I'm glad we agree that words mean things and we should use the proper words. It makes the next step easier.
Go to your LLM of choice - I prefer GPT5 Thinking or Pro these days - and type 'Is the United States both a democracy and a republic?' or 'Are the terms Republic and Democracy mutually exclusive?'
For convenience, here's what mine just said to the latter:
No.
Democracy: rule by the people. Mechanism for political authority (elections, participation). Comes in direct and representative forms.
Republic: no monarch; public offices are held by elected or appointed officials under law.
Overlap is common: the U.S., Germany, and India are democratic republics.
Words do mean things, and you seem to think the word "republic" is exclusive with "democracy". It's not! They are referring to different spectra of things!
A *constitutional* republic and a democracy are, though. Both the express argument for and the lived experienced of constitutional republics, and the arguments against strict constitutionalism, is that it hampers, limits, and contravenes democracy. The interplay between representative governance and constitutional limits on that representation are by-design not democratic.
I guess we could append a 'real' onto 'election', but definitions generally don't feel the need to do that. All of those 'reals' would get a bit tedious.
I once used this argument in opposition to someone who, in late November 2024, was hoping that, subsequent to Trump winning the election, would declare him ineligible to take office. I agreed there might be grounds for that sort of declaration (I forget what those were now) but thought it would be undemocratic to invalidate the 2024 election after it happened.
I think that also works with your argument that democracy is about repeated elections, because I would be more concerned about the long term success of American democracy if Trump's candidacy was invalidated post-election than if he's allowed to serve out his term.
In 2020, Trump tried to have the Supreme Court take an actual case (as opposed to having a case appealed up to it). If the election had been in some way shape or form "invalidated" -- that's much more of a "Constitutional Crisis" than whatever crazy "TrumpOfTheDay" is actually happening.
From the knowledge I've gathered, that still might have been the best move (along with a "and let Joe Biden serve out his term," even -- who actually got the Presidency was negotiable on Trump's side. Determining that the election was spoiled was not.)
I wonder if those WaPo tote bags will become a collectible someday? Don't see any on Ebay so consider it as an alternative currency if the USD ever collapses
This is basically John Hart Ely’s argument in Democracy and Distrust — the constitution mostly protects what he calls the “channels of change,” like free speech and advocacy, voting in the next election, separation of powers, etc. With some notable exceptions (no slavery), it does not enshrine outcomes, which should be left to the democratically elected branches.
Vladimir Putin has a PhD in law and ensures the Duma carefully designs legislation to make murdering opponents not a crime.
I think it a common pattern amongst dictatorships of completely breaking the spirit of legal order with complicated facade of keeping to the law. I am not sure why they do it, it isn't convincing even to their ardent supporters.
Putin's "Kandidat nauk"(no-ook=science; which I prefer to compare to an M.A.+, while the 'Doktor nauk' resembles a real PhD level) is in economics, not law (his first degree was in law, though). Wikipedia "In 1997, Putin received a degree in economics (Candidate of Economical Sciences) at the Saint Petersburg Mining University for a thesis on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy.[40][41] His supervisor was Vladimir Litvinenko, who in 2000 and again in 2004 managed his presidential election campaigns in St Petersburg.[42] Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy consider Putin to be a plagiarist according to Western standards. One book from which he copied entire paragraphs is the Russian-language edition of King and Cleland's Strategic Planning and Policy (1978)" - I am not aware that the Duma legislated murdering opponents not a crime, but if the prosecution does not prosecute and the judges would dismiss any case anyway: all is fine, legally. As the Russians say: Verboten - but if you really, really want to: it's ok!
The CCP doesn't officially claim to be a democracy, so saying it isn't a democracy isn't crossing them. Also I tend to believe the results here because Chinese people outside of the control of the CCP have told me that this is, in fact, what Chinese people in China believe.
Even the most repressive dictatorships can crumble if enough people resist. Dictatorships survive through a combination of fear, apathy, and genuine popular support.
I'm career-biased, but to me the most dangerous overreach of the Trump admin so far has been the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after disappointing job numbers. This is, to me, the largest reality-denying move so far and I worry that the Fed is next. At least with the political-on-political overreach you can imagine that other checks and balances might hold for another three years until a Democrat is elected. On the other hand, the global financial market's assumption of Fed independence might just be the North Star of the global economy, a rare shining beacon of trust and mission-critical efficiency. The LBS firing seems to be part one of the Great Data Denial, where Trump seeks to mold not only the public's opinion about cherry picked facts, but also the few facts that remain largely untainted by us-vs-themism.
And yet the BLS was wrong by the most it has ever been in 20+ years two weeks ago and fundamentally misrepresented the state of the economy by 1mm jobs. If that is not a firing offense, what is? The Fed did not act because of their massive inaccuracies, now revealed a year too late.
It's amazing because estimating the jobs in an economy of 340 million people is something that 6th graders do as basic homework. It's just as simple as calculating the tip on a restaurant bill.
The central conceit of populism is that there is a simple "common sense" solution to every problem and that it is only malice, elitism, and stupidity that keeps these solutions from being adopted.
The survey response rate has steadily dropped since Covid. It used to be near 90% ten years ago and is now below 70%. It's difficult to make trustworthy releases when your non-response bias and margin of error have both increased. This is a well known fact to anybody with an interest in this, including the Fed.
The models that the BLS uses have struggled with the life-and-death cycles of company creation, a known factor that has compounded the magnitude of the revisions. This is a well known fact to the Fed.
A vast amount of economic data releases are made every day in dozens of countries, with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Markets and decision-makers adjust to these changing degrees and give more or less value to a data release with this in mind. Claiming the Fed did not act "because of their massive inaccuracies" implies that a large portion of the Fed's decision making flows from BLS data releases, which is plainly wrong. There's a ton of data crunching at each of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, and no single data point is important enough to "cause" the Fed to act or not act. In fact, if what you imply were true, the market would have expected a larger than 25bp rate cut yesterday, which was not the case - the futures-implied probabilities for a 25bp cut stood above 90% for the past few weeks, even with the political attack on Cook and the appointment of Miren.
So, what was a firing offense, really? Can you prove that the BLS acted in bad faith? Do you have a strong understanding of how they do their work, who has the capacity to influence (if at all) data releases? Is there any strong evidence to the singular importance of monthly NFP in the Fed's decision making over the past nine months? Have you listened to a lot of Fed governor speeches, to Powell's press conferences, and have they given you any impression that the BLS numbers specifically were at the core of their repeated choices not to cut rates?
I'll have to look into it, but the grapevine was saying that the BLS was undergoing significant armtwisting under Biden, with some "snap back" deliberately placed near elections.
This is a different matter to the government monkeying with the statistics via Government Jobs (teachers and the like) -- the government can create jobs as well as private companies. This is a systemic issue in the Biden Administration -- lack of forward thinking ("today is the only day, and the numbers need to look good today!"). It underlies the whole "this isn't a recession" stupidity (like, I'd have been content if they'd said, "It's a mild recession, nothing to worry about." and just rode it out).
I agree that the BLS numbers aren't everything (the beige book et alia has So Much Data). And thanks for the numbers on the "survey response rate", that very much adds to the discussion.
"And yet the BLS was wrong by the most it has ever been in 20+ years two weeks ago and fundamentally misrepresented the state of the economy by 1mm jobs. "
Do you have any proof for that claim? If you are going to claim something like that, you better back it up.
I think a lot of people recognize that the BLS's methodology has been falling short recently. If the director was resistant to improving the methodology, or simply wasn't up to the task, then I think it would be reasonable to replace them. But it takes time and research to find a better methodology, and firing the director won't change that. It could, in fact, make it worse if the next director is chosen based more on political loyalty than economic or managerial competence.
You have a government body which exists so that businesses and people can be informed about the economy. Removing the head of that organization because it said that the was cloudy when the leader wanted it to be sunny seems like it is attacking one of the links of the chain up there.
12 months of "downward adjustments" prior to the election (I heard this in around oct/sept) because the Biden Administration was deliberately cranking the "top level" numbers, for the Boomers who still get the "Job Numbers" and care about them.
Under the BLS's watch.
This is coming from a "numbers guy" (his work's won a Nobel)...
why were downward revisions good for biden when biden was president but bad for trump when trump is president? if bls is cooking the books why revise them instead of just leaving up the cooked numbers?
Because they aren't cooking the numbers. The same downward revisions are happening for numbers released under Trump, so I don't believe that there is any conspiracy here. Regardless, there was a political benefit to Biden just because of the election timing.
It's not the "downward revisions" that are "good for Biden" -- it's the Top Level Numbers, that are placed in Boomer Boxes (like the news), and the Boomers in general don't read down to the nitty-gritty revisions.
You revise them because "actual business decisions" get made based on the revised data. Same with the CDC monkeying with numbers, it's one thing to have the top-level numbers be "good for the administration" (those form press releases), but the insurance industry needs the actual numbers, or the term life insurance industry Dies.
Adjustments are common and are often correlated. This is because the data tend to lag reality in predictable ways, and jobs numbers aren't memoryless.
People act like building these estimates is simple arithmetic and it's not. Moreover, changes to the calculation process made slowly and transparently and only with great care to preserve continuity.
Here's a great breakdown of the process if you're interested in digging into the weeds:
Correlated is one thing, I can accept a "two or three month" building spike (say), where we don't get good data because the builders are hiring quickly and not responding to surveys in time to capture the actual numbers. 12 months is a long time to have "downward revisions" every single month.
You're probably looking at a different link than my friend was (and he wasn't saying it at the exact end of 2024. Might have said it in July for all I remember). It's probably of more use to look at the "upward revision" mean (1979 on). This means that the survey is in general "bearish." (which kind of makes sense, hiring more than you think.) We can in general ask, "Is this still a good survey?"
Very strange that the word "republic" appears nowhere in this essay. Because it's not really about "liberalism" or having more than one election - it's about the fact that we are not actually a democracy with unlimited power bestowed upon an avatar of the majority. We are a republic where the majority is limited in the scope of what it may impose on the minority.
The heart of republicanism (not the party the sovereign entity) is anti-democratic. It's enshrining certain rights as being too core to be vulnerable to majoritarian whims. It's stating that the principle matters more than what the people want or the popularity of an idea.
For me the democracy vs. republic structure is a far better way to understand this.
This just sounds like pedantry to me. Democracy can refer to a pure democracy or it can refer to any political system where they have free and fair elections. Scott is clearly using it in the second sense here.
It is. There are people who learned "we're a republic, not a democracy" is insightful and will say it in places where it makes absolutely no difference. Nothing about the essay changes if Scott changes "liberalism" to "republicanism."
No, but what he's trying to talk about is excessively chauvinistic. if the goal is to "preserve elections" -- the Westminister system does so as well, without all the checks and balances.
1. I hate the word “populace” irrationally, and am enraged it’s been used so liberally.
2. Or, that is, “used so democracy-but-with-the-next-election-in-mind-ally.” By which I mean: this post feels way more convoluted and epicyclic than calling liberalism important in its own right. Democracy is the thing that’s the best of bad options; the insane idea that Bob the Illiterate Gardener has just as much say running the country as Alice the Constitutional Lawyer; the thing that gives us crazy and terrible leaders from time to time.
And it’s all fine and ok because we still have liberalism: because we mostly get to keep living our lives however we want to live them, even if the tax scheme gets changed a little bit or whatever. It’s very important that we keep the liberalism despite the democracy, because most of our (very good!) lives are spent interacting with the former and not the latter!
I guess point taken that in the States this can get confused with a partisan message—but this seems solvable by giving the thing a new name like “we must defend constitutionalism” or “we must defend our freedom” or whatever, instead of making the bizarre claim that authoritarian behavior is bad only because we won’t get the chance to make *our* preferred tiny changes to the tax scheme in four years.
Agreed. Liberalism and individual liberty are more important end values. Democracy is useful in achieving those end values, and likely better than other forms of government. But it is very important for all liberal democracies to have lots of checks on mob power (read the Federalist papers!). Constitutional rights are just as, if not more important for defending the rights of minorities from majoritarian tyrannies.
I think the better argument is to recognize that the central idea of the American Constitution is that unconstrained democracy does not work, and that can overcome this weakness of democracy through checks, balances and constitutional rights. These things are designed to frustrate some democratic impulses.
Bureaucrats are not a branch of government. I keep seeing this implicit assumption everywhere that the executive re-shaping bureaucracies is somehow un-democratic or a threat to our system. The bureaucracies themselves are the threat to the system. The independent judiciary and the people's Congress are supposed to be the checks on the President. Instead, out of a desire to accommodate an increasingly complex world and give flexibility to the expert-class, both Congress and the judiciary spent several decades ceding more and more discretion to the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats derive any legitimate authority they do have from the executive, there is no other conceivable source for it in our constitution.
The reason this does not enable somebody to end all future elections is that elections in the USA are distributed among 1000s of county clerks who are running local elections alongside them. Those people would notice discrepancies, they may decide on their own to fudge something and go along with a sham election, but they aren't under federal control and are only barely under any state control. These people all know their counties and wards and districts very well, and unusual results in local races, conspicuous numbers of undervotes, these would all tell the tale to Mary the 58 year old retired school teacher who got elected county clerk and has been gossiping about the local candidates since high school. The people running in local county commissioner races would notice the finger on the scale.
You will know democracy is over if somehow they separate the presidential or federal elections from the local ballots, some kind of National Election Day with nothing else being contested at the same time. That's what it would take. Something like that might even come disguised as an anti-corruption measure, "to securely monitor the election, we must have it separately on this day where we can observe everything, and to cut out the local variances of having different styles of ballots etc.", but however they pitch it, you'll know that's the actual end.
This is Allegheny county, Pennsylvania. If you want to dig up 5 year old news (this did make the news), feel free. I know the election judge was complaining that he/she couldn't get into the counting room.
Counterpoint: Congress, which makes the law and funds the government, has repeatedly given some bureaucracies a degree of independence from the executive. If the bureaucracy was completely under the thumb of the executive, then what stops the executive from commanding the bureaucracy from ignoring the law?
Nothing at all, and it is actually quite common for him to do so. That's how we have legal marijuana stores in many states while marijuana is federally illegal. The president simply ordered the DOJ and DEA not to enforce the law. As much as I am in favor of legal marijuana, the system that makes this possible is a complete joke and a total subversion of the constitution.
The Westminister system does pretty much eliminate all checks and balances except the election itself (and, debatably, the Queen. The current King is pretty much on his way to eliminating himself as a check, in that nobody will work for him).
Even India manages to keep having elections.
I'm still sympathetic to your last line, but I want to caution everyone against feeling that "America is superior" to all other forms of governance, given your "here's what we want" of "continuing elections."
I don't think that anyone who does political science or commenting thinks that America's democratic/republic system is better than the others from a systems design standpoint.
We are like those legacy nuclear control systems that run on BASIC because that was what was available at the time.
You’ve ignored the hard version of this, namely scenarios in which the majority of the population wants civil institutions to be removed.* There are versions of this which have weird consequences for democracy, such as where Party A wants to deport group x, who tend to support Party B. The more normal case is institutional distrust because of capture or perceived capture by one side. If Trump had won on an explicit platform of “end ptoper election monitoring and the rule of law,” would it be undemocratic not to let him?
*This probably isn’t the case in the US at the moment, but may have been the case in Hungary and/or Poland for parts of the 2010s.
Well said. This pairs well with the parable of lightning. Science is an interconnected whole, you can't poison one part of it without infecting the whole thing. Same for a free democratic republic.
The issue with many populist candidates, whether left-wing or right-wing, is that they goodhart on the gap between "the will of the people" and "the CEV of the people" (or "the all-things-considered will of the people").
This comes out of the argument in The Narrow Corridor, by Acemoglu and Robinson, that liberty arises and endures only when a society strikes a precarious balance between a strong state and a mobilized society, walking a "narrow corridor" where each restrains and empowers the other. A strong state is required to enact the will of the people, while a mobilized society is required to ensure that what government enacts is the will of the people, rather than something else.
Broadly speaking, I think it's true that the most resilient systems thrive only because they are under two complimentary pressures -- a pressure to grow (strong state, in this example), and a pressure to remain consistent with what came before (the mobilized society, in this example). Too little change and you can't adapt to changes in your environment. Too much change and you either become unrecognizable or, more likely, veer into uncharted territory and make a fatal error.
Other examples in my mind include the Kelly Criterion (growth: go for +EV. Consistency: don't bet too large of a fraction of your account), genetics (each generation changes in accordance with natural selection, but stays pretty similar to the parents), or even ethics (something like utilitarianism helps push us to a better world, while something like deontology constrains us so we can avoid falling prey to galaxy-brained schemes with very high short term costs.)
Neat seeing governments as another example of this. Thanks!
> Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during their term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? Or confiscate opposition parties’ treasuries? Or order the police to murder any candidate who runs against him?
I don't have to imagine this system because it is our system. You just have to win the election decisively enough. If you have control of 2/3 of congress in our system you have effectively unlimited power. You can remove the president and supreme court. You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life.
In fact, I would say that that not only is this our system, it is a necessary property of any system that calls itself a democracy. If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy? Your point about the next election is a good one, but it assumes that the public wants democracy. What if they don't? As strange as it sounds, you can't really be a democracy without giving the public the option to abandon democracy if they so choose.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same"
It really worries me how thoroughly “freedom” and “liberty” have disappeared from the lexicon. It seems to me that we never talk about them any more. Democracy is a means, not an end.
> I don't have to imagine this system because it is our system. You just have to win the election decisively enough. If you have control of 2/3 of congress in our system you have effectively unlimited power. You can remove the president and supreme court. You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life.
First, you've moved the goalposts. "Why doesn't winning with 51% give the winner a right to enact their agenda" is a fair question with answers discussed in the article. There's no principled reason that 'winning with 67%' should deliver a qualitatively different set of powers.
Second, you're conflating elections; winning a single presidency is different than winning a House majority, which is different yet from winning a supermajority of the Senate with staggered terms.
Third, you've also misrepresented the amending formula, which requires the assent of the legislatures (or constitutional conventions) of 3/4 of states. That's another set of elections required to make "unlimited power" changes.
> If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy?
First, you're just restating the paradox of tolerance, or "why can't I sign a contract to sell myself into slavery?"
Second, you're assuming that a momentary fit of unanimity must necessarily give a mandate for unlimited change. That's not true anywhere else in life; systems have inertia. It's entirely reasonable to require a sustained and fairly-decided majority to make fundamental changes to a government. The amount of that inertia is fairly debated, but it's not obvious that the right amount is zero.
The statement that democracy is about 'having more than one election', reminds me of what the chief of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria said before the elections that they won in the 90's: We beleive in one man, one vote, one time. Meaning: if we're elected, that will be the last vote people will cast. Just a reminder: that lead to a military coup, with bloodshed taking more than 100,000 lives.
When WE do it, we're only acting in self-defense, perhaps responding to outrageous provocation, at worst a measured an entirely justified pre-emptive strike in response to imminent threat.
When they do it, it's pure hate and aggression.
The tribe doesn't matter, only the friend - enemy distinction. Remember how conservatives passionately bewailed cancel culture (and liberals championed it), up until a few months ago? Now the tables are switched, and when we do it, then that makes it okay!
The only question is who has the whip hand at the moment. That is all.
You talk about the "civil service" in your last paragraph as one of the "institutions". But the US had a spoil system for a long time. This had flaws, but not the flaw of stopping elections. Thus an independent civil service is not load bearing for the continuation of elections.
Also the argument is infinitely flexible and has been abused to death. In much of Europe, in the UK and in Brazil, the idea that the population must be well informed to not just keep reelecting a dictator has morphed into suppression of speech to bolster incumbents to defend democracy.
And people who were trying to stop Donald Trump's election were also often arguing in this way.
And in the unlikely case that Trump tries to ignore term limits that would be obviously extremely serious, yet your extended-democracy framework would find no grounds for complaint. The US has strong anti-democratic features, and it's part of why it functions well.
> But the US had a spoil system for a long time. This had flaws, but not the flaw of stopping elections. Thus an independent civil service is not load bearing for the continuation of elections.
To be fair, in the historic context US elections have not always been 'fair and free', in part because the concepts were not thoroughly defined. It took an evolved, post-constitutional consensus to even decide that outright buying votes was bad; consider also how long it took to adopt the secret ballot.
"Fair and free" elections where one's vote is a considered but fundamentally private choice, made free of coercion, is a modern phenomenon. We shouldn't use 18th or 19th-century practices as strong evidence for the viability of this system.
He's already talked about running for a third term. It's only "unlikely" because Trump is old so he may die of natural causes before 2028.
Also, the spoils system and 19th century polities were doing "Democracy/technocratic government: The Alpha version."
The ability of a coordinated group to seize the government is much better understood and we unfortunately have many more examples of it being done successfully.
The judiciary issue is not one about independence or not.
The issue is that American law, based on British law, separates the specific plaintiffs and defendants in a court case, from the overall government and its own executive and legislative authorities.
In concrete terms: a British or American judge has the independence to suspend state and federal laws in the process of a court case - but only for the parties directly involved in the case.
What has been happening is that this core distinction is being ignored by activist judges in order to execute blocking mechanisms, nationwide, on federal executive orders and actions which said judges object to.
And this matters because the basic principle of this American Republic is not merely the separation of powers, but a balance of powers. A judiciary that can undemocratically (because these federal judges are all appointed, not elected) choose to obstruct the actions of the actual elected official e.g. Donald Trump - is not a balanced power but a controlling one.
To suspend immigration law for a specific individual while his immigration case is being decided is one thing.
To attempt to abuse the aforementioned authority to restrict the actions of the duly elected President of the United States across the entire nation, is something else entirely.
This type of action not only contravenes the executive authority of the executive branch, but also the legislative authority of Congress and is a direct abuse of the principle of separate and balanced branches of the United States government under the Constitution.
I see why you choose to say that liberalism and democracy are related concepts, and write "...the checks, balances, and civil society we call liberalism," but I still object to it. It relies on using the word in the classical sense, which is now nearly an archaic use. Fifty years ago I would have argued for its continued use, to hold the line against its newer meanings of social safety net and sexual freedom. But language changes, and that battle has been lost. Without getting into a boring linguistics discussion, words mean what they mean to a community, and use of "liberal" in that way comes perilously close to meaning "everything good."
"Silly" not longer means blessed. Shakespeare used "generous" to mean noble, which is a related concept but leads one astray. (King Lear, BTW)
As another example, I was corresponding with a college friend who said she had had a partner for thirty years. I assumed she meant someone she lived with, or quite near; shared meals frequently and spent much time together; helped each other with small favors and large throughout the week such as medical appointments, shopping, and help with projects. I think 100 out of 100 people would have assumed the same. I learned two years later that this partner lived 700 miles away and they saw each other for two weeks every summer. A couple can call themselves a school of fish if they want to, and their friends will adjust to it after they have been informed. But everyone else will demand to see fins and gills. It is the same with the word "liberal" now. Some of us will get the distinction in context, but even we leap at the common meaning first. 100 out of 100 people will leap to that meaning first, especially in a context of who is abusing authoritarianism more. It seems sly. It has a motte-and-bailey flavor, of "Oh I didn't mean THAT kind of liberal (you silly fool)."
Having next election is not enough. Russia and Belarus continue to have elections. Adam Przeworski coined a better definition: democracy is a system of governance in which government can lose election.
This simply doesn't solve the issue, though. You make a good case that electing through majority vote a tyrant who pledges to end elections is undemocratic. But preventing this from happening is also undemocratic! "Democracy is about the next election; therefore we are justified in fixing this current one" simply isn't coherent.
The main takeaway is that "democracy" taken as an end in itself is a bit self-undermining. "Listening to the will of the people is inherently good" is vulnerable to self-referential problems, as the will of the people might be "listening to the will of the people is not inherently good/is bad".
Having next election is not enough. Russia and Belarus continue to have elections. Adam Przeworski coined a better definition: democracy is a system of governance in which government can lose election.
> When people accuse a strongman who moves against the judiciary, the media, NGOs, etc, of “threatening democracy”, they mean that he’s taking actions that would weaken some of the links in this chain. These actions might be desirable for other reasons, but they need to justify themselves against the cost of potentially making future elections less fair and free, if the strongman chooses to move in that direction later.
This is a common and extremely dishonest liberal argument tactic that you are engaging in. It has become so common and accepted that I don't actually think you are intentionally doing this or arguing in bad faith here, though. You are conflating the judiciary, which has clear constitutional authority with the media and a bunch of NGOs that have none whatsoever. You are also using the word "attack" which is conflating things like publicly condemning and insulting or removal of public funding, which are fine, with a real violent "attack" or actual legal ban on their existence, which is absolutely not fine.
There are three branches of the federal government that have constitutional authority to govern and there are all these associated institutions like NGOs (which I consider mostly parasitic entities, but that is another argument altogether) and the media which have absolutely no constitutional authority. There are also federal agencies which are kind of a middle ground (I consider them a complete subversion of the constitution, and therefore illegitimate, but that's a different argument).
The Democrats constantly try to move power from the core branches of the government to these unofficial institutions. There are two reasons for this. First, and most importantly, because the Democrats control them and they want power. Second, because these branches are not actually constitutionally defined, they have no democratic control or checks and balances on their power. They are staffed exclusively by appointments or employees that are not selected by election, which is allowed because they were never intended to have any governmental authority.
The Democrats are not doing this to protect democracy, but quite the opposite. . They are doing it because they want control outside of the bounds of democracy. When a Democrat says "your democracy" what they really mean is "our bureaucracy." These institutions may nominally support "free and fair elections," but way wouldn't they? When they have all the power, it doesn't matter who wins the election because those winners have very little actual power. Our current congress reminds me very much of the Roman senate after Augustus took over. The system of government didn't change on paper, but in practice it was no longer a republic.
> The Democrats constantly try to move power from the core branches of the government to these unofficial institutions. There are two reasons for this. First, and most importantly, because the Democrats control them and they want power. Second, because these branches are not actually constitutionally defined, they have no democratic control or checks and balances on their power. They are staffed exclusively by appointments or employees that are not selected by election, which is allowed because they were never intended to have any governmental authority.
I'm having trouble telling what you mean by "these unofficial institutions" - is this federal agencies? NGOs? The media? Different parts of this paragraph seem like they would apply to different subsets of these.
>conservatives can reasonably claim that their own strategy of moving against institutions is a consequence of progressives taking them over
In a world where empirical investigation and fact checking is impossible, maybe. DOGE lied about federal funding being diverted to leftist organizations like Politico - they posted contracts from usaspending.gov that showed Politico Pro contracts for tracking Congressional legislature that were awarded during... Trump term 1. Tulsi Gabbard is accusing Obama and co of treasonous conspiracy that you can only believe if you're too retarded to understand how dates work - which Fox News anchors apparently are because these claims get dismantled on any other news station. The connecting thread of being against NGOs and the civil service and the judiciary (including Trump term 1 appointed ones) and USAID and independent agencies and anti-gerrymandering commissions and prosecuting Trump for falsifying electoral vote certificates to overturn the 2020 election isn't because Republicans have loads of super meritorious "These are undemocratic" arguments for them, it's because they want to tear down any opposition to Trump and cement permanent rule.
"Answering these questions requires a flourishing journalistic ecosystem, including investigative reporters." This feels like an intuitive leap that could be better justified. e.g. there are many steps between "token freedom of the press," and a "flourishing" ecosystem. Might any of those other steps suffice to answer those questions?
In Canada the Chief Justice has put up a bust of his head in the entrance to the Supreme Court.
The federal government has asked the court to "clarify" whether they can just overrule provinces who enact legislation using the Notwithstanding Clause, which was insisted on when the constitution was ratified as an escape valve against judicial supremacy. Notwithstanding legislation remains in force for five years and cannot be struck down by the courts.
In recent years courts have ruled that preventing addicts from using drugs in public parks, and removing bike lanes each violate the constitutional right to security of person. They can and will say anything now. More painfully, they ruled that teens with mental illness cannot be excluded from the government assisted death program.
Liberal democracy is already weakened. Just doing nothing about these kinds of things is an equal or greater threat. The correct criticism of Trump is whether he's likely to succeed in disincentivizing the takeover of liberal institutions by progressives.
> That’s because progressive authoritarianism’s comparative advantage is subverting these institutions from the inside (eg the civil service fails to protest anti-democratic encroachment by progressives because progressives have captured it and it serves their interests)
I'm not sure that's quite right, and the gap speaks to the missing half of a 'democracy' that causes an essential tension.
To return to the post's original thesis, democracy isn't just about having the next election, it's also about having meaningful elections. Guaranteeing that the next guy is fairly elected doesn't matter too much if _this_ guy can't reasonably enact large portions of a valid agenda.
Of course, "reasonably," "large portions," and "valid" are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and I don't think there's a robust way to define them for all places and times.
Coming back to subverted institutions, I see the steelmanned right-wing argument as something closer to, "These institutions have been captured by the left, and all those rules and regulations make it impossible for us to govern even when we win elections! It's so bad that we can't reform it from the inside, we just need to sweep it all away and have a fresh start." The argument isn't necessarily one of conscious and intentional differential enforcement; instead the bureaucracy (which "thinks on paper") is forced to care about progressive-coded minutiae.
I think there's also some game theory at work here. In a two-ideology system, if both ideologies are conventional (act within the system) and think that they'll essentially take turns in power, the incentive is to set up robust and reasonably neutral systems that can act as referees when the other guys are in charge.
However, this might not be a durable equilibrium. A party that thinks it has a structural advantage might decide to encode its ideology into the rules, and one that thinks itself at a disadvantage might defect to a a "burn it all down" stance and work to de-legitimize the referee institutions. This might explain the radical-versus-conventional dynamics of the US over the past half century.
Fine post, though I am not too happy about 'angry politics' on ACX (no scarcity; I subscribed to Paul Krugman et al.) - I miss the old anti-anti-Trump days of SSC (not Scott's mistake, but Tronald Dumb changed to being more ... effective). - Obviously, all those checks and balances bring a lot of inertia to the whole system - otoh, "it's a feature, not a bug" and the main argument against anarcho-capitalist/libertarians is the missing protection from a hostile-takeover of their utopia of freedom. Even Milton Friedman's ideal-state spending only 10% GDP might not be sluggish/stable enough - (Singapore: 16% / USA: 36% / Germany: 50% / France 58% / Ukraine: 66% - war, ofc.).
I have yet to see arguments in these discussions advance points that were not thoroughly addressed in the federalist papers.
I don't think the founders were infallible or that they were saints or anything but it would be nice to not have to dance the same steps over and over again, we should at least try to start where writers left off this conversation before.
1-Democracy is not in danger because US elections will happen in 2026 and 2028, and the results will be implemented.
2-Last sentence of penultimate paragraph is very good. The Deep State is in fact a very powerful, very entrenched bureaucracy - the 51 intel chiefs who wrote the Hunter laptop letter, ...
3-"democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election"
Yes, and more generally, it's about always respecting the meta-values: voting and elections (as mentioned), freedom of speech, due process, ...
During the 2016 and 2024 elections Democrats were very blatant about using their political power to directly harm their political opponent. This obviously changed the norms and it's mostly up to Trump to figure out what the new (small d) democratic norms are.
I think many Republicans in office view this as a tacit negotiation, which catches Democrats off guard as many of them are consequentialists (within a very broad set of rules) and the consequence they're aiming for is to win.
There's an obvious solution here, which will never happen, which is for the Democrats and Republicans to sit down and negotiate what the new norms are, and encode them into law.
If you seriously think you are at risk of not having another election, I urge you take a step back and go outside. I didn’t believe that even when we had an unelected cabal governing via autopen with a senile figurehead as President. It’s crazy talk.
> and although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader, because if the same electorate that puts the leader in power puts the checks on the leader in power, they’re likely to come from the same party.
I cannot overstate how hostile I am to the notion that bureaucrats are a check on the president. The grind of *bureaucracy* procedural requirements must be met and are enforceable through courts. That's not the same as bureaucrats as personnel. The common defense of having such a bureaucracy is that they're *not* a check, they're meant to be ministerial, still linked to the popular will in some manner and implementing it, with either direction from the president or under the comingled authorization of both the president and Congress, depending on what constitutional lawyer you ask.
Staggered appointments don't fix this problem even for commissions. They don't check the president, they check *the presidency* and government generally by slowing its operation with obstructionists. Appealing to libertarians and opposition parties, not to people wanting democracy to reign supreme. The powers of the purse and of legal judgments are the checks.
Is there any reason to think that an institution strong enough to prevent the executive from canceling or ignoring the next election wouldn’t also be strong enough to overrule the president on his “proper” functions? Once we posit the existence of a non-democratic system more powerful than the democratically elected president, what is to stop that system from seizing control directly?
Relatedly: Why is every Western country seemingly unable to stop mass immigration despite it being an unpopular policy?
Democracy is about having the next election.
We're not a democracy. That leads to a tyranny of the majority over the minority. The founders felt very strongly about this.
We are a federal republic with elected representatives. These are not the same thing at all.
This is always silly. We're a democratic republic. They are not mutually exclusive terms.
First, words mean things. We should use the right words for the right things.
Second, this highlights that the checks and balances among the three pillars of government are what protect our republic.
Yes. This. It doesn't actually protect our democracy (in that other democracies are functioning perfectly well without these protections).
I'm glad we agree that words mean things and we should use the proper words. It makes the next step easier.
Go to your LLM of choice - I prefer GPT5 Thinking or Pro these days - and type 'Is the United States both a democracy and a republic?' or 'Are the terms Republic and Democracy mutually exclusive?'
For convenience, here's what mine just said to the latter:
No.
Democracy: rule by the people. Mechanism for political authority (elections, participation). Comes in direct and representative forms.
Republic: no monarch; public offices are held by elected or appointed officials under law.
Overlap is common: the U.S., Germany, and India are democratic republics.
Words do mean things, and you seem to think the word "republic" is exclusive with "democracy". It's not! They are referring to different spectra of things!
> words mean things
When people assert that monarchy and democracy are not mutually exclusive terms either, I'm not sure they do anymore.
The U.S. *became* a democracy in the Jacksonian era.
A *constitutional* republic and a democracy are, though. Both the express argument for and the lived experienced of constitutional republics, and the arguments against strict constitutionalism, is that it hampers, limits, and contravenes democracy. The interplay between representative governance and constitutional limits on that representation are by-design not democratic.
Fine.
A federal republic with elected representatives is about having the next election for those representatives.
a republic is also about having the next election
That's a pretty weak definition. Even North Korea has elections (for its parliament).
I guess we could append a 'real' onto 'election', but definitions generally don't feel the need to do that. All of those 'reals' would get a bit tedious.
I once used this argument in opposition to someone who, in late November 2024, was hoping that, subsequent to Trump winning the election, would declare him ineligible to take office. I agreed there might be grounds for that sort of declaration (I forget what those were now) but thought it would be undemocratic to invalidate the 2024 election after it happened.
I think that also works with your argument that democracy is about repeated elections, because I would be more concerned about the long term success of American democracy if Trump's candidacy was invalidated post-election than if he's allowed to serve out his term.
*courts would declare him ineligible
In 2020, Trump tried to have the Supreme Court take an actual case (as opposed to having a case appealed up to it). If the election had been in some way shape or form "invalidated" -- that's much more of a "Constitutional Crisis" than whatever crazy "TrumpOfTheDay" is actually happening.
From the knowledge I've gathered, that still might have been the best move (along with a "and let Joe Biden serve out his term," even -- who actually got the Presidency was negotiable on Trump's side. Determining that the election was spoiled was not.)
I wonder if those WaPo tote bags will become a collectible someday? Don't see any on Ebay so consider it as an alternative currency if the USD ever collapses
Yes, it's in danger as it has been everyday for 250 years. The same applies to many good things in life. So what?
I'm sure that everyday in the past 250 years there were at least a thousand people arguing that.
Careful there: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
Thanks. I'm always watch for the other 1%
This is basically John Hart Ely’s argument in Democracy and Distrust — the constitution mostly protects what he calls the “channels of change,” like free speech and advocacy, voting in the next election, separation of powers, etc. With some notable exceptions (no slavery), it does not enshrine outcomes, which should be left to the democratically elected branches.
Vladimir Putin has a PhD in law and ensures the Duma carefully designs legislation to make murdering opponents not a crime.
I think it a common pattern amongst dictatorships of completely breaking the spirit of legal order with complicated facade of keeping to the law. I am not sure why they do it, it isn't convincing even to their ardent supporters.
Putin's "Kandidat nauk"(no-ook=science; which I prefer to compare to an M.A.+, while the 'Doktor nauk' resembles a real PhD level) is in economics, not law (his first degree was in law, though). Wikipedia "In 1997, Putin received a degree in economics (Candidate of Economical Sciences) at the Saint Petersburg Mining University for a thesis on energy dependencies and their instrumentalisation in foreign policy.[40][41] His supervisor was Vladimir Litvinenko, who in 2000 and again in 2004 managed his presidential election campaigns in St Petersburg.[42] Igor Danchenko and Clifford Gaddy consider Putin to be a plagiarist according to Western standards. One book from which he copied entire paragraphs is the Russian-language edition of King and Cleland's Strategic Planning and Policy (1978)" - I am not aware that the Duma legislated murdering opponents not a crime, but if the prosecution does not prosecute and the judges would dismiss any case anyway: all is fine, legally. As the Russians say: Verboten - but if you really, really want to: it's ok!
In polls more Chinese people believe that China is a democracy than Americans believe that the US is a democracy. It's extremely effective.
Maybe, but what is the value of polls in places where people can be arrested for their opinion ?
The CCP doesn't officially claim to be a democracy, so saying it isn't a democracy isn't crossing them. Also I tend to believe the results here because Chinese people outside of the control of the CCP have told me that this is, in fact, what Chinese people in China believe.
Even the most repressive dictatorships can crumble if enough people resist. Dictatorships survive through a combination of fear, apathy, and genuine popular support.
I'm career-biased, but to me the most dangerous overreach of the Trump admin so far has been the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after disappointing job numbers. This is, to me, the largest reality-denying move so far and I worry that the Fed is next. At least with the political-on-political overreach you can imagine that other checks and balances might hold for another three years until a Democrat is elected. On the other hand, the global financial market's assumption of Fed independence might just be the North Star of the global economy, a rare shining beacon of trust and mission-critical efficiency. The LBS firing seems to be part one of the Great Data Denial, where Trump seeks to mold not only the public's opinion about cherry picked facts, but also the few facts that remain largely untainted by us-vs-themism.
And yet the BLS was wrong by the most it has ever been in 20+ years two weeks ago and fundamentally misrepresented the state of the economy by 1mm jobs. If that is not a firing offense, what is? The Fed did not act because of their massive inaccuracies, now revealed a year too late.
It's amazing because estimating the jobs in an economy of 340 million people is something that 6th graders do as basic homework. It's just as simple as calculating the tip on a restaurant bill.
The central conceit of populism is that there is a simple "common sense" solution to every problem and that it is only malice, elitism, and stupidity that keeps these solutions from being adopted.
The survey response rate has steadily dropped since Covid. It used to be near 90% ten years ago and is now below 70%. It's difficult to make trustworthy releases when your non-response bias and margin of error have both increased. This is a well known fact to anybody with an interest in this, including the Fed.
The models that the BLS uses have struggled with the life-and-death cycles of company creation, a known factor that has compounded the magnitude of the revisions. This is a well known fact to the Fed.
A vast amount of economic data releases are made every day in dozens of countries, with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Markets and decision-makers adjust to these changing degrees and give more or less value to a data release with this in mind. Claiming the Fed did not act "because of their massive inaccuracies" implies that a large portion of the Fed's decision making flows from BLS data releases, which is plainly wrong. There's a ton of data crunching at each of the twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks, and no single data point is important enough to "cause" the Fed to act or not act. In fact, if what you imply were true, the market would have expected a larger than 25bp rate cut yesterday, which was not the case - the futures-implied probabilities for a 25bp cut stood above 90% for the past few weeks, even with the political attack on Cook and the appointment of Miren.
So, what was a firing offense, really? Can you prove that the BLS acted in bad faith? Do you have a strong understanding of how they do their work, who has the capacity to influence (if at all) data releases? Is there any strong evidence to the singular importance of monthly NFP in the Fed's decision making over the past nine months? Have you listened to a lot of Fed governor speeches, to Powell's press conferences, and have they given you any impression that the BLS numbers specifically were at the core of their repeated choices not to cut rates?
I'll have to look into it, but the grapevine was saying that the BLS was undergoing significant armtwisting under Biden, with some "snap back" deliberately placed near elections.
This is a different matter to the government monkeying with the statistics via Government Jobs (teachers and the like) -- the government can create jobs as well as private companies. This is a systemic issue in the Biden Administration -- lack of forward thinking ("today is the only day, and the numbers need to look good today!"). It underlies the whole "this isn't a recession" stupidity (like, I'd have been content if they'd said, "It's a mild recession, nothing to worry about." and just rode it out).
I agree that the BLS numbers aren't everything (the beige book et alia has So Much Data). And thanks for the numbers on the "survey response rate", that very much adds to the discussion.
is your view that trump fired the head of BLS because he wants to get the most accurate numbers possible?
"And yet the BLS was wrong by the most it has ever been in 20+ years two weeks ago and fundamentally misrepresented the state of the economy by 1mm jobs. "
Do you have any proof for that claim? If you are going to claim something like that, you better back it up.
Here's some relevant data. I don't see how he was getting 20 years, specifically, but it's not an exaggeration of the magnitude of the effect.
https://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2025/9/11/bls-payroll-revisions-slash-job-gains-by-nearly-a-million
I think a lot of people recognize that the BLS's methodology has been falling short recently. If the director was resistant to improving the methodology, or simply wasn't up to the task, then I think it would be reasonable to replace them. But it takes time and research to find a better methodology, and firing the director won't change that. It could, in fact, make it worse if the next director is chosen based more on political loyalty than economic or managerial competence.
It is very bad, but I don't think there is any anti-democratic element.
In the sense that it is aimed at removing a "well informed" populace.
"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
I mean that can apply to anything.
You have a government body which exists so that businesses and people can be informed about the economy. Removing the head of that organization because it said that the was cloudy when the leader wanted it to be sunny seems like it is attacking one of the links of the chain up there.
Really want to use that one still after the last 10 years?
12 months of "downward adjustments" prior to the election (I heard this in around oct/sept) because the Biden Administration was deliberately cranking the "top level" numbers, for the Boomers who still get the "Job Numbers" and care about them.
Under the BLS's watch.
This is coming from a "numbers guy" (his work's won a Nobel)...
why were downward revisions good for biden when biden was president but bad for trump when trump is president? if bls is cooking the books why revise them instead of just leaving up the cooked numbers?
This only really matters politically when there is an election between when the initial inflated numbers drop and when the revisions come out.
but why revise at all? why not just publish the cooked numbers and leave them be?
Because they aren't cooking the numbers. The same downward revisions are happening for numbers released under Trump, so I don't believe that there is any conspiracy here. Regardless, there was a political benefit to Biden just because of the election timing.
oh sure i also agree!
It's not the "downward revisions" that are "good for Biden" -- it's the Top Level Numbers, that are placed in Boomer Boxes (like the news), and the Boomers in general don't read down to the nitty-gritty revisions.
You revise them because "actual business decisions" get made based on the revised data. Same with the CDC monkeying with numbers, it's one thing to have the top-level numbers be "good for the administration" (those form press releases), but the insurance industry needs the actual numbers, or the term life insurance industry Dies.
Adjustments are common and are often correlated. This is because the data tend to lag reality in predictable ways, and jobs numbers aren't memoryless.
People act like building these estimates is simple arithmetic and it's not. Moreover, changes to the calculation process made slowly and transparently and only with great care to preserve continuity.
Here's a great breakdown of the process if you're interested in digging into the weeds:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/major-data-revisions-are-coming
Correlated is one thing, I can accept a "two or three month" building spike (say), where we don't get good data because the builders are hiring quickly and not responding to surveys in time to capture the actual numbers. 12 months is a long time to have "downward revisions" every single month.
"12 months is a long time to have "downward revisions" every single month."
I'm unsure where you're getting this, but it isn't true:
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm
2025 has seen lots of downward revisions but the end of 2024 had a series of upward revisions.
You're probably looking at a different link than my friend was (and he wasn't saying it at the exact end of 2024. Might have said it in July for all I remember). It's probably of more use to look at the "upward revision" mean (1979 on). This means that the survey is in general "bearish." (which kind of makes sense, hiring more than you think.) We can in general ask, "Is this still a good survey?"
Very strange that the word "republic" appears nowhere in this essay. Because it's not really about "liberalism" or having more than one election - it's about the fact that we are not actually a democracy with unlimited power bestowed upon an avatar of the majority. We are a republic where the majority is limited in the scope of what it may impose on the minority.
The heart of republicanism (not the party the sovereign entity) is anti-democratic. It's enshrining certain rights as being too core to be vulnerable to majoritarian whims. It's stating that the principle matters more than what the people want or the popularity of an idea.
For me the democracy vs. republic structure is a far better way to understand this.
This just sounds like pedantry to me. Democracy can refer to a pure democracy or it can refer to any political system where they have free and fair elections. Scott is clearly using it in the second sense here.
> This just sounds like pedantry to me
It is. There are people who learned "we're a republic, not a democracy" is insightful and will say it in places where it makes absolutely no difference. Nothing about the essay changes if Scott changes "liberalism" to "republicanism."
No, but what he's trying to talk about is excessively chauvinistic. if the goal is to "preserve elections" -- the Westminister system does so as well, without all the checks and balances.
"Having the next election" seems equally important in a Republic.
Two gripes:
1. I hate the word “populace” irrationally, and am enraged it’s been used so liberally.
2. Or, that is, “used so democracy-but-with-the-next-election-in-mind-ally.” By which I mean: this post feels way more convoluted and epicyclic than calling liberalism important in its own right. Democracy is the thing that’s the best of bad options; the insane idea that Bob the Illiterate Gardener has just as much say running the country as Alice the Constitutional Lawyer; the thing that gives us crazy and terrible leaders from time to time.
And it’s all fine and ok because we still have liberalism: because we mostly get to keep living our lives however we want to live them, even if the tax scheme gets changed a little bit or whatever. It’s very important that we keep the liberalism despite the democracy, because most of our (very good!) lives are spent interacting with the former and not the latter!
I guess point taken that in the States this can get confused with a partisan message—but this seems solvable by giving the thing a new name like “we must defend constitutionalism” or “we must defend our freedom” or whatever, instead of making the bizarre claim that authoritarian behavior is bad only because we won’t get the chance to make *our* preferred tiny changes to the tax scheme in four years.
Agreed. Liberalism and individual liberty are more important end values. Democracy is useful in achieving those end values, and likely better than other forms of government. But it is very important for all liberal democracies to have lots of checks on mob power (read the Federalist papers!). Constitutional rights are just as, if not more important for defending the rights of minorities from majoritarian tyrannies.
I think the better argument is to recognize that the central idea of the American Constitution is that unconstrained democracy does not work, and that can overcome this weakness of democracy through checks, balances and constitutional rights. These things are designed to frustrate some democratic impulses.
Bureaucrats are not a branch of government. I keep seeing this implicit assumption everywhere that the executive re-shaping bureaucracies is somehow un-democratic or a threat to our system. The bureaucracies themselves are the threat to the system. The independent judiciary and the people's Congress are supposed to be the checks on the President. Instead, out of a desire to accommodate an increasingly complex world and give flexibility to the expert-class, both Congress and the judiciary spent several decades ceding more and more discretion to the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats derive any legitimate authority they do have from the executive, there is no other conceivable source for it in our constitution.
The reason this does not enable somebody to end all future elections is that elections in the USA are distributed among 1000s of county clerks who are running local elections alongside them. Those people would notice discrepancies, they may decide on their own to fudge something and go along with a sham election, but they aren't under federal control and are only barely under any state control. These people all know their counties and wards and districts very well, and unusual results in local races, conspicuous numbers of undervotes, these would all tell the tale to Mary the 58 year old retired school teacher who got elected county clerk and has been gossiping about the local candidates since high school. The people running in local county commissioner races would notice the finger on the scale.
You will know democracy is over if somehow they separate the presidential or federal elections from the local ballots, some kind of National Election Day with nothing else being contested at the same time. That's what it would take. Something like that might even come disguised as an anti-corruption measure, "to securely monitor the election, we must have it separately on this day where we can observe everything, and to cut out the local variances of having different styles of ballots etc.", but however they pitch it, you'll know that's the actual end.
In 2020, our election judge was banned from the counting rooms. Now nobody wants to be the election judge. Go Figure.
I implore you to stop making posts without proof of your claims, and only vaguely referring to events. Please provide a link.
This is Allegheny county, Pennsylvania. If you want to dig up 5 year old news (this did make the news), feel free. I know the election judge was complaining that he/she couldn't get into the counting room.
Source? I have never heard of a position with the title "election judge" in the US.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/municipal-elections-101-judge-of-elections-and-other-key-coting-positions-on-pa-s-november-ballot/ar-AA1Mk4Bj?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Seems like it's a Commonwealth of Pennsylvania thing.
Counterpoint: Congress, which makes the law and funds the government, has repeatedly given some bureaucracies a degree of independence from the executive. If the bureaucracy was completely under the thumb of the executive, then what stops the executive from commanding the bureaucracy from ignoring the law?
Nothing at all, and it is actually quite common for him to do so. That's how we have legal marijuana stores in many states while marijuana is federally illegal. The president simply ordered the DOJ and DEA not to enforce the law. As much as I am in favor of legal marijuana, the system that makes this possible is a complete joke and a total subversion of the constitution.
the federal bureaucracy derives its legitimacy from article i
What a freaking chauvinistic post.
The Westminister system does pretty much eliminate all checks and balances except the election itself (and, debatably, the Queen. The current King is pretty much on his way to eliminating himself as a check, in that nobody will work for him).
Even India manages to keep having elections.
I'm still sympathetic to your last line, but I want to caution everyone against feeling that "America is superior" to all other forms of governance, given your "here's what we want" of "continuing elections."
I don't think that anyone who does political science or commenting thinks that America's democratic/republic system is better than the others from a systems design standpoint.
We are like those legacy nuclear control systems that run on BASIC because that was what was available at the time.
8 inch floppies. (I dunno about the BASIC, but the floppies are an actual logistics issue).
notably, even america doesn't think so. when america wrote constitutions for germany and japan, it did not saddle them with the madisonian nightmare
You’ve ignored the hard version of this, namely scenarios in which the majority of the population wants civil institutions to be removed.* There are versions of this which have weird consequences for democracy, such as where Party A wants to deport group x, who tend to support Party B. The more normal case is institutional distrust because of capture or perceived capture by one side. If Trump had won on an explicit platform of “end ptoper election monitoring and the rule of law,” would it be undemocratic not to let him?
*This probably isn’t the case in the US at the moment, but may have been the case in Hungary and/or Poland for parts of the 2010s.
Well said. This pairs well with the parable of lightning. Science is an interconnected whole, you can't poison one part of it without infecting the whole thing. Same for a free democratic republic.
The issue with many populist candidates, whether left-wing or right-wing, is that they goodhart on the gap between "the will of the people" and "the CEV of the people" (or "the all-things-considered will of the people").
This comes out of the argument in The Narrow Corridor, by Acemoglu and Robinson, that liberty arises and endures only when a society strikes a precarious balance between a strong state and a mobilized society, walking a "narrow corridor" where each restrains and empowers the other. A strong state is required to enact the will of the people, while a mobilized society is required to ensure that what government enacts is the will of the people, rather than something else.
Broadly speaking, I think it's true that the most resilient systems thrive only because they are under two complimentary pressures -- a pressure to grow (strong state, in this example), and a pressure to remain consistent with what came before (the mobilized society, in this example). Too little change and you can't adapt to changes in your environment. Too much change and you either become unrecognizable or, more likely, veer into uncharted territory and make a fatal error.
Other examples in my mind include the Kelly Criterion (growth: go for +EV. Consistency: don't bet too large of a fraction of your account), genetics (each generation changes in accordance with natural selection, but stays pretty similar to the parents), or even ethics (something like utilitarianism helps push us to a better world, while something like deontology constrains us so we can avoid falling prey to galaxy-brained schemes with very high short term costs.)
Neat seeing governments as another example of this. Thanks!
> Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during their term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? Or confiscate opposition parties’ treasuries? Or order the police to murder any candidate who runs against him?
I don't have to imagine this system because it is our system. You just have to win the election decisively enough. If you have control of 2/3 of congress in our system you have effectively unlimited power. You can remove the president and supreme court. You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life.
In fact, I would say that that not only is this our system, it is a necessary property of any system that calls itself a democracy. If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy? Your point about the next election is a good one, but it assumes that the public wants democracy. What if they don't? As strange as it sounds, you can't really be a democracy without giving the public the option to abandon democracy if they so choose.
"Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same"
It really worries me how thoroughly “freedom” and “liberty” have disappeared from the lexicon. It seems to me that we never talk about them any more. Democracy is a means, not an end.
> I don't have to imagine this system because it is our system. You just have to win the election decisively enough. If you have control of 2/3 of congress in our system you have effectively unlimited power. You can remove the president and supreme court. You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life.
First, you've moved the goalposts. "Why doesn't winning with 51% give the winner a right to enact their agenda" is a fair question with answers discussed in the article. There's no principled reason that 'winning with 67%' should deliver a qualitatively different set of powers.
Second, you're conflating elections; winning a single presidency is different than winning a House majority, which is different yet from winning a supermajority of the Senate with staggered terms.
Third, you've also misrepresented the amending formula, which requires the assent of the legislatures (or constitutional conventions) of 3/4 of states. That's another set of elections required to make "unlimited power" changes.
> If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy?
First, you're just restating the paradox of tolerance, or "why can't I sign a contract to sell myself into slavery?"
Second, you're assuming that a momentary fit of unanimity must necessarily give a mandate for unlimited change. That's not true anywhere else in life; systems have inertia. It's entirely reasonable to require a sustained and fairly-decided majority to make fundamental changes to a government. The amount of that inertia is fairly debated, but it's not obvious that the right amount is zero.
The statement that democracy is about 'having more than one election', reminds me of what the chief of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria said before the elections that they won in the 90's: We beleive in one man, one vote, one time. Meaning: if we're elected, that will be the last vote people will cast. Just a reminder: that lead to a military coup, with bloodshed taking more than 100,000 lives.
When WE do it, we're only acting in self-defense, perhaps responding to outrageous provocation, at worst a measured an entirely justified pre-emptive strike in response to imminent threat.
When they do it, it's pure hate and aggression.
The tribe doesn't matter, only the friend - enemy distinction. Remember how conservatives passionately bewailed cancel culture (and liberals championed it), up until a few months ago? Now the tables are switched, and when we do it, then that makes it okay!
The only question is who has the whip hand at the moment. That is all.
The whole premise of the post is that it matters when someone is taking steps to make sure the whip can't change hands again.
You talk about the "civil service" in your last paragraph as one of the "institutions". But the US had a spoil system for a long time. This had flaws, but not the flaw of stopping elections. Thus an independent civil service is not load bearing for the continuation of elections.
Also the argument is infinitely flexible and has been abused to death. In much of Europe, in the UK and in Brazil, the idea that the population must be well informed to not just keep reelecting a dictator has morphed into suppression of speech to bolster incumbents to defend democracy.
And people who were trying to stop Donald Trump's election were also often arguing in this way.
And in the unlikely case that Trump tries to ignore term limits that would be obviously extremely serious, yet your extended-democracy framework would find no grounds for complaint. The US has strong anti-democratic features, and it's part of why it functions well.
> But the US had a spoil system for a long time. This had flaws, but not the flaw of stopping elections. Thus an independent civil service is not load bearing for the continuation of elections.
To be fair, in the historic context US elections have not always been 'fair and free', in part because the concepts were not thoroughly defined. It took an evolved, post-constitutional consensus to even decide that outright buying votes was bad; consider also how long it took to adopt the secret ballot.
"Fair and free" elections where one's vote is a considered but fundamentally private choice, made free of coercion, is a modern phenomenon. We shouldn't use 18th or 19th-century practices as strong evidence for the viability of this system.
He's already talked about running for a third term. It's only "unlikely" because Trump is old so he may die of natural causes before 2028.
Also, the spoils system and 19th century polities were doing "Democracy/technocratic government: The Alpha version."
The ability of a coordinated group to seize the government is much better understood and we unfortunately have many more examples of it being done successfully.
Meh.
The judiciary issue is not one about independence or not.
The issue is that American law, based on British law, separates the specific plaintiffs and defendants in a court case, from the overall government and its own executive and legislative authorities.
In concrete terms: a British or American judge has the independence to suspend state and federal laws in the process of a court case - but only for the parties directly involved in the case.
What has been happening is that this core distinction is being ignored by activist judges in order to execute blocking mechanisms, nationwide, on federal executive orders and actions which said judges object to.
And this matters because the basic principle of this American Republic is not merely the separation of powers, but a balance of powers. A judiciary that can undemocratically (because these federal judges are all appointed, not elected) choose to obstruct the actions of the actual elected official e.g. Donald Trump - is not a balanced power but a controlling one.
To suspend immigration law for a specific individual while his immigration case is being decided is one thing.
To attempt to abuse the aforementioned authority to restrict the actions of the duly elected President of the United States across the entire nation, is something else entirely.
This type of action not only contravenes the executive authority of the executive branch, but also the legislative authority of Congress and is a direct abuse of the principle of separate and balanced branches of the United States government under the Constitution.
I see why you choose to say that liberalism and democracy are related concepts, and write "...the checks, balances, and civil society we call liberalism," but I still object to it. It relies on using the word in the classical sense, which is now nearly an archaic use. Fifty years ago I would have argued for its continued use, to hold the line against its newer meanings of social safety net and sexual freedom. But language changes, and that battle has been lost. Without getting into a boring linguistics discussion, words mean what they mean to a community, and use of "liberal" in that way comes perilously close to meaning "everything good."
"Silly" not longer means blessed. Shakespeare used "generous" to mean noble, which is a related concept but leads one astray. (King Lear, BTW)
As another example, I was corresponding with a college friend who said she had had a partner for thirty years. I assumed she meant someone she lived with, or quite near; shared meals frequently and spent much time together; helped each other with small favors and large throughout the week such as medical appointments, shopping, and help with projects. I think 100 out of 100 people would have assumed the same. I learned two years later that this partner lived 700 miles away and they saw each other for two weeks every summer. A couple can call themselves a school of fish if they want to, and their friends will adjust to it after they have been informed. But everyone else will demand to see fins and gills. It is the same with the word "liberal" now. Some of us will get the distinction in context, but even we leap at the common meaning first. 100 out of 100 people will leap to that meaning first, especially in a context of who is abusing authoritarianism more. It seems sly. It has a motte-and-bailey flavor, of "Oh I didn't mean THAT kind of liberal (you silly fool)."
Having next election is not enough. Russia and Belarus continue to have elections. Adam Przeworski coined a better definition: democracy is a system of governance in which government can lose election.
This simply doesn't solve the issue, though. You make a good case that electing through majority vote a tyrant who pledges to end elections is undemocratic. But preventing this from happening is also undemocratic! "Democracy is about the next election; therefore we are justified in fixing this current one" simply isn't coherent.
The main takeaway is that "democracy" taken as an end in itself is a bit self-undermining. "Listening to the will of the people is inherently good" is vulnerable to self-referential problems, as the will of the people might be "listening to the will of the people is not inherently good/is bad".
Having next election is not enough. Russia and Belarus continue to have elections. Adam Przeworski coined a better definition: democracy is a system of governance in which government can lose election.
> When people accuse a strongman who moves against the judiciary, the media, NGOs, etc, of “threatening democracy”, they mean that he’s taking actions that would weaken some of the links in this chain. These actions might be desirable for other reasons, but they need to justify themselves against the cost of potentially making future elections less fair and free, if the strongman chooses to move in that direction later.
This is a common and extremely dishonest liberal argument tactic that you are engaging in. It has become so common and accepted that I don't actually think you are intentionally doing this or arguing in bad faith here, though. You are conflating the judiciary, which has clear constitutional authority with the media and a bunch of NGOs that have none whatsoever. You are also using the word "attack" which is conflating things like publicly condemning and insulting or removal of public funding, which are fine, with a real violent "attack" or actual legal ban on their existence, which is absolutely not fine.
There are three branches of the federal government that have constitutional authority to govern and there are all these associated institutions like NGOs (which I consider mostly parasitic entities, but that is another argument altogether) and the media which have absolutely no constitutional authority. There are also federal agencies which are kind of a middle ground (I consider them a complete subversion of the constitution, and therefore illegitimate, but that's a different argument).
The Democrats constantly try to move power from the core branches of the government to these unofficial institutions. There are two reasons for this. First, and most importantly, because the Democrats control them and they want power. Second, because these branches are not actually constitutionally defined, they have no democratic control or checks and balances on their power. They are staffed exclusively by appointments or employees that are not selected by election, which is allowed because they were never intended to have any governmental authority.
The Democrats are not doing this to protect democracy, but quite the opposite. . They are doing it because they want control outside of the bounds of democracy. When a Democrat says "your democracy" what they really mean is "our bureaucracy." These institutions may nominally support "free and fair elections," but way wouldn't they? When they have all the power, it doesn't matter who wins the election because those winners have very little actual power. Our current congress reminds me very much of the Roman senate after Augustus took over. The system of government didn't change on paper, but in practice it was no longer a republic.
> The Democrats constantly try to move power from the core branches of the government to these unofficial institutions. There are two reasons for this. First, and most importantly, because the Democrats control them and they want power. Second, because these branches are not actually constitutionally defined, they have no democratic control or checks and balances on their power. They are staffed exclusively by appointments or employees that are not selected by election, which is allowed because they were never intended to have any governmental authority.
I'm having trouble telling what you mean by "these unofficial institutions" - is this federal agencies? NGOs? The media? Different parts of this paragraph seem like they would apply to different subsets of these.
Can you provide some examples? I don’t know how the Democrats are relying on the media to run the country.
>conservatives can reasonably claim that their own strategy of moving against institutions is a consequence of progressives taking them over
In a world where empirical investigation and fact checking is impossible, maybe. DOGE lied about federal funding being diverted to leftist organizations like Politico - they posted contracts from usaspending.gov that showed Politico Pro contracts for tracking Congressional legislature that were awarded during... Trump term 1. Tulsi Gabbard is accusing Obama and co of treasonous conspiracy that you can only believe if you're too retarded to understand how dates work - which Fox News anchors apparently are because these claims get dismantled on any other news station. The connecting thread of being against NGOs and the civil service and the judiciary (including Trump term 1 appointed ones) and USAID and independent agencies and anti-gerrymandering commissions and prosecuting Trump for falsifying electoral vote certificates to overturn the 2020 election isn't because Republicans have loads of super meritorious "These are undemocratic" arguments for them, it's because they want to tear down any opposition to Trump and cement permanent rule.
Good post.
I feel you should change "channels like Telegram" to "channels like Signal". Telegram is not secure and not enough people realize that.
"Answering these questions requires a flourishing journalistic ecosystem, including investigative reporters." This feels like an intuitive leap that could be better justified. e.g. there are many steps between "token freedom of the press," and a "flourishing" ecosystem. Might any of those other steps suffice to answer those questions?
In Canada the Chief Justice has put up a bust of his head in the entrance to the Supreme Court.
The federal government has asked the court to "clarify" whether they can just overrule provinces who enact legislation using the Notwithstanding Clause, which was insisted on when the constitution was ratified as an escape valve against judicial supremacy. Notwithstanding legislation remains in force for five years and cannot be struck down by the courts.
In recent years courts have ruled that preventing addicts from using drugs in public parks, and removing bike lanes each violate the constitutional right to security of person. They can and will say anything now. More painfully, they ruled that teens with mental illness cannot be excluded from the government assisted death program.
Liberal democracy is already weakened. Just doing nothing about these kinds of things is an equal or greater threat. The correct criticism of Trump is whether he's likely to succeed in disincentivizing the takeover of liberal institutions by progressives.
> That’s because progressive authoritarianism’s comparative advantage is subverting these institutions from the inside (eg the civil service fails to protest anti-democratic encroachment by progressives because progressives have captured it and it serves their interests)
I'm not sure that's quite right, and the gap speaks to the missing half of a 'democracy' that causes an essential tension.
To return to the post's original thesis, democracy isn't just about having the next election, it's also about having meaningful elections. Guaranteeing that the next guy is fairly elected doesn't matter too much if _this_ guy can't reasonably enact large portions of a valid agenda.
Of course, "reasonably," "large portions," and "valid" are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and I don't think there's a robust way to define them for all places and times.
Coming back to subverted institutions, I see the steelmanned right-wing argument as something closer to, "These institutions have been captured by the left, and all those rules and regulations make it impossible for us to govern even when we win elections! It's so bad that we can't reform it from the inside, we just need to sweep it all away and have a fresh start." The argument isn't necessarily one of conscious and intentional differential enforcement; instead the bureaucracy (which "thinks on paper") is forced to care about progressive-coded minutiae.
I think there's also some game theory at work here. In a two-ideology system, if both ideologies are conventional (act within the system) and think that they'll essentially take turns in power, the incentive is to set up robust and reasonably neutral systems that can act as referees when the other guys are in charge.
However, this might not be a durable equilibrium. A party that thinks it has a structural advantage might decide to encode its ideology into the rules, and one that thinks itself at a disadvantage might defect to a a "burn it all down" stance and work to de-legitimize the referee institutions. This might explain the radical-versus-conventional dynamics of the US over the past half century.
Fine post, though I am not too happy about 'angry politics' on ACX (no scarcity; I subscribed to Paul Krugman et al.) - I miss the old anti-anti-Trump days of SSC (not Scott's mistake, but Tronald Dumb changed to being more ... effective). - Obviously, all those checks and balances bring a lot of inertia to the whole system - otoh, "it's a feature, not a bug" and the main argument against anarcho-capitalist/libertarians is the missing protection from a hostile-takeover of their utopia of freedom. Even Milton Friedman's ideal-state spending only 10% GDP might not be sluggish/stable enough - (Singapore: 16% / USA: 36% / Germany: 50% / France 58% / Ukraine: 66% - war, ofc.).
I have yet to see arguments in these discussions advance points that were not thoroughly addressed in the federalist papers.
I don't think the founders were infallible or that they were saints or anything but it would be nice to not have to dance the same steps over and over again, we should at least try to start where writers left off this conversation before.
1-Democracy is not in danger because US elections will happen in 2026 and 2028, and the results will be implemented.
2-Last sentence of penultimate paragraph is very good. The Deep State is in fact a very powerful, very entrenched bureaucracy - the 51 intel chiefs who wrote the Hunter laptop letter, ...
3-"democracy isn’t just about having an election. It’s about having more than one election"
Yes, and more generally, it's about always respecting the meta-values: voting and elections (as mentioned), freedom of speech, due process, ...
During the 2016 and 2024 elections Democrats were very blatant about using their political power to directly harm their political opponent. This obviously changed the norms and it's mostly up to Trump to figure out what the new (small d) democratic norms are.
I think many Republicans in office view this as a tacit negotiation, which catches Democrats off guard as many of them are consequentialists (within a very broad set of rules) and the consequence they're aiming for is to win.
There's an obvious solution here, which will never happen, which is for the Democrats and Republicans to sit down and negotiate what the new norms are, and encode them into law.
If you seriously think you are at risk of not having another election, I urge you take a step back and go outside. I didn’t believe that even when we had an unelected cabal governing via autopen with a senile figurehead as President. It’s crazy talk.
> and although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader, because if the same electorate that puts the leader in power puts the checks on the leader in power, they’re likely to come from the same party.
I cannot overstate how hostile I am to the notion that bureaucrats are a check on the president. The grind of *bureaucracy* procedural requirements must be met and are enforceable through courts. That's not the same as bureaucrats as personnel. The common defense of having such a bureaucracy is that they're *not* a check, they're meant to be ministerial, still linked to the popular will in some manner and implementing it, with either direction from the president or under the comingled authorization of both the president and Congress, depending on what constitutional lawyer you ask.
Staggered appointments don't fix this problem even for commissions. They don't check the president, they check *the presidency* and government generally by slowing its operation with obstructionists. Appealing to libertarians and opposition parties, not to people wanting democracy to reign supreme. The powers of the purse and of legal judgments are the checks.
Is there any reason to think that an institution strong enough to prevent the executive from canceling or ignoring the next election wouldn’t also be strong enough to overrule the president on his “proper” functions? Once we posit the existence of a non-democratic system more powerful than the democratically elected president, what is to stop that system from seizing control directly?
Relatedly: Why is every Western country seemingly unable to stop mass immigration despite it being an unpopular policy?