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.
---
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.
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.