Party and the openly pro-dictatorship far-right and partially military-backed Bolsonaro. One of the consequences of the extreme focus on anti-corruption was a generalized lack of trust in politics that cleared the way for "outsiders" like Bolsonaro. However, with the government's failure to make efficient political alliances and with the probable return of the Workers Party to the political scene, it's unlikely that Bolsonaro will make it to a second term.
(the parallel I'm drawing is anti-corruption being used to deliberately damage liberal democracy)
>If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan".
NO! No. No, it is not. That is really, really wrong. In fact, I'd hazard to say that is so wrong that if you took a monolingual English speaker and a monolingual Turkish speaker - assume the English speaker has read about Erdoğan, and obviously that the Turkish speaker isn't living under a rock - and asked them both about "air-do-wan", neither of them would understand what you're talking about.
Erdoğan is pronounced [ˈæɾdoan]. Its edit distance from the spelling is 2. The e is pronounced [æ], and the ğ is silent. Note the COMPLETE ABSENCE of a [w]. There is no [w]. If you only learn one thing from this post: there is no [w] in Erdoğan.
A native English speaker will read air-do-wan as something like [ɛəɹdowɑn], perhaps [e:ɹdowɑn] or [eəɹdowɑn] - in other words, you're getting literally only the middle syllable right. Drop the w, and you've got two syllables right. Native Turks will probably forgive you for getting the first syllable wrong, as you can't write [æ] in English (it's the sound a makes in the words "at", "bad", "tramp"), and Anglophones are famously bad at trills and taps.
You'd really do better just reading it phonetically and pretending the breve isn't there: [ɛɹdogɑn]. Then you'd still be pronouncing it wrong, but wrong in such a way that anyone from anywhere will understand what you're saying.
I'd really appreciate if you deleted that first line. Being wrong occasionally is fine. Actively teaching people to say things wrong is not.
I'm not sure if your complaint is "instead of posting the closest English-comprehensible approximation you should post the IPA" or "this is actually the wrong English-comprehensible approximation". I don't really care about the first, I do care about the latter, suggest a better English-comprehensible approximation to me and I'll put it in.
I did listen to people pronouncing it on YouTube a few times, and it sounded like "air-do-wan" to me.
My interpretation of the post is that "air-do-an" would be the best you could do.
"Do-an" _does_ sound very close to "do-wan" so I could see why it would sound like that from your YouTube videos, but presumably telling people to say "do-an" would get them closer to the correct pronunciation.
As a (British) native English speaker, "air-do-wan" pretty much exactly replicates what I hear when people say "Erdoğan". I've visited Turkey, had conversations with Turkish speakers about him, and when I say "air-do-wan" I have received compliments on my pronunciation (though maybe I'm just getting sympathy points for not butchering and saying "arr-do-gan")
Also, I'd be really interested to know what percentage of people understand IPA. I'm a reasonably educated person with reasonably educated friends, and I don't think I've ever come across someone who can decipher IPA.
Is this a common skill which I'm just completely lacking? Or is it as niche as I imagine it to be?
Define "decipher". I know some IPA symbols, mainly for the sounds that are common in English or missing from English but sufficiently common outside of it, but there are tons of random IPA symbols out there. Then again, I enjoy learning linguistics.
Having it written in IPA makes it easy to look up even if you don't know the sound (maybe less so if you haven't studied phonetics enough for "voiceless velar fricative" to be comprehensible, but Wikipedia also has recordings of sounds).
I enjoy linguistics and read lots of stuff in the area (though related to history and classification/genetic ancestry moreso than messin' around with phonemes), and I have no fucking idea what any IPA anything means.
It might as well be meaningless scribbling for all anyone I've ever spoken with has been able to help, too.
It has, unsurprisingly, a few sounds that are rare-to-nonexistent in common American English phoneme vocabularies. No AmE speaker is going to get the first phoneme right from pure text, since AmE basically doesn't have a flipped "r" sound. "Air" is close; the first syllable of "arrow" is at least equally close to my ear, but I think English speakers have settled on "air".
Contra Austicus Maximus, I'd say that the second-to-third syllables almost have a /w/ and not an /o/! If you listen to the pronunciation, it goes smoothly from the /o/ to the /a/, with the /o/ touched very lightly. But this comes out almost as "dwan". He's right that in Turkish there's not a clear consonantal /w/ there, but that's just what English does when it has two adjacent vowels.
But the real answer is, no, educated English speakers consistently say something like what you wrote; it's not quite authentic to Turkish pronunciation but there's no way it's going to be.
It's the latter (although why no approximation _and_ IPA option?).
I think just pointing out that the Ğ is silent will get most people closer than "air-do-wan". Probably half of anglo readers will still diphthongise the first syllable, but oh well. At least the cursed [w] won't show up most of the time.
If you really must write out the syllables phonetically in this most unphonetic of languages, try er-do-an.
> Erdoğan is pronounced [ˈæɾdoan]. Its edit distance from the spelling is 2. The e is pronounced [æ], and the ğ is silent. Note the COMPLETE ABSENCE of a [w]. There is no [w]. If you only learn one thing from this post: there is no [w] in Erdoğan.
The one thing I'm learning from this post is that there is at least one person who pronounces "do-wan" differently if told to leave out the w. I don't know how to do that. I am interested to know how. I thought "w" was just what happened when your mouth transitioned from "o" position to a different vowel.
I'm guessing most native (especially if monolingual) English speakers do that. It's worth noting that [ʊ] and [w] are different sounds (one's a vowel and the other's a consonant). When you just say "o", the letter, you're (probably) saying [oʊ], not [ow], but I'll grant that the difference is very minor.
With the knowledge that you pronounce "o" as a diphthong, you should be able to just say [o] by not letting the vowel sound glide when you pronounce it. Or to put it another way, don't make the part of the sound that you make by drawing your lips closer together at the end of the sound.
If you succeed at that, and then try to pronounce [oan] and [owan], they should sound plainly different.
To be clear, your lips should be moving apart from o to a, but together from o to w. In saying "owa", you'd be starting in a mid-rounded position, pursing your lips closer for the w, and then opening to a wider non-rounded position for the a.
Ok. So let me be super precise. When I see "do-wan" written down, that tells me to make an "o" sound and then an "a" sound, and there is no further pursing in transition like you are describing. At this point what I'm thinking is that I am getting the "correct" pronunciation from "do-wan". And that when you say it's super important to realize that there's no "[w]", you have some technical meaning in mind for "[w]" that doesn't correspond to a typical west coast American English speaker's idea of a "w" in that particular context.
"Erdogan won partly by making Turkish universities change to a "well-rounded" admissions policy that ignored exam scores - instantly destroying the cram school industry that served as the Gulen movement's power base."
Honestly I have to say I respect Erdogan for this - as far as political moves go, it's brilliant.
the problem with americans (even of the j variety) is their lack of practical political cynicism
suggestion 1. wouldn't work because even if you had an amendment fixing the number of judges on the SC it would not stop a certain party from impeaching current judges . the sort of political power (not just the votes but public legitimacy ) you need is equivalent for both options.
suggestion 2. are you seriously suggesting that the government agencies that persecuted the tea party or fabricated evidence in order to wiretap trump should be made even for independent ?
is this what you people call *fortifying democracy* ?
suggestion 3. is a generalization of 1. the sort of power you need to hack the system can not be stopped by adding caveats to the rules. there are enough lawyers in dc to find work arounds.
"The third big difference is that it's really hard to change the US Constitution. Erdogan was able to change the Turkish Constitution with a simple majority. Nobody took it too seriously, because the Constitution was just whatever the last group of military-coup-pulling generals said it was. The US Constitution requires a lot more work. And as the work of titans like George Washington and James Madison and so on, it has an aura of sacredness that makes it hard to add "PS: I can do whatever I want" to the end without a lot of people feeling violated. I know this has caused a lot of problems, but after seeing the ease with which Erdogan swept aside any part of the Turkish Constitution he didn't like, I have a new respect for it."
I'm nonplussed by this. The risks of entropy in any political system seem sufficiently well demonstrated by history to make any informed observer respect the value of counter-entropic institutions within a polity he or she doesn't want to fail. This is what convinced me to abandon my support for republicanism in New Zealand - I decided the monarchy was counter-entropic. The US Constitution is also pretty obviously counter-entropic. I'm surprised it took a book about Erdogan for Scott to reach this conclusion.
That said, when all said and done, I worry it's all just dwarf fortress: the game is about how long you can stave off total system collapse.
> In the end, Erdogan ends up not joining the EU. Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, causing him to lose faith in the European conception of liberalism as relevant to his pro-Islam project.
Something here can't be quite right because the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, based in Strasbourg, France) is *not* an EU institution. It is not to be confused with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, based in Luxembourg), which does belong to the EU.
Based on how the book review links the court decision to French secularism, and on an overview of relevant decision by the non-EU ECHR [1], I would guess that the relevant decision was indeed one by the non-EU ECHR, namely Leyla Şahin v. Turkey. I also don't see how the EU's CJEU would have been involved in a decision about a domestic law of a non-EU contry (i.e. Turkey).
The ECHR does *not* decide based on EU law (and, again, is not an EU institution), but based on the European Convention on Human Rights. This convention is one of the foundational documents of the Council of Europe (CoE), which is distinct from the EU. The CoE is both older (founded in 1949 compared to 1951 for the arguably first EU precursor, the European Coal and Steel Community -- though it took decades for the EU to evolve into its current form) and larger than the EU: No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the CoE, but the CoE has 20 non-EU member states including Switzerland, Armenia, Russia, and -- crucially -- Turkey. So in particular, Turkey is a party of the CoE's European Convention on Human Rights, and therefore the ECHR's decisions on how to interpret that treaty are applicable to Turkey.
The Council of Europe is not to be confused with the European Council nor the Council of the European Union, both of which *are* EU institutions. (No, I didn't make this up. Bonus question: can you guess which of these is most commonly referred to as simply 'the Council'?)
This was already pointed out by Gurnemanz in a comment below, but I thought I'd highlight it again since it's a common misconception. (Roughly every other news article in European media seems to get it wrong, for instance.)
The reason that people get accused of being right-wing populists is because, in America at least, the Republican party is seen as being the natural home of the elites -- the rich, the business owners, and so on -- so when they make a concerted effort to appeal to the "lower classes", they're being populist. The Democrats and anyone else perceived as being on the left are viewed as being inherently populist in that it's the lower classes that they "naturally" appeal to and not the elites. It's the crossing of these boundaries that leads to the populism accusations. It's generally seen to be a tautology to call a Democrat populist under normal circumstances. And to damn them as "champaign socialists" when they're infringing on Republican territory.
I think that Turkey has and will, unfortunately, continue to have problems. For example, what happens when Erdogan dies? He's not going to live forever, and he appears to be paranoid enough to have prevented anyone else within the AKP from accumulating sufficient power to be seen as his natural successor. Does that mean that as soon as he's passed away, the opposition returns to power and undoes everything he's done, re-writing the constitution again and re-introducing secularism and all the rest, but this time, with a vengance?
I don't expect a stable Turkey in my lifetime (I'm 60), although I'm more than willing to be surprised.
A little late to the party but I wanted to share my experience as a student at a so called "Gulen" school in America which I attended for both middle and high school (graduated around 2012).
For reference, the school was set up as a magnet school (most Gulen schools in America are set up this way AFAIK). The one I attended was rated among the top two schools for college prep in my (somewhat large) city, and provided me with an education several degrees above standard for my area.
Some people might expect after reading this article that my schooling would have included some aspect of propaganda, but that is not at all what I experienced. In fact, other than most of my teachers being Turkish (and the existence of Turkish cultural extracurriculars), the fact that I was attending a "Gulen" school barely made an impact on my education at all.
In fact, neither I nor my parents actually had heard about Gulen until a rather inflammatory article was published by a local news source claiming that students at my school were being brainwashed by Turkish radicals. I admit that while neither I (nor any of my closest peers) experienced any 'brainwashing' during our attendance at this school, I cannot be totally sure that it was not occurring in some (likely mundane) fashion. The supposed explanation for my experience at the time was that the Turkish faculty were using the culturally focused extracurriculars as some sort of filtering mechanism to determine who would be most receptive to propaganda, and focused their efforts on those students. With me being an academically mediocre white student with no interest in Turkish culture, my experiences would hypothetically mesh with this theory.
Despite that, I would say it is highly unlikely that anything of the kind was happing. From my perspective my high-school was (and still is) a run of the mill school whose only outstanding characteristics were teachers with strong accents and Turkish language courses as an elective. Obviously this experience doesn't really shed any light on what the situation was like in similar schools actually based in Turkey, but I thought that some people might like some insight into what a "Gulen" school based in America might look like.
This was a kind of meandering post without much of a point, so if anyone wants to know anything specific feel free to ask. I'll answer pretty much anything that doesn't dox me.
Is a democratically elected dictator really "undemocratic"? Are we supposed to feel bad that one form of undemocratic government, that pretended to be a democratic, got replaced with another form, that didn't pretend? If everyone basically agrees dictatorship is the best form of government IF the dictator is good, then how can you claim "all dictatorships are bad" without getting into the specifics of a particular dictator?
>First, I was struck by how carefully Erdogan preserved the apparent structure of Turkish government and society. His style of dictatorship is less about smashing democratic institutions with a sledgehammer, and more about hollowing them out from the inside until they're zombies following his commands while still maintaining a facade of legitimacy. If Erdogan wants your head, he’ll have a corruption investigator arrest you, bring you to court, charge you with plausible-sounding corruption allegations, give you a trial by jury that seems to observe the proper formalities, and sentence you to death by decapitation. To an outside observer, it will look a lot like how genuine corruption trials work in genuinely democratic nations. You'd have to be really well-informed to spot the irregularities - and the media sources that should be informing you all seem very helpful and educational but are all secretly zombies controlled by Erdogan supporters.
I feel like that has already happened here, especially the last bit.
I dislike Erdogan, I do think he is practically a dictator, and yet your comment above demonstrated very clearly why he got such support - and why Trump did, as well.
You are saying "There is no caste, no royalty, in modern Turkey; we are all descendants of Edwardian peasants". But then you set up a distinction between nice, polite, don't eat with their elbows on the table Turkish people and those 'other' Turks.
This is the same mindset that had people writing haughty pieces about Trump's fondness for well-done steak with ketchup: oh my dear how gauche, we don't do that here!
Can you not see that if you are dismissing the poor, the traditionally religious, the farmers and those at the bottom of the social ladder as the kinds of natural inferiors of the hard-working virtuous women who become doctors and then go shopping in Nisantasi, then of course the moment a guy who comes along and (figuratively) rolls up his shirt sleeves, puts his feet on the table, and cracks open a can of Dutch Gold is going to have immense appeal to them? That he can convincingly sell himself as "one of you guys"? That he'll stick it to all the toffee-nosed ponces who want to pass themselves off as natural nobility even in a classless society where the rubes and rednecks are being deliberately -and everybody knows it - kept out of power, out of influence, out of having any say or representation by people like them?
I'm peasant stock too, and I deeply resent the kind of attitude above: oh dear me yes, we nice cosmopolitan leaning types are so much better than those grubby traditionalists. I am aware of the ways, and how badly those ways can be, that traditional, peasant, lower-class people and cultures go wrong. But the cure for that isn't "stop making a show of us in front of the neighbours, I was so embarrassed when my high-class friends saw you", it's to work towards healing divisions and incorporating those people and giving them a way out that they can see, that doesn't depend on a strongman populist who will pander to them as the only alternative to Westernised liberals holding their noses when having to talk to them.
User name checks out.
That was tried already and ended with piles of skulls.
I agree that capitalism has its problems. I'm a little troubled though by your attitude which seems to discount the enormous amount of suffering that communist regimes have caused. I really do want to hear an account of communism from you that explains or contextualizes without dismissing the gulags and the famines. I'm honestly willing to convert if I can get an account that explains the above! Despite my best efforts, though, I can't find one. I've read so many memoirs by people who actually went through the gulags or the Cultural Revolution and they all describe communism as far worse than capitalism. But it sounds like you think differently. Could you explain to me why you think differently?
I feel the need to quote a poem here, one by Michael Hartnett about that kind of peasant traditional Irish woman left behind by the changing times:
DEATH OF AN IRISHWOMAN
Ignorant, in the sense
she ate monotonous food
and thought the world was flat,
and pagan, in the sense
she knew the things that moved
at night were neither dogs nor cats
but púcas and darkfaced men,
she nevertheless had fierce pride.
But sentenced in the end
to eat thin diminishing porridge
in a stone-cold kitchen
she clenched her brittle hands
around a world
she could not understand.
I loved her from the day she died.
She was a summer dance at the crossroads.
She was a card game where a nose was broken.
She was a song that nobody sings.
She was a house ransacked by soldiers.
She was a language seldom spoken.
She was a child’s purse, full of useless things.
All that the poor have is their pride, and when they can see and hear their 'betters' saying "We don't regard you as our fellow-citizens, we think of you as an embarrassment and we wish we could be rid of you", then is it any wonder they are fodder for someone who can say "hey, I'm on your side, look I'm one of you guys too!" or can aspire to be convincing about it when he says "look, the people who hate you hate me too!" That of course does lead to ostentatious signalling, e.g. of religious affiliation. I dislike church gate electioneering by any party.
(It's what annoyed me about John Kerry when the photos at the communion rail came out, because I assumed then that this was a Catholic Mass (it now turns out it was at a service in an AME church which is a whole other facepalm moment for What Not To Do If You're A Catholic) http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/11/25/abortion-a-kennedy-and-a-catholic-communion-conundrum/).
But while I disagree with a lot of populist sentiment, I *understand* why people are attracted to it, because I come out of that kind of background (a cousin by marriage, for instance, thought those awful 'crying children' paintings were art). I don't know how I came by my snobby tendencies, but there you go. Which means I do recognise the snobby tendencies in those who like to play the Lady Bountiful and resent them, and realise why other people resent them, and how that resentment can be funnelled into political support.
Because when you have nothing but your pride, and no means of expression, sometimes the last thing you can do is a resounding "Eff you" to the great and good.
It's really surprising to find out ideas which were written out in political writings in my country a decade and half ago, are in a sense very universal.
Poland as a trendsetter or nations. Strange.
"Because when you have nothing but your pride, and no means of expression...": this is what is happening in many places, the USA including. Only a specific bandwidth of opinions manifests, and the rest do not have an outlet supported by thinkers, printing presses, publishers, etc. Yet in the USA, fortunately for the country's dwellers, the situation is milder and more "mediated" than in most parts of the world afflicted by such a discontent... due to better institutions, older institutions? hard to say
I think bringing up "this demonstrates why Trump got so much support" (not a quote, but I don't see how else to enclose it) and saying, "All that the poor have is their pride" in the same sequence is something to be extremely cautious with.
While a lot of Trump supporters self-identify as "the working poor", they were actually richer on average than Clinton voters (I haven't seen similar numbers for Biden).
I've recently seen people talking about how Biden's plans to raise taxes on households earning $400,000 is a bad idea, because those households aren't actually that rich. A lot more people see themselves as poorer than they actually are.
I've now found figures for 2020 at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184428/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-income-us/ - again, the Democrats won solidly the under 50k and 50k-100k categories, and lost solidly among those earning over 100k.
"We represent the oppressed common people against the elites" is very much the message the Republicans are trying to sell, but the numbers contradict it pretty flatly.
another interpretation - people under 100K are scared of saying they voted r
Has anyone broken out the socioeconomic status of voters by race, keeping in mind that many minorities are more likely to be poor?
Those categories are too broad say what you want them to say. The literal "working" class can easily have a household income above 100k. For example, people working in any of the trades, small business owners, farmers, ie actual working Americans.
Thos earning below 50k could more properly be called the welfare class, while those earning more than 400k are most certainly strongly in the Democrat camp. You only have to look at the election results by ZIP code to see this is true.
Any honest analysis would admit that the elites have created a class of dependants that they use to ensure their continued power. The not-entirely-poor working class are the American regime's kulaks.
Yes, it's about culture and power more than money.
You know, when an entitled elitist, a very talented one, tries to praise somebody outside their inner clique, something "like" this (a very talented but deeply flawed) poem appears, waving a fake-respect banner, spotted with condescending. The titular peasant woman *understands* the world much better than the author opines (and possibly deeper, than the author). Think of analogies all over the world.
I usually agree with and enjoy Deiseach posts, but I'm not so sure about this one. I mean, the general sentiment, yes -- I'm quite a traditionalist, and 23andme hasn't uncovered any royalty in my recent ancestry, curse the luck -- but in this particular case, well... Maybe the commenter (wish I'd got to see the post, sounds super interesting if it's about how Turks view each other) holds his nose around Islamist rubes because they *actually stink*. So to speak. Metaphorically.
Before I start, let me reiterate that I know the problems of the peasant, traditional, small town and small-minded insular side. I'm not claiming Superior Virtue As Real Turks for them here.
The thing is, before I read all this, I didn't understand how Erdogan came to power. Now I have a better understanding. And if we want to avoid the rise of right-wing populism/potential Fascism, we had better damn well understand how it happens.
So yeah, let's take the worst case scenario: the dirty, literally smelly (and yes I do know about farmers who stink of slurry, country people who smell of woodsmoke and manual labour, and so on, from personal experience), backwards, superstitious, conservatively religious, women in headscarves and hijabs, what use is higher education, inlander peasant and working class Turks who fell for the appeal of Erdogan and Gulah. Let's say that they really *are* a problem.
How do you solve that problem? Well, even if you are a cocktail-sipping, Westernised, nice-smelling, liberal city Turk who more instinctively looks to the West for a lead in culture, thought and politics - sorry, you're still Turkish. You're not European. And those smelly inlanders *are* your fellow-citizens and closer to you than Strasbourg or Brussels. The original commenter mentioned Ataturk's pulling down of all caste distinctions and that modern Turks are all descendants of 1900s peasants.
That has to be the realisation. You [general "you", not specifically about anyone posting here] are all in this together, and you have to get on together. The smelly peasants have to put up with the effete cocktail-sippers, and vice versa. The smelly peasants have a right to representation as much as you do, and if you manipulate the system such that the only representation they can get, or feel comfortable with, are people who game the system and then hollow it out as a 'get your retaliation in first' defensive measure, then you are going to end up with strongmen populists.
Erdogan isn't Trump and Trump isn't Erdogan, they have different backgrounds, different biases, different aims and goals. But how did Trump tap in to that particular mood back in 2016 where he went from the joke candidate, where John Oliver was pleading "please run, please!", to the threat he did become where he overcame the internal party resistance, won the nomination, and then beat Hillary in a result that shocked the pundits? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G87UXIH8Lzo
Could it possibly be something to do with... the rubes did notice that the nice liberal types held their noses around them because of the stink?
Give the rubes metaphorical water for a bath and maybe they'll stink less. But cutting off the taps and then complaining about the stink is all on you. Force people into a choice between "it's us (and we hold you in contempt and are hoping for the day you all disappear) or the Devil", and don't be surprised when some people go "Well all right then, I'm picking the Devil!"
"It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.
It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t."
The important connection between the lower classes and the elites is missing in our Liberal society. There aren't any painter-decorators in Senates or Parliaments - actually the House of Lords is more representative of the true republic by job occupation and the forces of 'democracy' are trying to get rid of it.
What we need is blue blood with a red streak that can weigh against the biases and self serving of the middle classes. It's not just the blue collar either - there are other elites in our society that are put upon like engineers and scientists who are banned from controlling public office. People will say not so - but they are full of shit as any scan of competitors will show - at this point the CCP is a healthier republic than the United States or the UK.
In the end - head, the hands and the heart are what you need for full stack human development - that's all there is to it. You can't get to niceness, fairness and community by balancing too much into any faction's nonsense.
You keep using this word "republic". I do not think you know what it means.
Trying to compress politics into a single left-right spectrum results in nonsense. (If you separate "culturally" and "economically", you have already stopped using that approximation.)
"NOTE: I'm a POC, so slow the F down before calling me a White Supremacist." I think you're good. Most of us here don't like that kind of rhetoric any more than you do.
This is just silly. Democrats don't hate America nor do they want to dismantle it. Did you miss that it's mostly Republicans flying the Confederate flag (you know, the actual flag of "wanting to dismantle the United States". Democrats are not a fan of bombing other countries. There were more drone strikes in Trump's four years than Obama's eight.
Your evolution from Obama to Hillary to Trump would be a fascinating story.
AOC and Ilhan Omar are not the Democratic party writ large.
The Democratic primary process is far more Democratic than the Republican one. In the democratic primary, state delegates are awarded proportionally. So a 40% biden and 35% Sanders, 20% Bloomberg didn't result in biden getting all of the delegates. He got something like 50% in that scenario.
In the Republican primary, by contrast, it was winner take all for a lot of states. Trump was able to build an insurmountable delegate lead quickly because he won states with a plurality (45%-40%) of the vote but got 100% of the delegates.
You are right that many minorities were super turned off by the violent protests of the summer. You will also note that Video condemned violent protests when they started and that he was widely reviled by the largely white college educated Woke class of the Democratic party.
You know who did like him?
Actual minorities in the Democratic coalition.The older religious more conservative black population said, "Let's go with a boring guy, not a firebrand who has stood up to the more loony left wing members" South Carolina put him over the top. The Democratic party is having an internal reckoning over Woke excess and it's a known problem.
The Democrats also have a platform. You can read it. In the last election, the Republican platform was literally "we support the president"
Owning the Libs is satisfying and there are a lot of them that deserve some ownage, but that's not a substitute for competent governance.
Hmm Well my hope is for a third party in the US. Seems to me there is a sane 'libertarian' center out there somewhere. Dan Carlin, Joe Rogan, the Weinsteins, Lex Fridman, Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson... Scott Alexander. You don't need to agree with everyone else's ideas, just respect them as real.
Those soldiers getting murdered by the mob was one of the worst things I've seen. Most of them had to be 17 or 18 and I think they had weapons but no ammunition so it was a set up.
This was one of those events that if you described it in text or in a formal way you would be on the side of the citizens beating off an illegitimate attempt by a military organization to take over the society. It would be unpleasant but it made logical sense.
Then if you watched the footage and saw the photos you immediately realized the opposite is the truth because you saw disgusting old men beating what are obviously terrified kids to death. After watching I understood something out of the anti-Turk sentiment in Germany was recognition of something real - which is that there is something horrible and unnatural in Turkish society. It is difficult to put into words and easy to interpret as being anti-Turk which isn't right. Turks - European or no - are great - yet there is something very dark in their society. This instinct is something more like recognition of evil than bigotry - it is an axiomatic error for Liberalism to conflate the two.
I'm not German. I agree with every thing you've said but I'm getting at something different - this is not about Germans or Turkish citizens.
It wasn't the number of people killed or the stressful conditions that caused violence that give me a sense of horror - it was a sense of something else. It seems to me there is an evil of circumstance which is tragic but somebody can work their way around to understanding it.
I think there are other indescribable forms that come out of our legacy with the deep past and we sometimes see glimpses of these things in premodern texts. It would be easy to laugh it off and think these are basic instincts to be held in check by reason - but there are other frightening possibilities - you have to ask why it is thought the analytical brain is the most advanced when it's the slowest and it is clear human beings are running all sorts of processes they are not aware of. When you then look at the history of human violence and evidence of genocides in the genetic record - it prompts unsettling suggestions. These are easy to dismiss with the confidence we are running the show - it would be good if that were correct.
I think this is a troll, rather than a real post. I recommend against feeding this one.
Hi Amy, I like your comments, but this is not other social media sites. Try to have some civility and assume others will also behave the same towards you. The goal (or at least my goal) is to have a good discussion, see the other persons side of things.
India is almost a mirror case of Turkey without military coups. For around 50 years it was ruled by liberal elites who educated themselves in Harvard, Oxford and the ilk and were explicitly secular. They were the high class, the majority religious low class almost had zero representation. Even at the state level was dominated by either explicit communists, or caste based socialists who rarely displayed any religion. The only significant right wing force was demonised for having one of it's members kill Mahathma Gandhi, the father of the nation that relegated them to the backseat for quite a while. But of course anyone who lived in India, knew that the country was still predominantly lower class Hindu, religious and nationalistic, you couldn't buy a car without having it blessed by a priest from a temple. So we eventually ended up with our strongman prime minister Modi, who is lower class and hated by most power structures when he first joined, predominantly the judiciary and to some extent the civil service. Then it seems clear, that over his second term he has gotten a lot of his people into the judiciary and so now cases the court striked against just five years are suddenly completely fine and in line with the constitution. I would say we aren't at the stage where he's proactively jailing or getting rid of his opposition. It's more like he's installing his people in the judiciary and civil services to make sure they don't get in his way. Whether we will slide into proactively hunting down the opposition, remains to be seen but needless to say the lower class is pissed and keeps getting more pissed, the more Bollywood and the media talk down to them. They could potentially excuse strong arm tactics by Modi in the name of anti-corruption or so
How did you type this whole thing without saying "antinational" or "The BJP will give you a wink and a nudge if you, in a totally understandable lapse, decide to lead a Lynch mob against a Muslim standing too near a cow"
The specifics matter.
The Lynch mob seems mostly an exaggeration, like the threat of "white-nationalism" in US. I haven't seen any sources that indicate an increase in Lynch mobs case under this govt and there certainly havent been any high profile cases to point to. Same with the cow vigilantes and the sort
Or a strict term-limit for dictators--you get X years of dictatorial power, and then a mandatory retirement to a nice south seas island somewhere far away, with armed guards whose job is both to protect you from harm and kill you if you try to retake power.
65,000 dead and maimed men from Waterloo would probably point out that that strategy is not foolproof.
In all fairness if you're lucky enough to get your hands on a Napoleon you should keep 'em around.
Should you? What happened to the French population, specifically of military-age young men, during the Empire? My impression is he had a pretty thorough draft, and even a brilliant general suffers losses. Even without Russia.
(I am actually not an expert, so please take the above as a genuine question; I think I know the answer, but my sources are weak enough that I wouldn't call myself confident.)
There’s a reasonably compelling argument that the ‘Napoleonic Wars’ were forced on Napoleon by European powers unhappy about the whole revolution and beheading royals bizzo.
The collective name for the wars is ’Napoleonic’ but the names of the individual wars are War of the First/Second/Third etc Coalition, i.e. whatever group of countries Britain was able to stitch together and fund to declare war against France.
The most obvious exception is Spain, which probably contributed more to Napoleon’s ultimate defeat than did the invasion of Russia.
It’s not obvious that Napoleonic France would have been anything like as expansionary had other European powers not kept trying to overturn the revolution. However, the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens seems to show poor faith and a lack of enthusiasm for peace on both sides of the Channel. So who knows. Counter-factuals and all that.
At any rate, it’s possible to construct a narrative whereby Napoleon was an enlightened, modernising ruler who would’ve been content to rule France in peace and bestow good government had reactionary crowned heads not objected to him on principle.
But then even if you accept that line of reasoning it's not clear that a leader that makes everyone else want to declare war on you is someone you want to keep around.
On the other hand, if everyone declaring war on you is a given (because for example you beheaded their cousin), then a leader preternaturally good at winning wars who is also a dab hand at creating good institutions and reforming bad ones seems as good a choice as any.
It was the French who started the War of the First Coalition. From Wikipedia: "Eight months later, following a vote of the revolutionary-led Legislative Assembly, France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792; Prussia, having allied with Austria in February, declared war on France in June 1792."
Basically, the Girondins had a paranoid conspiracy theory that Austria was colluding with the king and nobles of France to crush the revolution, and browbeat the king into declaring war on Austria. We now know that Austria was preoccupied with Poland and had no desire to help the French king. They would have been perfectly happy to see the French destroy themselves with revolution, had not France declared war on them first.
The hard part there is enforcing a term limit on a dictator who's held power for several years. My impression is China had a similar system after Deng and it worked for a few decades until Xi managed to build up enough of a power base to overstay past when is term would have ended.
Not quite; Xi inherited a truly flawed system. The patronage networks within the CCP basically meant that any president/chairman was effectively powerless for the first 1/2 to 2/3rds of his tenure.
CCP leadership is highly reliant on personal loyalty and patronage networks. New presidents were traditionally paralyzed by the substantial power that the previous generation of political leaders wielded (both directly and via their proteges still in the party).
For most presidents/chairmen, it took along time to sideline the old guard and appoint enough people loyal to them to get their agenda's rolling. Unlike US presidents, who tend to get the most done during the start of their tenure, Chinese presidents' power was mostly at the end. This, however, leads to the situation where someone is most powerful right when they're being asked to give up their power. This has an obvious failure mode that Xi exploited.
Isn't that, effectively, the Mexican model? [I am exaggerating of course but that is the direction of their presidential power, term limits, and wealthy retirement from what I understand...]
This is how dictators in the Roman Republic worked before the Second Punic War. The Senate / Consuls would give someone almost complete control of the government for 6 months, and then they were (usually) protected from prosecution for what they did in office.
But it created the office that would be used to overthrow the Republic. Slippery slopes and all that.
Lincoln was martyred before he had to deal with the aftermath of the Civil War. If he had had to be President during Reconstruction, he might have a reputation more like that of President Grant...
I thought his Reconstruction plan was significantly different, and much milder, than the one eventually enacted? Which would give us an entirely new hypothetical, but I would still expect a rather different reputation than Grant's.
(Also, I think most of Grant's problems would have stopped him long before he became president if he hadn't been a war hero. Lincoln was a very capable politician, all else aside.)
Lincoln's kind of a weird case because he actually did do a lot of very unpopular things (conscription was a big one - conscription to put down a secession has a very bad look) and had an utterly-terrible reputation from before his inauguration (hence, y'know, the South going "not my President") up until decades after his death. He's been historically rehabilitated, partially because of martyrdom and partially because of how far outside the Overton Window the Confederacy has drifted.
I'm not saying Lincoln was bad, but he's not a great example of "adored hero goes off the rails". He was never adored except in hindsight.
Truman is another good example of this. He wasn't well regarded in his time, but has appreciated steadily in the intervening years.
This raises a key point with this theory: who in history were the near-miss dictators who turned out to be heroes?
Possible candidates:
Old Pitt the Younger (continuing down the road of dissent=sedition)
President-for-life Juarez (slightly shady tactics to win the election in '71, had a personality cult, could have been a liberal Diaz)
5-term FDR (wasn't actually at war when he ran for a third term, had a shady court-packing plan and that weird dictatorship bill Garner proposed while he was still Speaker)
President-Chairman Aung San (not her, her father who was a Burmese independence leader)
1970s Emergency Nehru (although he'd be really really old)
So looking at the root causes of 'right-wing populist' movements the best antidote could be, to take care that the elites never get so much out of touch with the populace that they think they need a populist strongman. This has many elements and dimensions: It is about checks and balances, but also about trust, and political culture.
I think one Problem is having only a few but strong political parties. The parties have their own internal hierarchies that are not always democratic and enforce compliance to their programs. And it makes it very hard to raise new topics or groups outside of these strong and slow institutions.
Another point is about a political culture being aware of the importance of trust and the mechanics of gaining and loosing trust. This is were many moderate religious politicians have advantages, as they are often more humble, and they are more likely to ideals in serving a higher good than just beeing after power or money.
Another thing would be to implement feedback loops, for the elites and governments to keep in touch with the realities an every day struggles of ordinary people.
If it is Scott as Scott puts it in the end that right-wing populists feed on unfair class differences and left-wing populists feed on unfair economic gaps and "Anti corruption campaign" is a great excuse to sweep enemies out of institutions, it should be a important concern of any working democratic state to control these factors within a corridor, that it isn't a mayor problem causing people to thing they need a strongman to fix it.
I think the US didn't do a good job controlling these factors and so Trumpism is just what results.
Looking at it like this, i would conclude either the elites wake up and address the concerns of the people that make the populist look like the lesser evil, or they will lose. Explaining the dangers, propaganda or deplatforming will not help, at least not for long.
I suspect what's more likely to happen is that the established parties will adopt more and more of the policy of the populist outsiders but retain control over government.
The clearest example of this is in the UK where the Tories became a hardline anti-EU party (not that they were ever a strongly pro-EU party) and as a result the UK's biggest populist Farage has retired and his party has collapsed. But there's examples all over Europe with mainstream parties taking tougher lines on immigration, Islam, or both.
I would argue that this is a sign of a healthy democracy. If the voters want to leave the EU, you don't want to put a new inexperienced political party whose at war with all the elite institutions in charge of the most complex and tricky bit of governing since WWII. So instead elites move closer to the strategic political ground and you get a new elite/populus coalition that can hopefully make changes without declaring war on every institution.
Brexit is again a great example. It is probably the hardest test for this kind of democracy because it's so binary, in or out, with a strong polarisation turning people against compromise positions like EEA. And yet even though the elites lost post 2019 election even the anti-brexit institutions have calmed down in a way you never got with Trump.
I mean, the obvious corollary here is that you only get populist parties when the elite lose touch in an obvious way - when something has wide popular support, but the elite universally refuse to touch it.
@Little Librarian
> But there's examples all over Europe with mainstream parties taking tougher lines on immigration, Islam, or both.
There are also a lot of examples of populists being ignored.
Also, the EU is build on free movement of labor/people, so politicians often can't make their own immigration rules. This was a major reason for Brexit in the first place.
"Banned from Twitter" is a lot different from "forced at gunpoint to abandon any political ambitions you have," both in scale and in kind.
(And the current Republican clamor to *force* Twitter to unban Trump or similar sounds a lot more freedom-violating than anything Twitter has done.)
Looking at how Erdogan's ban at a gunpoint turned out, a ban from Twitter may turn out to be a lot more permanent and damaging.
So, you prefer Twitter just rolls over to allow the leader of the free world to use its platform for a nonstop torrent of deadly, destructive lies?
Yes. No single organization (or small set of organizations), whether government or private companies, should be in the business of deciding what either the leader of the free world or anyone else may or may not broadcast to the world. It should be up to the readers to judge it, the platform should stay a neutral conduit that transmits anything.
The idea that there should not be a line at all is fundamentally flawed. Everyone (now) agrees that spammers should be banned. But that consensus took years to forge; there's a reason that it's nearly impossible to eradicate spam from email, and that's because it's designed around freedom of speech. But if you don't ban spammers, you don't have a communications medium that is at all functional. If you don't want spam banned from your inbox, there is probably a specialised spam-friendly webmail somewhere, or you could run your own mail server if you want.
But once you've conceded the principle that some people should be able to be banned, you now have a problem. Someone has to to decide what is and what is not banned. If Trump started spamming (putting up adverts, endlessly repeated, at the limits of how fast his computer could post) then he would clearly be banned. If he started posting links to malware, then he could clearly be banned. But I can draw a gray area on any line you like - I've been doing moderation policies since the early nineties. In the end, it's not as easy as you'd like.
My preferred solution would be that no single organisation should have that power, and that there should be many separate organisations. More like email - if you get banned from Gmail, you could use yahoo or outlook or whatever - or you could run a private server.
IMO a legitimate purpose of moderation is to keep people from seeing posts they don't want to see (e.g. spam), or to facilitate high-quality discussion in a community. What is not a legitimate purpose of moderation is to prevent people who *do* want to read something from reading it (e.g. a Trump supporter from reading Trump's posts).
For the former purpose, moderation should be done at a low level. There is a good reason for subreddits to be moderated; there is no good reason for significant sitewide moderation on reddit. On Twitter, people can avoid having to see spam if they can decide whom they follow, and whom they allow to reply to their posts. (I guess, I'm not familiar with Twitter.) Again, I see no good reason for sitewide moderation.
Indeed, as far as I know, it's allowed and common to have accounts advertising products on Twitter; it's up to other users if they follow them.
Yes, I prefer it to a Twitter playing a fake moral card. Corporations lie all the time, they have no business targeting others for lying. Twitter is exactly the same heap of crap as Trump, they have no credibility to engage in a "holier than thou" kabuki. They fit together exceedingly well, Trump could be the ghost of Twitter personified.
Leader of the free world has been Angela Merkel since 2017.
I expect that both the US and Western Europe is fairly resistant, not only institutionally, but also culturally, in the sense that people would tolerate a dictatorship much less. Turkey has never had a strong democratic tradition.
The United Kingdom is the longest running democracy and could decide basically anything with a simple majority (including court-packing, etc). McGann is pretty convincing regarding the risk of a tyranny of minorities when supermajorities are required (The tyranny of the supermajority: how majority rule protects minorities). The evidence for the benefits of supermajorities seems thin. I would be wary of drawing too many lessons from specific cases.
I’m not sure your evidence applies well. But there is reason for concern. It is difficult to amend the US constitution, so those who find it inconvenient simply reinterpret it. I don’t think a solution to this problem has been demonstrated, at least not unambiguously.
My point was: Scott presented an example where a country relied on simple majorities and that was bad for democracy. I presented an example of a country that relies on simple majorities and things do well. I suggested we think about the issue systematically.
Only in a very slim and deceptive technical sense is this true. The majority of the populace was not able to vote until the early 20th century. Arguably the UK wasn’t even close to actual democracy until the parliamentary reforms of the 19th century.
As far as ‘tyranny of the minority’ goes, I find the evidence for this… thin.
What people mean mostly by ‘tyranny of the minority’ is that the majority doesn’t get to implement all of its reforms at its own pace, not that the country is actually in the grip of a tyrannical minority. A good example of a real tyranny of the minority is the UK before 1833!
Indeed - the House of Lords only lost their ability to veto legislation by the Parliament Act of 1911.
I'm talking about parliaments, not the general population (as is Scott).
But the fact that this is true formally but not in practice is part of my argument that majority rule does not tend to create opression. With respect to the evidence being thin, I'm not the one proposing that an innovation in democratic practice is very promising, Scott is. The burden of proof lies with him. But there is some evidence if you want to check: Huey Li's "Dividing the Rulers" is a good book on this. The evolution of parliamentary procedure also provides practical evidence. The UK before 1833 might be a tyranny for our standards only, but it was by far the most progressive country at the time. And, as Marian points out, the House of Lords only lost their formal ability to veto legislation in 1911.
Ultimately, there is no way to prevent bad laws from being created without locking down the laws, which means preserving bad laws forever (and laws can become bad if circumstances change).
Any system of lawmaking is a balance between making it too easy and too hard.
Note that if lawmaking is too hard, people will just overthrow or otherwise avoid adhering to the system, so that can actually be more dangerous.
Different approaches have different probabilities of preventing bad laws from being created. Nothing is guaranteed, but the experience of thousands of organizations, translated into the practice of "parliamentary procedure", has found that majority rule has the best promise. Theory shows why this may be expected (McGann, "Tyranny of the Supermajority"). The balance is 50% - not as reckless as the "move fast and break things" of Silicon Valley, nor as frozen as the proponents of ever increasing supermajorities (up until unanimity).
This is not to say that some fundamental rules about the very structure of functioning of organizations (truly constitutional norms) should not be subject to supermajorities. But the default should be simple majority, and the very exceptional should be supermajoity.
I think the reason the UK is distinct is probably that it's *always* been politically majoritarian, so everything else about the country has adapted to that. In particular, I don't think British elites could ever drift quite as far from the general population as Turkish elites without completely separating from the state; especially so as until recently almost nothing was shielded from politics and there were no checks & balances or separation of powers (until the 2000s, the head of the judiciary was a political appointee who got to personally select all judges).
The only institutions shielded from the majority are the BBC and the trust-owned Guardian (for some reason, all British press barons are populist oddballs), and their far less populist than anything else in the country.
I forgot to add a conclusion, which was that if Erdogan successfully reigns in or eradicates the liberal elite and waits a century, he could probably end up with roughly the UK but with rustic Islam taking the place of Britain's populist streak.
if Erdogan eradicates the liberal elites turkey would violently disintegrates
turkish nationalism is a european import
"Tyranny of the minority" can happen in the United States if you have a House election like 2010 (where more voters voted for Democrats than for Republicans, but Republicans got a stable majority in the House: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_House_of_Representatives_elections), a Presidential election like 2016 (where more voters voted for Clinton than for Trump, but Trump got a stable electoral college victory), and a series of three consecutive Senate election cycles where Republicans win a minority of the votes but get 60 of the seats (I don't know that this *has* happened, but it would have happened over the past three cycles if there had been a couple million more votes for Republicans in the southwest in 2016 and the midwest in 2018, and a few thousand more votes for them in Georgia in 2020). The Senate and Electoral College are institutions that greatly empower some groups at the expense of others, but don't really care whether those groups are majorities or minorities, contrary to some people who think they empower minorities.
You’re complaining here about features, not bugs, in my view. A legal code that ensured a popular majority could sweep the legislature and ensure that the legislative majority could pass whatever legislation it likes is exactly what I’d like to avoid, and I would much prefer that the Senate was representative of the States themselves, and not a duplicate of the House.
It’s better, in my mind, to make sure that checks and balances are in place, that even large shifts in the electorate can only take and implement new power projection slowly, and that we have every opportunity to default to no action taken at the federal level.
These are of course the priorities of a localist. I have very little in common with people in other states, nothing really at all in common with their representatives, and I would prefer being ruled and having a voice in ruling my locality only.
I don't think this is quite on point. If I understand, you are talking about the way the system works towards requiring different types of representation to pass legislation. That is arguably a feature. The criticism is that a minority position can gain a majority and rule without the consent of the majority. While that may not have happened, with a bare majority requirement in the Senate it would have happened and is quite plausible. There is a solid case for requiring the consent of the minority but I don't know what the case is for not requiring the consent of the majority. Certainly I don't think such an outcome can be described as democratic.
Are you forgetting about the House perhaps? Under what situation could the Senate have ruled alone?
That's why Kenny Easwaran gave all three conditions - a House election that gave a majority to under-50%, a series of Senate elections that gave a majority to under-50%, and a Presidential election that elected the minority candidate. He's saying that given all three - which have happened separately, although not together - you could have a minority gain total power.
Wait, you're saying it's better for a *minority* to be able to sweep the legislature and ensure that they can pass whatever legislation they like?!
The House exists.
The House can (and has recently) been controlled by a minority of the voters, due to gerrymandering.
The UK isn't that different: they use a first-past-the-post system, so lots of votes can be "wasted" without resulting in more seats. And in fact the party that gets the most votes often DOESN'T get to form the government over there.
I don't think that's true - I don't believe there's been a PM who wasn't the leader of the party that won the most votes in recent memory.
You're right, the last time was 1974. I was mistaken because of the distinction between majority vs plurality of the vote.
I have trouble looking at Brexit and thinking "yep, making all major decisions with a simple majority is a good idea". Having a substantial bias towards the status quo seems like it would naturally favor stability in the long run, even if it leads to suboptimally slow policy-making in the short term.
In any case, my understanding is that the UK (at least until recently) was a lot more culturally homogenous than Turkey (or the US). Is that inaccurate? There seems to be a lot of evidence that basically *any* type of government is significantly more stable in proportion to the cultural homogeneity of its populace.
Very true. Would "regionally homogenous" be more accurate?
The Protestant/Catholic divide isn't trivial -- and has obviously been involved in a lot of bloodshed -- but there's a lot more cultural common ground between British Catholicism and British Protestantism than you get mixing conservative Muslim, Orthodox Christian, and European Protestant/secular cultures together, like in Turkey, and that's just considering religion.
My memory wad that Jewish participation UK society led to about as much unrest/conflict/suspicion in its time as the growing Muslim population has today, but I don't live there so I welcome correction.
I don't think the percentage of prisoners who were Jewish was ever as large as the percent who are Muslim now.
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/lammy-review-muslim-prisoners_uk_59afcaa0e4b0b5e531022f26
Nor do I think there was as much terrorism from Jews (outside of the Middle East at least).
Per wikipedia, 0.43% of the UK population is Jewish. How "substantial" is that?
I think you can write off a lot of that heterogeneity as "not politically relevant" - the only big minorities were catholics and non-conformists, but because they were neither the dominant elites nor the bulk of the population (on Great Britain itself) the elites and the masses could stamp the catholics down so thoroughly that they didn't really affect anything, and the non-conformists (and the Scots until recently) were close enough to the mainstream that they could just go along with it. They're much more like the Kurds in the Turkish analogy.
I would very much separate decisions by a representative body from plebiscitary decisions (the former is good, the latter is not)
Touché, good point.
I would add that simple majorities can actually provide *more* stability in the long run. The more fragile is a decision you approve when you have a majority the more you would worry that a different majority would overturn it. If you want your decisions to be long-lasting, you wouldn't try to take advantage of a short-term disproportionate majority you have. But if you know that you have an unusually high majority now and that your opponents would need to win many more seats to revert a decision, you would be emboldened to at least try to make your long-term-not-as-majoritarian position a long term one. Then a different supermajority would form, and would act in the exact same way.
I was operating on the assumption that significant majorities form only infrequently, as has been the case in the US in my lifetime, but that obviously isn't generalizable. If large majorities frequently oscillate, then you're right that requiring a significant majority wont' necessarily improve long-term stability.
I see your argument for stability through strictly majoritarian decision making, but it strikes me as presuming a level of long-term orientation from policy makers that doesn't match observed evidence (in the US; I know we have a rather atypical system and won't presume to generalize). Here, there is significant pressure for the party in power to take all desired policy actions that are available, without regard for medium and long term consequences. Thus the push to end the filibuster to push policy through in spite of long-term Republican advantage in the senate.
"it strikes me as presuming a level of long-term orientation from policy makers that doesn't match observed evidence". I partially agree. You'd need to compare the level of long-term orientation from countries which rely more on supermajorities than the US. Let me offer the example of Brazil. We have a very long constitution, which can be amended by majorities of 2/3 in both chambers (no involvement of states). Our constitution was promulgated in 1988. We have just approved our 109th amendment.
Fascinating!
Does that include many significant reversals (like prohibition and ending prohibition in the US)? Are party politics in Brazil pretty bipolar like the US, or multipolar? I would naïvely expect supermajorities on a specific questions (e.g. a constitutional amendment) to be easier to achieve in a multipolar environment, but I could be entirely off base.
Very multipolar. To be fair, I feel our politics swing a lot but can't think of examples of reversals in amendments like what happened with the prohibition
"I would add that simple majorities can actually provide *more* stability in the long run. The more fragile is a decision you approve when you have a majority the more you would worry that a different majority would overturn it. "
By this logic, the proponents of Brexit would not have sought Brexit in 2016, because they had only a small majority and would have been afraid that a slight reversal of fortune would have had Brexit undone in 2018. Yet here we are, with Brexit solidly in place. I think you're forgetting several forms of status quo bias, all of which make decisions harder to reverse than to implement even if the vote threshold is 50% either way. If you can get 50%+1 to make the change, the change will likely endure even if 5% change their minds next year.
As I wrote on a different comment, plebiscitary votes and parliamentary votes are very different. Mobilizing the whole population of a country will always be a rare event, so even simple majorities can expect to not be overturn easily. But that is only one aspect in which they are very different.
Yes, there is status quo bias. But it applies to measures which are perceived to be generally welfare improving. Measures perceived to be opportunistic hardly benefit from that protection. Which, if you think about it, makes the case for expected stability with simple majorities even stronger. Means we have less reason to fear huge swings (because people will concentrate on the kind of measure which does not attract great opposition).
The UK has always had strong class divisions (see everything involving Thatcher vs Miners) that arguably date back to 1066 when Normans invaded and replaced the elite but not the general population. (Even today people with Norman surnames are disproportionately wealthy).
Is that more homogenous than Turkey? I can't say, but there's always been divisions.
I'm maybe not working with a technically accurate definition of cultural homogeneity, but in the sense I intended, that is a *flabbergasting* degree of homogeneity. If I'm reading you correctly, you're suggesting that a typical person has roots and shared cultural history with their neighbors going back ~1000 years?
I don't have data on the US handy, but I'd wager the average American can't say the same going back 100 years. I don't know how much cultural mixing has happened in Turkey, but I think it's safe bet it's more than Britain as you describe it.
Italy?
By the way, maybe my comment sounded harsh, but it wasn't meant like that at all. Apologize if that was the case.
Agree. Particularly in a country like the United States, which already has numerous structural protections (bicameralism, separate executive branch with veto, independent judicial review), imposing additional supermajority requirements seems unlikely to add much marginal benefit against majoritarian tyranny, but increases the risk of other kinds of social and structural failure (gridlock, minoritarian capture of government institutions, etc.)
The supermajority required to change the US constitution seems pretty extreme. Here in Ireland we have a referendum every decade or two, usually with a couple of proposed amendments. I think we mostly feel pretty good about having direct democracy in this form. Even if we basically kicked off abortion to the elites last time.
In Australia, changing the constitution requires a referendum with both an overall majority _and_ a majority in a majority of states (ie at least four out of six states). I was shocked when I found out that the US constitution can be changed by a simple conspiracy of politicians with no need to have a referendum at all.
Only eight out of 44 attempted referenda have passed, which seems reasonable to me as a believer in the Metropolis-Hastings Monte Carlo model of social progress.
You are right to be shocked because that is incorrect. I don't know what "a simple conspiracy of politicians" even means.
He means that in theory, the Constitution could be amended to say "everyone has to wear red squeaky balls on their nose" if 417 politicians (2/3rds House rounded up, 2/3rds Senate) wanted it and then about a thousand or so different politicians (3/4ths state legislatures) decided to go along with it, even if literally everyone else in the country thought it was a terrible idea.
In practice, the closest thing the US ever had to a "red squeaky balls amendment" (18th) was repealed in a little under 15 years.
Ah, the fact that we do not have referenda at a federal level. True, but it is almost impossible to imagine an ammendment passing that is not massively popular. As stupid as prohibition was it was still supported by a substantial majority of the people.
Having a monarch seems to be a pretty good stabilising force for the UK.
That looks like selection bias to me - five hundred years ago, basically everywhere in Europe had a monarch and today most places don't. Most of the remaining ones have less power than the Queen of England, and she doesn't exactly have a lot of power in practice. I'd rather suggest that the UK still has a monarch because they've been fairly stable, not the other way around.
Also think it is selection bias
Good point. But remember the British temporarily got rid of their monarchy under Cromwell and eventually made the conscious decision to restore it within a settled constitutional framework with William and Mary and the Glorious Revolution. So the English (after much drama) made a stable constitutional monarchy that, in turn, helped make Britain so stable.
I suspect that's a big factor in Britain still having a monarchy - lots of countries get their first republic in a similar fashion (chaotic quasi-democratic assembly gets stamped on by authoritarian dictatorship with the support of the army), but the UK did it so early in history that there wasn't any ideological foundation or external precedent for what to do at the end. So when it all collapsed, it went back to monarchy and stayed there.
As recently as 1900, only three places in Europe were non-monarchies: Switzerland, San Marino and France.
Though the nineteenth century was historically unusual in that respect - there were quite a lot of republics around until Napoleon and Bismarck smashed them all up (Genoa, Venice, the Netherlands, Hamburg, Lübeck, etc), and they came back in a big way after WWI (Germany, Poland, Soviet Union, Finland, Turkey, Czechoslovakia - and Portugal became a republic in 1910)
The UK did not become democratic until the 1832 Reform Act.
Do you mean that the UK wasn't democratic at some point because:
Only the nobility got a say, or
Only the propertied class got a say, or
Only those members of certain religions got a say, or
Only free people could vote, or
Only certain sexes got a say, or
the relative say of some houses of parliament was downgraded, or
only people over a certain age, or .....
What is the deviding line?
At some point in the future the consensus might say that the Brits aren't democratic now because 16 year olds can't vote, or
Oeachnly citizens (and not just residents) could vote, or
Groups of different gender/orientation/race/... didn't have a veto (three things one can see as possible in our lifetimes).
How broadly do all components have to have formal power/vote before it is democratic?
Can a country be democratic if all groups can vote but a tiny clasd of wealthy or otherwise powerful people have disproportionate influence by informal means?
The meaning of democracy is very fuzzy and a lot of loose use of the term is o ccuring in various subthreads.
I was responding to the FP's claim that: "The United Kingdom is the longest running democracy". The UK shouldn't be dated as democratic before 1832, which gives the US a 50 year head start on the UK. Before the Reform Act the UK was a a monarchy and aristocracy with very little power outside of the King and the Lords. George III was an active monarch. Victoria (1837-1901) wasn't.
The US was founded as a timocracy in which only the propertied could vote.
In Aristotelian terms perhaps, but not in Platonic terms. In the Constitution of 1787, there was no qualification for any election. Everything was up to the states.
Actually, in Aristotelian terms the American constitution is a mixed polity with elements of a democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. And the Federalist expressly states that the regime is not a democracy. But, in 21st Century America, such nice distinctions are not part of popular discourse, and what we have now passes for democratic. Retconning it is a waste of electrons.
That's not quite it. The commons was comfortably more powerful than the lords from at least 1688, albeit rich landowners had a lot of say in who made it into the commons (and still did until the reform acts in the 1860s). Victoria lost power because the commons developed a meaningful partisan split rather than a having a dozen informal factions all calling themselves "Whigs" who could corralled into some sort of majority on an ad hoc basis. It's the partisanship that meant the monarch was stuck with whichever party was bigger and had to do what they said or be unable to legislate (including passing a budget). This sort of coalition-wrangling is still common in a lot of countries, including the US. Expanding the franchise was just a gradual arms race to control the commons (if we give X the vote, hopefully X vote for us out of gratitude).
Either democracy means "elected assembly is in charge" (with enough people to have competitive elections in each constituency) or "everyone gets a vote." If the former, the UK is the oldest large democracy, if the latter it's either Germany or hasn't happened yet (e.g. nowhere lets children vote).
"the longest running democracy "
BTW that's San Marino, not UK.
I did not know that. I stand corrected, thank you
Not that court-packing was possible for most of English history. The house of lords *was* the highest court.
Yes, but my point was that simple majority is not incompatible with stable, competent and democratic government. The UK does not rely on supermakorities (there are a few recent things that complicate this but the main point stands)
The House of Lords was the highest court in one sense, but...
(a) for most of English history didn't function as a supreme court in the simple sense. There were lots of reasons why appeal to the Lords was not possible, and (for example) the key "constitutional" cases were usually heard not in the Lords but in "lower" courts (Ship Money finally decided in the Court of the Exchequer, for example, and Middleton v Crofts in the King's Bench).
(b) most of the Lords' judicial functions were exercised by a committee (formerly of those of its members who were judges, latterly of specially-appointed judges called Lords of Appeal). So in practice the committee had numbers and a defined membership much like the US Supreme Court. And of course those members were appointed imply by the Crown (i.e. formerly by the King, latterly by the Government) with need of confirmation.
(c) packing the whole House of Lords is by no means unknown. Remember that members are also appointed simply, which can create as many peers as it wants to get votes for government policy. Off the top of my head, this was unambiguously done to pass the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, and threatened as a live tactic in 1832 (Reform Act), 1910 and 1911 (Budget and Parliament Act) and 2018 (Brexit). Some people (me) would also say the entire history of the Lords post-1998 is an exercise in house-packing. I don't remember an occasion of Lords-packing for judicial reasons, mostly because of (b), but it could have been done.
*simply* by the Crown with *no* need of confirmation.
“simultaneously try to backstabbed” is, I think, a typoe. But great book review!
"Typoe" is also a typo.
Muphry's Law strikes again!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
> the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup”
It was an attempted coup, a weak one. I feel as if you are falling into a hapless pit where you cannot see the straightforward reading of the situation because of your own trapped priors around the left.
Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. Watch the would-be dictator speak words to a crowd. Don't litigate what the words mean that's stupid. Watch the crowd march. Watch the crowd break into a building and kill people. Think about the symbolic importance of that building.
People get confused by textual readings of speeches because they don't understand that people lie by omission, very pointedly. You struggle with this specifically, and now you are starting to encounter a wider world of betrayal and deception in government.
It's honestly heartening to see you take this project on with your usual sincerity.
> Erdogan gets described as a "right-wing populist", a term I've always had trouble understanding.
Notice that you were confused. The academic establishment has had access to these stories of dictators and would-be dictators and they were unified in declaring Trump a danger.
Trump is also a right-wing populist, and a fascist: he constructs the false narrative that it is just and necessary for him to take power.
These are terms which have a long history of use. I accept that you are attempting to educate yourself in these political fields and admire your willingness to struggle openly.
Pick another dictator and read about them. Keep on doing it until the pieces fall into place: Trumpism is a fascist movement and always has been and if you think otherwise you are not just wrong but dangerously misinformed.
When the fascists came to America Scott Alexander wrote "You Are Still Calling Wolf." You lost a lot of people with that essay and for some reason I still hope you might see that you made a mistake.
Work like this makes me hopeful for your future as a political bogger. Because I want you to understand: you don't have a future as a political blogger outside of the circle of people that care about substack, you won't make it as a commentator unless you can understand that YASCW was a failure.
Agreed. Doubling down on the role of genes in meritocracy and the puerile innocence of the Trump movement is increasingly tiresome.
The Wolf post argued only that people were exaggerating Trump's racial views, and specifically asked people not to interpret it as saying that other things about him weren't bad. The fact that everyone who argues against it points to totally different bad stuff Trump did seems like some evidence that I was right.
Re: the Capitol - if it was an attempted coup, how come once the coupers were in the Capitol, Trump asked them to stop? How come he had no plan to follow up on "a few people make it into the Capitol building and steal podiums" with actual action by the military, pro-Trump media outlets, or other players he controlled?
I think it's more like someone who mistakenly believes they deposited $1,000, shows up at the bank, yells at the cashier, throws stuff at the partition and demands $1,000. That's not a robbery. That's just someone committing assault and trespass and being very wrong about what is going on.
Just because *you* don't think the actions of the Jan 6 Capitol invaders could've resulted in Trump remaining in power doesn't mean *they* didn't think that's what they were doing or that *Trump* didn't think their actions could keep him in power.
For determining whether it was an attempted coup, I think their perceptions are more relevant than the reality of the situation.
The Shaman might very well believe that his magic would work... but the rest of us don't have to take his belief in magic seriously.
If the Shaman attempts a spell designed to kill you, he's still trying to kill you.
And, if a stupid, floundering president tries to harness that shaman to keep him in power, he's attempting a coup.
The real danger, at least in current America, is that too many people shrug off floundering stupidity as incidental narcissism or whatever. This phenom led Trump to power (and led him many steps down the road of permanently hobbling our democracy) just as surely as it led Hitler to power in the early 30s.
At least Hitler showed up for his coup...
So if you were a judge, would you sentence the Shaman to 30 years in prison for attempted murder, the same as if the Shaman tried to kill someone with a gun but missed? I think that's clearly unreasonable.
Please. At least 90% of the protestors own firearms, yet not a single firearm was brought into the Capitol by them and the only ones fired were by the police. The zip-tie guy picked those up from where the police left them. For a bunch of literal boy scouts, there was zero serious preparation for a coup attempt.
If someone were seriously attempting a coup, even if it was just one delusional person who was serious about it, why would they leave their guns at home? Try to see this from the other side. You're planning to take over at least one branch of the government and you have a stash of weapons, do you leave them all at home?
The whole "coup attempt" thing is a ridiculous story on it's face.
Did we watch the same pictures? At least one guy was clearly holding a rifle.
If you can find a photo of someone (other than police) with a rifle inside the capitol that day, I'm sure the prosecutors would be very excited to see it.
According to the government and news reports, while there were three people (of the thousands who attended the rally) arrested for having firearms outside, and a handful of people discussed bringing weapons from VA later in the event Antifa attacked the rally (but they never did), there is no evidence anyone brought a firearm inside the capitol.
Hmm, and of course now I'm unable to find that video... you could see a man, inside a building, who certainly didn't look like a policeman, holding a wooden rifle stock (presumably with the rest of the rifle attached to it, but I didn't see it for long enough...)
But point taken about "this is *not* how you do a coup !"
>The fact that everyone who argues against it points to totally different bad stuff Trump did seems like some evidence that I was right.
You need to do some long hard thinking about whether or not your own evaluation of whether or not you were 'right' is sufficient to the task of engaging with political matters. It doesn't matter what you think you said any more than it matters what Trump said to his mob. That was the moment you told your community to stand down. It cost you severely in credibility on the left.
You will not succeed if your response to criticism is always to find the arguments that say you were right all along. This isn't school and factual correctness is not sufficient, you also must show understanding of the fascist impulse.
You didn't have that understanding back in 2016, and I'm glad you're doing the reading to catch up with the rest of the educated world. But it's never smart to write about how the fascist isn't racist because you're fooled by the taco picture.
You fell for the con: you constructed the reasonable argument for them.
> how come once the coupers were in the Capitol, Trump asked them to stop?
I will translate the subtext of Trump's message for you: he validated the fascist lie (the election was stolen and you are correct to be where you are) and said it was time to go home. This, like "Stand back and stand by," was a message designed to be heard two different ways. His supporters hear "mission accomplished" and the rubes on the sidelines (you) hear "be peaceful" because it's easier to believe that there was a simple explanation for Trump's fascistic rhetoric than that Trumpism is fascistic.
The most fascinating part of 2016-2020 for me was the understanding that there are people who just cannot perceive the fascists. A giant blind spot.
>How come he had no plan to follow up on "a few people make it into the Capitol building and steal podiums" with actual action by the military, pro-Trump media outlets, or other players he controlled?
I said it was a weak coup attempt. But it was an attempt to interfere with the transfer of power through the use of force, powered by a fascist lie about the invalidity of the elections.
For me there is no surprise in learning there are people who see fascists everywhere.
Some coup where two of participants ecide to leave their packs with arms outside the building because they think that would made them into jail.
"Coup" still seems like the wrong word IMO. The right word seems to be much more like "terrorist attack". Terrorists want to send a message, not necessarily take the reins of governance. The people who entered the Capitol were dangerous and they were minutes or seconds away from actually taking members of Congress and harming them. If such a thing had occurred, I don't think Trump would have taken the opportunity to establish a military order and remain in office; I think in all likelihood he would have been impeached and removed. Cheering on terrorists is pretty bad and worthy of impeachment, but still "coup" just doesn't seem accurate.
I think the right word is "riot", although you might want to note that it was a specifically political riot. Terrorism is typically committed by smaller cells, even if they are part of larger groups, rather than big mobs on the street.
In the paranoid fever dreams of the modern Left, it doesn't matter what you said. All that matters it the secret message they imbue your speech with and hold you responsible for. No one can say anything true if it would be politically unfavorable to the Left- that would be tacit support for fascism. Therefore all criticism of the Left or defense in nay way of anything on the Right must be silenced. That is the only way they think fascism can be avoided- total state control of all speech.
He didn’t ask them to stop until it was clear the VP, Pelosi were gone and the NG was somehow said to be activated on the MSM without his authority. Someone in the deep state said “enough” already.
Wasn’t the argument that Trump was a fascist, but an ineffective one, because he wasn’t skilled at It? doesn’t mean he or his minions didn’t think a hail mary wasn’t worth trying.
Re-read The Banality of Evil. You seem to keep looking for laser-focused efficiencies as the only evidence you'll accept that shit is serious. Goofy Hitler and his silly brown-shirts is the parallel here. I'm actually kind of amazed by the sloppiness (and lack of imagination) of your reasoning here. "Once they were in capitol" Trump asked them to stop?? I'm not going to do your work of walking you through the timeline of the day, or the specificity of Trump's comments (or, more to the point, lack thereof), or his comments and actions from well before the election onward. I just suggest you do your due diligence before parroting such a cynical rightwing refrain. You're way off target here this time, Scott. In your post, you noted the complexities of events like coups -- how they're not just the result of one thing. This is no different.
I am giving Sa Matra the last word here and will not be further replying to this thread after the one reply I already made. I will also be deleting anyone else who replies, since otherwise I can already predict this is going to completely take over from discussion of Erdogan and become terrible. If you want to discuss this, take it to datasecretslox
This is why 'New First' should be the default setting for comments, as I said.
That's pretty hilarious, Scott. Your definition of "terrible" is that you're getting hammered because people take issue with your facile conclusions about THE WHOLE REASON YOU CLAIMED TO BE INTERESTED IN ERDOGAN -- how his history might be applicable here!
But, I guess, like Erdogan, you're just haplessly being forced toward totalitarianism?
I think one thing that confuses people about the Capitol attack being part of a coup is that the attackers didn't seem to have a plan to seize control of government themselves. (Though some seemed to have assassination on their minds. Of course, erecting a gallows and chanting "hang Mike Pence" is "just trolling", but that has the usual option for opportunistic conversion to actually very serious all along.) But Republicans in Congress overtly put forward several plans for unconstitutionally throwing out entire states' elections (appoint an electoral commission, empower state legislatures to throw out their own state's election, just do it themselves). That was the coup. The attack on the Capitol was meant to thwart the ordinary operation of government and justify the coup. People are angry, therefore something must be done.
(Not enough emphasis was put on the "that's not constitutional" aspect of those plans relative to the "they don't have the votes" aspect. While Republicans were following the procedure in the Electoral Count Act, that's legislation. To the extent that legislation just allows Congress to ignore the states' election and choose which candidate with electoral votes wins, it's not constitutional.)
Trump's specialty is chaos, which has arguably worked for him throughout his life. And he clearly hoped it would work one last time -- and he was especially desperate fearing prison, etc. And his chickenshit GOP enablers played along.
Trump hoped that there would be so much confusion about election integrity that the results would have to be nullified. He talked openly about new, replacement elections -- and he even talked about "his" Supreme Court stepping in. Whether he even knew enough to call it a "coup," that was clearly what he was attempting.
Someone upthread mentioned trapped priors with regard to Scott on this topic. Seeing his blatant defensiveness, I'm inclined to agree. The problem is he is contributing with his platform to the minimization of the current real threats to our democracy.
"Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. "
The nice thing about looking at someone's actual words is that there's a limit to how much you can distort them, either on purpose or through motivated reasoning.
"Watch what they do" lets you paint someone's actions as arbitrarily evil in an unfalsifiable way.
Here is an actual academic expert on coups:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/one-or-two-simple-points.html
And here are multiple experts on fascism:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21521958/what-is-fascism-signs-donald-trump
Ok. From your links:
Roger Griffin, emeritus professor in modern history, Oxford Brookes University
> Trump’s role models include leaders like Erdogan and Putin who are not exactly fascists, but something more: authoritarians, or strongman rulers who also use virility as a tool of domination.
> I also favor authoritarian over fascist as a description for Trump because the former captures how autocratic power works today. In the 21st century, fascist takeovers have been replaced by rulers who come to power through elections and then, over time, extinguish freedom.
Jason Stanley, Jacob Urowsky professor of philosophy, Yale University
> When I think about fascism, I think about it as applied to different things. There’s a fascist regime. We do not have a fascist regime. Then there’s the question of, “Is Trumpism a fascist social and political movement?” I think you could call legitimately call Trumpism a fascist social and political movement — which is not to say that Trump is a fascist. Trumpism involves a cult of the leader, and Trump embodies that. I certainly think he’s using fascist political tactics. I think there’s no question about that. He is calling for national restoration in the face of humiliations brought on by immigrants, liberals, liberal minorities, and leftists. He’s certainly playing the fascist playbook.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, professor of Italian and history, New York University
> By not calling him fascist, and concentrating on the way he perverts democracy, we see Trump in a different context. We don’t see him as Hitler or Mussolini. We see him in a different rogues’ gallery. And the rogues’ gallery is made up of a whole load of dictators throughout history, including Putin and Erdogan and Orbán and Assad today, who have abused constitutionalism and democracy to rationalize their abuse of power and their crimes against humanity.
Matthew Feldman, director, Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right
> Four months ago, I warned that Trump was descending into naked authoritarianism. Low-information commentators seek to reassure rather than dig deeply, telling readers to look on the bright side. That the US is an exceptional country.
> It is not.
Sheri Berman, professor of political science, Barnard College, Columbia University
> And, of course, Trump is undermining various norms and institutions of democracy. But this doesn’t make him a fascist, which means much more than these things. Indeed, I almost think calling Trump “fascist” gives him too much “credit” — he isn’t strategic enough, ideological enough, or ambitious enough. And as bad as things are today, we are still not in 1930s Germany.
...
> As for Trump overall, I would still prefer referring to him as an illiberal populist or right-wing populist. He has a lot in common with the right-wing populists roaming around Europe today.
So technically not a fascist, but definitely comparable to Erdogan.
I typically go for a Berlusconi comparison (although he managed to stay in power longer), Scott Sumner has recently pointed to Obrador*, there are lots of possible comparisons. Erdogan seems too competent in my book (he actually held an elected position as mayor and rose up from that), but I can see there being some similarities. I definitely think Trump has authoritarian instincts and would like to be able to haul his opponents into court.
* https://www.themoneyillusion.com/no-hay-esperanza/
"Try this: forget about what they say, and watch what they do. Watch the would-be dictator speak words to a crowd. Don't litigate what the words mean that's stupid."
Why do you think deliberately excluding information would improve your conclusions? If I specifically warn a teenager to NOT do something stupid, and he does the stupid thing just to spite me, does that mean I planned for the stupid thing to happen? That's why you'd have to conclude if you ignored my words and only watched what people did.
On January 6, Trump gave a speech to his supporters. He said: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard." The march to the Capitol wasn't spontaneous, nor was it caused by Trump's speech. Rather, the Trump supporters gathered in Washington DC on that day specifically to protest Congress' certification of the electoral votes.
At 2:38 pm, after the protesters breached the Capitol building, he tweeted out "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" At 3:13 pm, he tweeted "I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!".
At 4:17 pm, he tweeted a video in which he said "I know your pain. I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us,” he said. “It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order. We have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
At 6:01 pm, he tweeted "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!"
So in summary, Trump called for peace at least 5 times on January 6, including before any violence took place. If this is a coup, Trump seems like the least enthusiastic coup plotter of all time.
"Watch the crowd break into a building and kill people."
Not a single death can be positively attributed to the pro Trump mob. There were news reports that a police officer was beaten to death with a fire extinguisher. Those news reports have since been corrected (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/11/us/politics/capitol-riot-police-officer-injuries.html):
"Though law enforcement officials initially said Officer Sicknick was struck with a fire extinguisher, police sources and investigators are at odds over whether he was hit. Medical experts have said he did not die of blunt force trauma, according to one law enforcement official."
Also, there was a famous photo of a man carrying zip ties. Some news outlets speculated that he brought the zip ties to kidnap lawmakers. In fact, he happened to find the zip ties on a table inside the Capitol building: https://www.insider.com/zip-tie-guy-capitol-riot-plastic-handcuffs-police-prosecutors-2021-1
If you're interested in how countries lapse into dictatorship let me highly recommend "How Democracies Die" as a systematic overview on that theme. And also "Wars, Guns, and Votes" though that's a lot less relevant to the US.
Surely the main lesson is the danger of religion in politics?
More broadly, I suppose, it's due to religion being an old institution that winds up being central to 'low cultural class' aka cultural conservatism. But even so, this seems to be a story where Ataturk and the Turkish Army were terrified of Islamism destroying somewhat-liberal Turkey, to the point of staging multiple coups to avoid it, and when they let down their guard once they got an Islamist dictatorship.
The pattern that I find interesting here is that of someone who may not have wanted to be a dictator at first, but found that, because of the nature of the regime he was trying to reform, he was continually pushed toward dictatorship as a way to either accomplish his more modest reform or avoid being deposed.
I think one of the most important ways we can make our country less likely to end up with a dictator is to make sure that we don't have those same kinds of incentives. It's one thing I've been very uneasy about w.r.t. prosecuting Trump after he leaves power--you don't want to establish the pattern than once a president makes the wrong enemies in office, losing the next election means he goes to prison, because that sets up some very bad incentives. OTOH, you also don't want to let presidents get away with corruption or other crimes. It's not obvious to me how to resolve that conflict.
The whole situation seems like a good argument against a Presidential system at all, and the way it puts far too much power into the hands of one individual.
Prime Ministers are less powerful and more easily removed than Presidents, and that's a great thing.
Hardening institutions also enables undemocratic entryism, intentionally or not.
What do you mean by "out to get him"?
There definitely were a lot of journalists who'd love to find the story that ends his presidency, and politicians who wanted to impeach him. So by a broad definition it's true that they are out to get him. But then, neither of those are unusual (which president didn't have reporters who'd love to get that story) or imply wrongdoing on the part of Trump's enemies.
Degree of honesty seems important here: how many of those journalists were in any way scrupulous, and how many were just hunting for any muck they could find, making it up when they couldn't? This extends to other institutions as well, of course. In short: "out to get" can have the connotation of "not playing fair".
Somewhat separately: what proportion of institutional figures are "out to get" someone? Very different when it's a few dedicated individuals as opposed to (what feels like) most.
Honest question: what do you think are the most clear-cut examples of journalists making things up to libel Trump? I can think of many instances of half truths, exaggerations, out-of-context quotes, etc, but is there a case of a clearly deliberate lie from a mainstream American newspaper?
I'm having trouble tracing an obvious line between Erdogan's Islam and his dictatorship. I could equally well imagine him getting in power, using democratic mechanisms to implement Islamic policy, but maintaining the democratic structure of the country.
Your review makes it sound as if the system was set up to distil the most conservative, traditional, anti-State version of Islam possible. If parents who wanted to send their kids to a religious rather than secular school only had the choice of "practically a junior seminary", the students couldn't get into good colleges, their qualifications meant they weren't fitted for any kind of white-collar job - then is it any surprise that over the generations this creates clerics and devotees who are staunch believers who don't fall away from their faith because they can depict themselves as being persecuted and treated as second-class citizens, and whose aim once in power is to get rid of the persecuting elements and set up "Islamic values" in society and governance?
Strongly agree with Deiseach here. Religious folks fear French or Turkish style laicite happening in the US. I think this is why Christians have done things since the 90s like setting up their own movie ratings websites, colleges, Fox News, and institutions like the Federalist Society (have you heard progressive conspiracy theories about FS?). It reminds me of that quote from one SSC essay, "Conservatives literally begged for progressives to be more tolerant of conservative voices... but when conservatives left mainstream institutions to set up their own parallel institutions, the progressives said, 'No wait, you can't do that; come back here so we can keep stomping you.'"
In this essay, "Muslims, including the Gulenists, understood his ascendancy as their only route to fair political representation." In the American case, the failure mode is that a fair equilibrium is never reached, and conservatives ever more believe themselves to be in the Muslim/Gulenist situation.
When the anti-Gulenist countercoup happened, I picked up some Gulenist literature to figure out what it was all about. And, granted this is the way that they present themselves, it seemed to me they were largely about highly competent Islam, Islam which supports civilization and the common good and works and plays well with others. To do this, they really emphasize gaining the skills necessary to thrive in modern society and achieve high places (and defend Islam from persecution), so that society will have a place for devout, intelligent Muslims. If anyone is out there from a Gulenist school, I would love to hear more.
Also CHECK THIS OUT: They have a school called the Filipino Turkish Tolerance School. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_Turkish_Tolerance_School
Okay, I am really sorry, but I am down a rabbit hole but have to share.
There's a webpage of concerned citizens worried about Gulenism in US charter schools, and they have a conspiracy story about these insidious philanthropists!
https://sites.google.com/site/gulenmovementcharterschools/charter-schools-offer-numerous-business-opportunities
Short YouTube video by a US sociologist expert on Gulenism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJmldzfD884
(The concerned citizens website says she was cut off at minute 12 to stifle the truth about Gulenism in America's schools).
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402098932 Here's her book.
In The Netherlands, the Gülen movement puts great pressure on people during meetings to donate large sums of money. So they seem to be quite competent at extracting money from their followers as well.
I remember there was some controversy about Erdogan coming over to the Netherlands to campaign with Turkish nationals, which rubbed the Dutch the wrong way on several levels. I remember thinking it would be so weird if Hillary Clinton came to campaign for support from American expats. (There were something like 50K American expats in NL in 2016, but I’m pretty sure 99% of us were Democrats anyway.)
It wasn't Erdoğan, but his Ministers who wanted to visit. They had called for large scale demonstrations by Dutch Turks in The Netherlands, which pissed off the Dutch government, who didn't want large scale demonstrations about a foreign conflict. Note that it's even illegal by Turkish law for them to campaign abroad.
So the Dutch government told off the Turkish government, but was willing to negotiate, allowing more limited campaigning. Then the Turks started to threaten with sanctions and such, which made the Dutch unwilling to negotiate further. Then the Turks decided to just have a Minister visit anyway, but the Dutch refused to let the Turkish plane land.
Then the Turks sent their Minister of Family and Social Policies, who was touring Germany, to The Netherlands by motorcade. This motorcade was then intercepted by the police, but the car with the Minister managed to drive away. She headed for the Turkish consulate, but was cut off just in front of the building by a heavily armed elite police tactical unit. The Minister then refused to leave her car, until midnight, when the police sent in a flatbed to hoist the car on, to drive it back to Germany.
Then the Minister left the car and demanded to be let into the consulate, but was told that they could either go back to Germany or be arrested. She went back to Germany.
Then Erdoğan called the Dutch "fascists", "remnants of Nazism" and accused them of mass murder in Srebrenica. He also attacked Europeans in general, calling on the Turkish Diaspora to out-breed the locals and said that Europeans wouldn't be safe in Turkey.
Then I left some stuff out like protesters in Turkey stabbing oranges with knives and burning the French flag (apparently thinking that the conflict was with French President François Hollande due to his name). And there was an incident where the police department of the town of Rotterdam in New York State was harassed.
It would make for a pretty good H/Bollywood movie...
Would it?
I could see a version of this system (not saying this is how it is in Turkey, I don't know) where it just serves as a high-pass filter for religious extremism. The vast majority of people who aren't at some threshold of extremism basically disengage from it and the only ones who don't are the people most likely to be extreme.
Arguably it reveals the danger of aggressively excluding religion from politics - eventually someone like Erdogan will find a way to get into power.
> Surely the main lesson is the danger of religion in politics?
You could equally well argue the opposite. The Turkish elites tried to squash religion out of public life for a century, in a country that was still fairly religious, and it's not surprising that eventually the populace rebelled against this.
But the populace didn't rebel against this, as far as I can tell from the summary above? Erdogan didn't succeed in democratic politics until he hid his religion a lot, giving a very toned-down version that the populace was more comfortable with, and most of his popular support came from successful implementation of secular economic policies.
Am I missing something where the populace rebelled in favor of religious extremism in this story?
Yea I'm with you. Seems like Erdogan just took advantages of circumstance (people wanting to join EU, booming economy, military/deep state suspicion) and managed to get some results. And he (and Gulen I guess) just happened to be religious.
I think religion was far more important than you give it credit for. I believe religion gave Erdogan a fascistic sense of divine right: the sacred ends would justify any means.
A driven person born into a slum would understand power and violence, the gulenist apparatus gave him a path and a code to follow, and the circumstances presented him with with the unlikely opportunities to learn how to manipulate the system that was built to suppress people precisely like him.
Politicized religion built the ladder for him to climb. A secular strong man would not have had such solid footholds.
Imagine if Christians had comparable political ambitions in America as islamists do in Turkey, and that US had rabidly atheistic institutions in response. Even a preacher-Trump would be far more dangerous than the present one, especially if there was a competent, connected and powerful organization with a clear objective backing his ascendancy.
Now imagine that he also had the grit and savvy of someone bootstrapped from violence and hardship. Scary.
I'd say one important takeaway is that political instability tends to breed instability, and vice versa. Also, having a large gulf between elite and mass opinion/ideology seems like an important ingredient for despotism.
Scott already said that religion didn't have to lead to dictatorship. The converse also holds: religion is just one of many ideologies a leader can draw on while implementing a dictatorship. Chavez/Maduro in Venezuela, for instance, drew on socialism.
"And as the work of titans like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and so on" Thomas Jefferson was in France when the Constitution was written, he basically missed the late 80s.
Also, Jefferson was a big opponent of the idea of permanent Constitutions -- he wrote somewhere that there should be a new Constitution for every generation, and he defined generation as the oddly-specific period of 19 years: https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/206732#:~:text=CHAMPAIGN%2C%20Ill.,)%2C%20has%20prevailed%20since%201789.
I don't know why 19 exactly, except that it's long enough for the last generation to conceive a kid and raise them to adulthood, but if we were ever going to have a system where we regularly scrap and rewrite the constitution, I like the idea of it happening on a cadence that is relatively prime to all the term limits of all the elected officials.
Thanks, fixed.
Washington and Madison are generally #2 and #1 for that. Hamilton was there, but famously no one liked his ideas.
You mention that there's no equivalent to "we need to join the EU" as a reason to restructure all of our institutions, but...well...if there really is some goal everyone in the country has in common, isn't it pretty easy to use it to justify this sort of thing? Eisenhower's goodbye speech is all about the way US institutions changed in order to better fight the Cold War, and it occurs to me that if we get serious about a great power confrontation with China we would essentially have some kind of similar thing.
("We need to fight climate change" feels like an abortive attempt to create this sort of story. Not that climate change isn't a real problem, but in the late '80s/early '90s it felt like it was picking up enough power to be a reason to restructure institutions; for whatever reason it ran out of unifying ability by the mid-'90s, though. The rise of Green parties in 2010s Europe shows how *little* power the green movement has -- Turkey never needed a Join-EU Party, or 1950s America an Anti-Communist Party, after all).
Erdogan often manufactures these kinds of controversies when he needs more support.
I'm surprised by your claim that there was more energy in the fight against climate change in the 90s than today - say more?
That's not quite what I'm saying -- I think there was less energy in the fight against the fight against climate change, if that makes sense. The Montreal Protocol was ratified by *every* member of the UN in 1988, and Kyoto seems like it was much more ambitious than the Paris agreement (by setting some specific targets, for instance). The Kyoto agreement seemed uncontroversial when it was drafted in 1992 -- basically every country signed it and this doesn't really seem to have been controversial in most places -- but by 1997 the US Senate passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution *against* it unanimously. At some point in the mid-1990s, a very powerful anti-green movement emerged, such that environmentalist politics could no longer hope to be all-unifying.
The people who wrote the Kyoto Protocol seemed to have envisioned huge changes in institutions around the world and not to have expected to encounter very much resistance to their ideas -- which is analogizable to the pro-EU forces in Turkey in the 2000s, I think.
There probably is more energy in the fight against climate change today, as shown by all those Green parties growing in central Europe, but I think this is now because they have opponents who didn't really exist 30 years ago.
Sounds like there's more energy in the fight on both sides, which makes sense. The harder you push people, the harder they push back.
The 1990s anti climate change agenda was more like "Hey, maybe let's install some solar panels or something when it's convenient" whereas the 2020s climate change agenda is a bit closer to the "eat the bugs, live in the pod" meme.
Also, a lot of my thinking here is informed by your post about 1990s environmentalism -- I think you were tracking the transition of a movement from one that didn't really have enemies to a more confrontational one that realized that it did, in fact, have enemies.
The "need to join the EU" wasn't just an arbitrary cause every Turk had in common. (Did they actually?) The EU specifically demanded more democracy, which meant reducing the power of the military. An arbitrary goal is not equivalent to this, if it doesn't provide a specific excuse to restructure the institutions.
Nisantasi is the part of Istanbul where you would head if you wanted to buy a designer handbag.
I came here to explain that one too (though not as well).
The great part is that this is easy enough to infer from the context of the quote even if you know nothing about Istanbul.
I went to Turkey once, and the very first thing the very first Turkish person we befriended did was take us to a rooftop hotel bar in Nisantasi. I have rarely felt closer to the jet-set (which I am not). Still, we owe that guy one for showing us the best spot to drink raki while taking in an amazing view of the city.
I enjoy your exploration of politics. I have to strongly disagree with your object policy recommendations though.
America has a real lack of government capacity. Just about nothing it does is done well or effectively. Your recommendations (less direct control by the president over the bureaucracy and more supermajoritarian checks) is going to exacerbate this primary issue.
Also, I am left wondering if perhaps democracy is less valuable than we are led to believe from this book review. The object level "is turkey better off today as a dictatorship" is left unargued. The bits we get hint perhaps it is better off.
I'm a huge fan of federalism as a solution here, but I also worry about how federalism works in the modern age.
Example: California's net neutrality laws and emissions laws. I'm broadly in favor of the policies, there, and wouldn't mind seeing them happen at the federal level; nevertheless, I'm deeply uncomfortable with the degree to which California can effectively impose policy on the rest of the country.
Also, given how little people actually move (see the famous study about how far the average person lives from their mother), I'm not sure how easy foot voting really is.
I mean, yes, I'm all for breaking up California (and Texas, both for fairness and because it poses similar dominance problems, such as the way it determines what's in grade school textbooks).
But that doesn't change the problems posed by a highly interconnected economy. Modern economic systems give local governments strong, legitimate motivation to attempt to regulate trans-state (not to mention trans-national) organizations in ways that will inherently impact other localities. See: marijuana, laws requiring businesses to store personal data locally, efforts to tax digital advertising spending, and net neutrality and environmental things as mentioned above.
I hadn't considered the confounder of mothers moving to where their adult children are; that's an excellent point.
Yes, I agree that there's a tradeoff between "resistant to dictatorship" and "able to get anything done", and that possibly suggestions which are good at achieving dictatorship-resistance are nevertheless bad on net.
Now that just begs for a list of policy recommendations that increase resistance to dictatorship and increases state capacity. I wonder if there are any?
I think by definition there are none, we just have to find the optimal point between the poles of anarchy and tyranny.
I don't think that's quite right- there are things that would fit but most of them are either obviously desirable already or difficult to actually achieve. Basically we want things that make it easier for the government to do good things than bad things.
The obvious route is things that make the population more intelligent, ethical, and informed. As expected, that's all stuff we already want to do and don't have great ideas about how to do better.
There is, parliamentarism.
Exactly. I have honestly never heard of a dictatorial Prime Minister.
Although a PM with a strong majority has more actual power to make huge changes than does a president.
Moreover, in parliamentary systems with 3-5 significant parties like Canada a PM can get a large majority in parliament with under 30% (theoretically under 10%) of the national vote.
Perhaps parliamentarism combined with cabinet government. Historically, the UK PM was quite weak and a lot of power resided with the heads of government departments (secretaries of state). The PM's job is largely to manage secretaries of state and oversee the civil service.
Mussolini was Prime Minister.
Robert Mugabe was the first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 1987, at which point the position of Prime Minister was abolished and Mugabe became President of Zimbabwe for 30 years until a coup ousted him.
As some have pointed out, there have been dictatorial prime ministers. But I don't see that as undermining my case that parliamentarism increases resistance to dictatorship and increases state capacity.
First, I do not equate having a prime minister with being parliamentary. Parliamentarism is about primacy of the parliament, having a prime minister does not secure that. In the cases mentioned below, a lack of parliamentary primacy allowed for dictatorship.
Second, even if we find cases where a truly parliamentary regime became a dictatorship, it does not mean that, ex ante, parliamentary regimes do not increase resistance to dictatorship.
Some Prime Ministers are merely a primus inter pares, like the Dutch one, so their power is fully dependent on the other ministers yielding to him.
Having some positions in the executive branch (especially independent agencies) be elected instead of appointed by the president.
This increases resistance to dictatorship because there are multiple independent sources of power. It might increase state capacity. The post office (or EPA or FCC or ...) might work better if the election that determined its leader was separated from other political issues.
This exists on the state level. I don't know if there are studies looking at whether this makes the state more or less effective.
Garett Jones's "10% Less Democacy" is probably the best book on the promise of independent agencies. Indeed I think they improve resistance to dictatorship and state capacity, but only when they are independent of the executive, not of parliament. I would doubt that popular elections of heads of agencies would help, but do not know studies.
We do this (kind of) with the fed, and I'm skeptical that it's resulted in marketly better outcomes than if it was more tightly controlled.
I find the book pretty persuasive...
I'll take a look at it, but I should warn you that I'm starting out skeptical. I'm not particularly fond of independent agencies in general. They are not democratic, they are probably unconstitutional (part of the executive branch that can write regulations and levy fines?), and they seem to be a ratchet that continually increases the power of the federal government. Having independent elections would be a way to potentially fix a problematic part of government without removing what good they do.
Federalism (pushing state power down to the state or local level).
What makes you think that? It doesn't pass a sanity check. If we look at this map (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalism#/media/File:Map_of_unitary_and_federal_states.svg), we will see that there does not seem to be any relationship between being federal and being more democratic and developed. Historically, the association also seems to be missing. It also is hard to define (how much power will be pushed to the local level? If too much you will have secession and this is not associated with better outcomes).
1. State power != being developed.
2. Federalism is not sufficient for economic development. A corrupt dictatorship without property rights federating will not fix the underlying problems.
3. There are different levels of federalism. Many places on that map are nominally federal, but the bulk of political power still resides in the central government. For example, that is my understanding of Australia, Russia, India, and Germany. Even the US is much less federal than it once was. By "federalism" I'm thinking the US pre-1920s or Switzerland.
4. Dictatorship resistance is probably a tail risk with high downside and thus will not be weighted properly in this kind of analysis (how many democratic countries have become dictatorships?).
1. We are talking about state capacity which, while conceivably different from being developed, tends to be intrinsically connected to it (see https://www.econlib.org/state-capacity-is-sleight-of-hand/).
2. OK, not sufficient, but do we have any evidence it actually helps? I don't see it.
3. I agree, and that was my point on it being hard to define. If we are going to defend a policy, surely we would want the people that are inclined to listen to us to make similar measures, right? The fact that the cause of federalism arrives at such different outcomes should count against it as a cause.
4. I'm sorry but I'm not sure I understood the argument.
The relevant definition of federalism here is probably something like:
Local political elites determine their own platforms, rather than reflecting the will of a national organization.
I like federalism, but mostly for a different reason: Smaller organizations can be more responsive to a particular individual.
I don't know if federalism leads to better state capacity or not.
I do think that federalism increases the resistance to becoming a dictatorship. But dictatorship is only one way for a government to be not democratic. Federal systems should be more worried about local democratic erosion than a single person taking over everything.
Federal systems can also be formed by an alliance between small monarchies (UAE, Malaysia) or from the disintegration of an authoritarian government (Somalia, Iraq, Holy Roman Empire). These seem less relevant to the question of how to protect an existing democracy from becoming a dictatorship.
There doesn't have to be. The single best method of coup prevention is genuine federalism. Having legitimate alternatives to the national government not only makes it harder to concentrate power there, but gives people an alternative they can rally to. If there was a right wing coup in America, California would tell them to fuck off. And if the coup was left wing, Texas would do the same.
It also makes it easier to get things done, since you have a bunch of smaller polities. It makes things harder to do the same everywhere, but frankly, that's a feature, not a bug, because conditions vary.
How do you define genuine federalism and what ensures a country achieves it?
In the context of the US, you vest as much power as possible in state governors, who are by far the most accountable actors in the system.
* One senator per state who serves at the pleasure of his governor
* Allow a vote of 1/3 of the senate to annul federal laws or regulations
* Only flag officers, governors, and cabinet level officers can be president
* Limit the ability of the federal government to tax directly and/or convert federal spending programs into state level block grants that give governors a lot of discretion
* Limit the ability of federal courts to overturn state courts
I believe the idea of concentrating power on a personalized executive (independent of the level) is extremely dangerous. See https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/09/yay-parliaments.html
good thing I suggest doing the opposite of that, then. there isn't one state governor, there are 50. I'm talking about DE-concentrating power.
Didn't South Carolina, Georgia, Misissippi, North Carolina, Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama all try telling the federal government to fuck off once...?
And that was when the US barely had a standing army, and the sort of weapons you could find on most farms.
Slightly OT, I guess, but it seems to me that one of the sneaky advantages to federalism is that you encourage/allow for the development of different governing models, all of which are operating under a similar socio-economic framework.
As things stand, I don't think anyone really knows what the optimal approach is to addressing most policy challenges, and the only way (that I know of) to inch closer to some understanding of what would be optimal is to experiment. In a federal model in the US, you'd have 50 such real-life 'experiments' being conducted simultaneously, which would accelerate the process of understanding what kinds of policy responses work, and which do not.
In the long run, all/most states would appropriate the best policies and approaches to constructing policy from each other, and we'd have an easier time, in aggregate, of moving in the right direction.
Italian constitutional order tries its best to prevent future Mussolinis coming to power. Italian governments are, as a consequence, very weak and unstable and this weakness is exploited by, among others, various Mafiosi.
To get anything done, Italy has strong devolution of powers to regions.
Why aren't those regions then able to both provide services as well as take care of the mafia?
(As italian) I disagree on the diagnosis. It always felt to me more a problem of party culture, with party members which are more than happy to backstab their own party secretary to score personal points. Put the italian constitution in germany and I do not expect things to get significantly worse for the CDU.
Weirdly enough the effect of the extreme de jure weakness of the gobernment is to give the executive enormous control over the legislation. Often (and even with electoral laws) the prime minister basically threaten to dissolve the government if the law does not get approved, with the result that crucial legislation de facto passes by decree
The German system is designed to prevent new Hitlers, so that's not the best country to compare Italy to.
Yet it seems more functional than Italy, so that suggests that this sort of constitution doesn't necessarily cause dysfunction.
I don't see evidence for this trade-off, quite the contrary. If we look at countries which are generally able to get things done, they are the ones that are perceived as being the most resistant to dictatorship. Dictatorships usually do not get things done, this is a myth. See the twenty leaders in state capacity here: https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/206199.php Very democratic countries are over-represented.
Interestingly, though, your plot has the USA as the fifth highest on the "State Capacity" ranking, ahead of countries like New Zealand, where they don't have coronavirus, Germany, where they don't have delays, and Singapore, where they don't have crime.
Either it's measuring something different to our intuitive idea of state capacity, or else Americans are just loud whiners who complain loudly all over the internet about the problems in their own country without the least bit of awareness of how their own country compares to others.
Surely I am not suggesting that this rank is perfect (but I would never use one single indicator, coronavirus cases, as the final measure of state capacity). By the way, the US is vaccinating much better than Germany, for example. I don't know how the index was created. With respect to Americans perceptions of their own state capacity, of course it can and will be biased (as will perceptions in every country). It so happens that people pay a lot more attention to things Americans say.
Anyway, my only point, which I believe stands, is that we have no evidence of trade-off between resistance to tyranny and state capacity. Incidentally, I just learned yesterday of an interesting paper which shows that UK investments in transport infrastructure rose significantly after the Glorious Revolution which limited the power of the King. Available here: https://www.economics.uci.edu/files/docs/workingpapers/2012-13/bogart-06.pdf
Resident New Zealander here once again piping up to point out that our response to the Coronavirus was Extremely Unusual by the standards of New Zealand government action. On every other problem we face - housing, climate change, child poverty, productivity, healthcare - the government's par for the course is to do move very slowly and get nowhere.
Another NZer (and recovering bureaucrat) here to observe that I believe this somewhat misrepresents the problem. The New Zealand government spends a great deal of money on all of the problems identified. Each of these problems has small armies of officials busily briefing each other, creating initiatives and coming up with interventions (which are in fact implemented). What looks like inaction, however, is that none of these things work (KiwiBuild being a public example of the general problem). The exception had been climate change, for which the emissions trading scheme would have been a good second best to a carbon tax. Now, we’re going to take the same approach to climate change as for all the other issues you identify.
Fair comment actually, failure to act at all is not the problem we face. I'm curious about your comment that climate change is going to end up like the other issues? I was looking fairly favourably on recent progress, with the first genuinely capped carbon unit auction taking place. I will likely write a submission on the CCC's report soon, so I would value your perspective
I think you need to distinguish between "How hard is it to do ordinary things" and "How hard is it to change the rules?"
To get things done, you want a simple majority to be able to do "ordinary" things like building roads or changing the health care system. The fact that an effective supermajority has been needed in the US to do some of these things has led to some real problems like an ugly compromise of a health care system that nobody can be blamed for because nobody was responsible for it.
Allowing a simple majority to make changes to the rules of the game, though, is a real problem, and that seems to be what happened in Turkey, because the rules of the game hadn't been well thought out enough in advance.
I mean, what is "changing the rules"? The one key breakthrough Erdogan appears to have made was Ergenekon, which required more than his majority in Parliament (it required control of the courts, for starters). Scott doesn't give any examples of Erdogan making significant changes to the Turkish constitution, he merely notes that it was easy to do so.
Paul Kagame in Rwanda is a great example of a dictator who is really a dictator and bad.... but also like, pretty good at what he does? If you compare Rwanda to Burundi he's clearly been fantastic, even if he basically just gives young criminals a gun and says 'go over the border and fight in Sudan or whatever, bye, good luck'
I honestly don't know about that specific example, but in these kinds of things, we should look for general relationships, not iron laws, right? And the general evidence shows that parliamentary democracies tend to have much better state capacity than dictatorships.
No it's not better off at all! Every young person I know (let's say aged 16-25) says how they envy me (39) and wanted to be young in the years when I was young, before Erdoğan. Except for technology becoming better which is not something related to Erdoğan, everything got considerably worse.
That's interesting. I suppose it's hard to get data on that in the current political climate.
Where do you live?
I'm conscious of how capable we all are at forming bubbles with likeminded individuals (see Scott's post from 2016 noting that he knew literally not a single Trump voter).
I now live in Western Europe, but those young people I know are in Turkey, in different big cities. How can anybody think Turkey's better off now under Erdoğan? I don't think this is a matter of bubbles. I think the problem here is, people still vote for Erdoğan while full well knowing they're worse off. I've seen countless street interviews when somebody is ranting for 3 minutes straight about how everything is worse, they don't have any money in their pockets, they haven't eaten protein in weeks, but then saying they'll keep on voting for Erdoğan because he's a devout Muslim, or he's battling against crusaders so everybody needs to do their part by powering through poverty or something. I know some Erdoğan voters as well, and their point is things would've been much better by Erdoğan's work but there are a lot of outside forces that are trying to take him down which is causing the current misery.
I mean leaving aside the bubble issue, unemployment and especially young unemployment was sky high, even before the pandemic. Every day I see some news of suicides out of poverty. Young generation has lost interest in the one single biggest class hopping mechanism of Turkey since a century: higher education, since now for a decent job you need connections and not competence. Violence against women is at a historic high (more than a woman a day on average killed by a relative/spouse). Rule of law is at a historic low. Abortion, while legal on paper, is made exceptionally difficult. Child abuse by religious organizations had always been a problem, but now since they're actively being protected by the government they're going crazy at it. Since they lost all the big municipalities, they're handing over all the rights, resources and properties of municipalities to central government (such as the right to choose officials, like the person to run the public transport system of a city etc. you'd think a mayor should have a say in that but not anymore).
I can go on until tomorrow morning but there's one thing that's evident: Dictatorship of Erdoğan has been a net negative for the country. There's no doubt about that.
Thanks. I'm certainly not suggesting Erdoğan's is anything other than bad.
Everyone agrees things are worse, but his supporters think that things are getting worse because of outside forces. That makes intuitive sense.
Among the young you mention, to what extent do you think they fall into Erdoğan's camp? Do you think there is a substantial opposition to him left in Turkey?
The young that I personally know are all opposition. The few Erdoğan supporters I personally know are all over middle age.
I think there is a substantial opposition and it's growing, I see online some guys having fervent Erdoğan supporter posts just a few years ago becoming bitter and turning against him. Also, his demographic skews older and opposition younger (and 2/3 of Turkey's population is below 40) so as more young people are over voting age the more support is coming to opposition. I'm hopeful next elections he'll lose, but the process will be long and difficult and (probably but hopefully not) bloody. I don't believe he'll leave the post without some fight or chaos.
I'm not sure how to get from the description of Erdogan's path to Scott's three suggestions- they don't seem particularly well-aimed at the problems. For example:
1. Constitutional amendment against court packing - While this isn't necessarily a BAD idea, it doesn't seem central- Erdogan got a lot of power through non-court means, and it seems likely he could have used alternate routes, as you bring up in #2. This seems shoe-horned in as it relates to current domestic US political disputes. In addition, "court-packing" in the US sense is highly legislative-branch, not just executive, so this seems more about preventing majoritarian rule than it does preventing *executive* rule.
2. Stronger protections separating investigation of tax fraud (IRS?) and corruption (FBI?) from the executive. - Almost certainly a good thing, the Imperial Presidency is a real problem, and straightforwardly if we're worrying about executive power, than making the executive less powerful is an obvious good.
3. More things that might be used to hack the checks-and-balances system requiring 2/3 majorities instead of simple majorities - again, this gap between majority power and executive power. What we want to prevent is the majority from instituting sweeping changes that centralize power to one or a few people, and insulate their changes from future political will changing. Raw anti-majoritarian rules seems like a very blunt instrument to achieve this, especially considering the examples from other countries that already have a great deal less minority-veto-style rules than the US, without increased dictatorship outcomes.
A constitutional amendment against court packing also needs to decide whether it counts as "court packing" for the legislature to hold a seat open and then give a new president three appointments in a single term.
It really doesn’t need to decide anything about how justices are selected, only about how many can serve simultaneously.
I think there's a simple problem and a complex problem. The simple problem is that the law allows for congress to appoint lots of justices, so you could imagine control of both houses of congress + the white house to always lead to adding justices until your side had the majority. That would be bad, so it makes sense to forbid it.
The hard problem is that there are dozens of different ways that the major players can follow the written rules while violating the spirit of the rules, what anyone considers fair, etc., to get an advantage, and we really want major players to refuse to do that. Consider Trump's attempts to get various state legislators, state election officials, congressmen, and the vice president to somehow override the results of the election to keep him in power. Those attempts failed because the major players were unwilling to follow the written law while throwing out an election result. But they arguably had the legal power to do so. I think it's impossible to close off all the ways that people can do this sort of thing, and there's always a temptation to do it. McConnell grabbed that chance when it came his way, and put an extra Republican on the court. In so doing, presumably he also established the new norm that no president will ever manage to get a new supreme court justice appointed when the other party holds the senate. If Trump had managed to convince a state legislature or two to override their voters' decisions, that, too, would have become a new norm, used from then on to ensure that critical states in close elections always sent electors from the party that controlled their state legislature. And so on.
What we need is not so much laws against specific norm violations as political incentives against norm violations. We should probably explicitly close the loopholes for court packing and state legislatures overriding their voters, but we'll never close *all* the loopholes. And whenever one is used, it undermines the legitimacy of the whole system and creates more incentives for future norm violations.
"you could imagine control of both houses of congress + the white house to always lead to adding justices until your side had the majority. That would be bad, so it makes sense to forbid it."
I'm not so sure that it's bad. It seems to me that there's a natural steady state here - if the Presidency and Senate are of the same party, then the President appoints justices until their party has a majority; if the Presidency and the Senate are of different parties, then the Court shrinks due to attrition. My guess is that the steady state would be a court containing 20-30 justices, with the precise number fluctuating gradually over the years, and the court reflecting a sort of time average of partisan control of the Senate and Presidency.
It's not obvious what is actually *bad* about this, rather than just "unseemly".
This seems a reasonable observation: one equilibrium is disrupted, and the system will eventually settle on a new one. My concern is that predicting what the new equilibrium would look like is difficult to predict, and could easily be less salubrious than you propose.
By the time you're concerned about "This party's judges" versus "That party's judges", the battle is already mostly lost. The goal should be to create sufficiently non-partisan judicial institutions that it doesn't matter which party appoints a particular judge, because judges are seen as being above and beyond politics.
I feel like many countries do this better than the US.
The US system has major systemic weaknesses, and loopholes are potential escapes. It doesn't help to close the loopholes without fixing the systemic problems.
Given lifetime appointments, a political coalition could potentially appoint a Court majority that could complete block the other party from advancing its agenda for 4-5 decades even with strong democratic mandates. Rule by five judges with no accountability to voters would essentially mean the US is no longer a democracy. It's important that congress can check this power even if this looks like a "loophole."
There are a lot of other examples--it's important that the president ultimately has the power to get executive branch appointees without congress, or an opposition congress has every incentive and ability to just sabotage government. Loopholes make the system more resilient by offering ways out of crises that aren't just "become a dictator."
Note that this is a criticism that a lot of social conservatives had about the court over the last several decades--all kinds of liberal reforms were carried out by judicial order, completely insulated from any kind of democratic accountability. And indeed, I'd say this was a previous defection that led to the new norm that everyone does whatever they have to do to put their people on the supreme court.
But the Court is not actually totally insulated from democratic accountability--because the threat of court packing exists! It's a real threat that prevents the courts from going overboard in thwarting popular rule. FDR used it. Social conservatives could use it except most of the rulings they dislike are popular.
Sure, if you count that as a solution, then there's also a "solution" to court packing where you declare that the court shall always consist of seven members of the Socialist party.
My point is that if "packing" is said to be a problem, then surely the problem isn't just the change in numbers of people on the court - the problem is presumably something about the illegitimate way in which substantive political views can be represented on the court. Just making an amendment fixing the number does nothing to address whatever partisan trickery there can be that gets one political faction represented in an unfair way.
There was a proposal Buttigieg was discussing that would address this, where 5 justices would be selected by the majority party in the senate, 5 by the next largest party, and 5 more would be selected from the appeals courts by the unanimous consent of the 10 chosen beforehand.
But a simple amendment that just says "the Supreme Court shall always have nine justices" leaves open Mitch McConnell's plan to say that only Republicans can appoint justices to the court.
I mean, what you see as illegitimate (because, I assume, you think the President should be empowered to force a selection of one of his nominees before his term ends) I see as intentional (the President cannot reform the Supreme Court without consent of the Senate).
If it was up to me I’d probably rework the process so that the President submits a slate of candidates which the Senate considers and votes on simultaneously, reducing the risk of no candidate being chosen—but I’d retain the opportunity for the Senate to decline accepting any for whatever reason.
The amendment would need to prevent what McConnell did to get the vote of Democrat's, and prevent enlarging the size of the court or instituting age limits to get the vote of Republicans. To do the first I would put in a rule that a vote on a new justice needs to occur within three months or they are automatically accepted. If after 9 months the Senate still has not said yes on any candidate, the existing justices must select a new member ala the Buttigieg plan.
I would agree, if we're going to do a constitutional amendment to protect the Judicial Branch from shenanigans by the other two branches it makes sense to close all the loopholes that have already been thought of.
+1000
The ship has sailed on the Supreme Court, at least for me and, I assume, a lot of my fellow Democrats. As far as I'm concerned, we should follow the McConnell rule, which, in my phrasing would be: "If you have to power to seize an advantage by violating a longstanding custom, screw the custom."
That won't be happening this time around, but that's only because we didn't win enough seats and have to rely on squishy moderates. If (when?) the pendulum swings far enough back towards us, I fully expect the Court to be resized, in accordance with the new norms. (I certainly won't vote for a Dem who refuses to do so.)
And I think it's disingenuous as hell to wait until after your party steals a court seat to complain about norms and customs. McConnell and the rest of the Senate had two chances at this. Once with Garland, to do the clearly right and customary thing, and once with Barrett, to uphold their bullsh*t new norm. They refused to do either, because it was never about anything other than using the power then available to control the judiciary. To complain if the other side does likewise - or even talks about doing likewise - is ridiculous.
The conservative response to this tends to be two-fold:
1) The Garland/Barrett distinction is that in one case the Senatorial party was opposite the presidential party, and in the other case the parties were aligned, and that not confirming in the first case and confirming in the second is the historical norm. See Ted Cruz's arguments during Barrett's confirmation hearings: late-term SC vacancies are normal, they've happened dozens of times throughout American history, and almost always concordant parties lead to confirmation and discordant parties lead to no confirmation.
2) Democrats have been violating Supreme court nomination/confirmation norms whenever it pleased them to decades (the typical list is something like: Bork, Thomas, Estrada, Alito, Kavanaugh) with Republicans never doing it first, so trying to pretend that Republicans are suddenly starting a defect/defect cycle on this front is laughable.
Which is not to say that conservatives are necessarily right on this front, but if both sides have their danders up in righteous anger about how The Other Side Is Defecting So Now We Get To Defect However We Want madness will be here shortly.
My preferred solution is that neither side gets license to defect in any new ways; all old ways are fair game. So a Dem Senate can hold positions vacant, or not, as they see fit (Garland/Barret precedent) and Reps can do radical character assassinations on one person's say-so (Kavanaugh precedent) but no one gets to add new seats, institute mandatory retirement, etc. because those specific defections have not happened yet.
I understand where you are coming from, but this is a genuinely alarming sentiment.
From above, Scott quoted:
> even though Erdogan got only 33% of the vote, he ended up with 67% of the seats in Parliament
Based on this, a good take-away might be that we shouldn't have systems that grant a minority of voters supermajority powers. The policy solution would be strive to have policies that more closely align vote totals with power/representation in government bodies.
He did seem to miss that super obvious and important point
Possibly because the "super obvious and important point" isn't the case in many (most?) of the world's democracies, including many highly functional ones. In a Parliamentary system with first past the post voting, it's possible to have a majority in Parliament without a majority of the votes. In fact, it's normal. No UK party has won a majority of the popular vote since 1935, yet hung parliaments (where no party has a majority of Parliament) are rare, the last three times being 2017, 2010, and 1974. In the 2015 Canadian election, the Liberal Party won 54% of seats with 39% of the vote. Nobody would say that Canada or the UK are not functional democracies.
For point #2, the trick is to vastly simplify the tax code and get rid of most Federal criminal statutes. There's no reason we need a Federal minimum wage or EEOC. Let the States handle it.
Just a note: Strasbourg itself is not subject to laïcité, despite being in France. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concordat_in_Alsace-Moselle
There is indeed an alarm for dictatorship. The problem is, an alarm that is always ringing is no more useful than having no alarm.
In this nutshell you've summed up the Trumpian/GOP philosophy of power: throw so much constant shit into the air that most people no longer have any idea where the shit is coming from.
The added advantage of this strategy is that popular disgust tends to support the GOP mission of gridlock, with no hopes for progress. They are just fine when the majority wants to "drown government in a bathtub," as long as they can convince their rabid, gerrymandered base to keep them in their individual seats of power. It' survival of the fittest, and they love the challenge. Democracy, meh, not so much. That's why their number one goal currently (and historically) is to destroy voting rights.
Thank goodness democracy has been rescued and we're back to bailing out Wall Street!
This type of thing is what convinced me that immunity for government officials while they are doing their jobs is a good thing, even though Trump tried to use it for bad things. It's overall good for it to be very hard to arrest people who are currently serving in the government and it's worth having some bad people in the government for that.
I'm agnostic about whether you should be allowed to arrest them for things that are very unrelated to doing their job, like if you're the president and also you break into someone's house and take their TV.
Although I see what you're saying, Erdogan mostly went after non-officials - journalists, media barons, rich people who funded the other side, etc.
You mention trying to isolate the FBI/IRS/etc, who investigate things like corruption, from executive authority, but isn't the alternative for them to become independent power structures, ala Turkey's military, with ipso facto veto power over the government via corruption/tax fraud/whatever charges?
Not sure. The military seems like naturally more of a scary powerful force than the IRS; I don't know if you get these kinds of problems if you don't have tanks and bombers.
You need the right tool for the right job. For some jobs, the right tool is the IRS. Mexico had way more firepower in Chiapas, but it didn’t help.
I think for many average citizens, a weaponized IRS is in many ways scarrier than the military because they can more readily imagine the IRS swooping in and destroying their lives than they can imagine the 82nd airborne dropping a squad in to destroy their happy suburban existence ...
Maybe more scary than IRS. But naturally more scary than intelligence agencies (FBI)? Consider the scariness of intelligence agencies broadly. Clear uncontroversial examples include the secret police under Stalin, or in eastern Germany. More controversially, I've heard that FBI under its founder, J Edgar Hoover had a lot of political power due to copious blackmail material, against other elites, in its possession
There is already a strong norm against politically motivated tax audits. Back in 2013, the IRS went after various right wing nonprofits for violating arcane tax laws related to political activism. The Republicans made a huge deal out of it, holding several Congressional hearings, demanding that government officials be sent to jail, and convincing the FBI to investigate.
The norm was strong in what sense? In the sense that the Democrats could not quite sweep it all under the rug? Certainly not in the sense that violation of the norm seemed unthinkable - if it had been just a few cases, no one would have noticed. So the IRS had to feel at least somewhat comfortable with the idea of punishing the regime's enemies .
I have a vague memory that Nixon tried something similar. Persons on his enemies list were much more likely to get audited.
> The norm was strong in what sense?
It was strong in the sense that the object-level question of whether these groups had, in fact, broken the law was never even discussed. Instead, the question was just whether or not they had been singled out because they were aligned with conservatives. Essentially, because they were aligned with a political side, they were essentially rendered immune from investigation by the IRS.
I think saying they were rendered essentially immune to investigation by the IRS is a significant mischaracterization. The controversy concerned delays in granting 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) status and higher demands for documentation from particular groups in a way that could be considered discriminatory and unreasonable. Assuming that the organizations concerned eventually received confirmation of their tax status, they still had to follow the rules. All groups that seek such tax status have to jump through some hoops, but some had to jump through more than others. None are immune from investigation, unless the IRS feels too embarrassed to stir things up again.
Note how the IRS recently went after Derek Chauvin and his wife, right after the George Floyd killing. Regardless of whether they deserve it seems highly unlikely that's a coincidence, no? And if so, is that not proof of politically motivated (or values motivated) IRS action? But if we know it happened in that high profile case, shouldn't we expect there are lots of other cases we never hear about?
It doesn't even need to become an independent power structure to cause problems, which is what makes this an almost impossibly hard problem in countries like Turkey.
Scott slightly undersold the key point here: in most countries, ALMOST EVERYONE IS CORRUPT [I miss italics]. So you never need to frame anyone if you don't want to, you just investigate and prosecute them honestly.
Even with an honest, independent anti-corruption agency, it's not that hard to just dig up some corruption (as a private citizen, hire PIs or have the equivalent of opposition researchers). You then hand your dossier over to the independent anti-corruption agency (preferably with much fanfare), and then they either prosecute (bye-bye enemy), or they don't (which makes them look and arguably be not very independent).
Having a strong social norm against totally endemic corruption is probably the strongest advantage the US, Germany, the UK etc have as countries. It's an almost impossible hole to dig yourself out of because everyone keeps nicking all the shovels (just kidding). More seriously, if everyone looks around and sees everyone else is corrupt, they'll be corrupt too, because there's no social norm against corruption and that seems to be the only thing that can prevent it.
I suspect the random stroke of luck Northwest Europe hit was probably Calvinism, because "everyone is irredeemably evil other than our little group of people who magically aren't, and this is inevitable and proper" lets them disregard social norms in favour of radically different ones and group-select their way into power, thereby boot-strapping an anti-corruption norm that these countries didn't have 500 years ago.
Also, and obviously this is a while ago now, but this very system created the incentives that led to Caesar overthrowing the Republic. Couldn't be prosecuted when holding imperium, couldn't afford to surrender imperium as he would face politically-motivated (although not necessarily unjust) prosecution.
Really interesting book review; I am curious if you have any thoughts on the role of the Gulen movement within the modern opposition to Erdogan, and its (presumably uneasy) relationship with the liberal wing of the opposition. Presumably, Erdogan turning on Gulen would have created interesting new dynamics.
On a less interesting tangent, the notion of elite-controlled institutions has always seemed a tad tautological to me, and maybe someone could clarify.
Institutions empower individuals; power being central to the concept of elite status, how could their leaders not be in turn considered part of the elite?
A populist uprising would presumably elevate new individuals into leadership positions, but are there useful reasons to refrain from referring to this new ruling class as the Elite?
One weird parallel that may be worth exploring: In the US, it seems like a particular ideology had largely taken over elite education, and used that to acquire a lot of cultural power as a result. There's not a single leader like with Gullen, but there's still a certain parallel there. For example, I'd say that today's public debate on free speech, hate speech, deplatforming, etc., is very heavily shaped by the teachings of that ideology, as taught to the generation of people who are currently rising into positions of power in media, industry, academia, and government.
I'm neither an expert on the Gulen movement, nor on 'cancel culture' or however you'd prefer naming that side of analogy. Having said that, I am not convinced we can meaningfully compare ongoing shifts in our norms of discourse with the action of a concrete political organization with explicit membership.
I think it depends on whether there gets to be a new ruling *class*, or if it's actually a set of people that get refreshed from outside their immediate social circles. For instance, if the members of the legislature are chosen by lottery from the entire population, then they really won't be representatives of an elite class.
I have a hazy understanding that Erdogan has been undertaking a sometimes-bizarre campaign against Gulen and anybody ever associated with him. Is this right?
I'm imagining myself at a dinner party:
> Person: I just read this book about Erdogan's rise to power in Turkey.
> Me: Oh, that sounds really interesting. Wasn't there some thing where he tried to get an NBA player arrested for saying something nice about Gullen?
> Person: I don't think the book covered that...
> Me: I am out of useful things to say about this topic.
I'm writing as a liberal Turk. There is no relation with the Gülen movement. They are universally hated. Their power base is quite literally the deep state which to a large extent has been decimated over the last 5 years. The movement doesn't have popular support. To the extent it did in the past, if was within religious circles which align with AKP nowadays.
Makes sense, thanks for sharing!
As an American, what do you think we should do about him, given that he's currently residing within American borders?
I don't know what is going on behind the scenes or the details of extradition treaties but I think the rule of law should be followed. If our government demands extradition and provides incriminating solid evidence, there should be extradition(?). I'm not sure why that hasn't happened though.
What do you think about Erdoğan's allegations that Gülenists were behind the 2016 coup attempt? As a not-well-informed outsider, it seemed nonsense, as the military has traditionally been Kemalist/secularist, while Gülenists are soft Islamists much like Erdoğan. This would suggest that the crackdown on Gülenists after the coup was totally misdirected (potentially leaving open the possibility of another Kemalist coup attempt). However, I assume Erdoğan is smarter than to make a mistake like that.
Also, how did Gülenists become associated with the deep state? Again, I thought the deep state was associated mainly with traditional secularist politics, though I may be totally wrong about that.
Haha you are a little bit ill-informed though who can blame you for not being able to keep up with the machinations of our deep state.
So you're right that the Deep State traditionally was Kemalist. Though the ultra nationalists also were represented. AKP when it came to power, wanted to increase their representation in the military, media, business, judiciary, police etc. To do so they allied with Gülenists. Together they nepotistically promoted their own supporters. They used various reforms as justification as alluded in the post. Gülenists were especially experienced in placing and supporting the promotion of their own. Though I must admit I'm not knowledgeable about their origin story. They used sham prosecutions like the Ergenekon trial to try to get rid of Kemalists and seculars as much as possible.
This alliance somehow broke early in 2010s. I don't know why. Maybe they stopped needing each other. Gülenists attemted a "judicial coup". They leaked phone recordings of Erdoğan, his family, top AKP officials and many businessmen engaging in blatant corruption. And launched a corruption investigation. Miraculously AKP survived the scandal. The prosecutor was fired and nothing happened. And then they started purging the ranks of the police and judiciary and military from Gülenists. They also won the next elections.
The coup came after the purge started. There were definitely Gülenist generals. Also the coup was led by a small clique in the military. The entire military was not involved. In fact, I think some army commanders also moved to stop it. The Chief of Staff was kidnapped etc.
But I share your skepticism wrt the coup because it was very incompetently executed. Still, I think its not out of the question that this was an authentic but incompetent coup attempt by Gülenists. Or maybe it was a false flag operation. Maybe history will tell. I don't think it is apparent one way or the other.
One thing to note is, that coups in Turkish history are not all the same in the sense that some of them were directed by the Chief of Staff and the entire military was involved. Some were directed by a clique of junior officers (the first one at least). We've also had a couple of coups that were led by junior officers that failed.
My vague impression is that the US has been hosting Imam Gulen in Poconos for a couple of decades because the CIA sees the Gulenist movement as a potential pro-American government of Turkey that could be air-dropped into place.
Control of The Straits has been seen as a central strategic necessity for at least 1700 years and maybe back to the time of Pericles (whose strategy against Sparta was for Athens to hole up behind its Long Walls and feed on grain from the shores of the Black Sea). The US has generally been OK with the government of Turkey since at least 1946, but I presume the US has contingency plans in case the Ankara government becomes highly unsatisfactory.
The FBI was investigating in the mid-2010s how the Gulen organization skims from the tax-payer supported budgets of its ~150 charter schools in America. But then the whole topic seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the CIA had a little talk with the FBI about how in the Big Picture, a little local graft from American property taxpayers is a small price to pay for potential control of the Bosporus?
I wrote about the Gulen movement in 2014 in "The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos:"
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_shadowy_imam_of_the_poconos_steve_sailer/
Could be. I don't want to go deep down the conspiracy rabbit hole, but definitely some shady stuff is going on. Now that US shifts away from Cold War 1 to 2, I wonder what that will do to Turkey's strategic relevance.
I read your article. The significance of test prep centers seems a little funny. But they genuinely were the most common and successful test prep centers. I took some tests there back in the day and so did many of my secular and atheist friends, some even outright attended classes. And I have stories of their interactions with teachers. They were not intrusive and nothing happened, but they were invited to gatherings etc., one can imagine a different outcome for students who came from poorer and more conservative backgrounds.
What's your take on the Macron vs Erdogan conflict about the coranic schools ? Any relation to Gulen ? (P.S.: It takes some balls to basically end the separation of church and state, in France of all countries !)
It kind of sounds like you're saying the Kemalists don't have any real influence left at all?
Pretty much. Kemalists still hold some implicit power in the sense that the educated and wealthy tend to be overwhelmingly secular and Kemalist. But that part of the population has been shut out of explicit power structures. Only Erdoğan, his inner circle and factions within his coalition hold explicit power.
>Institutions empower individuals; power being central to the concept of elite status, how could their leaders not be in turn considered part of the elite?
"The elite" that populists oppose is usually not *everyone* in power, but rather a specific demographic or cultural group that holds a disproportionate and (they would say) unfair amount of power. In Turkey (as described here), the populists were conservative religious Turks opposed to the "liberal cosmopolitan secular Europeanized Turks sipping cocktails in Nisintasi hotels" who they thought had too much power over them. Likewise, the populists who supported Trump weren't opposed to the idea of some people having strong political power so much as they were opposed to that power being disproportionately held by the educated, secular, liberal, pro-social-justice members of the cultural middle class (in Fussell's terms).
That’s fair, I appreciate that aspect of it. Is it the ‘disproportionate’ aspect of it, or the ‘cultural middle class’ which makes the elites jarring in many circles? If it’s the former, then I assume the newly-empowered populist would over time become entrenched and networked as the new ‘elite’, but would your definition still hold if they don’t adopt a liberal outlook? If it’s the latter, then I’m not sure ‘Elite’ is that useful of a category, except in a derogatory sense.
I agree with you that defining the "elite" as the people who control the institutions and then decrying the fact that elites control the institutions is silly.
I think the issue with class comes about when institutional control becomes hereditary. That is, if the Harvard faculty and NYT editorial board and Hollywood stars are all the children of meat packers and line cooks, then I don't think there's an issue. If they're all the sons of NYT editors and Harvard grads and Hollywood directors, then things can get sclerotic.
I don't think turnover among the elites solves everything, but I think it makes problems less acute.
I think it makes sense to frame the argument around the notion social mobility, but that seems to yield fairly different attitudes and prescription than the rationalist critique of the Elites, so I feel like we might be missing something.
If we care about social mobility, then education, redistribution, access to care and services, and some form of affirmative action all probably should be on the table.
If we frame this around the cabal, the cathedral, the octopus, and the latest allegory for Them, I’m not sure any of the above are that relevant.
The relevant distinction is that taking control of industry frequently triggers civil war. This in turn frequently leads to dictatorship either as the left-wing government starts abandoning scruples to put down a rebellion or the right-wing faction wins and decides democracy threatens property. So real danger, different dynamic. Przeworski wrote a good book on this that I hope is more blackpilled than fully accurate, but that’s hope in the theological virtue sense.
(Arguably a different set of dynamics open up when left-wing parties realize this, stop making impossible bids for power, and then no longer exercise a disciplining effect on property elites.)
People are probably more familiar with the Hayek argument that a democratic government adopting central planning would slide into dictatorship. This doesn’t really seem to have as much basis and I can’t really think of any examples maybe outside the very heavily confounded examples of some Central European countries ~’45-50.
That said, I’m not sure the dynamic you mention for right-populism is quite right either, because I’m skeptical of the whole cultural theory of class on which it’s based. The only sense in which snobs (independent of actual, economic class) dominate slobs is by sneering at them, but slobs also sneer at snobs, so this feels more like a case of subcultural emnity than real power. (Credentialism certainly is real and non-reciprocal, but that’s why you want to incorporate it into your theory of economic class.)
An alternative explanation is simply that if by “cultural upper class” what you actually mean is “people with culturally liberal values” and by “culturally lower class” you mean “people with culturally conservative values,” then the latter are almost definitionally more sympathetic towards Decisions Made By A Cool Tough Leader Guy rather than Decisions Made By Endless Meetings, and visa-versa.
I remember in June 2016, being so happy about the state of my life, and the state of the world. I flew to the UK for a conference, and when I landed, I checked my phone and saw breaking news about a shooting in progress at a gay bar in Orlando. A few days later, during the conference, it looked like Turkey was undergoing one of its coups to remove the Islamist presence and restore its version of secularist democracy. But by the time I was leaving, it became clear that the coup was just enabling Erdogan to purge his opponents. But at least Brexit was about to go down in flames - or so I thought, as I boarded my plane back home.
Was there ever a consensus that there had been a real coup attempt? By the end of things, it was starting to seem like it might have been a honeypot by Erdogan to purge his enemies.
The book made it sound pretty real - Erdogan might have been assassinated if he'd been in the expected place, the military deployed tanks and jets, etc.
the jets were deployed, Erdoğan's plane was flying with its transponder open for hours, it was even possible to track him in flightradar, but none of the F16s actually tried to shoot it down. It's a weird issue, and even though I thought and read a lot about it I cannot come to a conclusion. In my long comment somewhere I gave more details.
I was watching it on TV that night, and it was intense. It was also fairly close to the William Wallace scenario, but coming out *for* Erdogan - there was insane footage of ordinary people dragging soldiers out of tanks on a bridge and beating them up while fighter jets flew overhead.
I can't find the footage from the night itself, but this is the people who mobbed the tanks still milling around with them and some rifles in the aftermath:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEFr6t5etUk
I also remember Erdogan seemingly standing on a random suburban porch urging people to take to the streets and fight the soldiers. It was heavy stuff.
Weirdly, I was also in Istanbul when the Ergenekon arrests were taking off (just coincidentally sightseeing) - there were big protests in Taksim Square, and a lot of gendarmerie troops loitering around outside their bases. I assumed that was a coup attempt, but then nothing happened.
America military bases are usually out in the boonies where there's plenty of room to practice shooting weapons. My impression from the few Turkish cities I've been to is that Turkish Army basis are typically in the middle of the city, next to the radio station.
The theory I read at the time - I can't remember exactly where, so take this with as much salt as you like - was that it was a real coup in preparation that got put into action prematurely, possibly when some of the participants were under pressure from the government and decided to go for it.
The most telling data point that shows the difference between the US and Turkey (or any other country that would be privy to democratic dictatorship) is that Trump's Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, was sued many times and then simply stopped tampering with mail delivery. How did he just ... stop?? I'm still baffled. I guess the Rule of Law is a more powerful force than we thought.
Knowing that a legal system (or other parallel forms of power) can eventually be brought to bear on bad actors/actions is a very strong long term deterrent. Sure, a leader of an organization can make an immediate change, but if it gets overruled by the courts, or a new law, or the police/FBI, then it makes more sense to follow the rules even in the short term.
Anyone know more about the military's structure during this time period? ~100 years is a reasonably long time to maintain what looks like a consistent set of values. How were they not taken over by would-be dictators who used the coups-are-okay constitutional clause to go about it? Did they just get lucky for a while or is there a structural difference that made them more successful than Myanmar?
Institutional traditions. In the cadet school they learn from a very young age they're the protector of a "secular, democratic, state of law". The same cadets in turn get to run the cadet schools when they're grownups. So even the worst of the coups ended with a transition to civilian governments via fair elections in a year or 2.
So more like a military "vote of no confidence" than a real coup.
Well that, and sometimes an update to the constitution as well. The country was going too right wing and there came the 1960 coup. The 1961 constitution was by far the most progressive we ever had, and that empowered the left, especially the labor movement a lot so there came the 1971 memorandum which didn't change the constitution but pulled the strings rightward. That wasn't enough though, so there was the more right wing 1980 coup and the 1981 constitution which is actually a huge step down from the 1961 one, but made the country somewhat easier to run. So the memorandums of 1971, 1979, 1997 and 2007 were each a military vote of no confidence (only the 2007 one was ignored). So was the coup attempt of 1969, the military stopped when the government took back their constitution change and resigned.
Interesting. So any general leading a coup who decided "Actually I think I'll just make _myself_ President" would immediately get taken out by the rest of the army, because that's Just Not What We Do Around Here.
That's what happened until now, the worst was the 1980 coup. The coup leader became the president, but in the 1981 constitution presidency is more of a ceremonial position so he didn't keep holding considerable amount of power and stepped down when his term ended without having a say in who'll get elected president next after him.
There had been a couple of coup attempts that were stopped or didn't gain any supporters inside the military since they thought the general leading it was a type prone to declaring himself supreme president for life or something. The indoctrination is unwavering commitment to the secular democratic state of law (because it's both a gift and a responsibility left directly by Atatürk, and there's no betraying him), so very few have such thoughts and those don't find much support (or get taken out by the rest).
I was wondering this myself, but I'm pretty sure the answer is similar to America's elite: you don't need to be come a dictator, to rule by orders, if the culture just naturally drifts your way, as Scott was saying. Remember that the military is staffed by Western style educated elites.
The Gulenists took over many of the police departments in Turkey by having the best test prep centers for passing the police hiring exam (it was almost as if they got a copy of the test beforehand).
The Gulenists didn't make as much progress at infiltrating the military, which had a strongly anti-Islamist culture.
Now that I think about it, the Turkish example seems pretty relevant to the Biden Administration's attempts to change the culture of the military.
> This has made me a lot less optimistic about the kind of dictator-prevention strategy where everyone has lots of guns and then if a dictator comes to power you rush out into the streets shouting FREEEEEDOM!, William-Wallace-style, shooting everything in sight. If there's a military coup or something, this might work. But if every day your institutions are just a tiny bit less legitimate than the day before, when do you rush out into the street? One of the most important steps on the way to Erdogan's total control was his court-packing, accomplished under the guise of EU-bid modernization. But if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court at some point, are the people with guns going to rush out into the street shouting FREEEEEDOM? No - realistically even the people who really hate the Democrats and think they're bad and wrong are going to stop short of armed revolution, because that alone isn't quite Stalin-level obvious evil. Erdogan demonstrates that you can become a dictator through a few dozen things like that chained together, without any obvious single point where everyone wakes up and notices. There is no fire alarm for dictatorship.
I agree with the object level message here but I have to wonder: if you lived through the same year that I did last year, how did you not already conclude this? Millions of people have had their jobs and lives taken from them through an active act of the government. Americans already have millions of guns. This is the single most oppressive thing that most Americans have and will ever live through. How many guerrilla actions were there to stop the lockdowns? Zero. There were zero.
The obvious conclusion from this is that Americans do not have the balls to take decisive action and use those guns to stop tyranny, even when it announces itself ahead of time. So yeah, the American guns aren't really doing shit to keep us safe from dictators
Is your point that once-in-a-century pandemics are good opportunities for governments to restrict freedoms? Because, sure. But that also means you have to wait around a while if you want to use one in order to launch yourself as a dictator.
Unless you manufacture one, of course...
What, you just convince a bunch of Italians and Spaniards to keel over an die? Or are you proposing deploying a bioweapon? Either way, this seems like its getting very complicated.
I'm a bad person to talk about this because I am mostly pro-lockdown, but a few thoughts:
1. I feel like there's a distinction between bad policy and change in the form of government. Even if the lockdown was bad policy, we've had lots of bad policy over the past two hundred years and we're used to it. That's different from eg dissolving Congress, suspending habeus corpus, etc, which seem like more obvious dictatorship fire alarms.
2. Most people interpreted the lockdown was an attempt to stop a pandemic and not an attempt to seize power, and I think we rightly use "looks like an attempt by some specific faction to seize power" as an important criterion for dictatorship.
3. The thing that struck me most about the lockdown was how easy it was to violate if you wanted. Sure, restaurants and stuff were closed, but if you wanted to go visit friends or refuse to wear a mask or something nobody could really stop you. I think if we'd gone for a Chinese-style lockdown where it was actually enforced, there would have been a lot more anger.
Broadly pro-Lockdown too here, but: you yourself say that a likely form that a slide to dictatorship would take would be "zombified institutions" which would still look like they were in place even though they'd have become puppets of the executive branch. So why would you still rely on "seeing Congress dissolved or habeas corpus suspended" as the real fire alarms?
Interesting side-fact: regardless of the situation in the US, I am told that France applied COVID restrictions to its own Parliament, such that the elected lawmakers were *forbidden* from meeting at full quorum for votes. This was used to pass unpopular laws that would probably have generated more debate if everyone who wanted to attend had been allowed to attend. That seems pretty bad, surely?
How was it determined who was allowed in? That certainly sounds bad at first read.
"I think if we'd gone for a Chinese-style lockdown where it was actually enforced, there would have been a lot more anger."
Agreed, but that's the only sort of lockdown that makes a difference when it comes to spreading COVID. It doesn't take a lockdown to make the people who prioritize health over sociability (crudely speaking) to stop hanging out in bars; all it takes for that is newspaper headlines. And it doesn't matter if the people who prioritize sociability over health are hanging around in bars or in private house parties, except that the bars probably have ventilation systems, etc, which are sized for that. The only sort of lockdown that would actually make a real difference, is the sort with actual locks, e.g. on the jail cells you throw people in when you catch them throwing house parties.
You can have lockdowns that don't work, or you can have lockdowns that are angrifying and divisive for any population accustomed to individual liberty, but it's going to be one or the other. Or, as we actually managed in e.g. California, both. Which of these options were you in favor of?
> Agreed, but that's the only sort of lockdown that makes a difference when it comes to spreading COVID. It doesn't take a lockdown to make the people who prioritize health over sociability (crudely speaking) to stop hanging out in bars; all it takes for that is newspaper headlines.
I don't think this is true. There's always been a correlation between the severity of local regulations and local conditions (which I think is what you mean here?), which makes teasing out causality (people's behaviors) difficult. However, in the US, compliance with state/local regulations qua state/local regulations was higher early on during the pandemic only to deteriorate over time to the point where, now, once you account for local conditions, the actual regs have no effect on behavior.
So at least at some point, the regulations themselves made a difference, even if they don't seem to anymore.
< How many guerrilla actions were there to stop the lockdowns? Zero. There were zero. >
Michigan's state capitol was stormed by armed anti-lockdown protesters, and then there was a plot to kidnap the governor. Anti-lockdown protestors in Idaho were also able to force their way into the state capitol. And if we count pro-Trump as anti-lockdown, we might be able to find some more examples.
These guerilla actions were not effective at stopping the lockdowns, but they did exist.
Guerrillas are normally supposed to attack vulnerable parts of the security forces and then retreat before a response can be mobilized. Storming a capitol is something you do when you've built up a large enough conventional force to hold it. Kidnapping is admittedly a tactic used by political movements which don't have good chance of a Maoist peasant revolution and instead adapt "foco theory" for urban terrorists.
They may not have acted like guerillas normally act, but they did involve "people with guns going to rush out into the street shouting FREEEEEDOM".
Fair enough on the state capitols. Although as far as I know there was no FREEEEEDOM resulting from those actions.
That's because they were a kind of guerrilla action (similar to the Capitol one). Real coups/revolutions involve people storming things, as well as a lot of planning, organisation, political intrigue etc. This is the equivalent of if the October Revolution had consisting solely of storming the Winter Palace, then just being in the Winter Palace for a bit and going home. Or if you kidnapped a federal judge, drove them out to the woods and made them administer the presidential oath to you at gunpoint, then sat there wondering when someone would show up to give you the nuclear codes.
Guerrillas aren't supposed to mill around after they strike until they get arrested. They're supposed to retain their own capacity to continue the fight, gradually bleeding out their conventional opponent. You might frame them as analogous to the Bolshevik revolution, which was closer to a coup than something like Mao's guerrilla war. But then I guess the Beer Hall Putsch would be closer still.
Did the book provide any insights regarding effectively integrating/deescalating political blocks with goals/policy preferences outside the bounds of other political blocks?
From your description, the Islamic faction in Turkey posed this problem for some time: a significant block attempting to participate in the democratic system to pursue fundamentally ends other power blocks considered intolerable, or incompatible with democracy.
Germany is currently dealing with the AfD, which is large enough to be a significant political faction, but is essentially under investigation as an extremist group. From a democratic perspective, that's a tricky position. It feels like some factions within US politics are headed the same way, and we're in the position of labeling explicitly political groups as terrorists.
Yeah, it's interesting the way this ends up with some policies being plausibly described as either ways to protect democracy or ways to undermine democracy, depending on your point of view. Extensive surveillance and infiltration of an upstart political movement that's challenging the ruling party is exactly the sort of thing we'd expect to see from someone undermining democracy, but it's also justified as being intended to protect democracy.
I need to find a good book looking at the political science of the IRA and Sinn Fein. From my limited knowledge, it seems like that history might offer useful insights into this problem.
That's because "democracy" is a load-bearing word in all of this, and you have to work out what you mean by it and then delve into the object level to work out which groups are defending it and which groups are attacking it - sort of how in WWII guns and tanks were both pro- and anti- democracy depending on who used them:
If democracy = "person majority wants to be in charge is" then that's probably Erdogan (or was until very recently) but it's very hard to know. So the army using these methods against him is anti-democratic, but him using them against the army is pro-democratic. Also this gets weird later on when he can control the media and civil society to boost his popularity. Also it possibly makes Nazi Germany a democracy at various points, which means it's wrong as a definition because 99% of people who use the word "democracy" are trying to describe a category which excludes Hitler.
If democracy = "regular one-person one-vote elections where anyone can be a candidate decide who's in charge" then any faction who are explicitly or covertly trying to end or rig (narrowly defined) elections is anti-democratic. This can create paradoxes if the party who would win the elections would go on to end or rig them. This seems to have been Turkey's repeated experience with its Islamists.
If democracy = "[multiple independent news sources and/or freedom of civic participation and/or values compatible with respect for human rights etc]" then you need a rigorous definition, and anyone who's opposed to them is anti-democratic, and suppressing them is pro-democratic. The problem is you can epistemically game what goes into this such that you have carte blanche to suppress anyone you don't like as a threat to democracy.
People will always publically justify things they do as being to protect/gain what Siskind/Yudkowsky call "applause lights" - and democracy certainly is one of those.
That doesn't mean they're telling the truth. They could be deluded, or their spin department could just be feeding them the lies that they calculate will get the best reaction. Complete inversion of what a word means isn't even *that* uncommon.
Background: I am an American who lived in a medium sized town in the Turkish "heartland" for a year. Confidence in the stylized portrayal of Turkish politics below: ~65%.
I think one thing this review under-emphasizes is the extent to which an islamic-friendly government is extremely popular among a majority of Turks, though extremely unpopular with the majority of turks you are likely to meet or hear from.
Turkish sentiment is strongly divided between cities on the Western, Mediterranean-facing Coast (Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, etc.) that are much more "liberal" "secular" "Western," and in Turkish terms, "republican" etc. vs. those cities in the Turkish interior and along the Black Sea which tend to be more "traditional" and thus "islamic" (of course cities in the heartland have pockets of liberal voters and cities along the coast have “islamic" suburbs or neighborhoods but this works as a generalization).
Westerners typically interact with and valorize the Turkey of the Mediterranean (and who can blame them! It’s great!), with maybe the occasional stop in Cappadochia or Pamukkele (both beautiful and amazing). The preferred politics of the interior, though, has essentially always included some form of Islamicly-informed government in much the same way that the American "heartland" was thought to consistently prefer some form of Christian or evangelical inflected government from the 80s-mid-2000s . As I understand it, a majority of the population lives in the "heartland" and so it requires no anti-democratic impulse to think that their preferences should have some representation in public policy.
The preferred politics of the Turkish interior, however, have also been basically outlawed for most of post-Ottoman Turkish history, with the military, as the review points out, frequently interposing itself against democracy in the name of preventing even mildly islamic changes or parties. For context, the government currently claims that an implausible 99%+ of turks are muslims. But even independent polls show ~80% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Turkey#Religious_statistics). For all that, Erbakan, for example, seems unlikely to have advocated for or succeeded in turning Turkey into a caliphate or ruling by sharia. And if he had banned alcohol or other similarly “red meat” items for muslim conservatives....well so did America in the 20s (due largely, I might add, to a religiously-inflected moral crusade). To say that the military did the right thing by preventing every and all expression of islamic morality in politics is to believe that General Pershing should have ordered Harding or Coolidge out of the White House in order to enact the moral priorities of flapper-era New York. Certainly many of the priorities of muslim Turkish politicians of the mid-2000s (pre Ergenkon/2016) seem no less totalitarian than French treatment of similar issues in public schools. If liberalism is a big tent, surely it can include a country which is a democracy with some laws reflecting the islamic faith of the vast majority of its populace. The Turkish military, however, was willing to try and depose or undermine even peak center-right technocrat Erdogan, reducing his incentive to stay within the bounds of typical politics, hence Ergenkon (I also think the review underrates Turkey’s “arab spring” moment with the gezi park/taksim square protests of 2013 but I won’t address that here, unsure what the book’s view on that is).
Erdogan has ended up a tyrant, no doubt, but I think the review is perhaps too open to the idea that Turkey was much of a democracy before Erdogan despite the fact that the moral preferences of a majority of the electorate were all-but-excluded from the political sphere by force. To be sure, many of the institutions we associate with democracy were more vibrant pre-Erdogan (particularly the press and the judiciary [the military was also more "vibrant" but not in a democratic way]). But the reason those institutions were targeted for hollowing-out by Erdogan was in part due to the reality of constant coup-threat which those same “democratic” institutions supported. This is a tragedy because I can easily imagine a world in which Turkey looks like a successful, if morally conservative, democracy (in much the same way America scans as conservative to Euros), rather than the dictatorship it has become.
Anyways, enjoyed the review and think it captured many of these points, but wanted to emphasize just how unrepresentative the previous governance of Turkey seemed to have been to the Turkish interior.
This isn't interesting. Think. Where did gastarbeiters of Turkish extraction come from? Istanbul? Izmir? No, mostly they came from poor inner Anatolia farming villages, because that's where one recruits cheap low-skill labor force. Sarrazin's book should have the data.
Sarrazin may or may be not right in this point, but I want to point out he is massively criticized for distorting (eg cherry-picking, unsubstantiated conclusions) data by those he cited. It's wise to never use him except as pointer to the original research.
By all means, read the original research if you have the time, but in such a highly charged and political polemic, it's a given that he would be criticized for that whether it was true that he distorted sources or not (and what would constitute distortion in the first place? are people who insist on smothering hate-facts in "context" fighting distortion or engaging in distortion?) so the mere fact that such criticism exists provide little evidence. It's not like e.g. highly reputed German journalists haven't been caught fabricating material out of whole cloth, for example. One may consider such a situation of epistemological warfare unfortunate - I do - but it is what it is.
Sarrazin as a source weakens an argument (when it's not directed against him, of course). The criticism I mentioned was *from the researchers* he cited, and *for bad science reasons*, not from the various other directions he got flak from. E.g. M. Blume: "he copied this table from my book but 'strategically truncated'" (not verbatim except "strategisch gekürzt") to make his point. Even in points where Sarrazin is right (as he is, incidentally, with the Anatolian origin of the migrants), his mixture of motivated reasoning, sloppiness, and domain specific ignorance has a halo effect that'll taint the overall argumentation that uses him as a source. Because of that halo effect it is better to always cite his source (ie, use him as a list of pointer *only*). A whataboutism about media failures and culture war does not salvage that.
*pointers
I'll amend that to "Sarrazin's book should have pointers to data" on the strength of my looking into this single "strategisch gekurzt" incident (https://scilogs.spektrum.de/natur-des-glaubens/die-demografische-traditionalismusfalle-und-warum-thilo-sarrazin-schummeln-musste-n-tv-4/). I found the place in question in Sarrazin's book, parsed the German as well as I could, and skimmed Blume's paper. I must say that while Sarrazin did omit many entries from Blume's table for both high- and low-fertility minor denominations without saying so (which is indeed sloppy), Blume's own protestations in Spektrum about Sarrazin drawing unwarranted conclusions from his data about connections between high religiosity and fertility ring hollow, because Blume himself writes in that article in the discussion of this same data that yes, there are a few of these highly religious but low-fertility denominations, of which celibate Shakers are the most extreme example, but these "contradictions [are] short-lived variants in religious competition". It is at least somewhat inconsistent of him to then bring up low-fertility New-Apostolic and Jehova's Witnesses as counter-examples to Sarrazin's ostensibly unwarranted conclusions in Spektrum.
> Germany has a lot of migrants who were eligible to vote in the Turkish elections…
They migrated in the 60es and 70es and often maintain a view of a Turkey of that time, and partly their offspring do, too. These voters are not well integrated into the contemporary German (or Belgian, or generally Western big-city) world. Pockets of Anatolya of the past, so to speak, ie in a broad generalization.
This is a great point, and maybe a great warning sign for other democracies: compromise may suck but a house divided....
Great point.
Counterpoint: this just goes to illustrate how important secular [classical] liberalism, and how unimportant democracy is.
Until the plebs overthrow you....
I dont think any significantly large society has survived on secular liberalism. At some point, the secularism becomes so dogmatic, you can't distinguish it from a religion.
"Only about 25% of Turks are civilized." - Turkish banker whom I know.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." - Theodore Sturgeon
Both this deep review by Astral Codex Ten and selden's a-must comment somewhere in the threads are well worth reading, this is the best comment
Cram schools? It’s like the whole plot hinged on a chain of frozen banana stands.
At last, we see Andrew Yang's path to power revealed....
I never thought of Turkey in terms of Cram Schools. I always envisioned them as an East Asian phenomenon...
There is a thread of logic, often only implicit, that runs through all these discussions about populace vs elites: whether is life winner-take-all or percentage-of-the-pot. In the first worldview the elites are the best of us, so they should win. Much as in baseball where the margin of greatness is small (think .300 hitter vs .250 hitter), being just a little bit better means you win all the competitions and get to decide everything in your sphere of influence and everyone else gets the scraps.
In the second worldview, everybody sucks, and the elites are just a *little* less clueless than the rest and "sucking slightly less" is a less hubris-inducing framing for their "superiority". An elite might make slightly better decisions on average than a pleb, and while that matters it isn't consistent or comprehensive enough to be a knock-down argument to always listen to the elite and never the plebs.
And one is not necessarily correct and the other wrong: there are certain situations where the first clearly applies. I already gave the example of baseball but your point from the comment highlights a couple of weeks ago comes to mind, the one about the taking the kid who's almost smart enough to cure cancer to the point where he's exactly smart enough to cure cancer, and how a fair bit of progress is driven this way.
But politics seems to be more the second kind of thing. I find Liberal arguments to be, on average, more correct than Conservative ones. The Liberals are really better, and this matters. But it's not consistent or comprehensive enough to be a knock-down argument for always listening to the Liberals and never the Conservatives.
And my beef is not that people disagree with that assessment, it's that the dichotomy *never comes up*. We talk about class, status, economic inequality, etc, using arguments that are clearly from one of those two frames, without ever talking about whether or not such framing applies in a given instance. And it seems to me like this is an important question, and maybe the *most* important question, for talking about how to talk about this stuff: do the winners deserve everything, or just slightly more than the not-quite winners?
There are several other possibilities, right?
For example, you might think the elites are mainly good at getting/keeping power rather than governing, and I think you could make a pretty fair case in that direction for US political elites. There's no question that senators, presidents, governors, etc., tend to be smarter and better-educated than the voters, but I'm not sure the quality of the decisions they end up making reflects that. Hell, think of the many places that have impending public-sector pension crises--the problem there isn't that past political leaders weren't smart enough, but rather that they had bad incentives.
You might think the elites are great at winning meme-wars and academic politics, but probably aren't that great at actually making decisions about real stuff. For example, I think I'd rather have the Ottomwa, Iowa sewer commission making important decisions about practical things than the faculty of the Black or Gender Studies department at a top university--I think those folks are mostly good at slinging words and infighting, but would make a mess if given any actual power. Would you like to have the state legislature where you live taken over for the next decade by the faculty of the local state university's sociology department? How do you think that would work out?
You might think we've over-concentrated power, so that even though the elites are on average smarter and better educated and better informed than the public, they're also put in the position to make decisions over stuff they don't understand, with little or no effective feedback that will prevent them from just wrecking important things without even noticing it.
That is an interesting perspective and surely much of it is to a degree obviously true, but I'm not sure it actually addresses my core point. My questions are this: given the elite CEO Alice who is unquestionable very smart and well educated and her secretary Amy who is not so much, what percentage chance do you give that on any given policy question Alice will give a significantly better answer than Amy? And what percentage of the rewards of civilization should flow to Alice instead of Amy because of it?
Because there's a lot that feeds in to this question. There are domains like most academic questions where Alice will obviously give a much better answer (~100%) but almost no one cares. There are domains like business where Alice will give a much better answer and people very much care and pay Alice 200x what Amy makes because of it, because Alice making a good strategic decision vs a bad one can generate a great deal of value or sink the company. And there are domains where there is basically zero reason to privilege Alice's answer over Amy's, like say we asked them the secret to a lasting marriage. There is no prima facie reason to think Alice would give a better answer, and she may in fact be at a disadvantage. So in the 2x2 matrix of important/unimportant and brains-matter-a-lot/not-so-much, where does politics lie? Like yes, there are technical questions in politics, like how much money the Fed should "print", and Alice will probably be more right than Amy and significantly so. But a lot of policy boils down to satisfying competing preferences in a mutually palatable way, and I think I differ from a good chunk of the crowd in these parts about what quadrant I put that in, or maybe even just how deep in a given quadrant I place it.
> If there's a general moral here, it's that having the "good guys" oppress and censor the "bad guys" is fun while it lasts, but it's hard to know whether you're building up a karmic debt, or when you're going to have to pay the piper.
Wondering whether most people who saw Erdogan as the "good guy" fighting for them against the "bad guys" regret the current state, or are just happy that their good guy implements their idea of how things should be to an ever higher degree. Do people get "tired of winning"?
I suspect that "I support having a system that properly selects the right leaders and policies" is generally less popular than "I support having the right leaders and policies" because the former is a derivative of the latter. There are values-based arguments for liberal democracy itself, but I think a lot of people view it as a means to an end, and are happy to get the same result another way if they have a clear idea what "the right leaders and policies are." Where the gulf is as wide as Islam vs Kemalism, I'd guess people are less likely to support the process over the result. That may be really uncharitable, though, and I don't have a good grasp on where most people stand.
Where are all the pro-Erdogan bits? Did you excise those to avoid making him look good?
The pro-Erdogan bits are the ones about him being a competent leader (at least as mayor of Istanbul and early caretaker of the economy), him being sympathetic as a representative of a persecuted movement, and a lot of his early shift to dictatorship being self-defense coup-prevention measures.
Oh, I see. Values dissonance, then; I judged the latter two to be baldly negative (possibly because I don't see it as admirable to be persecuted if it's happening because your movement is Islamist and thus illiberal; the Mafia is also notably a persecuted movement), and interpreted the first one as less of "Erdogan is competent!" and more of "my GOD, the guy before Erdogan was incompetent and corrupt! Even Erdogan could do better than this!".
However, the mafia are not elected to their positions. Regardless of who you agree with politically, the military coups seem to be unambiguously anti-democratic.
I am not in this instance (or actually in almost any instance) trying to defend military coups. I think it's possible for military juntas to be immoral *at the same time* as a number of persecuted movements are also unsympathetic. The Muslim Brotherhood and military junta of Egypt spring to mind as another example—I can't say I have any sympathy for the leaders of the Brotherhood, even as I deplore the current dictatorial rule of Egypt.
Isn't the problem with this that while they're obviously both awful, it's difficult not to pick a side when you live there. If the only viable options are "the military rules the country" and "Islamists win elections and seize total control over society" then not picking a side is essentially quietism.
"Islamist" in Erdogan's case means what exactly? He supports a somewhat Islamic inflected society, that doesn't necessarily make one illiberal. I find it weird that people keep calling Gulenism "Islamist" and yet we call the Taliban "Islamist" too. Shouldn't we call Erdogan just "Islamic", the closer to the way one might call George Bush "Christian" than not.
The best analogy is Bernie Sanders and Mao are both "Socialist." Bush was a Christian personally (as is Biden), and he'd be the first to admit his policies were Christian-influenced. But if he'd tried to be as politically Christian ("Christianist") as Erdogan is Islamist, people would massively freak out. That's an American/French/Turkish cultural thing though; Germany is governed by an explicitly Christian party, and the UK has a state church where bishops sit in the legislature, and hardly anyone bats an eyelid.
A number of recent posts have touched on the sort of right-wing, social-class-centered populism mentioned near the end of this one. I want to propose an alternative mental framework for thinking about this.
There is a named concept called the Just World Hypothesis - which is the hypothesis that the world is, more often than not, "just" - meaning, people in general tend to be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad behavior. If one strongly believes in the Just World Hypothesis, then one can make inferences in the other direction - that if a person has been rewarded, they must have been behaving well. Conversely, if someone strongly believes the JWH is false, then they will infer the opposite; that the person's rewards were acquired through theft, deception, etc. In other words, intuitive, unexamined beliefs people have regarding the JWH are the drivers of their responses to political questions.
One can easily map this onto leftist politics by applying it to wealth; the idea is that any given individual has an intuition about whether they believe in the . A proponent of, let's call it the Just Wealth Hypothesis, is likely to believe that progressive taxation and welfare programs are unjust; they ask, why should we tax the more productive people at a higher rate? Why should we reward poor people for not going out and getting a job? Meanwhile, someone with the opposite feeling would believe that richer individuals got their wealth via unethical behavior - exploitation, I believe the Marxists call it - and deserve to have it redistributed to at least some degree. What we call left wing "populism", in other words, is a believe that holders of extreme wealth - you might call their position "elite" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their wealth.
I think the way to map this onto "right wing populism" is to apply the JWH to *credentials* and *status* instead of wealth. A Just Credentials Hypothesis proponent would tend to believe that the cultural and intellectual "elites" got that way by working hard in school and acquiring more knowledge than others in their field; an opponent would believe that they got that way via connections and deception. As a result, when an Expert In The Field makes a policy recommendation based on their expertise - e.g. that restaurants should be closed to prevent covid transmission, or coal power plants should be closed down to prevent catastrophic climate change - people react to that recommendation based on their intuitive beliefs about the legitimacy of that person's credentials. What we call right wing "populism", in other words, is a belief that holders of extreme credentials - again, "elites" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their credentials.
Imagine an individual who is an extreme Just World supporter when it comes to wealth, and a extreme Just World opponent when it comes to credentials - has that person ever had a better presidential candidate than Donald Trump?
Either of these forms of populism has a danger, and a tendency towards dictatorship. For left wing populism, once you tear down capitalist economic structures and eliminate the economic elite, the only available alternative is a command economy managed by the state. This has been well covered. What is the equivalent for right wing populism? What do you end up with, if you eliminate credentials; who do people listen to, if not the experts? I think we're learning the answer to this, in the era of social media, alternative medicine and qanon: when expertise and credentials are discredited, what fills the void is *charisma*. The ideas that sound right, or feel good to hear, or have the most Likes, or come from people who you have come to trust for other reasons, become the Truth. And this is a powerful force for the sort of hollowing out of institutions, and slide into dictatorship, that Scott describes happening in Turkey.
You are clearly onto something here.
I think it's something simpler: we in the West like the appearance of democracy. If some foreign government isn't living up to our standards, and it's weak enough not to be a threat, and we're not distracted by something else, we may even intervene to force that government to become democratic.
So if you want to be a dictator or anything near to it, you have to work within those limits. You're setting up a democracy, look! You have a parliament and elections and a constitution and a president and everything! Yes, you may be voted into power with 98% of the vote in every election, but that just shows how much your people love you!
"Democracy" is treated as a kind of magic word that will make everything better. I wonder exactly how much hollowing-out Erdogan had to do, or if those institutions were a little hollow to begin with?
This is very good and an interesting way to think about it.
>I think the way to map this onto "right wing populism" is to apply the JWH to *credentials* and *status* instead of wealth. A Just Credentials Hypothesis proponent would tend to believe that the cultural and intellectual "elites" got that way by working hard in school and acquiring more knowledge than others in their field; an opponent would believe that they got that way via connections and deception. As a result, when an Expert In The Field makes a policy recommendation based on their expertise - e.g. that restaurants should be closed to prevent covid transmission, or coal power plants should be closed down to prevent catastrophic climate change - people react to that recommendation based on their intuitive beliefs about the legitimacy of that person's credentials. What we call right wing "populism", in other words, is a belief that holders of extreme credentials - again, "elites" - are illegitimate and corrupt and should be stripped of their credentials.
There's something to this, but I don't think the word "credentials" is right here. It's power and influence that's the issue, not credentials. Credentials don't of themselves give you any power, the powerful are a tiny subset of the credentialed.
To get power, you obtain some minimum set of credentials and then start aligning yourself with power by demonstrating your willingness to do whatever power asks of you. Once power is assured of your loyalty it will let you into the club. 99% of those with credentials, though, will never get power because they'll never do what it takes to obtain it.
Came here to say something similar — this is a clearer and more succinct way of getting at what I was going to say.
Will add one attempted steelmanning of the moral framework for left and right wing populism:
•"Left wing populism" = Corrupt elites have seized the means of production and are exploiting people. We need to remove them from power and redistribute wealth, since that is the fair thing to do and also ensures that everyone has a chance to succeed.
•"Right wing populism" = Corrupt elites have seized cultural control of society and are repressing our values and way of life while rigging the system in their favor. We need to remove them from power and make sure that [our ethnic/religious/etc identity group] is treated with respect and given the opportunity to compete.
I wanted to chime in on populism; there's a definition of what it is that I found useful.
In this view, populism isn't promising people what they want, or telling them you're the best party for them. Democrats will tell you that Republicans would introduce bans on gay marriage, so if you want gay marriage you should vote Democrat. Republicans will tell you Democrats will raise taxes, so if you want less taxes you should vote Republican. Each of them wants to convince you they're the best party for you.
Populists are different in that they claim they are the only ones representing the people. On this definition, promising everyone free beer isn't populist, but telling them you're the only one who cares for them and all other politicians or parties just are in it for the money (or for the power, or for some sinister goal) definitely is.
Thus, in a way, "We are the 99%" is the ultimate embodiment of populism; regardless of what the movement was and what it wanted, the slogan implies that they and only they represent the people, or at least the real people.
On this count, Erdogan is a populist if he claims that his opponents are all corrupt and he's the only one who really cares for the people; I don't know that much about him, but that's certainly the claim that is used in countries like Russia (and by populist opposition e.g. in Europe). Where a non-populist might consider (or at least call) her opponents less clever than herself, or less able, or misguided, or just representing a different constituency, the populist doesn't have this option. Since the populist is the true representative of the people, she has to assume there actually is "the people"; that it is relatively uniform so that it can be represented by a single party or individual; and that anyone else shows, at best, a total lack of knowledge; more often, great disloyalty. And disloyal people must be the enemy.
This, as far as I understand, worries many people who use the term "populist" in this way. A populist can't just peacefully coexist with others, not in the long term. This doesn't mean populists will go and kill all who dissent; but they will certainly do everything they can to marginalize them. Sounds pretty much like Erdogan, I guess.
Butting in here, but the "sipping cocktails in the hotels" caused me to look up the area, and Google tells me:
"Nişantaşı is an upscale residential area that's popular for its fashion boutiques selling international and prominent local labels. Art nouveau buildings house trendy restaurants serving Turkish and global cuisine."
While Wikipedia says:
"A popular shopping and residential district, it is one of Istanbul's most exclusive neighbourhoods. The area includes fashion shops, department stores, cafés, pubs, restaurants and night clubs. Abdi İpekçi Street, Turkey's most expensive shopping street in terms of lease prices, stretches from the neighbourhoods of Maçka and Teşvikiye to the center of Nişantaşı. ...Nişantaşı today is an elite shopping district and an affluent, secular residential area which is home to many creative types. The quarter forms the background to several novels by Nobel laureate Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who is a local resident. Nişantaşı has the largest community of foreign residents in Istanbul after Taksim and Cihangir."
So the implication is along the lines of "New York values" or the equivalent for every other large city, e.g. in Ireland the idea of Dublin 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_4
It's interesting that the top photo on its wikipedia article includes a 'christmas' tree.
Weird that Nişantaşı, Dublin 4, New York, etc. are all known for being connected to global culture or stuff like that. The way that far-rightists call lefties "globalists" suddenly makes a whole lot more sense to me now.
Wow, how come that you only have noticed this now? ("Globalists" are the enemies of leftists too...)
I think I only noticed this explanation for why far-rightists call lefties "globalists" (i.e. because leftism generally involves being connected to global culture instead of local culture, etc) because the author brought Nişantaşı up. (I knew about the phenomenon of the word "globalists" as a derogatory term for a much longer time.)
Also:
> "Globalists" are the enemies of leftists too....
Source please.
(For an example of far-rightists using the word "globalist", you can visit nigh any far-right site, but a generic example which I literally just looked up today is https://humansarefree.com/2021/03/become-a-digital-asset-globalists-great-reset.html.)
"Occupy Wall Street" ?
https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daniel-gross/occupy-wall-street-davos-anti-globalist-crowd-200329140.html
Leftists lionize local cultures too vs global consumerism : for instance I was at a protest this week-end that could certainly be called "leftist", and there was someone carrying a big photograph of (IIRC) a Native South American elder with some wise saying that I forgot what it was about exactly (the carrier might have been a descendant).
OK, at this point, I have to confess that I am now well and truly confused about the meaning of the word "globalist". Congratulations. I think we should take this discussion to an even-numbered open thread at this point because it's veered so far off the original topic (how Erdogan gradually became the quasi-dictator of Turkey).
I hadn't thought about it this way before. I figured "populist" was more-or-less "arguing for policies that *sound* good but are disastrous, but they sound so good you'll get people to go along with them."
There are lots of things like this in a modern complex society. Keeping the world functioning requires spending energy on some non-obvious things and purposefully not eating seed corn.
But I really like your definition. It might be way better than mine.
People definitely do use it to mean that as well, but I think they're using it in two different ways. Although it gets conflated, because people attack "elites-vs-masses" populists by saying their policies are "eating-your-seed-corn" populist.
Thanks for the populism explainer! I feel much less confused now.
(In another top-level comment, jon37 proposed another mental framework for defining "populism" based on the idea of beliefs in the/in the opposite of the Just World Hypothesis. I think this might also be valuable, but this one feels a lot clearer to me.)
As for court packing I’m not sure why you’re concerned about that. If you have 2/3 majority in the legislature just impeach the SCOTUS judges you don’t like on trumped up bribery charges. Or have them die in a convenient accident.
If the Democrats couldn't successfully impeach Trump, there's no way they can do it to a SCOTUS justice. And murdering a political opponent is much further outside of The Way We Do Things than passing a law changing the size of the SCOTUS.
If you're depending on the Army to arrange a coup every so often in order to maintain the vision of the Great Leader from beyond the grave, exactly how democratic a country are you to start off with?
I'm one of those opposed to the EU letting Turkey become a member, because I have grave doubts about what really is under the surface of the "we're a Western liberal democracy, honest!" and this account of the book describes exactly why I'm dubious about that.
However Ataturk dealt with The Problem Of Islamism (or Islamic Extremism) seems to be exactly the wrong way to go about it; he wanted to weaken Islam as a force and drag Turkey into the modern, Western world. To break the power of religion, he tried to crush it. But that's not how it works - persecution strengthens the committed believers. If they know that sending their kid to a religious school is torpedoing their chances in life, but they still do it, then their faith and the values they take out of that is more important to them than worldly success. Ensuring that kids who do attend the religious schools come out the end with their only realistic career option being "the clergy" is creating a stick to beat your own back with - is anyone surprised people on such a track were deeply committed, conservative, and anti-the State?
How you weaken religious influence in society is by honey, not vinegar. Let the parents have their religious schools, we just want to ensure that the same curriculum is taught in all schools. Don't give believers the everyday example of 'the State is crushing us', allow moderate to liberal seminaries (apologies for not using the correct terms) to be established. Don't ban headscarves or hijabs, but if a girl wants to stop wearing a headscarf, we will of course defend her right to make that choice. And so on. Allow the forces of secular society to dissolve the zealousness like pearls in vinegar. The example in the West is the smart kid who goes off to college and falls away from his family background of simple piety. If the smart kids from the boondocks are funnelled into religious schools and not allowed anything else, they will use that ability to defend Islam. If the smart kid from the farm or the small village or the hinterland can go off to college in the Big City to study engineering, there is a much greater chance they will end up secular or at the very least with the liberal version of Islam like liberal Christianity in the West.
I always suspected Erdogan was a strongman, not a centrist/liberal politician, especially in light of the 'conspiracy' that had him cracking down on all his enemies. This review explains why and how he came to that position, but it doesn't convince me that yes indeed the EU should admit Turkey. The underlying system, where the army as guardian of the secular democratic Westernised version of Turkey creates and maintains the very conservative Islamism they are fighting, is not robust enough to pass as a democracy and until Turkey fixes that, I don't want them here.
Funny you mention studying engineering. Oddly enough, Muslim terrorists are disproportionately likely to be engineers.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/07/11/theres-a-good-reason-why-so-many-terrorists-are-engineers/
Or in other high status white collar jobs like doctors...
But are engineers disproportionately likely to be Muslim terrorists? P(A|B) ≠ P(B|A), you know.
But P(A|B)>P(A) implies P(B|A)>P(B), as both inequalities just say P(A and B)>P(A)P(B)
See Macron vs Erdogan on coranic schools. I'm not certain that abolishing the separation of church and state was the best way to go about it however...
(I would have threatened to close all the mosques if the muslims didn't get their shit together.)
I know I must be the millionth person to ever point this out, but why do you always put commas and periods outside quotes? It's not correct--they go "inside," like "this." (Even when it doesn't "make sense.") I know I can't be the only person to mention this, and I'm new to reading this, but it's bothered me since I started reading a month or two ago. What's the deal?
British versus American style? I know I was taught "full stops go outside the inverted commas, like this". 😀
"And you do the same with commas", she typed.
Yes, it's an American thing.
Perhaps the corrosive effects of attending medical school in the People's Republic of Cork permanently affected Scott's style so that now he writes in the version on this side of the Atlantic? 😁
I'm British, and I was taught to "put them inside the quotation marks." I think this is universal here, because putting them outside looks bizarre and disconcerting to me even though it's clearly more logical in a lot of cases.
I was taught that if the quoted words constitute a full sentence or clause, the punctuation mark goes inside the quotation marks, elsewise outside.
You're mistaken—your preferred orthography is merely one of a number of standards. I was raised to do it the same way Scott does.
Nope, this is non-controversial in American grammar. That you were raised to do something doesn't make it right. There is perhaps an argument that pedantic enforcement of grammar "rules" is silly, but that's distinct from the factual matter that among American grammarians, there is 'correct' usage.
If "American grammarians", as a group, are this prescriptivistic, I think American grammarians have more serious problems than Scott's orthography does. Yet somehow I suspect they aren't really.
#PrescriptivismIsTrue
I suspect this is due to Scott's philosophical training. Philosophers adhere to the "punctuation outside the quotes" convention. Or more accurately, whether the punctuation is outside or inside depends on whether the punctuation mark is really part of what's being quoted, which in most cases it is not.
Which philosophers or style guide?
Just pulling a philosophy book off my shelf, and picking a random page. (Literally, that's what I just did.) From David Lewis's paper "Desire as Belief II", the second paragraph:
In the first place, Hume's "passions" are sometimes none too passionate. He speaks of some passions as "calm". We would do best to speak of all "passion", calm and otherwise, as "desire".
David Lewis is generally considered a paragon of style in analytic philosophy.
Pulling another book off my shelf and opening it at random, here's the first sentence of Donald Davidson's "Locating Literary Language":
Literature poses a problem for philosophy of language, for it directly challenges any theory of meaning that makes the assertorical or truth-seeking uses of language primary and pretends that other linguistic performances are in some sense "etiolated" or "parasitical".
One more example, pulling Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity off the shelf, and opening to a random page, this time page 57:
But then, suppose we say counterfactually 'suppose Aristotle had never gone into philosophy at all', we need not mean 'suppose a man who studied with Plato, had never gone into philosophy at all', which might seem like a contradiction.
Kripke uses single quotes for some reason, so he is unusual in that regard. But his placement of the commas outside the quotation marks is typical for philosophers.
That is so, so strange! Everything goes deeper than you think it does. So analytic philosophers have a different convention!
That is really interesting.
I might have the wrong kind of philosophy books. But I grabbed three books off my own shelf to see. Two put periods and commas inside the quotes, one puts them outside.
Inside: C.D.C. Reeve's translation of Aristotle's Politics, Hackett, 1998, see pg. 92.
Inside: Alvin Goldman's Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986, see pg. 114.
Outside: A.V. Miller's translation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford University Press, 1977, see pg. 48.
Bertrand Russell puts them inside (or possibly his British publisher does)
Correctness standards are a matter of convention and can be changed if people agree to change it. I agree with putting material that is not in the original text outside of the quotation marks. Probably because I'm a computer programmer? It just seems very obvious to me that the convention in this case needs to be changed.
Hah I've always wondered if coding is what taught me this too. I remember as a kid I was very adamant that punctuation go inside quotes (as I was taught), but at some point I began to see the purpose of quotation marks as expressing some kind of literal-ness, and therefore to modify the quoted contents is debasement.
Yeah, I think I'm where you used to be. The regularity with which I've had to edit writing to go against the 'intuitive' placement (that is, the literalness) has made me adamant about it too. Or, for a long time, I used the intuitive convention, only to have to make myself come around to the standard one.
The British or 'logical' convention is common among prgrammers. This has been a noted cultural characteristic for decades; see the Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html).
Decades... oh man... well I guess you're right. I learned to program in 1991. Doesn't seem like that long but somehow 30 years have passed. Weird.
I live in Britain, and I have never seen a British book or newspaper that puts them outside the quotation marks.
I changed to putting them inside, but for a long time I put them outside (and sometimes, in ambiguous situations, I still do.) Because it's Logical. Also I write a lot of code and no self-respecting computer language would accept commas on the inside of brackets.
EDIT: I wish you could edit. I should have said commas on the inside of quotes, or full stops on the inside of brackets.
I was taught to always put commas and periods inside quotes regardless of whether it makes sense, but that's a stupid rule and shame on the person who invented it.
Exactly why I don't.
I think that putting grammatical punctuation outside quoted text is also a hacker culture thing (mentioned in the Jargon File: http://catb.org/jargon/html/writing-style.html).
I see the differences as mathematical *parsing* based ('logical' style, evaluating inside -> out), versus typographical, i.e. *aesthetics* based (that looks just slightly better). Naturally each subculture uses what suits their needs and preferences; there is no One True Style. So I used to let the editors decide; if they want to change, it's their brain cycles...
As a programmer, I greatly prefer a syntax where we can treat the internals of a delimited string like a black box and expect the sentence terminator to come after it. Even if it is non-standard for prose!
Logical quotation makes more sense. If I'm writing "example string", the comma isn't part of the string, so it should go on the outside.
How does it matter? Both styles are highly readable.
"If Stalin wanted your head, he would have his goons cut your head off. If Erdogan wants you dead, he will have a corruption investigator arrest you, bring you to court, charge you with plausible-sounding corruption allegations, give you a trial by jury that seems to observe the proper formalities, and sentence you to death by decapitation. To an outside observer, it will look a lot like how genuine corruption trials work in genuinely democratic nations. You'd have to be really well-informed to spot the irregularities - and the media sources that should be informing you all seem very helpful and educational but are all secretly zombies controlled by Erdogan supporters."
This sounds exactly like Putin, too. (Though I guess Putin will also have his goons poison you, sometimes, but in a plausibly deniable way.)
""Anti corruption campaign" seems to be a code word for "arresting the enemies of people in power", whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China. I'm not sure what to do about it without leaving corruption in place, but, uh, maybe we should leave corruption in place."
On the other hand, Navalny's whole thing is the Anti-Corruption Foundation; he has gained influence against the Russian government by making YouTube documentaries with detailed allegations of corruption by people in power. Possibly "corruption" is just a thing people care about in a nonpartisan way in countries that have a lot of it, and as such it can be used symmetrically by those in power and those outside of it (except to the extent that power makes it easier to do *any* kind of thing)?
I've recently seen an article (or was it a video ?) titled something like "Putin, Erdogan, Xi : the new dictators."
>Although these looked good on paper, the end result was to destroy previous Turkish institutions with strong traditions and independent power bases, and replace them with new ones that Erdogan could pack with his supporters.
I'm assuming based on the wording that this is an instance of the recurring 'cultural evolution' framework. If so, it's a good demonstration that the framework *desperately* needs an injection of rigor regarding the time scales - if things that are a century old can either be "strong tradition" or "top-down planning" depending on how you feel like framing things, it's lost all explanatory power along with the predictive.
Also I just want to focus for a second on this:
"The FP was shut down, and Erdogan was personally banned from politics for the crime of "reading an incendiary poem". The Islamists appealed to the European Court of Human Rights - located in Strasbourg, France, home of laicite and enforced secularism, which ruled that none of this seemed like a human rights violation to them."
and
"Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, causing him to lose faith in the European conception of liberalism as relevant to his pro-Islam project."
I wish the European conception of liberalism had made a better showing here. It's probably naïve to think that would've prevented this but.
Europeans aren't really liberal. The French ban public religion. The Germans ban Nazis. And pretty much everybody but the Czechs ban effective gun ownership (and even they aren't too good on it). But they really like the process of voting.
I don't know of any country with such an absolutist vision of free speech as the US. They're the outlier, and I don't believe that they get to define what's "really liberal".
As for the "poem", here's an abstract (from Erdogan's wikipedia page): "The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers..."
Another poster (search "poem") says that this religious jingoism was combined with more overt hate speech in the same speech "later in the speech, he was calling for the pious to battle the infidel"
> This warrants checking out the affair in more details.
I'm not saying that we should have the same sentences for the sake offences in the West, but it wasn't so far out that the country could be condemned for human rights violations.
"Every artist in the country will make groundbreaking exciting new art criticizing the government's poor judgment"
If they really were making good new art, I'd be happy about that. But it tends to end up with things like the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_plinth,_Trafalgar_Square
"28 March 2018 – 2020 Michael Rakowitz The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist A recreation of a sculpture of a lamassu (a winged bull and protective deity) that stood at the entrance to Nergal Gate of Nineveh from 700 B.C. It was destroyed in 2015 by Isis, along with other artefacts in the Mosul Museum. Rakowitz's recreation is made of empty Iraqi date syrup cans, representing the destruction of the country's date industry"
I am really excited to read this, because lamassu? Oh yeah! And by the photos, it turned out pretty decent looking! https://londonvisitors.wordpress.com/2018/04/08/the-invisible-enemy-should-not-exist-by-michael-rakowitz-on-the-fourth-plinth-in-trafalgar-square/
However, what is there now?
"Heather Phillipson The End A dollop of whipped cream with an assortment of toppings: a cherry, a fly, and a drone. The drone will film passers-by and display them on an attached screen". Uh-huh, yeah that is sure better than stuffy old Neo-Classical art! https://www.galleriesnow.net/shows/heather-phillipson-the-end/
I would rather have the lamassu, but the fact that the artist had to slap on a political message about the destruction of the date industry, instead of simply making a work of art with classical and historical references, because that would be 'popular' instead of 'elite' is, I think, exactly the wrong message to take away from this.
I'm not convinced fourth-plinth style public art is reflective of elite tastes - it's generally fairly gimmicky and silly, and a worse version of the sort of thing that sits in publicly subsidised art galleries. It's more a reflection of some GLA bureaucrat being told their job it to "find art" and going for something that "seems modern" and "has a message." The fairer comparison would be this sort of thing: https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/best-artists-to-invest-in?image=5d13ad8771e2a00286ae6f9c vs "the Mona Lisa but with more urns and cherubs."
On reflection, I find your discussion of right-wing populism jarring, mostly because of your apparent defeatism toward/respect for the elites. On the contrary, it seems to me that if a specific elite will entrench itself so solidly in all the levers of power that it can defy democracy and fuck over the will of the majority (leaving entirely aside the ability to propagandize their values etc.), the only moral and democratic thing to do is to become or support a right-wing populist every now and then so that you can drag every last one of these elite members out in the street and shoot them. Nothing seems more important than to defeat and uproot this anti-democratic elite, especially since you've already outlined mechanisms whereby they convince themselves that their insular values represent real moral superiority which should be allowed to reign above democracy.
It seems baffling to me that you and everyone wouldn't agree that the obvious solution to this is to convince the dean of Harvard et al. to abdicate peacefully and become bean farmers while they're replaced by yokels from Nebraska every 20 years or so, on the understanding that the alternative and its consequences will be much, much worse. (Once the wheel has turned enough and the formed deans have been thoroughly yokelized, their distant descendants can once again have a turn at the steering-oar.)
Only if you think democracy is a really super-important value *because* it gives people what they want, or is good in itself. Many people support democracy because they see it as a guarantee of liberalism (either in the rule of law and free speech sense, or the culturally liberal pro gay and feminism, anti harsh criminal punishment sense, don't mean 'liberal' in the sense of 'views of the US Democrat party or anything economic.) I can't speak for Scott, but people who support it for that reason aren't going to be keen on what would inevitably be a super anti-liberal movement (especially on the cultural rather than rule of law reading of "liberal".)
Sure, but those people you speak of aren't in any material way different from Erdogan and his Islamists; they want, to use the phrase herr_mannelig quotes above, to ride the train of democracy to their stop and then get off. They're not actually democrats in any meaningful sense: in fact, they're *enemies* of democracy as soon as they get enough sway.
Elites are elites because they are well-educated, rich, and have lots of connections. It doesn't take a conspiracy to have well-educated, rich, well-connected people rise to the top of things. That's just what's going to happen unless you try really hard to prevent it.
If the dean of Harvard doesn't abdicate peacefully, then you have to use force, and yeah, that's part of why I think all these right-wing populists keep becoming dictators. It doesn't go well! The alternative - having annoying snobs in charge of Harvard all the time - has its disadvantages but beats authoritarianism.
Right, so far I follow you. What I'm saying is, I don't understand *why* you believe that one should not try really hard to prevent it, or why the soft authoritarianism of the elite (which, make no mistake, is plenty authoritarian) is better than the overt authoritarianism of "flaily guy making slightly ludicrous demands", instead of worse. At least most people can automatically peg Trump as kind of a dunkass; one of the terrible dangers of radical-chic elites is that they can be completely insane but yet respected as thought leaders, ideological trailblazers. The Fabian Society, memorably fought by both Orwell and Chesterton from opposite sides of the railing, is an excellent example of this which is perhaps better detached from the conditions of contemporary America so that it can be more dispassionately examined.
(Incidentally, I thought commenter Sa-Matra came off as a real p... as considerably rude and condescending, in disagreeing with you earlier, and I hope I do not come off the same way. If I do, please tell me so, and I'll try to modulate my expression.)
> Elites are elites because they are well-educated, rich, and have lots of connections
Really just the third of those, though.
Being merely "rich" doesn't get you close to the levers of power, unless you're Bezos-level. And being "well educated" certainly doesn't get you anywhere near them; if anything it's a liability to have anything beyond a Bachelor's.
"Well-educated" is where you get a lot of the connections; although scraping through an MA at Harvard makes you better-educated than doing a ground-breaking PhD thesis at Podunk State.
In my model there is a problem with this view.
The elites are the brain, the lower classes are the hands. As you go up the systems become more formalized. As you go down the systems become tacit.
The whole left/right/liberal thing papers over these being different forms of cognition with strengths and weaknesses - they never were symmetric. The left conjures up dialectical arguments, the right can just use recognition which is faster. You never hear of a sudden left wing takeover. Communist revolutionary leaders are always from the middle class. Right wing intellectuals are rare. Just three of a list of quirks that are explained by the formal - tacit model.
Here is the problem - that it is possible for all the faction elites to be wrong without the ability to use reverse gear because they are in the formal realm - which is a very tiny space compared to the tacit. Having a problem in the tacit realm is difficult because it's going to be very hard to model or it would exist already in the formal realm. It's also going to be more serious because of where it comes from - if the grass dies off it's bye bye for the rabbits and foxes.
Meta - I'm pretty certain the tech stag hypothesis solutions are in the tacit world because the formal space is not large and they should have been discovered. I think the only important problem for the 21st is what Polanyi called the Tacit Dimension - it looks like Silicon Valley has slammed into a wall without this.
>You never hear of a sudden left wing takeover.
Carnation Revolution?
I can allow it - a brief look suggest the whole affair was highly unusual. I salute them both on the grounds of human decency. I don't have deep knowledge here but the factions seem to have acquitted themselves in peculiarly responsible ways. It's hard to imagine any of that going on in the United States without large numbers of people being put to death or experiencing long imprisonment.
My guess is that in the 3 Faction Model the left and right factions happened to coincide perfectly - in the Liu Cixin three body physical model for political events this is like a complete lunar eclipse.
Without knowing the history in any depth we can see what happened as consistent with the tacit/formal model - first the Right moves out of nowhere using its classic recognition power move, then the Left responds separately using Voice. Then the factions calculate and discover probably to everybody's surprise that their interests are the same or balanced on this occasion - what is left out of the historical explanation is probably that there is a silent loser from this arrangement - which is the 3rd faction called Liberalism. I'm certain if they had been stronger in Portugal at the time there would have been widespread violence.
You've also re-invented the Indian Varna system (see verse 12):
http://sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10090.htm
"The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rājanya made.
His thighs became the Vaiśya, from his feet the Śūdra was produced."
Ancient texts are often more advanced than modern metacognition. There is a misconception with moderns that newer products and services are better because they are newer - this has generally been accurate thanks to the industrial revolutions. The problem with this view is that a basic evolutionary analysis should tell us many of the oldest sociopolitical technologies have to be state of the art for the same reason the nth version of an iPhone isn't a rotary phone.
That doesn't mean old texts ought to be taken literally but you'd be a fool not to read them if you do any meta analysis. One way to interpret this is our core software does not necessarily exist in formalist descriptions - literacy is a modern development - it might reside in other forms of information on another layer - even non-living like architecture - and most information communicated across generations must be implicit or tacit.
These people trying to knock down Chesterton's fence with sexual politics are likely going to meet a bitter end because this has happened before and not one time did it take hold - that western populations have stopped making copies of themselves is an ominous signal.
Something I've lately begun to think of as interesting (post Scott's recent posts on meritocracy) is how there were points in history where it was fairly obvious that the elites had got there because of being more powerful on some level than others (European nobles). But rather than trying to change that situation, another solution tried at the time was the idea of 'noblesse oblige' - that the elites deserved to be on top but that they in turn were obliged to do more to look after the people beneath them. I wonder what modern conceptions of 'live with elites' rather than 'replace elites' strategies might look like?
I think something like that existed in the past in many Western countries—the cultural elites agreeing that ordinary citizens' mores were disgusting, bigoted and stupid, but letting them have their way, cultural conservatism going unchallenged in politics while the elites traded and lived by their own ideas in their own cliques, untouched by the common man. The mid-late Sixties could be read as this consensus collapsing, the students—the new generation of the elite—effectively crying "why *shouldn't* we rule the peasants and tell them to shut up?! We're the ones who know how to make everything great again!".
One modern conception is the whole idea of trickle-down economics, which has not exactly proved itself successful.
I think Scott sets it out here:
> The normal course of politics is various coalitions of elites and populace, each drawing from their own power bases. A normal political party, like a normal anything else, has elite leaders, analysts, propagandists, and managers, plus populace foot soldiers. Then there's an election, and sometimes our elites get in, and sometimes your elites get in...
The comfortable situation, in a well-functioning democracy, has different competing groups of "elites" (massive air quotes from me) constantly engaged in jockeying for the support of the hoi polloi.
The US, like pre-Erdogan Turkey, seems to be trending more towards a situation where everyone with power is coming towards an arrangement where they stop fighting each other and start singing from the same mutually beneficial hymn book. All power lining up together in the service of obtaining more power for power.
Presumably the end result is a party with the elite-supported bits of both sides (e.g. Bloomberg, or the Clegg wing of the Lib Dems), and a hoi poloi-supported party of the bits they like from both sides (which I suspect wouldn't be functional, as it's hard to have a political movement without elites).
Noblesse oblige is a complete non sequitur in a society that abandoned the concept of virtue, and replaced it with an awkward blend of self-depreciation (confusingly called virtue signalling) and raw struggle for status.
Turns out, all those old people lamenting what happened with the moral fabric of society had a point.
You're probably going to like this :
https://samzdat.com/2017/01/18/alex-jones-deleuze-and-dawkins-are-the-exact-same-person-not-really-about-hypernormalisation/
Small spin on this:
I think the actual problem isn't that we've abandoned virtue. Rather, we've abandoned the idea that anyone could be doing thing for virtuous reasons. If you assume people are doing things not out of cynical self interest but because they just think its the right thing to do, you're laughed at and scorned. You're being naive. A fool.
This leads us down a destructive, antisocial path. It leads to a "conflict theory" mindset. Its the thing I like the least about modern discourse, including on this site and its predecessor.
I fully agree. That shows how deep we already included the game theory and it's implied selfishness as the best solution into our culture.
Adam Curtis made a great documentary about this: The century of self.
I agree with your conclusion that an Erdogan-style situation in the US is very unlikely, but I'd go even farther and disagree with your points 1 and 3 about how to defend against Erdogan-style maneuvers in the US.
About 1: Turkish courts don't use jury trials, even in criminal cases. A jury of Americans is going to be much harder to convince to unanimously convict someone who has a defense attorney presenting their side of the story in an adversarial setting than a panel of judges responding to a public prosecutor in an inquisitorial trial. Which is not to say that the US never puts innocent people in jail, but it's just not a viable route for a potential dictator to go after wealthy, powerful, or prominent opponents, who can afford adequate representation.
Without the threat of being able to arbitrarily jail opponents, court-packing becomes much less threatening. But also, courts are already the least-democratic branch of the US government, and the danger of making it harder for the more-democratic branches to reform the courts is that it creates pressure which only a populist, strongman dictator type can release. Which leads to my next point...
About 3: Creating a higher burden for changes to the system seems like a good idea, but an overly-rigid system that was too hard to reform was exactly the situation that Erdogan was able to exploit and turn into an excuse for just breaking the system.
Erdogan was part of a "correction" (in the sense of a stock market correction, not of being correct) in Turkish politics, a rebalancing of Kemalism and Islamism that had been building since Ataturk first put his reforms into place. There was a potential energy there - a repressed population - that I don't think exists in the US.
The obvious way to prevent something like that from leading to a dictatorship is simply to work on ways to democratize society in ways that enfranchise currently-disenfranchised populations without the intervention of a populist potential dictator. The nature of this dynamic is that any attempt to suppress the disenfranchised population further only adds to the pressure and makes it more likely that when the "correction" occurs it leads to an Erdogan (or Robespierre, or worse). In other words, if the military had backed off and allowed Islamists to hold office as such, Erdogan not only wouldn't have needed to do his purges - he wouldn't have been able to: there would have been no justification for it, and all the liberals who "sat out" his conflict with the military would have been up in arms against him.
I think the only analogue in the US is the current set of attempts at voter suppression - but as bad as I think that is, it's not clear to me that it would be bad enough to provide cover for a dictator to rise. Certainly the current Democratic attempt to fight back - H.R. 1 - doesn't seem particularly ambitious or threatening. I'm not convinced there's any analogous dynamic or set of forces in the US that a populist dictator could exploit; there's no population in the US that is systematically banned from participation in public life by the structure of the government itself the way that religious Muslims in Turkey were banned from participation in politics (and higher education) in Turkey before Erdogan. But just to be safe, I'd support measures that guarantee access to voting for historically disenfranchised groups in the US.
On a separate topic - Bernie Sanders is a clear example of a left-wing populist. Sanders and Trump were even compared in the 2016 election on the grounds of both being anti-establishment populist leaders in their respective wings. I'm not sure why people might find the idea of a left-wing populist inherently less threatening... maybe it's the mittens.
I agree with your first points, but that does not mean that the US doesn't have its own kind of underrepresented interests and needs that can fuel populists. In fact the way Trumpism has developed seems to me like proof that there is something wrong and building up for quite some time. It may not be obvious for you and I cant just name it too, but this is a warning, that should be taken serious and is worth investigating even if it didn't build up long enough by now to cause a dictator.
I suspect (although in fairness, I can't think of any examples) you could get very creative with who's on the jury and what they see if you've got a complete lock on the judiciary. A lot of these require explicit corruption (not just strong judicial sympathy), but your degrees of freedom are (in order of increasing ludicrousness):
Venue: Republicans could try Democrats in a federal court in West Virginia, Democrats could try Republicans in San Francisco
Jury selection: striking jurors without cause isn't in the Constitution, so you'd just need congress and the courts; if you control the judge, you can strike all the jurors you want with cause and not let the defence strike any. You could also manipulate either the panel (who gets a letter telling them to show up) or the ballot (who gets drawn randomly from the panel)
Disclosure: relies almost entirely on the US Attorney being honest
Evidence: it wouldn't be hard to fabricate really damning evidence (e.g. fake bank statements showing corrupt payments)
Representation: say they've refused to leave their cell for trial (people do this, and it's not unheard of in the UK for the prison to say they've done this when it's not clear that they have), and appoint someone sympathetic or simply incompetent as their public defender. If their real lawyer shows up, say they're not on the court record and there's no way to prove their really the defendant's lawyer.
Dictatorships can come about in any number of ways and the steps will all look different. The common element, as far as I can tell, is an escalation of the culture war to the point where
1. We need to band together and be loyal to each other to the point of excluding anyone who defects from loyalty even if they are making valid critiques. In other words, people and "sides" are seen as either "for us or against us".
2. The other side is seen as so bad that cheating, violating norms, and demonizing rhetoric on your side is seen as justified against their threat.
3. The other side is demonized to the point where they can no longer be worked with, but must be kept from power/restricted from the table entirely and attempt to skirt the system/apply standards of evidence, rules, or interpretation self-servingly in ways that consolidate power to your side or bar it or it's use from the other side are seen as justified.
4. A leader rises who both feeds off of and fans the flames those things; entering into a collusive relationship with his followers of blame, self-righteousness, indignation, and self-victimization.
The tactical maneuvers a dictator makes or the specific obstacles in his way are important in one sense(the more obstacles the better, the more tactful the dictator the more likely they are to succeed), but approaching the problem from that standpoint misses the big picture which is that the rise of a dictatorship is primarily not a political but a MORAL cultural event. The dictator themselves, in some sense, fills a need, a spot, or a hole that a "side" of a culture war creates for themselves of a "champion". Their power comes from their willingness to be a dark mirror of the hate, anger, and repressed conscience towards the other side. The mob fashions the dictator as much as the dictator fashions the mob and they do it by the shared moral collusion of the demonization of the "bad guys".
This book explains what I'm talking about in the context of the Israel-Palestinean conflict, as well as a personal/familial manifestation of the same problem. I'd be super interested to see your thoughts on it at some point.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Peace-Resolving-Heart-Conflict/dp/1626564310
About Attaturk, a "small" detail is left out: to make the "modern Turkey" a nation-state, he went through a process of power consolidation followed with ethnic cleansing of Armernians, Greeks, Assyrians, and Kurds (perhaps others), some of the first and biggest genocides of the 20th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seyfo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
He wasn't just some benovolent "modernizer".
Though it's true that Atatürk's state was reliant on a constructed idea of Turkish identity and continued policies of Turkification, all these happened under the Ottomans, before the Turkish republic was established. In some respects the Ottoman idea of Islamic identity – that had such fatal consequences for Christian minorities – flowed into the Republic-era idea of Turkish identity.
Those attrocities though did not just happen in some distant Ottoman past, e.g. in the 19th century or something.
They happened as part of the turkist nationalist project, in the 10 years immediately preceeding (and following) the establishment of the Turkish republiic and with members of CUP, Kemalists, and so on leading this.
The bigger point is that Ataturk was part of the Young Turks (who were definitely responsible for the genocides), and although he wasn't in their top leadership Kemalism is to some extent an extension of the same project.
No he never did that.
There is a good deal of debate as to whether Ataturk was personally responsible, or other leaders did it shortly before he took over and he just benefitted. I do not personally know which theory is correct; Turkey wants to push the latter argument hard, while various anti-Turkish/anti-Kemalist groups push the former.
Well, there is the case of the Dersim rebellion, in which tens of thousands were killed and atrocities were committed (mass executions, rape, pregnant women eviscerated, among others). There are dark spots on his record. Forgng a nation-state out of disparate parts following decades of murderous conflict is going to have its ambiguities.
Do you have English-language books to recommend on the topic? I'm always happy to expand my historical knowledge.
It occurred to me, and I don't know if it's a damage caused by the time you had with NYT, or you're building a base so you must not be populist, so you're going too far. Populist is a person who stands for nothing, promises abstract concepts, or things we all ought to take for granted, usually ending up destroying them, since those things ought to be taken for granted in an evolved civil society. Freedom of speech, of prosecution, Rule of Law, basically the US constitution, or the one of every EU member state. After four years, you can't ask populist about his achievements, or has he achieved anything of promised, since there's nothing to hold him accountable for. That's a populist, on the left, on the right, in the center. Whether a populist wants it or not, the successful one will end up as a dictator, even if he started in a democracy.
The neutral intended definition of "populist" is basically just someone who claims to be the legitimate representation of the people's will and thereby an opponent of the corrupt elite who currently hold power, live apart from the people and frustrate the people's desires. Of course it is partly just a term of abuse.
And the cynical definition of "Populist" is "Popular person that I don't like".
It's helpful to look at this story in the context of other countries where there was forced and rapid modernisation. (I'm not sure it has very much relevance to the US, but then I'm not a USian). There were countries where the process was managed well (Japan and Korea for example, where, critically, old traditions and practices largely survived) and other countries (Iran is a good example) where the process was badly handled and eventually rebounded against the originators. Iran is an example of where top-down high-speed development was largely in the hands of urban elites and worked very much against the interests of ordinary people. Egypt and Algeria have followed variants of the same path, and much of the Arab Spring was about the final rejection of the corrupt elites who had forced modernisation and westernisation on Arab countries. (Tunisia, where the movement started, now has a government largely controlled by the Islamists). Turkey is an example, as Iran was, of a society which has an indigenous moral and legal tradition to fall back on when top-down westernisation and modernisation has clearly failed. Political Islam (of which Erdogan is a practitioner, and which also explains why the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt's first free elections) provides an alternative, indigenous and most of all untried model when everything else has failed. It also provides a political framework and ideology around which you can base political parties with mass appeal. So in a way this isn't very surprising.
Two other points about Turkey: history is a factor, and the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its dismemberment by the western powers is still a bitter memory. I suppose you'd call it making Turkey great again ....The other is national pride: Turkey was a major NATO ally during the Cold War, but its status has slipped a lot since. Not being member of the EU (which doesn't want a border with Syria, thank you) hurts a lot. It's not surprising that Turkey is financing Islamist schools in Europe as part of its soft power strategy.
Another great post. Scott, you wrote, "I want to go into some of this in more depth, because I think this is the main reason why Erdogan's example doesn't generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws."
I am reminded of the anecdote of the German professor who explained to American college students after WW2 that of course German fascism sounded silly to them, because German fascism played on idiosyncratic elements of 1930s German society, culture, and national character - with the professor concluding with the admonition that if fascism came to America, it would be in an idiosyncratically American way.
Similarly, we should probably expect that almost all examples of a decline and fall of a liberal democracy will have many idiosyncratic elements unlikely to apply elsewhere, and we should probably focus on extracting very general, high-level conclusions/principles.
In this case, I suggest that among those principles is this: that when a state uses unvirtuous means to accomplish virtuous ends, the impact of the means on future society is usually much larger than the original ends. We see this in Republican Rome, where the road to Not-Republican Rome is littered with the bodies of populist politicians murdered in public by conservative Senators who thought their ideas were freaky, and which by no coincidence introduced a new form of political argument, Having The Most Thugs With You At The Time Of The Vote. We also see this recently in Egypt, where the democratically-elected Muslim Brotherhood freaked enough people out that they happily supported a military coup to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood, which then of course did not lead to a new election.
What strikes me about the general character of this story of Turkish politics is that it was never all that democratic. The military, much like it does in Thailand, plays a "reserve" role in policing the bounds of acceptable political discourse all throughout this story. The people it's keeping out of the public sphere are people we probably don't approve of, i.e. Islamists, but that's an appeal to virtuous ends. The means by which they were kept from power had the actual effect of, among other things, teaching a young Erdogan (along with presumably millions of other Turks) that obedience to democratic principles was less important than virtuous outcomes.
Lo and behold, it turns out that that's a really uncomfortable principle once the person in the control room has a different definition of what a virtuous outcome looks like.
But do we notice the base-rate of unvirtuous means that don't lead to ruin?
I understand the argument more like: Don't ever exclude any group or popular opinion from discourse. Always oppose it on a level you would consider fair if you are dealed alike.
1. Scott's discussion of (natural?) elites being able to govern with a naturally soft touch is very Curtis Yarvin-inflected. Is this a response to being featured on Yarvin's Substack?
2. The 2012 "well-rounded" changes to Turkish university admissions--have they been studied as a natural experiment in economics? Did the shift to "well-roundedness" even give less weight to cognitive ability? (Imagine if Turkey had switched from whatever exams the Gulenist cram schools prepped applicants for to the eight-legged essay competition of Imperial China, or a "why BLM is the greatest" essay contest, or an English-language spelling bee, or a simple recitation contest for Koranic verses or digits of pi, the change would be slight: these are all cognitively loaded competitions.)
> Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.
What?! Scott, this strikes me as exactly the wrong lesson to learn. Turkey has an actual, honest to goodness Deep State! They literally invented the term! This isn't a wild conspiracy—everybody *knows* there was one. The reason ideas about the Deep State were floating around, just like ideas about attempted coups were, and the reason they seemed vaguely credible, is because *they were real* and *they are credible*! You are inadvertently suggesting that we should just, like, learn to stop worrying and love the shadowy cabal. No thanks.
About your final point: I think it would benefit from some discussion of heterodox elites and institutions. For example, the Federalist Society was founded by and for elites, and is chock full of them, but it couldn't be more out of step with the Times-Harvard-Beltway consensus. It represents a different strain of legal thinking which the society was founded to foster. It seems to me that one of the ways to protect democracy is to encourage the formation and sustenance of such institutions. Besides forming the individuals who belong to them, these institutions coordinate them, in other words, help them to act. This enables a bulwark against the complete domination of society by a single party or entity. Erdogan's purges look to me like a particularly poignant subversion of this: hollowing out every other institution, until the only thing left is him and his party. It should really, really concern us if seemingly every semi-official institution in our country, from the top schools to the top newspapers to the top thinktanks, march in nearly complete uniformity: it raises the question whether they, and the people in them, can act of their own will at all. It should also concern us when institutions like churches and private schools decline, or are targeted either to be co-opted or marginalized; what, if anything, is replacing them?
One last thing: I haven't read the book, but it looks to me like, before Erdogan took over, political parties were absorbing all the functions which might otherwise have been done by nonpolitical institutions. For example, where are the imams? Why is it that the *only way* for Muslims to resist militant secularism was to win elections? Even attending a religious school was career suicide. It looks to me like this was partly a mess of the military's own making: it made sure these people had no way to live their lives like they wanted without first taking over the country. It rather parallels your explanation of why Erdogan kept seizing more power, and it seems to me like the only stable alternative is a devolution of power.
You don't have to call what Turkey has a 'Deep State', because you can name the actual physical people you're talking about and show evidence of the actual tangible things they did.
I think the admonition here is against using a term like 'Deep State' to refer to a nebulous, faceless, undefined entity that is not directly empirically attached to specific persons and actions that are publicly verifiable.
We can't name the actual physical people we are talking about any more than we can name e.g. the actual physical people who make up the US Congress. There are too many of them, the audience's eyes will glaze over before we get to the end of the list, and really they'll get annoyed and stop reading if we just use cumbersome constructions like "the set of people empowered by the U.S. Constitution to vote on legislation to be presented to the President for his signatures, see footnotes 1-5 for evidence that such a body exists".
For effective communication, we actually do have to use collective terms like "Congress" and "The Deep State".
I will repeat my usual comment that you are making a fundamental mistake by treating the left/right political spectrum as a useful way of orienting oneself in politics-space. Especially your apparently idiosyncratic version of it which considers "right-wing populism" to be a confusing concept rather than a commonplace thing to watch out for! (See also Sa Matra's comment, which is a little harsh, but I think points in roughly the right direction.)
Also, I think you may have drawn the wrong conclusion from the corruption / tax evasion thing? The corruption thing worked in Turkey because corruption was endemic there. That wouldn't work here via the means of corruption trials because the US is a much less corrupt country. The dangerous thing to my mind isn't corruption prosecution; it's selective enforcement, and, in particular, having laws that are so out of sync with reality that selective enforcement is possible -- laws that aren't consistently enforced, so violation can become endemic, but can be used to persecute someone in a pinch. And of course the US does have a big problem with that! So if you were to see the same sort of purge in the US, it wouldn't be effected using corruption laws, but perhaps using some other other laws that have fallen into a similar status.
God help us if politicians ever start enforcing digital piracy laws or jaywalking laws on their opponents.
Why does anyone need to go that far when they can just resuscitate the Logan Act or decide that it's criminal campaign finance to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/14/the-strikingly-broad-consequences-of-the-argument-that-donald-trump-jr-broke-the-law-by-expressing-interest-in-russian-dirt-on-hillary-clinton/">talk to a foreigner</a> or to make an otherwise legal pay off to someone with your own money?
Yes, the purge component is very important imho, the coup are often not from an external group, it's one branch of the elite becoming ultra dominant, and a common tactic is gaining popular support exposing the vices of the other elites. In short, a purge.... Want to have a US example? Metoo in Hollywood seems to fit the bill very well, even if it does not seems to have (yet?) wide reaching political effects... It's milieu purge, not a state one, but the mechanics are the same...
Do something to watch out for are laws so vague or so extreme that most people break them. When it's mostly elites breaking them it's even better because you get natural public outrage. Corruption fit this, so does puritan sex and substance abuse laws...
I feel like this post is too accepting of Erdoganist framing of Gulen's network of schools as a vast shadowy conspiracy, rather than as what it appears to be - an influential network of private educational institutions. Given that people have already had their lives ruined or ended by Erdogan's persecution, you should be more careful before supporting that persecution.
Also, the "NBA player arrested for saying something bad about Erdogan" is Enes Kanter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enes_Kanter
Kanter's father was fired and imprisoned in Erdogan's purges because of Kanter's support for Gulen, despite said father having publicly disowned him. There's a human cost to Erdogan's actions.
Yeah, it occurred to me that in Scott's description that you could pretty much substitute in the Ivy League for Gulenist schools if you were making the American analogy - 8 of the 9 Supreme Court justices went to Harvard or Yale Law. Credential-mediated consolidation of status and capital into small networks of elites is observed in nearly every society and institution throughout history. I'm not terribly familiar with the specifics of Turkey and Gulenism, but I'd need a pretty high threshold to buy into the conspiratorial thinking around it, particularly given Erdogan's obvious credibility issues.
Has someone coined a Hanlon's-like razor for credentialism? "Never attribute to conspiracy what can be adequately explained by elite capture."
The distinction between Gülenist schools and say Harvard Law is that, Gülenist movement stole the questions and answers of national examinations and leaked it to their students every year. Their judges and prosecutors literally forged evidence, launched bogus investigations and held sham trials. It is a genuinely true conspiracy. The secular Turks hated Gülen long before, when he was an ally to Erdoğan for these reasons. Btw, I'm a liberal Turk and I can say that there is a reason they are universally hated in Turkey.
Now I'm wondering how inevitable is elite capture. Is it possible for there to be two simultaneously competing sets of elites (e.g. Ivy League and a competing group/system)?
Erdoğan being a dictator doesn't make Gülen any less conspiracy cult
Wait...you mean there can be more than one villain in the piece?
*Plot twist*
Even back in the 90's, Erdogan would occasionally slip off the democratic facade.
Here is a video of him from 1997, saying "According to us Democracy can never be a goal, it can only be a tool" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY52kEMQyBA
There is also a newspaper interview from 1996 (which I can't find at the moment) where he is quoted as saying "Democracy is like a train ride: when you reach your stop, you get off". I believe the phrase is also quoted here: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2016/02/04/getting-off-the-train
For those who listened, the warning bells were deafening.
"Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better."
Weren't the ideas about Deep States and attempted coups basically true, at least in the case of Turkey?
"When elites use the government to promote elite culture, this usually looks like giving grants to the most promising up-and-coming artists recommended by the art schools themselves, and having the local art critics praise their taste and acumen. When the populace uses the government to promote popular culture against elite culture, this usually looks like some hamfisted attempt to designate some kind of "official" style based on what popular stereotypes think is "real art from back in the day when art was good""
An obvious solution presents itself in separating art and state.
Can you do that? If you want a new courthouse you have to build it in some sort of style. You want public spaces to have some manner of aesthetic merit, and that involves artists. You need to decide what music shall accompany any ceremonial occasion.
This reminds me a fair bit of Dan Carlin's take on the Brexit vote, a show called "Revenge of the Gangrenous Finger". The thesis of that show boils down to "if you live in a society in which people have the right to vote, and you ignore too many of their needs for too long, they will kill you."
That feels like the sort of dynamic in play here - years of using military coups, exiling their leaders from politics, and stigmatization made the Islamists into a serious "gangrenous finger" that eventually erupted into something worse than it otherwise might have, if not left to fester.
To some degree it seems like it doesn't matter what the specific details of the rift are over, the fact that it was Islamists in this case feels immaterial, and of course the outcome was very different in an absolute sense - Brexit is not exactly the complete breakdown of democracy and the rise of a dictatorship - but it feels like two separate manifestations of a similar underlying mechanism.
It's very odd to me to see (as one very often does) Brexit discussed as a self-evident failure of democracy or plain disaster, as you do here. Isn't it possible that it's merely *legitimate* to not want to be in the EU, even if you might have wanted to be in it yourself? Can one not imagine a majority of a nation sincerely wanting out, and this majority getting what they want *not* being catastrophic, *even if* there is a considerable economic downside?
I think this is a problem of your own perceptions and preconceptions rather than of the political system.
Can one not imagine a majority of a nation wanting to remain in the EU, but some of them voting to get out as an expressive act, and the minority getting what they want *being* catastrophic, *even if* there was a formal electoral majority?
Both of these interpretations are quite possible.
One can indeed imagine this scenario, and many people do seem to be imagining it with the tenacity of a drowning man clinging to flotsam. However, it's worth noting that it doesn't actually seem to correspond to reality at all. But more crucially, being able to imagine this counterfactual doesn't go the shortest bit of the way toward answering my question, which is about why the disaster-interpretation is so frequently *assumed*, as though it were obviously true, as though nothing else could possibly be hypothesized.
My explanation is that any drastic change has the potential to be disastrous.
I will say that after the results of all the covid precautions turned out not to be so disastrous, I've softened up quite a bit on doing drastic things like pulling out of the EU.
I'll admit that I'm stumped here. Once again, your comment does not actually appear to respond to anything I wrote. Your explanation for what? For why people constantly assume the disaster-interpretation is possibly true? Are you arguing that the reason people speak as though blinded to any other possibility than Brexit being disastrous is that any drastic change has the *potential* to be disastrous? I.e., because Brexit could conceivably be disastrous, therefore many people are insistent on not even considering other possible outcomes?
If that's the case, one of us has a serious problem with logic, because that looks like an obvious non-sequitur to me. Not just a fallacy, but a fully incoherent argument. A does not appear to lead or point to B in any way in this syllogism.
Also, even if I'm the one in the wrong here, and your reasoning makes perfect sense, it still doesn't appear to justify or elucidate why you posed the scenario in your *previous* post in any way. Something is very wrong here. I feel like one of us must be on acid or the like.
I think this was a direct response. You asked why the disaster interpretation is frequently assumed. I answered by saying that *any* drastic sudden change seems like a potential disaster - it's why I don't support immediately firing all health insurance employees and switching to Medicare immediately, and why I don't support immediately opening the borders, and why I don't support anything else sudden and drastic like that.
However, as I said, the year of covid made it clear to me that drastic sudden changes might *not* be disastrous, so that something like Brexit or Medicare-for-all could turn out to be fine and shouldn't just be so immediately ruled out of my thoughts.
Not to mention we've already seen a positive outcome of Brexit for the UK in the clearly better vaccination program when compared to the EU. I never particularly picked a side in the Brexit issue, I mainly just thought the UK was economically hobbling itself for nationalistic reasons. But that's certainly their choice, and the Brexiteers have already been somewhat vindicated in that choice. Localized decision making can often provide better results when needing to coordinate an emergency response.
"I mainly just thought the UK was economically hobbling itself for nationalistic reasons. But that's certainly their choice"—precisely. One cannot in a democratic system say that economic concerns are *per definition* more important than whatever cultural ones people might actually care more about, and that democracy has failed of those people actually get what they want. Whether you or I or Retsam agree with the evaluation seems to me to be obviously irrelevant compared to what the majority of people prefer—even if one of us happens to be the Prime Minister (which I trust that we do not).
If you consider democracy to have intrinsic value, then *per definitionem* it's always a good thing if the majority get the policy it wants, and it makes no sense to discuss if a democratic outcome is a failure.
Some of us, instead, support democracy because it leads to relatively better outcomes than dictatorship (by metrics other than "what the majority wants"). Then it makes sense to discuss whether a particular democratic outcome is a disaster.
We've also seen all the "catastrophic" Brexit predictions already fail. I seem to recall a lot of predictions of famines and shortages when Brexit kicked in, but that happened a couple of months ago and I haven't heard anything about it since.
In the end, Brexit will wind up like any other controversial Government project -- less good than its supporters predicted, and less bad than its opponents predicted. There will be upsides and downsides.
Just because the media stopped reporting something doesn't mean it actually stopped.
I have no idea if brexit based shortages are still happening, but "I haven't heard about it" seems like weak evidence.
If the media isn't reporting something that doesn't fit their narrative then that's weak evidence of it not happening.
But if the media isn't reporting something that does fit their narrative, then that's strong evidence of it not happening.
It's true that there were some people saying there would be very serious immediate impacts of Brexit and that this didn't really happen. (I even made modest stockpiles of long-lasting food just in case.)
But significant reductions in quality of life over the next decade compared to what they would have been have certainly not been refuted. (Unfortunately we probably won't see it in the statistics because Brexit wasn't the biggest problem the UK faced in 2020/2021...)
It's pretty questionable whether "significant reductions in quality of life over the next decade, compared to a hypothetical that I made up" is even a meaningful category of drawback. I think it's pretty inarguable that the modal Brexit voter won't slot this in the category of "disaster", though. (I've also personally seen less rhetoric about reductions than about a *slowing of the rate of increase* of QoL, even less disastrous, but I won't pretend to have full overview of available doomsaying.)
"a hypothetical that I made up" is a pretty uncharitable way of putting it. Economists do make forecasts of economic growth among other things, and their forecasts in the event of Leave were worse than their forecasts in the event of Remain. (There's more to life than economic growth but it is pretty important.)
You never know for sure whether a conditional forecast whose conditions weren't met was correct or not, but you can do a lot better than nothing, for example seeing whether trends changed around 2020, or trying to tell if the UK outperformed or underperformed against countries that remained in the EU.
As for where the "modal Brexit voter" slots things, they'd probably be right to avoid the word "disaster" because it's a very emotive word whose meanings mean different things to different people. One should instead talk about whether things are measurably better or worse than they would otherwise have been.
I'm more "concerned" about longer-term issues : how is the UK going to deal with the now likely split of Scotland from the Kingdom ? (Especially if Scotland applies to be back in the EU.) Especially about the offshore oil... and I think that there's a nuclear submarine base there ?
Is the vaccination programme an "outcome of Brexit" or just "something that happened after Brexit"? I might be missing something, but I don't see any clear logic that not being in the EU made it easier for the UK to have a good vaccination programme.
I think the assumption is that if the UK had been an EU member, it would most likely have done what most other EU members ended up doing: purchased vaccines through the EU, waited for the EMA to approve vaccines and so on – in which case its vaccine rollout would presumably have been considerably slower (say at 12% like Germany instead of the current 41%).
It strikes me as remarkable that the EU has performed worse on a per-capita basis than Europe as a whole on such an important issue. I wonder what the political repercussions will be.
I suppose this could be viewed as a positive outcome, but I have read that the reason for the lower levels of vaccination in Europe is due to demands for resource equity in terms of vaccine distribution to member states. Germany (like the UK) could have used its superior wealth to procure a far greater amount of vaccines but (I think VdL said) such a move would undermine the essential spirit of cooperation in the EU. The newly independent UK no longer has to spare a thought for the poorer partners in the EU so was in a position to enact a national resource protectionism by (unofficially) demanding that AZ renege on non-UK contracts. Whether the European concerns surrounding AZ vaccine clot causing side-effects are the EU's way of punishing AZ is another matter.
All the EU countries, including the poorer ones, could have used their wealth to acquire more vaccines, whether together or by nation. The EU pays something like €2 for the AstraZeneca vaccine, and maybe €15 for the more expensive ones, per dose. That's pocket change even for the poorer EU members, especially compared to the economic cost of the slow vaccine rollout and longer lockdowns. The EU's approach of nickeling-and-diming is massively stupid.
On the one hand, yes, I acknowledge my views on Brexit are almost entirely reflective of the opinions I've been exposed to and not one that I've particularly formed myself, I'm not really qualified.
But I do think "it's not a disaster because the majority wanted it" is probably not a great argument in light of the incredible narrowness of the vote (51.89% is a majority, but only just barely). An outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry, and causes considerable economic upheaval seems fairly fair to call a disaster, even if you agree with the 52%.
To Scott's point about "it's probably a good thing that the Constitution is relatively hard to change", leaving the EU is probably not something that should have been done on a simple majority vote.
---
Tangentially, though I do largely agree that people (especially non-Brits) are very quick to just assume "leaving EU must be bad", I kind of feel that people take sort of an "end of history" viewpoint where they assume that unification is *necessarily* a good thing and division is *necessarily* a bad thing, which seems to be driven more by preconceptions about what the "correct trajectory for human society" is.
But even with sympathy towards that general position, I still don't know that I could stretch to call Brexit, as it actually happened, a good thing.
Let me say first that your position here reads as much more nuanced and as such more understandable to me. However, your argument seems to me to be orthogonal to my original concern—I don't mean to accuse you of moving goalposts, I think this is a simple misunderstanding (my fault, no doubt).
What really surprised me was that you appeared to *take it for granted* that Brexit was a disaster, something that did not in fact need defending or explaining. In this instance you motivate why it might be fair to call it a disaster; in your previous post you just assumed nobody would even argue. This is far from the first time I've seen this, but I always find it startling. This is really my key point: that is a dangerous way to proceed, lazy thinking at best. By such shortcuts, you effectively block yourself off from understanding the other side.
Nevertheless, I am prepared to engage with your specifics also:
"An outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry, and causes considerable economic upheaval seems fairly fair to call a disaster, even if you agree with the 52%."
I don't understand how. Do you actually believe in democracy? If the level of anger of the losing side is a pertinent factor, should abortion be illegal in America? Should even an abortion advocate regard Roe v. Wade as a disaster? If Trump lost by a small margin, should Biden be kept out of office (or indeed, vice versa: Hillary for Trump, Trump for Biden)? I don't register either of those as disastrous, but your principle suggests otherwise.
I'll put my own cards on the table for the avoidance of doubt: I believe in democracy the way Socrates believed in democracy, who drank hemlock because people voted for it. The system itself is far more important than any given outcome of the system being dangerous or obviously foolish to any given observer. You have to absolutely hold the process more sacred than any of your own values, otherwise the system will always tend toward its own destruction, and dissolution into one of these Turkish-style dictatorships.
"[L]eaving the EU is probably not something that should have been done on a simple majority vote."
I think it's key to recognize in this context that the UK never *joined* the EU in the first place. They joined a much, much more lightweight trade union which metamorphosized (many EU skeptics would no doubt say metastasized) into the EU. That metamorphosis was basically enabled by the entrenched elites of the UK nodding along with various things which the populace, as far as anyone can judge, never really approved of. As such, it seems to me—a value judgment, admittedly—that even a simple majority vote to leave has much more moral force than inertia. You might have had a point if the people had voted to join the EU such as it currently is in the first place, but even then, surely *that* vote would have had to be held to the higher standard you espouse to be legitimate, as well? We can assume that in that case the UK would never have joined, the result of the Brexit vote being what it was.
> They joined a much, much more lightweight trade union which metamorphosized (many EU skeptics would no doubt say metastasized) into the EU.
The EU constitution was actually an attempt to fix this poor democratic legitimacy of the new course of the EU, but this backfired when several countries held a referendum that rejected the constitution.
Of course, the rules in the constitution were then just passed as regular treaties, without referendums and with a simple majority vote.
(in parliament).
Quite. Thus further undermining the democratic legitimacy of the EU.
But if acts of parliament are not democratic enough for you, then it’s the parliament that lacks democratic legitimacy.
"I don't understand how. Do you actually believe in democracy? If the level of anger of the losing side is a pertinent factor, should abortion be illegal in America? Should even an abortion advocate regard Roe v. Wade as a disaster? If Trump lost by a small margin, should Biden be kept out of office (or indeed, vice versa: Hillary for Trump, Trump for Biden)? I don't register either of those as disastrous, but your principle suggests otherwise."
Are you you saying you don't view the last election as somewhat disastrous? Surely the outcome in which angry protesters storm the capital is not considered a good outcome. I believe in Democracy, but the last election is not exactly what I'd hold up as a shining example of Democracy's finest hour.
Maybe it was an unavoidable disaster - I'm not saying the incumbent should get a "status quo advantage" or anything like that, but I do think the combination of "a narrow margin of victory and bitter anger on both sides" is evidence of our system not working very well, and we should be looking for how to fix it. (I mean, "the two party system isn't producing optimal outcomes" is hardly a deep cut critique of the American system)
But, while presidential elections shouldn't have a bias towards status quo: that's a very normal thing for democracies to do. Surely you aren't suggesting that it's undemocratic to require a 2/3rds vote to make a major upending of the status quo - it's common all throughout the American system and elsewhere.
You can argue that it's not *really* a major upending of the status quo. I'm not really confident enough to firmly dispute that, but it sure seems like one to me.
"Are you you saying you don't view the last election as somewhat disastrous?" Pretty much, yeah. I wouldn't register that as higher than "a bit hinky". Nobody was assassinated, there were no *attempted* assassinations, nobody even got brutally assaulted with a cane on the Senate floor. The attempted coup, if indeed it could be called that, was feeble, feckless, and dissolved into directionless milling about almost at once; I came off with the distinct impression of a dog unexpectedly catching its tail when chasing it. It seemed like nobody had expected to actually get into Congress and they were hoping to smash themselves with heroic futility against a wall of riot cops for some reason. And that wasn't even part of the election itself, which saw no more disruption than a few placid recounts. None of it even reached my threshold for disorderly, let alone catastrophic.
"I do think the combination of "a narrow margin of victory and bitter anger on both sides" is evidence of our system not working very well, and we should be looking for how to fix it."
I guess that's fair enough, but I respectfully disagree. I think it's evidence of the American public itself becoming electorally divided, which isn't the system's fault and isn't something you can devise a system to prevent—or, rather, you can, but it isn't *desirable* to create a system which suppresses that type of deep-seated ideological disagreement, because it necessarily has to be very repressive of at least one of the ideologies, which is bad. (I think there's a framework in which one can see the Civil War and subsequent political order as doing just that, and that the present division in America is just the chickens coming home to roost over the fact that the North wouldn't allow the Union to split last time, when the "correct" solution would have been to realize that differences were irreconcilable and accept the division of the nation.)
"Surely you aren't suggesting that it's undemocratic to require a 2/3rds vote to make a major upending of the status quo"
Yes I am. The various arguments in favor of such safeguards are all undemocratic, often explicitly undemocratic in defense of some other principle of governance considered crucial, vide the frequent if normally disingenuous refrain "we don't live in a democracy, we live in a republic!". But in particular, I'm arguing in this instance of Brexit that the status quo of "being in the EU" was sneaked up on the electorate by degrees in such a way that they never had a chance to adopt it by 2/3 majority in the first place, so how could 2/3 majority reasonably be required to abolish it? That sort of thing only incentivizes minority-viewpoint elites to subvert the mechanisms of representativity in order to be able to thwart the actual popular will. This is a sort of idea which I feel like I only ever see applied selectively, in defense of specific policies which the writer/speaker likes but knows that the general public don't like.
"outcome that makes 52% of people happy, and 48% of people very angry"
I think you overestimate the passion of the folk. There were some very angry Remainers out there, but lots of people were lukewarm about the EU membership even if they voted Remain for pragmatic reason. 48 per cent of genuinely mad people would have looked a lot different.
But haven't they had fair elections in Turkey throughout the Erdogen era? And if Turkey happens to be a democracy with a super-powerful executive, why should that be considered inherently wrong?
The inherent wrongness with Erdogan is not winning elections with a large majority, it's everything else horrible that he's done. He's thrown tens of thousands of political opponents in jail, committed ethnic cleansing against minority groups, persecuted academics and journalists, curtailed free speech, committed war crimes in Syria, attacked gay rights, and many other issues.
It seems like that's a good outline for a majority-resistant constitution. In general, there are things majoritarian systems tend to safeguard poorly (ensuring minority rights, or forbidding the use of state power to suppress opposition). You may want some of those protections and ideals enshrined somewhere, along with a powerful body to enforce it. Just have to generalize all those bad acts enough that people can see the wisdom of banning them in some way.
But I guess if Erdogan hollowed out the judiciary too... it's hard to enforce any checks and balances anyway. And every leader invokes "exigency" when systems are inflexible.
I don't know what the best system is for ensuring majority rule while also protecting minority concerns, but I respect the authors of the Federalist Papers for having thought so much about all of these issues. Their foresight into the real practical problems of a mode of governance they didn't yet live under was pretty uncanny.
Well . . . he's the popularly elected leader of the country. It would probably be more accurate to say that "Turkey" did all those things. People tend to forget that "democracy" is a process for making decisions, not a set of liberal policies.
If Turks don't want gays to have rights is Erdogan supposed to go against the will of his people? Is it "undemocratic" for him to do what they want?
In America "Democracy" is virtually a religion. This creates cognitive dissonance whenever the people choose some politically incorrect outcome. "Democracy" therefore has to be redefined as "the will of the people, as long as they choose correctly (as defined by the ruling technocratic elite 'experts')."
Sure, attacks of Erdogan, or any other leader, are going to be at risk of the Great Man theory history. Perhaps of Erdogan had never existed, a similar person would have made all the same decisions. However, Erdogan is still personally morally culpable for those decisions, since he made them. A Hitler-equivalent would probably have done many of the same decisions as Hitler, but Hitler was still horribly evil.
Also, I don't know enough about Turkish politics to really say whether the elections have been fair elections, but certainly many other dictators throughout history have manipulated the polling so that they get elected even when the majority of the population is against them.
But after 1933, Hitler really was a dictator who didn't have to face an election. It's hard to believe Germans would have elected a guy running on a "let's invade Russia, fight a world war on two fronts, and kill all the Jews" platform. But you never know.
In any event, the danger with an "elected strongman" system is that the strongman is so strong that he just cancels the next election and no one can do anything about it.
People vote for wars all the time. Conquest used to be profitable.
I agree on some counts: attacking gay rights or committing war crimes in Syria are not anti-democratic (except under some expanded definitions of democracy that I don't find useful). However, jailing political opponents (so that the opposition parties can't retain talented politicians), or curtailing free press to such an extent that opposition parties have drastically less opportunity to convince the electorate than the governing party, can make a system non-democratic, even if the votes are fairly counted.
And that's assuming that the votes are actually fairly counted. There seem to have been allegations of ballot stuffing, though the election results are not grossly out of line with the opinion polls.
Fair elections seems generous to me. To take one example, Ekrem İmamoğlu defeated the AKP candidate to become Istanbul mayor in 2019. Erdoğan's government demanded a recount, and then declared his election invalid and removed him from office. Another election was held, which he won by a much wider margin.
That sounds like two fair elections . . . even better than one.
Imagine how fair it would've been if they kept going till İmamoğlu lost!
"Fair" excludes "The media belong to us." To various degrees at different times, sure, but still...
This post demonstrates my exact concerns with your "A Modest Proposal for Republicans"[0] - it's a roadmap for building basically Erdogan's party. Obviously there's a bunch of other things mixed in there, since Erdogan hasn't set up prediction markets, but the thrust is basically the same. (I haven't read the book, and I'm not that caught up on Turkish politics, so this is basically based on this review.) His hollowing-out of the existing political system is *exactly* what you'd get from the "War On Experts" point, since whoever takes over with the power to replace the institutions is going to want to replace them in their image, not with prediction markets. The "War On College" is basically what Erdogan did with the Gulen schools and some of his other reforms, particularly around scientists and professors. The "War On The Upper-Class Media" would result in the lowering of the freedom of the press, and if you think that it would only allow the lower-class media to exist while continuing to allow the upper-class media to exist, you're kidding yourself. And as for the "War On Wokeness," that's Erdogan's repudiation of EU liberalness and his assaults on groups like the Kurds, the Yazidis, and other minorities.
Sorry if this post was getting too close to modern politics, but I feel like ignoring this is dangerous.
Side note, my autocorrect wants to replace Erdogan with Underdog. This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence.
[0]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-republicans
My point wasn't that right-wing populism is good, my point was that if right-wing populism is based on opposition to classism, you can just have actual opposition to classism, and maybe even effectively fight classism, instead of pursuing the vague generic right-wing populist package.
Or a bunch of right-wing populists claim they're going to fight classism and use it to hollow out the institutions that support democracy like Erdogan did.
My point was that if a party based their message on those things, the result isn't going to be good, and it's going to be worse than the current Republican party. The core of your proposed platform is a bunch of wars against the existing system, and that's going to lead to dictators, even if you think the existing systems aren't great. Turkey's systems pre-Erdogan certainly weren't great, but they were better than his new replacements.
And well, you can say that you don't actually support this proposed party, you just think it would make American politics interesting or better, but I'd be pretty worried if Scott-of-Turkey-in-the-90s made an equivalent post about Erdogan's platform.
"The core of your proposed platform is a bunch of wars against the existing system, and that's going to lead to dictators . . ."
That's quite the false dichotomy -- "status quo or dictatorship." Of course you can reform a system democratically. In fact, that's what Democracy is supposed to be for.
I don't think gbear is arguing that status quo or dictatorship is inevitable, just that the specific changes Scott proposed moved things more in the dictatorship direction.
If you frame your reforms around "wars" against certain things you dislike, that's not exactly encouraging democracy. The "war against drugs" has been essentially unilateral, and real wars don't usually involve the opposing country voting on it. The platform laid out in that post is much more antagonistic and conflict-theory based than is healthy for a political platform that is going to wind up with reasonable reform.
Huh, I really like Scott's modest proposal post. (It could make me republican... I'm an independent, former democrat.) I also read the 'stop calling wolf' post for the first time. Great stuff! I've been totally feed up with the 'all trump voters are racist' for years. (Oh I live in Trump country, so 'all these racists' are my friends and neighbors. I often think we need some definition of 'racist', that we can agree on.)
I definitely don’t think that all Trump voters are racist. I’m not a fan of his at all, but you definitely can be without being racist, at least for some definitions of “racist.” But similarly, a person could vote for Erdogan without hating the Kurds (or the free press, or any of the other groups or things that he has suppressed), but that vote indirectly caused those things to be attacked. Trump caused a lot less harm than Erdogan in my opinion, and some would even say that he helped the country, but part of that was ineffectiveness or being restrained by the American system in ways that Erdogan wasn’t.
My problem with the modest Republican post is that the party that it advocates for is one that tears down the system when it gets in the way. Getting rid of experts means that we’re left with a system where the political leader just makes all the decisions. This post shows how bad that would be.
The problem is anyone can find an "expert" to say what he wants said. I have to cringe every time a journalist writes "According to Experts . . ." and then cites some guy at a university who coincidentally holds the same opinion as the journalist.
One thing you didn't mention was that in 2017, Erdogan changed the constitution, abolishing the post of prime minister (the leader of the majority party in the legislature and answerable to the legislature) and adopted an American-style elected presidency instead, the better to consolidate and exercise his power.
If you're drawing lessons to learn for America, this might be one.
What a phenomenal section on right wing populism. This is exactly how the right wing government in India is targeting the elites, for instance.
I do believe that the left-wing elite rising naturally to the top is a very Western hemisphere phenomenon, however. The intellectual and cultural elite in India seems to be uniformly distributed amongst the Right and Left, for instance.
Even more specifically : a USA phenomenon ? (Note that in Europe, Democrats would probably be considered a centrist or maybe even a right-wing party - you see expressions like "rightist ultraliberals" coming from leftists for instance...)
Art is a great example where left-wing populism is following the same pattern you describe for right-wing populists. Look up Soviet Realism and compare it to art in Germany 1933-45. Both have the principle that the art is "to be comprehensible to the average man".
Have you read Paul Hoover's "Poems We Can Understand?"
I think it's kind of funny, but if I read too much postmodern poetry in a row, I tend to get sympathetic to the more literal reading.
Being completely adrift is fun in doses.
Though weirdly nobody has demanded rock lyrics make any kind of sense since maybe the Beatles, so I guess the masses and me are a little inconsistent on this one.
(To be clear, not saying I would want any government to arbitrate or mandate this. Just a tangent about what a philistine I probably am.)
Not inconsistent, if rock lyrics are only an afterthought to the rock.
As someone fairly familiar with Turkey: You'll get roughly the right cultural context of sipping drinks Nişantaşı hotels if you think of Georgetown Cocktail Parties. It's a trendy wealthy neighborhood with all kinds of elite clubs/restaurants/etc.
It has the added bonus that sipping cocktails in a bar is European and foreign. A salt of the Earth Turk would drink in a cafe or lounge, probably beer or watered down raki or some other spirit. Probably while drinking tea and smoking and feeling vaguely guilty about it. Turkey's drinking culture (which is a real thing that exists) most closely resembles that of Eastern Europe.
Think of it a bit like the good old boy at the bar sipping a Budweiser vs the smartly dressed man at the hotel bar sipping an expensive cocktail. Even for people who don't mind drink, there's a strong culture and class divide. (By the way, raki turns milky white when you mix it with water. There's an old joke that you can still go to heaven if you only drink raki: God will think it's milk.)
More broadly, I see warnings against "right wing populism" coming from two sources. Firstly, the media and academic elites are increasingly leftist and so feel more threatened by the right. Secondly, left wing populism is simply not succeeding right now. Is Sanders more influential than Trump? Personally I think this is due to political demographics. Populism appeals mostly to the lower classes. These people are traditionally in the left wing voter base. So left wing populism simply pulls the existing left wing coalition further left while right wing population causes defections of formerly left voters to the right and creates a huge coalition.
Also I know a fair bit about Turkey. And the right wing populist governments in eastern Europe that I see as part of a broader movement in the region. (Sorry EU, Turkey counts as part of "the region.") AMA.
Thank you for weighing in!
I sometimes bucket the US and Turkey together as each having politics shaped by an extreme urban-rural divide. Is that fair, or too reductive? Any key differences that might gloss over?
And, half joking, but would Istanbul secede from Turkey if it meant it could join the EU?
In addition to the urban/rural divide, there's the planned urban / slum divide inside urban areas. Also some regions of the country having more of a certain ethnicity or religion than others, in big urban centers some neighborhoods also having similar ethnicity/religion divides. Some of them USA also has, but some of them I think are unique to Turkey. There're also USA specific stuff that doesn't apply to Turkey.
The divide isn't really urban-rural. Istanbul has voted right wing in every election since 1990 with one exception. And not all those rural peasants in Erdogan's coalition are Islamists: a fair number were former Communist strongholds. Erdrogan has effectively welded a super-coalition of the former supporters of the Communists, non-Kemalist Social Democrats, Islamists, moderate business parties, and non-Kemalist nationalists. This means it's basically southern/western coastal Turkey and European Turkey, the old Kemalist strongholds, vs everyone else. With the Kurds in the southwest as a third party who have somewhat managed to build a genuine pan-minority party. They hate both sides.
The asterisk next to democratic is key here. Ataturk's Turkey had a contradiction at its core. It was based on a liberal order that was committed to illiberal means to stay in power. And not just in the sense of keeping free and fair elections. Certain policy prescriptions and political tenets were also sacrosanct. These ideas were popular among certain classes and populations but those populations were a minority, not a majority, and a privileged minority at that. I'd say the divide was less urban-rural and more apartments vs slums or suburbs vs farms.
Imagine if the American Democrats had set up a government and every American institution and every major industry such that anyone to the left of (say) Klobuchar or the right of (say) Romney would never reach a position of importance. If they did, they'd get a nice note saying to step down or face a coup. Then combine this with outright discrimination against people who didn't toe the line enough. These people then go to the European Union, which is supposed to be the gold standard for liberal democracy, and the EU basically says, "Yes, the government is harming you, but you're the majority so it's not structural discrimination." (That's not me interpolating American politics. That was key to the ruling.) Mix in a huge dollup of corruption and that's Turkish democracy pre-Erdogan.
It's not that Turkey was a dictatorship. Far from it. People didn't disappear in the night and elections were largely fair. Or as fair as they can be with the regular threat of coups. But you might expect everyone who isn't left to center left to moderate center right would feel pretty upset at this state of affairs. Erdogan rose to power on promises of competence, being free of corruption, to be moderate, and to give concessions to the other outsiders. More importantly, his promise to dismantle the Kemalist deep state (again, not drawing that term from American politics) was credible. Because he would have to in order to survive. So anyone who wanted to see that happen either sat on the sidelines or supported him even if they disagreed with his politics. (Also, there were no trusted neutral gatekeepers. They were all considered subverted, even among the people farther to the left.)
As for Istanbul seceding: Probably not. Maybe some specific neighborhoods would. But overall the city is in Erdogan's coalition.
we took the city with a landslide when I last looked, but I agree they wouldn't secede
Sorry, I'm not as familiar with municipal politics. (Which is what I assume you're talking about, since Erdogan won Istanbul in 2018.) Mind giving some reading links?
I don't have any English sources from the top of my head, but the short version is that for the first time in 20 years the opposition became immune to Erdoğan's divide and rule tactics (in the opposition there's a Turkish nationalist group and a Kurdish nationalist group and when Erdoğan plays them against each other one of the two votes for Erdoğan or at least boycotts the election) for a variety of reasons, the primary being main opposition party's awakening to this empasse and spending their effort not to oppose but to broker between those groups.
It may seem like a small deal being a municipality, but the municipality of İstanbul is actually one of the biggest economic entities of Turkey. Through corruption, many groups close to Erdoğan were being fed. Ever since the municipality changed hands, a handful of TV channels and newspapers cheering Erdoğan went bankrupt.
The downside of a dictatorship of this kind is, it's economically not sustainable. Erdoğan needs to feed all the media to cheer for him, it's like a huge party-state-corruption-industrial complex and there's not much left to loot so he's able to keep less of his allies loyal.
Here's a link to a Guardian article, but that's something mainstream so you probably already found it: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/23/ekrem-imamoglu-turkeys-unexpected-new-hope-in-fight-for-democracy
Turkish is fine. I'm by no means fluent but I've picked up a bit. I'm not Turkish (either nationally or ethnically) but I've been dealing with Turkey for the better part of a decade so I'm at least smarter than the average bear.
Yeah, Istanbul municipals are very important. And Erdogan's been having economic issues lately. We'll see what happens in 2024. Three years is a long time to recover and you'll need more than Istanbul to break that big coalition. Still, I'm pretty sure a lot of people who were on board for breaking the status quo aren't on board for the AKP becoming the new status quo for a century like the Kemalists had.
Back in 2013, I tried to come up with an analogy to explain Turkish political history since the Young Turks to Americans, but it wound up sounding crazy:
It’s extraordinarily difficult to come up with an analogy to American history that would shed some light on Turkish politics since the beginning of the 20th century.
All right, try this: Imagine that in 1908 the most advanced thinkers of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greenwich Village take over the US Army. They eventually move the capital to Omaha and rename the country the Midwestern Republic. Yet the four times the country elects somebody a little more Christian than a Unitarian Universalist, the Army stages a coup.
Finally, the Midwesterners stare down the Army. To rub in their long-thwarted dominance, the Midwestern Christian Party then orders all the bars in New York City to close at 10PM, driving New Yorkers into Times Square to protest.
Does that clear everything up?
No, I guess it doesn't.
https://www.takimag.com/article/the_byzantine_forces_behind_turkish_politics_steve_sailer/
As with all analogies some stuff is missing but good stuff. 1960 coup was because the prime minister at the time attempted to collect judiciary powers as well, uniting all 3 powers under himself. 1980 coup was to prevent a civil war because right wing and left wing militias were routinely having firefights on the street (which was also in line with the US policy of a "green belt", so while some rightists and nearly all leftist ended up in prison, Islamists were more or less free to roam). One of the memorandum was because the parliament was not electing a president, one when the labor movement was becoming powerful, and only the 1997 memorandum and the ignored 2007 e-memorandum that was against the Islamists. So not simple as 4 times the country elects a Christian the army stages a coup.
Yeah, I didn't even want to get into the whole thing about Ataturk's weirdness. To extend your metaphor: imagine that the US lost World War 2 and was under German occupation. A liberal officer gets assigned to dismantle gets sent out east to force some old American units to disband. But the units are full of god, guns and country Republicans who are on the point of mutiny. They're rather run to the hills and fight than give up.
The officer sides with them and starts a rebellion. He even gets the Evangelical Communion to declare it a holy war. They're assisted by religious and nationalist militias. Oh, also they're getting guns from the Soviet Union (China, I guess?) for reasons.
They win the war. The liberal officer then declares a republic, dissolves most religious organizations, kicks them out of government, and declares an aggressively secular, left wing republic.
Oh, and as an added bonus, this whole thing kind of creates a sovereign Canada on accident.
One of the problems is that the "Populism" label gets a very peculiar definition in this country. For example, the left is founded largely on appealing to two groups that are predominantly lower income and non-college educated: i.e., Blacks and Hispanics. Yet, "populism" is somehow defined as whatever appeals to non-college white voters. And these voters are uniformly considered to be dangerous and suspect by the white elites.
It's a very peculiar dynamic, really. Is there any other country where the elites of one race are in coalition with the other races, to keep down the lower income members of the elite's own race?
> It's a very peculiar dynamic, really. Is there any other country where the elites of one race are in coalition with the other races, to keep down the lower income members of the elite's own race?
There are many examples from colonial history where the native elites come to an agreement with the colonising outsiders that winds up beneficial for everyone except the native non-elites.
Many Western European countries with a newly imported ethnic underclass have something similar going on, with low-status anti-immigration political parties rising up as a new opposition against the established powers. Off the top of my head some examples are Perussuomalaiset in Finland, Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden, Dansk Folkeparti in Denmark, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, UKIP in the UK, FPÖ in Austria & Front National in France.
But I wouldn't consider it as a coalition between the elite and the ethnic underclass. I think the ethnic underclass doesn't have much political power and it's just that the elites for whatever reason like to see themselves as their protectors, same as with certain other groups that have become culturally and politically relevant during the last few decades. If there is a target market for that type of politics, I think it's not so much the ethnic underclass itself as those parts of the middle class that also aspire to being their protectors.
Trump actually did get more support from non-white voters than most prior post-war Republican candidates (GWB in 2004 being an exception someone here pointed out to me), even as he lost while many of them won.
My impression is that Turkey varies dramatically in culture from west to east (although there has been much migration from inland Anatolia to Istanbul). For example, Mustafa Kemal came from Salonika, which was so far west in Europe that it's now part of Greece. Erdogan's parents came from the Rize Province in eastern Anatolia.
I visited Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera, a Santa Barbara-like upscale beach town that was Herodotus's hometown when it was named Hallicarnasus, and is now 3 miles from the Greek Island of Kos. The women dressed like Mrs. Kennedy in 1962: restrained but chic. I saw very few hijabs.
Istanbul is more of a mix due to the city being a huge economic magnet for Anatolian peasants.
My impression isn't east to west. It's basically who benefited from the Kemalist social democratic order and who didn't. And the coastal regions tended to benefit or at least have a higher proportion of people who benefited. The people who got new houses vs the people living in the old ones, the people who work in a new industry vs still working in the old style, and so on. You'll find both in every province but the more heavy the investment was the more things changed there.
I've generally approached "populism" with the feeling of the average person voting to get what they want directly rather then to establish good systems in which they might thrive.
A right-wing populist would run on eg. mandatory religious education in schools whereas a left-wing populist would run on more direct cash payments to people.
In contrast, a non-populist right-wing leader might work towards simplifying zoning requirements for churches or a more equal tax policy, and a non-populist left-wing leader might work towards providing better schools.
By 'Medieval Turkey' you mean Early Modern Turkey. Medieval Turkey was ruled by some combination of the Byzantine Empire, Seljuks, and the Sultanate of Rum (as well as other smaller polities).
"This was a remarkable set of people and things to find in the same car! I can’t quite follow all of the threads of what later became known as the Susurluk scandal, but they apparently involved drug smuggling, terrorism, human rights abuses, several assassinations, Iranian spies, a coup against the government of Azerbaijan, and "a number of Susurluk investigators [dying] in suspicious car accidents curiously similar to the Susurluk car crash itself"."
As Steve Sailer has quipped: "Turkish politics are Byzantine."
Is there a good summary out there of how actively bad Erdogan is now that he's consolidated power? Like I get that he's jailed a few hundred journalists but there are a lot of dictators and semi-dictators out there and I'd like to know where is on the scale from Franco to Kim Jong Un.
Well written and fascinating.
Saddam makes a great compare and contrast with Erdogan. Saddam was more the traditional template of how one might dismantle democracy. He also came from a tough lower class background, but was much more direct in seizing power.
I may be misremembering a few details, but as I recall, he had the military lead a tortured prisoner to the front of parliament. The prisoner began "confessing" by naming co-conspirators in the chamber, who were summarily dragged out and shot. During this process Saddam cooly smokes a cigar, while realization hits the faces of the remaining parliamentarians, who begin desperately chanting "long live Saddam!" to beg for their lives. Conveniently enough, this was all filmed, so you can watch it on YouTube if you really want to be traumatized or something.
I know that the traditional picture of tyranny doesn't update as many priors, but it's just an interesting reminder that while some evil is banal, some of it the more flashy kind, so don't over-correct. Guarding against the more instant tyrannies would probably require different structures, though I'm not sure which ones, and I'm similarly unsure guns in the street would be enough. Throughout his life, Saddam was pretty good at violence.
If you want other humbling accounts on drifts between liberal and illiberalism, I'd recommend the long history of Persia, which would oscillate between (relative) progressivism and authoritarianism for stretches of hundreds of years at a time. Reading Persian history is like reading the Foundation, with Hari Seldon reminding you that history and social reordering occurs over scores of generations, and not necessarily in our lifetime.
How much democracy was there in Iraq prior to Saddam? My guess would have been "not very much", but I don't really know the area.
Indeed : A kingdom, then various juntas, with the help from the CIA :
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/2003/0410saddam.htm
Convenient, how every cause is dissected except the key turning point of letting the Islamists enter the arena because 'otherwise the children-eating-communists will legitimately win the elections'. Much as, oh help me out, yes it's called Weimar in the 30s. Or, ahem, operation Condor and the majority of Latin American dictators.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, right wing dictators rise to crush majority far left movements? Who would have thought!
"The third big difference is that it's really hard to change the US Constitution."
I disagree with the emphasis on the written constitution, for reasons that I'll elucidate in a separate comment, but isn't it worth considering in this regard that Turkey, as a Near/Middle Eastern Muslim-majority nation, differs substantially from the US in its ethnic and religious composition? That seems like a quite important difference to consider, whatever its application (or perhaps lack thereof) to the particulars of governance in this case. The most comparable nations to the US would be firstly its fellow Anglosphere countries, followed by WEIRD countries generally. The most comparable nations to Turkey would seem to me to be its neighboring countries in the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, as well as perhaps similarly middle income countries in Latin America. (E.g. Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil.) So, a comparison between, say, Turkey and Egypt, Russia, or Mexico would strike me as more informative than one between Turkey and the US. (Or, conversely, a comparison between the US and Canada, the UK, or New Zealand---the latter of which was done in David Hackett Fischer's book Fairness and Freedom, which I have not yet read.)
As an instructive example of how constitutions don't determine governance, consider that the 1847 Liberian constitution was closely modeled on the US constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberian_Constitution_of_1847
But, even though Liberia had three branches of government, a bicameral legislature, and formal legal protection of civil liberties, its subsequent political history has differed substantially from that of the US.
Well, you are wrong about the use of populism. Thomas Frank wrote a whole book on it. https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/
Well, this is important and clearly haven't been mentioned here enough. To recap, "right-wing populism" was invented by elitists who wanted to claim their philosophy can't possibly go wrong. It's just a dishonest way of grouping original Populists (whose demands and policies were by then, and still are, clearly vindicated in any way possible) with literally hitler.
As for anti-elitism in practice, I can only gesture towards "The Consequences of Radical Reform". The problem with Erdogans of the world is not that they're against the current elites, it's... all the other stuff, including the fact that they're not actually anti-elitist, in that they're not against the idea of elites, as long as it's them on top. To somehow couple that other stuff with (honestly pretty uncontroversial) anti-elitism is to fall into an epistemic trap set up by elites to justify their own (honestly perfectly authoritarian) power.
>"required prostitutes to wear hijabs... the sort of measures he took to drag Turkey, kicking and screaming, into secular modernity..."
This is an odd thing to hear from a libertarian; requiring or banning forms of clothing / religious expression might be secular, and superficially *look* modern, but it's hardly free, liberal democracy
If there's one thing Atatürk & successors didn't have it was a libertarian outlook. Besides the headscarves, fezzes were also banned, to be replaced with Western dress. They changed the writing system and swapped out many Ottoman words with Arabic or Persian origins for Turkic ones. Many industries were nationalized. The idea here was that it might not be free, at least at first, but you can't have a liberal democracy in a country where almost everyone was an illiterate peasant. They had to have Western values first.
Whoops, I misread what you mean, thought you were saying "as a libertarian".
I don't think I endorsed it - why is it odd to hear me describe it?
I think the confusion is in saying that a government "requiring prostitutes to wear hijabs" and the other policies of Ataturk are part of "secular modernity" - you were taking as granted Ataturk's framing that his actions brought about "secular modernity" even when his policies were often horrible in many ways.
His policies weren't horrible in many ways. Maybe very rarely.
Ah, I apologize, it turns out that I've forgotten my timeline of Turkish history, and thought that the Armenian genocide was under him, but it was under the Ottomans prior to him. He wasn't great to them, but at least didn't commit genocide, so I retract my above statement that his policies were often horrible
No problem, it's a common misconception. Horrible stuff like the Armenian Genocide was one of the reasons he got away from CUP and went his way. He has his share of horrible stuff for example against the few Turkish communists that existed back then, but he was a pragmatic man in a difficult time so I cannot judge him too hard for those ones.
the anecdote is an urban myth created by the Islamists for propaganda, and turning a backwards country to a modern one in 10 years requires that kind of attitude. It wasn't banned from civic life, it was only banned from public service. Not only hijab was banned but any kind of religious attire or symbolism. This is a pro liberty move.
>requiring or banning forms of clothing / religious expression might be secular, and superficially *look* modern, but it's hardly free, liberal democracy
Then it's a good thing that the word 'secular' appears in the passage you quote, but the words 'free' and 'liberal' do not.
'What does it mean to condemn a party in a democracy for being "populist"? Isn't that the whole point of democracy? Isn't any party that wins necessarily going to be populist? Isn't a non-populist party winning a sign something went wrong?'
That's not what it means. "Populism" means attempting to make yourself a spokesman for the "good" "people" against the "corrupt" "elite". It therefore tends to want to bypass or tear down regular institutions (as these are controlled by "the elite"). Populism leans directly on the masses without the moderating institutions that have been put there for a reason. Whether Erdogan, Chavez or Trump, it's the same method.
Can it happen here?
Romantic fantasies, Braveheart and Les Miz aside, revolutions don't happen when the 99% get fed up and overthow the 1%, as long as the 1% are united, because the 1% will do whatever it takes to hang onto power.
Rather, changes happen when the 1% are divided amongst themselves, usually because they cannot decide on how to respond to a foreign threat or how to divvy up the spoils.
I'm an engineer, not a PolSci major but I'm Turkish who's quite into politics and had to immigrate after the Gezi protests so I regard myself kind of an expert on this subject. I'll add here my comments as I read the post:
1- Erdoğan has never ever rose to power on credible promises. This is a very characteristic flaw of people who one time believed in him or thought he was pliable enough for their vision. Very early in his political career he authored a play named "MasKomYah" which stands for Masonic Communist Jews whom he blames for everything wrong with everything, that's the kind of person he always was. He's always been in the fundamentalist islamic party. Just before that party (headlining the governing coalition at the time) was closed by court because they wanted to replace the secular republic with sharia, he infamously said: "Democracy is a tram, we'll get off it when it takes us where we want to be". After that, he splintered off that fundamentalist party and started his own party, after realizing being a fundamentalist on the outside will prevent him from riding the tram. There was a strange coalition in that party.
At the core of the party were discontents from the previous fundamentalist party (the majority of them were expelled before the next elections because they voted "no" when the Americans wanted to attack Iraq via Turkey). One thing they shared was that their image was pious but not fundamentalist.
The second clique were the liberals (liberal not in the American sense meaning progressive, but liberal as in believing in the neoliberal economic model). The constituency was small enough to be ignored, but their main function was to create consent both among Turkish intelligentsia and Western.
The third was the Fethullah Gulen movement. More on that later. There were other smaller cliques that formed the early AKP. Now, the error Mr. Çağaptay has here is the error everybody who at one point falled for AKP. For the liberals, AKP was great until 2008 and evil afterwards. For the intersectionalists it was 2013. For Gulenists it was 2015. As Erdoğan concentrated more power in his hands, he stopped needing those cliques so dropped them one by one like the stages of a rocket ship to Moon. Each of those think that Erdoğan was good until the drop-off date of their stage and evil afterwards. At least a third of the voters and more than half of the intelligentsia knew what he was all along. This is kind of a sensitive nerve ending to those who never fell for him when somebody says he was good in the beginning thus my rant.
2- Imam Hatip graduates being stigmatized: This was actually quite close to how other European systems work. Imam Hatips were formally trade schools like the ones you learn carpentry or auto repairs. Those have some extra points when they want to enter universities related to their field (so Imam Hatip graduate would have extra points towards Theology major, Electric Repair graduate towards Electrical Engineering and so on, and subtracted points from everything else).
3- 650000 arrestees in 1980, the overwhelming majority were left wing of differing colors from more nationalist center left to outright communists. Along with Erbakan, all other party leaders regardless of affiliation at the time were banned from politics and all current parties were also banned so when it was time for elections all parties were brand new.
The pre-coup vs secret versions of parties is also a bit different story. When the junta decided to hold elections they created some template parties (one center left, one liberal etc) and put some retired military men at their helms. But also secret resistance parties that are affiliated to precoup versions of them sprung up. So it was junta parties vs precoup secret parties. Since all the precoup parties were banned they had different names and logos.
Also, between this (I think 1983) and Erdoğan becoming mayor of İstanbul (1994 I guess) there's quite some time so not immediately after the post coup power vacuum. The event that led to Erdoğan's mayoral success was that every party in 1994 had at least 1 splinter party except the Islamists. So the center right vote got divided in 2, the center left got divided in 2, extremes had very little vote and Erdoğan won İstanbul with like 23% of the votes or something. The "elite westernized pawn sipping drink" is a PR move actually, to rally ignorant masses against a perceived "high class" who actually make less money than them.
4- Communist mayor of İstanbul: He was literally from the Social Democratic Party. The only communist mayor anywhere in Turkey who wasn't promptly killed by the anti communist army in the entire history is one of the smallest towns in Eastern Turkey who won it 6 years ago. That's not my party so I don't want to defend them but the story here is very one sided. The bribe, still being a horrible thing, was less than a thousandth of the corruption by the ones before or after him. The workers were only able to strike because when workers in cities run by non-social democrat mayors tried to strike they were beaten by cops and got their contracts terminated. The explosion was not on the streets but at a landfill.
5- The "recalibration" at Sincan: Just before this, at a community center in Sincan Islamist militias were doing something you can call a show-training with pump action shotguns at a night they called "the Jerusalem night". They said their aim was to liberate Jerusalem. The local mayor from RP was sympathetic so this became the straw that broke the camel's back and the "recalibration" happened. I'm not disputing anything here, just adding some color.
6- The 8-year school: Before, it was 5 years primary education, 3 years secondary (middle school) and 3 years tertiary (high school) with only 5 years of primary education being compulsory and the rest optional. The trade schools (including İmam Hatips) started at 6th grade. The military thought, by lengthening mandatory primary school to 8 years and making trade schools (including İmam Hatips) just 3 years, they'll make the islamists miss 3 crucial years when the students are more pliable to be radicalized at a younger age. From an educational viewpoint this is a bad move. For example I graduated from primary education when it was 5 years and by a centralized examination got a place in a good high school with a mandatory English prep class before the 6th grade began and that's how I learnt English. People a few years younger than me had to wait until 9th grade for the full year with language education and a foreign language is MUCH easier to learn when you're younger so that hurt the top end of the human capital considerably. Just a side note.
7- The poem. He was not sentenced for reading that poem. Later in that speech he was inciting the pious to battle the infidels. It was hate speech that caused the sentence. I can see it's still not good to sentence people because of their speech, but if he died in that prison many would be alive today. Is it morally justifiable to put a young Hitler to prison for life after a speech? Maybe so, maybe not, but that's a tough decision and those are not as clear cut as you westerners tend to see.
8- The economic boom: God, that guy was lucky. After the 1998 economic crisis, a technocrat economist (Derviş from World Bank) was brought in 2001, he put in place a disciplined austerity program that really turned things around, then the USA started printing money and decreasing interest rates to stimulate economy and all those cheap dollars started flowing in to a recently reorganized economy. Just then, the 67% of seats wıth 33% of the votes thing happened. I think we really are cursed.
9- Susurluk scandal: It's normal you can't follow all the threads, because even after years thinking about it I still can't and whoever says they do are just believing in a crazy theory. There are so many loose threads it's virtually unfollowable. But even though the details are unfollowable the main things are pretty straightforward. The gray wolves and the mafia are one and the same, they have a lot of connections inside police, western countries have a neverending need for heroine while Afghanistan has a neverending source of heroine ingredients and Turkey is conveniently on the way, this also ties to the PKK insurgency in the East and clandestine NATO plans in case a NATO country goes communist. It just hurts my head to think of all the crooked shit that went on and still going on.
9- Susurluk scandal: It's normal you can't follow all the threads, because even after years thinking about it I still can't and whoever says they do are just believing in a crazy theory. There are so many loose threads it's virtually unfollowable. But even though the details are unfollowable the main things are pretty straightforward. The gray wolves and the mafia are one and the same, they have a lot of connections inside police, western countries have a neverending need for heroine while Afghanistan has a neverending source of heroine ingredients and Turkey is conveniently on the way, this also ties to the PKK insurgency in the East and clandestine NATO plans in case a NATO country goes communist. It just hurts my head to think of all the crooked shit that went on and still going on.
10- After this point, the book becomes more objective. As I said, my working theory is that whoever's clique (or the clique they believe in) got dumped off the AKP bandwagon, started seeing things clearer.
11- Re:Ergenekon trials and media. If a media conglomerate didn't toe the Erdoğan line, suddenly they received a tax bill of a few hundred millions that were miscalculated the years before. They either have to sell the newspaper/TV channel to cover the bill or to become an Erdoğan mouthpiece, which made the bill disappear. Later, the tactic was to give extremely lucrative deals to build airports or highways to companies of Erdoğan's relatives and in turn they had to buy and run at a loss a media corporation. At the moment, there're next to none independent/opposition newspapers / TV channels compared to Erdoğan mouthpieces. There have been days 20 25 newspapers had the exact same headline on the same day.
12- Rise of Gülenists: Really crazy story. There has always been a lot of underground religious organizations or cults like them, and from time to time by promising a certain amount of votes from their devotees they gain some mid level government posts. When many groups wanted to be in the health system or security, Gülenists wanted some posts in the government organization that organizes the centralized examinations. They prepare under strict security exams like the SAT equivalent of Turkey, or exams to enter the military, police etc. Turns out when you hold that with some devotees, and play the long game you can suddenly put thousands in all organizations of the state.
13- Kurds (and the nationalist Turks): Erdoğan has always masterfully played this to his advantage. When one seemed strong he pounded on the other one. Turns out when you have control of the entire media, you can spin things in such a way that your base never questions when you're pro Kurdish one year and ultra nationalist the next back and forth.
14- The 2016 coup: I still cannot understand this. There was either some collusion (but that doesn't make much sense), or the planning of the coup was worse than a 5-year old would come up with (which also doesn't make much sense). My money is on some part of the Gülenists selling some other part by starting a half assed thing and disappearing but that also doesn't make much sense. For example if they wanted to kill Erdoğan, his huge airplane was flying for hours with its transponder open (it was possıble to track it from flightradar etc) and the Gülenists had a lot of F16s flying but couldn't find and shoot at his plane. If they wanted to stop channels of communication and make propaganda, they should've cut off internet and took over the Turksat building with all the satellite TV uplinks instead of going for the low-rating state TV. If they wanted to collect a lot of top officials they should've started just before dawn (like all other successful Turkish coups) and not at evening rush hour. Putting tanks on the Bosphorus bridge doesn't give one ANY tactical advantage but creates a lot of buzz. Everything seems like a photo op the more you think about it, but on the other hand the most important question is why would they do it? And that has no answer. Were they that stupid? Maybe.
15- Something very Turkish which I've not seen here in Europe and my short time as tourist in USA: In Turkey, the rules are impossible to follow. They are deliberately contradicting and the most nonsense ones are deliberately not enforced, but not removed also. So when somebody you don't like happens to break a rule you can break his back. I had this epiphany 10 years ago when driving from İstanbul to my hometown. On the highway the speed limit was 110 km/h. Then suddenly it drops to 30 km/h for 100 meters, and back to 110 km/h. There's nothing there. Nobody EVER drops to 30 km/h. But when the local police has to reach a yearly quota of fines or something, they suddenly ticket 100 cars there in a row and call it a year. That's not just some funny example of Mediterranean corruption but that's how everything in Erdoğan's state works. That specific example is at least not a discriminatory practice, but when it comes to serious matters it only matters who they want to screw, and they're sure to find something because there's always something. When in 2019 AKP lost the İstanbul mayor elections, they scrapped the election (for no reason at all) and since they saw the Kurds voted en masse to the opposition, they wanted to appeal to them so on the state TV channel they got the brother of Öcalan, leader of PKK, read a letter from his brother calling Kurds to at least protest the elections and not vote for anybody. Now, when they do it there's no court rulings. Just today, they annuled an opposition parliamantery from his seat because he retweeted some news and the news outlet later changed its header to something pro-Kurdish.
Another example, my father was trying to get a hospital built. Now hospitals have a hell lot of building codes, much more than ordinary buildings and of course this is for good measure. But in Turkey it's physically impossible to follow all the rules since they contradict. If you make the doors exactly like the document says, then it's impossible for the corridors to be how the documents says so. If you get your hospital plan drawn at any company other than the ones who're related to Gül's (Erdoğan's one time 2nd in command, now they're sour) son-in-law, it would get denied. If you get the right company to draw your plans, suddenly they're ok.
16- About the high class and low class thing: The teacher child of a teacher parent who's living from paycheck to paycheck as a modern human being: high class elitist sipping drink in a Nişantaşı hotel. The owner of a contracting firm owning 5 SUVs, crass furnitures with gold engravings and fake diamonds on them but doesn't brush his teeth: poor honest nationalist Anatolian Muslim. Yes, class and wealth are not the same thing but at the moment it's also correlated the wrong way! Premarital sex is elitist white Turk but child brides are totally a-ok. Now the cultural "elite (not a cultural 1% elite, a roughly 30% elite)" has either immigrated to Europe, or is so poor that they lost their culture too since they're literally too hungry to think about things meanwhile many Erdoğan supporting primary school dropout grocer-turned-into-construction firm owners are swimming in it. Erdoğan is a subtle Pol Pot. Ok I ranted a lot on this.
To be less emotional and more rational about the above, when the populist takes over the government and cultural elite is against it, over time with enough money populists buy some of the cultural elites to blow their horn, threaten others to do the same, crush others who are too vocally against and ignore the rest since they don't have any TV channel or anything to air them.
17- How to prevent this in the West: Well, for one you don't have a West of your own with their open or subtle support or hindrance that'll nudge the natural processes towards a local minima. When Erdoğan was in his first years, there was unimaginable-before amounts of money from West flowing to NGOs preaching how democratic Erdoğan was and after years of fundamentalist parties we finally found a German-style Muslim-Democrat conservative liberal party. It was so evident that it was all bullshit, but a lot of the out of touch cultural elites took it line hook and sinker. Now all are trying to hide those days, but many progressive liberal types of today were ardent supporters of Erdoğan back then, calling his opposition "old fashioned fascist military boot lickers" or something. If let's say there was a very powerful civilization on Mars who paid a lot for pro-Trump propaganda by the finest cultural elite, it would be much easier for him to fabricate consent. Also, Trump is a guy that knows no subtlety. He cannot play the long game. If by chance the crazy power hungry surprise president was a more intelligent and subtle version of Trump, it would've been riskier.
But a structural safeguard against an Erdoğan-like scenario is fiercer protection of all independent institutions. Congress (and Senate) and President can be highly coupled since they're elected by similar methods, so Judiciary has to be more powerful and more independent. In fact, president or congress or senate should have no say in who gets to be appointed a high judge or whatever you call it. This actually should go for all other institutions. Like from the FCC to FDA to FAA, they should have more independence in what they do and should only answer to the courts for any mismanagement etc. The rule that should be painfully inflicted to all of these institutions, including the judiciary, should be complete transparency. Democratic countries, even faulty democracies like old Turkey in fact have a lot of redundancy in their institutions so that even if one is infiltrated or hollowed out, others can still make the whole thing work. When a critical mass of them are infiltrated or hollowed out though, you have an Erdoğan situation. So that's why I'm listing all possible institutions. You can never know which one will play which role so all shall be 100% transparent and 100% independent.
18- One last thing: The last 20 years really thought me what power is. Power really resides where people think it resides. Any office, or any institution has no intrinsic power whatsoever, even the ones like military who has actual physical power. There's no divine power or magical whatever or computer game logic that says the election is done thus and the senate works like thus etc. There are laws, and then there are meta-laws that govern how those laws are to be applied and which institution will oversee it. And there are even more meta-meta-laws that govern how that institution will work and so on. But there's no end point to it. Small example: When a court makes a decision, one can take it to the higher court. When the higher court overturns that decision the lower court has to agree. Well what governs this? Let's say an Erdoğan-sided court unlawfully punished a dissident. The higher court, still has a judge with some conscience, overturned the decision. The lower court ignores this. Now what happened to the iron law of higher court overturning decisions? If the board of judges who's to oversee this turns a blind eye, all the carefully constructed system is just as strong as wet toilet paper. So what shall happen? Media going crazy? What if the media is just sycophants? A public outrage? That's usually the last in the chain. Well if they believe the power is with them and with the righteous higher court they'll be able to do something. Otherwise, most of them will just stay home fearing for their life or their livelihood since police brutality isn't necessary to destroy an ordinary person, a big enough fine will bankrupt a lot of individuals. If only a minority believes the power is with the righteous judge, there'll only be a small commotion which government leaning media will soon spin as terrorists trying to unstabilize the country, and blame the falling value of the lira on them as well taking the attention away from the poorly run economics. I don't want to finish this pessimistic, but that's how things are. No matter how good you design a system to run human beings, the power will be where people somehow believe the power is. When some institutions or individuals ignore your carefully constructed system, if the people believe those individuals have the power in the end it's a losing battle. So as I said before, it should be a system with many moving parts independent from each other, each answering only to themselves and another independent institution, in the meanwhile all being transparent. Also the laws about media should be very specific about a lot of things but too long to list here.
PS: Sorry for any faults in my English, it's not my native language and in a comment this long I probably had more than a few screwups.
Appreciate the comment chain.
it took some time and nobody commented until you so I was a bit sorry to see I've wasted my time to produce something crappy. Thanks for the appreciation :D
Emrah, I found your comments well reasoned and interesting as well. I lived in İstanbul and Bursa for several years and became very invested in understanding Turkey's politics, until I realized how truly difficult it is to keep up and how many bad analyses of Turkish society are produced by foreign observers on a daily basis. Anyway, I like to think there is hope for a shift in the future with younger politicians like Ekrem İmamoğlu, though I haven't been following things closely enough to understand how AKP's hold on power is evolving or what kind of plans, if any, Erdoğan may be making for his succession (he is getting old after all, and the constant intrigue and paranoia must take its toll on his health).
Thank you for your reply. It indeed is difficult to keep track of Turkish politics. It's one part Byzantine one part nomad horde politics mixed with chronically underreporting and underrecording and a shock therapy switch to modernity that causes all the chaos.
Now, with vote base eroding Erdoğan is trying to polarize through the Kurds again. This time Erdoğan is a hardline nationalist cracking down on Kurds trying to pry away the secularist nationalists from the opposition alliance.
On the long run though, the succession is more than bleak. If he's not toppled before, when he dies it'll be time of warlords. One of his sons is a weird case and he's kept abroad since ever. At one point early in Erdoğan's career this eldest son killed somebody and needed a cover, he might be an unstable person. The young son is such an idiot Erdoğan keeps him busy with archery tournaments etc and away from any serious business since he'll destroy Erdoğan's dynasty in short time. His proteges are his 2 sons in law (son in laws? sons in law?). One he made the minister of economics but he screwed up big time so he interestingly disappeared a few months ago. Literally disappeared! There are rumors he's abroad. The other son-in-law is an engineer and a prominent businessman in the Turkish military-industrial complex. He seems to be a composed person, but he hasn't been into politics yet. There's also the minister of internal affairs who's making the police loyal to himself in person, so he's wielding a lot of power and during a succession he might try to become a king rather than a kingmaker.
I hope we can beat him in an election before he dies so he can spend some years in prison, although he'll probably flee.
It shed additional light on things. I just didn't have anything useful to say. So a mere *Thanks!* from here.
I've done a little business in Turkey and I'm aware of how ignorant I am. Your detailed comments made me less ignorant. Thanks very much and I really appreciate it!
This is a phenomenal comment chain, thanks for posting it. Also your English was good enough that your final line almost reads like a humblebrag - certainly it seems better than mine.
Anyway I have two questions really. Can I know which group or party you were supporting during the Erodogan years ? Everyone I speak to about Erodogan seems to have wildly different opinions and it would be nice to know what bias you're coming in with.
Secondly can I ask if you feel like Erodogan actually made some significant positive changes to the country ?
The reason I ask is because my mum and her friends consider Turkey to be heaven on earth and they fully intend to retire there. Everyone they spoke to while on their various holiday's, even extended family who have no reason to lie, gave worshipful accounts of Erodogan and how he managed to turn the country around. My mum couldn't stop talking about how clean, energetic and just flat out nice everyone and everything in Turkey was. She said it felt like a country ascending and she wants to be part of it. Naturally i'm alot more skeptical and im spending an inordinate amount of time arguing with her about this but its hard because neither me, my mother or her friends are turkish and its hard to balance out all the contradicting reports.
1- I've been voting age for 20 years, and mainly supported the main opposition party (the secular CHP) with some twists. In 2007 I went to a liberal independent as a reaction to cause some change within CHP. CHP changed a bit but didn't improve much, but at that point I stopped being idealist and started supporting whichever party is the biggest contender against AKP in that specific election. If I had to vote for Mephistopheles himself if he's running against AKP, I'd start explaining what a good dude he was. In the last few years though, the opposition in general and CHP in specific has been on a better path. They leave aside (most of the) differences to form a united front against AKP, and CHP stopped worrying about its own votes and focused on the vote that's against AKP. This also includes having a softer approach to religious issues a well. For example Ekrem İmamoğlu, the new mayor of İstanbul from CHP is from a quite religious family background and Mansur Yavaş, the new mayor of Ankara again from CHP is a former right wing mayor of a small town who happens to have left wing economic policies. So embracing the whole spectrum of population seems to be working for the opposition for now and they're whom I support.
2- Erdoğan himself didn't make a lot of significant positive changes (maybe a wide battle against smoking is one of the most positive ones) but world has progressed a lot in the last 20 years and that trickled to Turkey as well. Turkey has regressed a lot for an ordinary Turkish citizen in social or economic issues, but to a foreigner these don't matter much. For example when I was a university student 20 years ago, with my meager stipend I was able to comfortably live, be able to get drunk, saving some to buy an electric guitar and in the summer a non fancy but nice vacation. Now students are barely feeding themselves, an engineer with a decent job cannot buy that electric guitar or go on vacations. Many green public spaces are now shopping malls or gated apartment buildings, the quality of public education has plummeted. On public TV there were gay characters or premarital sexual relations, or people having a cup of wine with their meal. Now rainbow pattern is banned on children's toys or clothing for fear that it'll turn them gay, a statue with a woman's figure is blurred from the screen, and even the mention of alcoholic drinks are beeped. I'm sure the moment AKP is out these'll change suddenly, but a whole generation has grew up in this environment. But those are actually not impacting a foreigner living in Turkey.
I can say that Turkey's still a great country to live in, especially if your income is in dollars/euros. Especially in the southwest coast there are a lot of European retirees. All the signs etc are in English, some municipalities even send the water bill etc multilingual, there was a German lady who became the town leader, the Russians in Antalya have their own amateur soccer team etc. The Turkish people are a clean bunch (my European friends think I'm OCD but that stuff is just normal in Turkish culture). Also they're nice, especially towards foreigners. I mean calling the people from my country nice seems like calling everybody else non-nice so I don't want to go there, but I wouldn't think retiring in Turkey would be a bad idea.
What concerns me in this situation is that the people your mum and her friends are in touch are people who worship Erdoğan, so I'm not sure how much a good company that is. That's the only red flag here, but that's a big one.
I would still like to live in Turkey again, and plan to do so. I like the culture more than American culture, frankly, even though having lived in many countries I'm aware that every culture has very deep flaws and traumas unique to it.
I appreciate your analysis of the future (in the comment above the one I'm replying to). As a casual observer I can't help but think İmamoğlu looks like a future president of a politically and economically more robust Turkey - but I'm also aware that I don't follow things closely anymore. He has charisma and excellent PR but that doesn't make him a great leader per se. And of course it remains an open question whether big electoral outcomes can happen to unseat AKP - of course İmamoğlu's victory over Yıldırım and other examples are encouraging, but the highest level of electoral politics, and the possibility of an actual change of regime, raises the stakes considerably.
It's tragic that almost all young people, regardless of their family backgrounds and political views, want to leave Turkey these days for the EU, Canada, or US. I understand that the pandemic, as it has in many places, has only served to make the economic situation more acute and cause further loss of hope amongst the young people who should be Turkey's ticket to a brighter future.
Well it's really unfortunate that it's not possible to know beforehand how a leader will be once he has the seat. I hope he doesn't do a head heel turn, but he seems decent enough to not do that. To be honest, he's too light on AKP to my taste, but if he were a hardliner he wouldn't have so many people voting for him so I'll probably have to swallow that and live with it, especially when the alternative is a fundamentalist cleptocrat dictator.
What's more tragic about the young people is that, Turkey has always had economic troubles and was never a rich country like the Western economies. The real reason why all the young people want to leave now is the loss of meritocracy everywhere. Back then the country was not rich, but the child of a poor family always knew if they were smart and studied well and did decent in the centralized exams, they'd at least have a decent career for them. Not a very rich one, but one that'll keep them employed with a roof over their head and no shortage of food and more than enough ways to socialize. Now, either the exams are rigged or there's this "interview" part added whose only function is to filter the party members or their relatives. Now, it's nearly impossible to land a job as a civil servant unless you know somebody who knows somebody. So it's not the economy per se, but the loss of equality of chances that's making everybody move away. I immigrated to EU 8 years ago as well, and dozens of friends did after me. I hope there'll still be a country for me to migrate back to and we get rid of these pests.
Thank you Emrah for the indepth post. I completely agree with you. It is hard to explain Turkey to foreigners.
Thank you for the effort post. Sorry for what's happened to your country.
Thank you so much for your extended comments. Really great detail.
Great comment chain. Thanks!
I'm sort of Russian (my parents moved us to the US when I was a teenager), so I have some gestalt for late Soviet / early Russian laws, without any clear distinction of what they were specifically or when they were active. So, I'm pretty sure the things I'm going to say have been true at some point in the past ~40 years, but I'm less certain of what the system looks like now. The thing about the rules system being designed so that it's impossible to follow rings very true. In addition to providing plausible excuses for blackmailing anyone, this is an excellent way to feed corruption (e.g. if a building inspector wants money, they can just threaten to examine your building according to the letter of the law). Civil engineers in the US, to my knowledge, do not have this kind of power :)
I'm curious if the car-stopping (on the random stop in the middle of the highway that has a reduced speed limit) is actually as egalitarian as you casually suggest? In the Russia of my childhood (early 90s) it certainly wouldn't have been, because the more expensive cars would have people you didn't want to cross, but that might've settled down since.
Worse, it's not organic free-range corruption but industrial corruption. Since it's known being a building inspector nets you with corruption money, it needs not be in the form of bribes but only having your inspecting fee high. This way there's no need for the inspector to launder the money. He just approves projects coming from the "correct" project office and rejects the rest. The "correct" project office donates money to the "correct" foundations who have a relative of the inspector on its board of trustees or whatever with a salary. The higher-ups own the entire operations of the foundation be it promoting medieval archery or building student housing. So it's very similar but a bit different (and I believe more structured) way of corruption than the plain old official/inspector/police-requires-bribes kind of post Warsaw pact corruption (which Turkey also had but in smaller quantities before Erdoğan). It's like a huge machine oiling itself and the entire political/PR machine of Erdoğan and it has a fractal quality to it so what's at the nation-level is the same at a village-level albeit small scale.
The car-stopping would indeed be mostly egalitarian if the reason is the local police trying to fill their ticketing quota. Of course somebody related to the party circles (a second/third cousin somewhat removed of the town's party leader) would just wave and go on. Since they have the expensive cars it correlates, but the causation is the connection (and not the money) getting you a free pass, although the same connection also gets you money so the result is the same.
Interesting info, thank you.
Re #14, my impression at the time (as an outsider who doesn't follow Turkish politics too closely) was that it seemed like a fake coup, organized by Erdogan to give him an excuse to reduce the military's power so they couldn't launch a real one. Is that plausible?
Re #15, it's not that egregious here, and certainly not that malicious. But there's stories of cops talking to people riding along to point out how ridiculous traffic laws are, and betting they can't point to a car who can go a single block without breaking some rule of the road somewhere. See also https://www.amazon.ca/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp/1594035229
14: Plausible, but what was in it for the guys who actually tried to coup and died trying? Somebody somehow must have convinced them but how? It could've been some part of the Gülen movement making a deal with Erdoğan and then selling out the rest by starting a (very intentionally badly planned) coup which would out them all. That's the theory convinces me the most but as I said, none of the theories really fits 100% and I don't have my own that I believe completely works.
15: I think whenever it's politically safer to put more laws that restrict stuff and not remove laws that restrict stuff, this situation arises. In my opinion what's different in Turkey is that, this law of nature is somehow a very foundational part of the underlying system and being actively weaponized to rule arbitrarily but make it look like everything is quite lawful.
Mr. Cagaptay is known to have ties with the older authoritarian regime that the Turkey had. It is no surprise that he supports some wrong doings of Erdogan. To be honest, looking at those researchers will not completely tell you what is going on in Turkey because they are extremely biased. It is only a representation of how a small group of people see rte and his regime.
Scott, it reads like a really deep and fascinating analysis, except for the Stalin part. If you spend 15 min reading about Stalin's methods online, it would be nearly exactly the prescription Erdogan followed:
- take control of the existing institutions by staffing them with his loyalists (conveniently, staffing was his official job to begin with)
- slowly push away your opponents' supporters, including by trumped up charges
- use existing legal systems to begin with for show trials
- eventually streamline the legal system to speed up the process (hello, Troika!)
There was no need for extrajudicial action on the home turf, after all, he controlled everything there. Only those outside his reach ended up with an ax in the head.
Putin simply adapted Stalin's recipe to the modern times, replacing the charge "enemy of the people" with "corruption". A big added bonus was that the charge was always correct: it is impossible to do business in Russia without bribery and tax evasion. Only lately the tried and true "agent of a foreign power" hammer was brought back.
Erdogan followed the playbook of their northern neighbor, adapting it to the local situation. The most impressive feat, of course, was to take control of the military. Most dictators either come from the military background and enjoy its support, or operate in an environment where the military is not strong enough to take control. Erdogan used "democratization" as a leverage, and the Turkish military didn't realize what hit it until it was too late.
This. Scott's ignorance of how the soviet union worked is puzzling. In contrast with fascist countries where people were indeed just disappeared, Stalin's purges are notorious for having massive trials where not only a guilt verdict was important, but the soviets deemed specially important for the suspect to provide a confession, hence all the torturing.
You are ignorant if you think that any but a vanishingly tiny fraction of the millions of people purged under Stalin went through "massive trials". To begin with, it would never work logistically. Most of them were indeed just arrested, sometimes interrogated with liberal use of third degree methods (I suspect e.g. most peasants accused of picking up ears of wheat, a crime by the notorious law of 7/8, weren't given the honor), tried and sentenced in absentia whether they confessed or not, given an extract from a troika protocol to read and sign, and then they were happily on their way to log taiga and mine gold in Siberia, if not executed. Solzhenitsyn and many other memoirists describe how this process worked. Massive show trials were important, but they were PR events designed to build support for Stalin and his policies and undermine the support of his enemies. That's why they were so carefully staged, complete with tearful confessions from the stand. Important people who didn't break down and agree to confess from the stand, like the geneticist and botanist Nikolai Vavilov for instance, weren't tried publicly.
The EU is a project led by Germany and France, which is possible because they are the largest two countries by population, having 80 and 60 million people, respectively. The EU is nominally democratic, so the leadership of these two countries has to be legitimized by them having the largest populations.
In reality, the expansion of the EU is/was about conditioning the new nations to adopt EU rules and mores. For this reality to work with the pretension of EU democracy, it is crucial that new EU states are smaller than Germany and France, so they can be kept out of the driver's seat.
Yet Turkey has 80 million people. So if they were let into the EU, they could immediately appeal to the democratic pretensions to be given equal power to Germany and more power than France, which would be a huge threat to the EU.
However, I disagree that the EU intended to keep Turkey out. The Europhiles truly believe in that the expansion of the EU is a way to bring peace and prosperity to other nations. The dynamic in the EU is that the deep state in the EU is full of Europhiles and that they cooperate with friendly politicians to bribe/coerce/threaten those who are more skeptical. The result is that they get their way much more than what the EU populace would support if the EU would be truly democratic.
The EU has a huge set of rules for prospective EU states, requiring them to adapt their laws to meet EU regulations, and to improve their institutions, at least on paper. The EU has often accepted imperfect compliance, because of their belief in the benefits of expansion, but the consequences of this seemed limited for smaller nations (although, Greece managed to cause a significant crisis).
However, Turkey was never going to get this amount of leeway. However, I've seen no evidence that extra rules were created for Turkey. It is clear that many EU citizens and politicians thought that Turkey was a danger to the EU and spoke out against it, which probably resulted in a feeling in Turkey that they wouldn't be accepted.
However, ultimately, the only way for Turkey to put the EU on the spot was to adhere to the EU rules and (proper) institutional reforms. By not doing so, it was Turkey that effectively stalled the accession process.
Note that Erdogan didn't merely benefit from the EU accession process by using it as a casus belli for transforming his institutions, but also profited from pre-accession support in the form of hundreds of millions a year, money they are still getting. So Erdogan's economic wonder can be partially attributed to an influx of this money.
"The dynamic in the EU is that the deep state in the EU is full of Europhiles and that they cooperate with friendly politicians to bribe/coerce/threaten those who are more skeptical. The result is that they get their way much more than what the EU populace would support if the EU would be truly democratic."—One recalls Macron's "no, we would never stage a referendum on EU membership, Leave would get 60-70%".
BTW, I don't think that Erdogan was ever willing to actually adhere to the EU rules. I think that he very smartly managed to pretend that he was not stalling (helped by control over many newspapers), which got the liberal Turks angry and dejected at the supposed unwillingness of the EU to let Turkey in, thereby convincing them to keep supporting Erdogan, rather than a party who actually wanted to seriously try to enter the EU.
Yes, Turkey joining would be as large a population change as the 2004 accessions of the mostly former communist countries but as a single nation rather than ten.
I think this is 100% right. The EU's concern about military coups was also more pragmatic than just "coups are bad": if a member state had a coup in the modern post-Maastricht EU, and the EU wanted to keep that country on side (Turkey is, or was until recently, a seriously important part of NATO), the whole system would break down. The EU can more-or-less shut down a member state for having a coup if all the others agree, but not without a lot of awkwardness. If they wanted to side with the coup, they'd be faced with having to waive immunity so that the whole Turkish delegation to the European Parliament being arrested.
Towards the end of part IV I was thinking "this sounds like a good argument in favor of incremental change over sudden shocks". Don't burn down a system, improve it a piece at a time.
For some reason this put me in mind of the American Revolution vs the French Revolution - one of the reasons we had a better time of it overall is that we already had local governance that could be severed from the overseas monarchy and continue operating while we stitched together a new national government. instead of having to burn the whole system down and start fresh. Which, is still a pretty large system shock, but we lucked into having leadership (Washington in particular) that genuinely didn't seek power for its own sake.
I think that putting the label of "Revolution" on something that would be more accurately described as "The American Secession" is a huge historical mistake.
It was pretty revolutionary.
>There were four such coups between 1960 and 2000 - including "coups by memo", where the military would say "let's pretend we just held a coup" and the civilian government, unwilling to risk a real coup, would resign en masse.
That's a coup every 15 years. That's less than two presidents! It's hard to imagine the government being able to change quickly enough that it goes from "basically alright" to "tanks in the streets" in the amount of time it took the US to go through Bush and Obama. Which makes me feel that at least part of the problem is that the military in Turkey is *really eager* to throw coups.
> It's hard to imagine the government being able to change quickly enough that it goes from "basically alright" to "tanks in the streets"
I don’t really know the Turkey situation, but in the abstract it’s much less hard to imagine changing from “barely tolerable, let’s hope we don’t need the tanks this time” to “tanks in the street”.
So, this is actually off-topic, but I've noticed it a couple of times that Scott's called himself a "libertarian" but last I recall he was "definitely not a libertarian, even if they're object level right about certain things"... what happened, when did this change?
Yeah, I'm inconsistent about this. I think of myself as left-to-libertarian-to-liberal. I am definitely not a "government cannot do anything except prevent fraud or force" minarchist libertarian, but I am at least kind of a "government should try to do fewer things and leave decisions to individual choice" libertarian.
Where do you fall on the "How do we make sure economically useless 80 year olds can get medical care?" question?
Not quite the same question but Alexander has said in the past that he strongly supports a universal basic income as one of the things the state should be doing.
I think there has been discussion previously about how your style often makes it hard to distinguish summary from commentary in your book reviews. A succinct example: when you write something like
<blockquote> Erdogan got - realistically probably forged - documents proving…</blockquote>
it reads like “probably forged” is your own inference, but I suspect it is in fact part of your summary of what the author said himself.
In practice my guess is that you actually do a very clean separation where everything before a certain point is summary and everything after is commentary, but you don’t make that clear and therefore I read more of the summary as being your personal opinion than you may have intended unless I am very careful to prime myself against it.
I'm not sure how to fix this. The author didn't use exactly these words. He presented some evidence which I think a reasonable person would interpret as sufficient to show forgery. So it's partly the author interpreting reality and partly me interpreting the author.
I lived in Turkey through many of the worst years of its recent history - the war in Syria, the renewal of conflict in the Kurdish region, Islamic State terror attacks in İstanbul, the failed 2016 coup, the crash of the lira.
There is a deep culture of conspiratorial and paranoid thinking, that's not unnatural given everything that's happened to Turkey (there's a saying that Turkey has more newsworthy things happen in a week than most countries have in a year - it's true) and in the neighboring Middle East in the past decades.
There's also this thing that's pervasive but easy to miss if you're a foreigner, especially one who's passing through: the subtle ways in which one's ethnic, religious, and political identities take on a burdensome importance in everyday interactions. In other words, in every small affair of life, there's an assessment and awareness of the political orientations and backgrounds of one's interlocutors, though it's rarely broached head on unless it's a drunken altercation or late night taxi ride. It's just this thing, almost imperceptible from the outside but crushingly heavy to actually be immersed in. But it is taking place in the context of bitter zero sum struggles for power in which people at being killed, unjustly imprisoned, tortured, and any other affront to dignity you can name.
I've been back in the US since 2017, and I often say that I feel the US is moving in exactly the direction Turkey was moving in then: the increasing burden of ethnic and racial identity in every facet of life, the fear and paranoia, the circumscription of acceptable topics of conversation (I was baffled when I returned why everyone only ever talks about fucking Netflix shows and Marvel movies), and the mental health toll all of this takes on average people (coupled with overdosing on social media technologies which make everything seem more immediate and threatening than it is).
Anyway, I think your analysis based on this book is good, and I think as you said it's not easy to draw parallels too directly between the US and Turkey. The contexts are so different, the milieu and relative power of each country economically, militarily, etc. But almost in a sense of social aesthetics and base political emotions, I feel there is indeed a parallel to be drawn and it's a dark one.
I forget what the norm is now about comments that just express approval or appreciation, but I thought this was a really insightful post and I appreciate it.
Thanks for these excellent reflections. I've been to Turkey a couple of times, and thought it was a beautiful country, but I am anxious about returning under the current state of affairs there. And I certainly don't want the US going down that path.
So, my understanding from the last few years isn't that this is getting worse in the US per se, but that your ethnic background played a burdensome role in everyday interactions in a way that the white majority could just ignore, and in the last few years social media and the great awokening have made (white) people aware of that in a way that's uncomfortable, hence the pushback against wokism and pc. Probably you'd disagree, but that's the other side's narrative as I understand it.
There's no doubt that there's a lot of truth to that. However, I do think that many people in racial and ethnic minority categories in this country would say that this aspect of their identities has become more burdensome in the past 20 years and particularly in the past couple of years. There are huge pluralities of views within every minority community and this is something that's being denied or discarded in favor of certain absolutist framings. I think it's the view of all ideas as necessarily in service of power or in service of the oppressed, with those classifications being strictly linked to ethnicity, that is at the root of the growing paranoia, mistrust, and even ethic hatred that we are seeing. I also think a very tenuous consensus is being manufactured at a certain level, to turn areas of extreme complexity into narratives that deflect attention away from other dynamics of power. I think you can mark a point in a lot of countries' histories where natural and legitimate tensions between different ethnic groups, based on large historical processes, have been stoked beyond reason or usefulness by agenda-driven politicians, interest groups, and the intellectual elites who create the ideological frameworks they use. Most countries have dark histories of oppression and systemic violence and there's a broad spectrum of how they deal with them. I only know that the US is heading in a direction where things like ethnic-based paramilitaries and political parties look like a conceivable eventuality, and where institutions and entire regions are re-segregated. I view that as an inorganic and ahistorical balkanizing that will not lead to good outcomes.
I really disagree with you here. I doubt very strongly that it's more burdensome in 2020 than in 2000. Of course, all I have are my priors, I wonder if there are surveys?
One other point: what do you mean by re-segregated? That implies desegregation, which I don't think has ever really been successfully done. Do you disagree on this point, or do you mean something else?
Well, there has evidently been lots of desegregation in schools, universities, government facilities, and businesses, and at least some undeniable progress in neighborhoods and cities. I have been seeing an awful lot of initiatives lately that support separating students, colleagues, and residents by race, as well as the expression of ideologies espousing immutable and irreconcilable differences between Americans of different ethnic backgrounds. But more broadly, I did not mean for my initial or subsequent comment to be about Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, Trumpism, or any other touchstone culture wars topic. It was my personal observation of a psychological parallel, based on my cumulative reading and experience of being American (in a very diverse part of America) and having lived in Turkey and in other societies divided by ethnic, racial, religious and other forms of conflict.
I'll respectfully decline to continue discussing this topic. It's rarely fruitful and pushing back on your line of thinking would betray a level of interest in the subject of race that I don't actually possess.
Why do you think that this specific kind of balkanization is "inorganic" and "ahistorical" ?
I view the process known as balkanization itself as inorganic and ahistorical, as it involves elite interests using the wedge of identitarian rhetoric to pry apart cultures that are cosmopolitan and deeply intertwined in their ethnic composition, for the purpose of political projects that benefit said elites and justify the expansion of their power.
"There is no fire alarm for dictatorship." From my perspective, Gezi Park was a very loud fire alarm. Erdoğan violently put down peaceful protests and then put down the protests against that violence. It just failed.
"A country without the same history of military coups, where every group feels like it's gotten a fair shake from the democratic process"
I hope this isn't implying that "every group" in the US "feels like it's gotten a fair shake from the democratic process," haha.
Well, it's a two-party system, so every group who votes has had the people they voted for take power about half the time.
There are still a lot of grievances, obviously, but it may be qualitatively different from 'no one I have ever voted for has ever taken power'.
I suppose if "every group" is supposed to mean "every political party," then sure. I was interpreting it closer to "every demographic." That said, while there are two parties in power, there aren't only 2 parties, and I know supporters of the Green Party feel frustrated (as I'm sure do Libertarians and supporters of smaller parties I'm forgetting about) about how impossible it is for their parties to gain real power (beyond a few rare congresspeople).
Hi Scott, I've posted a comment that may be taken as a bit harsh, so I came back to try posting a nicer comment.
Regarding populism seeming like it should be default in a democracy: populism is defined by a discourse that proposes that there is an opposition between the elite and the people, the populist branding himself as a defendant of the latter. One would expect this person to lose the votes of said elite. Therefore the default in a democracy should be the conciliator, the one whose main discourse is that he will work for the betterment of everybody. Biden is a great example. Even Reagan would not be taken as a populist, silent majority aside, trickle down economics is a hallmark of class conciliation.
The Erdogan case of blaming some urban centered foreign-aligned well educated elite that dominates the media and academia, condemns corruption in the state, emphasizes a return to roots (Islam in his view) is absolutely general to right-wing populism. Comparing to cases of populism in Latin America and Central Europe (e.g. Hungary and Poland) right-wing populism that is culture war based is the norm. From what I gather the only thing very distinct in Turkey is the role of the armed forces.
Regarding the elites naturally rising to the top: your right there with Marx on it. As long as the elites maintain control of the means of production they will maintaining power and a network of connections that guarantee their influence. Which, of course, is why they seem to have a light handle on power, the game is already rigged for them, no need to make an effort.
Hope it helps
"Erdogan was able to change the Turkish Constitution with a simple majority. Nobody took it too seriously, because the Constitution was just whatever the last group of military-coup-pulling generals said it was. The US Constitution requires a lot more work. And as the work of titans like George Washington and James Madison and so on, it has an aura of sacredness that makes it hard to add "PS: I can do whatever I want" to the end without a lot of people feeling violated. I know this has caused a lot of problems, but after seeing the ease with which Erdogan swept aside any part of the Turkish Constitution he didn't like, I have a new respect for it."
I'm personally quite skeptical of this thesis, for a couple of reasons (though to be clear it's been propounded by many other people than Scott).
Firstly, I don't think that the US' history of continuous democratic governance is all *that* unique and thus requiring of a novel explanation. It's pretty similar to other Anglosphere countries (Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand) in particular and other European ones in general. Insofar as there's a difference in the duration of democratic governance between e.g. the US and Sweden, it seems like it's simply because the start date of democracy was earlier in the US, rather than being the result of some significant difference in the operation/design of the governments.
And, as a corollary of this, many of these nations differ from the US in that e.g. they espouse parliamentary sovereignty or lack written constitutions (as in the case of the UK), especially ones with the same symbolic importance/difficulty to change as that of the US.
Secondly, many key civil liberties (e.g. freedom of speech and habeas corpus) nominally guaranteed by the US constitution have in fact been shamelessly violated in practice, especially during wartime, as in the Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR administrations. Not only in wartime, however, as the 14th and 15th amendment's guarantees of equal protection under the laws and the right to vote were ignored for nearly a century following the Civil War/Reconstruction w.r.t. blacks in the southern states. While there are several notable such cases of political power overriding nominal law to trample civil liberties/rights, I'm not sure if there are many or any identifiable converse cases in which the holders of such power refrained from abuses they wanted to commit because of their theoretical illegality.
Thus, I don't see a particularly strong connection between written, hard-to-change constitutions and robust civil liberties. Such constitutions can fail to protect civil liberties, and these liberties can be protected without such constitutions.
"I'm not sure if there are many or any identifiable converse cases in which the holders of such power refrained from abuses they wanted to commit because of their theoretical illegality. "
You mention Lincoln, Wilson and FDR, but is anyone knowledgeable about the legality of more recent stuff, like Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons and drone strikes?
For example, on Guantanamo, the way I read Wikipedia, Bush challenged that habeas corpus did not apply in Guantanamo, the US supreme court overruled the government twice, Bush's government passed legislation that retroactively made it legal, which was again decided against by the US supreme court. Since then, some prisoners have been freed or transferred, but nothing has changed about the general circumstances of the said facility operating.
On the other two points, I am more fuzzy. Having read some Benjamin Franklin lately, I am less sure if such things were intended, but I surmise it is possible that the practical powers of the US government do include, for example, operating secret prisons in Poland for purpose of torture? There was some noise in report, but nobody seems to have got charged with anything. ECHR ordered some signatory countries to pay damages to victims.
Anyway, I think commenter Emrah Dincer above presented the correct realist conclusion: "Power really resides where people think it resides." One could put the governments and judicial systems would make fine characters in Neil Gaiman's American Gods. The printed letter in the books of law have got nothing in them to stop those in power doing whatever they please if enough people think those in power have the power to do so. People might even cheer, if the things those in power do are perceived as an attack to the perceived outgroup.
Proposition 1: "Elites have enough advantages ... that in the natural course of events, they always come out on top."
Proposition 2: "Trying to come up with a system where elites don't come out on top is an almost futile task, one where you will constantly be pumping against entropy."
Proposition 2 is a corollary of Robert Michels's Iron Law of Oligarchy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy The law was articulated in Michels's 1911 book: "Political Parties". "Who says organization, says oligarchy". He also stated Scott's corollary: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
Proposition 1 is also a corollary of the Iron Law. It is also almost a tautology. But, there is a caveat. When we are discussing the subject of political regimes that govern a state and not subsidiary organizations like unions, schools, businesses, etc. we can observe that every regime creates the elites who run it. We can also observe that as long as the regime can pay the soldiers it will stay in power and continue the power of its elite.
A quick look at American history shows three regimes. The first was the Planter's Republic from 1787 to 1861. During the first 48 years of the Republic, the President was, except for the single terms of the 2 Adams, a slave owning planter. The cataclysm that destroyed that regime is called the Civil War. The second regime was the Republican regime run by northern white protestant industrialists. That regime went bankrupt in the Great Depression. The successor regime, still in place is rooted in the global financial system centered on Wall Street, the Federal Bureaucracy, and the Communications Media .
The current regime will sooner or later collapse too. It is a human institution run by humans. I think the 1.9 T$ is a warning. The need to print ever larger quantities of money to buy off the proles is a fatal disease.
A couple book recommendations on subjects touched on in this post:
On populism, I highly recommend John Judis' concise and insightful book The Populist Explosion (https://www.amazon.com/Populist-Explosion-Recession-Transformed-American/dp/0997126442). (Plus its follow-up The Nationalist Revival.)
On the relationship between states, the rule of law, and accountable governance, I highly recommend Francis Fukuyama's duology The Origins of Political Order (vol. 1) and Political Order and Political Decay (vol 2.). (https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Political-Order-Prehuman-Revolution/dp/0374533229 and https://www.amazon.com/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Globalization-ebook/dp/B00IQOFS7M)
Here's a sample excerpt from The Origins of Political Order on the competition/cooperation between various elite groups in the quest for political power up to the French Revolution:
"The state emerged in Europe when certain noble houses achieved a first-mover advantage in becoming more powerful than the others—the Capetians in France, the Árpáds in Hungary, the Rurik dynasty in Russia, the Norman royal house [in England] after the conquest. Their rise was due to some complex combination of favorable geography, good leadership, organizational competence, and the ability to command legitimacy. Legitimacy may have been the source of the ruler’s initial advantage, as in the case of István leading the Magyars to Christianity, or it may have followed upon the military success of a prince in vanquishing rival warlords and bringing about peace and security for the society as a whole.
The upper nobility might well be described as residual warlords who possessed their own land, armies of retainers, and resources. This group effectively governed their own territories, which could be handed down to descendants or traded for other assets.
The gentry were lesser elites with social status but who did not necessarily possess significant land or resources. They were more numerous than the nobility and distinctly subordinate to them.
The Third Estate consisted of tradesmen, merchants, free serfs, and others who inhabited towns and cities and lived outside of the manorial economy and feudal legal system.
In addition to these four groups, there was the peasantry, which constituted the vast bulk of the population. The peasantry was not, however, a significant political actor until it emerged as such in certain parts of northern Europe in the eighteenth century. Dispersed, indigent, and poorly educated peasants could seldom achieve significant collective action. Agrarian societies from China to Turkey to France saw the periodic outbreak of violent peasant rebellions, and all were eventually suppressed, often with great savagery. Those revolts affected the behavior and calculations of other actors, for example by inducing caution on the part of the state when considering raising agricultural taxes. On other occasions, peasant uprisings could help overturn a Chinese dynasty. But the peasantry could seldom act as a corporate group or force long-term institutional change that would take its interests into account.
The relationships among these five groups were illustrated in Figure 1. Except for the peasantry, these social groups were mobilized to a greater or lesser extent and thus could behave as political actors and struggle for power. The state could try to expand its dominion, while the groups outside the state sought to protect and enlarge their existing privileges against the state and against one another. The outcome of these struggles depended largely on the collective action that any of these major actors could achieve. The need for solidarity extended to the state itself. State weakness could be the result of internal cleavages within the ruling dynasty, organizational failures, a loss of belief in the ruling house’s legitimacy on the part of its retainers, or even the simple failure of a king to produce an heir. In addition, any number of alliances were possible among these different groups—between the king and gentry, between the king and the Third Estate, between the upper nobility and the gentry, between the gentry and the Third Estate, and so on.
In the cases where absolutism emerged, whether of a strong or weak variety, there were inevitably collective action failures on the part of groups resisting the state (see Figure 6). Where accountability was imposed, the state was relatively weak in relationship to the other political groups. Parliamentary government emerged when there was a relative balance of power between a cohesive state and an equally well-organized society that could defend its interests."
It seems odd to describe Hugo Capet as having achieved a first-mover advantage when the Merovingians had already ruled France for centuries until they were deposed by their erstwhile servants the Carolingians, who ruled until they ran out of direct lineal Carolingians and Hugo was elected by the nobility to replace the last one. That transition seems to me to be of a distinctly different nature than e.g. William conquering England.
Did someone mention Hugh Capet? A name I recognise! From the "Purgatorio" of Dante's "Divine Comedy":
Dante combines two Hughs--Hugh Capet the Great (d. 956) and his son, Hugh (ruled 987-96)--into this composite "Hugh Capet," root of the medieval French dynasty of Capetian rulers. Of humble origins himself, according to Dante's version, Hugh Capet laments the corruption of his ruling descendants as they acquired power and privilege over the centuries. He prophesies events of particular interest to Dante: the coup d'état in Florence plotted by Pope Boniface VIII and staged by the Black Guelphs with the help of the French prince, Charles of Valois; and the abduction and humiliation of Boniface at the hands of forces controlled by King Philip IV (Philip the Fair) of France (20.85-90). Like Pope Adrian V, Hugh Capet lies prostrate on the floor of the fifth terrace to expiate the sin of avarice.
And he: 'I will tell you, not for any comfort
I await from there, but for the grace that shines
in you, reflected even short of death.
'I was the root of the evil tree
that casts its shadow over all the Christian lands
so that good fruit is rarely gathered there.
'If Douai, Lille, Ghent, and Bruges
but had the power, there would soon be vengeance--
and this I beg of Him who judges all.
'On earth I was known as Hugh Capet.
Of me were born the Philips and the Louis
who lately have been rulers over France.
'I was the son of a butcher of Paris.
When the ancient line of kings had all died out,
except for one, a gray-robed monk,
'I found the reins to govern all the kingdom
firm in my hands, and soon had in possession
such power and so very many friends
'that to the widowed crown
my son's head was put forward.
His issue is entombed as consecrated bones.
'As long as the great dowry of Provence
had not yet stripped my house of feeling shame,
it counted little, but at least it did no harm.
'Then, with fraud and pillage, the rape began
and afterwards, to make amends,
my heirs took Ponthieu, Normandy, and Gascony.
'Charles came into Italy and, to make amends,
made Conradin a victim and then,
to make amends, drove Thomas back to Heaven.
'I see a time, not very long from now,
that brings another Charles away from France
to make himself and then his kin more known.
'He comes alone, armed only with the lance
that Judas used to joust. And with one thrust
he bursts the swollen paunch of Florence.
'From this he shall acquire, not land,
but sin and shame, so much the heavier for him
the lighter he considers such disgrace.
'Still another Charles: once led, a prisoner,
from his own ship, I see him sell his daughter
after haggling, as pirates do for female slaves.
'O avarice, what more harm can you do us,
since our blood is so attached to you
it has no care for its own flesh?
'That past and future evil may seem less,
I see the fleur-de-lis proceed into Anagni
and, in His vicar, make a prisoner of Christ.
'I see Him mocked a second time.
I see renewed the vinegar and gall--
between two living thieves I see Him slain.
'I see that this new Pilate is so brutal
this does not sate him, and, unsanctioned,
I see him spread his greedy sails against the Temple.
Piggybacking to recommend Jan-Werner Muller's book "What is Populism?" It's easily-digestible and does a pretty darn good job of answering its titular question, especially when "populist" can sometimes feel more like a buzzword than an actual classification. https://www.amazon.com/What-Populism-Jan-Werner-M%C3%BCller/dp/0812248988
"He proposed a series of amendments which would bring the Turkish government more in line with international best practices. Although these looked good on paper, the end result was to destroy previous Turkish institutions with strong traditions and independent power bases, and replace them with new ones that Erdogan could pack with his supporters."
Made me think of HR1. Did it you?
Nope, apparently we have different context (in the sense of my post on priors last week)
"This makes me a little more concerned about things like QAnon than I had been previously - if Trump had arrested various prominent Democrats for their role in a Deep State pedophile ring, that would be pretty similar to the tactic Erdogan used to seize ultimate power. On the other hand, the thing where Democrats talk about how Trump supporters entering the Capitol was an “attempted coup” and we need lots of “domestic terror laws” and a grand attempt to uncover the complicity of the mainstream Republican establishment and bring them to justice - that also feels a little too Erdoganesqe for comfort."
Nice attempt at balance. Still, I can't help noticing that, er, Trump *didn't* arrest various prominent Democrats for, you know, anything. Perhaps he would have, if he had appointed a more compliant AG than Barr. But then, he did appoint Barr.
Perhaps the noise about “domestic terror laws” will turn out to be as much nothing. If so, feel free to press me for an apology, but I am not optimistic.
On the other hand, the FBI did prosecute Flynn, Stone, Cohen, Papadopoulos and others - with Trump being sitting President. If anybody was looking for a diametrical opposite of an authoritarian strongman using the state to punish his political opposite, they wouldn't find a much better candidate than Trump. And yet somehow "but Trump also could!" is rolled out as a serious "balance" argument.
In truth, QAnon gets all this free PR from the press because QAnon is the only thing they have. Remove it, and the whole "authoritarian strongman" thing becomes obviously ridiculous. But if you take QAnon feverish fantasies as a potential "fact", you can do some balancing act, pretending it's the same as actions of actual Congressmen and government officers.
> But sometimes political parties can run on an explicitly anti-elite platform. In theory this sounds good - nobody wants to be elitist. In practice, this gets really nasty quickly.
I think there's a missing step here, it's the one where all the People With Power (I don't like the term "elites" as I think it sounds too cool and gives these people more respect than they deserve) are _all_ strongly out of alignment with the majority of the population on an important issue. This is a situation that shouldn't really arise in a correctly-functioning democracy, but sometimes it does, because principal-agent problems are a thing.
In Turkey, the issue was the role of Islam in the state. In the US, it was illegal immigration. When both Hilary Clinton and Jeb Bush are opposed to taking action against illegal immigration, and the population is for it, then it creates an unstable situation likely to lead to a "populist" uprising.
The situation in the US, or Turkey for that matter, is far from resolved. Four years of Trump produced no meaningful action on illegal immigration, because it turns out that the President has less power than people thought, but the unstable balance remains.
Re: Trump and illegal immigration, I don't think it shows that the President has less power than people thought, I think it shows that he didn't really care. Real action on illegal immigration is simple. Make e-Verify mandatory and back it with robust enforcement. If there are no jobs, no one is coming.
Not only did Trump not do this, he didn't talk about it. Instead, he did theatre. I think that's deliberate, but I am, to say the least, not a fan.
ON TYRANNY: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
By Timothy Snyder
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2017/02/24/20-ways-to-recognize-tyranny-and-fight-it/
and Black Earth
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/books/review/timothy-snyders-black-earth.html
Haven't got time for a long comment but agree with Tiago- c.f. UK. It seems to me that barriers to dictatorship are rarely formal. They're to do with the percentage of the population who wants one, or who can be hammered into a coalition that wants one. I'm sure the constitutional structure has an effect at the margin, but I think overemphasizing constitutional structure as a bulwark against dictatorship is one of the reasons why the US has a particularly screwy constitution.
Consider that unwieldy structures might prevent evil for a time, but also might be more likely to make people go "screw it, let's just throw the whole thing out so we can get stuff done".
I see little reason the liberals should gracefully give up the courts to the right, given the right's very recent less than graceful history on that front. The real solution to the supreme court is probably to reduce its power, not pack it or stop it from being packed.
Good post btw Scott, though I disagree with almost all its practical recommendations.
I seem to recall Scott wrote an anti-libertarian faq, so it's a bit surprising to see he now identifies as libertarian.
Any speculation on why the EU didn't vwant Turkey?
Also, what's this thing about "the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban"? Presumably this is Erdogan's headscarf ban, so this would mean the EU agreed with Erdogan and this caused him to lose faith in them? Something here doesn't make sense.
I'm startled to hear about these "Gulenists" which held high posts in "a surprising number of countries". Are they still around? Is this sort of thing common?
...like, I feel like the moral I'm taking from this story is not "Erdogan slowly became a dictator through gradually taking over important institutions" so much as "there's a shadowy multinational group which has the power to topple major governments, and they showed up in Chapter Four and did most of the actual work and then vanished again". Is there a different book we should be reading which covers how the shadowy multinational group works?
The headscarf ban was upheld by the European Court of Human Rights, which ist n o t an EU institution, but an emanation of the Council of Europe, a larger organisation. Turkey, Russia, Armenia, Switzerland, Norway, and many others are members of the CoE while remaining outside of the EU (and of course now this is also true of the United Kingdom).
The headscarf ban is n o t Erdogan's policy. On the contrary, it is a symbol of top-down enforced secularism.
Thanks, that helps, but I still find I'm confused. Erdogan runs Turkey; if he wants to not have a headscarf ban, can't he just say "okay guys Turkey no longer has a headscarf ban"? Why does he care what the European Council of Human Rights thinks?
He wrote "A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto" about a year or so after the Anti-Libertarian FAQ, and when he reposted the Anti-Libertarian FAQ in 2017 he wrote "It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas. I’m reposting it by popular request and for historical interest only."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
> it's really hard to change the US Constitution.
On the other hand, the US Constitution is interpreted loosely enough that it can effectively be changed by a Supreme Court ruling. The 14th Amendment's requirement of equal protection was weakened enough to allow racial segregation by Plessy v. Ferguson, then strengthened again by Brown v. Board of Education and related cases, followed by the ruling in Regents v. Bakke that racial discrimination was constitutional for some purposes; it was later extended by decisions such as Reed v. Reed (prohibiting legal gender discrimination) and Obergefell v. Hodges to forms of discrimination that the amendment's authors never considered (although IMO these decisions were correct and consistent with the amendment). Griswold v. Connecticut (overturning a ban on contraception) established a constitutional right to privacy which was not specified in the constitution but instead was based on the idea that "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance"; this was extended by Roe v. Wade and Lawrence v. Texas. The Bill of Rights originally bound only the federal government, but the court gradually decided that the 14th Amendment's provision that "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" had extended it to the state governments in various rulings from around the beginning of the 20th century onward (starting with Gitlow v. New York, regarding freedom of the press). In Wickard v. Filburn, the Court (under pressure from FDR's threat to pack it!) overturned the previously fundamental principle of federalism and strict limitations on the federal government's authority by interpreting the Interstate Commerce Clause (I.8: "The Congress shall have Power ... [t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes") to mean that the federal government could regulate more or less any economic activity with any effect on interstate commerce.
If the Constitution's text is difficult to change but the Supreme Court can interpret it in widely varying ways, that doesn't mean the Constitution's legal effects can't be changed, it means that the easiest way to change it is by appointing Supreme Court justices willing to reinterpret it.
This. It was weird to read Scott reel off "muh Constitution" civics noise. I guess he didn't read Moldbug carefully when he wrote the Planet-Sized Nutshell, because Moldbug describes and explains what happened to the American Constitution in much detail, quoting and citing many primary and secondary (i.e. primary history written by respectable academic historians) sources, and at great length (though with him, that's a given lol).
They should have used approval voting
The advantage of approval voting is that it allows a charismatic milquetoast centrist to get elected.
The disadvantage of approval voting is that I'm not sure it allows anyone except a charismatic milquetoast centrist to get elected.
I'd like to see approval voting tried in earnest in meaningful elections in some nontrivial place for a few decades, to see how the political strategy landscape adapts to it, before adopting it on a wider scale. What kind of people would actually win elections? Once someone not-obviously-terrible got into power would they be practically impossible to dislodge? Would this actually be a good thing?
This is perhaps a non charitable interpretation, but those objections sound like the disadvantage is that it makes minority rule less of a possibility.
>Once someone not-obviously-terrible got into power would they be practically impossible to dislodge?
In current systems, are they not similarly impossible to dislodge?
But I agree, we need to see how it changes the political landscape. I think we could be surprised by how not-terrible a candidate can be under a different system.
I kind of like the idea of the head of state being a charismatic milquetoast centrist whose job it is to stare vaguely at the mess in Congress and try to get the parties to work together, occasionally handling crises via boring centrist means that both parties can agree upon, but usually doing nothing in particular.
One might call this new creation a preside-nt.
Regarding the question of whether the type of "populism" coming from people like Erdogan is an inherently "right-wing" phenomenon, you'd be straightened out by reading a good book about Hugo Chavez' Venezuela. As far as I'm aware, that book hasn't been written yet, but when it does I think you'll find it to be an eerily similar story with many of the same tricks for subverting institutions.
Some of your conclusions really remind me of Chris Arnade's from his book "Dignity". Have you read this?
It sounds like Erdogan, although gifted, was similar to most Turks: a working class Muslim, with roots in the hinterland of the country. And it sounds like he was a politician who rose through the ranks in the expected way until becoming prime minister/president. Whereas the natural American comparison, Trump, was a billionaire and a household name before he announced he was running for president.
I think this implies the pool of potential Erdogans in Turkey is much larger than is the pool of potential right wing populist U.S. presidents. The American Erdogan couldn't conceivably be a Republican politician who steadily rose from local to state/nationwide office, since that was exactly the type Trump, the only person resembling a right wing populist leader we have had to date, contrasted himself with in order to become the Republican nominee. And Trump being able to in large part self fund his 2016 campaign was important too, because he didn't have to rely on the Party as much and could therefore deviate from its orthodoxy. So basically just keep your eye on very prominent American billionaires.
"Medieval Turkey was dominated by the Ottoman Empire, ..."
This sentence mangles a lot of history. The Medieval period ends in the late 15th century. The Ottoman dynasty begins in 1299. Their home base was in western Anatolia between Ankara and Constantinople. They were quite expansionist from the 14th Century onward. They captured Bursa on the Sea of Marmara southwest of Constantinople and made it their capital in 1325. From there they expanded into the Balkans. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 ends the Byzantine Empire. Some see this moment as the end of the Middle Ages.
The Ottomans expanded east and west from Constantinople after that. By the middle of the 16th Century, they rule not just Anatolia and the Balkans but, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, and the Hijaz. They claim the Caliphate in 1517 after the conquest of Egypt. The Ottomans are an empire and a caliphate, but none of this is Medieval.
The Ottomans ruled a multinational empire. Its peoples were organized into millets, under which different national/confessional groups lived under their own personal laws. Greeks were under the Orthodox Church, Armenians under the Armenian Church, Muslims under Shariah, Jews under Halakah, etc. Like any pre-modern imperial state, the relationship between the central government and the peoples in the territories was pretty loose.
The language of administration was Ottoman Turkish which was more Persian and Arabic than Turkish and was written in the Perso Arabic script. It was rarely spoken. It was not a literary language either. People spoke their national languages at home.
The modern nation of Turkey is a creation of the post-Ottoman Turkish governments. They rearranged the ethnic map of Anatolia by population exchanges with Greece and the Armenian Genocide. They created the Turkish language, so much so, that they have had to translate speeches Ataturk made in the 1920s so that they are intelligible to modern Turks.
Erdogan’s story reminds me of the rise of Chavez and then Maduro in Venezuela. They also systematically stacked institutions with their loyalists, notably their supreme court, military, and intelligence services. And they also made claims of coup attempts against them to their benefit, although I don’t know whether those were supported by evidence (setting aside the National Assembly’s formation of a rival presidency after the dictatorship was already established). I am not sure that your closing comments about left- and right-wing populism fit well against the Venezuelan example, as it seems the populism-to-dictatorship process was similar in many respects, but from the opposite political direction.
Matt A has probably the best comment but it's buried at a sub level comment so I wanted to signal boost him:
"From above, Scott quoted:
> even though Erdogan got only 33% of the vote, he ended up with 67% of the seats in Parliament
Based on this, a good take-away might be that we shouldn't have systems that grant a minority of voters supermajority powers. The policy solution would be strive to have policies that more closely align vote totals with power/representation in government bodies."
It seems like the obvious places to look next for readings on the topic would be Orban's Hungary (which is often claimed, I don't know how reliably, to have started the same process) and Putin's Russia (which, again as I understand, briefly flirted with being a democracy before just being a Putinocracy). I'm not sure what other countries you'd want to look at; most countries that were democratic before becoming dictatorships were democratic for only a very brief period, and I can't think of any better cases to look at if you're worried about the U.S.
Does anyone else have any suggestions?
All the countries you've mentioned are still theoretically democracies, though, and all those people could theoretically be removed from power peacefully by the ballot box, unlike true dictatorships like China. Even in Russia it seems like Putin wins the actual elections fair and square, even if he does feel the need to murder anyone who might theoretically be a threat.
Singapore is another weird example. As far as I can tell it's a perfectly functional democracy set up with good-faith democratic institutions... it's just that the People's Action Party has never been out of power since the founding of the country in 1959. (Then again, the Democrats haven't been out of power in New Orleans since 1872, and they don't seem to be doing such a good job of running the city as the People's Action Party.)
Yeah, most countries that ever have been democracies claim to still be democracies, along with many countries that have never been democracies. (DPRK, anyone?)
But also, democracies are really, really resilient. It's definitely important that they don't go bad, but it's hard to find examples of them doing so where the country was actually democratic for a significant period first.
"fair and square" is a bit ridiculous, especially with your following caveat. But yeah, if Putin loses the majority of the population (which could happen any day now, or drag for another decade or two...) then he'll have to cede power or "officially" become a dictatorship (and considering the number of corpses in the closets, starting with the false flag "terrorist" attacks that helped his first election, he'll only leave dead...)
Is this the first time Scott's called himself a Libertarian?
I seem to recall his tongue-in-cheek policy is to be libertarian on mondays, wednesdays and fridays and left-wing on tuesdays and thursdays.
He regularly describes himself as a "left-libertarian". He occasionally shortens that to "liberal" or "libertarian." I don't think this is the first time he's shortened it to 'libertarian' without first prefixing it with 'left-' earlier in the article, but that's about a 70% 'don't think', not a 95%.
Two comments:
1. Not sure how appropriate the "fighting against entropy" example is to Turkey, considering ita regular coups to keep it a secular democracy. Seems like the secularists are the ones fighting against entropy.
2. Seeing parallels with Hong Kong here, though the specifics are obviously different (and HK isn't exactly a democracy). Court-packing is the one that stands out the most, cf. the sentences for a taxi driver driving into a crowd of protesters and a girl throwing an egg. Another is mass arrests of the opposition, though under "national security" rather than corruption (which Mainland China uses as well). Of course, the most important difference is that it's under PRC rule, which means democracy is an uphill battle, since the HK constitution favors Beijing.
I wrote a lot about the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey (I was a journalist at the time) and I eventually came to the likely conclusion that it was a false flag.
The official story is that a mysterious cabal known as the Peace at Home Council (whose members are still unknown, five years after the fact) used a small cadre of generals (who were all Erdogan opponents) who launched an incredibly disorganized and ineffective coup attempt that was easily squashed (despite previous military coups being tremendous successes), all while acting as the agents of the sinister and all-powerful Gulen (who had a high-profile falling out with Erdogan several years prior.)
In response, Erdogan accused all levels of Turkish society, from the police to the journalists to the teachers to the hospital administrators, of being secret infested with Gulenist agents who were somehow involved in the coup and therefore needed to be thrown in jail. Of course, this list of targets for arrest included almost every anti-Erdogan voice in a position of power that could conceivably be reached.
None of this scans to me as the presence of a massive, well-organized conspiracy... if they were so pervasive why was their coup attempt such a pathetic failure? Far more likely is that Erdogan got some patsy generals to take the fall so he could round up all his enemies and throw them in prison.
At the time I too felt that this was more of a staged attempt by Erdogan which gave him the excuse he needed to crush his opposition. As you say, previous military coups had been successful but this time round they couldn't manage it? And by a strange coincidence, everyone who needed to be rounded up as an enemy of the people was an enemy of Erdogan? It all seemed way too convenient, along with a Sinister Islamist Extremist Movement to be the fall-guys.
> So, again, can it happen here?
The answer is obviously yes. If instead of a sleepy Biden we get somebody energetic and eloquent, of FDR mold, it wouldn't even be hard. They'd own the academia, the media, the entertainment industry, the big business (most of it), the internet infrastructure... I struggle to identify one important institution they wouldn't own at least a majority. Most (like academia, education and press) they'd own overwhelmingly. Courts may be a bit of an impediment, but well-placed SCOTUS packing combined with a series of federal judge appointments would solve this issue very quickly.
Everything else is basically ready - we have information delivery field itching for "fighting misinformation" (i.e. censorship, which will be directed by "experts" - guess who gets to appoint those), we have an established tradition of kicking people out of offices for wrongthink, we have semi-legitimized political violence - from the right people doing it, of course!, we have military in the thousands in the capital without anybody giving a whistle, we have at least half of the country believing that unless drastic measures are taken armed insurrection is imminent, we have the same half of the country believing foreign nefatious forces are controlling their opponents, we have FBI and intelligence services actively participating in politics and more than ready and willing to deliver "process crimes" against literally anybody, and now we have the top miliraty brass slowly but surely joining them too. And having active infrastructure to spy on literally anybody, maybe they don't even need to fabricate much to deal with their opposition... And if a random judge would object, there's always administrative state which can ruin anybody's life without the need for criminal law per se. And yes, of course, we have a religion to go with it, from soft-woke moderates who just want to tell people what to wear, what to eat, which books to read and so on, to hardcore CRT imams who are itching for full-blown racial discrimination laws and trillions-wide reparations budget that they would control.
If somebody who is really energetic, charismatic - and, say, has a good luck to preside over an economic boom, which frequently follows economic contraction (say, caused by a pandemic and lockdowns?) - which exactly institution is going to stop them?
> Having ideas about the Deep State and attempted coups floating around, sounding vaguely credible, was a major factor in Erdogan's success. The more skeptical we can be of that sort of thing, the better.
Right until the moment the coup actually happens, and then oopsie... I guess we'd be more vigilant in our next democracy, whenever that happens?
Interesting, but I don't think the powers that be would be willing to accept the "bad optics" of installing a dictator for life. What's the use, when you can keep the power in the same hands while swapping out the figurehead every four to eight years?
Well, technically Putin is not a dictator for life. He has been President, then Prime Minister, then President, then Prime Minister, then President again, then when his completely legit terms were nearing the end, by a miraculous coincidence Russia decided to change their constitution and reset the terms counter - of course, for ever President, not just Putin, who by another miraculous coincidence happened to be the President then... so all this talk about "dictator for life" is just the lack of imagination. And of course, he won completely honest elections each time - despite widespread conspiracy theories about it, there's no evidence recognized by a Russian court that there ever has been any election irregularities in Russia, at least none that could have influenced the election results.
So, you don't even need to swap anybody, just be a bit more imaginative.
Scott,
"Populism" is an irregular noun/adjective. It goes like this:
1. I enjoy broad democratic support.
2. You're a populist
3. He's an evil demagogue.
No, I feel fairly certain that the idea of "populism" is more than Russell conjugation. Refer to the top-level comments by PS and jon37.
This sounds snooty lit-crit of me to write, but I do need to call out Scott's diction:
"If he'd died of a heart attack in 2008, we might remember him as a successful crusader against injustice [...] Young Erdogan decided that supporting Erbakan's crusade..."
"Crusade"? Seriously? Given who and what we're talking about, there's a much more apposite word that begins with J.
However, "crusade" has largely fossilized and lost its original meaning (nobody called a "crusader" today is suspected of mounting a horse and galloping to liberate Jerusalem), the J-word is very much alive and colloquially means a very specific very violent movements - which as far as I know Erdogan is not affiliated with, despite common religion.
He's indirectly affiliated with it, considering the Macron/Erdogan spat over coranic schools.
Also, the correct term is "Mujahideen" - "Jihadist" is a western neologism designed to separate the "bad guys" from the "good guys", even though they're basically the same guys.
Correct term in Arabic, but we're speaking English here (mostly).
My point is that mujaheddin *was* the term used before 2001 in *English* to refer to them ! (<= this one was the spelling that my *English* dictionary corrected me to, the previous one was from Wikipedia)
I think before 2001 the militant radical Islam was considered a regional issue of low concern for the West, and thus did not need a popular term to describe it. Once that changed, the terminology got "popularized", just as for example many diseases and health conditions that are common among the populace have popular names beside scientific names (flu, cold, heartburn, rash, etc.)
While it was certainly of lower concern, it was still a pretty important one in the proxy war that the two western blocs carried in Muslim countries. Your theory doesn't explain why, instead of the original English term having been simplified to something like "mugdin", a brand new term was created.
> Businessmen and tycoons who Erdogan needed swept aside got accused of tax fraud, or sometimes just audited with such a fine-toothed comb
How about that time when IRS turned out to be engaged in political persecution, and then their hard drives had mysteriously suffered an epidemic of crashes? Can anybody remind me whose tax returns were just recognized by SCOTUS as fair game for fishing expeditions?
> I wonder if we should trade off our ability to catch corrupt officials and tax evaders, in favor of very high burdens of proof for those specific misdeeds.
Ah, but the funny thing you don't even need to find the tax fraud. Any false statement, even the most trivial, would do. Any violation of a myriad of process rules (like speaking with a wrong person at a wrong time - hello "witness intimidation"!, or losing any paper - hello "destruction of evidence"!) would do. In a pinch, there's always RICO where no proof of the specific crime is needed. In the worst case, the process itself is a punishment - how much does it cost to keep a lawyer involved for years? How much would it cost to your family to do the same? To your business partners? To everybody you hold dear? What if we also apply 4am searches, civil forfeiture, account lockdowns, travel restrictions, redflagging and other niceties?
Just raising burden of proof wouldn't be nearly enough - about 95% of cases in the US don't need any burden of proof at all because they never even see the court. The state has a lot of ways to play dirty.
> How about that time when IRS turned out to be engaged in political persecution
Not for the first time either.
https://www.amazon.com/Power-Destroy-Political-Kennedy-Nixon/dp/1566634520
https://www.wnd.com/2003/09/20617/
https://web.archive.org/web/20111111141221/http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/08/reuther-memorandum-1961.html
Yes, of course. Using security apparatus - including the administrative state - against political enemies doesn't seem to be something that never happens in the US. In the recent case there also wasn't any serious punishment to the perpetrators, and while Nixon actions are more or less universally considered to be villainy, I feel like IRS actions are seen differently depending on politics and there's no barrier to repeat it as soon as opportunity and need arises. While somebody who the Deep State considers to be an enemy (like Trump) would have very hard time pulling it off, somebody who is aligned with its goals would have no resistance at all to doing it at any time.
And of course comparing Kennedy and Nixon is very illustrative here. If Kennedy hasn't been a victim of an assassin and if he wasn't a Democrat, his actions and personal behaviour should have been seen way worse than Nixon's - but he's a Democrat and Nixon is a Republican, so all political historians agree that Kennedy is a saint and a martyr and Nixon is a devil incarnate.
> Just raising burden of proof wouldn't be nearly enough - about 95% of cases in the US don't need any burden of proof at all because they never even see the court.
Burden of proof still matters. What plea bargain defendants are willing to accept, if any, depends on what their chances are like if they choose to go to trial, I presume.
I suspect most defendants pleading out are not very good in evaluating chances over burden of proof, since they aren't the lawyers and they don't know which kind of proof the police might have. They will also be assisted by a public defendant that has 20 cases running simultaneously, so for her the incentive to plead out in any case where it looks remotely plausible is overwhelming. The calculus would probably go as "go to the court with 15 charges after which anything could happen, maybe you win, maybe you get 15 years in jail, or plead out on one count and get 6 months and we're done right now". Even if the defendant were a perfectly rational human with outstanding capability in rational estimation of chances (which most aren't) they don't have proper information to make informed decision substantially depending on burden of proof - and pretty much everybody else in the process will be pressuring them to plead out. So I don't think changing burden of proof alone would change _that_ much - unless the change is so radical it's obvious without any special education and long calculation of chances. I.e. if you make it "pretty much impossible to prove" - yes, that may change things, but that won't happen.
"pubic defender", of course. I hate how I can't edit comments here...
If we are talking about political persecutions targeting important people (politicians, businessmen etc.), they will be able to afford to have a lawyer advise them.
For the big boys, maybe, though as we learn from Gen. Flynn's example, sometimes it doesn't help - the State has much more money and many more lawyers than you do, and the clock doesn't work in your favor. Eventually your money runs out and you're forced to cut your losses. To discourage and neutralize more low-level supporters, even that wouldn't be necessary - most middle-class people couldn't afford even a small pressure from the State.
Most defendants pleading out are *guilty*. Making it substantially harder to convict guilty people, will enable guilty people (even ones with overworked public defenders) to negotiate better deals with less punishment. Which, in turn, will make crime a more attractive proposition.
Most everyone else, *wants* criminals to be harshly punished, on the theory that punishing criminals makes for less crime and crime is bad. If they see criminals getting slap-on-the-wrist plea bargains because actually convicting them is too hard, and they can't do anything about the "hard to convict people" part, they're going to ratchet up the sentences so that even after the plea bargains the punishments will seem fair to them. That's how we get three-strikes laws with mandatory life in prison for any felony. Or to make it even easier, we can go with the old English system where basically every crime the law noticed was an automatic death sentence, and the real action was in the private negotiations with the prosecutor.
If some poor schmuck, even an innocent one, winds up accused of e.g. car theft, they are going to have two choices. They can plead guilty and sit in jail for however long the people feel is appropriate for car theft, or they can demand a trial and if convicted spend *more* time in jail for having wasted the court's time. The harder it is to convict the actually guilty, the greater the extra penalty will be for making the court go through all that trouble. That's the one knob you actually get to turn.
Fascinating stuff! Aspects I'd like to understand better:
- The Gulenists. The post makes them sound like a cross between Scientology and the Mafia but I'm hesitant to accept that framing since it tracks so closely with the story Erdogan is pushing. One could, if motivated, tell a similar story about Catholics in the US-- minority religious sect (though 20% to the Gulenists' <2%), heavily involved in certain kinds of educational institutions, clear majority on the Supreme Court-- but (almost) no one's suggesting a conspiracy there. Is there a version of this where they're just a socially conservative faction that's unusually effective at education and networking? (And if so, what accounts for their falling-out with Erdogan?)
- The Europhiles. Normally I think Europhile = neoliberal = arch-nemesis of right-wing populism. How did they end up in Erdogan's coalition? For that matter, who was *out* of Erdogan's coalition? Scott's post mentions Europhiles, Islamists, the center-right-- who's left? The military? Socialists maybe? (Are they big in Turkey?) How did Erdogan hold such an overwhelming and broad coalition together?
- Scott's theory of light-touch populism being impossible. It's interesting and helpful for understanding current politics, but I worry that there's a hidden assumption driving the broader conclusions Scott draws. His model unduly privileges the idea of high-state-capacity, centralized, bureaucratic government as being "normal" when historically it's not. It's particularly jarring when he describes the managerial practices of the elites as "all the organic processes of civil society". From where I stand they're more like vampires puppeteering the corpses of those organic processes (local government and press, neighbor / kin relationships, churches, etc.). I'd like to see how Scott's typology might change if we stop holding the modern administrative state constant.
"And if so, what accounts for their falling-out with Erdogan?"
Only one backside can sit on the throne at a time?
Indeed, historically it's not normal. But are you seriously interested to go "back" to pre-civilized times ? Bureaucracy is a pre-requisite for civilization, in particular for the modern nation-states. (It's possible that the Internet allows for a radically different method of gathering and processing information and then acting on it, but I wouldn't bet on it, especially for the acting part...)
And one more thing - changing US constitution also requires a simple majority. You just need to know where to place that majority - specifically, in the SCOTUS. SCOTUS has been able to turn Interstate Commerce Clause into "Congress can regulate whatever they like, as long as it can be sold", find various "rights" that never existed before in "penumbras" of constitutional texts, enable Congress to force people to perform any action by levying punitive taxes on not doing the thing, legitimize forcible transfer of property from one person to another as long as the state thinks the new owner would be more economically productive, and do many other things like that. And once you have the "living Constitution" proponents in the majority, there's literally nothing that one can't find in its penumbras. The text on paper remains the same, but who cares? It's just words, and US legal system has no real connection to these words beyond what SCOTUS allows to exist by their actions. And by now, this connection is so tenuous that "unconstitutional" has long become just a meaningless pejorative and SCOTUS is just one of many partisan institutions, routinely used in partisan political struggle. Just like the Koran stays the same, but it's the ruler that defines whether for specific country it means hijabs or no hijabs, the SCOTUS can decide for the US - and in appropriate circumstances, with the right majority, can decide hijabs - or masks - are now mandated and it's fully constitutional.
Obvious caveat: I am aware that there is a reasonable case to made that the written language of US constitution sets some limits on what interpretations are possible, so I am not agreeing.
However.
This whole framing "who is able to interpret the written book of law and make their interpretation stick no matter how twisted the interpretation is, and what role the living tradition plays on the matter anyway" reminds me quite much about one earlier debacle from some centuries ago, which started with one monk called Martin Luther in Wittenberg.
Thus, maybe there is something to be said for the Bible's feature that the text does not clearly and unambiguously specify any mortal person or Earthly institution as the ultimate authority concerning the matters of contention. (Okay, I am obviously referring to the the NT, which is very not much like a codified legal text, but a collection of teachings and events attributed to Jesus, some letters concerning the management of the church and a prophetic revelation about apocalypse; the OT specifies some procedures regarding high priests and kings in Israel, but understandably these are not considered applicable in this context.) Thus despite the obvious tendency of ruling and rule-making hierarchies to appear, such haphazard structure enables possibility some chance for a challenge and competition that can be viewed as legitimate by enough people for it to matter, especially so if the decisions by any hierarchy veer too far from the common sense interpretation of codified law and there is widespread access to the written texts.
The Indian right's weaponization of 'anti-corruption' movements to both defeat their political opponents and convince MPs to switch parties under threat of endless raids and prosecution is another piece of evidence that this sort of rhetoric is not to be trusted. I'm very convinced that it's worth increasing the likelihood that individual acts of corruption go unpunished in order to make the facade of eradicating it less easy to use as a coercive weapon, not least because these so-called reformers almost always end up being just as corrupt as their predecessors. Corruption is a symptom of weak institutions, and it cannot actually be rooted out through campaigns that target particular individuals instead of the structures and incentives that surround them. In fact, I would even make a stronger claim: 'high corruption' is the natural state of human society, and the few countries that have low corruption all became rich before they got rid of it. Nobody gets rich by eradicating corruption *first* -- rather, you want to ensure that your corrupt plutocrats are interested in growing the pie so that the value of their cut increases rather than just commandeering more and more of a fixed or shrinking pie.
Re: three recomendation for shoring up American democracy:
Agree that court packing is obviously a maneuver that could BREAK EVERYTHING,
but that was never something I seriously doubted, and I suppose only a partisan
could ever consider that move anything but balance destroying. Separation of tax
fraud and FBI investigation from the executive is interesting and something I've
put no thought to, but the question becomes, what means separate, and doesn't
that fuel further conspiracy concerning the deep state? Last, I feel three is
missing the greater half of what 2/3 majorities are actually supposed to
accomplish, which is delegation of power farther from the capital.
This is not a right-wing/left-wing thing. It is simply an elites/masses thing. The dynamic you (I think correctly) describe is one in which a right-wing person who comes to power cannot rely on the unthinking loyalty of other elites in society in the same way as the left-winger does. But this is only because you have posited a left-wing cultural/academic elite. If you have a right-wing elite (I'm British - there are people old enough to recall a right-wing cultural/academic elite in this country) then the same dynamic would appear with an outside left-winger coming to power. That is precisely the dynamic one sees in Communist revolutions: the revolutionaries seize political power, but they cannot rely on the loyalty of the leadership of the armed forces, the police, the courts, the media, big business, the professions, universities, etc, and so these organisations need to be purged.
To put it another way, consider the difference between a Jedi and a non-Jedi coming to power in a modern Western country. The norm is non-Jedis, and they can rely on the unthinking support of non-Jedis running the other institutions. But when a Jedi comes to power (on the wave of popular protest against traditional left- and right-wing parties) and tries to set up a main Jedi Temple in the capital, and compulsory Jedi training for children, and Jedi warriors in the armed forces - well, you can imagine the kinds of pushback and foot-dragging and legal challenges that would ensue. So the Jedi finds it a good idea to find ways to install Jedis at the top of these institutions. Nothing right-wing or left-wing about it.
The upshot is that any society is most at risk of revolution from groups which are a combination of (a) popular and (b) not permitted elite representation. A big prudential reason for universities, arts organisations, media etc allowing right-wing views to be represented at high levels is to reduce the possibility of them being forcibly re-made should a right-winger come to power. (And vice versa in societies with right-wing institutions.)
Finally, just an observation, but while "“Take government control of industries” was a left-wing idea a few years, it sounds more and more right-wing as time goes on.
The issue is basing your definition of "left-wing" and "right-wing" on specific political parties, like these couldn't radically change in such a short amount of time as half a century.
'The important point is that elite government can govern with a light touch, because everything naturally tends towards what they want and they just need to shepherd it along. But popular/anti-elite government has a strong tendency toward dictatorship, because it won't get what it wants without crushing every normal organic process'
I'm not sure that's the lesson here. The Republic of Turkey's secular institutions -- good or bad -- were installed inorganically by a dictatorship (Ataturk's). They then produced a (frequently authoritarian) elite often ruthlessly loyal to those institutions, and counter-elites hostile to them.
Erdogan has basically just gone about the same thing in reverse. The old secular elites still exist in the background -- either submitting to Erdogan or marginalised -- but he has gone about bringing down their institutions and recreating them to form a new elite loyal to his vision of society. How this will play out over the long term is yet to be decided.
So perhaps the real lesson is that regimes tend to be authoritarian until they have brought the elite and society to heel, then they may ease off after reaching a certain point of stability and security?
Also, at the end of the day the institutions in nearly all countries which select the elite are universities, and arguably these are quite 'inorganic': in the digital world there is no practical need for their credentials to have the power they have, but it serves the status quo for there to be defined routes to intellectual, elite and ultimately political legitimacy. And when it comes to choosing who should have credentials conferred upon them, the top schools often place a heavy emphasis on factors aside from raw merit.
Interestingly this mirrors something you touch on briefly in your article: in Turkey the university system was effectively rigged (inorganically) to keep out religious conservatives -- excluding them from an elite they otherwise had the ability to be a part of, and making them hostile to it. Could there be parallels with the US and the west at the moment?
Damn, I thought all the accusation against Kaczyński and PiS in Poland were absurd - not only because the opposition screamed "end of democracy is nigh" as soon as PiS got into power postion, and because the accusation under the previous rule were so obviously fake - but after this review I am not so sure.
"As a libertarian" Is this just meant to be provocative? I've yet to come across any coherent account of libertarianism that wasn't at bottom contrary in practice to the ends desired by the promoter. Don't you mean something along the lines of, "As someone who only favors government laws, policies, and regulations that I suspect, given whatever limited domain-specific understanding I have, are one the whole beneficial?" What do you mean by "libertarian" and should other people understand the term to mean what you mean?
Scott posted "A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto" on his old blog SSC back in 2013. He also posted "The Non-Libertarian FAQ" about a year or so before that which was arguments against Libertarianism, although when he reposted it in 2017 he said "It no longer completely reflects my current views. I don’t think I’ve switched to believing anything on here is outright false, but I’ve moved on to different ways of thinking about certain areas." So yes, as far as I know, Scott identifies as at least libertarian-ish.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
Thanks for the links. IMO, it appears that he's just being provocative in the blunt statement in the piece. I mean, I also don't like "too much" regulation or social control, I like just the right amount of regulation and social control, not more, and not less.
And since we're born into the state of nature naked and with no regulation or social control, a reasonable default stance is that society should not introduce such "regulations", except when they would be useful, in which case we should have them. So I guess I am a "libertarian" like Scott, in that my position is that people who want regulation and social control solely for the sake of regulation and social control, even though it impoverishes society and makes people less happy, are ideological adversaries.
I support the good and deplore the bad, so I join with Scott in embracing our collective libertarianness and denouncing those who believe society should be directed toward the general promotion of misery and unhappiness. I sometimes forget who those people are though, perhaps the Rothchilds, maybe critical race theorists, or the Chinese, possibly muggles, mayhaps anti-smokers? Maybe abortionists, pedophiles, satanists, fornicators, communists, I dunno, I forget, but I'm pretty sure they're up to no good and could use a dose of good ole libertarianism to set them straight.
(This initially posted twice, so I tried to delete one, and it appears to have deleted both copies, so this is a second attempt to post the same thing.)
There's plenty of people who are well-intentioned with a policy that nonetheless has unintended bad consequences. A lot of libertarian critique of regulation focuses on just that, how well-intentioned policies can have bad outcomes.
Of course, there's also the libertarian critique that politicians are just as self-interested as CEOs, and political self-interest might not align with the populace (see public choice theory).
There are plenty of people who are well-intentioned about not having a policy, with bad consequences. I think things like meat inspection, dental licensing, widespread access to healthcare, and antitrust law are good, though they likely have some bad outcomes. One approach to policy preferences is to evaluate policies on a case by case basis and decide, through some democratic process, whether they are more beneficial than harmful. Sure, it's a suboptimal mess, but it's pretty much the only option in the real world. To me Scott's use of "libertarian" is just stating a bias that caution is warranted and there are often unforeseen consequences. That's true, but there are also often harms that can and should be addressed.
The Myth of the Rational Voter provides a solid critique of democratic approaches to decision-making. Voters have consistent biases, such as anti-market, anti-foreign, make work, and pessimism biases, and these biases lead to voting for bad policies. And given the incentives involved in voting, where expending a lot of effort to become informed and reduce your biases still leads to your vote counting just as much as your ignorant neighbor (which is a less than a one in a million chance at your vote being decisive), it doesn't pay to become informed.
For another good take on why we shouldn't expect good results from political decision-making, see David Friedman discussing market failure, and why it's an exception in private markets but common in politics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vht--IPjikg
Not sure if "And since we're born into the state of nature naked and with no regulation or social control" is part of the satire, but we aren't : humans are social animals, there's a reason why exile was often used as a punishment close to being a death sentence.
Just a small note: "recalbrating" is spelt wrong.
As far as I understand it, populism used to be associated with left-wing economic policies that would have some immediate effect on poorer workers (e.g. protectionism, enforced wage increases) while cutting against mainstream economic theory about what's best for the whole economy.
No, the first Populists were anti-protectionism :
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/
I mean : yes about the poorer workers.
Also interesting to compare to the Communists who *were* against immigration :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_Association#Origins
(I guess that the lesson is that fundamentally, left-wing parties are concerned about the power of the working class, and any specific policies about protectionism and immigration are contingent on the situation.)
Just checking, is this a book-review-contest book review?
I was wondering that too.
No, it sounds way too Scott.
I'm reminded of this article, about how India's limited state capacity means that it probably should let some things go that developed countries regulate: https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_24_2_01_rajagopalan.pdf
I don't know if the argument extends from food safety to corruption, but it is plausible that prosecuting low-level corruption is more expensive than ignoring it when a country is still low-income or middle-income. The argument about limited police resources is definitely relevant.
Alternatively, perhaps we should adopt the heuristic that corruption in such countries is too rampant to actually stamp out, and therefore most corruption investigations are themselves corrupt. Maybe that just squeezes the excuse to some other crime instead, though.
Re: populism. Populist leftism definitely exists. The first image on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism is an OWS sign. Bernie and AOC are probably the most notable American leftist populists. Yes, they aren their supporters tend to be educated and work in influential knowledge professions, but I think what matters more is the group's own perception, and in particular their rhetoric. They try to position themselves as defenders of the poor against the exploitative rich, and use similar language as right-wing populists, just with different groups as the "people" and the "elite."
There was a clear pattern to the repression of the Islamist movement in Turkey. The army and the judiciary felt that they did not have the backing to totally eradicate them (like they did to the communists), but kept picking the most egregious examples and pruning them with political bans and jail time. This has created an environment of artificial selection in the Islamist movement where the most cunning, skilful and politically savvy individuals easily rose up to the top, as the less savvy people around them were taken out by the military. Such people had no qualms with breaking the rules, since the rules were obviously rigged against them and wielded non-charitably. This is the environment that formed Erdogan's political personality and made him thrive.
This situation has a clear parallel to the contemporary Western countries where it is becoming increasingly acceptable to censor and ostracise (but never entirely eradicate) political actors who do have popular backing. Trump and the new wave of "counter-domestic terrorism" rhetoric is the prime example but this is far from unique. Such weak but unfair and unpopular repression risks breeding leaders who have the moral conviction and the political savvy to really burn it all.
Both this deep review by Astral Codex Ten and selden's a-must comment somewhere in the threads are well worth reading: multiple analogies (in the USA and in Europe) come to mind despite the disclaimer.
An advantageous and unique geopolitical location of Turkey, poised on the map to rule as a trading and military power, is curbed by the inner squabbles and frequent rotations of elites... Hard to say, for the best or the worst, as the male-populist democracy is defended by feared Islamic fundamentalists by non-democratic means, and the Western and EU- style democracy is defended by all-male multiple military coups, supported by women's liberation movements...
What a puzzle, what an invitation to think outside boxes... Erdogan's predicament on a personal level is well-analyzed in this balanced article and well-complemented in the selden's comment.
Off-topic, I only run into this blog due to the NYT scandal, the moral of which is "never talk to reporters" :( of NYT: it is an outrageous bridge of professional ethics, what they have done tp Astral, and in combination with their recent gang-style jumping of a distinguished reporter, ousted after being provoked by his bored entitled charges on a Peruvian trip, and other mini-elite rotations of their own, NYT as a venerable newspaper is losing readers' respect, actually re-directing to a freer to self-express bloggers.
In a broader sense, NYT is getting rid of "competition" both in their inner bickerings and online, because nobody in their opinion can have a voice but the outlets aligned with their own wildly swinging "party line" at each given instant. This sucks!
So thank you for maintaining this blog.
Henrichs The Weirdest People in the World kind of kills modernization theory and Inglehart, and thus partly the thrive/survive model. The new interesting question becomes how to make a culture weird and abolish kinintensive institutions. Japan did it throught the Meijirestauration, and China came a long way though obviously not all the way to democratic ideals. MENA-countries may be the furthest from Weird, and the question becomes why - is it Islam and the Ok for cousin marriages? Anyhow, Turkey seems like the perfect case study, telling us something about what will happen if we try to force Weird:ness on an islamic/kinintensive/nepotistic population. The constant corruotion errode the Proto-weird elites, which by the way is less weird than embedded in informal contacts and nepotism, ie kinintensive structures. And the authoritarian ubdercurrent is there to be channeled through Erdogan when time comes to scale back the Weirdness.
I have to admit that when Scott declares himself a Libertarian, I don’t know what he is talking about anymore than what today is a conservative.
In anycase, in the political sphere, In the 2020 presidential election, the Libertarian Party candidate, Jo Jorgensen, gained 1.2 percent of the vote, less than half the party’s 2016 election result.
{ https://tinyurl.com/What-Happened-Election }
The Libertarian Delusion
{https://prospect.org/power/libertarian-delusion/ }
Libertarian and "externality"
The Libertarian Civil Rights Paradox
{ https://tinyurl.com/Libertarian-Paradox )
Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View
{ https://www.jstor.org/stable/3557960?seq=1 }
The dangers of illiberal liberalism
{ https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/08/17/the-dangers-of-illiberal-liberalism }
The Anatomy of Illiberal States - Brookings Institution
{ https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/illiberal-states-web.pdf }
1997 Fareed Zakaria The Rise of Illiberal Democracy
{https://www.jstor.org/stable/20048274?seq=1}
Confronting Illiberalism
{https://freedomhouse.org/report/nations-transit/2018/confronting-illiberalism}
For those missing context, the blog author has written about libertarianism previously on the old blog platform some years back.
The Non-Libertarian FAQ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/22/repost-the-non-libertarian-faq/
A Something Sort Of Like Left-Libertarianism-ist Manifesto
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/08/a-something-sort-of-like-left-libertarianism-ist-manifesto/
There is also his review of Machinery of Freedom
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/18/book-review-the-machinery-of-freedom/
I find myself agreeing with that I don't know what declaration of being a libertarian practically means today either, both in general and in author's case in particular. Anyhow, the linked posts and comments therein may tell something about what kind of discussion about the matter there had been had in past, however.
Great post, thanks. My only solution (to no dictator here in US) is to make the congress take back the power they have given up to the president. I don't know how to do that.
What does suggestion number 3 mean? Hacking the 2/3 majority sounds like getting around it. Are you in favor of further gutting of the filibuster?
Dystopian vision of US. Gulen schools = Elite colleges and uni's. Control of media and message is already going on. All we need is populist president from the left to pick up the reins and run with it. (I couldn't read all the replies and still get out into the sun today.)
A quibble on where the lines get drawn between you, the elite, and me, the hoi polloi. I strongly suspect terms such as elites and the populace are bankrupt shells, standing in for little else than attempts at in-group/out-group distinctions. Witness the example of "Passion of the Christ" as an anti-elite production, but one clearly produced by people who are elites. And me? I used the term hoi polloi and I work in the media, so I'm a cultural elite. But I went to a public college, so I'm a man of the people? In a coastal state? Elite! But one in the mid-Atlantic that's won numerous national championships in revenue-producing sports, so back into the unwashed masses? I dunno, but in the US at least (your mileage may vary in other countries), when you scratch the anti-elites, it's easy to see a whole lot of eliteness right underneath the signifiers of populism. What does it all mean? I've been coming to the hypothesis that any anti-elite movement in the US that claims to be punching up can easily be seen as punching down without having to contort one's self into too painful of a position. Secondary hypothesis: We have it pretty good in my country. So good that you can't create any movement with enough power to demand attention that is not arguably elite along some metric.
"Populist" just tends to mean "widely popular democratically elected official the media/academic and/or business corporate elite don't like." They've only succeeded in making it pejorative the last few years.
It seems to me the most natural way to prevent us democracy from devolving into dictatorships is to
1. Stop having presidents, seems much less likely for a senate majority leader to turn dictatorial than a president.
2. Have multiparty systems such that single party governments are very uncommon, coalition governments seem much less prone to dictatorships.
Both of these recommendations sound good, but they don't apply to this particular example.
1. Erdogan rose to power as prime minister, not president. Turkey's president had effectively no power before a referendum in 2017 changed Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential system. Conveniently, this was shortly after Erdogan found himself term-limited as prime minister.
2. Turkey is a multiparty system and typically has 4 parties represented in parliament. Most democratic governments in Turkey from the 1960s-2002 were led by a coalition.
"I think this is the main reason why Erdogan's example doesn't generalize to other countries. What went wrong in Turkey was mostly Turkey-specific, a reckoning for Turkey’s unique flaws. Erdogan rose to power on credible promises to help people disenfranchised by the old system; by the time he turned the tables and started disenfranchising others in turn, it was too late to root him out. "
I don't think this is really Turkey-specific; in fact, I think this is the most common path to dictatorship in the modern era. Certainly if you dive down into the details you'll find "Turkey's unique flaws", which aren't exactly the same as Venezuela's unique flaws, Cuba's unique flaws, Egypt's unique flaws, Rhodesia's unique flaws, etc, etc. But there's generally a large number of (usually poor) effectively disenfranchised people who feel they are getting a raw deal from the present regime, and there's a Chavez or a Castro or a Nasser or a Mugabe (etc, etc) who aside from personal ambition also sincerely wants to help those people.
And I suspect *doesn't* specifically want to be a dictator, but the reason the people he's trying to help are poor and disenfranchised isn't just because the top people in the old regime were Evil Oppressors. So when he sweeps away the old regime and things don't automatically get better, when he tries to implement reforms and finds that the remaining power centers in the nation are opposing him, well, the poor oppressed people need to be helped and if anyone is getting in the way of that, well, *those* people need to be disenfranchised. And it's easy to make yourself believe it is *good* to disenfranchise those people, because they are the Obstructionist Deep State (or whatever).
So the lesson shouldn't be "It won't happen that way here because that was a Turkey-specific thing". The only Turkey-specific thing about it was that the specific set of poor disenfranchised people the proto-dictator was trying to help (or cynically use to climb his way to power) were Islamists. In the United States, it won't be Islamists. But the rest of it, will probably look a lot like Erdogan in Turkey.
also,
"In this model, left-wing populism would be someone trying the same thing, except using economic rather than cultural class war. I don’t know enough about this to have a good feeling for whether it has exactly the same pathologies or subtly different ones."
I think in this model, left-wing populism is going to manifest as communism, or if that's a dirty word as some communism-adjacent form of socialism. The elites, as you note, find themselves at the top of everything, which means they're at the top of the economy. And first in line to claim the economic benefits, e.g. yachts and private jets and mansions. This may still be the best possible outcome for everyone, because "Elites manage the economy as efficiently as possible and then selflessly give it all away" isn't a thing humans are going to do. But when there's a big enough economic downturn and the Elite are conspicuously not going hungry, it's going to be real popular to say that the Elites owning all the factories and deciding how much to pay the workers, the Elites owning all the apartment buildings and deciding what rent to charge, is part of the problem and so the popular will is to take (operational control of) those things away from the Elites and give it to, well, there will have to be some centralized committee representing the people en masse.
So if you're looking for what form the pathologies will take, I think the pathologies of communism, "Bolivaran socialism", etc, are farily well documented. They aren't identical to the pathologies of right-wing populism, but some of them look pretty close.
Might it manifest, like it already did in the US, as Populism ?
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/05/how-the-anti-populists-stopped-bernie-sanders/
>Since all natural organic processes favor elites, if the government wants to win, it will have to destroy everything natural and organic
Far-left populism runs into the pareto principle, trying to maintain an equal distribution in universe that wants the top 20% to get 80% of the stuff.
> "Anti corruption campaign" seems to be a code word for "arresting the enemies of people in power", whether in Erdogan's Turkey or Xi's China. I'm not sure what to do about it without leaving corruption in place, but, uh, maybe we should leave corruption in place. Hard to say.
This is wrong, but only because of a lack in perspective. People who live in non corrupt countries are really bad at simulating how everyday corruption is in some parts of the world and just how damaging that is to society. There are countries where it is common and expected to bribe teachers for your kids grades, bribe government officials to not interfere in your business... the list goes on and on. It also infects everyone. Not bribing people puts you at a significant disadvantage, but bribing people then makes you forever guilty of bribery if you ever upset the wrong person. This actively suppresses any kind of dissent. It also results in a less equal, less fair more paralyzed society and sinks trust in any kind of public institution.
So - if you have a society past the "total societal corruption threshold" (Turkey, China, India... etc) then anti-corruption campaigns are bad because everyone is corrupt and the campaign will only go after whomever the people in power want to go after.
But, in countries that aren't past that point, anti-corruption campaigns are good because we need to get rid of corrupt people. Both because corruption is bad, and because we really, really want to avoid having our society slip past the total societal corruption threshold.
It gets even worse : in my experience a lot of people in these countries don't believe that it's even possible to have it otherwise, and when you give examples where you *didn't* have to use bribes to do X, they don't believe you.
I'm surprised by the lack of commentary here about the role of the military in the Turkey example vs. the U.S. and West generally.
Clearly in the U.S. the military has an enviable nonpartisan reputation - and consistent track record of not interfering with the election process. That contrasts with a significant number of countries that have experienced a Turkey-style drift toward authoritarianism.
It was notable that Trump rather desperately switched out a significant number of Pentagon and Intelligence nominees in the weeks immediately preceding the election and inauguration. FWIW I'd argue several of those 'acting' (not approved by Senate) changes bolster the case that he DID think a post-election coup was possible.
And yet it failed. Despite some questionable delays in approving National Guard support for the Capitol, there were several important signals sent by the Joint Chiefs indicating that they would not play ball. It sure would be interesting to have access to the Pentagon email servers for the month of Jan - to confirm or deny what those political appointees were really doing.
That's definitely possible - alternate explanation being that he anticipated a contested election, and wanted to lessen the chances of being removed from office by the military.
Agreed. Equally plausible.
Point being that in many undemocratic power transfers the military effectively has veto powers, yet we in America seem to be reasonably distant from that reality despite Trump's recent attempts to politicize the institution.
I think the left-wing populism equivalent of having to crush the natural processes of the elite culture and politics is the basic premise of the "I, Pencil" documentary. The emergent order of the modern economy is far too complex to centrally plan and every heavy handed state intervention is crushing that emergent order and coded price information. I think the parallels are in fact quite extensive -- think of it from the perspective of your own writing on the cost dilemma regarding health care or higher education.
Nope! You're wrong.
Relevant to ACX takeaway: Charter Schools have a massive and terrifying failure mode that would never have occurred to anyone.
Not following your reasoning, nor how this connects to the book. Explain further?
Seems like a joke about the Gulanists. Start charter schools -> something -> charter school illuminati packs courts and installs dictator.
Long time reader, never poster.
This book review resonated with me a lot. Probably, because I live in a dictatorship which somewhat tries to resemble democracy. I'll have to reflex a bit about it all, there seems to be some interesting insights between the lines. For now, I'd like to point this:
"I wonder if we should trade off our ability to catch corrupt officials and tax evaders, in favor of very high burdens of proof for those specific misdeeds."
This resembles 10% barrier, invented to prevent fundamentalists from holding power and which allowed Erdogan to get a majority with only 30% votes. Such ideas may work for a while but when they fail, they fail hard and right into tyrrany.
I mean, in my country we've implemented exactly this. One can make a full scale investigation with documental proofs and videos made from drone, showing huge palace, costing approximately billion of dollars, given as a bribe to the president of the country, post it on youtube, get tens of millions of views and still it's not enough proof to even start an official investigation of the matter.
And then the leader of non-govermental non-profit organisation which made the investigation will be jailed for obviously fake crimes. In modern Russia corruption investigates you.
So, maybe making its easier for the officials to get away from societal control is a bad idea? If the goverment controls the court, no amount of burden of proof is high enough for them. And if corruption is easier to conduct, it seems to be easier for the goverment to take over the justice system.
The part V very much describes the Belarusian dictatorship as well. Although there are some other factors at play in Belarus too.
Maybe I missed the part where you talk about this, but America doesn’t legislate purely by simple majority or supermajority. I don’t know if those aspects of Turkish or British government translate.
In America, bills and resolutions are enrolled by simple majority of both houses, tax increases are 3/5 majority and must come from the House of Representatives, vetos (by a roughly simple majority directly elected president) can be overriden by s 2/3 majority, constitutional amendments are 2/3 majority plus the States’ ratification.
The principle is that neither pure strategy is enough. If you always need supermajorities then you have long periods of gridlock punctuated by massive winner-take-all tornados of laws. If it’s all simple majority then the whole government is fragile.
This is precisely the problem with the modern veto. The modern veto can be wielded like the Turkish “soft coup” - by email from an office and takes 3/5 of the votes to override. This is very recent history - only the last few decades - but it converts all those simple majority rules into 3/5 majority rules. Effectively we have 100 mini presidents! That’s not how the system was designed. (There’s also the so-called Hastert Rule, which is overtly minoritarian. And gerrymandering! If a system works, you can break it by changing how it measures the world.)
I think the modern veto is one of the major sources of governing partisanship. If you can break with your party line to get tangible wins that your constituents care about, then you have an incentive to work across the aisle. Without that, you’re basically only ever thinking about how to keep your bloc in line so you can vote on your shared priorities.
Yes, and I think Scott needs to get a bit more educated about what's been happening with our courts recently (as well as historically) before so casually aligning himself against the anti-democratic-sounding term, "court-packing."
Ugh. Another hot mess, typical of today's libertarian disconnection with American democratic politics.
Way too many false equivalencies to unpack here, along with naïve justifications for courting disaster (maybe we just shouldn't worry about corruption because the term tends to get hijacked by demagogues??)
I'll just point out a primary misunderstanding about our democracy, which Scott says is "populist" by default definition.
No, we are designed as a democratic republic. where SOME of us become policy experts, politicians, leaders, etc, so that the rest of us can pursue full and happy lives. The idea that our representatives should be sticking their fingers in the air on a minute-to-minute basis (thanks Twitter) to determine policy is warped. We are indeed living through such a low point currently, where demagogues like Trump, Cruz, Graham, etc have totally abandoned any interest or pretense in governing by principles or rational analyses. Their ONLY methodological interest in "serving the people" has become a machine-like tweaking of volatile groups who might keep them in power. They are empty shells when it comes to the job of improving society and people's lives. Just look at their entire focus now: limiting voting (after Roberts famously declared we'd outgrown the Voting Rights Act).
I do agree that our Constitution is an impressively stubborn document. But I don't think Scott grasps the magnitude of the growing insidious cultural resistance to it. Yes, it's exasperatingly sluggish (just ask African Americans how quickly Reconstruction succeeded), but the more popular it is to disparage its effectiveness (e.g. via simplistic, smug "none of the above" posturing) the more it is genuinely put at risk.
We are perilously close to a breaking point where too many people are throwing their hands up declaring "the system is broken" -- and with false equivalencies such as the many abounding above, you are playing directly into the hands of the chaos agents who are intent in moving us toward authoritarianism. Make no mistake: there certainly is a point of no return, and we may well be the generation responsible for passing that point.
1: "false equivalency" is a nonsense accusation. Analogies aren't true or false.
2: vague claims of "many" "abounding" "false equivalencies" is just a fancy way of saying "I didn't like it". If you don't like an argument, it's on you to point out which one and why you think it doesn't work
You are wrong in thinking that the left cannot fight a culture war against the elite. Look at the folk music movement in the 1950s.
So, how to dismantle this type of regime? What are the examples of (preferably right-wing) populist governments, bordering on dictatorships, which have been dethroned by something other than military coup?
Neither Franco nor Salazar (nor Cromwell, for that matter) managed to build regimes that would persist for more than a few years after their deaths.
This is a very accurate description of Erdogan's dictatorship, and yet I think that Scott got the main point completely wrong: that any of this is specific to Turkey.
Of course, it is specific in *some* sense. The parties are called differently in other countries, the allies are aligned a bit different. And yet, the same story repeats again and again in dozens of countries. The following story applies with just minor modifications to
Turkey, Erdogan (since 2002)
Simbabwe, Mugabe (1980-2017)
Russia, Putin (since 1999)
Algeria, Bouteflika (1999-2019)
Ethiopia, Abiy (since 2018)
Nigeria, Obasanjo (1999-2007)
Tanzania, Magufuli (2015-2021)
and many, many more. If we focus on the methods and leave out the initial phase, it also tells the stories of Orban in Hungary, Kaczinskis/Duda in Poland, Sisi in Egypt.... You get the point.
And so goes the story:
The old government and elites are widely distrusted, with good reason. They are corrupt, or even violent and oppressive. A young man of integrity, somewhat an outsider, comes to power (sometimes by election, sometimes in other ways). Often he already has a record as a succesful local politician. In any case, his main point is his integrity, and he promises to clean up the country. He fights corruption, follows a policy of conciliation towards oppressed groups, is popular in large parts (though maybe not all) of the people, and gets international praise. He does a lot of things right, people support him, the economy booms.
However, he finds that the old elites are in his way, and are still damaging his country badly. The fight against corruption is difficult when the old networks protect each other. He becomes more aggressive in seizing them: running trials against oligarchs, replacing old judges with uncorrupted ones, cutting the independence of the military, reaching out for the media. This is not a single coup, but takes years, or even a decade. (The details here depend on the country. The military is not always a thread. The point is that he fills influential positions with loyal supporters.)
Sooner or later, some of his allies start to disagree with his methods. They also start to become his oppponents, later his enemies. He fights them so that he can bring his country on course. Eventually there is a (presumed or real) coup or even assasination attempt against him, which involves some former allies. He answers with force. Further cleansings in his own party, to remove traitors. Institutions associated with the coup are banned. He is still popular, and the coup is condemned by the people, although they don't exactly approve the violence he uses. Influential positions are now controlled by him.
At some point, things like economic crises happen. It doesn't really matter whether it is the dictator's fault or not. Now further allies turn away from him, but he has become paranoid and sees/treats them as traitors. Now loyalty is the only coin that counts. Ironically, he has re-introduced all the old problems: corruption, oppression, violence.
Probably not all of them started with good intentions. But some definitely did. Mugabe was the democratic hope for a whole continent. Obasanjo is co-founder of Transparency International. (It is harsh to put him in this list. When his attempts to seize permanent power failed, he withdrew without violence. But he did try.) And pretty much all of them used the same method: stay within the legal system, but place loyal people in all positions of power. Usually this involves controlling the media. Sometimes this involves banning parties, changing constitutions etc, but theses things were usually *after* they had gained complete control.
I recognize the pattern and agree that this is real, but you can definitely think of way more examples than I have. (I can add Nasser, I suppose, but he came to power via an honest coup, not an election.)
Are there any book recommendations you can share with me? I'd like to gain your knowledge of recent history.
I find this hard to answer, since I mostly haven't used books, but rather I have read consistently the international parts of news sites. So I can't offer one book which covers all. But a very prototypical case is Robert Mugabe, on which the following book seems very good:
"Mugabe: Power, Plunder, and the Struggle for Zimbabwe's Future" by Martin Meredith.
Going beyond this, this book promises a lot of insights into African politics:
"Dictators and Democracy in African Development: The Political Economy of Good Governance in Nigeria" by Carl LeVan. This might end up on my own read list.
As an afterthought, Xi Jinping in China also fits this pattern so far. It's a bit harder to tell since we don't hear a lot of interna from the communist party. Before him, obviously there was already "dictatorship" by the communist party, but that was different. There wasn't a single dominating person. Other than his predecessors, Xi
- has started an anti-corruption campaign that is actually successful. Really, it works well, he is generally acclaimed for it, even by initial sceptics. But it also happened to sweep away his most dangerous rivals (like the "gang of four"). A lot of new people came into powerful positions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were quite loyal to Xi.
- has gained much more personal power over the military (chairman of the Central Military Commission) and the communist party (chairman of the National Security Commission of the Chinese Communist Party).
- has successfully removed the term limits for leadership in China.
- has established a cult around his own person, not just around the country or the party.
At the same time, I totally believe him that he does all this to the Greater Good Of China, that he sees himself as the best man for this position, and that he believes he knows best what is good for china. He gracefully shares his Thoughts with us, and they have been incorporated into the constitution of the Chinese Communist Party.
So far it worked out well. (As it did in the first decade of Erdogan or Mugabe or Putin.) But on the long run, dictators can easily become a single point of failure. If they get something wrong, it might not be easy to convince them otherwise, especially if they have found that allies with slightly different political opinions end up being their enemies. Perhaps Xi will do better. But if we look for the one person in the world who poses the largest thread for the Great Revival Of The Chinese Nation, then it's probably him.
I think Bryan Caplan doesn't give Acton enough credit:
https://www.econlib.org/could-such-a-man-care/
But I also think his analysis is right about Mugabe even if some foolish people saw "hope" in him.
Can you name people who began down this same path, but were able to continue to do good for their country for many years without becoming repressive?
Or, how about comparing George Washington and Maximilien Robespierre to this pattern?
Obasanjo was in the list, but he did accept when his attempt for permanent presidency failed, and retired. I think this was really noble.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia looked for a while like she would use her power to take influence on judges. It looks a bit like she actually tried but realised that it's wrong, and did not do it again, and she had a really strong positive impact to her country.
The really hard part seems to be to let go of power. I know German history well, and even the great post-war political heroes (Adenauer, Kohl) would not go until they are absolutely forced to, and stayed bitter about it. Merkel seems to be the first to actually go volunatrily. (You could count Willy Brandt, but he rather resigned for personal disappointments.)
Browsing a bit on the topic, I found this interesting top ten list of dictators who gave up power.
https://www.realclearhistory.com/articles/2018/05/17/10_dictators_who_gave_up_power_309.html
The bad news: Apparently there were less than 10 in the modern era.
The good news: There are (very few) examples of really bad guys like Julius Nyrere who apparently realized that they had ruined their country, stepped down, and tried to help clean up the mess.
Well, everything in this is just wrong about Putin. He wasn't neither particularly young nor an outsider. He has never fought corruption. He was an old failed power's appointee. He never won competitive elections. He was just more or less successful in following the right-wing trend after the years of economic troubles during perestroika and 90s. There was never a coup against him.
There's no allies that turn away from him and are of any political significance. There's nothing ironical about him, it was all clear and boring from start.
It is correct that there was no coup against Putin, and that he doesn't have a large record of early allies who turned against him. Though by now, he has exchanged a lot of local governors, and the analyses that I have read claim that the replaced governers were probably chosen because they lacked personal loyality to Putin.
When he first became premier in 1999 (and president one year later), he was 47, which was considered very young for the office, and he was almost unknown to the public, and not even famous in the political class. He did not have to win elections right at the beginning, but a good part of his power in his early years came from being very popular. Whether it was his merits or not, Russian economy was really successful at this time (especially compared to the post-communist chaos that also persisted under Yelzin), and the Russian public attributed this success to him. Elections like 2000 or 2004 may not have been 100% trustworthy, but there was very strong support from the people, at least for another decade.
In his methods, he fits the picture very well. He did use legal allegiations to bring down his rivals, like Khodorkovsky. He established loyal supporters in all important positions of society. He installed new oligarchs who owned him personally. (He did not remove all of the old ones, but the ones that were most against him.) He installed loyal supporters in the media, in courts, and since 2013 also local governors. I find it fair to say that loyalty is the only coin that counts for him nowadays. And Russian economy has stopped doing well some time ago, too.
well, it's an example of how all this makes sense until you actually observe the whole context. Putin wasn't particularly old, but his competitors and other prominent figures were even younger. His propaganda changed this narrative backwards - like he was the only person to hope for etc, added some strongman rhetorics, but at the time he was a most cautious pussy ever, never getting any competitive elections despite popularity claims. His legal allegations against Khodorkovsky were ridiculously weak. At the same time he appointed many high-profile opposition members to governor and ministerial positions, further dividing opposition while exploiting its expertise. Also some of very loyal old friends were easily disregarded. And all that for a reason - he's a special services person who recruits and plays with them as assets and expects them to do the same. It's not some commonplace loyalty concept, it's the system rules and methods of people control through getting compromising information, secret killing threats, paybacks etc.
Chavez did the same thing, but with petrodollars instead of a good economic policy that brings economic boom.
There are serious parallels with the anti-corruption Car Wash operation activities in Brazil, which have been described as a political project, and culminated with the downfall of the populist center-left Workers Party and the openly pro-dictatorship far-right and partially military-backed Bolsonaro. One of the consequences of the extreme focus on anti-corruption was a generalized lack of trust in politics that cleared the way for "outsiders" like Bolsonaro. However, with the government's failure to make efficient political alliances and with the probable return of the Workers Party to the political scene, it's unlikely that Bolsonaro will make it to a second term.
(the parallel I'm drawing is anti-corruption being used to deliberately damage liberal democracy)
>If you only learn one thing from this post: it's pronounced "air-do-wan".
NO! No. No, it is not. That is really, really wrong. In fact, I'd hazard to say that is so wrong that if you took a monolingual English speaker and a monolingual Turkish speaker - assume the English speaker has read about Erdoğan, and obviously that the Turkish speaker isn't living under a rock - and asked them both about "air-do-wan", neither of them would understand what you're talking about.
Erdoğan is pronounced [ˈæɾdoan]. Its edit distance from the spelling is 2. The e is pronounced [æ], and the ğ is silent. Note the COMPLETE ABSENCE of a [w]. There is no [w]. If you only learn one thing from this post: there is no [w] in Erdoğan.
A native English speaker will read air-do-wan as something like [ɛəɹdowɑn], perhaps [e:ɹdowɑn] or [eəɹdowɑn] - in other words, you're getting literally only the middle syllable right. Drop the w, and you've got two syllables right. Native Turks will probably forgive you for getting the first syllable wrong, as you can't write [æ] in English (it's the sound a makes in the words "at", "bad", "tramp"), and Anglophones are famously bad at trills and taps.
You'd really do better just reading it phonetically and pretending the breve isn't there: [ɛɹdogɑn]. Then you'd still be pronouncing it wrong, but wrong in such a way that anyone from anywhere will understand what you're saying.
I'd really appreciate if you deleted that first line. Being wrong occasionally is fine. Actively teaching people to say things wrong is not.
I'm not sure if your complaint is "instead of posting the closest English-comprehensible approximation you should post the IPA" or "this is actually the wrong English-comprehensible approximation". I don't really care about the first, I do care about the latter, suggest a better English-comprehensible approximation to me and I'll put it in.
I did listen to people pronouncing it on YouTube a few times, and it sounded like "air-do-wan" to me.
Taking a stab at what I read autisticus as saying: "the g in erdogan is silent, it's heir-doe-ahn"
tbf Ws are kind of vowel-y
I mean, isn't the whole distinction between vowel and semivowel/glide (like [w] and [j] = "y") debatable and relative to the language's structure?
My interpretation of the post is that "air-do-an" would be the best you could do.
"Do-an" _does_ sound very close to "do-wan" so I could see why it would sound like that from your YouTube videos, but presumably telling people to say "do-an" would get them closer to the correct pronunciation.
It's not "an" as in "an animal" is the problem.
fwiw Google suggests "ehr · dow · aan" https://www.google.com/search?q=erdogan+pronunciation
"wan" is an actual word, and it's not pronounced with the æ sound of "an" or "animal". The pronunciation varies somewhat, but it's definitely not æ.
Right, telling people to say "do-an" instead of "do-wan" might cause them to say "do un-"
Sorry, I misread.
As a (British) native English speaker, "air-do-wan" pretty much exactly replicates what I hear when people say "Erdoğan". I've visited Turkey, had conversations with Turkish speakers about him, and when I say "air-do-wan" I have received compliments on my pronunciation (though maybe I'm just getting sympathy points for not butchering and saying "arr-do-gan")
Also, I'd be really interested to know what percentage of people understand IPA. I'm a reasonably educated person with reasonably educated friends, and I don't think I've ever come across someone who can decipher IPA.
Is this a common skill which I'm just completely lacking? Or is it as niche as I imagine it to be?
Define "decipher". I know some IPA symbols, mainly for the sounds that are common in English or missing from English but sufficiently common outside of it, but there are tons of random IPA symbols out there. Then again, I enjoy learning linguistics.
Having it written in IPA makes it easy to look up even if you don't know the sound (maybe less so if you haven't studied phonetics enough for "voiceless velar fricative" to be comprehensible, but Wikipedia also has recordings of sounds).
I enjoy linguistics and read lots of stuff in the area (though related to history and classification/genetic ancestry moreso than messin' around with phonemes), and I have no fucking idea what any IPA anything means.
It might as well be meaningless scribbling for all anyone I've ever spoken with has been able to help, too.
It has, unsurprisingly, a few sounds that are rare-to-nonexistent in common American English phoneme vocabularies. No AmE speaker is going to get the first phoneme right from pure text, since AmE basically doesn't have a flipped "r" sound. "Air" is close; the first syllable of "arrow" is at least equally close to my ear, but I think English speakers have settled on "air".
Contra Austicus Maximus, I'd say that the second-to-third syllables almost have a /w/ and not an /o/! If you listen to the pronunciation, it goes smoothly from the /o/ to the /a/, with the /o/ touched very lightly. But this comes out almost as "dwan". He's right that in Turkish there's not a clear consonantal /w/ there, but that's just what English does when it has two adjacent vowels.
But the real answer is, no, educated English speakers consistently say something like what you wrote; it's not quite authentic to Turkish pronunciation but there's no way it's going to be.
It's the latter (although why no approximation _and_ IPA option?).
I think just pointing out that the Ğ is silent will get most people closer than "air-do-wan". Probably half of anglo readers will still diphthongise the first syllable, but oh well. At least the cursed [w] won't show up most of the time.
If you really must write out the syllables phonetically in this most unphonetic of languages, try er-do-an.
Personally I pronounce it the same with a w and without?
> Erdoğan is pronounced [ˈæɾdoan]. Its edit distance from the spelling is 2. The e is pronounced [æ], and the ğ is silent. Note the COMPLETE ABSENCE of a [w]. There is no [w]. If you only learn one thing from this post: there is no [w] in Erdoğan.
The one thing I'm learning from this post is that there is at least one person who pronounces "do-wan" differently if told to leave out the w. I don't know how to do that. I am interested to know how. I thought "w" was just what happened when your mouth transitioned from "o" position to a different vowel.
I'm guessing most native (especially if monolingual) English speakers do that. It's worth noting that [ʊ] and [w] are different sounds (one's a vowel and the other's a consonant). When you just say "o", the letter, you're (probably) saying [oʊ], not [ow], but I'll grant that the difference is very minor.
With the knowledge that you pronounce "o" as a diphthong, you should be able to just say [o] by not letting the vowel sound glide when you pronounce it. Or to put it another way, don't make the part of the sound that you make by drawing your lips closer together at the end of the sound.
If you succeed at that, and then try to pronounce [oan] and [owan], they should sound plainly different.
> Or to put it another way, don't make the part of the sound that you make by drawing your lips closer together at the end of the sound.
This is confusing me more. My lips move apart from o to a, not together.
To be clear, your lips should be moving apart from o to a, but together from o to w. In saying "owa", you'd be starting in a mid-rounded position, pursing your lips closer for the w, and then opening to a wider non-rounded position for the a.
Ok. So let me be super precise. When I see "do-wan" written down, that tells me to make an "o" sound and then an "a" sound, and there is no further pursing in transition like you are describing. At this point what I'm thinking is that I am getting the "correct" pronunciation from "do-wan". And that when you say it's super important to realize that there's no "[w]", you have some technical meaning in mind for "[w]" that doesn't correspond to a typical west coast American English speaker's idea of a "w" in that particular context.
"Erdogan won partly by making Turkish universities change to a "well-rounded" admissions policy that ignored exam scores - instantly destroying the cram school industry that served as the Gulen movement's power base."
Honestly I have to say I respect Erdogan for this - as far as political moves go, it's brilliant.
the problem with americans (even of the j variety) is their lack of practical political cynicism
suggestion 1. wouldn't work because even if you had an amendment fixing the number of judges on the SC it would not stop a certain party from impeaching current judges . the sort of political power (not just the votes but public legitimacy ) you need is equivalent for both options.
suggestion 2. are you seriously suggesting that the government agencies that persecuted the tea party or fabricated evidence in order to wiretap trump should be made even for independent ?
is this what you people call *fortifying democracy* ?
suggestion 3. is a generalization of 1. the sort of power you need to hack the system can not be stopped by adding caveats to the rules. there are enough lawyers in dc to find work arounds.
"The third big difference is that it's really hard to change the US Constitution. Erdogan was able to change the Turkish Constitution with a simple majority. Nobody took it too seriously, because the Constitution was just whatever the last group of military-coup-pulling generals said it was. The US Constitution requires a lot more work. And as the work of titans like George Washington and James Madison and so on, it has an aura of sacredness that makes it hard to add "PS: I can do whatever I want" to the end without a lot of people feeling violated. I know this has caused a lot of problems, but after seeing the ease with which Erdogan swept aside any part of the Turkish Constitution he didn't like, I have a new respect for it."
I'm nonplussed by this. The risks of entropy in any political system seem sufficiently well demonstrated by history to make any informed observer respect the value of counter-entropic institutions within a polity he or she doesn't want to fail. This is what convinced me to abandon my support for republicanism in New Zealand - I decided the monarchy was counter-entropic. The US Constitution is also pretty obviously counter-entropic. I'm surprised it took a book about Erdogan for Scott to reach this conclusion.
That said, when all said and done, I worry it's all just dwarf fortress: the game is about how long you can stave off total system collapse.
> In the end, Erdogan ends up not joining the EU. Partly this was due to a European Court of Human Rights case where the EU upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, causing him to lose faith in the European conception of liberalism as relevant to his pro-Islam project.
Something here can't be quite right because the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR, based in Strasbourg, France) is *not* an EU institution. It is not to be confused with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU, based in Luxembourg), which does belong to the EU.
Based on how the book review links the court decision to French secularism, and on an overview of relevant decision by the non-EU ECHR [1], I would guess that the relevant decision was indeed one by the non-EU ECHR, namely Leyla Şahin v. Turkey. I also don't see how the EU's CJEU would have been involved in a decision about a domestic law of a non-EU contry (i.e. Turkey).
The ECHR does *not* decide based on EU law (and, again, is not an EU institution), but based on the European Convention on Human Rights. This convention is one of the foundational documents of the Council of Europe (CoE), which is distinct from the EU. The CoE is both older (founded in 1949 compared to 1951 for the arguably first EU precursor, the European Coal and Steel Community -- though it took decades for the EU to evolve into its current form) and larger than the EU: No country has ever joined the EU without first belonging to the CoE, but the CoE has 20 non-EU member states including Switzerland, Armenia, Russia, and -- crucially -- Turkey. So in particular, Turkey is a party of the CoE's European Convention on Human Rights, and therefore the ECHR's decisions on how to interpret that treaty are applicable to Turkey.
The Council of Europe is not to be confused with the European Council nor the Council of the European Union, both of which *are* EU institutions. (No, I didn't make this up. Bonus question: can you guess which of these is most commonly referred to as simply 'the Council'?)
This was already pointed out by Gurnemanz in a comment below, but I thought I'd highlight it again since it's a common misconception. (Roughly every other news article in European media seems to get it wrong, for instance.)
[1] https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/fs_religious_symbols_eng.pdf
I dislike Erdogan, but that's beside the point.
The reason that people get accused of being right-wing populists is because, in America at least, the Republican party is seen as being the natural home of the elites -- the rich, the business owners, and so on -- so when they make a concerted effort to appeal to the "lower classes", they're being populist. The Democrats and anyone else perceived as being on the left are viewed as being inherently populist in that it's the lower classes that they "naturally" appeal to and not the elites. It's the crossing of these boundaries that leads to the populism accusations. It's generally seen to be a tautology to call a Democrat populist under normal circumstances. And to damn them as "champaign socialists" when they're infringing on Republican territory.
I think that Turkey has and will, unfortunately, continue to have problems. For example, what happens when Erdogan dies? He's not going to live forever, and he appears to be paranoid enough to have prevented anyone else within the AKP from accumulating sufficient power to be seen as his natural successor. Does that mean that as soon as he's passed away, the opposition returns to power and undoes everything he's done, re-writing the constitution again and re-introducing secularism and all the rest, but this time, with a vengance?
I don't expect a stable Turkey in my lifetime (I'm 60), although I'm more than willing to be surprised.
Who controls the military in Turkey?
A little late to the party but I wanted to share my experience as a student at a so called "Gulen" school in America which I attended for both middle and high school (graduated around 2012).
For reference, the school was set up as a magnet school (most Gulen schools in America are set up this way AFAIK). The one I attended was rated among the top two schools for college prep in my (somewhat large) city, and provided me with an education several degrees above standard for my area.
Some people might expect after reading this article that my schooling would have included some aspect of propaganda, but that is not at all what I experienced. In fact, other than most of my teachers being Turkish (and the existence of Turkish cultural extracurriculars), the fact that I was attending a "Gulen" school barely made an impact on my education at all.
In fact, neither I nor my parents actually had heard about Gulen until a rather inflammatory article was published by a local news source claiming that students at my school were being brainwashed by Turkish radicals. I admit that while neither I (nor any of my closest peers) experienced any 'brainwashing' during our attendance at this school, I cannot be totally sure that it was not occurring in some (likely mundane) fashion. The supposed explanation for my experience at the time was that the Turkish faculty were using the culturally focused extracurriculars as some sort of filtering mechanism to determine who would be most receptive to propaganda, and focused their efforts on those students. With me being an academically mediocre white student with no interest in Turkish culture, my experiences would hypothetically mesh with this theory.
Despite that, I would say it is highly unlikely that anything of the kind was happing. From my perspective my high-school was (and still is) a run of the mill school whose only outstanding characteristics were teachers with strong accents and Turkish language courses as an elective. Obviously this experience doesn't really shed any light on what the situation was like in similar schools actually based in Turkey, but I thought that some people might like some insight into what a "Gulen" school based in America might look like.
This was a kind of meandering post without much of a point, so if anyone wants to know anything specific feel free to ask. I'll answer pretty much anything that doesn't dox me.
Watch the phenomenon surrounding the massively popular Ertugrul series. Peak Erdogan.
Is a democratically elected dictator really "undemocratic"? Are we supposed to feel bad that one form of undemocratic government, that pretended to be a democratic, got replaced with another form, that didn't pretend? If everyone basically agrees dictatorship is the best form of government IF the dictator is good, then how can you claim "all dictatorships are bad" without getting into the specifics of a particular dictator?
Great piece of writing. FYI, if Kasimpasa is Istanbul's Compton, then Nisantasi is its Beverley Hills.
>First, I was struck by how carefully Erdogan preserved the apparent structure of Turkish government and society. His style of dictatorship is less about smashing democratic institutions with a sledgehammer, and more about hollowing them out from the inside until they're zombies following his commands while still maintaining a facade of legitimacy. If Erdogan wants your head, he’ll have a corruption investigator arrest you, bring you to court, charge you with plausible-sounding corruption allegations, give you a trial by jury that seems to observe the proper formalities, and sentence you to death by decapitation. To an outside observer, it will look a lot like how genuine corruption trials work in genuinely democratic nations. You'd have to be really well-informed to spot the irregularities - and the media sources that should be informing you all seem very helpful and educational but are all secretly zombies controlled by Erdogan supporters.
I feel like that has already happened here, especially the last bit.