Note that the Supreme Court's power of constitutional review is not in the Constitution - it was simply asserted by the early courts and accepted by all of government ever since then.
It does seem to be a pretty good system though. Though it has its flaws (e.g. court packing) and there are other terrible flaws in the constitution (e.g. president's power to pardon those who commit crimes for his political benefit). But all in all the Constitution was indeed breathtakingly good for its time.
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.
I'd love to learn more, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the constitution of Japan seems pretty American? The Diet has two houses, one with 4 year terms and one with six year terms, and laws have to passed in both, and it has an independent judiciary. Is the relevant difference having a Prime Minister instead of a President?
Maybe you were exaggerating here, and I'd have to look up how it went down in Japan, but Germans wrote their own post-WW2 constitution. It was of course overseen and approved by the Allies which is a measure of influence, but yeah. Not directly written by the Allies.
And even if it had been, the UK was one of said Allies; that influence alone could've pushed the (West) German constitution in a Westminsterian direction.
The postwar Japanese constitution was written by Americans and then translated into Japanese; I didn't realize the process in West Germany was different
Why would the government appropriate for America be the same as the government appropriate for America's conquered vassal states? The problems the systems are trying to solve are completely different.
I think there's some genuinely good features in the US system. If there is one that I would definitely copy when setting up a new country, it's the bill of rights, explicitly stated as a set of restrictions on things that the government cannot make laws about (to prevent nonsensical "positive rights" from creeping in).
The 9th amendment literally states there are a set of rights that *definitely* exist and are legally protected but aren't written down anywhere and provides no mechanism to test if something is covered under it or not.
Yes, but it is perfectly possible to have a parliamentary system with a bill of rights. That the US has a bill of rights and the UK doesn't is just anecdotal.
The UK has strong protections for the civil service, though, so a would-be tyrant can't just fire everyone and replace them with cronies. That's also why the PM can take over the next day instead of a three month transition.
There are many different ways of securing democracy, and the Westminster system has its own. In Canada we have a constitution, and power sharing between the federal and provincial govts, while in the UK the constitution is unwritten and the checks are largely informal, but they're there. American democracy *might* survive if it were changed into a constitutional monarchy, but just dumping the checks and balances they *do* have could turn out badly. This is how I took the essay.
TBH I think unwritten constitutions are the most important, even in countries with written constitutions. Almost every country in the world, including Russia and China, has free speech protections in its constitution, but without the legal and political culture to enforce them, words on a piece of paper don't make a blind bit of difference.
It hadn't dawned on me that anyone would read this post as an argument that "America is superior" to anything except <checks post> Russia under Putin or Venezuela under Chavez. I think you might be carrying a bunch of baggage from other discussions into this one.
Most of the mechanisms discussed in the article don't actually depend on the governmental system. Independent journalists, independent NGOs that can organize, legal protections for protests, none of that depends on the exact structure of your government. And the UK has an independent judiciary, even if they don't have it enshrined in a written constitution, so that safeguard is there.
And if you're going to argue "but Parliament could just repeal the laws creating judicial independence," that's one of those bright-line moments that Scott was talking about. "The government is voting on the We Want To Be Dictators bill so they can override the courts" is the sort of thing that mobilizes protesters in a way that "the government is wrangling over the fine points of election law in court" might not.
my understanding is that parliamentary supremacy is a severe weakness in the British system (especially after leaving the ECHR) and Britain itself isn't looking particularly free these days
is a country that tries to ban wikipedia and criminalizes opposition to its foreign policy - and which routinely arrests people for things they say on the internet - really still a democracy?
1A. This is more or less American boosterism. It’s also not related to the non distinction between republics and Democracies. I’m not even sure what you think a democracy is on this context.
The U.K. is a major recent violator of the free speech principles that we pretty much originated (you can thank us later) but the major violation is not the police turning up for trivial tweets - which is itself pretty bad, but the mass arrests of pro Palestinian activists a few weeks ago. This is something we have in common in the US. Word on the street is that it’s influenced by the US.
And something really bad happened lately. The government managed to ban a fairly popular late night host on a private TV channel for saying something that upset them. That’s North Korea levels of control right there, if only we had a 1A
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 multiple things. "Democracy" is not a single, definitional form of government. It's a rough categorization of a bunch of things that share certain properties (and those properties can be contested at times, as you are now). Largely, it simply refers to any form of government where elections are held to determine outcomes (be they electing representatives, or voting on laws themselves). If you want "democracy" to be specific, it needs modifiers like "representative democracy" or "direct democracy" etc.
What is your definition of democracy that it would exclude the United States? I feel like it has to be so narrow that it's never been achieved by a significant state in practice, and hence isn't a very useful word/concept.
Using Wikipedia:
"Democracy ... is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive or maximalist definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections".
Most countries have anti-corruption laws which prevent the wealthy from buying political power with said wealth, and significantly smaller wealth gaps which make it harder to do in the first place. The United States had similar laws until 2010, when a far-right judiciary struck them down; now it does not.
Most countries also don't arrest journalists for publishing stories critical of the regime, and historically many of them did not surveil or censor the internet to quash dissent either.
If one of the most unequal societies on Earth, with a near-total oligarchic capture of its political system, must be called a "democracy" then the term is diluted beyond all meaning; one might as well accept the DPRK's claim to constitute such. America's civil liberties situation is nothing to be proud of and competitive elections are a necessary but far from sufficient condition (and consider who the competition is between?)
How do you explain Donald Trump's election, given that the vast majority of the rich did NOT want to see him elected in ANY election, and he's 2 for 3? This assertion that the US is some kind of oligarchic authoritarian state doesn't survive review of evidence.
I wouldn't suggest that there's no corruption, or that corruption isn't a major problem; but it's a major problem in all democratic governments (and indeed in all large, complex governments where the governors are far removed from the governed geographically and culturally). But to pretend it's tantamount to oligarchy is absurd. (Incidentally, there are anti-corruption laws in the US as well. I'd like to see them enforced more thoroughly.)
The commenter did not say "we are a [pure] democracy", they said "democracy is..." I am generally fine with pedantry, but in this case you misinterpreted the statement to imply something that was not said. On a rationalist blog, the correct remediation here is to admit you made an error, delete or edit your posts, and feel some embarrassment about clogging up the comments section with all this unnecessary noise.
I think it was obviously somewhat Democratic prior to that; certainly more Democratic than many (most? Almost all?) European states. And of course, it became yet more Democratic after the Civil War amendments and then later the Voting Rights Act. I agree Jackson is a big step change, but I'm not totally sold that the US is clearly a democracy on one side of that line, and not on the other.
For sure, but I think it's reasonable to say that a country can be MORE democratic than another without BEING a democracy. The Roman Republic certainly wasn't a democracy, but it had STRONGER democratic elements than mere autocracies.
For a long time, Switzerland was the only European country that could compete with the U.S.
Yeah I'm not really in disagreement, just slightly objecting to the categorical statement that the US “became a democracy” in Jacksonian era; I think that's justifiable but not incontrovertible.
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.
This is not silly at all. The Federal government is not a democracy of any kind, and was never meant to be one. The Constitutional order establishes a system that, from beginning to end, is *very deliberately anti-democratic,* and with good reason.
What we have is government by consensus. Its fundamental rules are very different from those of democracy, prioritizing stability and broad agreement over majority rule. The principles of the government are:
1) By default, the status quo endures.
2) If you want to change that, you need a broad consensus across multiple distinct interested parties. The will of any sizeable minority must always be allowed to thwart a majority and revert to rule #1, to prevent democratic majorities from imposing their will upon unwilling people whose outcomes they have no stake in.
Not necessarily. There have been undemocratic republics. Oliver Cromwell got rid of Parliament after he led the Parliamentary forces against the monarchy, which was abolished to create a Commonwealth.
North Korea *does* hold elections. They're just extremely undemocratic circus elections, but they serve a function as a ritualistic pseudo-confirmation of the Kimist rule.
This is just so tedious. For some reason, wanna-be pedants like you come out of the woodwork to incorrectly well-akshully this point. It has been debunked a thousand times by a thousand people.
A federal republic with elected representatives is a KIND OF DEMOCRACY. How is that just impossible for some people to understand.
You sound extremely stupid when you try to claim otherwise.
"We may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behaviour. It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic. It is sufficient for such a government, that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified; otherwise every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well organised or well executed, would be degraded from the republican character."
This argument has always felt like "We're not the [the word associated with the political party X], we're [the wword associated with the political party Y]".
This argument is just semantics about what "democracy" means. By all means, by the modern understanding, the US are a democracy. Even back in ancient Greece the tyranny of the majority degeneration was called a "demagogy". The "illiberal democracy" of Orban would be an example of that: simply nominally appeal to the popular sentiment to legitimate your power and then do whatever (and notice that this side of having some kind of genuine direct democracy, this kind of thing very quickly morphs into just plain old dictatorship, because once you've stopped caring for the minority the representatives of the majority can just cement themselves in place forever).
Iran is an interesting case, all in all. As far as I understand, it really IS a democracy - to a degree. Not only elections happen, they are also contested, compared to NK (or USSR) - people really have a choice, and that choice matters (e.g. they have elected a more moderate/liberal president the last time). But the elections are not "free" in the western sense, because only candidates approved by clerics can participate. And then the power of president and parliament is limited by the ayatollah.
I think this system might even have some merit, in the sense that the strategic vision is provided by a single determined person who doesn't have to worry about pandering to voters, while implementation of that vision can be flexible. The vision ITSELF might be problematic, but that's a matter of opinion (locally) and history (globally). Of course, it provides no legal recourse for citizen if they actually think the vision is bad and must be changed, but at least they can influence it, somewhat.
The main problem with it, it all ends when the main person in charge dies. It's very unlikely Khomeini will be able to "pass the torch" to anyone, and is just as unlikely that his vision (we're putting aside the question what this vision actually is) will be achieved in his lifetime. For Iran, it might be actually good, but if the person in charge had some vision we could all agree was worthy, it would possible be a tragedy, because the infighting after his death would be vicious, and will hamper country's ability to achieve that vision. Maybe they should instead train an LLM on Khomeini quotes and works and put it in charge?
> It's very unlikely Khomeini will be able to "pass the torch" to anyone, and is just as unlikely that his vision (we're putting aside the question what this vision actually is) will be achieved in his lifetime.
Ruhollah Khomeini has already died and "passed the torch" to Ali Khamenei, who, despite sharing many letters in his last name with his predecessor, is a different person.
Iran is actually a great example of the tension discussed in this article.
The actual elections to parliament are free (once the candidates have been approved) and have real consequences -- but only on issues where the Ayatollah does not have strong opinions.
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.
But the Supreme Court, with very limited exceptions, is only an appellate court. And even when they hear a case they appoint a special master to actually do all the trial stuff.
Yep, I agree with this. I also think, through gritted teeth, that it will probably be better if Trump is never punished for the crimes he has committed in office. One of the things we have to do is to accept that (a) leaders are human and will mess things up; (b) when a leader of a powerful country messes things up, the consequences will be very bad indeed; and (c) we need the leader to be willing to leave office and become an ordinary citizen again.
All of which means that some level of immunity and impunity for the stuff they got wrong in office is necessary. It may be that the recent Supreme Court ruling went too far, but a lot of leeway should be given.
Because if a leader thinks they're going to be jailed when they leave office, the incentives become very, very bad.
I do not believe Trump can stay in office even if he wants. His musing about staying for a third term is mostly bait for Democrats to distract them from other things he's doing. That said, I would not like to see Trump pursued for crimes any other than what reasonable justice demands, and some of the charges pursued by states over the last few years have been political. That is regrettable and corrosive. I don't have much of an opinion on what SCOTUS decided but it seems to me if their decision is respected as it should be, there may not be much that Trump can be reasonably prosecuted for.
This seems exactly backwards to me. If a leader thinks he can’t possibly be jailed when he leaves office, the incentives become arguably even worse. In the first case, the leader can try to cling to power, but may not succeed. In the second, the leader can literally just do anything whatsoever.
There are plenty of examples of countries jailing former authoritarians. In every case I can think of, the consequences of doing so have been at worst neutral and at best somewhat democracy-restoring.
Yeah, I see what you mean. And there are certainly examples that point in both directions. I’d suggest that the jailing of Lula in Brazil and Chen Shuibian in Taiwan were examples of bad effects, and are likely to have a negative impact on others who consider going into politics. But in fact, in both those cases, their party continued to operate and was able to resume power…
So perhaps I’m wrong. I fear situations where two factions waste their time taking revenge on each other rather than getting on with governing. But perhaps maintaining rule of law is more important.
I think what’s missing is a mechanism by which the prosecution can be plausibly seen by the public (especially by the politician’s supporters) as independent and not politically motivated. Sometimes this seems to happen (eg. Nixon) but I don’t know of a reliable mechanism to ensure it happens
By the way, now Brazil jailed Bolsonaro too. It seems like an excellent case study of what happens when you're not in fact too shy about punishing leaders for going off the script.
It's complicated. If there are no legal consequences, he is encouraged to do further crimes. But if he is worried that leaving office will be the difference between jail and freedom (because he can suppress legal processes only while in office), he is *much more strongly* encouraged to commit further crimes because (paradoxically) committing crimes is what prevents punishment in practice.
Or do like Berlusconi did back in the early 2000s in Italy and simply spend his time passing laws that say the crimes he would be jailed for are not crimes any more.
Both incentives are true. But I suspect that our actual rules tends to lean towards leniency to politicians for their widdle human mistakes because they are made - surprise surprise - by other politicians.
I read some time ago about the imperative mandate, the notion of having representatives being somewhat legally tied to upholding the mandate they've been given (read: deliver, within reasonable bounds, on the promises they've made or indications they've been given from their electorate). There's plenty of arguments for why this would be Very Bad for democracy, most of them not terribly convincing. The essence seems to be that politicians can't possibly imagine being subject to that level of scrutiny or accountability - but that's a shared trait between anyone doing any job. We'd all like to be left entirely to our own devices without any overseers, regulations and what have you - but that does not mean those things aren't sometimes necessary.
The incentives only become bad when the checks and balances of the state are flouted to the extent they have been this time round - see the removal of the BLS head, the attempted removal of Lisa Cook from the Fed, extreme unilateral diplomacy (you court Trump now, as the UK did on his visit in mid-September, not the United States).
This has the propensity to create Emperor-like power in a single person. The accountability that was previously diluted across entire bureaucracies now more than ever rests solely on a single person's shoulders. What was previously mostly a figure-head who had some room to make their own policy decisions, and who mostly used their vested powers like executive orders to do the bidding of a buttressing group of policy experts (this is still true today), is morphing more into facilitating the caprice of whomever happens to hold the position (we cannot deny a lot of Trump's policies result from his idiosyncrasies).
Procedurally we are where we have always been; the President-cum-Commander-In-Chief role, the discovered power of executive order, the ability to leave a bill unsigned in the Oval Office and so forth has facilitated the President's unilateral action for decades. However, substantively we are seeing Trump try to push these powers further, changing their nature by emphasizing the person in the role more than what the role represents (the figurehead of a republic).
All this does is increase the impact of your (a) on your (b), reducing their ability to (c). How can someone all-mighty, as close to corporeal omnipotence as we might get, go back to being an "ordinary citizen" after this? How will people avoid seeing only their personal culpability for all policy decisions?
Your take is the pragmatic one, and I agree with it assuming the course cannot be changed. But normatively, more must be done to stop this shaping of the POTUS position. We SHOULD accept your (a), (b) and (c), but we should try and mitigate (a) and (b) by restricting the position's power, the antithesis to Trump's actions today, so (c) is possible.
Yep, that’s true, and I was suggesting that it might be better if it stays that way. (Though I thought Daeg above was quite persuasive, and I’m reconsidering.)
The alternative would be to prosecute him for his crimes in office as well, which are presumably more momentous because of the power he has.
I don't think invalidating an election is strictly undemocratic. The problem is simply that such things are always fraught with dangers because that is already a full blown constitutional crisis. If there is good evidence that an election was invalid, it should be in theory declared invalid - fiat justitiam ruat caelum. But in practice, since now the guy is in charge, and in the end all power flows from the barrel of a gun, to say it with Mao, if you do that you better make damn sure you have the backing of enough strength to actually carry it out (and that is dangerous too because even a military deployed for a just removal of a leader can get "ideas").
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
I see that your comment survives even though its parent has been deleted.
I got a response to the comment of mine in this thread pointing out that Canada doesn't have a monarchy, arguing that obviously they do because it's inarguably true that they have one. [You might think I'm characterizing that response uncharitably. I am not.]
After two exchanges, that subthread has now disappeared, their comments and mine, and the notifications in my substack activity dropdown say "1 user replied to your note on [the ACX essay]" rather than saying - as they did before the disappearance - "[username] replied to your comment on [the ACX essay]".
I'd like to know more about what happened here, and why another user was apparently allowed to delete my comments.
(Also, just to be sure, I checked my personal activity and it displays "You haven't published any notes yet.")
There are no two equal days in history. There may be a lot of similarities and a few differences or viceversa. Who knows how much democracy was threatened yesterday and today? And tomorrow.
If you know any book or paper that reports a serious study of key factors implying a threat to democracy over any period during the past 250 years, I'd appreciate the reference.
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.
But channels only carry water if there’s pressure behind them. I think the pressure is cultural, whether people feel part of the whole or shoved to the side. If that weakens, the channels silt up and all the elegant procedure in the world won’t move anything.
I've always been fascinated by how people could look at the 4th and 5th amendments and think they're merely procedural safeguards. "Reasonability" checks and "public use" are merits judgments. Choosing to treat them as merely inviting merits judgments from somewhere else isn't exactly a straightforward reading of the document, it's a structural inference at best, and made up bullshit at worst, regardless of the merits of Ely's normative argument.
The fifth amendment is literally about due “process.” It allows government to take your life, liberty, and property if it follows due process. Grand juries, self-incrimination, and double jeopardy are all procedural rights. And even the partially substantive eminent domain provision does not prevent the government from taking your property; it only requires compensation (the calculation of which is left to a process). Likewise, the fourth amendment does not prohibit searches and seizures; it requires the government to get a warrant, i.e., to follow a process. And the typical remedy for a violation is exclusion of evidence, a procedural rule.
Getting the warrant requires showing that there is probable cause to find evidence of a crime. In some cases like with wiretaps the rules are even stronger.
I don't love the trend of people reading the words "due process of law", picking out exactly one word from that idiom, and forgetting the rest. Even if I agree that the Supreme Court has been wrong about that clause in the fifth amendment (*The One and Only One Substantive Due Process Clause* article comes to mind here, saying the 14th is different in this regard..), that's not the only part of the fifth, and I don't think the procedural reading is self-evidently right, it comes across as myopic when compared to state constitutions.
I'm not sure reading the right against self incrimination as a procedural right is the obvious reading, nor eminent domain or the warrant requirement as purely procedural. The fourth prohibits *unreasonable* search and seizures. If it was just prohibiting general warrants, requiring only process, that adjective would be superfluous. Even conservative jurists seem to grant that it requires normative considerations, and have other reasons to read it narrowly than literal meaning. That's kind of my point, Ely's normative argument might be fine, but the descriptive one?
This is why I think Ely’s framework misses half the picture. He treats the channels as self-sustaining, but they only flow if people believe the system belongs to them. Without that, the 4th or 5th can read however you like.
> I don't love the trend of people reading the words "due process of law", picking out exactly one word from that idiom, and forgetting the rest.
I don't see what the rest of your comment has to do with this opening statement? The idiom has no particular meaning. But you aren't arguing that it does. You're arguing that there are additional concerns described outside that phrase.
You're right that I raised one point and moved on fast because I thought by referencing a relatively well known dispute in the law concerning the due process clauses I didn't need to relitigate the entire merits of it when there's relatively well defined positions on it. And I do say "even if I agreed" before going on. I don't think it's generally advisable to read each comment on here as a high school essay, replete with a thesis, body, and close. I think you're being a bit pedantic, put simply. I can't edit my comment so I apologize I cant make it clearer posthumously.
For what it's worth, the separate argument referenced there is that "due process of law" may not merely imply what we have come to understand as "procedural" rights, but rather either incorporate other rights by virtue of being "of law", or that among the procedures required by due process "of law" is judicial review, which in itself requires a normative theory distinguishing law from mere acts of Congress.
I don't see the Third, or Fourth amendments as protecting those channels of change. The Ninth & Tenth are also more about federalism than democracy. The original Constitution was actually rather silent on how elections were to be conducted within states, amendments concerning voting rights were added generations later.
I'd say "no slavery" protects the channels of change too. Even in a very strange system in which slaves had the right to vote they would hardly be free enough to exercise it properly. Obviously you need citizens to be, well, citizens or you have a very obvious loophole for a ruling class to gerrymander things in their favour.
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.
Despite not being a free or fair democracy in any sense, Chinese citizens vote in elections. Citizens elect deputies at the county level, who in turn elect deputies at the next level up, and so on.
In the modern West, "democracy" is commonly understood to mean elections. But a few centuries ago, it's my understanding that "democracy" meant something closer to "vox populi" or "nationalism". I.e. a vague notion that the state should be controlled by the nation (AKA the common people; rather than a monarch/theocracy). Or at least serve the *interests* of the nation.
From there, you can see how the USSR took this and came up with "Democratic Centralism" [0], i.e. the idea that the Party Vanguard would "democratically" debate and decide on policy, theoretically in service of the interests of the proles. (Notice the lack of elections here though, even in theory). Which China then inherited from the USSR.
Obviously, there's plenty of cases where tyrants like the Kim Regime of the DPRK just pay lipservice to "democracy". But in the case of the CCP, they really do believe their own words [1]. In this context, "democracy" isn't really about elections, it's more like a secular Mandate of Heaven.
It's more like, it was meant to understand rule of the people. This was widely seen as bad by the obviously non-democratic states of the time. I think the most important thing is that the general model of democracy of the era (like Athens) was direct. Athenian citizens allowed a political life at all (namely, free adult males) were all in the assembly. They personally voted on individual issues and decisions, not just elected representatives to do all the voting for them.
To those people, our modern representative democracies would probably feel quite undemocratic.
The USSR had elections. They simply served a different purpose in a single-party state. Low turnout was a sort of an opinion poll: "ackchyually, if the party candidate is this bad, the people simply won't vote for him". Not that it ever worked this way, of course.
And I think you're confusing democratic centralism with the vanguard role of the party. DC is basically "disagree, then commit": you can freely debate which way the party should go, but if your side loses the internal vote, you have to follow the majority and present a united front.
Even the most repressive dictatorships can crumble if enough people resist. Dictatorships survive through a combination of fear, apathy, and genuine popular support.
In theory, sure. In practice, authoritarians are not toppled by popular uprisings.
>From 1950 to 2012, there were 473 authoritarian leaders who left power. Regime insiders were responsible for the majority (65 percent) of these exists, with coups and ‘regular’ removals from office each accounting for about a third of all leader exits. Twenty percent of authoritarian leaders died in office, and only 10 percent were kicked out at the hands of the masses.
Are they? Pretty sure those are the 10% of the 65% leader exits from internal reasons. I would suspect the majority of the remainig 35% would be invasions from another country.
I think you need to consider whether the coups and removals didn't happen because the leader was already very unpopular and the coupers and removers didn't think this made the time ripe for a change, and possibly harnessing the resulting popularity gains from being the Guy Who Saved The Country From The Previous Guy.
And yet, to borrow sports terminology, you have to credit a goal to the player who gave the ball the deciding kick, not to the teammates who may have given the assist. That is a useful, but different question.
That’s pretty rare in China. I’d recommend the Substack sinification which has a lot of internal Chinese academic discussion, not all of it pro Marxist or pro government.
My understanding is that in China, the term means something more like "Is the government acting in the interests of the people?" than "Was the free-and-fair-elections ritual performed correctly?" They call it "Whole-process democracy."
On a similar note, if you read the Wikipedia page on Chinese political parties (i.e. those who sit in the NPC or Standing Committee), you might notice that the english names are surprising; China Democratic League, China Association for Promoting Democracy, Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League.
Yeah I've heard it as, how many levers do common people actually have on the government (I prefer the term, how many bits can be transmitted from people to government). Ideally, in democracy it'll be much higher numbers than dictatorship. But is it actually the case today?
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.
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?
The revisions get reported in the same Boomer Boxes, and when they're big, Boomers notice. Vibes about the economy have always been affected by headlines saying "jobs numbers way less than previously thought," and whichever party's in opposition makes as much hay from that as they do from initial reports.
The revisions are usually reported in the same article as the current month's job number estimates, since the same report is the source for both, and most media consumers want a summary of the employment situation rather than a separate analysis of what the BLS said about previous months. So going hunting for separate articles on "jobs report revision" is usually going to get you the money pages (unless the revisions are the most striking feature of the report). But that doesn't mean the revisions don't shape the headlines.
If the Biden gang were juicing the job numbers, it's remarkable how utterly they failed in October 2024, the point when most Boomers start paying attention to election-related stuff. Not only were the numbers unspinnably weak, they were underestimates that would later be revised upward by 358%. Maybe the deep state/media conspiracy wanted to tank Biden's reelection then and Trump's popularity now?
October 2024 was also when the downward revisions to August 2024 were announced. Unsurprisingly, those downward revisions didn't independently make headlines because the headline was already "job numbers bad." Even when the first August 2024 numbers were released, the NY Times headline was "US jobs report shows hiring has shifted into lower gear," which captured both the Aug numbers not being terrific and (as the headline lede made clear) the downward revisions to previous months.
So in both of the immediate pre-election months, the NYTimes jobs headlines around this report were "employment is weak," explicitly citing the revisions to previous months as well as the current numbers.
Did Boomers pay attention? Well, Biden/Harris lost the election, primarily on grounds of the economy being bad. Trump won the Boomer vote by pretty much the same margins as in 2020.
The recent revisions are the largest downward revisions on record. They'd make headlines for that even if they didn't also confirm "tariffs bad" priors (which haven't been confirmed as resoundingly as liberals like me had expected after 'Liberation Day,' with the stock market ticking along just fine and jobs seemingly doing OK). It's hard to argue that they aren't genuinely newsworthy. Newsmax reported on them too; are they on the memo list for the lockstep journalisic conspiracy?
Also, dude. The Dean Scream was the best TV of that whole week, by a mile. Anyone who watched it, heard it, or heard the James Lileks techno remix shouldn't wonder why it was on every channel the next day. Yaaaargh!
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.
But upward revisions would have been viewed as suspicious too! There would have been a political benefit to Biden if the numbers looked good near election day, not a year before. This conspiracy makes no sense
I agree with you that they're not cooking the numbers, but I also don't think there's any good reason to think that the pattern of revisions gave a benefit to Biden, or that they particularly look like they did.
Check the table here: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/job-numbers-change-revisions/. In the months leading up to the 2024 election, there were two overestimates (June and Aug), two underestimates (Jul and Oct), and one month where the preliminary results were pretty much on the money (Sep).
I don't see a pattern of politically motivated distortion there -- and if there had been, I certainly wouldn't have expected it to lead to dismal numbers and an underestimate in October. The unusually high September job numbers might raise an eyebrow, but that's the month where the preliminary numbers were confirmed. (After the election.)
"We got it right *eventually*" is an important part of the argument and motivation for a certain kind of liberal that has a generally positive affect towards the bureaucracy.
"We got it right 'eventually'" is only a lame excuse if someone else is getting it right faster, with no meaningful drop in accuracy (obviously what counts as meaningful is context-dependent).
Can you point to a source that provides comparably-good estimates as BLS provides, but faster?
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:
I'm looking at the payroll survey results and revisions, from which the jobs numbers ("The US added XXXXXX jobs this past March ...") in the jobs report . That statement wasn't true in December of 2024 or in July.
Regardless, while your general question is a reasonable one, defining what a "good survey" is in this case isn't trivial. The employment report serves a number of different masters. Balancing those needs along with others (transparency, consistency, predictability, etc.) is challenging.
It's appropriate for someone like the President to tell the BLS chief to shift how they're balancing these priorities. ("It's important to make the initial report as accurate as possible, even if it takes longer to get it out and uses a methodology that breaks the time series.") Firing the BLS chief is entirely different.
A lot of people were ranting about supposed distortions in the jobs report when the numbers were looking better for Biden's chances in late 2023 and early 2024.
Remarkably, almost none of those people revised their priors when the jobs reports in the immediate lead-up to the election were bad for Biden.
But a bunch of them have picked up the case again when the jobs numbers are looking bad for Trump.
Principled analysts or partisan hacks? You decide!
If it's predictable, then the BLS should have predicted it. I'm not an expert in either field, but it reminds me of cost estimates for construction projects. The estimates are consistently lower than the actual cost, even though it would be easy to eliminate the bias by adjusting the estimate a by the average-underestimation-factor. The persistence of that bias indicates perverse incentives.
Part of the value of the BLS process is its consistency. They know there is a problem with declining response rates, but they also have to be careful with ad hoc fixes that would break the time series. If you're interested in the issue, Odd Lots had a great discussion last month with the BLS commissioner from Trump's first term digging into these issues: https://pca.st/q1ea1pcc
I don't think your comment is a satisfying explanation in and of itself, but I'll listen to the podcast that you link to before solidifying my judgement.
Right *before* the 2024 election the BLS revised the jobs numbers down by 818k jobs, which seems like it would be really bad for Biden's and/or Harris's chances, so it seems really implausible that they were deliberately tampering with the numbers, unless they are just very bad at it.
But the entire big story about BLS screwing up *is* the revisions, so that first point is clearly false. They had a huge downward revision in the fall of 2024 and then an even-bigger downward revision in 2025.
And why would anybody "spike the ball" right before an election, when it's going to be scrutinized the most?
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.
It took me a minute to realize the first paragraph was a case of sarcasm.
We used to have a term for this at a company I worked at. There were certain tasks that people said were "done every day", and by implication the person they're talking to is making the problem too complicated. But the problem is complicated, and you need expertise to understand it much less fix it.
Some people are just allergic to complexity. It's probably not a good idea to let them run the world.
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?
Based on some other comment threads, it seems like you have a track record of citing unsourced evidence that subsequent commenters have been unable to verify. So you’ll excuse me if I raise a skeptical eyebrow at your reference to “the grapevine”.
Dude, please do. You seem like a smart guy and having a vibes-based worldview probably isn't conducive to civic virtue. It's a straight up civic vice, I'd figure
Most people here can't even tell what you are talking about.
We try to communicate using words, rather than winks and nudges. Reading your posting, I have no idea who you mean by Dick Cheney's protogee. I don't know what "the adults in the room" refers to. Nor do I know the names of the neocons whom the Biden administration hired and put in power. Why didn't you name them? Was it to make yourself appear like more of an insider?
Rhetorical tricks like these may work elsewhere, but here they just make you look, uh, a bit epistemically naive.
>The survey response rate has steadily dropped since Covid. It used to be near 90% ten years ago and is now below 70%.
As the guy whose job it is (not explicitly, but nobody else was going to do it and I'm kind of the "catch all admin guy") to respond to those surveys, I find it funny how statistics that huge markets rely on and political careers may depend on rely on people like me bothering to fill out a web form every few months. I usually have more important work to do and let it sit for a month or so before they send a reminder email with ALL CAPS in it and I think "Eh, I got five minutes to burn I guess."
"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.
That was funny. So the US ended up with Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. because they were the most professional people Trump could find for the job?
"As far as I know, nobody grades them on professionality versus loyalty as a part of their job performance."
Then you must not know about the people Laura Loomer has gotten fired, or who's nominations she got rescinded.
Maybe you mistook my comment about loyalty to mean loyalty to the Constitution and to the United States writ large? That's not how I meant it. I meant it as personal loyalty to Trump.
Do you believe thats why the BLS head Erika McEntarfer was fired because we got those numbers after the firing occurred? Is it a coincidence that McEntarfer was fired after posting July's job numbers which were the worst since COVID? If she wasn't doing her job than she could have been fired well prior to July when the allegedly false numbers weren't so embarrassing for the administration.
You don’t think that indiscriminately firing government employees in the name of “efficiency” might have something to do with the accuracy of these numbers?
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.
I don't see this as a "democratic issue" because juries aren't a legislating body and jurors aren't the peoples representatives.
When you say "fully informed," is the idea of having a bailiff stand up and tell them all the ways a jury can find someone not guilty? Or like telling the jury this is how we can make a mistrial happen? Or a hung jury?
I always hear about Jury Nullification in that sense, but surely there's a reverse sense, where a jury can choose to find someone _guilty_ because they disagree with the law?
"Theoretically this guy should get out on that loophole, but that loophole sucks so let's just put him away"
But the BLS is a project aimed at nothing other than getting you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. The concept is that the government will tell you how the economy is doing, and if you disagree with them, you're wrong.
You're trying to make two different arguments, and they're incompatible.
Expertise as a concept is directly opposed to "the evidence of your eyes and ears". You can't criticize getting rid of part or all of the BLS on the grounds that it represents the government telling you what to think. The BLS is a part of the government that tells you what to think. Shrinking it means that there is now 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 of the government telling you what to think.
I think this is bad policy but isnt a threat to democracy. Agencies get incompetent leaders on a fairly regular basis actually. Your institutional bias here might also be pointing in the direction of, without this agency, wed never know. There is a lot of other data available that measures economic health, many of it privately produced (asset prices for example) that the fed and others use to inform decisions. We may have marginally worse data now, but I am not filing this anywhere near as high as threats to free speech and judicial independence
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."
I don't think there's any lack of checks and balances in the Westminster system, it's just that some of them are kept implicit rather than explicit.
The central problem of government is this: you have a roomful of people who don't necessarily get along, and also in that room you have a loaded gun, and a keyed safe full of gold bars. The problem is how to handle both the gun and the key in a way that doesn't result in anyone shooting anyone or stealing the gold.
The Constitutional Monarchy solution is to hand both the gun and the key to the one guy who seems least likely to use it, then give him a palace and a Rolls so he's invested in the stability of the system, and allow him to pass these privileges on to his son so he's _really_ invested in the stability of the system.
The Republic solution is to come up with a complicated system for sharing ownership of the gun and the key around to ensure that nobody ever gets both gun and key at the same time.
There also exist indirectly elected heads of state, such as in Germany. No monarch, but in practice it works exactly the same as a constitutional monarchy.
This indicates that an actual monarch isn't the special quality, but rather that they are not elected by the population is what makes them a safe pair of hands.
"Republic" just means "not a monarchy". It has zero bearing on how the system works. Presidential system versus parliamentary system is the actually useful terminology.
This distinction isn't generally pedantic. During Biden's presidency, institutions such as the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College were all criticized by progressive activists for being "undemocratic".
However, it *was* pedantic in *this* case, because Scott was defending these pseudo-democratic institutions, not attacking them.
Not understanding your point here. Are you saying that it's invalid to criticize an institution for being undemocratic if that institution is in a country that has not been classified as a democracy? Why would that be the case?
I'm saying the progressive tribe wittingly or unwittingly plays a bait-and-switch game with the word "democratic".
On one hand, they say it's pedantic to distinguish between a pure democracy and constitutional republic, implying that we're all talking about the same thing when we say "democracy".
On the other hand, they criticize the Electoral College (etc.) for being "undemocratic", even though they meet the broader definition of democracy that they implicitly endorsed.
Taken together, it harnesses the positive valence that people have for constitutional republics (which are "democracies" in one sense) to advocate for changes that would make the country a pure democracy, instead. ("democracy" in a different sense")
Interesting! So it sounds like there isn’t any logical argument that depends on how the system as it currently exists is classified. Rather what’s at stake is which term people have more positive associations with. Thanks for the explanation! That actually clarifies a lot.
Now, there are some people (like me) who are only interested in the logical arguments and find it annoying when people roll up with "Don't you know the US is a republic?" as if it's a refutation of anything. But I think I now better understand where those people are coming from.
I'm sympathetic to the point you're making, but I think there's some talking past each other here; it's true that the EC is an antidemocratic feature of the US that is still compatible with the overall system being broadly democratic; and saying "the US is a republic not a democracy" is a reasonable slogan to express the idea that the presence of some nondemocratic features are justifiable even if the system as a whole is meant to have democratic legitimacy.
But I also think... the EC isn't really the kind of thing you find in other republics, nor is it the kind of feature that by design functions as part of the system of checks and balances; the fact of being a republic not a democracy isn't sufficient to justify just any old nondemocratic feature. You wouldn't just shrug and say, "oh, America counts right-handed people's votes for twice those of left-handed people's... that's antidemocratic but whaddayagonnado we're a republic not a democracy"--specific antidemocratic features need to be justified by some independent principle.
I personally, don't think the EC has a good justification as helping to preserve America's liberal character, or defend minority rights, or whatever, so *absent* such a reason the fact of its being antidemocratic is, all else equal, an argument against it.
I think part of why you take these arguments as a bait and switch is that people who oppose the EC take the premise that there is no other justification for the EC as a given, and so don't explicitly state it, or don't explicitly state that they might accept it if one could provide an argument that it was necessary to preserve minority rights or something.
This article deals with the very core of the difference between a republic and a democracy - the protection of the rights of the minority from the democratically expressed will of the majority. It could not possibly be more central. The claim it "makes absolutely no difference" is preposterous.
There are two kinds of people on the Internet: those who learned to reflexively say, "we're a republic, not a democracy" even when it doesn't make any sense, and those who learned to reflexively mock those people even when it does.
It's pedantry, but, like most pedantry, it is very useful when you're getting into the weeds and find yourself struggling with overloaded terms, as Scott did here.
It's not pedantry, it's just the use of an idiosyncratic definition of "democracy" that never appears outside the context of the people on the internet who like to say this particular thing. I'm not sure what the history of it is, maybe it has some roots going back to old debates from the 1700s, maybe it was made up on usenet thirty years ago, I'm not sure.
"Democracy" is not overloaded to mean "absolute unrestricted direct democracy with no brakes" because that's not a real system that actually exists anywhere.
On the other hand "Republic" is also heavily overloaded to mean "country where the guy in charge is called a President", and of course there are many of those that aren't representative democracies. On the other hand, there's also many functional representative democracies which are not republics because they're constitutitional monarchies or whatever.
And since 'Founding Fathers' like James Madison seem to be treated like patron saints in the U.S., a lot of Americans treat the arguments/definitions in this 250-year-old op-ed as holy text—immutable and inarguable—trumping common sense about how the word’s actually typically used today.
Akhil Amar (in America's Constitution: A Biography) argues persuasively that the distinction between the terms "democracy" and "republic" was inconsistent and not deeply rooted in the thought of the Founders. They did talk a great deal about how the popular will needed to be moderated by balancing institutions, but they didn't specifically use "democratic" as the label for the one and "republican" for the other, at least not generally.
Nevertheless, it's a useful distinction!
When you are talking specifically about the balance between those parts of the government that are directly, intentionally responsive to The Will Of The People and those parts that are intentionally *not* responsive (or even resistant!) to The Will Of The People, it's really useful to have one term that describes the first thing and another that describes the second thing! Although I don't know when or why the distinction arose, using "democratic" to talk about the more demos-oriented aspects of our government, with "republican" for the more res publica institution-oriented aspect of our government has become both conventional and very handy!
Scott, for whatever reason, either didn't think of or didn't want to use "republic" for this article, so, instead, he used "liberalism." (That's the overloaded term I saw here, not "democracy." Scott even acknowledge that "liberalism" is an overloaded term!) This muddled his point, I thought, because "liberalism" means left-of-center political positions, and *also* describes a certain philosophy around the free exchange of ideas and mutual respect for conscience (which doesn't necessarily have to exist in a democracy at all; you could have a liberal monarchy in this sense), and *also* a set of economic theories derived from that philosophy.
The whole thing does read cleaner if he replaces "liberal" with "small-r republican" throughout.
"Will of the People" is not results of an election. The People express their will in multiple ways, eg through free press, through judicial opinions etc.
This is certainly true in one sense, which I will dare to call the republican sense: the wise people have established a government that includes substantial institutional and procedural checks on their raw popular in-the-moment will.
It is false in another sense: the people do not vote on judicial opinions, and they are, by and large, quite powerless to affect the editorial choices of the New York Times or Fox News.
Here is one way of showing why it is false: if you had a government that consisted *entirely* of unelected journalists and unelected judges (appointed by non-partisan panels chosen by the ABA), with the journalists proposing the laws and the judges ratifying the laws, that would not be a democracy. (It *might* be a republic, at least in Plato's sense, if the journalists and judges were the nation's wisest and best persons.) To have a democracy, you must have votes. Votes are what makes a democracy a democracy.
The moderating (small-r republican) institutions are necessary to making democracy work in the real world, and so have been sort of conflated into democracy, but, when you get down to brass tacks, there are parts of our government that are democratic, and other parts that are more republican (and less democratic).
And, to be clear, I'm all for that! I just think it's silly that some people want to deprive of us the language that allows us to distinguish clearly between them. This counter-pedantry makes it really hard to have discussions about whether our current system of government has the balance right. (I don't think it does.)
A form of governance where the rights of individuals are protected against the whims of the government or the majority is properly called liberalism. Being a republic has nothing to do with it, other than that when people say "republic" or "democracy" they usually mean "liberal republic" or "liberal democracy", as it's pretty much the only kind these days. But historically, famous republics like Rome or Revolutionary France weren't that big on protecting individual liberties.
Not going to get too deep here because it's necessarily arguing semantics and not that interesting. I doubt we disagree on the underlying ideals.
However, that's not the definition of "liberalism" as I understand it. The most relevant denotation given by OED is: "a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise." That comports with my own understanding of the word, which I tend to use in the manner which means roughly "to live in comportment with the ideals of the Enlightenment". Liberalism implies democracy (and possibly also republicanism) but requires neither.
The distinction that specifies that "individuals are protected against the whims of the government or the majority" is the republic vs. democracy distinction.
It is the minority which is really to be guarded against, not the majority,
In any state, it is the elite, a minority, that rules and the non-elite majority suffers itself to be ruled.
People differ in their will to power, their capacity for deceit and political intrigue, their interest in and amplitude for public affairs. This separation defines the ruling and the ruled elements.
Political liberalism is the doctrine that the political authority is based upon consent and flows up from the individuals. That the individuals in a state of nature possess full sovereignty, and enter into a social contract to pool or surrender their several sovereignties.
Liberalism is so dominant that it is hard even to conceive of any alternatives. But the alternatives exist.
Republic literally means “the public thing”, trying to imply that it can be completely divorced from the principles of democracy is a tool of oligarchs and authoritarians spanning from Plato to the Islamic “Republic”.
How do we know a “republic” actually represents the public interest if we don’t obtain the public’s unfiltered opinion at regular intervals?
That's totally fair. I do believe both statements and while I didn't see them as contradictory, I can understand how brevity did me few favors there.
What I was trying to say was that the core republican idea - that some rights are too sacred to subject to majority rule, is a fundamentally anti-democratic one. I don't think that means that you can't have a republican democracy, I think that I (still, today at least) live in one. The ideas are only completely incompatible in some idealized perfect democracy that's never existed.
> If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.
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 mean, good on the border control part. As for family formation, I think saying that liberalism is more important terminally than democracy is not to say that it is the only value. I agree that there’s clearly a good in human life served by family, and that’s not a thing we can replace simply on the basis of individualism and liberty without losing a lot of value.
You also can't have human freedom if humans cease to exist, which is what happens if TFR trends to zero (or even stays sub-replacement long enough.) But sure.
Are there any examples of countries which have done a particularly bad job of defending the rights of minorities from majoritarian tyrannies? I mean, worse than the US
Many populist leaders take this approach. And many dictatorships start with broad popular support before the crackdown on dissidents makes popular discontent less important to the continuance of the government. Chavez in Venezuela had broad popular support but targeted the wealthy when his economic mismanagement caught up to him. Similarly Orban in Hungary, Peron in Argentina, and early Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Tyranny absolutely does not require the rule of a few! Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner as the saying goes. Majoritarian overreach was a major point of interest for the founding fathers, hence the addition of the Bill of Rights. Large majorities of Americans repeatedly voted to outlaw gay marriage across California, North Carolina and many other states. The "will of the people" was that this act should be disallowed. Similarly, majorities are often in favor of suspension of criminal rights in many cases.
Yet the classical liberal position would be to restrain government from acting on these democratic impulses because they are just as tyrannical overreaches on individual liberty regardless of whether the state's interests are driven by majorities or minorities.
I agree that it's important to defend the rights of minority groups from majoritarian tyrannies (and I regularly apply that principle across the political spectrum).
... and that seems to me a major point of Scott's article? We need strong constitutional (and procedural, and normative, and ...) principles to prevent temporary mob mentality from ceding authority!
Scott is saying if you believe in democracy, then you need liberal institutions to defend democracy. That is a great point and a useful argument if someone sees democracy as the ultimate good. However, I believe it's key to point out that if you believe democracy is a higher order goal than liberalism, I do think that is the wrong order of values. Liberalism is a higher value than democracy, especially pure majoritarianism. You could theoretically have a robust democracy with repeated elections, that nonetheless uses majoritarian outcomes to target minorities. Like taxing certain churches more than others, making public servants disavow certain ideologies (communism, counter-revolutionary capitalism, whatever). This is bad even if compatible with democracy.
> this post feels way more convoluted and epicyclic than calling liberalism important in its own right.
The whole premise of the post is that you don't need to care about liberalism in its own right to defend checks and balances. You just need to care about having democracy that lasts more than a few years. That is, if you're trying to appeal to people who (think they) mainly care about democracy, and who are arguing against allowing unelected officials to interfere with the President on the grounds that this is 'undemocratic', you don't need to try to get them to care about liberalism. You can just show that it's bad for democracy to give elected officials unchecked power.
As a reader, Scotts essay does a good job of explaining why so many non elected ppl having power is good. I agree liberalism is good, but giving power to unelected ppl does not automatically achieve liberalism. The framing here, that those ppl help to ensure there is a next election is very useful, and that is a direct appeal to democracy not liberalism.
I’m actually not sold on the idea that it’s a good idea to treat liberalism as an end in its own right.
Someone who is not sold on liberalism, who is open to supporting illiberal leaders and damaging liberal institutions, will not accept the premise that liberalism is good in its own right. Nor is this the reasoning that led us to prefer liberalism, at first, over its predecessors.
Rather, there are *very strong reasons* why liberalism is good, and liberalism’s goodness depends on these reasons; and the case to be made for liberalism, to someone who is skeptical, is to point them to these reasons, rather than to any markers of intrinsic value.
Liberalism bakes in an institutional commitment, within the government, to promoting the happiness and wellbeing of its people; liberalism creates a precondition for any government’s existence, that it enjoy the consent of the governed; liberal governments are more peaceful and stable; liberalism provides a plausible and inclusive framework for peaceful transfers of power, and legitimate means to remove and punish a government’s highest officeholder; it leads to more virtuous and competent leadership; it gives power and freedom to the people; and so on. These are reasons to approve of liberalism. They are not logical necessities; in hypothetical cases where liberalism does not achieve these outcomes, liberalism would not be worth having. It is a means to these ends. Someone can be persuaded of these reasons, and of the values of these ends, without already being committed to the value of liberalism - and if we wish to strengthen liberalism in the popular discourse, we must be explaining these reasons, and must stop taking liberalism’s value for granted!
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.
The terminology varies, but there are always representatives of the two major parties—they're usually the best dressed people at the polling place—who, when they aren't chatting like the old chums they are, are checking their voter rolls against who shows up and tells "their people" to get out anyone who's missing.
I try to confound them as much as possible by voting mixed tickets in the general election.
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.
In Colorado at least there are still occasional federal prosecutions for multi-state operations. Usually it's someone selling it out the back door and taking it to states where it's illegal.
The balance against the executive refusing to faithfully execute the law would be either impeachment, judicial review, additional legislation, or nothing, depending on exactly what the distortion is. It may be that an agency's rulemaking violates the APA or that it exceeds the power granted to it by the enabling legislation, in which case the courts are the check on it.
If the agency simply fails to do something the law directs it to do, the remedy is murkier because some of those actions are discretionary. This is particularly true for actions that touch on law enforcement, as the judiciary cannot compel the government to bring charges or institute charges themselves, for very very very good reasons that would cause more damage if you altered them than anything else being discussed here. Generally the way to prevent this is for Congress to provide a private right of action to citizens affected by it, though they would still need to have injury-in-fact to have standing. In other cases, Congress could simply be more specific and use their subpoena power to oversee compliance.
And if all that fails and they really can't bring it in line, maybe it's just not something the federal government should be doing in the first place and needs to be devolved to the states to handle.
Attempts by Congress to create bureaucratic agencies with the power to enforce the laws, but which are in some fashion independent of the executive, have repeatedly created serious constitutional questions. We saw this most recently with the CFPB in 2020, which could only be salvaged as an entity by severing its supposed independence out of the law entirely. At present, such quasi-independent boards are limited to ones with trivial powers plus a few legacy multimember boards from 100 years ago during the lawless days of Woodrow Wilson who didn't care a whit for the text of the constitution. The best that Kagan (the sharpest mind on that side of the aisle by a wide margin) could muster in defense of these in her 2020 dissent is that the constitution is silent on administration and therefore it is acceptable to "experiment" with such agencies, which is just not a very good argument for a structural question about the balance of power in a republic with a written constitution.
Congress is supposed to be zealously guarding their power, not handing it off for political expediency to agencies whose decisions the congressmen can then avoid blame or take credit for at their convenience. Congress by its nature has by far the most inherent legitimacy of any of the powers, the system largely depends on them acting like they care about preserving their power as a body and in their individual capacities as the people's representatives, if they want to pal around DC and delegate everything to the bureaucrats then they're at the mercy of any president who manages to effectively rule it.
The Constitution does not give Congress the power to create executive departments independent from the existing executive. That would require a constitutional amendment.
The Federal Reserve isn't an executive department. It's more like a chartered monopoly, formed by member banks with the permission of the government.
The Constitution is silent on specific matters of firing members of the executive branch, because granting all executive power to the President already gives him permission to fire anybody in it. He could also remove himself as Nixon did, but Congress explicitly has the power to impeach & remove the President (as well as "Vice President and all civil officers").
I agree. Nor does it give them power to delegate legislative power to executive agencies. And certainly can't give it power to delegate judicial power, as Congress lacks that entirely.
Just because Congress said something doesn't mean it's actually constitutional.
The Constitution does not mention this. It is silent on what the "powers" mean.
However, congress is allowed to pass laws, and in doing so require the president to enforce that law. If the law says "make an executive department and don't fire people arbitrarily" then the president has to enforce that law.
It is a logical consequence of having the president be bound by the law that they can be bound by the law.
No, if Congress passed a law that said the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was now the official church of the US, the President would not be required to enforce that law, because that's prohibited by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Congress can only pass laws that are authorized by the power granted to it by the Constitution, and the Constitution assigns all legislative power to Congress and all executive power to the President. Those Constitutional restrictions can only be altered by a Constitutional Amendment, not ordinary Congressional legislation.
There's no need to fudge the numbers in 1000s of precincts across the country. Control of the House hinges on the election outcome in a relatively small number of tightly contested districts. Gerrymandering those districts or making it marginally harder/easier for certain people in them to vote can be sufficient to decide the balance of power, and those things don't require explicit fraud.
The Senate and the Presidency are less vulnerable to this since they are decided by statewide votes, but they still aren't completely immune because of the importance of a small number of swing states and the voting patterns within those states (e.g. making it easier/harder to vote in a heavily Democratic urban area may be enough to tip the scales).
The purpose of the executive branch is to *execute* the law, but starting in the seventies a bunch of Republicans decided it really means that Nixon should've been able to do whatever he wanted.
Many countries conduct their elections in a centralized manner. For example, India has an Election Commission, an appointed body with three Commissioners, who conduct all national, state and local elections.
That democracy persists depends upon people and their willingness to fight for their rights. It does not depend upon some procedure.
Democracy depends on the *appearance* of legitimacy, even when nothing crooked is actually happening, it has to look trustworthy. People trust their votes being counted by a lady everyone in the county has known for decades and who they watched play high school basketball and went to her flower shop etc, they know she's not part of a conspiracy to rig anything and that she'd see the evidence if anyone tried. 1000 people like her all over the country are a bulwark against widespread fraud. If you had a federal election conducted apart from local ones and overseen by bureaucrats in DC who went to Ivy League schools and have never set foot outside the Acela corridor, it's not only much easier to have a sham election it also looks like a sham election even if it weren't. Having the information about an election distributed among numerous low-level officials who are in most cases only trivially partisan is much safer and more democratic. That Indian election commission you mentioned is being accused of not turning over voter roll data, which could be a credible accusation when a central group controls everything but which could rarely be significant here when that data is spread among 1000s of ordinary local people.
Democracy IS a procedure for making the winner of a power contest feel sufficiently legitimate so that people continue to obey the law.
>People trust their votes being counted by a lady everyone in the county has known for decades and who they watched play high school basketball and went to her flower shop etc, they know she's not part of a conspiracy to rig anything and that she'd see the evidence if anyone tried. 1000 people like her all over the country are a bulwark against widespread fraud
If the whole world was an L M Montgomery novel, sure. In a country where most of the population lives in big, anonymous cities, social trust is declining, large numbers of people don't even know their literal next-door-neighbours very well, and extremist rhetoric about the other side is normalised, I'm afraid "Just let charming old florist ladies run things" isn't a serious proposal.
Thanks for the comment about the bureaucracy. Vis a vis Scott's essay, it's good to bear in mind the fact that bureaucratic continuity across administrations is a relatively recent innovation. For about half the country's history, the spoils system resulted in a mostly wholesale replacement of the bureaucracy with each election. By Scott's reasoning, the US was not "properly" democratic during that 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!
That's... Just not correct, unless you are thinking of some nonstandard definition of EV.
The Kelly Criterion is about bet sizing to help make sure you don't end up being massively in the green on a vanishingly small fraction of probability mass, and bust the rest of the time. If all you want is to maximize EV, you go all-in on any bet that is +EV, no matter how small your edge is.
> In probability theory, the Kelly criterion (or Kelly strategy or Kelly bet) is a formula for sizing a sequence of bets by maximizing the long-term expected value of the logarithm of wealth, which is equivalent to maximizing the long-term expected geometric growth rate.
It's just a generalization from calculating the expected value of making one bet to the expected value of making the same bet an arbitrary number of times in a row. Note that where your strategy is constrained to "choose a fixed value x, and then repeatedly bet x% of your holdings on a bet that will win with probability p", choosing 100 for x will guarantee an expected value (of your wealth) of zero as long as p is less than 1. So this:
> If all you want is to maximize EV, you go all-in on any bet that is +EV, no matter how small your edge is.
is pure crackpottery.
Kelly assumes that you can make your bet as many times as you want, one after the other. And it maximizes the expected value of doing so as a function of time (where time is measured in number of bets placed).
If that assumption doesn't hold, then you do indeed maximize your EV by going all-in on a one-time-only bet.
Hi, yes, I saw the Wikipedia quote you shared, and I'm pretty sure it underscores my claim?
Kelly maximizes the expected value of log wealth — not linear wealth. This is important, and it's the whole point of the criterion. It trades off some raw expected return in order to avoid ruin and maximize long-term geometric growth.
So when I said “unless you're using a nonstandard definition of EV,” I was referring exactly to that. “EV” usually means expected linear return, and under that definition, Kelly explicitly does not maximize EV — it plays smaller to protect against downside volatility.
And yeah, if you're only trying to maximize linear EV on a one-off bet, going all-in on any +EV bet is technically correct (even if reckless). It's also technically correct to do twice, three times, and so on. No matter how many times you do it, the math still shows your expected value going up. Sure, your probability of having a nonzero account value is tiny, but the EV calculation still multiplies out to a very large number, even in the limit.
Kelly avoids such foolish bets because it's optimizing something else entirely.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but do refrain from calling it crackpottery.
> 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.
Because people don't feel particularly free these days, I'd imagine, and it's questionable whether they even want to be. Mostly, they fear and hate their internal enemies, and since freedom goes both ways, it's a tough call whether your allies being more free cancels out improving your enemies' freedom.
Yeah, and it's a problem that liberalism isn't equipped to solve, pretty much by design. "Freedom" is a meta-value, but people also need to loosely agree on object-level values for there to be a coherent society, and I'm not sure whether this is even possible if your post-modernity is diverse enough...
I think freedom as a theoretical concept is maybe less important to folks? Because while America is in theory supposed to be a "free" society, there are certainly a lot of constraints folks feel in their day to day life, in terms of harsh economic realities, job prospects, etc.
"Free" means you are free to make your own choices. It doesn't mean that they will be easy or that you will necessarily have good options to choose from.
True, to an extent. But can you really call a choice "free" if, for example, it's between two options that are both not that great? In choices where there truly are no constraints, then of course you could call that free.
> 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.
You're not arguing with what they said. They're saying what makes supermajority rule checks democratic. You're talking about the propriety, the "principled reasons" to not allow unchecked democracy. Remember, Scott Alexander is explicitly arguing that it's undemocratic to democratically allow threats to democracy, not merely that it's bad for some other reason we value. He starts the article disavowing the liberalism arguments. That's what we're commenting on. The person you're replying to could completely agree with you and disagree that it's democracy we're defending.
The first half of my argument is technical, that their claim that "because it is our system" is incorrect.
The second half of my argument is more philosophical, and here I challenge a central claim of the parent author, that:
> If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy?
In particular, I argue that "decisively" is not a self-evident term. Leaving aside all other arguments for now, the parent poster is implicitly assuming that an instant's consensus ought to be sufficient to enact difficult-to-revoke, long-term changes, and anything less is not "democracy."
Instead, I think that inertia is a flexible and important aspect of a democratic system, although I also do not think it is easily constrained from first principles. A notionally democratic system that can only become 10% less democratic per year is still arguably "democracy" per the parent poster's definition, since a popular consensus sustained for a sufficiently long term could roll back the entire system.
We don't need liberalism to sustain this argument, just a time-fuzzy definition of 'decisively' or 'want'.
TL;DR: "Are you sure? Okay/Cancel/Retry" is not undemocratic.
I see what you mean now. I don't think you're right though. I think this can only be workable if democracy is meant as something other than fuzzier notions of general will or popular sovereignty, like the specific mechanisms of synchronous polling most associated with democracy, in which case you'd be right by definition only applied to voting rights issues.
In either case, I don't see why inertia is important to democracy *for democratic reasons*. You're saying that synchronicity isn't important, but think about why we have limits to when one can vote for an upcoming initiative. If you're trying to proxy aggregate preferences without doing it simultaneously, you're introducing another kind of noise into the data. There are strong democratic reasons for the polling rate to be fast and the polling period to be narrow, ones both practical and consistent with the theories behind democratic governance, largely identical to the reasons you want synchronicity in general on issues of polling data. I think that's why inertia is typically a small L liberal argument; fast change means reactionary, destabilizing, shortsighted changes that affect individual liberties, including the prerequisites of the right to vote, but not the right to vote itself, insofar as you can democratically adjust the procedures without outright changing suffrage.
This is not entirely a hypothetical scenario: the Republican Party had more than a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress from 1865 through the beginning of 1871. The 1864 elections took place during the Civil War when most Confederate states didn't elect anyone to the US Congress for obvious reasons, while Republicans swept most of the elections in the North and West, and the next two elections took place during Reconstruction.
This supermajority did make heavy use of their ability to override most procedural checks. The country is very fortunate that they mostly used this power to make the system freer and more democratic in the long term (as the voters who elected them likely mostly intended) rather than less.
> 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.
That doesn't get you anywhere close to unlimited power. Kings exercising their divine right still have to worry about what they can and can't get away with.
A friend of mine once repeated to me the wisdom, an important part of the modern Chinese educational system, that the imperial system was bad because the power of the emperor was unrestrained.
I mentioned to her that the empress Cixi had issued a decree banning the practice of footbinding, and she confirmed that this decree had been issued but that it had had no effect.
I don't think she took my point about "unrestrained" power, though.
"You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life. "
No. 2/3 of Congress is not enough, the amendment has to be ratified by the states to be valid.
The US system does have other deep inherent flaws, for example the president can instruct his followers to kill political opposition and then pardon them.
Why have you written this as a response to my comment?
> The US system does have other deep inherent flaws, for example the president can instruct his followers to kill political opposition and then pardon them.
That's not a flaw; if people are willing and able to kill the political opposition, they will not face repercussions regardless of other circumstances.
>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.
The problem being, of course, that this is the one and only decision that you can't, even in principle, undo democratically, which does at least make it a special case rather than a natural consequence of democracy. Non-democratic forms of modern government also don't have, on average, the best track record in just about any metric you care to name, so I'm not sure what is even the point of locking yourself out of the house on purpose.
I guess the bottom line is, democracy can be (and should be able to be) dismantled, but it should not be THIS easy. Get 67% people and now we talk. By the way, if we replace all the "populace" in this article with "51% populace", it now sounds like lots of people do still want democracy and it should still be preserved.
It really doesn't matter whether you think it should be easy or not. All a new state needs to justify its existence is a monopoly on violence and a majority support of men. At that point, the law of the old state is entirely worthless. Democracy's true purpose is to placate the majority enough to stop this from happening.
Well, the monopoly of violence certainly can't be hold by 51% of people, so the 49% of people should have lots of leverage. In this case, "democracy" is a lot more tyrannical than normal law of nature instead.
In a vacuum, sure. In practice, certain groups have more resources, ambition, and capabilities. With a numbers advantage on top, there really isn't much the minority can do. A great example, of course, is the difference between the sexes. Why do you think practically every society in history is patriarchial?
> In this case, "democracy" is a lot more tyrannical than normal law of nature instead.
Nothing exists outside of nature, therefore whatever happens is by definition natural. Not to mention that "tyranny" is far more commonly observed in human history than the alternative...
A party winning 2/3rds and (3/5th states) does not grant any one person absolute power. You may think all the GOP are toadies but they actually have a difficult time passing bills because different reps want different things. So even the hypothetical, unlikely landslide victory doesnt achieve that amount of absolute power.
The system of elections itself presumes limited powers. The system depends upon the loser peaceably accepting his loss. And why should the loser do so? Because the elections are not meant to change the system in fundamental ways.
For instance, elections are not meant to change the country to a communist system.
So, it depends upon loss/gain calculus for the loser. If the loser stands to lose a great deal, he might decide not to peaceably accept the results of the elections.
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.
I’m not sure what the point of ensuring that there are future elections is if the election that *just happened* is ignored. Like, what higher principle are we trying to achieve here?
you may consider that people who vote for such a candidate should have known better. The issue is that there is no easy way back, even if the majority flips few months after. Examples are countless around the world. And in many cases, like China and Russia, leaders didn't say they will make sure they will stay forever when elected. They changed the rules afterwards
Okay, but once you’ve conceded that the people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, why keep-up the “democracy” facade? You have assumed-away the whole reason to have elections in the first place.
Even the most optimistic about democracy and the people's will, have to concede that no single electoral mechanism can at one time capture everything about what the people want. So even if you think democracy and giving the people what they want is a paramount value, you'd still offer have multiple chances for them to express what they want, to account for measurement error from any single election.
I agree that there should be some level of safeguards to ensure that a slight victory in a single election doesn’t topple a previously-stable electoral regime, but the 1991 Algerian election was the first multiparty parliamentary election in the country’s history, and the Islamists were wiping the floor. Maybe the people really did want an Islamist theocracy?
The point is: "what the people want" isn't some unitary thing, even at one point in time, and certainly not at multiple times.
Was there some sense in which what the people wanted was an islamist theocracy? Yes of course. Is "an anti Democratic party won 48% of the vote" such a good measure of what the people want that you'd be 100% confident that by establishing an Islamic theocracy you'd be giving the people what they want? I think obviously not.
The trouble is, what the people want is not a perfectly coherent singular thing, and even if it were, no political system would be perfect at measuring it. So, there will always be some tension between "giving the people what they want as best we can measure it right now", and "preserving a system that will continue to respond to what the people want"--the fact that sometimes you'll prioritize the second doesn't mean you've given up on giving the people what they want, it means that different versions of what that means are in conflict and for various reasons you've chosen the second.
Note, I don't claim it's always clear how to reconcile these tensions; I think this problem is roughly isomorphic to the alignment problem, so I think we just sometimes face hard choices. But I don't think it's right to interpret this as "assuming away the reason to have elections"--we face a difficult problem in how to best act on those reasons, and that's completely different.
“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
Pretty sure no one in FIS ever actually said that. Their enemies said it about them -- it was a pithy summary of not-entirely-unreasonable fears -- but as far as I'm aware, FIS didn't say there'd never be another election.
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.
But that also shows that the idea of "democracy" itself is malleable - it's a historical contingency that one's vote is considered an individual and private thing, rather than communal and public. Thus, we should be concerned about attempts to lock in the meaning of "democracy" beyond the most minimal.
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.
People really need to understand that democracy is a system of compromise. It doesn't matter how many checks and balances you have against "tyranny of the majority", because if you piss off the majority enough, they'll simply seize power by force. Democracy is only stable because the desires of the majority (of people with leverage) are respected. It's so simple that even beasts like hyenas understand it.
>He's already talked about running for a third term.
He also talked (at length) that the 2020 election was stolen, and yet slunk away when it turned out that nobody was particularly excited to "fight like hell" for him. That Trump will spout any random self-serving bullshit, then not follow through when it seems like too much work, is like the number one fact about him.
If by "slunk away", you mean "led a violent mob to attack the capitol" and "tried to get Pence to throw out the election results" then sure.
Back in 2020, I thought he would slink away. I thought people were being alarmist about Trump. I have been proven wrong time and time again. I've lost count by now of how many times even the alarmists turned out to be less bad than reality.
After all of that failed, yes. I expect that he'll ineffectually try some bullshit this time around as well, it'll also fail, and he'll slink away once again.
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.
There is one single court charged with the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution: it is the Supreme Court of the United States.
As for "changing the meaning of the Constitution" - you are engaging in the same nonsense that has been conducted over disagreements over US law since the beginning: choosing to interpret the literal words of the Constitution in the way desired rather than the layers of practice and precedent built upon it.
In point of fact: the definition of citizen, and the process for becoming one, has changed multiple times over the years - and thus the presumption that the literal text of the Constitution is actual law, is nonsense.
I don't know why you think judicial review is not part of British law - they have courts, after all.
The main difference between the basis of British law, and American law, is that British courts derive their authority from the Monarch whereas American law derives its authority from the Constitution. Precedent cases are built upon these respective bedrock foundations.
And yes, states sue the federal government all the time. And vice versa.
... were you aware that "judicial review", in American law, is the power to determine if a LAW ITSELF is illegal? As opposed to British law, which mostly is limited to the procedural question of "was the law followed"?
I realize that not everyone has the good fortune to be American, so I apologize for my USA-centric framing, but... this is important!
I think you are very confused about judges ruling something as being "as applied" (for which your statement DOES hold true; that applies to the particular parties), vs a judge ruling something "facially invalid", which means that (they find) the law itself is unconstitutional.
Even at the state level, if a trial judge finds a law contrary to the state's constitution, they apply a statewide injunction against the unconstitutional law being enforced. This does indeed happen at the federal level as well, but note that it is PRECISELY because of judicial review in both cases. If the law itself is illegal, then allowing it "to act on everyone, everywhere" would be unjust. States might have different appeals processes beyond that point, but that's a different matter.
For a specific example, did you think that the Texas judge who issued an injunction nationwide blocking it... was that affecting the federal government's ability to act?
As a corollary, have you read the Federalist Paper #78?
I think you are confused in thinking that every judge is the arbiter of the Constitution.
Among other things, the vast majority of judges are empowered to rule over the laws of the land, not the Constitutional basis (or lack thereof) of same.
As for your examples: it is quite clear you don't know anything of what you speak of. A ruling on an election, for example, concerning the counting of mail in ballots would obviously affect all paper ballots but would not affect in person voting. The equivalent of what is happening now though, is one or a handful of people objecting to paper ballots - preventing anyone else from receiving the same.
And yes, that Texas ruling is the exact same bullshit; the court is infamous for its pro-corporate nonsense much as DC and NY and CA courts are infamous for other types of abuse. It is precisely this type of bad precedent which is going to result in all manner of unanticipated consequences - all of which are bad.
The point being: there are literally centuries of precedent in behavior and process for escalating Constitutionality questions...oh but the Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives, these days...
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)."
Totally agree with the point about language in general (relevant to King Lear, I'm a proponent of John Mcwhorter's arguments about translating Shakespeare into Contemporary English)
For what it's worth, 'liberal' in its other 'archaic' meaning is still going pretty strong in much of the rest of the English speaking world, notably in Australia the major right-wing/nationalist leaning party are called the 'Liberal Party'. I think the more American definition is steadily becoming more prominent though.
I see smart people using the word liberal in its true sense (and not the US partisan politics sense I'm assuming you are alluding to) all the time. Their audience understands them without any difficulty. I doubt many people came to this essay unprepared to understand the sense Scott is using.
(On an somewhat related point, I do wish one side of US politics hadn't conceded the term. I wish conservatives would reclaim it. I also wish the conservative movement would talk more about liberalism as an ideal. This might be entirely in my head, but I feel like I even hear the word "freedom" used less. The recent rhetoric by Pam Bondi invoking a concept of "hate speech" to justify silencing people makes me legitimately sad. I see conservatives weakening on freedom of religion as well...)
I thank both of you and find it some comfort. Even here in well-educated New Hampshire I do not hear the term used in anything but the popular sense. Only online in a few communities do I hear it otherwise unless "classical" precedes it. I am 72. I should ask my children what their experience is.
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.
In that case Orban's Hungary is about to show it's a democracy, and South Africa got somewhat close in the last election, while the US has been demonstrably democratic in the past 3 Presidential elections.
Singapore is an odd case though. The People's Action Party totally could lose an election, they just... don't. Although they have made some sketchy moves at various times in history to ensure they remain in power, these moves never seem to have actually been necessary.
Sometimes I think of it like a company board. Company boards are elected by votes of shareholders. But these elections are rarely seriously contested. If you went to a company AGM and found that elections were seriously contested between two factions of board members seeking control of the company and promising to move it in two very different directions then you'd say "this company is extremely poorly run, and probably a terrible investment".
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.
Wasting money isn't illegal, so all to that legal apparatus is completely useless against it. In our government you don't get to steal money out of the till, but you can hire rooms full of useless bureaucrats doing useless work that doesn't need to need done. You can use decades old technology that requires an army of people to operate and never upgrade it. The inspector general can't do a damn thing about it. This is 2025. There should be no such job as "air traffic controller." And yet we have 14,000 of them.
> 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.
I don't really understand how you don't know control of the media is a powerful tool in running a country. Any tinpot general planning a coup knows that TV and radio stations are one of the main things you need to gain control of to be successful. Do you think the CCP maintains an iron grip on Chinese media just to protect their egos?
If friendly media are unconstitutional, then everything is unconstitutional, even graffiti and booing.
Also, Fox is the most successful news network and nobody has seriously suggested shutting it down by force, even though it’s solidly pro-GOP and always has been.
Relatedly: The concern against an undemocratic or illiberal tyrannical power in the U.S. (an Article 2 executive), is Congress (Article 1). Impeachment is the fundamental check. Surprised the words impeach and Congress aren't coming up in Scott's treatment. Also, although an NGO is an interesting possible party is his lawsuit progression, the directly aggrieved party who should have standing would be the candidates being obstructed in the ballot stuffing. The NGO may not have standing. Adversarial justice system has the aggrieved as the primary check. All Scott's "checks" are interesting, but way down a ladder of priorities in this system.
I thought Scott made the case pretty well that even though the media and NGOs don't have constitutional authority, they're a necessary part of the democratic ecosystem -- which is why the US Constitution explicitly protects freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and assures equal protection of law to people who've organized to promote ideas the government doesn't like.
Some "attacks" on those non-governmental institutions are thus unconstitutional. Others are legal but unhealthy, like broad attacks from the president on "the media" as enemies of the people.
Other "attacks" are good, like calling out media bias (whether it comes from America's most popular media company, https://deadline.com/2025/07/cable-news-ratings-july-1236473642/, or from ailing broadcast companies) or ending government-NGO partnerships in provision of public services when the NGO isn't performing well. I agree with you that it's important to keep up that distinction, and not treat any criticism of media or NGOs as if it's antidemocratic or illiberal.
The Freedom of the Press clause *doesn't protect the media as such*. Meaning it's not about the capital-P Press (the media establishment). It's the counterpart of the speech clause, protecting the right of all people to publish information in non-spoken formats. The "Media" isn't special. And I'd be hard-pressed to say that it's anything other than a house press organ for one of the parties at this point (which party depends on which media outlet you're looking at).
NGOs have *zero* status in the constitutional order beyond any other group of people. And the idea that they are some important part that needs/deserves funding is abhorrent--he who pays the piper calls the tune. As soon as you take government money, you've accepted their strings and are no longer independent.
The *only* real backstop to the American system is the American people themselves. "Democracy" will last in the US as long as the bulk of the people continue to fight for it and demand it, and will end no sooner than they cease to do so, whether out of apathy or any other reason. It may persist a bit longer, but it won't end as long as enough people care enough to fight for it (possibly literally).
The freedom of the press clause equally protects partisan press organs and fiercely independent dissident media, big conglomerates and individual bloggers. We agree that it's not meant to privilege The Media Establishment, but nor is it meant to exclude them (on the grounds of size or polarization or inaccuracy or whatever else you disapprove of). And one of the features of an establishment is that it gets very skilled at making the most of generally available rights and privileges.
An NGO, precisely as an organized "group of people," absolutely has status in the constitutional order. The freedom of association is a key outworking of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as the Supreme Court decisively held in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama.
You and I (and I think most Americans of any party) agree that NGOs don't have a *governing* status or any right to government funds. But Scott's examples of the value of NGOs to democracy (for example, their readiness to take the government to court when the government violates the constitution) have nothing to do with state funding of NGOs -- and everything to do with the kind of organized attempts by citizens to redress wrongs that the First Amendment explicitly protects.
We agree that democracy relies on American citizens and that neither the press nor advocacy groups will keep democracy alive if voters stop caring about it. But as long as we do care, media institutions and organized advocacy groups can be helpful tools. The diversity of current dysfunctions in those areas don't mean they're worthless or irrelevant to democratic health.
I find that the current media institutions and organized advocacy groups actually do more to *harm* matters than help. And I'm including *all* of them across the political spectrum(s). In large part because they get co-opted basically instantly.
I'd much prefer to empower (and cease putting a thumb on the scale against) individuals and small, mostly ad-hoc groups. Reduce the scope of government so it's more easily watched over. Raise more bright-line rules constraining government power and private rights of action so that it doesn't take an NGO with a big budget to make the suits.
I want to be able to gather with a few dozen of my fellows and make a difference at the local/local+ level (county/city). I want to be able to gather with a few dozen such groups across the country and make a meaningful difference at the state or national level. Not have to entrust money to NGOs and media organizations that have incentives and beliefs *at best* orthogonal to what I want, and often directly opposed.
I'd prefer if government had a hard-line separation of media and state--no media or NGO can receive government funds for anything other than direct services rendered (that the government could pay its own people for legally) and no even slightly discretionary license or tax approval is needed. Yes, this means getting rid of most of the FCC and IRS. GOOD.
This would just disempower ordinary citizens unless you also somehow keep business interests from lobbying. You need people working full-time in DC to have any influence.
That's entirely the problem, that in the current system you need full time lobbying.
I want a system decentralized enough where the people that matter to your life 99% of the time are right near by. Where the feds are a sleepy branch not worth lobbying unless you're into foreign policy, and even then the upside is limited.
"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?
Also, hasn't Scott exposed the media as being full of hack-job propagandists? There is simply zero incentive for them to actually report the unvarnished truth. I don't know why he has any faith in them to "inform" the populace...
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 think that Scott's politics posts are still much better than average - e.g. during the USAID debacle I only read here that PEPFAR got crippled, while the MSM mostly cared about their own pork being curtailed. Scott also at least tries to make principled arguments, whereas pretty much everybody else have long given up all pretenses.
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.
The federalists were trying to create a central government within a much more decentralized system, not optimize elections. There were no political parties then, and in fact they mistakenly believed that a large republic could not give rise to political factions. Hence the odd initial rule that the Vice President was the runner-up in a Presidential election.
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, ...
>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, ...
Which makes me appreciate the importance of freedom of the press. The fact that we know about what happened, and that a significant portion of citizens want to gut the Deep State as a result, is all thanks to that freedom.
the mainstream American press is owned by a small number of billionaires who are increasingly self-censoring to placate the regime, and independent media is regularly subjected to censorship-by-algorithm on every major platform (which billionaires also own)
The Dems and the woke left have had almost all of msm in their back pocket for years. Very few major players are still real journalists - possibly WSJ, ...
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.
I don't know what the point is of arguing with someone who claims to live in a different universe than me. Biden's attempt to cover up the Post's story on behalf of his son (and his own election prospects) was an abuse of power straight out of a dystopian novel. I'm happy the truth was eventually uncovered even if it didn't lead to impeachment.
Biden's team contacted Twitter to tell them to take down the story. He was the likeliest President for the next term and used that to throw his weight around, plus he had friends in the right places. He campaigned against false information on social media and called the (true) laptop story false information. Biden (or his autopen) signed mass pardons before he left to prevent prosecutions. Otherwise Hunter would be in a much worse place.
Sanders didn't campaign in 2024 as far as I know. I'm more referring to the actions taken against Trump. For instance, removing his name from primary ballots to make it harder to elect him. They wanted to do the same in the general but the Supreme Court unanimously ruled what they did was illegal. They did a huge amount of Jawboning. Plus the barrage of lawsuits to distract him while he should've been campaigning.
As for the primary ballots, I think there was a genuine question about whether the events of Jan 6th were disqualifying. AFAIK the Supreme Court only ruled that states can't enforce the insurrection clause; they did not say that Trump was not guilty of insurrection. Agree it's unfair that one has to fight through the courts at the last minute to get a resolution (I wish laws were written precisely and we didn't have to ask the Supreme Court to interpret everything), but this is the system we have and it's not clear to me that it was abused.
As for the court cases against him, Trump's legal troubles are all his own fault for bad behavior, and I don't think it's fair to blame politics for this, even though I acknowledge politics surely had some role in the decision to prosecute the NY case.
I appreciate your take on these as well. I don't think you can reduce a government to a precise set of rules though. The US Government (in theory) gets its legitimacy from the people, and if POTUS removes all his opponents from the ballot I don't think pointing to the rules make it legitimate. It's certainly not democratic. The 2024 election was really bad as far as fairness goes, which I think caused many people to vote against the incumbent.
As far as the rules matter though, and they do matter a lot, Democrats weren't a stickler for them. In Maine they took Trump off the ballot by unilateral decision of one person, which is a very obvious violation of his due process. Everyone in the system (in theory!) has a duty to the constitution, and SCOTUS will never have the capacity to interpret every situation. Nor do they have the authority to correct every wrong.
he didn't campaign because the party made it very clear that they would not tolerate an opposition candidate, hence no politicians running against an incumbent whose favorables were so poor he didn't make it to election day. Biden's opponents being reduced to voting "uncommitted" was some real authoritarian regime shit.
(And it's worth noting that of the three candidates to run anyway, one has openly called the 2024 'primary' unfair and another is now a Republican cabinet minister; AFAIK Dean Phillips is the only one of the three to continue to uphold the charade)
and many states were also denied the chance to vote in 2020, because of the pandemic, and 2016 saw such gems as debate questions leaked in advance to one candidate but not the other and "superdelegates"...
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 even if it weren’t, to go from there to the fear that the country would sit still for a President preventing the next election four years later…well, it’s crazy talk.
Kennedy stole the election against Nixon “fair and square” and it did not undermine our Constitution.
The only recent President who could plausibly be accused of *actually* stealing an election is Biden, but we survived that.
No, of course not. Is there reason to believe Bush somehow coerced the Supreme Court? How? He wasn’t even President at the time. Or did you have in mind some other chicanery?
My recollection is that happened because, contrary to his delusions at the time, Congress was not completely full of his cronies. And even then his supporters tried to physically coerce them
I don't think we're at risk of never having another election. Even Russia still holds an election every term, and in ye olde USSR voting was essentially compulsory. What we are risking is never having another election that *matters*.
Well, (a) that's not the phrasing Scott used, and (b) what do you foresee as a mechanism by which a President can cause that to happen? Be serious here.
There are a lot of people (though I'm not one of them) who consider the 2016 election the first one in decades that "mattered" because it was the first time it was won by someone who wasn't anointed by the elites.
Well, a President could for example have a chat with the media companies, telling them, "You can do whatever you want as long as you toe my party line, otherwise my administration will choke you out of any profits, if not shut you down altogether. Speaking of which, here's a list of people I want fired." Or he could have a chat with all the major law firms: "Represent any lawsuits against me and I will have you shut down". Or he could deploy the military to major cities whose mayors are opposed tom his policies, quashing any protests along the way. Or he could shut down government watchdog agencies and gut others, making it clear that personal loyalty is any civil servant's only saving grace. Speaking of which, that applies to election monitoring as well; after all, the people love him, so any vote against him is likely to be fraud, right ?
Of course none of these moves will be as effective as simply arresting his political opponents or having them thrown out of windows -- but they don't have to be. As long as his electoral victory (and the next one, and the one after that) is inevitable or close to it, he can tolerate some amount of dissent.
Well, anything’s possible in the fullness of time. The first of these didn’t help Biden. The military has been mostly apolitical for a century or more except when it conspired against Trump.
It’s so funny that we have switched sides here. You think there’s no way a superintelligent AI could take over because people are all too diverse and uncontrollable, but you think a mere human could order the army to interfere with elections and get away either it.
I don’t have a clear picture of how much of that was from Carter himself, who was pretty ineffectual, but I’ll grant you that, too, if you like. It’s still a very far cry from deploying the army to install a dictator in the White House.
I never said that a smart human or an AI, could not become a dictator in principle (though of course no present-day LLM could do so). Humans become dictators all the time. What I did say is that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to become supreme overlord of the entire world by mind-controlling the populace, and indeed to date no human had ever come close.
That said, are you disputing (somehow) that humans can become dictators ? If not (I hope), then can you explain how the playbook of e.g. Putin, Lenin, Kim Jong Il, Mao, or any other human dictator, differs substantially from my playbook ? They were not born supreme dictators, you know. Granted, many dictators seized power by conquest right from the get-go, but let's set those aside for now.
It’s also sort of darkly humorous how much this kind of discussion of how a corrupt President could become a dictator sounds like the fever dreams of those fringe types who think this already happened: the Uniparty, the Cathedral, Davos, etc.
I'll ask you the same question as before: do you believe that e.g. Putin is a dictator ? Do you believe that he grabbed power in a (mostly) bloodless fashion ? How did he do that, in your view ?
I don't think you're remotely at risk of that either.
Here's what I think you reasonably _can_ worry about. You can worry about an escalating tit-for-tat between the remaining non-partisan institutions of the US become partisan, with the net result of making things worse.
Trump didn't invent this of course, neither did Biden, nor anyone in recent history. The Supreme Court, probably the most important institution to keep non-partisan, has been openly partisan for at least a century.
I've repeatedly thought that people were being alarmist about Trump, only to be proved wrong time and time again. At some point you have to update in response to evidence.
I think Trump will probably leave office in 2029, but it's not going to be for a lack of trying. Every day brings new news of his pushes for dictatorship, with only occasional opposition from Republicans. The country will probably survive the next three years, but in significantly worse shape. It might take generations to get back to the system of rule of law and democracy that we had.
>I think Trump will probably leave office in 2029, but it's not going to be for a lack of trying.
I'm a fan of the theory that Trump's main motivation was Obama's "mic drop" comment at the Correspondent's Dinner (which, notably and IMO correctly, Trump refuses to attend). As such, I think he will go quietly because he gets to go out a winner. Especially if there's some event where he can look like a winner near the end of the term and pass the torch well.
If the Nobel committee would just give him a prize for doing nothing (cough cough, where'd I get that idea) he'd probably go ahead and retire to spend his twilight years riding high and playing golf.
I also think that absent COVID shenanigans, J6 wouldn't have happened, but I don't have much confidence whether Trump would've lost absent COVID, either.
> 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.
And impeachment. The bureaucrats have no valid authority other than that derived from the executive, and so the notion of an independent agency is an abomination in our constitutional order. One that's been accepted for a while, but still abhorrent.
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?
I'd postulate that it has, in fact, seized most of the actual power from the democratically elected side. Just not openly. And much of this whining about "our sacred democracy" is pushback against someone who was elected at least in substantial part to take power back from the unelected, unaccountable groups.
>unable to stop mass immigration despite it being an unpopular policy
Because it's not unpopular enough, and few people are single-issue voters. When the only parties/candidates willing to emphasize it in their agenda are roundly denounced by everybody else as "fascists", most normies get with the program.
Where "everybody else" is mostly the folks in power. Talk about authoritarian and anti-democracy--when every other party, no matter how opposed to each other, bands together and says "you can't say anything bad about immigration" (cf Germany, recently), that's not a sign that no one cares. It's a sign that the official organs have their party line and will enforce it regardless of what the people think or want.
Sure, but theirs isn't only the "hard" power, but also the "soft" one. As elites get increasingly crazy/out-of-touch it does deteriorate, but so far their grand multiculturalism ideal is still the default attitude of the "polite society".
Yes. Because the "institutions" in question (like Congress) do not have infinite power, they in themselves are responsible to other parties such as voters. If the president tries to cancel elections, Congress probably will have public support for impeaching and removing him over this. If the president does some normal policy election, Congress won't have the same support.
Electing a president is picking a guy to do a job, defined by law. If he’s acting outside of that role hes taking powers away from jobs other people voted on.
Im not gonna defend US-style presidential systems; they’re bad bc they encourage this kind of problem. But “he won the election he can do whatever he wants” is proposing a totally different kind of government.
I strongly disagree with the importance of the press as a check. They're more important as a threat vector. The checks by which the government operates are largely obscure anachronisms in the eyes of the public. There's practically two outlets that provide decent court coverage, for example, as most will flat out misrepresent the issues in a case, like making cases that involve abortion about abortion even when they're really about agency discretion. The NLRB could be completely off the rails in terms of favoring unions in every ruling right now and hardly anyone except labor lawyers and Matt Bruenig would know, and it's not clear they'd want anyone to know it if it was.
The press is a systemic threat here. Even the supposedly good journalists have no incentive to fix this issue, so the press is able to poison the well trivially easily and weaponize ignorance for their own political benefits, regardless of what the public would do otherwise. I think all social media did was make the threat model more transparent.
Social media should be considered part of the press for purposes of this discussion. Remove "freedom of the press" as a check on the system turning authoritarian, and the impact won't be limited to big news companies. The dysfunctions and biases of those companies are real, but that doesn't mean that democracy will be healthier if the public's sources of information grow even more limited.
I don't know if that's true in the context of Scott's argument. His argument puts a lot of weight on the fact finding apparatus the press in particular provides, insofar as it's a check on the presidency, rather than an argument about the role of speech in political discourse and the dissemination of ideas. Both in his argument and in general, freedom of speech vs press are distinguished with meaningful legal effect though, both in political theoretic arguments and in the constitution (and constitutional law as a consequence). I'm saying that privileging the latter comes at an expense greater than the former. It's not clear to me that special press considerations beyond free speech considerations are appropriate. They tend towards privileging firms where it may not be necessary, as can be the case with solo journalists like David Lat or Matt Taibbi.
Both freedom of speech and freedom of the press have an "expense" in terms of undesirable system dynamics, and it's not clear to me that the press one is greater than the speech one. I still support both.
Giving constitution-level recognition to the organized press privileges at least two things that go beyond speech rights: the right to maintain publication forums that are available to the mass public (so your free speech gets beyond a street corner) and the right to investigate public matters and share the results. Both of those strike me as important in a democracy for more or less the reasons Scott outlines.
I'd be happy with a jurisprudence that took protection of individual journalists as its guiding priority, but I think the net benefits would still mostly accrue to firms. There are efficiencies in starting an institution and "bundling" a lot of things people want (Wordle!) with the core journalistic practices that are constitutionally important. Investigations and publication both have costs, and while it's great that we've got more ways than ever for individuals to bear those costs with help from their audiences, organizing into a company is still the most reliable way to cover them.
The core problem with the argument is one word of question begging: “independent”.
If the NGOs live off the government, the independent judges and journalists are selected by a process that favours conformist climbers and activists willing to trade off wealth for prestige; if the bureaucracy is basically the same social set and votes 90+% one party (and to top it all off has statutorily entirely one-sided mandates/risk-reward calculi – poster children: NRC and FDA); if the legislative bodies are a mix of puppets of their zealot staffers and ad copy readers for some lobby and cemented to their seats – then none of these alleged checks and balances have any salutary effect.
All of those things have held as of 2024.
That does nothing to prove that Caesarism is better per se, but as a starting point it’s necessary to accept that the theory of independent institutions and separated powers is void as far as its alleged purpose goes. So you end up with the blob critique, which as far as simple diagnoses about complex phenomena go is as plainly true as anything can ever be.
To restore such a system to a point where it even has the potential to provide the function that makes it worthwhile (it’s a very expensive, friction-inducing social technology after all) you’d have to do absolutely wild, out-of-overton things – completely separating any personnel and financial links between civil society organisations and government; sever the link between universities and government; introduce offset elections and term limits for all judicial posts, make journalism a blue-collar field again (that has kinda happened with social media, for better or worse); reduce the scope of regulation, but both add some actual teeth (e.g. anti-revolving-door laws, requirements that fines are always a > 1 multiple of estimated profit of the violation, more even-handed incentives than “prevent everything, lest anything ever happens”); have term limits + sortition + temporally offset negative voting for filtering obvious nuts + mandatory service if selected for the legislative and prohibit permanent legislative staffers;
No actually existing faction is remotely incentivised to run that program; and aside from that the continuous elections it would require would fatigue the citizenry almost immediately.
In the end, I think republics just don’t scale to whole continents. Distinctly small country stuff. Maybe the options are just: Be happy with the oligarchy (people aren’t) or with Caesar (people won’t be, if maybe less?).
Aside from this fundamental criticism the starting idea of “the real thing is the iterated thing” is a very insightful and important one. You just need an extremely far-sighted and virtuous population for playing everything as an infinite game, which is a lot of load to put on one “just”.
This is an interesting point. Does the US not (classically) have this, in its state governments? This seems to support the classically federalist position.
Sure, but they're only a world power because of their union. Perhaps it's time for the founding of an American empire? The states can still be allowed some autonomy.
One might ask, are the states better run than the federal government? I would argue the U.S. government effectiveness is higher than most (but not all) states.
Democracy often spends long stretches in an equilibrium where it operates as rules-based rotation of power among social elites, and locks out changes stemming from lower classes (who contribute their votes without getting an option that corresponds to their values or interests). It's a social oligarchy even if the rule set is democratic.
During those periods it still works as a non-violent way of alternating power betwen elites --and that isn't nothing! The Americans who are talking themselves into the idea that political violence isn't that bad for the most part have no personal experience of countries where killing your enemies is the norm, and will I predict find the experience intolerable the more we make it a reality.
Regardless, the track record of Caesarism in solving the problem of social exclusion is laughably bad. Autocrats, even ones elevated by revolutionary movements, almost always come from social elites; whatever bones they throw to their footsoldiers, they consolidate an order where oligarchs continues to dominate, usually with fewer of the procedural freedoms that make that domination tolerable to voters in a democracy.
A democratic republic at least includes the institutions by which a revolt against elite "blobs" can take place without blood in the streets. Non-elites can mobilize to drive change, and repeatedly have, by voting in e.g. a Jackson or an Attlee. All human social orders so far have tended toward elite capture, and liberal democracy isn't immune...but it's the order where the kind of critique you're making here could most easily lead to actual change.
It certainly isn’t nothing, no. But political violence has long arrived in America, in periodic paroxysms of terrorism and state-sponsored rioting starting in the 1950s. What has been limiting it so far is that one side has largely refused to engage in it. That willingness to endure that asymmetry and the (mostly, correct) hope that it will get punished in the polls is obviously wearing thin.
What’s highly unclear is how much such Jacksonian Saturnalia can still do anyway. An interlocking system of institutions that evolved precisely to prevent such change would have to be broken in toto to make it work. That’s a moment of intense danger of total norm breakdown.
Attlee is something totally different. A fabian socialist is exactly the champion of the type of bureaucratic oligarchy that has disabled all pressure release valves that are supposed to make democracy work. “[Democracy] is the order where [popular discontent] could most easily lead to actual change” is begging the question again – I’m saying that the actually implemented “democracy” is exactly optimised to subvert that. Maybe it makes sense here to distinguish between democracy and Our Democracy™ which is, branding aside, just a very different system.
The thing that no friend of the sort of the ubiquitous left-acculturated lib bureaucratic oligarchy that’s (for the most part) still running the west, even in the US, seems to want to account for is that it underperfoms the talent it deploys incredibly in substance. Note e.g. Attlee’s NHS, which costs probably the most money you can spend to provision totally dysfunctional healthcare; but it’s basically the state religion over there. I think most people would live with an enormous amount of micromanaging technocracy if it could deliver the goods, it just can’t, anywhere, on any dimension.
Then again the tariff rollout was also a shambles.
The American paroxysms of the 1960s and '70s had a pretty extended pause before picking up again recently. No significant presidential assassination attempts between 1981 and 2024; a marked drop in domestic terror and rioting between the '70s and the '20s. People who shrug off the recent rise in political violence with "we've never really been free of it" are I think seriously underestimating the difference between the last few decades of US life and the 1970s, let alone the Years of Lead.
Everyone's frustrated with modern bureaucratic oligarchy, but most people still vote for what it offers anyway. The NHS is talismanically popular with Britons of all classes; the "state" part of its "state religion" role is downstream of that fundamental democratic popularity, not manufactured by an oligarchic elite. The promise of making it work better has so far appealed more than the idea of throwing off the shackles of bureaucracy.
If you're hungry for a radical alternative to the current elite consensus, Trump would be (at best) the old order's murderer, not a plausible builder of anything more effective. *Of course* his tariffs and DOGE cuts were a shambles; he thrives on the shambolic and unpredictable. The one major exception from his first term, Operation Warp Speed, happened when a crisis forced him to rely on the institutional competencies he usually disdains. He's not a talent manager; he's a narcissist wary of any talent that threatens to eclipse him.
> Read this for an alternate view of the asymmetry
I skimmed it but it has very little meat by itself and I didn’t want to follow the avalanche of links, also because I suspect that it would be quite unedifying – every summary “showing” a higher level of right-wing violence that I’ve ever seen has one or more of the following methodological errors[1]:
• Classifying every one of the numerous crimes of the the Aryan Nations gang as a right-wing crime. It does use Nazi symbology, but it’s just another of the race-based prison gangs that recruit convicts rightly fearful of the incredible level of violence in US prisons with the promise of relative safety. It then drives these people into often much worse crime.
• Classifying every crime based on racial animus as right-wing (and classifying nigh-every interracial crime committed by whites as based on racial animus). The vast majority of racialist crimes in the US are black-on-white; the particular black Americans who commit those crimes are mostly not really political in any systematic way (but as far as they are, their radicalization is squarely on the shoulders of the left).
• Counting nutcases who spewed right-coded nonsense as right-wing criminals and their counterparts with left-coded delusions as nutcases.
If you have a particular study at hand that does not have any of these weaknesses and shows the same result, that might be worthwhile. In the meantime here’s a case-by-case a guy on Twitter did on one of those lists: https://x.com/Recursion_Agent/status/1967059298267394218
> had a pretty extended pause
More of a lull, but yeah, 20 years for the comparatively mild 90s PC struggle sessions that still purged academia fairly completely, then another 20 to get really kinetic again. Wonder what creates that rhythm. Last generation of activated radicals receive tenure?
> fundamental democratic popularity, not manufactured
Those are not mutually exclusive. I think the popularity is genuine, but not exactly organic. There’s a lot of “clapping for the NHS” promoted from on-high, people who denigrate it get anathemized aggressively, and the state/corporate prestige media don’t really talk about actual price/performance much.
> the US proves that the NHS isn't the most you can spend for totally dysfunctional healthcare
US healthcare cost is basically being very cash-rich, very opportunity-rich (Baumol's), and the industry being very very good at lobbying. It’s also extremely regulated, like every industry where prices have exploded.
US healthcare is also not “dysfunctional” judged by results adjusted for demographic and lifestyle factors, just ludicrously expensive. E.g. cancer survival rates seem to be quite good and I don’t think only the rich get cancer in the US.
That’s not to speak of the load-schedding with a humane skin suit spreading in the public systems, MAiD in Canada is just the most absurd and extreme case.
> Trump would be (at best) the old order's murderer, not a plausible builder of anything more effective
He certainly has his foibles, put politely, but the great villain model of history has all the same problems as the great man model. In reality, these things are always dead or dying before the scavenger manages to land.
In a way he’s just the inevitable result the 1992 election: That illustrated what the deep state parties did to a great outsider executive who was more thoughtful and introspective but also more sensitive. Since then the system has become much more broken, dysfunctional, and hated (and the giant sucking sound did come on harder than probably even Perot expected) and now they got Trump instead.
Trump, BTW, counter to the claims that he just ran the first time as a self-promotion exercise climbing on a topic in the discourse he didn’t actually care about, was one of the few in the business elite who gave the same warnings as Perot at around the same time. Just louder, less eloquently, and in a Playboy Magazine interview. Say about him what you will, but he is farsighted and consistent in his vision.
Alas the execution is another topic.
> Operation Warp Speed
My vague and uncertain impression on that is that it did prevent some deaths among the aged and very ill, but did not stop transmission, did little against long covid or for average severity, may have actually increased susceptibility for infection with later variants, and had (rare, occasionally deadly) side effects for circulatory health particularly among the young, so QALY impact is marginal/doubtful if not negative, at ocean-boiling effort and with quite a bit of damage to the social fabric due to the pressures exerted to take it.
Doesn’t seem like a triumph to me TBH. Doing great things is one thing but they also have to be good.
It would be really interesting to ever know the net QALY adjusted impact definitively, but I have to say that I pretty much don’t trust anyone or anything on this topic since everyone still motivated to work on it seems compromised due to material, institutional, or just axe-grinding interest.
> wary of any talent
Not sure it’s true of Trump in all cases (Vance is a _great_ politician and communicator – whether good, we’ll see). But maybe he’ll still gut him, and Vance is comically focussed on always crediting the boss.
Complicating factor: Seems to be the same for the oligarchy. Maybe not re: eclipsing, but maybe re: imposing any through-line or coherence to the free run of their office politics consensus?
Hard to say why else they would have nominated and elected [“…” – ed.] a shambling zombie and a vacuous confused lady in what they claimed to see as a critical juncture.
Funnily enough the thought of Compton’s second ethnic cleansing etc. crossed my mind when I wrote the above but are those really on comparable scale?
I’m absolutely not blaming “the blacks”. That’s why I took pains to write “the particular black Americans who”. Most blacks are fine.
Putting it all on the table, TBH I’m not even blaming the perpetrators of things like the spectacular light rail slaughter that got so much attention lately either, but for all the darkest reasons. That’s a feral beast. I can totally see why the stabber should not be held criminally culpable. It should be put down, though.
Who I am very much blaming in particular are the left…lib political/judicial machines who enable these reoccurrences of as you rightly say “stochastic violence” to milk them, to absorb resources to manage a problem that they have created.
These people are not “the blacks” in any meaningful way. In fact the evolution of “black fatigue” discourse shows that blacks who after all are the chief victims of this cruel dysfunction and chaos are as horrified and sick and tired of it as anyone else, if not more so due to simple frequency of exposure.
It’s no coincidence that Trump who does not participate in the usual treacly pieties on the whole complex of issues as much as others received more of their votes than other republican candidates.
After many years of thinking what exactly power means and how states/governments run; and also after many years seeing nearly all the assumptions and the majority of the theory being held together by duct tape and good wishes; and finally after witnessing the state of governance in different places across time and space (Turkiye my home country, Syria about an hour's drive from my hometown, the Netherlands where I've been living for over a decade, and the USA where one is subjected to what's going on over there regardless of one wants to follow that or not) I think I kind of figured out how things work and my conclusion is unfortunately grim.
One of the first things one needs to understand, and it's been difficult for me, and I'm guessing it would be even more difficult for somebody from the first world; that all laws, rules, customs, constitutions, etc are at best suggestions. This is not something that requires a lot of intelligence to understand or figure out, but one needs to be able to go into a different mindset. Basically the deal is this: all laws, rules etc need to be enforced. Somebody needs to do the enforcing. In case there is resistance to it, the enforcer needs to apply force. There needs to be a sort of command chain for this, some kind of overseeing of this application of force, some documenting or record keeping and all that. On the other hand, all that command chain and overseeing and documenting and stuff also needs to be enforced recursively. So, that is as imaginary as the original laws themselves. Mind you, this can be collection of taxes, counting of ballots, HOA bylaws, mandatory draft to military, distributing of soup to homeless, and everything else that a state might do. Of course there are some Schelling points that create local minima to converge to, but I'm trying to be quick and witty here.
The thing to keep in mind is that the world is not a computer game that has to obey some laws, except for the laws of physics. No laws or agreements are as algorithmically fixed as something one puts into an ethereum chain or whatever. That means every state, be it democratic or communist or whatever; runs on the will of the people to uphold it. There will of course be a lot of convoluted ways of keeping people believing in the system, and even more ways of keeping people obeying it. Nobody wants a system degrade to anarchy, but the reality is all systems are in fact anarchy with a thin coat of paint. If that sounds too punch-y or sloppy, I can say all states are hierarchical anarchy dampeners which substitute repeated-game incentives and selective coercion for pure anarchy. Still I prefer the punch-y version. I have to say in high capacity, high impersonality states the paint might still be load bearing since there’s redundancy (courts, audit offices, media, independent civil service, etc) that makes selective non-enforcement costly and thus rare, but when push comes to shove, I say it will degrade to anarchy all the same (paint is load bearing until it isn't).
So far I don't sound like I'm dealing a lot of wisdom to the readers of this, and I'm not sure how much of it would be distributed by the time I'm finished, yet I'll persist and I hope the reader does as well. I'll continue with a few recent examples to make my point.
Turkiye might not be a country the readers here regard highly, but until recently-ish, it used to be quite the nice place. There were always issues with democracy, some coups here and there, some persecution of this minority or that, a whiff of torture and extrajudicial killings but not too much, deep state cooperating with mafia and religious orders and corporations and politicians; but which state doesn't do a bit of this or that? Even the western world doesn't have clean hands regarding those. What Turkiye had was rules being applied more or less consistently like y'all have in the USA, which is not the case anymore in TR. For example, it is clearly stated in the constitution that, the decisions of the Constitutional Court must be upheld. Even during the coups and extrajudicial this and deepstate that, when Constitutional Court made a decision (be that decision just or not), it was applied. It doesn't matter the executive branch liked it or not, even if the executive branch is really stronk. The state apparatus saw to it happening. The lower court accepted that decision and the executive wing of the state one way or another did what the Constitutional Court said by way of putting some people in prison by force, or releasing some people from prison, or doing something else. When the executive branch, or to keep it short Erdogan wanted to have a say on how Constitutional Court decides, they changed the rules of how the members of the Constitutional Court was selected, and how they were retired, and who had a quota of sending a member there, and whatever, to pad it how they like to get friendly calls. This is also "undemocratic" in the vague way of what we declare democracy to be, but this wall of text will not discuss how to define the word "democratic" and nitpick about it.
Well this is too long for a single comment so continuing on a reply:
Quite recently, the Constitutional Court decided something that Erdogan didn't like about a political prisoner who won a seat in the parliament which, by law, needs to be set free because his fault was not a crime like a burglary or assault, but something political. One might say it's not "democratic" for somebody to be a political prisoner in the first place, but as I said, this is not the topic of this wall of text. There was a court about this which said he needs to stay in prison, and the matter went to the Constitutional Court. Even though it's been padded with cronies for about a decade and a half, keeping him in prison was so unlawful that they had to say he should be released. The thing is, nobody released him. There were protests about it by people in streets, there were protests about it by MPs in the parliament, but it's been about two years and he is still in the prison.
This is only one example that happened in the recent couple of years that surpasses the nebulous "undemocratic" into quite clear "but the constitution clearly says otherwise and it's not something up for interpretation, it is very literal" territory. The point is, there is no point between the nebulous undemocratic and the clearcut WTF. It is just that no law or no rule has any intrinsic meaning or power like a video game or a blockchain contract (hell, even in blockchains the outermost layer is social, right?). It might just not be enforced and that's completely within the rules of physics, which apparently are the only rules that matter. And it's not just Turkiye or liberal democracy, the same happened in Tsarist Russia, and later in USSR, and I think it happens in every functioning democracy as well, just in so small amounts that it doesn't cause people to lose their minds over it or collapse the system. It's a continuum and the absolute perfect way of it, even if it was attainable, I don't know if that's a desirable utopia or another dystopia where everything is controlled too much. It's a slider scale (probably multidimensional sliders actually, representing state capacity and legitimacy and whatever, but bear with the simplification) that has dystopias in both ends for sure, but it's not certain where the middle is, or if there is any stable place on the slider that doesn't have any dystopias, or if that good place, if that exists, is in the middle. I know this sounds very pessimistic, cynic, nihilistic, or any combination of those; but that's the feeling I eventually get for sure when I think about any kind of governance for long enough. It's not that all points on the slider are equally bad in different ways, obviously western democracies are better than past Turkiye which was better than current Turkiye which is still better than Syria. The problem is, I cannot really put my finger on how it is, but there is a dynamic system in which there's constant devolution in some axes and it always takes a lot of effort to evolve back into a better place. The problem is, Moloch always comes up with new measures to make it more difficult to fight back to evolve to a better state. From what I see, Erdogan's shaping of a democracy (with faults, but still) towards an authoritarian regime is a good (evil) blueprint for other democracies. The load bearing parts to destroy are more or less similar. That's why I see myself as a good candidate to write a comment this long and am writing the whole thing expected to be read.
I think the only real counterweight to Moloch in this scenario is the real will of people, by which I mean not what they vote for, but what they risk their lives for to make or prevent a change. There is a point in the slider for every set of human beings, that would make them take the streets and take up arms and swarm offices and defenestrate or cannibalize prime ministers, and switch to another local minima in the space of possibilities. That might be a good switch or a bad switch, but would be a switch nonetheless. Only the threat of this keeps a rogue head of executive branch at check, and this is the final and most natural of the much talked about "checks and balances". It's not demonstrations or street anarchy or anything like that (those are mostly just nuisance or pressure release) but more targeted like what recently happened in Nepal for example.
I'm still hopeful for a better future, but I don't know what is the source of that hope. I just keep that hope intact so if there's a critical mass of people that hopes more or less like me, good governance becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and spontaneously occurs. Otherwise I'm prepared for the survival of the fittest world.
The TLDR from chatgpt when I fed it this whole thing: "Law is a coordination equilibrium with a coercive backstop; institutions fail when enforcement chains lose capacity, legitimacy, or constraint." but I think my version is snazzier.
I don't think you need to think so hard about this. In the centuries that will come, the more inefficient and unsustainable systems will die or be consumed by superior systems. The wonderful part about natural selection is that it doesn't require intelligence or will. Improvement will naturally come through the destruction of failures. It just takes time.
Well even I wouldn't be that cynical. It's still theoretically possible to create a truly unified populace through the elimination of everything without. A society without a necessity for laws, because the people lack any independent will or desires. A society that truly approaches the perfection that is eusociality. Of course, humanity is also perfectly capable of changing on their own at the genetic level. That just takes a lot of time... And by then, they'll probably have built something that will supersede them.
I.e. written constitutions are treated by americans like holy texts. But at the end of the day, it's just words on paper. The only reason those words matter is because the men-with-guns spontaneously agree to abide by "the rules", i.e. the cultural norms.
Which is another reason why democracy (or whatever it is we currently have) is overrated. People put way too much stock in systems. But to surrender to systems is to let entropy take the wheel. I'm also reminded of Zawinski's Law:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
My simple way of answering this is: Democracy isn't about winning elections. Democracy is about the government reflecting the will of the people.
Representative democracy with elections and set terms is *one implementation* of democracy, but it's just a hack to approximate the real thing in a system that's somewhat workable and stable.
Direct democracy where anyone can propose a policy and everyone can vote on it would be another approximation of the thing, possibly closer to the thing itself, but possibly harder to implement and less stable.
There are a thousand different systems you could use to implement some approximation of the thing, but none of those are the thing itself. Elections aren't democracy; elections are one tool (among many) that we use to help us approximate democracy.
When you frame it like this, the rest becomes easy.
Destroying honest media establishments is anti-democratic because the populace can't effectively turn it's utility function into a decision matrix unless it has lots of accurate data to update on.
Dismantling the judiciary is anti-democratic because it is a crucial tool that the public uses to implement its will through laws and regulations.
Etc.
There's still room for quibbling about whether such-and-such a regulation increase democracy in expectation by implementing the public's will at the moment, or if it decreases democracy in expectation by locking in a regulatory regime that will get mis-applied or be hard to reverse if the will of the people changes in light of changing circumstances, or etc. Or quibbling about the majority's preference for a specific policy that hurts the minority vs the majority's general desire for universal liberty and fairness, and where the reflective equilibrium over those preferences lands.
But as long as people are not confusing the map of elections and branches and etc. for the territory of government reflecting the will of the people, all of those conversations become a lot clearer and more productive.
Enacting laws =/= judiciary. In fact, the judiciary should have basically nothing to do with enacting laws--that's the legislative.
The judiciary is charged with one and only one responsibility--responding to accusations of law breaking and deciding "was the law broken". Policy matters should be irrelevant--the substance of the law only matters to the degree that it conflicts with higher laws (such as the constitution).
No, this is the basics of separation of powers. There are *lots* of laws on the books (ie enacted laws) that have no enforcement at all. And lots of things get enforced not based on any enacted law (and instead on some bureaucrat's idea of should be proper).
Legislature enacts laws. It says "If X, then Y." (in the simple case). Or "Executive will spend $A on $B".
Executive (keeping to the criminal law aspect) says "ok, person XYZ broke law ABC, here's the evidence PQS."
Judiciary says either "Ok, PQS is sufficient to say that XYZ broke law ABC. Executive, perform the penalty $P" or "PQS is not sufficient to say that XYZ broke law ABC. Executive, let him go."
The law is enacted at the first step, by the legislature. It's enforced by the executive, who prosecutes (brings actions in court) and executes judgements. The judiciary only does the step of deciding "was that enforcement proper" and if so, what should be the penalty. Without an enacted law, judiciary has nothing to do (properly).
The judiciary has no constitutional say in what the law *is* or *should be* or what the range of penalties should be. Only whether the law as written was violated or not. It has no power to go out and actively enforce it in the first instance--the judiciary is entirely reactive. It only responds to complaints from others. Now they've arrogated to themselves lots of power to say what the law is/should be. And that's wrong and anti-democratic.
"The will of the people" isn't a thing, though. "The people" always include massive disagreements; the idea that they have a unitary will at any given moment, let alone over time, is an error.
A vision of democracy as a way of helping us take collective action despite our disagreements, by agreeing on how we're going to handle disagreement nonviolently and come up with the most broadly acceptable compromises that are reachable in a given context, feels more promising to me.
I don't think that any implementation of democracy can handle unboundedly large disagreements though. Some way of keeping them manageable seems needed.
What makes a disagreement "large"? Democracy regularly handles disagreements over pretty fundamental issues -- life and death, wealth and immiseration, people who are convinced their eternal destiny is at stake based on what the state might force them/other people to do. There's no guarantee that those disagreements won't destabilize a country, but liberal democracy has a pretty good track record of helping people find compromises that they can tolerate and grumpily coexist.
>liberal democracy has a pretty good track record of helping people find compromises that they can tolerate and grumpily coexist
Well, the vast majority of those people used to be some variety of Christian for most of that time. I'm sure it still seemed to them that they had huge disagreements, but little did they know what exciting new grounds could elite opinions reach in a matter of a few decades, and who knows what terrifying vistas lie just ahead...
Doesn't mean their disagreements weren't fundamental. The most destructive wars of religion (including the ones that inspired the invention of liberal democracy) have happened between coreligionists, not between totally different religions. It's often easier to get along with someone who's comprehensively different than with a heretic.
I'd rather say that those wars were necessary for people to even countenance the notion that sometimes you can't just kill the heretic, you have to work with him. It seems like this lesson may require a refresher.
I wouldn't say that religious wars are due to differences in desired policies between individual citizens. I think they generally have much more to do with the will and maneuvering of the people in charge of each faction, like most wars.
How about excluding those areas of large disagreement from the scope of government?
I'd bet that a government that focused on the very basics (basic law and order on things everyone agrees should be illegal, basic coordination issues like traffic laws, national defense) would have very high unity. But also wouldn't serve as a vehicle for power-hungry folks to accrete power to themselves. The ones opposed would be the (would-be) elites, not the people.
But the prophets of our age declared that "everything is political", that "silence is violence", which was pretty convincing by all appearances. I don't really see how this gets rolled back without a decently-sized crisis.
First of all, your second paragraph is pretty much what people mean by 'the will of the people'.
We can quibble on whether 'broadly acceptable compromise' is the same thing as the Pareto-optimal frontier or the utilitarian optimal expected value across all preferences or etc., there are lots of ways to satisfice over different utility functions. But no one is claiming that everyone always agrees on everything.
But, second, I do think that the feeling we have that no one agrees on anything is largely an artifact of already living in a liberal democracy that's doing a pretty good job, and that has a two-party system (or a general bipolarized tendency in other democracies) which finds and exploits wedge issues.
Like, the things we *argue about* in modern democracies are the things that passionately split the population close to 50/50, because those issues are the most powerful levers politicians have to gain support and build movements.
But if you look at the human history of non-liberal non-democracies, there's much wider agreement on a lot of issues. Most people do not want to be serfs, bound to the land and with no rights to self-determination. Most people do not want their liege lord to have the right to rape them or their wives whenever they feel like it. Most people do not want a secret police who monitor them for disloyalty to the regime. Etc.
If you took the starting point of a random monarchy or dictatorship throughout history, educated the populace enough to coherently formulate and pursue their utility functions, and asked them what they'd like to change, I think you'd get a large number of big important changes that enjoyed extremely wide support, long before you got to anything that divided the people 40/60. That's the benefit of democracy over the alternatives.
I'd still argue that "the will of the people" is a profoundly misleading phrase, leading us to imagine a singular people with a singular will. Perhaps if I were a utilitarian, I'd believe there was a single function that represented an optimal outcome in large-scale social disputes, and would thus take the singular-will language as a metaphor for some genuinely existing thing we could work towards.
As it is, I don't think math offers an adequate map of our desires, or that in the many places where they clash there's a single stable optimum that's calculable even in principle. Do the most painstaking and ingenious approximations you can come up with as a utilitarian technocrat... and you'll still have to deal with the host of people who respond to your proposal with a flat "no, that's unacceptable," even when you've walked them through your calculations of why this is best for everyone.
At that point, if you're a democrat, you resort to the contingent social process of trying to negotiate a temporary equilibrium in an ever-shifting chaos of contending interests and values. The measure of democratic success isn't how well it represents something that doesn't exist ("the will of the people," or some similar articulation of an imagined optimum). It's how many of your people you've managed to bring into the process while reaching an outcome they'll tolerate.
Maybe that's a quibble? It feels like more than a quibble to me, but I could be wrong. I'd never say that "no one agrees on anything"; the chaotic aspect to our values/interests is real, but it's far from total. I agree with you that there are plenty of things where there's a stable social consensus. "The will of the people is not to be enslaved" -- sure!
But the test of governing institutions isn't how they deal with social consensus. It's not just how they deal with 50/50 issues, either -- the 80/20s can be murder when the 20s care enough. Most divisive issues aren't a binary, anyway; one of the ways American democracy tries to manage them is to force disagreement into a binary mold suited to two-party contestation, but the reality is that democracy has to deal with plenty of 4/7/12/12/17... issues. For my money, that process is more accurately described by narrative historians than quantitative analysts.
I hold the view that it is important to actually talk about the separation of powers when you're talking about the separation of powers. If I were somehow forced to choose between separation of powers and democracy, I would choose the former, I think it is much more important.
Ensuring the winner of the election cannot influence the next election is simply not possible, as long as they at least hold the power of being able to address the nation. Similarly, I don't think there has ever been a "well-informed populace" anywhere.
I think it's plausible that before universal suffrage there were better informed populaces, at least. Of course, those came with their own cans of worms.
One of the critiques of universal sufferage, which i've yet to see anyone grapple with: theoretically, all voters in a given nation are responsible for the decisions of the nation state. Like, do I really want to be held personally responsible for Obama's counterterrorism in the middle east? Do I want to be held responsible for the Iran Contra Affair? Was the firebombing of Dresden morally justified?
Meanwhile, I remember seeing an episode of "are you smarter than a 5th grader", in which the contestant, a typical young white adult male normie, was asked whether the U.S.-Mexican Border was longer than the U.S.-Canadian Border. "Well, with all the talk about immigrants crossing the border, I reckon the U.S.-Mexican Border is longer." lmao. Should this person be allowed to vote?
Not that I'm a huge Trump fan (in fact I think he's all mouth and no trousers), but I don't think he's "gone against the judiciary" in any meaningful sense.
In fact the most important part of the judiciary is demonstrably with him, and against the impertinent ideologues in the judiciary who are pretending that they have the right to do his job.
I think most people on both sides understand that "democracy" applies to a system; nevertheless, the result of any particular vote is what it is, if a majority voted someone in to do some things, then all things being equal, those things should be done and the "opposition" should get out of the way of them being done, otherwise the system is a farce.
What do you mean "disobeying orders" - disobeying the "orders" of penny-ante judges who have no business trying to usurp the powers of the executive (as SCOTUS has repeatedly pointed out)?
Yes, that's how the US system works - the same system that SCOTUS is upholding by spanking judges who go off-piste by trying to usurp executive power that's rightly the president's.
Again: part of the point of a democratic system is to gracefully let the other lot have a go in order to avoid civil war (because a majority means you'd likely win one if it came to the bit).
IOW, one had one's chance in opposing the opposition, then one lost, now GTFO of the way. You can whinge and whine, even make reasoned complaints and build your case for the next go-around, but the executive power is no longer yours.
That's what the Republicans did when "Biden" was running things, that's what Democrats should be doing now that Republicans are running things. Otherwise their complaining about "muh democracy" is just hypocrisy.
>if a majority voted someone in to do some things,
You don't know what the majority voted them in to do. The ballot doesn't say "what things do you want this candidate to do?" It just says "which candidate do you want?" In fact, since Trump's immigration crackdown led to polls showing greater support for immigration, it seems that the voters did *not* actually want Trump to do the things he did.
>then all things being equal, those things should be done and the "opposition" should get out of the way of them being done, otherwise the system is a farce.
If the majority voted for something illegal, then those things should not get done, and they should have to change the law first. That's what "rule of law" means.
Yes that's what I meant by "all things being equal." Re. polls, you've obviously been looking at different ones from the ones I looked at.
Obviously there's no one-to-one correlation, but I think it's mostly taken as given in political discourse that it's the policies that people vote for - otherwise there wouldn't be all that foofaraw about the importance of an educated, informed voting populace, would there?
Scott is a very smart guy and always at least entertaining. But like all of us, there are areas where he has in-depth knowledge (e.g., psychiatry) and adds a lot of value, and others, like the subject of this post, where his knowledge base and thoughts are superficial. One of the problems of very smart guys is that they tend to assume that their opinions about subjects they haven't studied in depth are nevertheless worth sharing.
I don't read Scott for his psychiatric insights. His added value is almost always as a clever generalist who's avidly interested in a LOT of things, and thus able to make connections and point out patterns that might escape the in-depth specialist. If he ever decided to limit his posts to subjects he'd studied in depth, I'd unsubscribe. :)
You make a good point. Let me revise mine. Clever generalists, if they want to avoid becoming cranks, need to pick their spots. Yes, they can add value if they manage to make connections and point out patterns that have escaped in-depth specialists. Scott's observations about democracy are not in that category. I'm not interested in his thoughts about monetary policy or string theory either.
Fair enough. This post was a lightweight sketch; I found it interesting as a jumping-off point for conversation, but I agree it's not at the level of his stuff that turned me into a subscriber.
I'd add that democracy is -- like ethics, or (for the religious) theology -- a topic way too important in day-to-day life to abandon to in-depth specialists. I don't think it's ever entirely without value to think through some aspect of it "out loud" in everyday language and see where it gets us.
I read it because over the years Scott has built up a lot of credit with me, and I assume that anything he has written is worth reading. I responded because I believe that criticism can be helpful.
> The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in.
This reminded me of two things.
(1) One of the points Amy Chua made in World On Fire was that South American elites commonly talk about how they need to better implement democracy in their countries, in imitation of the United States, but if you look at their policy demands what they want is methods to block everybody else from voting to confiscate their property.
(2) I have often observed that when people say "capitalism", what they mean is "whatever the United States does", which makes arguing about capitalism a pretty incoherent affair. This also seems to happen with "democracy" - it's "whatever the United States does".
>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) and conservative authoritarianism’s comparative advantage is weakening or attacking these institutions (eg the civil service fails to protest anti-democratic encroachment because the government has limited its power).
I think this is more about the populism axis than the conservative vs progressive axis. My experience observing online left-populist discourse is that they often tend to distrust and support weakening these institutions in the US for parallel reasons to those of right-populists: the court, media, and civil service are captured by out-of-touch parasitic elites who are systematically thwarting the *true* will of the people. This is especially the case when institutional checks prevent progressive politicians from enacting their policies.
There is currently correlation between "conservatives" and the populist side of the spectrum in the US, because the extreme populist wing of the Republican party is currently dominant and has been doing its best over the past decade to marginalize anti-populist conservatives, while the populist factions of the Democratic party are not currently in the driver's seat and haven't been for some time.
I've heard that sort of thing called the Green Lantern Theory of Politics: i.e. the assumption a President or a Congressional leader can enact any policy they want through sheer force of will if they believe in it enough.
For populist-left criticism of Obama in particular, I am inclined to place a measure of blame at the feet of Ezra Klein. Klein is a very clever man, and during the Obama years he devoted considerable effort and ingenuity towards promoting various ways that Obama might abuse the rules to unilaterally implement policies. For example the idea of minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin to work around the debt ceiling (theoretically legal since the laws authorizing the US Mint to produce platinum coins don't specify or limit the face value) isn't original to Klein, but I'm pretty sure I remember him being the first mainstream voice talking about it as if it were a viable notion. This is somewhat ironic in this context, since I read Klein as leaning anti-populist and expect he was modeling the Obama administration as an institutional check against the populist excesses of Republicans in Congress.
Imagine a country where an unelected interest group attempts to spread a new state ideology, not by persuasion, but by force, and using the new generation as its target.
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
They noted that professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
The next step up in authoritarianism from censorship is enforced speech. This affected 54,000 professors, and is but one example of such “guidelines”. FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case.
Of course FIRE is now pursuing the Trump administration’s excessed with equal vigor. “Democracy” - or whatever this is- depends on people in all institutions who have the courage to stand up and insist that these perform the functions they are supposed to. And wouldn't it have been nice if everyone had figured out that the other path leads to massive mistrust, the fundamental undermining force.
I don't think there's any contradiction in arguing that a completely democratic process might result in fewer or no elections later down the line. In a society where the people overwhelmingly want a dictator with no elections, isn't it undemocratic to deny them that? After all, we do that with every election--the rulers get 2-4 years of power before the next vote. All this would be is the people democratically changing their minds about term limits.
It's the difference between a consequentialist who wants to reduce the amount of killing in the world and a deontologist who believes thou shalt not kill. There may be some instances where you reduce net murders by killing someone, but that doesn't make what you're doing not murder.
The things that people *actually* say are Trump "threatening democracy" have nothing to do with not having more than one election. They aren't links in the chain of not having more than one election either. The idea that Trump wants to be president for life or is doing anything towards being so is ludicrous.
You only make it not sound even more conspiratorial by speaking in generalities. Yeah, Trump does things with the judiciary. And there are things you can do with the judiciary to prevent future elections. But these sets don't intersect.
The judiciary has said that the President has complete immunity for any crimes committed in office, which sounds like the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to enable the President to subvert elections or attack his political opponents without getting punished for it.
The attacks on the media are also threatening - if the government can threaten to pull your TV station's broadcast license because they don't like the content, that makes it harder to report on any shenanigans the government is getting up to.
That's...just not true. He has the exact same immunity for *official acts* (ie those that are an actual part of his job) as *judges* do. For exactly the same reasons.
He has *zero* immunity for acts that are actually outside his power, and only *qualified* immunity (ie it can be pierced and refuted) for acts that are arguably within his authority.
Which is, actually, *exactly the same as judges, cops, or any random administrator*.
So the problem in the US (at least one problem, as highlighted by Dan Carlin) is that the congress has given too much power to the executive branch. To fix this, we have to vote in a congress that will start taking back it's power and with it responsibility. Not impossible, but I don't hear anyone talking this way. (Well except for Carlin.)
A lot of words to say "Trump's gonna cancel elections". Wake me up when he actually does.
Before launching into these fascist-pattern-matching arguments, may I point out that no one affiliated with Trump or the Republican Party calls himself a fascist, or thinks well of fascists? Which segment of the right is calling for elections to be canceled? How is a political movement that doesn't even exist going to succeed in the putative aims you've assigned to it?
I also think it's a bit odd that not even someone who calls HIMSELF a socialist gets accused of wanting to cancel elections, despite the fact that socialists have canceled more than a few.
Have you gamed this out at all, in your head? Trump says "I'm running for a third term." The Supreme Court says no, the 22nd Amendment is extremely clear, you are not a valid candidate and won't appear on ballots. So Trump... what? Sends the National Guard to arrest every state legislature?
Every time -- I mean literally every single time -- someone tries to convince me of the Fascist Menace, they end up doing the exact opposite.
It wouldn't get to the "election fraud" stage. States would not put him on ballots! Even, arguendo, if EVERY state he carried in 2024 agreed to put him on, which they certainly wouldn't, he'd still have no shot in the actual election. There would be no "tally". He is not eligible to run for a third term absent a Constitutional amendment, and everyone, including Trump himself (but apparently not including some of his enemies, though I'm never sure to what extent you guys are pulling my leg), knows that. The Republican Party would not forfeit a presidential election for the sake of Trump's vanity. Everyone knows that too.
If you're really sold on this insane scenario, I'm sure some prediction market will lay you 100:1 or something. Good luck.
“Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? “
This really reads like someone who has never seriously thought about Westminster parliamentary systems.
The real risk is the Erdogan route. He hasn't cancelled elections, but has gradually tightened the noose on the opposition until they effectively can't field any of their chosen candidates.
I don't doubt that the next Democratic nominee will be subject to one or likely multiple DoJ investigations over trivial transgressions. It was a bad idea when prosecutors went after Trump, and I expect it will be much worse this time around. Maybe also investigations for 'hate speech'. It's not cancelling the election, it's using the power of the federal government to disable the opposition, but it's effectively the same thing.
This argument feels extremely obvious to me. Do people who believe otherwise genuinely reject it? It seems more likely that they either don't believe in democracy, and/or that they don't have real beliefs and just like to score points to "own the libs."
Donald Trump was in two more Presidential elections after his first term (losing as an incumbent, winning when not), thus making him an unusually democratic President.
> for some reason, no Russian judge has ever convicted Vladimir Putin of any of the assassinations that so many Western sources are sure he committed
He's never been charged. If anyone would be, it would probably be someone much lower down who carried them out (I've never heard it alleged that Putin personally carried any of the out, although he IS ex-KGB).
> or - in the worst-case scenario - the military realizing this and taking direct action.
This actually does happen in Latin America sometimes even in the 21st century, which gets called undemocratic even if they hold elections shortly after.
> Some NGO employs constitutional lawyers who are prepared for an issue like this, and they sue to stop the move (this step goes better with a well-funded NGO ecosystem, which itself requires large donors whose money cannot be arbitrarily confiscated)
Would that make most of US history not democratic?
>Would that make most of US history not democratic?
I mean, the US still had politically active lawyers who could challenge government actions, it's just that the country was small enough that you didn't need an entire organization dedicated to hiring said lawyers.
Also, abolitionist groups go pretty far back, so even if you specifically ask about NGOs I'd say most of US history is covered.
Lawyers were politically relevant enough that de Tocqueville said they acted like America's aristocracy, but I don't recall him describing them as preserving democracy.
Abolitionist groups didn't prevent any President from becoming dictator, they advocated for policy changes.
This article ignores the fact that a common criticism of the Trump administration is that the elected head of the executive branch makes decisions over what the executive branch does or doesn't.
"although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader" How can you write this? You defend the concept of unelected bureaucrats having unaccountable power by saying that they should not be elected at the same time as the head of the executive branch. But they are not elected! And the common argument that this article defends is that they should be unelected, independent from democracy.
The judiciary should be "independent", as in elected separately, but instead they are independent from democracy.
No, it was published at the Carolina Journal on 9/1725. Where are you? I sent a link to a friend in Australia, and he couldn't open it. I wonder if the government there could possibly have blocked access? Maybe I'm being paranoid. Anyway, try going here, https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/, and then clicking the link to "The constitution and its enemies" on the right hand side of the page. Please let me know if that works. Thanks.
It's not an Australia problem, I can read it fine. I'd suggest it might be something in the tracking portion of the URL that the snakes' browser doesn't like.
Democracy is not about giving elected official power over non-elected officials. Democracy is not about having an election or another election after that.
Democracy is sovereignty of the people.
Of course it is very difficult to obtain it. Constitution is a tool to achieve this goal, via proclamation of rights, elections, separation of powers...
Of course how Donald Trump attacks the constitution, the rule of law, the balances and checks, is a threat to democracy. This leads to an authoritarian regime, accumulation of wealth by those at proximity of the ruler, causing the impoverishment of the general population.
I dunno. I guess the way to say my feelings is that I share your worries (electing people does not guarantee you get to do so again), but I don't think your solution (elect democrats), will work. Like, if we look at our present President's behavior, it's alarming, but the last guy tried to throw his opponent in jail and win by default!
I'm open to the idea that democracy is threatened, but I have yet to see a plan where it can be defended. Both parties seem to be tag teaming it. If I get an election in 2028, I don't know which lever to pull to have better odds of getting one in 2032.
>the last guy tried to throw his opponent in jail and win by default!
The check for this should be "have an independent judiciary decide if the opponent belongs in jail," not "never investigate prominent politicians for crimes." Otherwise you run into problems when a politician is, in fact, committing crimes.
Another check we previously had was "have an independent law enforcement agency with norms against directly ordering investigations on a specific target," but unfortunately we never put those norms into law and Trump decided to ignore them.
This is right, but what’s missing is a mechanism by which the politician’s supporters can be convinced that the prosecution against him is honest and independent, rather than a political witch hunt. Of course, the politician himself is highly motivated to scream “witch hunt” even (or especially) if he’s guilty
Democracy is an ideal notion: that the government will be controlled by "the people" somehow. But the whole point of the government is to constitute "the people" as a unit, and give that unit some degree of agency. So, democracy is a loop. The government exists to control the people. The government is also controlled by the people. We can bootstrap that loop somehow. If the bootstrapping succeeds, the loop might persist for a while due to its angular momentum. But it has no foundation. We can't even clearly define "democracy".
When leftists screech that populism is a threat to democracy, they just mean that the voting process might generate an outcome that they don't like, so they want to change the process to prevent that outcome (e.g. "fortifying the election"). One man's rigged election is another man's democracy.
I think the most important point about all of this, is that unless the American government is willing to go Full-Iran on its own people. What a sufficient majority people want, if they want it consistently for long enough, will eventually happen.
Weather its pro/anti abortion. Or more/less immigrants. Less foreign forever wars or sending Al-Qaeda back to the stone age.
So yes, it is fair to say that Trump is damaging democracy even though he's the guy with the most votes. But its also fair to say the real thing that damaged democracy, is a few decades of government that was increasingly out of alignment with a majority of the public creating the environment that brought someone like Trump into power.
A big part of that is things like Judicial Activism (I'm thinking a lot from a UK perspective and how many judges have stopped cautious norm-abiding governments from stopping mass immigration), so the outsider is of course going to make that their first target. To promise to stomp over the laws that stopped the previous elected governments doing what they promised.
So TL;DR mainstream politicians need to find ways to move the balance of power back away from the unelected and towards the public, before the public get someone like Trump to do it for them.
"Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same."
You missed the most obvious counter-argument: what if this is what the people want? What if people realize that there's no justification for allowing leftists to hold positions of power in this country when they ruin everything they touch, and are solely responsible for the moral decay and division that has occurred over the last century? What if they want a country for Christians, by Christians, as Kirk did?
If the people who voted for him want this, it would be undemocratic for him 𝘯𝘰𝘵 to pursue this dream by any means necessary. And if this is all done with the consent of a majority of American men, is this still not rule by majority, the essence of democracy?
> What if people realize that there's no justification for allowing leftists to hold positions of power in this country when they ruin everything they touch, and are solely responsible for the moral decay and division that has occurred over the last century? What if they want a country for Christians, by Christians, as Kirk did?
Then they would presumably stop electing leftists. And then a new ideological split would open up within the Republican Party and form two new parties, perhaps a Conservative Party and a Libertarian Party. And it would probably be a better world.
But the people who want this are not electing leftists. In fact, leftists would probably not be getting elected in the first place if women were not allowed to vote. And we still called it a democracy back then, didn't we? No reason to give leverage to people who don't have it in the first place.
And ultimately, demographics can be changed. New lines can be drawn for what ideas are tolerated. The majority becomes the entirety. Order is restored.
Here's my (mostly serious, but not entirely) proposal, sure to piss *everyone* off in one way or another. A constitutional amendment (in layman's terms, rather than formal language for the purpose of this comment). Lines with # are comments, not part of the actual text
Section 1: No delegation. No branch of the federal government can delegate any portion of its power to any entity outside that branch. All regulations and "laws" must be passed via presentment (passed by both houses, signed or at least not vetoed by the president). All penalties must be imposed after judgement by an article III judge; all law enforcement and military must be subordinate to the president (and removable by him). Anything that mixes these streams must be split up or abolished.
# Note: this means that if the legislature needs expert help drafting legislation, those investigative and research bodies need to either be entirely advisory OR be part of the legislative branch. Similarly, the whole abomination of non-article-III judges imposing penalties would be over. This drastically reduces the ability of anyone (Congress, judges, or the president) to take over and requires each side to guard its own privileges (via the next section).
Section 2: Private right of action. Any individual can bring suit to enforce the terms of this--the only standing required is proof of citizenship and of paying at least one dollar in taxes the previous year. The penalty for violating this is immediate removal from office and a permanent ban on ever being employed by the federal government or any of its contractors or being elected to any federal post, with a bounty for the one bringing the complaint. An external defense attorney can be provided in case of conflicts.
#This prevents the executive from just saying "no, we won't prosecute anyone for this." There'd probably have to be some measure to enforce res judica (no second bites at the apple for any given government action on the same grounds).
Section 3: We really mean it clause.
# this one's a bit of a joke...trying to enforce any of this via judges who are perfectly willing to overlook the text isn't very easy.
It’s getting harder to know what the people want with technology advancements and outside meddling augmented by those technologies. As well as meddling by special interests.
We need to rethink online discourse. There needs to be a space where reputation and people/info being verified is central. And where the algorithms are tuned to not push easily digestible content.
Or we could just eliminate it entirely. Do we need to tolerate this uncontrolled spread of information? We could make it so even online content requires a publishing license, which would effectively prevent social media from existing. It would also prevent this comments section from existing, but would that be a huge loss?
It's not that different from the pre-internet status quo. Just because the government can't prosecute people for their speech doesn't mean they can't control the avenues for information to spread in the first place.
Given the current state of the media, maybe they were correct to be concerned. Perhaps it's for the best if unaccountable individuals are unable to affect public consensus.
I feel like I understood this as a kid so it's weird to see that adults who work in politics can't wrap their heads around the idea that functioning democracy requires numerous limitations and counterbalance on the power of the winner of an election.
Constitutions exist for a reason and are difficult to change by design. The writers of the American constitution could plainly see that someone winning an election did not mean they were immune to the temptations of corruption and megalomania and therefore imposed rules to force them to answer to other competing elected officials, and to have fixed terms.
I’m sorry but I feel quite certain that the US will not hold another free and fair election. One does not consolidate this much power and then hand it’s over to a group they’ve been claiming are evil and ruining the country after being voted out. They’re not planning on going anywhere. It’s over
How old are you? Is this your first election? People have been saying the same thing every year since at least 2000. And we keep having elections. This is the sort of catastrophism that leads the unhinged to assassination.
It is 2025. Are you from the future? Do you know something that is going to happen 3 years from now? And no, I wouldn't support that if it was tried. At this point, I would support Vance 2028.
Democracy (defined as having meaningful elections that actually change the identity of the people in power) is not under threat, what's under threat is good governance.
Democracy is relatively easy, doing good governance under the constraint of democracy is hard, because the obvious failure mode is that fighting the other side becomes more important to those in power than actually doing the boring business of government.
Some properties of tolerably good government:
1. Government policy is reasonably well aligned with the preferences of the population
2. Where the preferences of the population are split somewhat evenly, government policy tends to move towards a stable compromise rather than oscillating wildly depending on who is in power
3. Budgets are balanced, if not every year then at least when averaged over an entire cycle.
This sentiment seems a few decades out of date. It's not under threat, it's dead and buried. The inertia on which the deadlocked system still stumbles on hasn't entirely run out though.
I dunno man, I think your #3 hints that there is more to #1 than meets the eye.
The reality is that most people don’t really think that hard about policy and don’t want to. They would rather vote for something like “the economy is good” rather than “what is the correct depreciation treatment for particular capital expenditures”. And the people often express policy preferences that put the short term over the long term. Budgets are far from the only way that happens.
I think you want something like, the system translates the high level preferences of the population into specific policy in a way that is stable, transparent, etc.
Many good points. The US has a government of limited & separated powers, for many good reasons including all those in the article.
It is possible to have governments of limited powers that are not democratic, i.e. do not select leaders by election. For instance, British history has plenty of examples of governments where there was no election or the election itself was the merest veil of tissue paper, yet no one leader had full and complete power.
Even theocratic monarchies can have checks. The king may be anointed/divinely chosen but he must still listen to the voice of the gods, prophets or priests (or both!).
Absolute authority in a single individual is a less common form of government historically; IIRC the first theorists were the centralizing monarchs of the early modern period. Greatest practitioners have been of course the 20th and 21st century dictatorships.
Democracy/elections may be good; limits on government power may be good. They can go together but they need not do so. Our Constitution endorses both.
We erred when we decided "Democracy" was the word we would use for this sort of discussion. And again when we allowed one of our political parties to adopt that name. I would prefer that we talk about "defending the Republic" or "the Republic" being under threat; that also has the problem that we foolishly let a political party adopt the name, but it at least carves reality closer to the relevant joints.
The only forms of government worth having, are ones where there are clear and enforceable limits on what powers the government can have and how it can wield them. "Democracy", alone, has nothing to say about that. It may tell you who the government will be, but not what it can do. "Republic", is by definition a sort of democracy but one with an elected legislature as intermediaries between the people and the policies, and by implication generally has other structural limits on the government's power.
There seems little chance that the United States will any time soon be any thing other than *some* form of Democracy. But if the Republic falls, I don't want to be any part of it even if what remains is technically some other sort of "Democracy".
Yes, yes, as in "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", we know this. Nobody is fooled by it; nobody believes that North Korea is in fact a Republic, and saying a thing doesn't make it so. And *whatever* word we generally settle on to describe the sort of government a free society should have, all the most horrible dictatorships will incorporate into their name at the next reasonable opportunity.
Why should any sensible person care? The word has a well-defined meaning, and that meaning has nothing to do with whether the head of state is named "President" and everything to do with having an elected legislature that can say "No we're not doing that" to the nominal Top Dog. People will sometimes say that their glorious and wonderful nation is a "republic" even though it has only a token legislature of yes-men, and they'll be lying and we'll know they are lying.
"Democracy" says something very simple about what a government can do; it can do what the people want.
The fact that elected governments routinely defy public opinion and get away with it on a wide range of issues only undermines their claims to be democracies; perhaps a model originating from 17th and 18th-century Anglo-American aristocrats is less democratic than it claims to be.
Modern Democracy is a type of population management that emerged alongside Fascism and Communism. Even countries like Russia and China are mostly Democratic in this sense, even though their systems are illiberal. Democracy generates primary legitimacy by growing the wealth of the population, unlike fascists nationalistic dreams or communist social utopia. Elections have little to do with actual Democracy - fascists and communists generally also have elections. Its quite easy for bureaucrats to manage populations in all 3 systems so the mass votes correctly. Instability happens when two sets of elites send alternative messaging.
>Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election?
Heh. And note that the Pope *does* respond to the pressures from his cardinals.
The important thing to note, here, is that the country is way too big for one person to meaningfully rule it *regardless of how much official authority they have*. Authority =/= power. You can have all the authority in the world, but if no one listens to you, you're stuck. And the President only has power *because* people listen to him. If the military said "sorry, no", he'd have zero recourse.
He doesn't rule alone--he has the entire weight of a very carefully constructed system behind him, the personal loyalty of many people at all levels, and a culture that has been shaped for this kind of control for millennia. He has real power, not just paper authority. And it's still pretty fragile, requiring constant compromise (hidden by the system on purpose to obfuscate how fragile it is) and maintenance from millions of people.
That's what I mean by authority not intrinsically being power. Power requires building and maintaining systems, systems that will often turn on any individual and often take a life of their own.
Thank you for an eloquent article Scott. This is why I still come here despite other articles. I've seen people saying this is another "rant" article but this seems much better than all other "rant" ones.
About democracy dismantling democracy, I guess there's a merit in saying that if people wants to dismantle democracy, it'd be within their right to do so. And we can't stop it anyway since they can all just pretend that a new constitution is the actual valid one and left the old one in the dust. But the most important question remains, do actually ALL people want it dismantled? If not, how much? Do we want it dismantled despite 49% of them not wanting it to be? How about 33%? 10%? 1%? The question becomes very nuanced and is actually already (attempted to be) handled in the constitution itself, where significant changes are gated behind supermajority (66%).
The broken part of current American democracy is that the fracture is so deep that that number can never be obtained so now 50+-5% of people tries to snuff the other 50+-5% of people. Regardless of who wins, 50+-5% of people will suffer. And the other 50+-5% shouldn't be able to claim that they represent the other 50+-5% people. And we haven't even counted people who don't or can't vote!
The argument here is pure self-dealing. It's all rationalization for "we don't want the guy we don't like."
Donald Trump has done ~nothing that wasn't commonplace in the U.S. from 1789 to 1960. There is no evidence that he is any threat to "American democracy" as defined over that timeframe.
To which the immediate rejoinder is, "Oh, but before 1960 we had <insert parade of horribles>. Are you saying we should go back to THAT??"
Which simply proves my point: the real dispute is about policy preferences, not "democracy." We should be honest and discuss those polices directly, not attempt to preempt that discussion with grandiose talk about "democracy."
Strong agree. He misses that while all the things he describe may have some theoretical relation to democracy, the magnitude is unclear (as you point out, seemingly empirically not that high). Very surprised that many read this as some great revelation.
The US South only democratized in the 1960s. (There was an earlier attempt in the 1860s-70s, but it fell in the face of a violent insurgency.)
The things Trump is doing now are very much *not* routine across the history of the Northern US; there are precedents, sure, but most of them are remembered as dark moments in American history. There's a reason John Adams was a one term president.
According to the most widely accepted political history, the United States was a republic from the beginning of its constitution in 1789 and became broadly democratic under Jackson in 1829 ("Jacksonian democracy").
You can obviously fuss about this or that exception, but again, that simply proves my point that what is at stake here is particular policies, most of which have been common in the U.S., not some grandiose thing about "democracy."
As applied to the northern and western states there isn't that much reason to argue with it, although some states (Vermont and Pennsylvania come to mind) were democracies before Jackson.
However, the United States is a federation, and a state where the outright majority of people are disenfranchised or even enslaved can not be in any real sense considered democratic. I think most historians recognize the US as mostly democratic with an undemocratic south oddly grafted on. Democracy came to the South with the Civil Rights Movement and the abolition of the Poll Tax, not earlier.
The things Trump is doing have few precedents in US history, and said precedents, at the federal level, either happened during major wars (which, you might note, the US is not currently in) or are broadly remembered as near-misses with dictatorship.
I suppose an exception could be made for Biden's abuses of power - but Biden was the Pompey to Trump's Caesar and no friend of democracy either.
I encourage you to investigate the many, many extralegal exercises of power that went on in the Johnson administration (not to mention Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations). You're treating as anomalous things that are not at all anomalous.
Democracy is not the point and it never really has been. Liberty is the point. Without liberty, democracy is just mob rule with better branding.
I sincerely say that not as a provocateur, but rather as a federalist and a classic conservative. The trappings of liberty have been conflated and not particularly effectively laundered into the connotations of what in post Cold War American political rhetoric is virtually universally called upon when people use the term “Democracy.”
Democracy is not a functioning system of government in the classic sense of the term, it is an important but secondary element that serves, when used well, as *a mechanism* to reverse the inexorable intentional restrictions on liberty. I say ‘inexorable intentional restrictions’ because what government in history has ever, over the long arc of its existence, progressively increased the opportunities for the citizens of that country to exercise those liberties outlined in, for example, the UN declaration of human rights?
I do not mean to say that citizen participation in deciding who gets authority and in lawmaking is not important, and in some moments, essential. My point is one that many others have made: the conversation has shifted over decades towards an unthinking primacy for the term “Democracy” when discussing existential political angst, and when discussing what is claimed to be the fundamental virtue that we hope all mankind can enjoy to the fullest. But no one ‘enjoys’ democracy, we flourish or we fail best within an ordered liberty that is minimally, constrained by regulation.
And I believe that this current moment is exactly the time to make this point. Because it is at this moment that it could be said that those who elected Trump are undermining and proactively seeking to deny essential liberty, through democratic processes.
From a 1-D diachronic perspective, this sounds like a bad argument. “Subverting the courts and the constitution are not democratic actions,” goes the refrain. Problem is that this reflects a gross mischaracterization of the important but limited scope to which we should expect to depend on the mechanisms of voting for authorities, and is in fact, a weak argument that can be rebutted by anyone with an adequate awareness and facility in rhetoric.
2025 is precisely a moment when people who care about risks of a genuine tyranny emerging should STFU about democracy, and instead use the much much sharper swords of Liberty and Pluralism. Libertarians most of all - this is your moment to speak up, but use the right fucking words that carry the right import and make the maximum impact to the largest audience in the most effective way possible. And I do not speak of abstract liberty, so I propose grounding this in “Let’s begin again, with Pluralism.” Because a proper understanding of pluralism put the spotlight precisely on where liberty is most under threat: American citizens of various political tribes have been actively trying to deny each other essential liberties for about the last decade because of differences in political opinions. Differences of opinion, that are churned by intellectual tribalism and other forms of tribalism, into such heated rhetoric that we view each other, not as people with different opinions that we are absolutely allowed to dislike challenge and spurn but must abide as equals, but as enemies of the republic who deserve no less than to be denied the full set of liberties guaranteed under our constitution to each citizen.
If you actually want liberty to survive, begin again with Pluralism. Because the minute you deny your enemy the rights you demand for yourself, you’ve already lost.
A Canadian professor wrote about something similar. He views democratic governments as having 3 branches to check each other, but with one acting as first among equals based on some combination of norms and actual government structure. For example, Canada's legislature is the dominant branch, while France centers the executive (at least with the current republic).
The US has evolved to have the judiciary dominate. For example, we are looking to the courts to invalidate Trump's tariffs. Judicial supremacy is unsatisfying, as it is the branch with the least democratic legitimacy. Trump is attempting to destroy this convention of judicial supremacy and establish a strong executive branch.
I'm not entirely convinced by his framework, but it was an interesting perspective.
The judiciary only gets involved when someone breaks the law. In a sense, it's a sign of the *weakness* of the judiciary when the presidency feel frees to violate the law in a new manner every day and it's worthwhile because the judicial remedy is so often late or inconsistent.
>which itself requires large donors whose money cannot be arbitrarily confiscated
Or perhaps large amount of donors who don't live paycheck to paycheck and can afford sparing some of their money for socially beneficial institutions. Don't sneak in the assumption that society somehow requires rich people, when the only effect of rich people is institutional capture of [essentially everything] - nothing funded by them will ever go against them and their fortunes, and that's the whole "democratic" system, and the effect is the system doing what they (and not the voting public) want. After a while, people just give up and vote for anyone at all who promises to shake it up, and we end up with Trump(/Putin/etc.).
On a more general note, this is why we'd perhaps do better ditching leaders entirely (at least institutionally entrenched leaders with institutional powers). Unfortunately, leaderless coordination is a hard problem to solve. But even more unfortunately, we aren't even trying.
This is what the sycophants forget, when it comes to Trump.
For sure, he won the election. But there are still rules and laws, and Trump is not immune to them. I woulda said norms, but that ship sailed a long while ago.
Perhaps better to view this in terms of high-middle-low politics as I think Burnham has spoken off. Your defence of "democracy" is in practice a defense of the privilege and power of the distributed "middle" class -- i.e. judges, doctors, media owners, etc., and prevents a strong central leader from ever making use of a popular mandate to roll back the power and privileges of that "middle" class. You may call them "civil society", but they could also be called the "clerisy", the "managerial elite", etc.
Yep. I always say: Elections are a necessary but insufficient element in a democracy. Rule of law and freedom of speech are probably more important parts.
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
If you anthropomorphize the result of election as "the Will of the People" then attacking democracy is an equivalent of "preventing the Will of the People tomorrow". So it makes sense to think why would you do that. Basically, it means that you expect the People to change their Will.
One possibility is that election had a narrow outcome. The Will of the People is actually more like the will of the 50.001% of voters, so they want to cement the outcome, just in case the coin flip would end up differently the next time.
Another possibility is that there is a good reason to expect that the People will soon learn something that will change their Will... which kinda sounds like maybe someone was deceiving the People?
This got very messy around Brexit. An unambiguous referendum result in 2016 (albeit close) followed by a highly ambiguous election result in 2017. The tories were only able to form a majority at all with DUP backing and because of some gains in Scotland off the back of Ruth Davison (a very unorthodox tory). Otherwise we would have had an extremely messy Corbyn-led coalition. Instead we got two years of deadlock, ended by the 2019 election, which settled the question. I'm not sure if there's a possible world where Brexit gets reversed, but a more competent Labour leader might have actually been able to form a government in 2017 or put up more of a realistic fight in 2019. You have to say the will of the people is a bit of a will o' the whisp if elections are all you have to go on - we also need opinion polls, public consultations, parliamentary scrutiny, right to protest, satire etc.
One problem with using regular elections as a barometer of public opinion is that political platforms consist of all sorts of elements. For example, it's quite conceivable that a candidate might win because the public like his stance on, say, social security, even though they dislike his policy on crime. If the successful candidate then goes on to claim a popular mandate for his crime policies, that's... not entirely false, because people did vote for him knowing what his policies were, but it's still a bit misleading, because most people voted for him *in spite of* his policies in this area. That's why I think it makes sense to treat referendum results as more dispositive of the will of the people than election results: referendums are generally about one thing, so the signal is less noisy.
I agree with this entirely with the proviso that even a referendum is a blunt instrument - brexit voters included labour-supporting industrial workers who wanted more protectionism, and right-libertarians who wanted Singapore-on-Thames. There were always going to be problems of interpretation.
True, you sometimes get baptist-and-bootlegger coalitions supporting a particular referendum outcome, but this tends to be less of a problem than with elections. And even with something like Brexit, the issue of "Should Britain be more protectionist or more free-trade afterwards?" is arguably separate to Brexit itself.
We should define what "Democracy" means, before we can define how to defend her.
Scott argues that: Democracy is about having *the next* election. Therefore, we must prevent the winner of the current election from accumulating enough power to rig the next one, or to cancel it completely. The checks and balances to achieve constitute "liberal" democracy: An independent judiciary, media, etc...
We can steelman Scott's argument by operationalizing "Democracy" as "a government that enforces the Will of the People"(*).
If we do this, an election can be seen as *a mechanism* for the people to incentivize government to enforce "The Will of the People", or else get voted out. If we allow for the election-winner to have too much power, then this mechanism breaks down, and the election-winner can just enforce his own will.
----------------------------
This idea opens up a whole can of worms:
1. Who are "The People", and how do we know what their will is?
This leads naturally to the next question:
1.1. Does the will of the people include whatever issue has 50% + 1 approval?
1.2. Do we enforce a higher limit for certain issues such as changing the constitution?
1.3. Do we enshrine certain protections for the minorities, under the justification that they are also part of the people and they should be respected?
The resolution to these issues are typically enshrined on the constitutions, and governments usually implement a whole set of institutions to resolve these issues, which is what constitutes "liberal" democracy.
2. Does the "Will of The People" coincides with what is good for the people?
If we answer affirmatively, then democracy would be more or less synonymous with "Good Governance".
This is obviously difficult to answer, but in economics there has been many attempts to answer a weaker version of this (Does the "Will of the People" coincides with what causes economic growth?"), and there is evidence that it does.(**)
Since the most common form of democracy for which we have evidence is "liberal" democracy, then this means that our evidence goes in favor of liberal democracy.
----------------------------
But there are alternatives.
1. On the issue of who "The People" are, we can argue, like Thatcher did, that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals".
Then we could probably end up in a Libertarian rabbit-hole where the purpose of government is to maximize the liberty of the individual, not necessarily to enforce the "will" of anybody.
In this case, we would be abandoning the idea of "Defending Democracy" in favor of "Defending Liberty first, and Democracy second".
2. On the issue of "Good Governance", we can argue that there are Reactionary countries with better governance than liberal democracies.
Over a decade ago, the favorite country was Singapore(***). Scott back then counterargued by claiming that this good governance was because of Singapore being a "supercapitalist Chinese-British city-state".
I am not entirely satisfied with this counterargument, because it implies that Good Governance is *independent* of democracy, leaving us with the need to defend democracy as a good-in-itself.
Instead, I think that we have to conceptualize the idea that our world is one of tradeoffs: Sometimes we can have both more democracy and better governance, and other times we can tradeoff a little less democracy for a little more of good governance.
If we do this, then we can have a more fruitful discussion, because we start arguing about which countries are in a stage where they can benefit from copying Singapore, and which are just not at that stage.
I think that, to continue having fruitful discussions, this is a good opportunity to bring back the "Dictator's Book Club".
As in all philosophical debates, it all lies in how you define your terms. Democracy originally just implied "rule by the people", but pure democracy in this sense is simply mob rule, which the founders were so worried about that they put in place a large number of safeguards, which are the source of the claim "We are a republic, not a democracy" - ie, we are a limited democracy, not a pure one.
Populism has been defined as "The power of a community over the rule of law." Mob rule, historically, almost always comes in the form of a strongman becoming a tyrant claiming to represent "ordinary people" (that is, in fact, what the word "tyrant" means. In ancient Greece it indicated a popular leader who overthrew the aristocracy). In the founders eyes, protecting against mob rule was nearly the same thing as protecting against a tyrant.
Nearly every safeguard used against tyranny rule takes the form of de-centralizing power. The tree branches of the federal government were intended to be more or less equal in power, at least in the long run, so that no one branch could rule unrestricted. This was particularly true of the executive. The independent sovereignty of the states, the ten amendments (which manifest the concept of civil rights), a free and independent press, separation between church and state, etc., are all intended to protect against the rise of a popular tyrant.
And historical justification isn't hard to find. The history of Greek city states is full of stories of tyrants causing civil wars and disrupting the state. Julius Caesar was murdered because he was suspected of trying to become a tyrant. And of course, not to Godwin the thread, but "You Know Who" was famously elected before starting a war that killed tens of millions of people.
Trump isn't threatening "democracy", per se, but I think a case could be made that he's threatening our constitutional republic, and it's safeguards against tyranny.
In germany this is actually codified into law. For example, the communist party of germany is outlawed precisely because they are an anti-democratic party.
They do this because of their *unique* history. The nazis themselves were democratically elected, however the people democratically elected an antidemocratic party.
Germany is currently doing the same thing with their ongoing process to get the AfD labelled as "gesichert rechtsextremistisch", arguing that the AfD itself is antidemocratic and thus should be outlawed. (I'm explicitly not putting forward an opinion on the AfD in general here though)
Are you from Germany yourself? What do you think are the merits of the case against AfD? (Not your personal opinion on the AfD but the facts of the case)
I'm not German, but I think that I know something about this.
The big weakness of the case against the AfD is that there doesn't seem to be an actually anti-democratic ideology that is being espoused by the leadership of the AfD. This is different from Hitler and Marx, both of whom rejected democracy (Hitler permanently and fundamentally, while Marx was more 'the end justifies the means').
A lot of accusations of the AfD being undemocratic are false accusations, based on conflating certain political choices like non-discrimination, with democracy. I have seen no evidence that they actually want to establish an autocracy or such.
The best evidence against the AfD is an alleged coup attempt by sovereign citizens, where an ex-lawmaker of the AfD was part of that group, but that is still very weak evidence given that the lawmaker was not an active member of the AfD at the time of the alleged plotting, nor is there apparently any evidence that the AfD as an organization was involved in any way, nor does the AfD espouse the sovereign citizen ideology.
Any ban is unlikely to restore Germany to its old political landscape. If we look at Belgium, then the ban for the Vlaams Blok merely resulted in the creation of a new party. And in The Netherlands, the implosion of the LPF that broke the taboo on being anti-migration didn't result in the voters returning to the old mainstream parties, but in them finding new parties.
Thanks. LPF was an interesting one because Pim Fortuyn was explicitly trying to protect Dutch liberal permissiveness from the puritanism of Islamic immigrants. This idea may yet have its day.
A sovereign citizen is someone who believes that government power is not legitimate.
It seems common for these people to have the misguided belief that government power is actually fully constrained by laws and that it merely requires finding a loop hole to be able to opt out of (the current) government and its laws.
In the German case, it is alleged that Heinrich XIII Prince of Reuss was going to be made the new monarch in a coup. This gentleman believes that the current federal German republic is not valid because the allied victors set up the new state in a legally invalid way, and that the old royalty are the legitimate rulers. And for some reason, that he, as a descendant of very minor royalty, that ruled a small kingdom in pre-unification Germany, is now the legitimate ruler of all of Germany.
But note that this kind of belief is fairly particular to sovereign citizens in Germany. In the US and other countries, they seem to generally have a more anarchist, rather than monarchist belief, where they are not bound by the laws.
I think this story is basically right as far as it goes. But it doesn't seem to go to the place that seems most troublesome to me. I hear plenty of people calling Trump an authoritarian because he asserts control over the bureaucracy, for example by firing directors of various executive branch agencies. I have the same response, that Trump was elected and the bureaucrats were not. But unlike the media, the nonprofits (which are usually not called "NGOs" in the domestic context but whatever), or the judiciary, the bureaucrats don't seem to make an appearance in this story about how we ensure that there is a next election. The parenthetical paragraph suggests, without any explanation, that the bureaucrats are somehow part of the checks on the president. But this is never tied in to the rest of the story, and it flatly contradicts what we all learn in middle school civics. The checks on the president are supposed to come from the other two branches of government, not from the bureaucrats. If the bureaucrats play some role in ensuring that there is a next election, somebody please explain what it is.
I would also note that in our system, the elections, even the federal ones, are run by the state secretaries of state. They do not work for the federal government, and thus cannot be fired by the president. So that particular part of the story I find a bit weak, but that I believe can be patched up so that the rest of the story holds together.
I think that Fukuyama fundamentally misunderstood what he was describing in The End of History. He noticed that almost no one openly disagrees with words like democracy, so he thought that there is consensus.
However, in reality, there is a taboo about rejecting the word 'democracy,' but not actually a taboo on disagreeing with a specific definition of the word. So in reality, there are still large disagreements about how democracy should be implemented, including the extent to which people (don't) want power in the hands of the populace. They just all call whatever they themselves want: 'democracy'.
Because we don't use clear, separate terms that describe the different things we want to achieve, it becomes nearly impossible to have a proper debate about the upsides and downsides of certain choices, because everything ends in a shouting match about what is actually 'democracy' and accusations that everyone who rejects our own definition is undemocratic and thus a bad person. People usually see no need to actually properly defend what they want because they hide behind the taboo on rejecting the word.
This essay by Scott suffers from the lack of clear definitions and lack of multiple concepts as well. His argument is essentially that to defend democracy we must have less democracy, which is a muddled argument exactly because everything is forced into an artificial single dimension: more democracy, more better. But less is apparently more, because of reasons. Yet if you introduce other concepts, and leave democracy to just mean 'to do the will of the people,' then you can have a proper debate about the trade-offs that you want to make with regards to each of these concepts.
For example, if you introduce the concept of political expertise and the other side of that coin: the political insularity of professional politicians. Then you have a way to argue for a representative democracy without having to abuse the word 'democracy,' to argue for term limits, or to argue for direct democracy. And you can have the concepts of political stability and executive stability, versus responsiveness. You can have the concept of error correction, where you can value the ability to correct legislative mistakes, when you see how the laws work out in practice, versus the benefits of more often sticking with choices, so people can trust that the law is fairly stable. And you can have the concept of crucial laws where you cannot afford to make big mistakes or really need stability, and then there are a whole bunch of methods to achieve this (higher levels of consensus than 51% to make a change, requiring the probationary law to still have support after another election, etc, etc).
But an honest discussion about tradeoffs requires the willingness to say that one is opposed to maximal democracy, and values other things more than maximizing it.
Scott has written before about the undesirability of vague, overly-broad definitions of democracy:
"I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary."
It's almost as if marriage isn't just a pair of atomised individuals choosing to live together in a hermetically-sealed vacuum, but is fundamental for the continued survival of society as a whole.
There are allegations of widespread fraud and irregularities in 2020 presidential elections too.
We aren't now in village era anymore. American elections practices are odd from a global perspective. It takes far too long to count. Not to mention oddities like hanging chads etc.
Okay. Then can someone please explain what Trump is doing that makes the next election less fair?
He's supporting paper ballots (cannot be hacked, cannot even plausibly claim they are hacked, can be counted fairly in presence of observers from both parties, used in most jurisdictions outside USA).
He's supporting proof of citizenship. Yes, that would benefit his voters who are more motivated and less lazy, but the real thing is lots of progressives want illegals voting for their candidate, cannot justify that openly and so keep screaming about racism; again it's not racism it's Trump favouring his voters. Similar to the Louisiana stuff it's just not logical that Democrats can safely gerrymander their seats, but Republicans can't because Democrat voters are Black. Anyway, racism aside, citizens do have a right to vote, illegals do not.
He's opposing harvested ballots. Yes, those make it harder for citizens to vote, but also much easier to confirm that the correct person voted, and that the vote was real.
It seems to me like he's fixing actual, observed problems that make it difficult to prove that there was no election fraud. None of what he's doing at the moment is rigging the next election. Almost of all his moves are fixing the potential for election rigging by progressives (who lost despite the potential for illegal activity which favoured their side more).
The idea that paper ballot would make for uncontroversial elections would come as a surprise to the people of Florida circa 25 years ago.
But more to the point, if you're looking for a substantive discussion, I would suggest not caricaturing your opponents. If you don't understand the substantive reasons why people are nervous about his proposed voting reforms, you can ask, but jumping in with "for the illegals" suggests you're just looking for an extreme version of your opponent to score points against.
>If you don't understand the substantive reasons why people are nervous about his proposed voting reforms
In a lot of years of trying to be charitable, I've yet to hear one *good* explanation why voter ID is bad and ballot harvesting is good.
The rough trend is Dems want more vote *numbers*, and Reps want more *confirmed* votes. The incentives are clear: loose ballot confirmation benefits the team with more activists; high ballot security benefits the team with fewer, ah, low-agency people.
While I'm sure a dedicated journalist can find some hardworking single mother working 5 jobs despite having zero forms of ID or some heartstring story about a care home of quadraplegics that can't mail their own ballots, I've never been convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it.
But you're not speaking to OP's points, or at least not most of them. "Voter ID" requirements and "proof of citizenship" requirements are different concepts.
Paper ballots are a whole other ball of wax.
If you want to ban 'ballot harvesting' - what do you mean? Is 'voting by mail' included in that?
So what's the debate we're having here? Are we asking if Specific Reforms A, B, and C make sense? That's one I'm happy to talk about. If you're saying you've never heard an objection to _any_ voting reform that sounds like a good faith objection, then either you just haven't been in the right forum, or you're not really operating in good faith yourself.
Only citizens can vote in federal and (most?) state elections, so while voter ID and proof of citizenship are technically different concepts, they're close enough for my tastes. Some form of ID that confirms citizenship seems like the most straightforward way to provide proof, yes?
I didn't comment on the paper ballots part, deliberately.
I would define ballot harvesting as "any person other than the one registered on the associated ballot, or their legal representative, submitting the ballot to a ballot-collection site." Vote by mail has its own issues but I wouldn't count it as ballot harvesting on its own, though it can enable ballot harvesting. I mean primarily people
Several years ago on- I think the Slatestarcodex subreddit or possibly the blog comment section- there was a partisan campaign volunteer that went door to door knocking and had been coached that, if the person seemed likely to vote for their candidate, to help them fill it out and to collect their ballot to deposit it for them, so they don't forget. If the person was not likely to vote for their candidate, end the conversation politely but quickly and move on. The commenter seemed to think this behavior is virtuous.
The obvious corollary is that one could just *lie*, collect all the ballots they think are opposed to their candidate too, and dispose of them. There's an ongoing court case of possible voter fraud in Hamtramck, Michigan regarding social pressure being used to harvest ballots and have them filled out a particular way, as well.
>If you're saying you've never heard an objection to _any_ voting reform that sounds like a good faith objection
No, I quite specifically meant I have not what I consider any good-faith objection on why voter ID is unacceptable and why ballot harvesting is good (and also not easily abused).
I am sure I have heard good faith objection to other voting reforms. The catch-22 of gerrymandering is a can of worms but some of those objections are good faith, for example.
I would be in favor of both of those changes. I think they're both nothingburgers, to be clear - I think harvesting is not a thing, and that the kind of fraud that voter ID would prevent is exceedingly rare. But I also think they would not impact voting rights much and Democrats are being hysterical when they oppose these measure.
But the overall framework here troubles me, and this is why I think trying to operate in good faith (on both sides) is so critical.
Democrat's bad faith is to treat all forms of voting reform as de facto suppression efforts. Republican's bad faith is to treat allegations of voting fraud as fundamentally non-falsifiable, such that you can justify ever-escalating forms of election 'security'.
Take OP's call for paper ballots. Back in '04 it was Democrats who were convinced that Diebold machines were flipping votes to Bush, and it took a round of reforms to make people feel secure enough to trust voting machines. But then, in Arizona in 2020, Democrats won a state that used electronic voting, and suddenly it was a conspiracy again. Even though this theory was disproved as thoroughly as possible, it still hasn't stopped some (mainly on the far right) to insist that only paper ballots are okay.
That's the cycle I'm wary of.
1. Someone proposes a reform to make elections more secure. Anyone who objects is considered to be doing so for bad faith reasons (i.e. they want to enable fraud).
2. They get implemented anyway
3. A party loses at a time of national partisan fervor
4. That losing party comes up with new theories for why the election was actually stolen, with zero evidence, just theories.
Go to step 1.
I'm not convinced we can get out of this cycle. Both parties are to blame here at different times but at the moment it seems to be mainly Republicans who are convinced that fraud is happening and we can stop it if we just get to step 2 (reforms).
Pessimistically, I just don't think that's true for most people. You sound reasonably enough to be an exception, to be clear, so thank you for the sober response.
> The obvious corollary is that one could just *lie*, collect all the ballots they think are opposed to their candidate too, and dispose of them.
This reminded me of something that bothered me about a local vote-by-mail election.
My ballot came to me in the mail, addressed to me personally and distinct from the ballots addressed to the other people living in the same house.
It had a unique identifying code on it, and it advertised that I could use this code to "verify" that my vote had been counted. It seems safe to assume that other ballots in fact had different codes on them.
A website was provided where you could go and enter the code from your ballot and see a message saying it was counted. Now, the problem is:
Why is that supposed to verify that your vote was counted?
In the first place, since you enter the code yourself, they can just show a message saying "we received your vote", regardless of whether they received your vote.
In the second place, in a slightly-better-designed system where you go to a list of received ballots and check for yours, the code on the ballot originated from them, not from you, so there's still nothing stopping them from showing that they've received your vote, regardless of whether they received your vote. (Technically, there is a risk that they could be caught by someone who kept their ballot and then audited that it 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 received; this risk exists but I'm guessing it's pretty small.)
They could verify that they received your vote by publishing 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 when you enter a ballot code. Except that since the codes they 𝘶𝘴𝘦 are associated with your personal identity, the principle of the anonymous ballot legally prevents them... from... having that information....
I wonder how they destroyed the records of which codes were sent to which voters.
The correct way to do this is either:
(1) Print a bunch of coded ballots, let people pick them up from a centralized location -- breaking the connection between code and identity -- and display the recorded vote when a ballot is audited; or
(2) Print a bunch of uncoded ballots, mail them to individual voters, provide a space where the voter is free to supply an audit code, and record the audit codes you've received in a place where people can look for them.
Either of these also allows for verifying (probabilistically) that a vote was counted and not just received, if you display the vote in the audit records for option (2). If you don't want the vote count to be auditable, option (2) will allow you to prove that you received ballots without making you also prove that you counted them.
So, I can speak to this with some knowledge regarding how it works in my home state of NJ. First off, they make sure that all identifying information is on the envelope that encloses the ballot, not on the ballot itself. When they get the envelope back they check for signature match and that everything on the outside is properly filled out, and then they scan it to mark it as a submitted vote. At that point, they take the mail-ballot out of the envelope and put it in a sealed bag of valid votes that will be counted. (Same sealed bag they use to transport provisional ballots cast in-person.) From this point on, the ballot itself lacks any personally identifying information, in order to protect ballot secrecy. Voters can easily use a state portal to look up whether their ballot has been received, but those who wish can see the full list of every individual who has returned a ballot so far - it’s all public record and you just need to find the spreadsheet on the board of elections website. Could they mark a ballot as received when it wasn’t? It’s technically possible, but if you do that with any frequency, at scale, you will absolutely run into cases where people notice. Political campaigns go through all this data in very fine detail to determine who they’re targeting, and if they find people who are listed as voted but still have their ballots, that would become a huge scandal.
Now, how can you know that your vote is counted and not just your ballot received? The answer is that you can’t, you basically can only have the same confidence that you’d have if you voted in-person with a paper ballot. There are safeguards in place, for example campaigns on both sides can appoint watchers to observe the process, and the board of elections itself is a bipartisan body with members appointed by chairs of the local dem and gop committees. So you have multiple democrats and republicans watching as each mail ballot is fed into an optical scanner, and then there are random audits to double check the scanner counts.
The biggest threat to having your ballot counted isn’t malfeasance, it’s that when they finally open up your ballot there might be some issue which makes your vote impossible to read. Like, maybe you spilled water on your ballot and the pen marking your vote bled and they can’t tell who you voted for. At this point they no longer have your personally identifying information connected with that ballot, so you will never know that your vote wasn’t counted. But… this is the same issue you run into any time you use paper ballots, with or without a machine to scan them. If you look at the Florida recount in 2000, one of the challenges I was that ballots were private so of course they couldn’t just call up the voter and ask them who they had meant to vote for. If you could, that would open a whole other can of worms where people could be paid or pressured to lie about how they had voted.
The states decide who votes and how, so these are all just theatre.
A meaningful example: the next election will be less fair if the FCC threatens to pull the license of networks that air opinions that are overly critical of one candidate or party (but not the other).
Another example. The President could insist the DOJ "go after" the opposition candidate. It doesn't take much to indict someone, and a President-friendly judge may be happy to maximize the damage to the candidate. The President may have committed similar or worse crimes, but as President they can't be charged.
These are standard authoritarian moves (see Turkei under Erdogan) to bias electoral results in favor of the incumbent (ie, create unfair elections). You may think these things could never happen in the USA, but never say never.
"You may think these things could never happen in the USA, but never say never."
Why would I say never? They did it to Trump. Moreover Trump's prosecutions all involved novel legal theories and prosecutions for things no one else had been prosecuted for.
By contrast, Trump's intended prosecutions are for standard crimes and the Democrats did many incredibly authoritarian (see COVID) things during their reign.
The media last time was 95% favourable to the Democrats. You cannot seriously be saying that anything the Republicans do with the media would be unfair.
"The states decide who votes and how, so these are all just theatre."
The Supreme Court (and not you) will decide if Trump's laws or executive orders on this are legal or not.
Wow that is really quite blind. What would you call the prosecutions of candidate Trump in 2022 and 2023 by the DOJ and various local democratic DAs who ran for office in a platform to get Trump?
Funny how I didn't mention any particular president but you and Navigator both assume I have a particular one in mind. Blind indeed!
I thought it was a terrible idea to prosecure Trump for trivial crimes, and I think it's a terrible idea for Trump to do the same to his political opponents. I thought it was bad when the Biden mucked with the media, and I think it's bad when Trump does the same. For me these are not partisan issues, but represent a drift toward authoritarianism, which might be good for particular politicians but is likely to be bad for civic society and for Americans in general.
No but the clear implication was that you were talking about out Trump who is the subject of the article. No one here is a mind reader so next time why don’t you just spell things out clearly.
Trump is not the subject of the article. The subject of the article is the maintenance (or not) of democracy. I took a couple of examples from the news of the day to make a point or two about what I think are some real risks to democracy.
This is a nominally rationalist community - I don't come here (or anywhere) looking for partisan battles. Like the rest of us I'm sure my biases show through from time to time, but my actual positions on many issues might surprise you.
I'd add that their intervention should be limited substantively, too, because the more expansive the government gets the harder it is to contain it when it goes rogue.
For instance, when the government is in charge of assigning frequencies to media companies or approving media company mergers, it creates auch larger attack surface against free speech.
When the government funds most basic research and gives students a large part of the financial support, it becomes hard for universities to assert their independence.
I agree with the people saying that democracy requires having *meaningful* elections, and that you can't have meaningful elections if the bureaucracy/judiciary/media/etc. prevent half the country from ever implementing their favoured policies, even when they win. But I'd add that another precondition for having meaningful elections is knowing whom to blame when things go wrong, and that requires having someone, or a clearly-identifiable group of someones, responsible for each thing. In a functioning democracy, if, say, the legislature passes a bad law, you can vote out the legislators who supported the law at the next election; or if the executive appoints corrupt incompetents to high office, you can vote for another candidate. The problem with ceding lots of power to bureaucracies, the judiciary, NGOs, etc., is that this often complicates the chain of responsibility, making it harder or impossible to hold people accountable. (If the Department of Education produces some catastrophically bad guidance for all schools to follow, how do you know which one of the thousands of employees there is responsible?) The democratic response would be to make these institutions less powerful and/or more responsive to the wishes of the elected parts of the government, but doing this often leads to accusations of trying to destroy democracy, as we're seeing now.
I like the spirit of this, but as you rightly said, political platforms consist of all sorts of elements. Trump has supported a smorgasbord of things, some of which are contradictory. VP Vance, before he was nominated, praised Trump for his "strategic ambiguity". And that's a valid strategy but obviously it then becomes difficult to say this is our programme and anyone who opposes it is anti-democratic.
Yes, I was thinking more of the "being able to kick out corrupt and incompetent politicians" aspect of democratic accountability, rather than the "get your preferred policies implemented" aspect. Although the fact that the two go together is another complication -- if you're an American who likes Trumpism but thinks Trump himself is too incompetent to achieve anything meaningful, or if you liked Biden's policies but thought Biden himself was obviously too senile to govern, there was basically no way for you to vote for what you wanted.
No, I think it is not simply so. I think the word "democracy" simply changed. It used to mean "majority rule", but today it means "individual rights". Originally, "individual rights" was associated with a republic, not a democracy, but the two were merged into the concept of liberal democracy, where the liberal part meant individual rights, and then it was shortened to "democracy".
Arguably elections don't really matter much. The electorate has the attention span of a goldfish and treats politics as an entertainment, there are no reasons for politicians to care about what their electorate wants, therefore their vote gets them nothing. They will just do whatever they do want anyway, or they will do whatever the experts of the think-tanks want them to do.
Elections are not a load-bearing part of the system anymore. The important part is that the system respects your rights or not.
"....nothing about this situation justifies the argument that democracy is not in danger because the person who got most of the vote is still in charge."
Sure, agreed, and well argued as always.
But unfortunately, a further drift toward autocratic rule may be in the cards, once the process is set in motion.
Not because rulers are gradually becoming emotinally fonder of autocracy. But because they behave rationally in an evolving social setting that makes it gradually more rational to become (gradually more) autocratic.
Call it "the rationality of autocratic drift".
Here's the thing: If Trump should ever lose power to the Democrats after all the dubious legal tricks he has played against them since he regained power, they will have good legal cases against him if or when they regain power.
....Which gives him an ever-stronger incentive to rig (or more likely, "influence") the election system in a way that increases the probability that his successor will be a loyalist Republican.
(Digression: Right now his successor, whoever that will end up to be, looks like he/she will win without having to do much "influencing". Since the Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. But it is not guaranteed that they will continue to do so all the way till the next election & beyond.)
In a nutshell: Trumps incentive to try to control the succession increases, the more stuff he does that the opposition might use to legally come after him should he NOT be able to control the succession.
Notice that such rigging can probably be done in subtle legal ways, much like the curtailing of free speech is now done in subtle and perhaps/probably in formally legal ways.
It was a similar logic that let to the dismantling of democracy in Venezuela. Maduro could not afford to lose, since he had done stuff that might put him to prison - or at least to personal ruin - should he lose the election. A similar "rational" process has happened in Russia, which is still formally a democracy. And might be unfolding in Hungary with Orban.
Brazil barely escaped the same fate, thanks to Bolsonaro not managing to sufficiently "influence" the election system in advance. Which is something similar-type rulers in similar positions in democratic countries should (rationally) make a mental note of.
Why not do a deep dive on the literature on how democracy works in practice? I wrote about it for Aporia, but there's a lot more studies. I'm sure a "More than you wanted to know" style post would be excellent on this. https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/do-elites-control-public-opinion
Reading this comment section, and seeing the immense number of arguments about what "democracy" and "liberalism" mean, I am begging everyone to try to adhere to two simple principles:
1. If you understand the basis point of what is being argued, don't be overly pedantic about whether the exactly proper terminology was used. After all, if you understood the point, it doesn't really matter.
2. If you *didn't* understand the point, consider the possibility that this is a "you" problem, and try to think about what the writer is trying to say.
Lots of people here who are too used to thinking of themselves as the smartest person in the room like to be pedantic so they can hear themselves talk even when they have nothing important to say.
None of the pedantic arguments about "democracy" vs. "republican" or anything else are actually relevant to the core thesis.
What you described in this essay is our daily reality in Nigeria. The one who wins (through election that was only barely fair) indeed gets all the power and then goes ahead to flex it over all the already servile institutions. It's rare for an incumbent not to win a second term in Nigeria. The only exception was Goodluck Jonathan who lost in 2015 precisely because he refused to fully capture these servile institutions for his own gains. His opposition did and those very institutions worked against an incumbent. This happened because Nigerian institutions are never independent: they're begging to be captured and used by any power player with loads of cash. And to make matters worse, the elected president in Nigeria has the constitutional rights to select the electoral chairman after the expiration of the 5-year term of the current one. So, indeed institutions are everything and must be built and protected at all cost if liberal governance is to thrive and survive.
The Left gains power, captures or ideologically subverts institutions (NGOs, large parts of the press, most universities, the independent judiciary and the largest share of the administrative state etc.)-> Democracy is endangered by this. The right gains power, attacks those institutions -> Democracy is endangered by this. Democracy is always in danger. Like every other power structure at all times.
Rather than trying to devise ways in which the terms ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalism’ can be fine-tuned to cover every conceivable form of attack on their principles, which given human ingenuity is clearly impossible, anti-authoritarians would probably do better to defend and stand by the principle of ‘rule of law’. Yes, I am aware of what German justice became under the Nazis, or Russian justice under Stalin; but by the time both authoritarian systems were fully in place, it was too late. Rule of law must be defended tooth-and-claw the moment it comes under threat.
Unions work by being elected to represent their workers once... and there is a union there forever. Don't like your union? Why did they get voted in 70 years ago then. Do you hate democracy so bad?
Note that the Supreme Court's power of constitutional review is not in the Constitution - it was simply asserted by the early courts and accepted by all of government ever since then.
It does seem to be a pretty good system though. Though it has its flaws (e.g. court packing) and there are other terrible flaws in the constitution (e.g. president's power to pardon those who commit crimes for his political benefit). But all in all the Constitution was indeed breathtakingly good for its time.
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.
notably, even america doesn't think so. when america wrote constitutions for germany and japan, it did not saddle them with the madisonian nightmare
I'd love to learn more, so correct me if I'm wrong, but the constitution of Japan seems pretty American? The Diet has two houses, one with 4 year terms and one with six year terms, and laws have to passed in both, and it has an independent judiciary. Is the relevant difference having a Prime Minister instead of a President?
yeah, being able to remove the executive turns out to be really important
That sounds much more Westminster than American.
Maybe you were exaggerating here, and I'd have to look up how it went down in Japan, but Germans wrote their own post-WW2 constitution. It was of course overseen and approved by the Allies which is a measure of influence, but yeah. Not directly written by the Allies.
And even if it had been, the UK was one of said Allies; that influence alone could've pushed the (West) German constitution in a Westminsterian direction.
The postwar Japanese constitution was written by Americans and then translated into Japanese; I didn't realize the process in West Germany was different
Why would the government appropriate for America be the same as the government appropriate for America's conquered vassal states? The problems the systems are trying to solve are completely different.
I think there's some genuinely good features in the US system. If there is one that I would definitely copy when setting up a new country, it's the bill of rights, explicitly stated as a set of restrictions on things that the government cannot make laws about (to prevent nonsensical "positive rights" from creeping in).
The bill of rights doesn't work this way:
The 9th amendment literally states there are a set of rights that *definitely* exist and are legally protected but aren't written down anywhere and provides no mechanism to test if something is covered under it or not.
Yes, but it is perfectly possible to have a parliamentary system with a bill of rights. That the US has a bill of rights and the UK doesn't is just anecdotal.
The UK has strong protections for the civil service, though, so a would-be tyrant can't just fire everyone and replace them with cronies. That's also why the PM can take over the next day instead of a three month transition.
There are many different ways of securing democracy, and the Westminster system has its own. In Canada we have a constitution, and power sharing between the federal and provincial govts, while in the UK the constitution is unwritten and the checks are largely informal, but they're there. American democracy *might* survive if it were changed into a constitutional monarchy, but just dumping the checks and balances they *do* have could turn out badly. This is how I took the essay.
TBH I think unwritten constitutions are the most important, even in countries with written constitutions. Almost every country in the world, including Russia and China, has free speech protections in its constitution, but without the legal and political culture to enforce them, words on a piece of paper don't make a blind bit of difference.
Japan has the same thing, but at a cultural level. No wonder they drink so much, given how strict the social hierarchies are...
It hadn't dawned on me that anyone would read this post as an argument that "America is superior" to anything except <checks post> Russia under Putin or Venezuela under Chavez. I think you might be carrying a bunch of baggage from other discussions into this one.
> The current King is pretty much on his way to eliminating himself as a check, in that nobody will work for him).
Where would I read more about this?
Most of the mechanisms discussed in the article don't actually depend on the governmental system. Independent journalists, independent NGOs that can organize, legal protections for protests, none of that depends on the exact structure of your government. And the UK has an independent judiciary, even if they don't have it enshrined in a written constitution, so that safeguard is there.
And if you're going to argue "but Parliament could just repeal the laws creating judicial independence," that's one of those bright-line moments that Scott was talking about. "The government is voting on the We Want To Be Dictators bill so they can override the courts" is the sort of thing that mobilizes protesters in a way that "the government is wrangling over the fine points of election law in court" might not.
Invoking the Emergencies Act did not declare martial law
my understanding is that parliamentary supremacy is a severe weakness in the British system (especially after leaving the ECHR) and Britain itself isn't looking particularly free these days
is a country that tries to ban wikipedia and criminalizes opposition to its foreign policy - and which routinely arrests people for things they say on the internet - really still a democracy?
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.
They are?
I don't see many democracies functioning even close to perfectly well, at least Anglosphere ones. The UK's definition of "free speech"? No thanks.
I'll take the 1A and 2A, thanks. And can we return to 10A?
1A. This is more or less American boosterism. It’s also not related to the non distinction between republics and Democracies. I’m not even sure what you think a democracy is on this context.
The U.K. is a major recent violator of the free speech principles that we pretty much originated (you can thank us later) but the major violation is not the police turning up for trivial tweets - which is itself pretty bad, but the mass arrests of pro Palestinian activists a few weeks ago. This is something we have in common in the US. Word on the street is that it’s influenced by the US.
And something really bad happened lately. The government managed to ban a fairly popular late night host on a private TV channel for saying something that upset them. That’s North Korea levels of control right there, if only we had a 1A
The constitution means nothing without a public that is dedicated to its enforcement. That is why the 1A and 2A still work,
but the "Fedaral government allowed to regulated inter-state trade" means that it can now regulate pretty much any trade.
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!
Overlapping 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.
As a Canadian, I’m kind of used to the idea you can have both.
As a Canadian, you don't have a monarchy. You're just pretending.
Words mean multiple things. "Democracy" is not a single, definitional form of government. It's a rough categorization of a bunch of things that share certain properties (and those properties can be contested at times, as you are now). Largely, it simply refers to any form of government where elections are held to determine outcomes (be they electing representatives, or voting on laws themselves). If you want "democracy" to be specific, it needs modifiers like "representative democracy" or "direct democracy" etc.
Or "people's democracy." Or "managed democracy."
What is your definition of democracy that it would exclude the United States? I feel like it has to be so narrow that it's never been achieved by a significant state in practice, and hence isn't a very useful word/concept.
Using Wikipedia:
"Democracy ... is a form of government in which political power is vested in the people or the population of a state. Under a minimalist definition of democracy, rulers are elected through competitive elections while more expansive or maximalist definitions link democracy to guarantees of civil liberties and human rights in addition to competitive elections".
Seems like the USA counts under that definition
Most countries have anti-corruption laws which prevent the wealthy from buying political power with said wealth, and significantly smaller wealth gaps which make it harder to do in the first place. The United States had similar laws until 2010, when a far-right judiciary struck them down; now it does not.
Most countries also don't arrest journalists for publishing stories critical of the regime, and historically many of them did not surveil or censor the internet to quash dissent either.
If one of the most unequal societies on Earth, with a near-total oligarchic capture of its political system, must be called a "democracy" then the term is diluted beyond all meaning; one might as well accept the DPRK's claim to constitute such. America's civil liberties situation is nothing to be proud of and competitive elections are a necessary but far from sufficient condition (and consider who the competition is between?)
How do you explain Donald Trump's election, given that the vast majority of the rich did NOT want to see him elected in ANY election, and he's 2 for 3? This assertion that the US is some kind of oligarchic authoritarian state doesn't survive review of evidence.
I wouldn't suggest that there's no corruption, or that corruption isn't a major problem; but it's a major problem in all democratic governments (and indeed in all large, complex governments where the governors are far removed from the governed geographically and culturally). But to pretend it's tantamount to oligarchy is absurd. (Incidentally, there are anti-corruption laws in the US as well. I'd like to see them enforced more thoroughly.)
The commenter did not say "we are a [pure] democracy", they said "democracy is..." I am generally fine with pedantry, but in this case you misinterpreted the statement to imply something that was not said. On a rationalist blog, the correct remediation here is to admit you made an error, delete or edit your posts, and feel some embarrassment about clogging up the comments section with all this unnecessary noise.
The U.S. *became* a democracy in the Jacksonian era.
I think it was obviously somewhat Democratic prior to that; certainly more Democratic than many (most? Almost all?) European states. And of course, it became yet more Democratic after the Civil War amendments and then later the Voting Rights Act. I agree Jackson is a big step change, but I'm not totally sold that the US is clearly a democracy on one side of that line, and not on the other.
For sure, but I think it's reasonable to say that a country can be MORE democratic than another without BEING a democracy. The Roman Republic certainly wasn't a democracy, but it had STRONGER democratic elements than mere autocracies.
For a long time, Switzerland was the only European country that could compete with the U.S.
Yeah I'm not really in disagreement, just slightly objecting to the categorical statement that the US “became a democracy” in Jacksonian era; I think that's justifiable but not incontrovertible.
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.
This is not silly at all. The Federal government is not a democracy of any kind, and was never meant to be one. The Constitutional order establishes a system that, from beginning to end, is *very deliberately anti-democratic,* and with good reason.
What we have is government by consensus. Its fundamental rules are very different from those of democracy, prioritizing stability and broad agreement over majority rule. The principles of the government are:
1) By default, the status quo endures.
2) If you want to change that, you need a broad consensus across multiple distinct interested parties. The will of any sizeable minority must always be allowed to thwart a majority and revert to rule #1, to prevent democratic majorities from imposing their will upon unwilling people whose outcomes they have no stake in.
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
Not necessarily. There have been undemocratic republics. Oliver Cromwell got rid of Parliament after he led the Parliamentary forces against the monarchy, which was abolished to create a Commonwealth.
North Korea is a republic. Denmark is not a republic. Being a republic or not has nothing to do with whether there are free and fair elections or not.
north korea is in fact a great example of how a republic that doesn't hold elections can very quickly become a hereditary monarchy
North Korea *does* hold elections. They're just extremely undemocratic circus elections, but they serve a function as a ritualistic pseudo-confirmation of the Kimist rule.
This is just so tedious. For some reason, wanna-be pedants like you come out of the woodwork to incorrectly well-akshully this point. It has been debunked a thousand times by a thousand people.
A federal republic with elected representatives is a KIND OF DEMOCRACY. How is that just impossible for some people to understand.
You sound extremely stupid when you try to claim otherwise.
He understands it just fine. He is just trying to waste your time and make it harder to have discussions.
100%
James Madison in Federalist No. 39:
"We may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behaviour. It is essential to such a government, that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic. It is sufficient for such a government, that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified; otherwise every government in the United States, as well as every other popular government that has been or can be well organised or well executed, would be degraded from the republican character."
Nice but where’s the bit about it not being a democracy.
That's the point. James Madison is contradicting the OP's implied claim that republics aren't democracies.
They literally are. Only the American right thinks that republics are not a form of democracy.
tyranny of the majority sounds a lot better than tyranny of slaveowners (in their time) or oligarchs (now)
the founders were wrong and democracy would be an excellent idea
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7X2j8HAkWdmMoS8PE/disputing-definitions
This argument has always felt like "We're not the [the word associated with the political party X], we're [the wword associated with the political party Y]".
This argument is just semantics about what "democracy" means. By all means, by the modern understanding, the US are a democracy. Even back in ancient Greece the tyranny of the majority degeneration was called a "demagogy". The "illiberal democracy" of Orban would be an example of that: simply nominally appeal to the popular sentiment to legitimate your power and then do whatever (and notice that this side of having some kind of genuine direct democracy, this kind of thing very quickly morphs into just plain old dictatorship, because once you've stopped caring for the minority the representatives of the majority can just cement themselves in place forever).
That's a pretty weak definition. Even North Korea has elections (for its parliament).
Iran is an interesting case, all in all. As far as I understand, it really IS a democracy - to a degree. Not only elections happen, they are also contested, compared to NK (or USSR) - people really have a choice, and that choice matters (e.g. they have elected a more moderate/liberal president the last time). But the elections are not "free" in the western sense, because only candidates approved by clerics can participate. And then the power of president and parliament is limited by the ayatollah.
I think this system might even have some merit, in the sense that the strategic vision is provided by a single determined person who doesn't have to worry about pandering to voters, while implementation of that vision can be flexible. The vision ITSELF might be problematic, but that's a matter of opinion (locally) and history (globally). Of course, it provides no legal recourse for citizen if they actually think the vision is bad and must be changed, but at least they can influence it, somewhat.
The main problem with it, it all ends when the main person in charge dies. It's very unlikely Khomeini will be able to "pass the torch" to anyone, and is just as unlikely that his vision (we're putting aside the question what this vision actually is) will be achieved in his lifetime. For Iran, it might be actually good, but if the person in charge had some vision we could all agree was worthy, it would possible be a tragedy, because the infighting after his death would be vicious, and will hamper country's ability to achieve that vision. Maybe they should instead train an LLM on Khomeini quotes and works and put it in charge?
> It's very unlikely Khomeini will be able to "pass the torch" to anyone, and is just as unlikely that his vision (we're putting aside the question what this vision actually is) will be achieved in his lifetime.
Ruhollah Khomeini has already died and "passed the torch" to Ali Khamenei, who, despite sharing many letters in his last name with his predecessor, is a different person.
Hm, my bad. Well, this does work sometimes, so I guess we'll have to see.
Iran is actually a great example of the tension discussed in this article.
The actual elections to parliament are free (once the candidates have been approved) and have real consequences -- but only on issues where the Ayatollah does not have strong opinions.
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.
Not currently! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_North_Korean_parliamentary_election
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.
But the Supreme Court, with very limited exceptions, is only an appellate court. And even when they hear a case they appoint a special master to actually do all the trial stuff.
*courts would declare him ineligible
Yep, I agree with this. I also think, through gritted teeth, that it will probably be better if Trump is never punished for the crimes he has committed in office. One of the things we have to do is to accept that (a) leaders are human and will mess things up; (b) when a leader of a powerful country messes things up, the consequences will be very bad indeed; and (c) we need the leader to be willing to leave office and become an ordinary citizen again.
All of which means that some level of immunity and impunity for the stuff they got wrong in office is necessary. It may be that the recent Supreme Court ruling went too far, but a lot of leeway should be given.
Because if a leader thinks they're going to be jailed when they leave office, the incentives become very, very bad.
I do not believe Trump can stay in office even if he wants. His musing about staying for a third term is mostly bait for Democrats to distract them from other things he's doing. That said, I would not like to see Trump pursued for crimes any other than what reasonable justice demands, and some of the charges pursued by states over the last few years have been political. That is regrettable and corrosive. I don't have much of an opinion on what SCOTUS decided but it seems to me if their decision is respected as it should be, there may not be much that Trump can be reasonably prosecuted for.
You are more in the weeds than I am. I did not know Trump was accusing Obama of anything. I didn't mean to touch on that topic at all
This seems exactly backwards to me. If a leader thinks he can’t possibly be jailed when he leaves office, the incentives become arguably even worse. In the first case, the leader can try to cling to power, but may not succeed. In the second, the leader can literally just do anything whatsoever.
There are plenty of examples of countries jailing former authoritarians. In every case I can think of, the consequences of doing so have been at worst neutral and at best somewhat democracy-restoring.
Yeah, I see what you mean. And there are certainly examples that point in both directions. I’d suggest that the jailing of Lula in Brazil and Chen Shuibian in Taiwan were examples of bad effects, and are likely to have a negative impact on others who consider going into politics. But in fact, in both those cases, their party continued to operate and was able to resume power…
So perhaps I’m wrong. I fear situations where two factions waste their time taking revenge on each other rather than getting on with governing. But perhaps maintaining rule of law is more important.
I’ll continue to think about it, thanks.
I think what’s missing is a mechanism by which the prosecution can be plausibly seen by the public (especially by the politician’s supporters) as independent and not politically motivated. Sometimes this seems to happen (eg. Nixon) but I don’t know of a reliable mechanism to ensure it happens
By the way, now Brazil jailed Bolsonaro too. It seems like an excellent case study of what happens when you're not in fact too shy about punishing leaders for going off the script.
It's complicated. If there are no legal consequences, he is encouraged to do further crimes. But if he is worried that leaving office will be the difference between jail and freedom (because he can suppress legal processes only while in office), he is *much more strongly* encouraged to commit further crimes because (paradoxically) committing crimes is what prevents punishment in practice.
Or do like Berlusconi did back in the early 2000s in Italy and simply spend his time passing laws that say the crimes he would be jailed for are not crimes any more.
Both incentives are true. But I suspect that our actual rules tends to lean towards leniency to politicians for their widdle human mistakes because they are made - surprise surprise - by other politicians.
I read some time ago about the imperative mandate, the notion of having representatives being somewhat legally tied to upholding the mandate they've been given (read: deliver, within reasonable bounds, on the promises they've made or indications they've been given from their electorate). There's plenty of arguments for why this would be Very Bad for democracy, most of them not terribly convincing. The essence seems to be that politicians can't possibly imagine being subject to that level of scrutiny or accountability - but that's a shared trait between anyone doing any job. We'd all like to be left entirely to our own devices without any overseers, regulations and what have you - but that does not mean those things aren't sometimes necessary.
The incentives only become bad when the checks and balances of the state are flouted to the extent they have been this time round - see the removal of the BLS head, the attempted removal of Lisa Cook from the Fed, extreme unilateral diplomacy (you court Trump now, as the UK did on his visit in mid-September, not the United States).
This has the propensity to create Emperor-like power in a single person. The accountability that was previously diluted across entire bureaucracies now more than ever rests solely on a single person's shoulders. What was previously mostly a figure-head who had some room to make their own policy decisions, and who mostly used their vested powers like executive orders to do the bidding of a buttressing group of policy experts (this is still true today), is morphing more into facilitating the caprice of whomever happens to hold the position (we cannot deny a lot of Trump's policies result from his idiosyncrasies).
Procedurally we are where we have always been; the President-cum-Commander-In-Chief role, the discovered power of executive order, the ability to leave a bill unsigned in the Oval Office and so forth has facilitated the President's unilateral action for decades. However, substantively we are seeing Trump try to push these powers further, changing their nature by emphasizing the person in the role more than what the role represents (the figurehead of a republic).
All this does is increase the impact of your (a) on your (b), reducing their ability to (c). How can someone all-mighty, as close to corporeal omnipotence as we might get, go back to being an "ordinary citizen" after this? How will people avoid seeing only their personal culpability for all policy decisions?
Your take is the pragmatic one, and I agree with it assuming the course cannot be changed. But normatively, more must be done to stop this shaping of the POTUS position. We SHOULD accept your (a), (b) and (c), but we should try and mitigate (a) and (b) by restricting the position's power, the antithesis to Trump's actions today, so (c) is possible.
I assure you, the crimes Trump is charged with are not related to his ineptitude in office.
Yep, that’s true, and I was suggesting that it might be better if it stays that way. (Though I thought Daeg above was quite persuasive, and I’m reconsidering.)
The alternative would be to prosecute him for his crimes in office as well, which are presumably more momentous because of the power he has.
I don't think invalidating an election is strictly undemocratic. The problem is simply that such things are always fraught with dangers because that is already a full blown constitutional crisis. If there is good evidence that an election was invalid, it should be in theory declared invalid - fiat justitiam ruat caelum. But in practice, since now the guy is in charge, and in the end all power flows from the barrel of a gun, to say it with Mao, if you do that you better make damn sure you have the backing of enough strength to actually carry it out (and that is dangerous too because even a military deployed for a just removal of a leader can get "ideas").
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.
I see that your comment survives even though its parent has been deleted.
I got a response to the comment of mine in this thread pointing out that Canada doesn't have a monarchy, arguing that obviously they do because it's inarguably true that they have one. [You might think I'm characterizing that response uncharitably. I am not.]
After two exchanges, that subthread has now disappeared, their comments and mine, and the notifications in my substack activity dropdown say "1 user replied to your note on [the ACX essay]" rather than saying - as they did before the disappearance - "[username] replied to your comment on [the ACX essay]".
I'd like to know more about what happened here, and why another user was apparently allowed to delete my comments.
(Also, just to be sure, I checked my personal activity and it displays "You haven't published any notes yet.")
Probably blocked you; I still see that thread.
You can check by coming back to the comments in private browsing.
Your comment is still there. Presumably the other guy (not me) blocked it because he didn’t see the point in arguing against nonsense.
I don't even know what the reply said, but I'm confident there are a lot more than a thousand people saying democracy is in danger today.
Careful there: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
Thanks. I'm always watch for the other 1%
What does this comment mean? I am pretty confused.
Fallacy of the gray, right?
This really is exactly the same as any other day in our country's history?
There are no two equal days in history. There may be a lot of similarities and a few differences or viceversa. Who knows how much democracy was threatened yesterday and today? And tomorrow.
If you know any book or paper that reports a serious study of key factors implying a threat to democracy over any period during the past 250 years, I'd appreciate the reference.
“My house is in danger of a tornado the same way it has been since it was built, I’m just going to wait these annoying sirens out in the attic”
It's arguably gone more and more broken since Roosevelt's 4th term victory. Maybe this is finally the last straw?
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.
But channels only carry water if there’s pressure behind them. I think the pressure is cultural, whether people feel part of the whole or shoved to the side. If that weakens, the channels silt up and all the elegant procedure in the world won’t move anything.
I've always been fascinated by how people could look at the 4th and 5th amendments and think they're merely procedural safeguards. "Reasonability" checks and "public use" are merits judgments. Choosing to treat them as merely inviting merits judgments from somewhere else isn't exactly a straightforward reading of the document, it's a structural inference at best, and made up bullshit at worst, regardless of the merits of Ely's normative argument.
The fifth amendment is literally about due “process.” It allows government to take your life, liberty, and property if it follows due process. Grand juries, self-incrimination, and double jeopardy are all procedural rights. And even the partially substantive eminent domain provision does not prevent the government from taking your property; it only requires compensation (the calculation of which is left to a process). Likewise, the fourth amendment does not prohibit searches and seizures; it requires the government to get a warrant, i.e., to follow a process. And the typical remedy for a violation is exclusion of evidence, a procedural rule.
Getting the warrant requires showing that there is probable cause to find evidence of a crime. In some cases like with wiretaps the rules are even stronger.
I don't love the trend of people reading the words "due process of law", picking out exactly one word from that idiom, and forgetting the rest. Even if I agree that the Supreme Court has been wrong about that clause in the fifth amendment (*The One and Only One Substantive Due Process Clause* article comes to mind here, saying the 14th is different in this regard..), that's not the only part of the fifth, and I don't think the procedural reading is self-evidently right, it comes across as myopic when compared to state constitutions.
I'm not sure reading the right against self incrimination as a procedural right is the obvious reading, nor eminent domain or the warrant requirement as purely procedural. The fourth prohibits *unreasonable* search and seizures. If it was just prohibiting general warrants, requiring only process, that adjective would be superfluous. Even conservative jurists seem to grant that it requires normative considerations, and have other reasons to read it narrowly than literal meaning. That's kind of my point, Ely's normative argument might be fine, but the descriptive one?
This is why I think Ely’s framework misses half the picture. He treats the channels as self-sustaining, but they only flow if people believe the system belongs to them. Without that, the 4th or 5th can read however you like.
> I don't love the trend of people reading the words "due process of law", picking out exactly one word from that idiom, and forgetting the rest.
I don't see what the rest of your comment has to do with this opening statement? The idiom has no particular meaning. But you aren't arguing that it does. You're arguing that there are additional concerns described outside that phrase.
You're right that I raised one point and moved on fast because I thought by referencing a relatively well known dispute in the law concerning the due process clauses I didn't need to relitigate the entire merits of it when there's relatively well defined positions on it. And I do say "even if I agreed" before going on. I don't think it's generally advisable to read each comment on here as a high school essay, replete with a thesis, body, and close. I think you're being a bit pedantic, put simply. I can't edit my comment so I apologize I cant make it clearer posthumously.
For what it's worth, the separate argument referenced there is that "due process of law" may not merely imply what we have come to understand as "procedural" rights, but rather either incorporate other rights by virtue of being "of law", or that among the procedures required by due process "of law" is judicial review, which in itself requires a normative theory distinguishing law from mere acts of Congress.
I don't see the Third, or Fourth amendments as protecting those channels of change. The Ninth & Tenth are also more about federalism than democracy. The original Constitution was actually rather silent on how elections were to be conducted within states, amendments concerning voting rights were added generations later.
I'd say "no slavery" protects the channels of change too. Even in a very strange system in which slaves had the right to vote they would hardly be free enough to exercise it properly. Obviously you need citizens to be, well, citizens or you have a very obvious loophole for a ruling class to gerrymander things in their favour.
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.
What do these people think democracy is?
Despite not being a free or fair democracy in any sense, Chinese citizens vote in elections. Citizens elect deputies at the county level, who in turn elect deputies at the next level up, and so on.
Rule by consent of the majority? China's a big place, it would be hard for it to stay in one piece if the ruling party wasn't widely popular.
In the modern West, "democracy" is commonly understood to mean elections. But a few centuries ago, it's my understanding that "democracy" meant something closer to "vox populi" or "nationalism". I.e. a vague notion that the state should be controlled by the nation (AKA the common people; rather than a monarch/theocracy). Or at least serve the *interests* of the nation.
From there, you can see how the USSR took this and came up with "Democratic Centralism" [0], i.e. the idea that the Party Vanguard would "democratically" debate and decide on policy, theoretically in service of the interests of the proles. (Notice the lack of elections here though, even in theory). Which China then inherited from the USSR.
Obviously, there's plenty of cases where tyrants like the Kim Regime of the DPRK just pay lipservice to "democracy". But in the case of the CCP, they really do believe their own words [1]. In this context, "democracy" isn't really about elections, it's more like a secular Mandate of Heaven.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_centralism
[1] https://scholars-stage.org/where-is-the-communism-in-the-chinese-communist-party/
It's more like, it was meant to understand rule of the people. This was widely seen as bad by the obviously non-democratic states of the time. I think the most important thing is that the general model of democracy of the era (like Athens) was direct. Athenian citizens allowed a political life at all (namely, free adult males) were all in the assembly. They personally voted on individual issues and decisions, not just elected representatives to do all the voting for them.
To those people, our modern representative democracies would probably feel quite undemocratic.
The USSR had elections. They simply served a different purpose in a single-party state. Low turnout was a sort of an opinion poll: "ackchyually, if the party candidate is this bad, the people simply won't vote for him". Not that it ever worked this way, of course.
And I think you're confusing democratic centralism with the vanguard role of the party. DC is basically "disagree, then commit": you can freely debate which way the party should go, but if your side loses the internal vote, you have to follow the majority and present a united front.
Even the most repressive dictatorships can crumble if enough people resist. Dictatorships survive through a combination of fear, apathy, and genuine popular support.
In theory, sure. In practice, authoritarians are not toppled by popular uprisings.
>From 1950 to 2012, there were 473 authoritarian leaders who left power. Regime insiders were responsible for the majority (65 percent) of these exists, with coups and ‘regular’ removals from office each accounting for about a third of all leader exits. Twenty percent of authoritarian leaders died in office, and only 10 percent were kicked out at the hands of the masses.
https://acornabbey.com/blog/?p=19481
Unruly masses are a precipitating factor in many of the other exits, though.
Are they? Pretty sure those are the 10% of the 65% leader exits from internal reasons. I would suspect the majority of the remainig 35% would be invasions from another country.
I think you need to consider whether the coups and removals didn't happen because the leader was already very unpopular and the coupers and removers didn't think this made the time ripe for a change, and possibly harnessing the resulting popularity gains from being the Guy Who Saved The Country From The Previous Guy.
And yet, to borrow sports terminology, you have to credit a goal to the player who gave the ball the deciding kick, not to the teammates who may have given the assist. That is a useful, but different question.
The Chinese government is widely popular. It’s not going anywhere.
That’s pretty rare in China. I’d recommend the Substack sinification which has a lot of internal Chinese academic discussion, not all of it pro Marxist or pro government.
My understanding is that in China, the term means something more like "Is the government acting in the interests of the people?" than "Was the free-and-fair-elections ritual performed correctly?" They call it "Whole-process democracy."
Was going to make a similar point.
On a similar note, if you read the Wikipedia page on Chinese political parties (i.e. those who sit in the NPC or Standing Committee), you might notice that the english names are surprising; China Democratic League, China Association for Promoting Democracy, Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_China
All of these legal parties were started in the 1940's and they are allowed to exist for purely cosmetic reasons.
I disagree that it's purely cosmetic.
For example, one useful purpose is soaking up potential dissenters, giving them a outlet for their beliefs, similar to controlled opposition.
They were made in the 1930's and 1940's during the Chinese civil war.
I have met people in the mainland KMT.
They are not a controlled opposition they are the 70 year old window dressing of pluralism.
Yeah I've heard it as, how many levers do common people actually have on the government (I prefer the term, how many bits can be transmitted from people to government). Ideally, in democracy it'll be much higher numbers than dictatorship. But is it actually the case today?
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.
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?
The revisions get reported in the same Boomer Boxes, and when they're big, Boomers notice. Vibes about the economy have always been affected by headlines saying "jobs numbers way less than previously thought," and whichever party's in opposition makes as much hay from that as they do from initial reports.
The revisions are usually reported in the same article as the current month's job number estimates, since the same report is the source for both, and most media consumers want a summary of the employment situation rather than a separate analysis of what the BLS said about previous months. So going hunting for separate articles on "jobs report revision" is usually going to get you the money pages (unless the revisions are the most striking feature of the report). But that doesn't mean the revisions don't shape the headlines.
If the Biden gang were juicing the job numbers, it's remarkable how utterly they failed in October 2024, the point when most Boomers start paying attention to election-related stuff. Not only were the numbers unspinnably weak, they were underestimates that would later be revised upward by 358%. Maybe the deep state/media conspiracy wanted to tank Biden's reelection then and Trump's popularity now?
October 2024 was also when the downward revisions to August 2024 were announced. Unsurprisingly, those downward revisions didn't independently make headlines because the headline was already "job numbers bad." Even when the first August 2024 numbers were released, the NY Times headline was "US jobs report shows hiring has shifted into lower gear," which captured both the Aug numbers not being terrific and (as the headline lede made clear) the downward revisions to previous months.
So in both of the immediate pre-election months, the NYTimes jobs headlines around this report were "employment is weak," explicitly citing the revisions to previous months as well as the current numbers.
Did Boomers pay attention? Well, Biden/Harris lost the election, primarily on grounds of the economy being bad. Trump won the Boomer vote by pretty much the same margins as in 2020.
The recent revisions are the largest downward revisions on record. They'd make headlines for that even if they didn't also confirm "tariffs bad" priors (which haven't been confirmed as resoundingly as liberals like me had expected after 'Liberation Day,' with the stock market ticking along just fine and jobs seemingly doing OK). It's hard to argue that they aren't genuinely newsworthy. Newsmax reported on them too; are they on the memo list for the lockstep journalisic conspiracy?
Also, dude. The Dean Scream was the best TV of that whole week, by a mile. Anyone who watched it, heard it, or heard the James Lileks techno remix shouldn't wonder why it was on every channel the next day. Yaaaargh!
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!
But upward revisions would have been viewed as suspicious too! There would have been a political benefit to Biden if the numbers looked good near election day, not a year before. This conspiracy makes no sense
I agree with you that they're not cooking the numbers, but I also don't think there's any good reason to think that the pattern of revisions gave a benefit to Biden, or that they particularly look like they did.
Check the table here: https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/job-numbers-change-revisions/. In the months leading up to the 2024 election, there were two overestimates (June and Aug), two underestimates (Jul and Oct), and one month where the preliminary results were pretty much on the money (Sep).
I don't see a pattern of politically motivated distortion there -- and if there had been, I certainly wouldn't have expected it to lead to dismal numbers and an underestimate in October. The unusually high September job numbers might raise an eyebrow, but that's the month where the preliminary numbers were confirmed. (After the election.)
"We got it right *eventually*" is an important part of the argument and motivation for a certain kind of liberal that has a generally positive affect towards the bureaucracy.
Tell me how we eliminate smallpox or get unleaded gasoline without this mentality.
"We got it right 'eventually'" is only a lame excuse if someone else is getting it right faster, with no meaningful drop in accuracy (obviously what counts as meaningful is context-dependent).
Can you point to a source that provides comparably-good estimates as BLS provides, but faster?
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
"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.
I'm looking at the payroll survey results and revisions, from which the jobs numbers ("The US added XXXXXX jobs this past March ...") in the jobs report . That statement wasn't true in December of 2024 or in July.
Regardless, while your general question is a reasonable one, defining what a "good survey" is in this case isn't trivial. The employment report serves a number of different masters. Balancing those needs along with others (transparency, consistency, predictability, etc.) is challenging.
It's appropriate for someone like the President to tell the BLS chief to shift how they're balancing these priorities. ("It's important to make the initial report as accurate as possible, even if it takes longer to get it out and uses a methodology that breaks the time series.") Firing the BLS chief is entirely different.
A lot of people were ranting about supposed distortions in the jobs report when the numbers were looking better for Biden's chances in late 2023 and early 2024.
Remarkably, almost none of those people revised their priors when the jobs reports in the immediate lead-up to the election were bad for Biden.
But a bunch of them have picked up the case again when the jobs numbers are looking bad for Trump.
Principled analysts or partisan hacks? You decide!
If it's predictable, then the BLS should have predicted it. I'm not an expert in either field, but it reminds me of cost estimates for construction projects. The estimates are consistently lower than the actual cost, even though it would be easy to eliminate the bias by adjusting the estimate a by the average-underestimation-factor. The persistence of that bias indicates perverse incentives.
Part of the value of the BLS process is its consistency. They know there is a problem with declining response rates, but they also have to be careful with ad hoc fixes that would break the time series. If you're interested in the issue, Odd Lots had a great discussion last month with the BLS commissioner from Trump's first term digging into these issues: https://pca.st/q1ea1pcc
I don't think your comment is a satisfying explanation in and of itself, but I'll listen to the podcast that you link to before solidifying my judgement.
Right *before* the 2024 election the BLS revised the jobs numbers down by 818k jobs, which seems like it would be really bad for Biden's and/or Harris's chances, so it seems really implausible that they were deliberately tampering with the numbers, unless they are just very bad at it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/21/business/economy/us-jobs-economy.html
But the entire big story about BLS screwing up *is* the revisions, so that first point is clearly false. They had a huge downward revision in the fall of 2024 and then an even-bigger downward revision in 2025.
And why would anybody "spike the ball" right before an election, when it's going to be scrutinized the most?
Okay, but then why do the same thing a year later? What sinister explanation could apply equally well before and after the election?
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.
Your latter point. Absolutely. Great piece on just this: https://www.academia.edu/43969904/Populists_as_Technocrats
It took me a minute to realize the first paragraph was a case of sarcasm.
We used to have a term for this at a company I worked at. There were certain tasks that people said were "done every day", and by implication the person they're talking to is making the problem too complicated. But the problem is complicated, and you need expertise to understand it much less fix it.
Some people are just allergic to complexity. It's probably not a good idea to let them run the world.
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?
Based on some other comment threads, it seems like you have a track record of citing unsourced evidence that subsequent commenters have been unable to verify. So you’ll excuse me if I raise a skeptical eyebrow at your reference to “the grapevine”.
Source please.
Don't hold your breath. He just makes shit up on the fly.
>"I'll have to look into it"
Dude, please do. You seem like a smart guy and having a vibes-based worldview probably isn't conducive to civic virtue. It's a straight up civic vice, I'd figure
Most people here can't even tell what you are talking about.
We try to communicate using words, rather than winks and nudges. Reading your posting, I have no idea who you mean by Dick Cheney's protogee. I don't know what "the adults in the room" refers to. Nor do I know the names of the neocons whom the Biden administration hired and put in power. Why didn't you name them? Was it to make yourself appear like more of an insider?
Rhetorical tricks like these may work elsewhere, but here they just make you look, uh, a bit epistemically naive.
>The survey response rate has steadily dropped since Covid. It used to be near 90% ten years ago and is now below 70%.
As the guy whose job it is (not explicitly, but nobody else was going to do it and I'm kind of the "catch all admin guy") to respond to those surveys, I find it funny how statistics that huge markets rely on and political careers may depend on rely on people like me bothering to fill out a web form every few months. I usually have more important work to do and let it sit for a month or so before they send a reminder email with ALL CAPS in it and I think "Eh, I got five minutes to burn I guess."
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.
That was funny. So the US ended up with Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth and RFK Jr. because they were the most professional people Trump could find for the job?
"As far as I know, nobody grades them on professionality versus loyalty as a part of their job performance."
Then you must not know about the people Laura Loomer has gotten fired, or who's nominations she got rescinded.
Maybe you mistook my comment about loyalty to mean loyalty to the Constitution and to the United States writ large? That's not how I meant it. I meant it as personal loyalty to Trump.
Do you believe thats why the BLS head Erika McEntarfer was fired because we got those numbers after the firing occurred? Is it a coincidence that McEntarfer was fired after posting July's job numbers which were the worst since COVID? If she wasn't doing her job than she could have been fired well prior to July when the allegedly false numbers weren't so embarrassing for the administration.
You don’t think that indiscriminately firing government employees in the name of “efficiency” might have something to do with the accuracy of these numbers?
This was explicitly predicted ahead of time.
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?
Do you think it's similarly anti-democratic to prevent juries from being full-informed, specifically of jury nullification?
Like sequestering them? Or of their right to just decide to decline to participate, thereby nullifying the verdict?
Their ability to declare people not guilty because they disagree with the law.
I don't see this as a "democratic issue" because juries aren't a legislating body and jurors aren't the peoples representatives.
When you say "fully informed," is the idea of having a bailiff stand up and tell them all the ways a jury can find someone not guilty? Or like telling the jury this is how we can make a mistrial happen? Or a hung jury?
I always hear about Jury Nullification in that sense, but surely there's a reverse sense, where a jury can choose to find someone _guilty_ because they disagree with the law?
"Theoretically this guy should get out on that loophole, but that loophole sucks so let's just put him away"
But the BLS is a project aimed at nothing other than getting you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. The concept is that the government will tell you how the economy is doing, and if you disagree with them, you're wrong.
I'm struggling to see the relationship between my comment and your response.
That is just anti expertise.
I might drink a sweet drink and my taste buds say it's good.
Then a toxicologist tells me that o actually just drank ethylene glycol and I'll need my stomach pumped to avoid death.
The BLS is a concession to the idea that the single mind and personal senses can't understand the aggregate interactions of millions of people.
You're trying to make two different arguments, and they're incompatible.
Expertise as a concept is directly opposed to "the evidence of your eyes and ears". You can't criticize getting rid of part or all of the BLS on the grounds that it represents the government telling you what to think. The BLS is a part of the government that tells you what to think. Shrinking it means that there is now 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 of the government telling you what to think.
I think this is bad policy but isnt a threat to democracy. Agencies get incompetent leaders on a fairly regular basis actually. Your institutional bias here might also be pointing in the direction of, without this agency, wed never know. There is a lot of other data available that measures economic health, many of it privately produced (asset prices for example) that the fed and others use to inform decisions. We may have marginally worse data now, but I am not filing this anywhere near as high as threats to free speech and judicial independence
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."
I don't think there's any lack of checks and balances in the Westminster system, it's just that some of them are kept implicit rather than explicit.
The central problem of government is this: you have a roomful of people who don't necessarily get along, and also in that room you have a loaded gun, and a keyed safe full of gold bars. The problem is how to handle both the gun and the key in a way that doesn't result in anyone shooting anyone or stealing the gold.
The Constitutional Monarchy solution is to hand both the gun and the key to the one guy who seems least likely to use it, then give him a palace and a Rolls so he's invested in the stability of the system, and allow him to pass these privileges on to his son so he's _really_ invested in the stability of the system.
The Republic solution is to come up with a complicated system for sharing ownership of the gun and the key around to ensure that nobody ever gets both gun and key at the same time.
There also exist indirectly elected heads of state, such as in Germany. No monarch, but in practice it works exactly the same as a constitutional monarchy.
This indicates that an actual monarch isn't the special quality, but rather that they are not elected by the population is what makes them a safe pair of hands.
"Republic" just means "not a monarchy". It has zero bearing on how the system works. Presidential system versus parliamentary system is the actually useful terminology.
This distinction isn't generally pedantic. During Biden's presidency, institutions such as the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College were all criticized by progressive activists for being "undemocratic".
However, it *was* pedantic in *this* case, because Scott was defending these pseudo-democratic institutions, not attacking them.
Not understanding your point here. Are you saying that it's invalid to criticize an institution for being undemocratic if that institution is in a country that has not been classified as a democracy? Why would that be the case?
I'm saying the progressive tribe wittingly or unwittingly plays a bait-and-switch game with the word "democratic".
On one hand, they say it's pedantic to distinguish between a pure democracy and constitutional republic, implying that we're all talking about the same thing when we say "democracy".
On the other hand, they criticize the Electoral College (etc.) for being "undemocratic", even though they meet the broader definition of democracy that they implicitly endorsed.
Taken together, it harnesses the positive valence that people have for constitutional republics (which are "democracies" in one sense) to advocate for changes that would make the country a pure democracy, instead. ("democracy" in a different sense")
Interesting! So it sounds like there isn’t any logical argument that depends on how the system as it currently exists is classified. Rather what’s at stake is which term people have more positive associations with. Thanks for the explanation! That actually clarifies a lot.
Now, there are some people (like me) who are only interested in the logical arguments and find it annoying when people roll up with "Don't you know the US is a republic?" as if it's a refutation of anything. But I think I now better understand where those people are coming from.
I'm sympathetic to the point you're making, but I think there's some talking past each other here; it's true that the EC is an antidemocratic feature of the US that is still compatible with the overall system being broadly democratic; and saying "the US is a republic not a democracy" is a reasonable slogan to express the idea that the presence of some nondemocratic features are justifiable even if the system as a whole is meant to have democratic legitimacy.
But I also think... the EC isn't really the kind of thing you find in other republics, nor is it the kind of feature that by design functions as part of the system of checks and balances; the fact of being a republic not a democracy isn't sufficient to justify just any old nondemocratic feature. You wouldn't just shrug and say, "oh, America counts right-handed people's votes for twice those of left-handed people's... that's antidemocratic but whaddayagonnado we're a republic not a democracy"--specific antidemocratic features need to be justified by some independent principle.
I personally, don't think the EC has a good justification as helping to preserve America's liberal character, or defend minority rights, or whatever, so *absent* such a reason the fact of its being antidemocratic is, all else equal, an argument against it.
I think part of why you take these arguments as a bait and switch is that people who oppose the EC take the premise that there is no other justification for the EC as a given, and so don't explicitly state it, or don't explicitly state that they might accept it if one could provide an argument that it was necessary to preserve minority rights or something.
This article deals with the very core of the difference between a republic and a democracy - the protection of the rights of the minority from the democratically expressed will of the majority. It could not possibly be more central. The claim it "makes absolutely no difference" is preposterous.
There are two kinds of people on the Internet: those who learned to reflexively say, "we're a republic, not a democracy" even when it doesn't make any sense, and those who learned to reflexively mock those people even when it does.
It's pedantry, but, like most pedantry, it is very useful when you're getting into the weeds and find yourself struggling with overloaded terms, as Scott did here.
It's not pedantry, it's just the use of an idiosyncratic definition of "democracy" that never appears outside the context of the people on the internet who like to say this particular thing. I'm not sure what the history of it is, maybe it has some roots going back to old debates from the 1700s, maybe it was made up on usenet thirty years ago, I'm not sure.
"Democracy" is not overloaded to mean "absolute unrestricted direct democracy with no brakes" because that's not a real system that actually exists anywhere.
On the other hand "Republic" is also heavily overloaded to mean "country where the guy in charge is called a President", and of course there are many of those that aren't representative democracies. On the other hand, there's also many functional representative democracies which are not republics because they're constitutitional monarchies or whatever.
I think a lot of it comes from this: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp
And since 'Founding Fathers' like James Madison seem to be treated like patron saints in the U.S., a lot of Americans treat the arguments/definitions in this 250-year-old op-ed as holy text—immutable and inarguable—trumping common sense about how the word’s actually typically used today.
Akhil Amar (in America's Constitution: A Biography) argues persuasively that the distinction between the terms "democracy" and "republic" was inconsistent and not deeply rooted in the thought of the Founders. They did talk a great deal about how the popular will needed to be moderated by balancing institutions, but they didn't specifically use "democratic" as the label for the one and "republican" for the other, at least not generally.
Nevertheless, it's a useful distinction!
When you are talking specifically about the balance between those parts of the government that are directly, intentionally responsive to The Will Of The People and those parts that are intentionally *not* responsive (or even resistant!) to The Will Of The People, it's really useful to have one term that describes the first thing and another that describes the second thing! Although I don't know when or why the distinction arose, using "democratic" to talk about the more demos-oriented aspects of our government, with "republican" for the more res publica institution-oriented aspect of our government has become both conventional and very handy!
Scott, for whatever reason, either didn't think of or didn't want to use "republic" for this article, so, instead, he used "liberalism." (That's the overloaded term I saw here, not "democracy." Scott even acknowledge that "liberalism" is an overloaded term!) This muddled his point, I thought, because "liberalism" means left-of-center political positions, and *also* describes a certain philosophy around the free exchange of ideas and mutual respect for conscience (which doesn't necessarily have to exist in a democracy at all; you could have a liberal monarchy in this sense), and *also* a set of economic theories derived from that philosophy.
The whole thing does read cleaner if he replaces "liberal" with "small-r republican" throughout.
"Will of the People" is not results of an election. The People express their will in multiple ways, eg through free press, through judicial opinions etc.
This is certainly true in one sense, which I will dare to call the republican sense: the wise people have established a government that includes substantial institutional and procedural checks on their raw popular in-the-moment will.
It is false in another sense: the people do not vote on judicial opinions, and they are, by and large, quite powerless to affect the editorial choices of the New York Times or Fox News.
Here is one way of showing why it is false: if you had a government that consisted *entirely* of unelected journalists and unelected judges (appointed by non-partisan panels chosen by the ABA), with the journalists proposing the laws and the judges ratifying the laws, that would not be a democracy. (It *might* be a republic, at least in Plato's sense, if the journalists and judges were the nation's wisest and best persons.) To have a democracy, you must have votes. Votes are what makes a democracy a democracy.
The moderating (small-r republican) institutions are necessary to making democracy work in the real world, and so have been sort of conflated into democracy, but, when you get down to brass tacks, there are parts of our government that are democratic, and other parts that are more republican (and less democratic).
And, to be clear, I'm all for that! I just think it's silly that some people want to deprive of us the language that allows us to distinguish clearly between them. This counter-pedantry makes it really hard to have discussions about whether our current system of government has the balance right. (I don't think it does.)
> Democracy can refer to a pure democracy or it can refer to any political system where they have free and fair elections.
Really? You think the Catholic Church is a democracy?
Or even better, the Holy Roman Empire.
"Having the next election" seems equally important in a Republic.
In my ideal republic, the state would be small enough that most people wouldn't care one way or the other.
A form of governance where the rights of individuals are protected against the whims of the government or the majority is properly called liberalism. Being a republic has nothing to do with it, other than that when people say "republic" or "democracy" they usually mean "liberal republic" or "liberal democracy", as it's pretty much the only kind these days. But historically, famous republics like Rome or Revolutionary France weren't that big on protecting individual liberties.
Not going to get too deep here because it's necessarily arguing semantics and not that interesting. I doubt we disagree on the underlying ideals.
However, that's not the definition of "liberalism" as I understand it. The most relevant denotation given by OED is: "a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise." That comports with my own understanding of the word, which I tend to use in the manner which means roughly "to live in comportment with the ideals of the Enlightenment". Liberalism implies democracy (and possibly also republicanism) but requires neither.
The distinction that specifies that "individuals are protected against the whims of the government or the majority" is the republic vs. democracy distinction.
It is the minority which is really to be guarded against, not the majority,
In any state, it is the elite, a minority, that rules and the non-elite majority suffers itself to be ruled.
People differ in their will to power, their capacity for deceit and political intrigue, their interest in and amplitude for public affairs. This separation defines the ruling and the ruled elements.
Political liberalism is the doctrine that the political authority is based upon consent and flows up from the individuals. That the individuals in a state of nature possess full sovereignty, and enter into a social contract to pool or surrender their several sovereignties.
Liberalism is so dominant that it is hard even to conceive of any alternatives. But the alternatives exist.
Republic literally means “the public thing”, trying to imply that it can be completely divorced from the principles of democracy is a tool of oligarchs and authoritarians spanning from Plato to the Islamic “Republic”.
How do we know a “republic” actually represents the public interest if we don’t obtain the public’s unfiltered opinion at regular intervals?
I was not suggesting that republicanism should be divorced from democracy. I don't believe that's likely a good idea.
“ I was not suggesting that republicanism should be divorced from democracy”
This is your direct quote
“ The heart of republicanism (not the party the sovereign entity) is anti-democratic”
This is also your direct quote.
I hope you can see where some would be confused about what it is you actually hold to be true.
That's totally fair. I do believe both statements and while I didn't see them as contradictory, I can understand how brevity did me few favors there.
What I was trying to say was that the core republican idea - that some rights are too sacred to subject to majority rule, is a fundamentally anti-democratic one. I don't think that means that you can't have a republican democracy, I think that I (still, today at least) live in one. The ideas are only completely incompatible in some idealized perfect democracy that's never existed.
Venice was a republic, many other medieval cities were republic as well. Rome was an ancient republic.
But they were not liberal republics.
> If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote.
James Madison, Federalist No 10.
Republanism isn't the anti democratic position, it's the middle of the road position.
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.
Individual liberty contradicts border control vs. anyone beside actual criminals. There's also no freedom-based justification for family formation.
I mean, good on the border control part. As for family formation, I think saying that liberalism is more important terminally than democracy is not to say that it is the only value. I agree that there’s clearly a good in human life served by family, and that’s not a thing we can replace simply on the basis of individualism and liberty without losing a lot of value.
You also can't have human freedom if humans cease to exist, which is what happens if TFR trends to zero (or even stays sub-replacement long enough.) But sure.
Are there any examples of countries which have done a particularly bad job of defending the rights of minorities from majoritarian tyrannies? I mean, worse than the US
Many populist leaders take this approach. And many dictatorships start with broad popular support before the crackdown on dissidents makes popular discontent less important to the continuance of the government. Chavez in Venezuela had broad popular support but targeted the wealthy when his economic mismanagement caught up to him. Similarly Orban in Hungary, Peron in Argentina, and early Vladimir Putin in Russia.
Majoritarian tyranny? What would it mean?
All tyranny ultimately resolves to rule of a few.
Tyranny absolutely does not require the rule of a few! Democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner as the saying goes. Majoritarian overreach was a major point of interest for the founding fathers, hence the addition of the Bill of Rights. Large majorities of Americans repeatedly voted to outlaw gay marriage across California, North Carolina and many other states. The "will of the people" was that this act should be disallowed. Similarly, majorities are often in favor of suspension of criminal rights in many cases.
Yet the classical liberal position would be to restrain government from acting on these democratic impulses because they are just as tyrannical overreaches on individual liberty regardless of whether the state's interests are driven by majorities or minorities.
Gay marriage indeed-- paradigm of judicial tyranny.
I agree that it's important to defend the rights of minority groups from majoritarian tyrannies (and I regularly apply that principle across the political spectrum).
... and that seems to me a major point of Scott's article? We need strong constitutional (and procedural, and normative, and ...) principles to prevent temporary mob mentality from ceding authority!
Scott is saying if you believe in democracy, then you need liberal institutions to defend democracy. That is a great point and a useful argument if someone sees democracy as the ultimate good. However, I believe it's key to point out that if you believe democracy is a higher order goal than liberalism, I do think that is the wrong order of values. Liberalism is a higher value than democracy, especially pure majoritarianism. You could theoretically have a robust democracy with repeated elections, that nonetheless uses majoritarian outcomes to target minorities. Like taxing certain churches more than others, making public servants disavow certain ideologies (communism, counter-revolutionary capitalism, whatever). This is bad even if compatible with democracy.
ah, you're emphasizing that "(classical) liberalism" is the terminal goal, and "democracy" is merely in instrumental goal; I largely concur.
I have a truly marvelous thought to add here, but this comment box is too small to contain it.
It looks like it's trying to explain liberalism without saying it, for people who are allergic to the word. Which is probably a good thing!
Joe that made me smile It’s wild how one word can set people off when the ideas behind it are just basic fairness and care
> this post feels way more convoluted and epicyclic than calling liberalism important in its own right.
The whole premise of the post is that you don't need to care about liberalism in its own right to defend checks and balances. You just need to care about having democracy that lasts more than a few years. That is, if you're trying to appeal to people who (think they) mainly care about democracy, and who are arguing against allowing unelected officials to interfere with the President on the grounds that this is 'undemocratic', you don't need to try to get them to care about liberalism. You can just show that it's bad for democracy to give elected officials unchecked power.
As a reader, Scotts essay does a good job of explaining why so many non elected ppl having power is good. I agree liberalism is good, but giving power to unelected ppl does not automatically achieve liberalism. The framing here, that those ppl help to ensure there is a next election is very useful, and that is a direct appeal to democracy not liberalism.
What do you not like about the word "populace"?
I’m actually not sold on the idea that it’s a good idea to treat liberalism as an end in its own right.
Someone who is not sold on liberalism, who is open to supporting illiberal leaders and damaging liberal institutions, will not accept the premise that liberalism is good in its own right. Nor is this the reasoning that led us to prefer liberalism, at first, over its predecessors.
Rather, there are *very strong reasons* why liberalism is good, and liberalism’s goodness depends on these reasons; and the case to be made for liberalism, to someone who is skeptical, is to point them to these reasons, rather than to any markers of intrinsic value.
Liberalism bakes in an institutional commitment, within the government, to promoting the happiness and wellbeing of its people; liberalism creates a precondition for any government’s existence, that it enjoy the consent of the governed; liberal governments are more peaceful and stable; liberalism provides a plausible and inclusive framework for peaceful transfers of power, and legitimate means to remove and punish a government’s highest officeholder; it leads to more virtuous and competent leadership; it gives power and freedom to the people; and so on. These are reasons to approve of liberalism. They are not logical necessities; in hypothetical cases where liberalism does not achieve these outcomes, liberalism would not be worth having. It is a means to these ends. Someone can be persuaded of these reasons, and of the values of these ends, without already being committed to the value of liberalism - and if we wish to strengthen liberalism in the popular discourse, we must be explaining these reasons, and must stop taking liberalism’s value for granted!
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.
I implore you to stop making posts without proof of your claims, and only vaguely referring to events. Please provide a link.
I could not find any articles. Closest I was able to find - https://triblive.com/local/republican-congressional-candidates-denied-tour-of-allegheny-county-election-warehouse/ - candidates, not a judge.
https://triblive.com/news/politics-election/no-poll-watchers-at-allegheny-county-satellite-election-offices/
But that was by a judge.
Is it either of those points? Otherwise it seems your statement has no support. Could you search too? Do you have a name?
What is the name of the paper? And to make the search simpler, this was 2020 right?
Source? I have never heard of a position with the title "election judge" in the US.
The terminology varies, but there are always representatives of the two major parties—they're usually the best dressed people at the polling place—who, when they aren't chatting like the old chums they are, are checking their voter rolls against who shows up and tells "their people" to get out anyone who's missing.
I try to confound them as much as possible by voting mixed tickets in the general election.
In NJ when i was growing up they were "Challengers." I see them in Michigan, but I don't know what they're called here.
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.
In Colorado at least there are still occasional federal prosecutions for multi-state operations. Usually it's someone selling it out the back door and taking it to states where it's illegal.
The balance against the executive refusing to faithfully execute the law would be either impeachment, judicial review, additional legislation, or nothing, depending on exactly what the distortion is. It may be that an agency's rulemaking violates the APA or that it exceeds the power granted to it by the enabling legislation, in which case the courts are the check on it.
If the agency simply fails to do something the law directs it to do, the remedy is murkier because some of those actions are discretionary. This is particularly true for actions that touch on law enforcement, as the judiciary cannot compel the government to bring charges or institute charges themselves, for very very very good reasons that would cause more damage if you altered them than anything else being discussed here. Generally the way to prevent this is for Congress to provide a private right of action to citizens affected by it, though they would still need to have injury-in-fact to have standing. In other cases, Congress could simply be more specific and use their subpoena power to oversee compliance.
And if all that fails and they really can't bring it in line, maybe it's just not something the federal government should be doing in the first place and needs to be devolved to the states to handle.
Attempts by Congress to create bureaucratic agencies with the power to enforce the laws, but which are in some fashion independent of the executive, have repeatedly created serious constitutional questions. We saw this most recently with the CFPB in 2020, which could only be salvaged as an entity by severing its supposed independence out of the law entirely. At present, such quasi-independent boards are limited to ones with trivial powers plus a few legacy multimember boards from 100 years ago during the lawless days of Woodrow Wilson who didn't care a whit for the text of the constitution. The best that Kagan (the sharpest mind on that side of the aisle by a wide margin) could muster in defense of these in her 2020 dissent is that the constitution is silent on administration and therefore it is acceptable to "experiment" with such agencies, which is just not a very good argument for a structural question about the balance of power in a republic with a written constitution.
Congress is supposed to be zealously guarding their power, not handing it off for political expediency to agencies whose decisions the congressmen can then avoid blame or take credit for at their convenience. Congress by its nature has by far the most inherent legitimacy of any of the powers, the system largely depends on them acting like they care about preserving their power as a body and in their individual capacities as the people's representatives, if they want to pal around DC and delegate everything to the bureaucrats then they're at the mercy of any president who manages to effectively rule it.
The Constitution does not give Congress the power to create executive departments independent from the existing executive. That would require a constitutional amendment.
The Federal Reserve isn't an executive department. It's more like a chartered monopoly, formed by member banks with the permission of the government.
The Constitution is silent on specific matters of firing members of the executive branch, because granting all executive power to the President already gives him permission to fire anybody in it. He could also remove himself as Nixon did, but Congress explicitly has the power to impeach & remove the President (as well as "Vice President and all civil officers").
I agree. Nor does it give them power to delegate legislative power to executive agencies. And certainly can't give it power to delegate judicial power, as Congress lacks that entirely.
Just because Congress said something doesn't mean it's actually constitutional.
The Constitution does not mention this. It is silent on what the "powers" mean.
However, congress is allowed to pass laws, and in doing so require the president to enforce that law. If the law says "make an executive department and don't fire people arbitrarily" then the president has to enforce that law.
It is a logical consequence of having the president be bound by the law that they can be bound by the law.
No, if Congress passed a law that said the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster was now the official church of the US, the President would not be required to enforce that law, because that's prohibited by the First Amendment of the Constitution. Congress can only pass laws that are authorized by the power granted to it by the Constitution, and the Constitution assigns all legislative power to Congress and all executive power to the President. Those Constitutional restrictions can only be altered by a Constitutional Amendment, not ordinary Congressional legislation.
the federal bureaucracy derives its legitimacy from article i
There's no need to fudge the numbers in 1000s of precincts across the country. Control of the House hinges on the election outcome in a relatively small number of tightly contested districts. Gerrymandering those districts or making it marginally harder/easier for certain people in them to vote can be sufficient to decide the balance of power, and those things don't require explicit fraud.
The Senate and the Presidency are less vulnerable to this since they are decided by statewide votes, but they still aren't completely immune because of the importance of a small number of swing states and the voting patterns within those states (e.g. making it easier/harder to vote in a heavily Democratic urban area may be enough to tip the scales).
The purpose of the executive branch is to *execute* the law, but starting in the seventies a bunch of Republicans decided it really means that Nixon should've been able to do whatever he wanted.
Many countries conduct their elections in a centralized manner. For example, India has an Election Commission, an appointed body with three Commissioners, who conduct all national, state and local elections.
That democracy persists depends upon people and their willingness to fight for their rights. It does not depend upon some procedure.
Democracy depends on the *appearance* of legitimacy, even when nothing crooked is actually happening, it has to look trustworthy. People trust their votes being counted by a lady everyone in the county has known for decades and who they watched play high school basketball and went to her flower shop etc, they know she's not part of a conspiracy to rig anything and that she'd see the evidence if anyone tried. 1000 people like her all over the country are a bulwark against widespread fraud. If you had a federal election conducted apart from local ones and overseen by bureaucrats in DC who went to Ivy League schools and have never set foot outside the Acela corridor, it's not only much easier to have a sham election it also looks like a sham election even if it weren't. Having the information about an election distributed among numerous low-level officials who are in most cases only trivially partisan is much safer and more democratic. That Indian election commission you mentioned is being accused of not turning over voter roll data, which could be a credible accusation when a central group controls everything but which could rarely be significant here when that data is spread among 1000s of ordinary local people.
Democracy IS a procedure for making the winner of a power contest feel sufficiently legitimate so that people continue to obey the law.
>People trust their votes being counted by a lady everyone in the county has known for decades and who they watched play high school basketball and went to her flower shop etc, they know she's not part of a conspiracy to rig anything and that she'd see the evidence if anyone tried. 1000 people like her all over the country are a bulwark against widespread fraud
If the whole world was an L M Montgomery novel, sure. In a country where most of the population lives in big, anonymous cities, social trust is declining, large numbers of people don't even know their literal next-door-neighbours very well, and extremist rhetoric about the other side is normalised, I'm afraid "Just let charming old florist ladies run things" isn't a serious proposal.
Thanks for the comment about the bureaucracy. Vis a vis Scott's essay, it's good to bear in mind the fact that bureaucratic continuity across administrations is a relatively recent innovation. For about half the country's history, the spoils system resulted in a mostly wholesale replacement of the bureaucracy with each election. By Scott's reasoning, the US was not "properly" democratic during that time.
I, too, wonder what Scott makes of the Spoils System.
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!
> 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)
You might find it useful to think of it that way, but Kelly doesn't have any concerns other than maximizing EV.
That's... Just not correct, unless you are thinking of some nonstandard definition of EV.
The Kelly Criterion is about bet sizing to help make sure you don't end up being massively in the green on a vanishingly small fraction of probability mass, and bust the rest of the time. If all you want is to maximize EV, you go all-in on any bet that is +EV, no matter how small your edge is.
Where did you get your ideas?
Here, I'll quote from wikipedia:
> In probability theory, the Kelly criterion (or Kelly strategy or Kelly bet) is a formula for sizing a sequence of bets by maximizing the long-term expected value of the logarithm of wealth, which is equivalent to maximizing the long-term expected geometric growth rate.
It's just a generalization from calculating the expected value of making one bet to the expected value of making the same bet an arbitrary number of times in a row. Note that where your strategy is constrained to "choose a fixed value x, and then repeatedly bet x% of your holdings on a bet that will win with probability p", choosing 100 for x will guarantee an expected value (of your wealth) of zero as long as p is less than 1. So this:
> If all you want is to maximize EV, you go all-in on any bet that is +EV, no matter how small your edge is.
is pure crackpottery.
Kelly assumes that you can make your bet as many times as you want, one after the other. And it maximizes the expected value of doing so as a function of time (where time is measured in number of bets placed).
If that assumption doesn't hold, then you do indeed maximize your EV by going all-in on a one-time-only bet.
But if it does hold, you don't.
Hi, yes, I saw the Wikipedia quote you shared, and I'm pretty sure it underscores my claim?
Kelly maximizes the expected value of log wealth — not linear wealth. This is important, and it's the whole point of the criterion. It trades off some raw expected return in order to avoid ruin and maximize long-term geometric growth.
So when I said “unless you're using a nonstandard definition of EV,” I was referring exactly to that. “EV” usually means expected linear return, and under that definition, Kelly explicitly does not maximize EV — it plays smaller to protect against downside volatility.
And yeah, if you're only trying to maximize linear EV on a one-off bet, going all-in on any +EV bet is technically correct (even if reckless). It's also technically correct to do twice, three times, and so on. No matter how many times you do it, the math still shows your expected value going up. Sure, your probability of having a nonzero account value is tiny, but the EV calculation still multiplies out to a very large number, even in the limit.
Kelly avoids such foolish bets because it's optimizing something else entirely.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but do refrain from calling it crackpottery.
The Narrow Corridor AKA "The Birth Canal of Liberty" https://x.com/pseudoerasmus/status/1179746491247874049 :)
> 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.
Because people don't feel particularly free these days, I'd imagine, and it's questionable whether they even want to be. Mostly, they fear and hate their internal enemies, and since freedom goes both ways, it's a tough call whether your allies being more free cancels out improving your enemies' freedom.
I think that's right. It worries me a lot.
Yeah, and it's a problem that liberalism isn't equipped to solve, pretty much by design. "Freedom" is a meta-value, but people also need to loosely agree on object-level values for there to be a coherent society, and I'm not sure whether this is even possible if your post-modernity is diverse enough...
I think freedom as a theoretical concept is maybe less important to folks? Because while America is in theory supposed to be a "free" society, there are certainly a lot of constraints folks feel in their day to day life, in terms of harsh economic realities, job prospects, etc.
Yes/No?
"Free" means you are free to make your own choices. It doesn't mean that they will be easy or that you will necessarily have good options to choose from.
True, to an extent. But can you really call a choice "free" if, for example, it's between two options that are both not that great? In choices where there truly are no constraints, then of course you could call that free.
Sadly they became right-coded and unfashionable. You talk about "freedom" these days and people think about "freedom fries".
> 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.
You're not arguing with what they said. They're saying what makes supermajority rule checks democratic. You're talking about the propriety, the "principled reasons" to not allow unchecked democracy. Remember, Scott Alexander is explicitly arguing that it's undemocratic to democratically allow threats to democracy, not merely that it's bad for some other reason we value. He starts the article disavowing the liberalism arguments. That's what we're commenting on. The person you're replying to could completely agree with you and disagree that it's democracy we're defending.
The first half of my argument is technical, that their claim that "because it is our system" is incorrect.
The second half of my argument is more philosophical, and here I challenge a central claim of the parent author, that:
> If there are political possibilities that aren't allowed no matter how decisively the public wants them, how can it be democracy?
In particular, I argue that "decisively" is not a self-evident term. Leaving aside all other arguments for now, the parent poster is implicitly assuming that an instant's consensus ought to be sufficient to enact difficult-to-revoke, long-term changes, and anything less is not "democracy."
Instead, I think that inertia is a flexible and important aspect of a democratic system, although I also do not think it is easily constrained from first principles. A notionally democratic system that can only become 10% less democratic per year is still arguably "democracy" per the parent poster's definition, since a popular consensus sustained for a sufficiently long term could roll back the entire system.
We don't need liberalism to sustain this argument, just a time-fuzzy definition of 'decisively' or 'want'.
TL;DR: "Are you sure? Okay/Cancel/Retry" is not undemocratic.
I see what you mean now. I don't think you're right though. I think this can only be workable if democracy is meant as something other than fuzzier notions of general will or popular sovereignty, like the specific mechanisms of synchronous polling most associated with democracy, in which case you'd be right by definition only applied to voting rights issues.
In either case, I don't see why inertia is important to democracy *for democratic reasons*. You're saying that synchronicity isn't important, but think about why we have limits to when one can vote for an upcoming initiative. If you're trying to proxy aggregate preferences without doing it simultaneously, you're introducing another kind of noise into the data. There are strong democratic reasons for the polling rate to be fast and the polling period to be narrow, ones both practical and consistent with the theories behind democratic governance, largely identical to the reasons you want synchronicity in general on issues of polling data. I think that's why inertia is typically a small L liberal argument; fast change means reactionary, destabilizing, shortsighted changes that affect individual liberties, including the prerequisites of the right to vote, but not the right to vote itself, insofar as you can democratically adjust the procedures without outright changing suffrage.
This is not entirely a hypothetical scenario: the Republican Party had more than a 2/3 majority in both houses of Congress from 1865 through the beginning of 1871. The 1864 elections took place during the Civil War when most Confederate states didn't elect anyone to the US Congress for obvious reasons, while Republicans swept most of the elections in the North and West, and the next two elections took place during Reconstruction.
This supermajority did make heavy use of their ability to override most procedural checks. The country is very fortunate that they mostly used this power to make the system freer and more democratic in the long term (as the voters who elected them likely mostly intended) rather than less.
> 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.
That doesn't get you anywhere close to unlimited power. Kings exercising their divine right still have to worry about what they can and can't get away with.
A friend of mine once repeated to me the wisdom, an important part of the modern Chinese educational system, that the imperial system was bad because the power of the emperor was unrestrained.
I mentioned to her that the empress Cixi had issued a decree banning the practice of footbinding, and she confirmed that this decree had been issued but that it had had no effect.
I don't think she took my point about "unrestrained" power, though.
"You can rewrite the constitution to make yourself president for life. "
No. 2/3 of Congress is not enough, the amendment has to be ratified by the states to be valid.
The US system does have other deep inherent flaws, for example the president can instruct his followers to kill political opposition and then pardon them.
Why have you written this as a response to my comment?
> The US system does have other deep inherent flaws, for example the president can instruct his followers to kill political opposition and then pardon them.
That's not a flaw; if people are willing and able to kill the political opposition, they will not face repercussions regardless of other circumstances.
>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.
The problem being, of course, that this is the one and only decision that you can't, even in principle, undo democratically, which does at least make it a special case rather than a natural consequence of democracy. Non-democratic forms of modern government also don't have, on average, the best track record in just about any metric you care to name, so I'm not sure what is even the point of locking yourself out of the house on purpose.
I guess the bottom line is, democracy can be (and should be able to be) dismantled, but it should not be THIS easy. Get 67% people and now we talk. By the way, if we replace all the "populace" in this article with "51% populace", it now sounds like lots of people do still want democracy and it should still be preserved.
It really doesn't matter whether you think it should be easy or not. All a new state needs to justify its existence is a monopoly on violence and a majority support of men. At that point, the law of the old state is entirely worthless. Democracy's true purpose is to placate the majority enough to stop this from happening.
Well, the monopoly of violence certainly can't be hold by 51% of people, so the 49% of people should have lots of leverage. In this case, "democracy" is a lot more tyrannical than normal law of nature instead.
> the 49% of people should have lots of leverage
In a vacuum, sure. In practice, certain groups have more resources, ambition, and capabilities. With a numbers advantage on top, there really isn't much the minority can do. A great example, of course, is the difference between the sexes. Why do you think practically every society in history is patriarchial?
> In this case, "democracy" is a lot more tyrannical than normal law of nature instead.
Nothing exists outside of nature, therefore whatever happens is by definition natural. Not to mention that "tyranny" is far more commonly observed in human history than the alternative...
> Well, the monopoly of violence certainly can't be hold by 51% of people
Why not? Ordinarily it would be held by a much smaller group than that.
A party winning 2/3rds and (3/5th states) does not grant any one person absolute power. You may think all the GOP are toadies but they actually have a difficult time passing bills because different reps want different things. So even the hypothetical, unlikely landslide victory doesnt achieve that amount of absolute power.
I don't think they are all toadies, just the vast majority of them
The system of elections itself presumes limited powers. The system depends upon the loser peaceably accepting his loss. And why should the loser do so? Because the elections are not meant to change the system in fundamental ways.
For instance, elections are not meant to change the country to a communist system.
So, it depends upon loss/gain calculus for the loser. If the loser stands to lose a great deal, he might decide not to peaceably accept the results of the elections.
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.
I’m not sure what the point of ensuring that there are future elections is if the election that *just happened* is ignored. Like, what higher principle are we trying to achieve here?
you may consider that people who vote for such a candidate should have known better. The issue is that there is no easy way back, even if the majority flips few months after. Examples are countless around the world. And in many cases, like China and Russia, leaders didn't say they will make sure they will stay forever when elected. They changed the rules afterwards
Okay, but once you’ve conceded that the people are too stupid to know what’s good for them, why keep-up the “democracy” facade? You have assumed-away the whole reason to have elections in the first place.
Even the most optimistic about democracy and the people's will, have to concede that no single electoral mechanism can at one time capture everything about what the people want. So even if you think democracy and giving the people what they want is a paramount value, you'd still offer have multiple chances for them to express what they want, to account for measurement error from any single election.
I agree that there should be some level of safeguards to ensure that a slight victory in a single election doesn’t topple a previously-stable electoral regime, but the 1991 Algerian election was the first multiparty parliamentary election in the country’s history, and the Islamists were wiping the floor. Maybe the people really did want an Islamist theocracy?
The point is: "what the people want" isn't some unitary thing, even at one point in time, and certainly not at multiple times.
Was there some sense in which what the people wanted was an islamist theocracy? Yes of course. Is "an anti Democratic party won 48% of the vote" such a good measure of what the people want that you'd be 100% confident that by establishing an Islamic theocracy you'd be giving the people what they want? I think obviously not.
The trouble is, what the people want is not a perfectly coherent singular thing, and even if it were, no political system would be perfect at measuring it. So, there will always be some tension between "giving the people what they want as best we can measure it right now", and "preserving a system that will continue to respond to what the people want"--the fact that sometimes you'll prioritize the second doesn't mean you've given up on giving the people what they want, it means that different versions of what that means are in conflict and for various reasons you've chosen the second.
Note, I don't claim it's always clear how to reconcile these tensions; I think this problem is roughly isomorphic to the alignment problem, so I think we just sometimes face hard choices. But I don't think it's right to interpret this as "assuming away the reason to have elections"--we face a difficult problem in how to best act on those reasons, and that's completely different.
What other option do you have? Is there a smarter population you can replace the current one with?
Of course. It's possible to disenfranchise some categories of voters in principle, but in practice this seems to be a non-starter these days.
Reminds me of a Terry Pratchett quote from Mort:
“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
“Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.”
Democracy means letting Nobby vote!
Pretty sure no one in FIS ever actually said that. Their enemies said it about them -- it was a pithy summary of not-entirely-unreasonable fears -- but as far as I'm aware, FIS didn't say there'd never be another election.
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.
💯
And what's wrong with that? Who would willing let themselves get whipped?
I feel like you've missed the point of the OP and also the Bill of Rights.
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.
But that also shows that the idea of "democracy" itself is malleable - it's a historical contingency that one's vote is considered an individual and private thing, rather than communal and public. Thus, we should be concerned about attempts to lock in the meaning of "democracy" beyond the most minimal.
Buying votes doesn't seem nearly as bad as stealing them, which is the actual threat against democracy.
> "Fair and free" elections where one's vote is a considered but fundamentally private choice, made free of coercion, is a modern phenomenon.
The Athenians were very serious about allowing for anonymous voting.
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.
People really need to understand that democracy is a system of compromise. It doesn't matter how many checks and balances you have against "tyranny of the majority", because if you piss off the majority enough, they'll simply seize power by force. Democracy is only stable because the desires of the majority (of people with leverage) are respected. It's so simple that even beasts like hyenas understand it.
>He's already talked about running for a third term.
He also talked (at length) that the 2020 election was stolen, and yet slunk away when it turned out that nobody was particularly excited to "fight like hell" for him. That Trump will spout any random self-serving bullshit, then not follow through when it seems like too much work, is like the number one fact about him.
If by "slunk away", you mean "led a violent mob to attack the capitol" and "tried to get Pence to throw out the election results" then sure.
Back in 2020, I thought he would slink away. I thought people were being alarmist about Trump. I have been proven wrong time and time again. I've lost count by now of how many times even the alarmists turned out to be less bad than reality.
After all of that failed, yes. I expect that he'll ineffectually try some bullshit this time around as well, it'll also fail, and he'll slink away once again.
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.
There is one single court charged with the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution: it is the Supreme Court of the United States.
As for "changing the meaning of the Constitution" - you are engaging in the same nonsense that has been conducted over disagreements over US law since the beginning: choosing to interpret the literal words of the Constitution in the way desired rather than the layers of practice and precedent built upon it.
In point of fact: the definition of citizen, and the process for becoming one, has changed multiple times over the years - and thus the presumption that the literal text of the Constitution is actual law, is nonsense.
I was under the impression that judicial review was NOT a part of British law.
But to more directly address your point: can a state bring suit against the federal government?
I don't know why you think judicial review is not part of British law - they have courts, after all.
The main difference between the basis of British law, and American law, is that British courts derive their authority from the Monarch whereas American law derives its authority from the Constitution. Precedent cases are built upon these respective bedrock foundations.
And yes, states sue the federal government all the time. And vice versa.
... were you aware that "judicial review", in American law, is the power to determine if a LAW ITSELF is illegal? As opposed to British law, which mostly is limited to the procedural question of "was the law followed"?
I realize that not everyone has the good fortune to be American, so I apologize for my USA-centric framing, but... this is important!
The issue is not the fact or existence of judicial review.
If you re-read my original comment carefully; there is no issue stated with judicial review as a practice.
The problem is the abuse of the scope of suspension of applicable laws during said review.
The normal practice is that only the specific participants in the case are exempted while said laws are under review.
The abuse is the extension of this to affect the entire federal government's ability to act - ie on everyone, everywhere.
This is an exceedingly stupid precedent to set because it means judges of any stripe can now veto federal government actions across the entire nation.
I think you are very confused about judges ruling something as being "as applied" (for which your statement DOES hold true; that applies to the particular parties), vs a judge ruling something "facially invalid", which means that (they find) the law itself is unconstitutional.
Even at the state level, if a trial judge finds a law contrary to the state's constitution, they apply a statewide injunction against the unconstitutional law being enforced. This does indeed happen at the federal level as well, but note that it is PRECISELY because of judicial review in both cases. If the law itself is illegal, then allowing it "to act on everyone, everywhere" would be unjust. States might have different appeals processes beyond that point, but that's a different matter.
For a specific example, did you think that the Texas judge who issued an injunction nationwide blocking it... was that affecting the federal government's ability to act?
As a corollary, have you read the Federalist Paper #78?
I think you are confused in thinking that every judge is the arbiter of the Constitution.
Among other things, the vast majority of judges are empowered to rule over the laws of the land, not the Constitutional basis (or lack thereof) of same.
As for your examples: it is quite clear you don't know anything of what you speak of. A ruling on an election, for example, concerning the counting of mail in ballots would obviously affect all paper ballots but would not affect in person voting. The equivalent of what is happening now though, is one or a handful of people objecting to paper ballots - preventing anyone else from receiving the same.
And yes, that Texas ruling is the exact same bullshit; the court is infamous for its pro-corporate nonsense much as DC and NY and CA courts are infamous for other types of abuse. It is precisely this type of bad precedent which is going to result in all manner of unanticipated consequences - all of which are bad.
The point being: there are literally centuries of precedent in behavior and process for escalating Constitutionality questions...oh but the Supreme Court is controlled by conservatives, these days...
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)."
Totally agree with the point about language in general (relevant to King Lear, I'm a proponent of John Mcwhorter's arguments about translating Shakespeare into Contemporary English)
For what it's worth, 'liberal' in its other 'archaic' meaning is still going pretty strong in much of the rest of the English speaking world, notably in Australia the major right-wing/nationalist leaning party are called the 'Liberal Party'. I think the more American definition is steadily becoming more prominent though.
See response below
I see smart people using the word liberal in its true sense (and not the US partisan politics sense I'm assuming you are alluding to) all the time. Their audience understands them without any difficulty. I doubt many people came to this essay unprepared to understand the sense Scott is using.
(On an somewhat related point, I do wish one side of US politics hadn't conceded the term. I wish conservatives would reclaim it. I also wish the conservative movement would talk more about liberalism as an ideal. This might be entirely in my head, but I feel like I even hear the word "freedom" used less. The recent rhetoric by Pam Bondi invoking a concept of "hate speech" to justify silencing people makes me legitimately sad. I see conservatives weakening on freedom of religion as well...)
I thank both of you and find it some comfort. Even here in well-educated New Hampshire I do not hear the term used in anything but the popular sense. Only online in a few communities do I hear it otherwise unless "classical" precedes it. I am 72. I should ask my children what their experience is.
>"Silly" not longer means blessed. Shakespeare used "generous" to mean noble, which is a related concept but leads one astray. (King Lear, BTW)
Samuel Pepys in his diaries called one of his serving-maids "a most admirable slut" because she was good at cleaning things.
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.
In that case Orban's Hungary is about to show it's a democracy, and South Africa got somewhat close in the last election, while the US has been demonstrably democratic in the past 3 Presidential elections.
Singapore is an odd case though. The People's Action Party totally could lose an election, they just... don't. Although they have made some sketchy moves at various times in history to ensure they remain in power, these moves never seem to have actually been necessary.
Sometimes I think of it like a company board. Company boards are elected by votes of shareholders. But these elections are rarely seriously contested. If you went to a company AGM and found that elections were seriously contested between two factions of board members seeking control of the company and promising to move it in two very different directions then you'd say "this company is extremely poorly run, and probably a terrible investment".
I like to think of Singapore as midgar from ff7, basically a company rules the country
Singapore is odd in that it's well-governed. It's not that odd in not having genuinely competitive elections
I've heard "two peaceful exchanges of power" as a reasonable metric
Russia's elections are rigged though. I suspect Belarus too although I haven't checked.
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".
Seconded! You captured my thoughts and expressed them more succinctly than I would've.
Agreed very strongly. Democracy without people being able to get what they want is a charade, even if what they want 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.
Wasting money isn't illegal, so all to that legal apparatus is completely useless against it. In our government you don't get to steal money out of the till, but you can hire rooms full of useless bureaucrats doing useless work that doesn't need to need done. You can use decades old technology that requires an army of people to operate and never upgrade it. The inspector general can't do a damn thing about it. This is 2025. There should be no such job as "air traffic controller." And yet we have 14,000 of them.
> 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.
I don't really understand how you don't know control of the media is a powerful tool in running a country. Any tinpot general planning a coup knows that TV and radio stations are one of the main things you need to gain control of to be successful. Do you think the CCP maintains an iron grip on Chinese media just to protect their egos?
The question was for specifics as to *how* the Democrats are relying on the media to run the country.
If friendly media are unconstitutional, then everything is unconstitutional, even graffiti and booing.
Also, Fox is the most successful news network and nobody has seriously suggested shutting it down by force, even though it’s solidly pro-GOP and always has been.
Relatedly: The concern against an undemocratic or illiberal tyrannical power in the U.S. (an Article 2 executive), is Congress (Article 1). Impeachment is the fundamental check. Surprised the words impeach and Congress aren't coming up in Scott's treatment. Also, although an NGO is an interesting possible party is his lawsuit progression, the directly aggrieved party who should have standing would be the candidates being obstructed in the ballot stuffing. The NGO may not have standing. Adversarial justice system has the aggrieved as the primary check. All Scott's "checks" are interesting, but way down a ladder of priorities in this system.
Congress is itself undemocratic. It is elected, to a first order of approximation, by dirt rather than people. Gerrymandered dirt at that.
I thought Scott made the case pretty well that even though the media and NGOs don't have constitutional authority, they're a necessary part of the democratic ecosystem -- which is why the US Constitution explicitly protects freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and assures equal protection of law to people who've organized to promote ideas the government doesn't like.
Some "attacks" on those non-governmental institutions are thus unconstitutional. Others are legal but unhealthy, like broad attacks from the president on "the media" as enemies of the people.
Other "attacks" are good, like calling out media bias (whether it comes from America's most popular media company, https://deadline.com/2025/07/cable-news-ratings-july-1236473642/, or from ailing broadcast companies) or ending government-NGO partnerships in provision of public services when the NGO isn't performing well. I agree with you that it's important to keep up that distinction, and not treat any criticism of media or NGOs as if it's antidemocratic or illiberal.
Here's the thing--
The Freedom of the Press clause *doesn't protect the media as such*. Meaning it's not about the capital-P Press (the media establishment). It's the counterpart of the speech clause, protecting the right of all people to publish information in non-spoken formats. The "Media" isn't special. And I'd be hard-pressed to say that it's anything other than a house press organ for one of the parties at this point (which party depends on which media outlet you're looking at).
NGOs have *zero* status in the constitutional order beyond any other group of people. And the idea that they are some important part that needs/deserves funding is abhorrent--he who pays the piper calls the tune. As soon as you take government money, you've accepted their strings and are no longer independent.
The *only* real backstop to the American system is the American people themselves. "Democracy" will last in the US as long as the bulk of the people continue to fight for it and demand it, and will end no sooner than they cease to do so, whether out of apathy or any other reason. It may persist a bit longer, but it won't end as long as enough people care enough to fight for it (possibly literally).
The freedom of the press clause equally protects partisan press organs and fiercely independent dissident media, big conglomerates and individual bloggers. We agree that it's not meant to privilege The Media Establishment, but nor is it meant to exclude them (on the grounds of size or polarization or inaccuracy or whatever else you disapprove of). And one of the features of an establishment is that it gets very skilled at making the most of generally available rights and privileges.
An NGO, precisely as an organized "group of people," absolutely has status in the constitutional order. The freedom of association is a key outworking of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, as the Supreme Court decisively held in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAACP_v._Alabama.
You and I (and I think most Americans of any party) agree that NGOs don't have a *governing* status or any right to government funds. But Scott's examples of the value of NGOs to democracy (for example, their readiness to take the government to court when the government violates the constitution) have nothing to do with state funding of NGOs -- and everything to do with the kind of organized attempts by citizens to redress wrongs that the First Amendment explicitly protects.
We agree that democracy relies on American citizens and that neither the press nor advocacy groups will keep democracy alive if voters stop caring about it. But as long as we do care, media institutions and organized advocacy groups can be helpful tools. The diversity of current dysfunctions in those areas don't mean they're worthless or irrelevant to democratic health.
I find that the current media institutions and organized advocacy groups actually do more to *harm* matters than help. And I'm including *all* of them across the political spectrum(s). In large part because they get co-opted basically instantly.
I'd much prefer to empower (and cease putting a thumb on the scale against) individuals and small, mostly ad-hoc groups. Reduce the scope of government so it's more easily watched over. Raise more bright-line rules constraining government power and private rights of action so that it doesn't take an NGO with a big budget to make the suits.
I want to be able to gather with a few dozen of my fellows and make a difference at the local/local+ level (county/city). I want to be able to gather with a few dozen such groups across the country and make a meaningful difference at the state or national level. Not have to entrust money to NGOs and media organizations that have incentives and beliefs *at best* orthogonal to what I want, and often directly opposed.
I'd prefer if government had a hard-line separation of media and state--no media or NGO can receive government funds for anything other than direct services rendered (that the government could pay its own people for legally) and no even slightly discretionary license or tax approval is needed. Yes, this means getting rid of most of the FCC and IRS. GOOD.
This would just disempower ordinary citizens unless you also somehow keep business interests from lobbying. You need people working full-time in DC to have any influence.
That's entirely the problem, that in the current system you need full time lobbying.
I want a system decentralized enough where the people that matter to your life 99% of the time are right near by. Where the feds are a sleepy branch not worth lobbying unless you're into foreign policy, and even then the upside is limited.
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?
Also, hasn't Scott exposed the media as being full of hack-job propagandists? There is simply zero incentive for them to actually report the unvarnished truth. I don't know why he has any faith in them to "inform" the populace...
Not particularly; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bounded-distrust
Have we been reading the same blog?
The blog that only exists because the New York Times doxxed and smeared him? Yes.
>I don't know why he has any faith in them to "inform" the populace
Because at heart and above all else, Scott is a good liberal-progressive, and prefers the liars that would dox him over the alternatives.
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.
> There is a longstanding tradition of busts of chief justices appearing in the Grand Entrance Hall
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/chief-justice-says-he-does-not-know-who-donated-bust-displayed-in-supreme-court
> 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 think that Scott's politics posts are still much better than average - e.g. during the USAID debacle I only read here that PEPFAR got crippled, while the MSM mostly cared about their own pork being curtailed. Scott also at least tries to make principled arguments, whereas pretty much everybody else have long given up all pretenses.
I agree mostly, but it is the not-directly-politics-posts Scott excels even more. And about PEPFAR Scott got so worked up, he even attacked Tyler Cowen over an NGO-critical post. Also not much of an update on PEPFAR - if one starts to engage in politics, it is never ending. https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/an-update-on-pepfar-reauthorization/#:~:text=PEPFAR%20is%20a%20permanent%20part,2025%2C%20the%20current%20fiscal%20year.
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.
The federalists were trying to create a central government within a much more decentralized system, not optimize elections. There were no political parties then, and in fact they mistakenly believed that a large republic could not give rise to political factions. Hence the odd initial rule that the Vice President was the runner-up in a Presidential election.
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, ...
1-Those 51 intel chiefs who signed that letter lied, by their own admission.
https://www.newsweek.com/biden-team-sparked-effort-kill-hunter-laptop-story-ex-cia-boss-1795950
2-This is your most recent blog post:
https://thekoopaking.substack.com/p/charlie-kirk-obviously-deserved-to
"Charlie Kirk Obviously Deserved To Die"
You're fortunate that you're anonymous. No further communication with someone that writes such filth.
>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, ...
Which makes me appreciate the importance of freedom of the press. The fact that we know about what happened, and that a significant portion of citizens want to gut the Deep State as a result, is all thanks to that freedom.
Freedom of the press is indeed essential to democracy. Thank God that a few papers in msm remain real houses of journalism.
the mainstream American press is owned by a small number of billionaires who are increasingly self-censoring to placate the regime, and independent media is regularly subjected to censorship-by-algorithm on every major platform (which billionaires also own)
Increasingly?
The Dems and the woke left have had almost all of msm in their back pocket for years. Very few major players are still real journalists - possibly WSJ, ...
those same outlets ran nonstop partisan advocacy to crush Sanders, and they're certainly bending the knee to Trump now...
Besides, Democrats in their current incarnation are part of the regime, not a real opposition force
Sanders was an anomaly.
Dems are not GOP.
Most of msm crapped on Trump in his first term, during Biden's four years, and now continue against Trump. Get real.
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.
Interesting post. I'm sure that happened in the Conservative Cinematic Universe and that's why Republicans no longer support rule of law.
Unfortunately those who don't watch the movies were caught by surprise.
We live in the same universe, and comments like this just make it worse.
I don't know what the point is of arguing with someone who claims to live in a different universe than me. Biden's attempt to cover up the Post's story on behalf of his son (and his own election prospects) was an abuse of power straight out of a dystopian novel. I'm happy the truth was eventually uncovered even if it didn't lead to impeachment.
Biden's team contacted Twitter to tell them to take down the story. He was the likeliest President for the next term and used that to throw his weight around, plus he had friends in the right places. He campaigned against false information on social media and called the (true) laptop story false information. Biden (or his autopen) signed mass pardons before he left to prevent prosecutions. Otherwise Hunter would be in a much worse place.
>During the 2016 and 2024 elections Democrats were very blatant about using their political power to directly harm their political opponent
What events did you have in mind with this statement? I assume you're not referring to how the DNC treated Bernie Sanders?
Sanders didn't campaign in 2024 as far as I know. I'm more referring to the actions taken against Trump. For instance, removing his name from primary ballots to make it harder to elect him. They wanted to do the same in the general but the Supreme Court unanimously ruled what they did was illegal. They did a huge amount of Jawboning. Plus the barrage of lawsuits to distract him while he should've been campaigning.
Thanks, I think I see where you're coming from.
As for the primary ballots, I think there was a genuine question about whether the events of Jan 6th were disqualifying. AFAIK the Supreme Court only ruled that states can't enforce the insurrection clause; they did not say that Trump was not guilty of insurrection. Agree it's unfair that one has to fight through the courts at the last minute to get a resolution (I wish laws were written precisely and we didn't have to ask the Supreme Court to interpret everything), but this is the system we have and it's not clear to me that it was abused.
As for the court cases against him, Trump's legal troubles are all his own fault for bad behavior, and I don't think it's fair to blame politics for this, even though I acknowledge politics surely had some role in the decision to prosecute the NY case.
I appreciate your take on these as well. I don't think you can reduce a government to a precise set of rules though. The US Government (in theory) gets its legitimacy from the people, and if POTUS removes all his opponents from the ballot I don't think pointing to the rules make it legitimate. It's certainly not democratic. The 2024 election was really bad as far as fairness goes, which I think caused many people to vote against the incumbent.
As far as the rules matter though, and they do matter a lot, Democrats weren't a stickler for them. In Maine they took Trump off the ballot by unilateral decision of one person, which is a very obvious violation of his due process. Everyone in the system (in theory!) has a duty to the constitution, and SCOTUS will never have the capacity to interpret every situation. Nor do they have the authority to correct every wrong.
he didn't campaign because the party made it very clear that they would not tolerate an opposition candidate, hence no politicians running against an incumbent whose favorables were so poor he didn't make it to election day. Biden's opponents being reduced to voting "uncommitted" was some real authoritarian regime shit.
(And it's worth noting that of the three candidates to run anyway, one has openly called the 2024 'primary' unfair and another is now a Republican cabinet minister; AFAIK Dean Phillips is the only one of the three to continue to uphold the charade)
and many states were also denied the chance to vote in 2020, because of the pandemic, and 2016 saw such gems as debate questions leaked in advance to one candidate but not the other and "superdelegates"...
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.
It's crazy talk? The current President has already tried to blatantly steal one election already.
That’s crazy talk.
And even if it weren’t, to go from there to the fear that the country would sit still for a President preventing the next election four years later…well, it’s crazy talk.
Kennedy stole the election against Nixon “fair and square” and it did not undermine our Constitution.
The only recent President who could plausibly be accused of *actually* stealing an election is Biden, but we survived that.
Have you forgotten the 2000 election?
No, of course not. Is there reason to believe Bush somehow coerced the Supreme Court? How? He wasn’t even President at the time. Or did you have in mind some other chicanery?
Neither was Biden president in the 2020 election. Or are you somehow arguing that Trump helped him?
My recollection is that his opponent became President.
My recollection is that happened because, contrary to his delusions at the time, Congress was not completely full of his cronies. And even then his supporters tried to physically coerce them
I don't think we're at risk of never having another election. Even Russia still holds an election every term, and in ye olde USSR voting was essentially compulsory. What we are risking is never having another election that *matters*.
Well, (a) that's not the phrasing Scott used, and (b) what do you foresee as a mechanism by which a President can cause that to happen? Be serious here.
There are a lot of people (though I'm not one of them) who consider the 2016 election the first one in decades that "mattered" because it was the first time it was won by someone who wasn't anointed by the elites.
Well, a President could for example have a chat with the media companies, telling them, "You can do whatever you want as long as you toe my party line, otherwise my administration will choke you out of any profits, if not shut you down altogether. Speaking of which, here's a list of people I want fired." Or he could have a chat with all the major law firms: "Represent any lawsuits against me and I will have you shut down". Or he could deploy the military to major cities whose mayors are opposed tom his policies, quashing any protests along the way. Or he could shut down government watchdog agencies and gut others, making it clear that personal loyalty is any civil servant's only saving grace. Speaking of which, that applies to election monitoring as well; after all, the people love him, so any vote against him is likely to be fraud, right ?
Of course none of these moves will be as effective as simply arresting his political opponents or having them thrown out of windows -- but they don't have to be. As long as his electoral victory (and the next one, and the one after that) is inevitable or close to it, he can tolerate some amount of dissent.
Well, anything’s possible in the fullness of time. The first of these didn’t help Biden. The military has been mostly apolitical for a century or more except when it conspired against Trump.
It’s so funny that we have switched sides here. You think there’s no way a superintelligent AI could take over because people are all too diverse and uncontrollable, but you think a mere human could order the army to interfere with elections and get away either it.
I don’t have a clear picture of how much of that was from Carter himself, who was pretty ineffectual, but I’ll grant you that, too, if you like. It’s still a very far cry from deploying the army to install a dictator in the White House.
I never said that a smart human or an AI, could not become a dictator in principle (though of course no present-day LLM could do so). Humans become dictators all the time. What I did say is that a superintelligent AI is unlikely to become supreme overlord of the entire world by mind-controlling the populace, and indeed to date no human had ever come close.
That said, are you disputing (somehow) that humans can become dictators ? If not (I hope), then can you explain how the playbook of e.g. Putin, Lenin, Kim Jong Il, Mao, or any other human dictator, differs substantially from my playbook ? They were not born supreme dictators, you know. Granted, many dictators seized power by conquest right from the get-go, but let's set those aside for now.
No, of course not. That would be stupid. And your playbook is certainly plausible. But not here.
It’s also sort of darkly humorous how much this kind of discussion of how a corrupt President could become a dictator sounds like the fever dreams of those fringe types who think this already happened: the Uniparty, the Cathedral, Davos, etc.
I'll ask you the same question as before: do you believe that e.g. Putin is a dictator ? Do you believe that he grabbed power in a (mostly) bloodless fashion ? How did he do that, in your view ?
I don't think you're remotely at risk of that either.
Here's what I think you reasonably _can_ worry about. You can worry about an escalating tit-for-tat between the remaining non-partisan institutions of the US become partisan, with the net result of making things worse.
Trump didn't invent this of course, neither did Biden, nor anyone in recent history. The Supreme Court, probably the most important institution to keep non-partisan, has been openly partisan for at least a century.
I've repeatedly thought that people were being alarmist about Trump, only to be proved wrong time and time again. At some point you have to update in response to evidence.
I think Trump will probably leave office in 2029, but it's not going to be for a lack of trying. Every day brings new news of his pushes for dictatorship, with only occasional opposition from Republicans. The country will probably survive the next three years, but in significantly worse shape. It might take generations to get back to the system of rule of law and democracy that we had.
>I think Trump will probably leave office in 2029, but it's not going to be for a lack of trying.
I'm a fan of the theory that Trump's main motivation was Obama's "mic drop" comment at the Correspondent's Dinner (which, notably and IMO correctly, Trump refuses to attend). As such, I think he will go quietly because he gets to go out a winner. Especially if there's some event where he can look like a winner near the end of the term and pass the torch well.
If the Nobel committee would just give him a prize for doing nothing (cough cough, where'd I get that idea) he'd probably go ahead and retire to spend his twilight years riding high and playing golf.
I also think that absent COVID shenanigans, J6 wouldn't have happened, but I don't have much confidence whether Trump would've lost absent COVID, either.
> 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.
And impeachment. The bureaucrats have no valid authority other than that derived from the executive, and so the notion of an independent agency is an abomination in our constitutional order. One that's been accepted for a while, but still abhorrent.
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?
I'd postulate that it has, in fact, seized most of the actual power from the democratically elected side. Just not openly. And much of this whining about "our sacred democracy" is pushback against someone who was elected at least in substantial part to take power back from the unelected, unaccountable groups.
>unable to stop mass immigration despite it being an unpopular policy
Because it's not unpopular enough, and few people are single-issue voters. When the only parties/candidates willing to emphasize it in their agenda are roundly denounced by everybody else as "fascists", most normies get with the program.
Where "everybody else" is mostly the folks in power. Talk about authoritarian and anti-democracy--when every other party, no matter how opposed to each other, bands together and says "you can't say anything bad about immigration" (cf Germany, recently), that's not a sign that no one cares. It's a sign that the official organs have their party line and will enforce it regardless of what the people think or want.
Sure, but theirs isn't only the "hard" power, but also the "soft" one. As elites get increasingly crazy/out-of-touch it does deteriorate, but so far their grand multiculturalism ideal is still the default attitude of the "polite society".
Yes. Because the "institutions" in question (like Congress) do not have infinite power, they in themselves are responsible to other parties such as voters. If the president tries to cancel elections, Congress probably will have public support for impeaching and removing him over this. If the president does some normal policy election, Congress won't have the same support.
Electing a president is picking a guy to do a job, defined by law. If he’s acting outside of that role hes taking powers away from jobs other people voted on.
Im not gonna defend US-style presidential systems; they’re bad bc they encourage this kind of problem. But “he won the election he can do whatever he wants” is proposing a totally different kind of government.
I strongly disagree with the importance of the press as a check. They're more important as a threat vector. The checks by which the government operates are largely obscure anachronisms in the eyes of the public. There's practically two outlets that provide decent court coverage, for example, as most will flat out misrepresent the issues in a case, like making cases that involve abortion about abortion even when they're really about agency discretion. The NLRB could be completely off the rails in terms of favoring unions in every ruling right now and hardly anyone except labor lawyers and Matt Bruenig would know, and it's not clear they'd want anyone to know it if it was.
The press is a systemic threat here. Even the supposedly good journalists have no incentive to fix this issue, so the press is able to poison the well trivially easily and weaponize ignorance for their own political benefits, regardless of what the public would do otherwise. I think all social media did was make the threat model more transparent.
Social media should be considered part of the press for purposes of this discussion. Remove "freedom of the press" as a check on the system turning authoritarian, and the impact won't be limited to big news companies. The dysfunctions and biases of those companies are real, but that doesn't mean that democracy will be healthier if the public's sources of information grow even more limited.
I don't know if that's true in the context of Scott's argument. His argument puts a lot of weight on the fact finding apparatus the press in particular provides, insofar as it's a check on the presidency, rather than an argument about the role of speech in political discourse and the dissemination of ideas. Both in his argument and in general, freedom of speech vs press are distinguished with meaningful legal effect though, both in political theoretic arguments and in the constitution (and constitutional law as a consequence). I'm saying that privileging the latter comes at an expense greater than the former. It's not clear to me that special press considerations beyond free speech considerations are appropriate. They tend towards privileging firms where it may not be necessary, as can be the case with solo journalists like David Lat or Matt Taibbi.
Both freedom of speech and freedom of the press have an "expense" in terms of undesirable system dynamics, and it's not clear to me that the press one is greater than the speech one. I still support both.
Giving constitution-level recognition to the organized press privileges at least two things that go beyond speech rights: the right to maintain publication forums that are available to the mass public (so your free speech gets beyond a street corner) and the right to investigate public matters and share the results. Both of those strike me as important in a democracy for more or less the reasons Scott outlines.
I'd be happy with a jurisprudence that took protection of individual journalists as its guiding priority, but I think the net benefits would still mostly accrue to firms. There are efficiencies in starting an institution and "bundling" a lot of things people want (Wordle!) with the core journalistic practices that are constitutionally important. Investigations and publication both have costs, and while it's great that we've got more ways than ever for individuals to bear those costs with help from their audiences, organizing into a company is still the most reliable way to cover them.
Good thing the Supreme Court didn't give a stamp of approval to jawboning against social media (/s, of course; I'm referencing Murthy v. Missouri)
The core problem with the argument is one word of question begging: “independent”.
If the NGOs live off the government, the independent judges and journalists are selected by a process that favours conformist climbers and activists willing to trade off wealth for prestige; if the bureaucracy is basically the same social set and votes 90+% one party (and to top it all off has statutorily entirely one-sided mandates/risk-reward calculi – poster children: NRC and FDA); if the legislative bodies are a mix of puppets of their zealot staffers and ad copy readers for some lobby and cemented to their seats – then none of these alleged checks and balances have any salutary effect.
All of those things have held as of 2024.
That does nothing to prove that Caesarism is better per se, but as a starting point it’s necessary to accept that the theory of independent institutions and separated powers is void as far as its alleged purpose goes. So you end up with the blob critique, which as far as simple diagnoses about complex phenomena go is as plainly true as anything can ever be.
To restore such a system to a point where it even has the potential to provide the function that makes it worthwhile (it’s a very expensive, friction-inducing social technology after all) you’d have to do absolutely wild, out-of-overton things – completely separating any personnel and financial links between civil society organisations and government; sever the link between universities and government; introduce offset elections and term limits for all judicial posts, make journalism a blue-collar field again (that has kinda happened with social media, for better or worse); reduce the scope of regulation, but both add some actual teeth (e.g. anti-revolving-door laws, requirements that fines are always a > 1 multiple of estimated profit of the violation, more even-handed incentives than “prevent everything, lest anything ever happens”); have term limits + sortition + temporally offset negative voting for filtering obvious nuts + mandatory service if selected for the legislative and prohibit permanent legislative staffers;
No actually existing faction is remotely incentivised to run that program; and aside from that the continuous elections it would require would fatigue the citizenry almost immediately.
In the end, I think republics just don’t scale to whole continents. Distinctly small country stuff. Maybe the options are just: Be happy with the oligarchy (people aren’t) or with Caesar (people won’t be, if maybe less?).
Aside from this fundamental criticism the starting idea of “the real thing is the iterated thing” is a very insightful and important one. You just need an extremely far-sighted and virtuous population for playing everything as an infinite game, which is a lot of load to put on one “just”.
> Distinctly small country stuff.
This is an interesting point. Does the US not (classically) have this, in its state governments? This seems to support the classically federalist position.
Sure, but they're only a world power because of their union. Perhaps it's time for the founding of an American empire? The states can still be allowed some autonomy.
One might ask, are the states better run than the federal government? I would argue the U.S. government effectiveness is higher than most (but not all) states.
Democracy often spends long stretches in an equilibrium where it operates as rules-based rotation of power among social elites, and locks out changes stemming from lower classes (who contribute their votes without getting an option that corresponds to their values or interests). It's a social oligarchy even if the rule set is democratic.
During those periods it still works as a non-violent way of alternating power betwen elites --and that isn't nothing! The Americans who are talking themselves into the idea that political violence isn't that bad for the most part have no personal experience of countries where killing your enemies is the norm, and will I predict find the experience intolerable the more we make it a reality.
Regardless, the track record of Caesarism in solving the problem of social exclusion is laughably bad. Autocrats, even ones elevated by revolutionary movements, almost always come from social elites; whatever bones they throw to their footsoldiers, they consolidate an order where oligarchs continues to dominate, usually with fewer of the procedural freedoms that make that domination tolerable to voters in a democracy.
A democratic republic at least includes the institutions by which a revolt against elite "blobs" can take place without blood in the streets. Non-elites can mobilize to drive change, and repeatedly have, by voting in e.g. a Jackson or an Attlee. All human social orders so far have tended toward elite capture, and liberal democracy isn't immune...but it's the order where the kind of critique you're making here could most easily lead to actual change.
It certainly isn’t nothing, no. But political violence has long arrived in America, in periodic paroxysms of terrorism and state-sponsored rioting starting in the 1950s. What has been limiting it so far is that one side has largely refused to engage in it. That willingness to endure that asymmetry and the (mostly, correct) hope that it will get punished in the polls is obviously wearing thin.
What’s highly unclear is how much such Jacksonian Saturnalia can still do anyway. An interlocking system of institutions that evolved precisely to prevent such change would have to be broken in toto to make it work. That’s a moment of intense danger of total norm breakdown.
Attlee is something totally different. A fabian socialist is exactly the champion of the type of bureaucratic oligarchy that has disabled all pressure release valves that are supposed to make democracy work. “[Democracy] is the order where [popular discontent] could most easily lead to actual change” is begging the question again – I’m saying that the actually implemented “democracy” is exactly optimised to subvert that. Maybe it makes sense here to distinguish between democracy and Our Democracy™ which is, branding aside, just a very different system.
The thing that no friend of the sort of the ubiquitous left-acculturated lib bureaucratic oligarchy that’s (for the most part) still running the west, even in the US, seems to want to account for is that it underperfoms the talent it deploys incredibly in substance. Note e.g. Attlee’s NHS, which costs probably the most money you can spend to provision totally dysfunctional healthcare; but it’s basically the state religion over there. I think most people would live with an enormous amount of micromanaging technocracy if it could deliver the goods, it just can’t, anywhere, on any dimension.
Then again the tariff rollout was also a shambles.
The funny (not really) thing about American political violence is how utterly convinced both sides are that they've been righteously refusing to engage in it despite the other side indulging it. Read this for an alternate view of the asymmetry: https://theconversation.com/right-wing-extremist-violence-is-more-frequent-and-more-deadly-than-left-wing-violence-what-the-data-shows-265367 "We don't riot like your extremists do" meets "we shoot people way less than your extremists do."
The American paroxysms of the 1960s and '70s had a pretty extended pause before picking up again recently. No significant presidential assassination attempts between 1981 and 2024; a marked drop in domestic terror and rioting between the '70s and the '20s. People who shrug off the recent rise in political violence with "we've never really been free of it" are I think seriously underestimating the difference between the last few decades of US life and the 1970s, let alone the Years of Lead.
Everyone's frustrated with modern bureaucratic oligarchy, but most people still vote for what it offers anyway. The NHS is talismanically popular with Britons of all classes; the "state" part of its "state religion" role is downstream of that fundamental democratic popularity, not manufactured by an oligarchic elite. The promise of making it work better has so far appealed more than the idea of throwing off the shackles of bureaucracy.
And the US proves that the NHS isn't the most you can spend for totally dysfunctional healthcare: https://www.kff.org/global-health-policy/health-policy-101-international-comparison-of-health-systems/
If you're hungry for a radical alternative to the current elite consensus, Trump would be (at best) the old order's murderer, not a plausible builder of anything more effective. *Of course* his tariffs and DOGE cuts were a shambles; he thrives on the shambolic and unpredictable. The one major exception from his first term, Operation Warp Speed, happened when a crisis forced him to rely on the institutional competencies he usually disdains. He's not a talent manager; he's a narcissist wary of any talent that threatens to eclipse him.
yesterday when the “autism announcement” teaser from trump came out i joked to friends that he’s gonna make it mandatory
> Read this for an alternate view of the asymmetry
I skimmed it but it has very little meat by itself and I didn’t want to follow the avalanche of links, also because I suspect that it would be quite unedifying – every summary “showing” a higher level of right-wing violence that I’ve ever seen has one or more of the following methodological errors[1]:
• Classifying every one of the numerous crimes of the the Aryan Nations gang as a right-wing crime. It does use Nazi symbology, but it’s just another of the race-based prison gangs that recruit convicts rightly fearful of the incredible level of violence in US prisons with the promise of relative safety. It then drives these people into often much worse crime.
• Classifying every crime based on racial animus as right-wing (and classifying nigh-every interracial crime committed by whites as based on racial animus). The vast majority of racialist crimes in the US are black-on-white; the particular black Americans who commit those crimes are mostly not really political in any systematic way (but as far as they are, their radicalization is squarely on the shoulders of the left).
• Counting nutcases who spewed right-coded nonsense as right-wing criminals and their counterparts with left-coded delusions as nutcases.
If you have a particular study at hand that does not have any of these weaknesses and shows the same result, that might be worthwhile. In the meantime here’s a case-by-case a guy on Twitter did on one of those lists: https://x.com/Recursion_Agent/status/1967059298267394218
> had a pretty extended pause
More of a lull, but yeah, 20 years for the comparatively mild 90s PC struggle sessions that still purged academia fairly completely, then another 20 to get really kinetic again. Wonder what creates that rhythm. Last generation of activated radicals receive tenure?
> fundamental democratic popularity, not manufactured
Those are not mutually exclusive. I think the popularity is genuine, but not exactly organic. There’s a lot of “clapping for the NHS” promoted from on-high, people who denigrate it get anathemized aggressively, and the state/corporate prestige media don’t really talk about actual price/performance much.
> the US proves that the NHS isn't the most you can spend for totally dysfunctional healthcare
US healthcare cost is basically being very cash-rich, very opportunity-rich (Baumol's), and the industry being very very good at lobbying. It’s also extremely regulated, like every industry where prices have exploded.
US healthcare is also not “dysfunctional” judged by results adjusted for demographic and lifestyle factors, just ludicrously expensive. E.g. cancer survival rates seem to be quite good and I don’t think only the rich get cancer in the US.
That’s not to speak of the load-schedding with a humane skin suit spreading in the public systems, MAiD in Canada is just the most absurd and extreme case.
> Trump would be (at best) the old order's murderer, not a plausible builder of anything more effective
He certainly has his foibles, put politely, but the great villain model of history has all the same problems as the great man model. In reality, these things are always dead or dying before the scavenger manages to land.
In a way he’s just the inevitable result the 1992 election: That illustrated what the deep state parties did to a great outsider executive who was more thoughtful and introspective but also more sensitive. Since then the system has become much more broken, dysfunctional, and hated (and the giant sucking sound did come on harder than probably even Perot expected) and now they got Trump instead.
Trump, BTW, counter to the claims that he just ran the first time as a self-promotion exercise climbing on a topic in the discourse he didn’t actually care about, was one of the few in the business elite who gave the same warnings as Perot at around the same time. Just louder, less eloquently, and in a Playboy Magazine interview. Say about him what you will, but he is farsighted and consistent in his vision.
Alas the execution is another topic.
> Operation Warp Speed
My vague and uncertain impression on that is that it did prevent some deaths among the aged and very ill, but did not stop transmission, did little against long covid or for average severity, may have actually increased susceptibility for infection with later variants, and had (rare, occasionally deadly) side effects for circulatory health particularly among the young, so QALY impact is marginal/doubtful if not negative, at ocean-boiling effort and with quite a bit of damage to the social fabric due to the pressures exerted to take it.
Doesn’t seem like a triumph to me TBH. Doing great things is one thing but they also have to be good.
It would be really interesting to ever know the net QALY adjusted impact definitively, but I have to say that I pretty much don’t trust anyone or anything on this topic since everyone still motivated to work on it seems compromised due to material, institutional, or just axe-grinding interest.
> wary of any talent
Not sure it’s true of Trump in all cases (Vance is a _great_ politician and communicator – whether good, we’ll see). But maybe he’ll still gut him, and Vance is comically focussed on always crediting the boss.
Complicating factor: Seems to be the same for the oligarchy. Maybe not re: eclipsing, but maybe re: imposing any through-line or coherence to the free run of their office politics consensus?
Hard to say why else they would have nominated and elected [“…” – ed.] a shambling zombie and a vacuous confused lady in what they claimed to see as a critical juncture.
Funnily enough the thought of Compton’s second ethnic cleansing etc. crossed my mind when I wrote the above but are those really on comparable scale?
I’m absolutely not blaming “the blacks”. That’s why I took pains to write “the particular black Americans who”. Most blacks are fine.
Putting it all on the table, TBH I’m not even blaming the perpetrators of things like the spectacular light rail slaughter that got so much attention lately either, but for all the darkest reasons. That’s a feral beast. I can totally see why the stabber should not be held criminally culpable. It should be put down, though.
Who I am very much blaming in particular are the left…lib political/judicial machines who enable these reoccurrences of as you rightly say “stochastic violence” to milk them, to absorb resources to manage a problem that they have created.
These people are not “the blacks” in any meaningful way. In fact the evolution of “black fatigue” discourse shows that blacks who after all are the chief victims of this cruel dysfunction and chaos are as horrified and sick and tired of it as anyone else, if not more so due to simple frequency of exposure.
It’s no coincidence that Trump who does not participate in the usual treacly pieties on the whole complex of issues as much as others received more of their votes than other republican candidates.
+1.
Nothing else matters until the reality of The Blob is acknowledged, at very least. Everything else is religious delusion.
that's indeed why the left must never be in power ever again
After many years of thinking what exactly power means and how states/governments run; and also after many years seeing nearly all the assumptions and the majority of the theory being held together by duct tape and good wishes; and finally after witnessing the state of governance in different places across time and space (Turkiye my home country, Syria about an hour's drive from my hometown, the Netherlands where I've been living for over a decade, and the USA where one is subjected to what's going on over there regardless of one wants to follow that or not) I think I kind of figured out how things work and my conclusion is unfortunately grim.
One of the first things one needs to understand, and it's been difficult for me, and I'm guessing it would be even more difficult for somebody from the first world; that all laws, rules, customs, constitutions, etc are at best suggestions. This is not something that requires a lot of intelligence to understand or figure out, but one needs to be able to go into a different mindset. Basically the deal is this: all laws, rules etc need to be enforced. Somebody needs to do the enforcing. In case there is resistance to it, the enforcer needs to apply force. There needs to be a sort of command chain for this, some kind of overseeing of this application of force, some documenting or record keeping and all that. On the other hand, all that command chain and overseeing and documenting and stuff also needs to be enforced recursively. So, that is as imaginary as the original laws themselves. Mind you, this can be collection of taxes, counting of ballots, HOA bylaws, mandatory draft to military, distributing of soup to homeless, and everything else that a state might do. Of course there are some Schelling points that create local minima to converge to, but I'm trying to be quick and witty here.
The thing to keep in mind is that the world is not a computer game that has to obey some laws, except for the laws of physics. No laws or agreements are as algorithmically fixed as something one puts into an ethereum chain or whatever. That means every state, be it democratic or communist or whatever; runs on the will of the people to uphold it. There will of course be a lot of convoluted ways of keeping people believing in the system, and even more ways of keeping people obeying it. Nobody wants a system degrade to anarchy, but the reality is all systems are in fact anarchy with a thin coat of paint. If that sounds too punch-y or sloppy, I can say all states are hierarchical anarchy dampeners which substitute repeated-game incentives and selective coercion for pure anarchy. Still I prefer the punch-y version. I have to say in high capacity, high impersonality states the paint might still be load bearing since there’s redundancy (courts, audit offices, media, independent civil service, etc) that makes selective non-enforcement costly and thus rare, but when push comes to shove, I say it will degrade to anarchy all the same (paint is load bearing until it isn't).
So far I don't sound like I'm dealing a lot of wisdom to the readers of this, and I'm not sure how much of it would be distributed by the time I'm finished, yet I'll persist and I hope the reader does as well. I'll continue with a few recent examples to make my point.
Turkiye might not be a country the readers here regard highly, but until recently-ish, it used to be quite the nice place. There were always issues with democracy, some coups here and there, some persecution of this minority or that, a whiff of torture and extrajudicial killings but not too much, deep state cooperating with mafia and religious orders and corporations and politicians; but which state doesn't do a bit of this or that? Even the western world doesn't have clean hands regarding those. What Turkiye had was rules being applied more or less consistently like y'all have in the USA, which is not the case anymore in TR. For example, it is clearly stated in the constitution that, the decisions of the Constitutional Court must be upheld. Even during the coups and extrajudicial this and deepstate that, when Constitutional Court made a decision (be that decision just or not), it was applied. It doesn't matter the executive branch liked it or not, even if the executive branch is really stronk. The state apparatus saw to it happening. The lower court accepted that decision and the executive wing of the state one way or another did what the Constitutional Court said by way of putting some people in prison by force, or releasing some people from prison, or doing something else. When the executive branch, or to keep it short Erdogan wanted to have a say on how Constitutional Court decides, they changed the rules of how the members of the Constitutional Court was selected, and how they were retired, and who had a quota of sending a member there, and whatever, to pad it how they like to get friendly calls. This is also "undemocratic" in the vague way of what we declare democracy to be, but this wall of text will not discuss how to define the word "democratic" and nitpick about it.
Well this is too long for a single comment so continuing on a reply:
continued from above:
Quite recently, the Constitutional Court decided something that Erdogan didn't like about a political prisoner who won a seat in the parliament which, by law, needs to be set free because his fault was not a crime like a burglary or assault, but something political. One might say it's not "democratic" for somebody to be a political prisoner in the first place, but as I said, this is not the topic of this wall of text. There was a court about this which said he needs to stay in prison, and the matter went to the Constitutional Court. Even though it's been padded with cronies for about a decade and a half, keeping him in prison was so unlawful that they had to say he should be released. The thing is, nobody released him. There were protests about it by people in streets, there were protests about it by MPs in the parliament, but it's been about two years and he is still in the prison.
This is only one example that happened in the recent couple of years that surpasses the nebulous "undemocratic" into quite clear "but the constitution clearly says otherwise and it's not something up for interpretation, it is very literal" territory. The point is, there is no point between the nebulous undemocratic and the clearcut WTF. It is just that no law or no rule has any intrinsic meaning or power like a video game or a blockchain contract (hell, even in blockchains the outermost layer is social, right?). It might just not be enforced and that's completely within the rules of physics, which apparently are the only rules that matter. And it's not just Turkiye or liberal democracy, the same happened in Tsarist Russia, and later in USSR, and I think it happens in every functioning democracy as well, just in so small amounts that it doesn't cause people to lose their minds over it or collapse the system. It's a continuum and the absolute perfect way of it, even if it was attainable, I don't know if that's a desirable utopia or another dystopia where everything is controlled too much. It's a slider scale (probably multidimensional sliders actually, representing state capacity and legitimacy and whatever, but bear with the simplification) that has dystopias in both ends for sure, but it's not certain where the middle is, or if there is any stable place on the slider that doesn't have any dystopias, or if that good place, if that exists, is in the middle. I know this sounds very pessimistic, cynic, nihilistic, or any combination of those; but that's the feeling I eventually get for sure when I think about any kind of governance for long enough. It's not that all points on the slider are equally bad in different ways, obviously western democracies are better than past Turkiye which was better than current Turkiye which is still better than Syria. The problem is, I cannot really put my finger on how it is, but there is a dynamic system in which there's constant devolution in some axes and it always takes a lot of effort to evolve back into a better place. The problem is, Moloch always comes up with new measures to make it more difficult to fight back to evolve to a better state. From what I see, Erdogan's shaping of a democracy (with faults, but still) towards an authoritarian regime is a good (evil) blueprint for other democracies. The load bearing parts to destroy are more or less similar. That's why I see myself as a good candidate to write a comment this long and am writing the whole thing expected to be read.
I think the only real counterweight to Moloch in this scenario is the real will of people, by which I mean not what they vote for, but what they risk their lives for to make or prevent a change. There is a point in the slider for every set of human beings, that would make them take the streets and take up arms and swarm offices and defenestrate or cannibalize prime ministers, and switch to another local minima in the space of possibilities. That might be a good switch or a bad switch, but would be a switch nonetheless. Only the threat of this keeps a rogue head of executive branch at check, and this is the final and most natural of the much talked about "checks and balances". It's not demonstrations or street anarchy or anything like that (those are mostly just nuisance or pressure release) but more targeted like what recently happened in Nepal for example.
I'm still hopeful for a better future, but I don't know what is the source of that hope. I just keep that hope intact so if there's a critical mass of people that hopes more or less like me, good governance becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and spontaneously occurs. Otherwise I'm prepared for the survival of the fittest world.
The TLDR from chatgpt when I fed it this whole thing: "Law is a coordination equilibrium with a coercive backstop; institutions fail when enforcement chains lose capacity, legitimacy, or constraint." but I think my version is snazzier.
I don't think you need to think so hard about this. In the centuries that will come, the more inefficient and unsustainable systems will die or be consumed by superior systems. The wonderful part about natural selection is that it doesn't require intelligence or will. Improvement will naturally come through the destruction of failures. It just takes time.
my point is, no system that humans run will be any better
Well even I wouldn't be that cynical. It's still theoretically possible to create a truly unified populace through the elimination of everything without. A society without a necessity for laws, because the people lack any independent will or desires. A society that truly approaches the perfection that is eusociality. Of course, humanity is also perfectly capable of changing on their own at the genetic level. That just takes a lot of time... And by then, they'll probably have built something that will supersede them.
Moldbug had quite the pithy saying:
> all power flows from the barrel of a gun.
I.e. written constitutions are treated by americans like holy texts. But at the end of the day, it's just words on paper. The only reason those words matter is because the men-with-guns spontaneously agree to abide by "the rules", i.e. the cultural norms.
Which is another reason why democracy (or whatever it is we currently have) is overrated. People put way too much stock in systems. But to surrender to systems is to let entropy take the wheel. I'm also reminded of Zawinski's Law:
> Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail.
My simple way of answering this is: Democracy isn't about winning elections. Democracy is about the government reflecting the will of the people.
Representative democracy with elections and set terms is *one implementation* of democracy, but it's just a hack to approximate the real thing in a system that's somewhat workable and stable.
Direct democracy where anyone can propose a policy and everyone can vote on it would be another approximation of the thing, possibly closer to the thing itself, but possibly harder to implement and less stable.
There are a thousand different systems you could use to implement some approximation of the thing, but none of those are the thing itself. Elections aren't democracy; elections are one tool (among many) that we use to help us approximate democracy.
When you frame it like this, the rest becomes easy.
Destroying honest media establishments is anti-democratic because the populace can't effectively turn it's utility function into a decision matrix unless it has lots of accurate data to update on.
Dismantling the judiciary is anti-democratic because it is a crucial tool that the public uses to implement its will through laws and regulations.
Etc.
There's still room for quibbling about whether such-and-such a regulation increase democracy in expectation by implementing the public's will at the moment, or if it decreases democracy in expectation by locking in a regulatory regime that will get mis-applied or be hard to reverse if the will of the people changes in light of changing circumstances, or etc. Or quibbling about the majority's preference for a specific policy that hurts the minority vs the majority's general desire for universal liberty and fairness, and where the reflective equilibrium over those preferences lands.
But as long as people are not confusing the map of elections and branches and etc. for the territory of government reflecting the will of the people, all of those conversations become a lot clearer and more productive.
> Dismantling the judiciary is anti-democratic because it is a crucial tool that the public uses to implement its will through laws and regulations.
Unless the judiciary is standing in the way of implementing the will of the majority.
That would be a good reason to purge the current office holders and/or implement systemic reforms. But you need *some* method of enacting laws.
Enacting laws =/= judiciary. In fact, the judiciary should have basically nothing to do with enacting laws--that's the legislative.
The judiciary is charged with one and only one responsibility--responding to accusations of law breaking and deciding "was the law broken". Policy matters should be irrelevant--the substance of the law only matters to the degree that it conflicts with higher laws (such as the constitution).
I'm not sure how you enact laws without a step somewhere that determines whether or not a law was broken. Would you just punish people randomly?
But, anyway, this sounds like semantics, not a substantive disagreement.
No, this is the basics of separation of powers. There are *lots* of laws on the books (ie enacted laws) that have no enforcement at all. And lots of things get enforced not based on any enacted law (and instead on some bureaucrat's idea of should be proper).
Legislature enacts laws. It says "If X, then Y." (in the simple case). Or "Executive will spend $A on $B".
Executive (keeping to the criminal law aspect) says "ok, person XYZ broke law ABC, here's the evidence PQS."
Judiciary says either "Ok, PQS is sufficient to say that XYZ broke law ABC. Executive, perform the penalty $P" or "PQS is not sufficient to say that XYZ broke law ABC. Executive, let him go."
The law is enacted at the first step, by the legislature. It's enforced by the executive, who prosecutes (brings actions in court) and executes judgements. The judiciary only does the step of deciding "was that enforcement proper" and if so, what should be the penalty. Without an enacted law, judiciary has nothing to do (properly).
The judiciary has no constitutional say in what the law *is* or *should be* or what the range of penalties should be. Only whether the law as written was violated or not. It has no power to go out and actively enforce it in the first instance--the judiciary is entirely reactive. It only responds to complaints from others. Now they've arrogated to themselves lots of power to say what the law is/should be. And that's wrong and anti-democratic.
"The will of the people" isn't a thing, though. "The people" always include massive disagreements; the idea that they have a unitary will at any given moment, let alone over time, is an error.
A vision of democracy as a way of helping us take collective action despite our disagreements, by agreeing on how we're going to handle disagreement nonviolently and come up with the most broadly acceptable compromises that are reachable in a given context, feels more promising to me.
I don't think that any implementation of democracy can handle unboundedly large disagreements though. Some way of keeping them manageable seems needed.
What makes a disagreement "large"? Democracy regularly handles disagreements over pretty fundamental issues -- life and death, wealth and immiseration, people who are convinced their eternal destiny is at stake based on what the state might force them/other people to do. There's no guarantee that those disagreements won't destabilize a country, but liberal democracy has a pretty good track record of helping people find compromises that they can tolerate and grumpily coexist.
>liberal democracy has a pretty good track record of helping people find compromises that they can tolerate and grumpily coexist
Well, the vast majority of those people used to be some variety of Christian for most of that time. I'm sure it still seemed to them that they had huge disagreements, but little did they know what exciting new grounds could elite opinions reach in a matter of a few decades, and who knows what terrifying vistas lie just ahead...
Doesn't mean their disagreements weren't fundamental. The most destructive wars of religion (including the ones that inspired the invention of liberal democracy) have happened between coreligionists, not between totally different religions. It's often easier to get along with someone who's comprehensively different than with a heretic.
I'd rather say that those wars were necessary for people to even countenance the notion that sometimes you can't just kill the heretic, you have to work with him. It seems like this lesson may require a refresher.
I wouldn't say that religious wars are due to differences in desired policies between individual citizens. I think they generally have much more to do with the will and maneuvering of the people in charge of each faction, like most wars.
How about excluding those areas of large disagreement from the scope of government?
I'd bet that a government that focused on the very basics (basic law and order on things everyone agrees should be illegal, basic coordination issues like traffic laws, national defense) would have very high unity. But also wouldn't serve as a vehicle for power-hungry folks to accrete power to themselves. The ones opposed would be the (would-be) elites, not the people.
But the prophets of our age declared that "everything is political", that "silence is violence", which was pretty convincing by all appearances. I don't really see how this gets rolled back without a decently-sized crisis.
Agreed. Path dependency bites hard.
Two responses.
First of all, your second paragraph is pretty much what people mean by 'the will of the people'.
We can quibble on whether 'broadly acceptable compromise' is the same thing as the Pareto-optimal frontier or the utilitarian optimal expected value across all preferences or etc., there are lots of ways to satisfice over different utility functions. But no one is claiming that everyone always agrees on everything.
But, second, I do think that the feeling we have that no one agrees on anything is largely an artifact of already living in a liberal democracy that's doing a pretty good job, and that has a two-party system (or a general bipolarized tendency in other democracies) which finds and exploits wedge issues.
Like, the things we *argue about* in modern democracies are the things that passionately split the population close to 50/50, because those issues are the most powerful levers politicians have to gain support and build movements.
But if you look at the human history of non-liberal non-democracies, there's much wider agreement on a lot of issues. Most people do not want to be serfs, bound to the land and with no rights to self-determination. Most people do not want their liege lord to have the right to rape them or their wives whenever they feel like it. Most people do not want a secret police who monitor them for disloyalty to the regime. Etc.
If you took the starting point of a random monarchy or dictatorship throughout history, educated the populace enough to coherently formulate and pursue their utility functions, and asked them what they'd like to change, I think you'd get a large number of big important changes that enjoyed extremely wide support, long before you got to anything that divided the people 40/60. That's the benefit of democracy over the alternatives.
I'd still argue that "the will of the people" is a profoundly misleading phrase, leading us to imagine a singular people with a singular will. Perhaps if I were a utilitarian, I'd believe there was a single function that represented an optimal outcome in large-scale social disputes, and would thus take the singular-will language as a metaphor for some genuinely existing thing we could work towards.
As it is, I don't think math offers an adequate map of our desires, or that in the many places where they clash there's a single stable optimum that's calculable even in principle. Do the most painstaking and ingenious approximations you can come up with as a utilitarian technocrat... and you'll still have to deal with the host of people who respond to your proposal with a flat "no, that's unacceptable," even when you've walked them through your calculations of why this is best for everyone.
At that point, if you're a democrat, you resort to the contingent social process of trying to negotiate a temporary equilibrium in an ever-shifting chaos of contending interests and values. The measure of democratic success isn't how well it represents something that doesn't exist ("the will of the people," or some similar articulation of an imagined optimum). It's how many of your people you've managed to bring into the process while reaching an outcome they'll tolerate.
Maybe that's a quibble? It feels like more than a quibble to me, but I could be wrong. I'd never say that "no one agrees on anything"; the chaotic aspect to our values/interests is real, but it's far from total. I agree with you that there are plenty of things where there's a stable social consensus. "The will of the people is not to be enslaved" -- sure!
But the test of governing institutions isn't how they deal with social consensus. It's not just how they deal with 50/50 issues, either -- the 80/20s can be murder when the 20s care enough. Most divisive issues aren't a binary, anyway; one of the ways American democracy tries to manage them is to force disagreement into a binary mold suited to two-party contestation, but the reality is that democracy has to deal with plenty of 4/7/12/12/17... issues. For my money, that process is more accurately described by narrative historians than quantitative analysts.
I hold the view that it is important to actually talk about the separation of powers when you're talking about the separation of powers. If I were somehow forced to choose between separation of powers and democracy, I would choose the former, I think it is much more important.
Ensuring the winner of the election cannot influence the next election is simply not possible, as long as they at least hold the power of being able to address the nation. Similarly, I don't think there has ever been a "well-informed populace" anywhere.
I think it's plausible that before universal suffrage there were better informed populaces, at least. Of course, those came with their own cans of worms.
One of the critiques of universal sufferage, which i've yet to see anyone grapple with: theoretically, all voters in a given nation are responsible for the decisions of the nation state. Like, do I really want to be held personally responsible for Obama's counterterrorism in the middle east? Do I want to be held responsible for the Iran Contra Affair? Was the firebombing of Dresden morally justified?
Meanwhile, I remember seeing an episode of "are you smarter than a 5th grader", in which the contestant, a typical young white adult male normie, was asked whether the U.S.-Mexican Border was longer than the U.S.-Canadian Border. "Well, with all the talk about immigrants crossing the border, I reckon the U.S.-Mexican Border is longer." lmao. Should this person be allowed to vote?
Not that I'm a huge Trump fan (in fact I think he's all mouth and no trousers), but I don't think he's "gone against the judiciary" in any meaningful sense.
In fact the most important part of the judiciary is demonstrably with him, and against the impertinent ideologues in the judiciary who are pretending that they have the right to do his job.
I think most people on both sides understand that "democracy" applies to a system; nevertheless, the result of any particular vote is what it is, if a majority voted someone in to do some things, then all things being equal, those things should be done and the "opposition" should get out of the way of them being done, otherwise the system is a farce.
What do you mean "disobeying orders" - disobeying the "orders" of penny-ante judges who have no business trying to usurp the powers of the executive (as SCOTUS has repeatedly pointed out)?
Yes, that's just the kind of conformist you are, I understand.
He's complained about the judiciary, but he hasn't removed people, because he doesn't have the power to do that.
Yes, that's how the US system works - the same system that SCOTUS is upholding by spanking judges who go off-piste by trying to usurp executive power that's rightly the president's.
Again: part of the point of a democratic system is to gracefully let the other lot have a go in order to avoid civil war (because a majority means you'd likely win one if it came to the bit).
IOW, one had one's chance in opposing the opposition, then one lost, now GTFO of the way. You can whinge and whine, even make reasoned complaints and build your case for the next go-around, but the executive power is no longer yours.
That's what the Republicans did when "Biden" was running things, that's what Democrats should be doing now that Republicans are running things. Otherwise their complaining about "muh democracy" is just hypocrisy.
>if a majority voted someone in to do some things,
You don't know what the majority voted them in to do. The ballot doesn't say "what things do you want this candidate to do?" It just says "which candidate do you want?" In fact, since Trump's immigration crackdown led to polls showing greater support for immigration, it seems that the voters did *not* actually want Trump to do the things he did.
>then all things being equal, those things should be done and the "opposition" should get out of the way of them being done, otherwise the system is a farce.
If the majority voted for something illegal, then those things should not get done, and they should have to change the law first. That's what "rule of law" means.
Yes that's what I meant by "all things being equal." Re. polls, you've obviously been looking at different ones from the ones I looked at.
Obviously there's no one-to-one correlation, but I think it's mostly taken as given in political discourse that it's the policies that people vote for - otherwise there wouldn't be all that foofaraw about the importance of an educated, informed voting populace, would there?
Scott is a very smart guy and always at least entertaining. But like all of us, there are areas where he has in-depth knowledge (e.g., psychiatry) and adds a lot of value, and others, like the subject of this post, where his knowledge base and thoughts are superficial. One of the problems of very smart guys is that they tend to assume that their opinions about subjects they haven't studied in depth are nevertheless worth sharing.
I don't read Scott for his psychiatric insights. His added value is almost always as a clever generalist who's avidly interested in a LOT of things, and thus able to make connections and point out patterns that might escape the in-depth specialist. If he ever decided to limit his posts to subjects he'd studied in depth, I'd unsubscribe. :)
You make a good point. Let me revise mine. Clever generalists, if they want to avoid becoming cranks, need to pick their spots. Yes, they can add value if they manage to make connections and point out patterns that have escaped in-depth specialists. Scott's observations about democracy are not in that category. I'm not interested in his thoughts about monetary policy or string theory either.
Fair enough. This post was a lightweight sketch; I found it interesting as a jumping-off point for conversation, but I agree it's not at the level of his stuff that turned me into a subscriber.
I'd add that democracy is -- like ethics, or (for the religious) theology -- a topic way too important in day-to-day life to abandon to in-depth specialists. I don't think it's ever entirely without value to think through some aspect of it "out loud" in everyday language and see where it gets us.
Clearly it was worth sharing if not only did you read it, but you took time to respond to it.
I read it because over the years Scott has built up a lot of credit with me, and I assume that anything he has written is worth reading. I responded because I believe that criticism can be helpful.
> The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to talk about “liberalism” because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept “democracy” as a stand-in.
This reminded me of two things.
(1) One of the points Amy Chua made in World On Fire was that South American elites commonly talk about how they need to better implement democracy in their countries, in imitation of the United States, but if you look at their policy demands what they want is methods to block everybody else from voting to confiscate their property.
(2) I have often observed that when people say "capitalism", what they mean is "whatever the United States does", which makes arguing about capitalism a pretty incoherent affair. This also seems to happen with "democracy" - it's "whatever the United States does".
>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) and conservative authoritarianism’s comparative advantage is weakening or attacking these institutions (eg the civil service fails to protest anti-democratic encroachment because the government has limited its power).
I think this is more about the populism axis than the conservative vs progressive axis. My experience observing online left-populist discourse is that they often tend to distrust and support weakening these institutions in the US for parallel reasons to those of right-populists: the court, media, and civil service are captured by out-of-touch parasitic elites who are systematically thwarting the *true* will of the people. This is especially the case when institutional checks prevent progressive politicians from enacting their policies.
There is currently correlation between "conservatives" and the populist side of the spectrum in the US, because the extreme populist wing of the Republican party is currently dominant and has been doing its best over the past decade to marginalize anti-populist conservatives, while the populist factions of the Democratic party are not currently in the driver's seat and haven't been for some time.
The populist left rails against Obama for not just imposing his will like Trump, as if creating Medicare for All is a simple as mass deportation.
I've heard that sort of thing called the Green Lantern Theory of Politics: i.e. the assumption a President or a Congressional leader can enact any policy they want through sheer force of will if they believe in it enough.
For populist-left criticism of Obama in particular, I am inclined to place a measure of blame at the feet of Ezra Klein. Klein is a very clever man, and during the Obama years he devoted considerable effort and ingenuity towards promoting various ways that Obama might abuse the rules to unilaterally implement policies. For example the idea of minting a trillion-dollar platinum coin to work around the debt ceiling (theoretically legal since the laws authorizing the US Mint to produce platinum coins don't specify or limit the face value) isn't original to Klein, but I'm pretty sure I remember him being the first mainstream voice talking about it as if it were a viable notion. This is somewhat ironic in this context, since I read Klein as leaning anti-populist and expect he was modeling the Obama administration as an institutional check against the populist excesses of Republicans in Congress.
>has been doing its best over the past decade to marginalize anti-populist conservatives
I mean, it didn't take much. The neo-con GOP was already brain-dead, Trump pushed and the corpse toppled over.
One man, one vote, one time. Many such cases.
Imagine a country where an unelected interest group attempts to spread a new state ideology, not by persuasion, but by force, and using the new generation as its target.
FIRE addressed the following mandate to teachers within California’s community college system:
They noted that professors were required to acknowledge that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid and intersectional” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic and other minoritized (sic) groups face” Professors were informed that "persons that think they are not racists are in denial" and that the drive towards color blindness in society "perpetuates existing racial inequalities". They were warned not to “weaponize academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students” (FIRE Quarterly, Fall 2023)
FIRE successfully sued for this. They stated: "These regulations are a totalitarian triple whammy. The government is forcing professors to teach and preach politicized viewpoints they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary indiscernible line."
The next step up in authoritarianism from censorship is enforced speech. This affected 54,000 professors, and is but one example of such “guidelines”. FIRE was able to take action only because a few professors were willing to stand up as litigants in this case.
Of course FIRE is now pursuing the Trump administration’s excessed with equal vigor. “Democracy” - or whatever this is- depends on people in all institutions who have the courage to stand up and insist that these perform the functions they are supposed to. And wouldn't it have been nice if everyone had figured out that the other path leads to massive mistrust, the fundamental undermining force.
I don't think there's any contradiction in arguing that a completely democratic process might result in fewer or no elections later down the line. In a society where the people overwhelmingly want a dictator with no elections, isn't it undemocratic to deny them that? After all, we do that with every election--the rulers get 2-4 years of power before the next vote. All this would be is the people democratically changing their minds about term limits.
It's the difference between a consequentialist who wants to reduce the amount of killing in the world and a deontologist who believes thou shalt not kill. There may be some instances where you reduce net murders by killing someone, but that doesn't make what you're doing not murder.
This is basically a straw man argument.
The things that people *actually* say are Trump "threatening democracy" have nothing to do with not having more than one election. They aren't links in the chain of not having more than one election either. The idea that Trump wants to be president for life or is doing anything towards being so is ludicrous.
You only make it not sound even more conspiratorial by speaking in generalities. Yeah, Trump does things with the judiciary. And there are things you can do with the judiciary to prevent future elections. But these sets don't intersect.
The judiciary has said that the President has complete immunity for any crimes committed in office, which sounds like the kind of thing you would do if you wanted to enable the President to subvert elections or attack his political opponents without getting punished for it.
The attacks on the media are also threatening - if the government can threaten to pull your TV station's broadcast license because they don't like the content, that makes it harder to report on any shenanigans the government is getting up to.
That's...just not true. He has the exact same immunity for *official acts* (ie those that are an actual part of his job) as *judges* do. For exactly the same reasons.
He has *zero* immunity for acts that are actually outside his power, and only *qualified* immunity (ie it can be pierced and refuted) for acts that are arguably within his authority.
Which is, actually, *exactly the same as judges, cops, or any random administrator*.
So the problem in the US (at least one problem, as highlighted by Dan Carlin) is that the congress has given too much power to the executive branch. To fix this, we have to vote in a congress that will start taking back it's power and with it responsibility. Not impossible, but I don't hear anyone talking this way. (Well except for Carlin.)
A lot of words to say "Trump's gonna cancel elections". Wake me up when he actually does.
Before launching into these fascist-pattern-matching arguments, may I point out that no one affiliated with Trump or the Republican Party calls himself a fascist, or thinks well of fascists? Which segment of the right is calling for elections to be canceled? How is a political movement that doesn't even exist going to succeed in the putative aims you've assigned to it?
I also think it's a bit odd that not even someone who calls HIMSELF a socialist gets accused of wanting to cancel elections, despite the fact that socialists have canceled more than a few.
Trump literally sells "Trump 2028" hats in the White House gift shop, indicating that he intends to unconstitutionally run for a third term (https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/08/23/whats-in-a-hat-white-house-merchandise-room-includes-trump-2028-caps). Maybe it's a joke. Maybe not. If Obama started talking about running for a third term, would you be equally chill about it?
Obama was never that funny.
Have you gamed this out at all, in your head? Trump says "I'm running for a third term." The Supreme Court says no, the 22nd Amendment is extremely clear, you are not a valid candidate and won't appear on ballots. So Trump... what? Sends the National Guard to arrest every state legislature?
Every time -- I mean literally every single time -- someone tries to convince me of the Fascist Menace, they end up doing the exact opposite.
It wouldn't get to the "election fraud" stage. States would not put him on ballots! Even, arguendo, if EVERY state he carried in 2024 agreed to put him on, which they certainly wouldn't, he'd still have no shot in the actual election. There would be no "tally". He is not eligible to run for a third term absent a Constitutional amendment, and everyone, including Trump himself (but apparently not including some of his enemies, though I'm never sure to what extent you guys are pulling my leg), knows that. The Republican Party would not forfeit a presidential election for the sake of Trump's vanity. Everyone knows that too.
If you're really sold on this insane scenario, I'm sure some prediction market will lay you 100:1 or something. Good luck.
Democracy is an infinite game huh? Who have thunk?
Joking. This is a small insight with huge underappreciated repercussions.
“Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election? Why can’t he ban the media from reporting on his missteps? “
This really reads like someone who has never seriously thought about Westminster parliamentary systems.
The real risk is the Erdogan route. He hasn't cancelled elections, but has gradually tightened the noose on the opposition until they effectively can't field any of their chosen candidates.
I don't doubt that the next Democratic nominee will be subject to one or likely multiple DoJ investigations over trivial transgressions. It was a bad idea when prosecutors went after Trump, and I expect it will be much worse this time around. Maybe also investigations for 'hate speech'. It's not cancelling the election, it's using the power of the federal government to disable the opposition, but it's effectively the same thing.
This argument feels extremely obvious to me. Do people who believe otherwise genuinely reject it? It seems more likely that they either don't believe in democracy, and/or that they don't have real beliefs and just like to score points to "own the libs."
> It’s about having more than one election.
Donald Trump was in two more Presidential elections after his first term (losing as an incumbent, winning when not), thus making him an unusually democratic President.
> for some reason, no Russian judge has ever convicted Vladimir Putin of any of the assassinations that so many Western sources are sure he committed
He's never been charged. If anyone would be, it would probably be someone much lower down who carried them out (I've never heard it alleged that Putin personally carried any of the out, although he IS ex-KGB).
> or - in the worst-case scenario - the military realizing this and taking direct action.
This actually does happen in Latin America sometimes even in the 21st century, which gets called undemocratic even if they hold elections shortly after.
> Some NGO employs constitutional lawyers who are prepared for an issue like this, and they sue to stop the move (this step goes better with a well-funded NGO ecosystem, which itself requires large donors whose money cannot be arbitrarily confiscated)
Would that make most of US history not democratic?
I find it strange you didn't link to your Dictator Book Club post on Erdogan. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan
>Would that make most of US history not democratic?
I mean, the US still had politically active lawyers who could challenge government actions, it's just that the country was small enough that you didn't need an entire organization dedicated to hiring said lawyers.
Also, abolitionist groups go pretty far back, so even if you specifically ask about NGOs I'd say most of US history is covered.
Lawyers were politically relevant enough that de Tocqueville said they acted like America's aristocracy, but I don't recall him describing them as preserving democracy.
Abolitionist groups didn't prevent any President from becoming dictator, they advocated for policy changes.
This article ignores the fact that a common criticism of the Trump administration is that the elected head of the executive branch makes decisions over what the executive branch does or doesn't.
"although having “unelected bureaucrats” sounds bad, it’s important that these people not be directly elected at exactly the same time as the leader" How can you write this? You defend the concept of unelected bureaucrats having unaccountable power by saying that they should not be elected at the same time as the head of the executive branch. But they are not elected! And the common argument that this article defends is that they should be unelected, independent from democracy.
The judiciary should be "independent", as in elected separately, but instead they are independent from democracy.
And that's how the giraffe got his long neck!
According to Popper, the fundamental political question is not, “Who should rule?” It is, “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” Democracy is just one of many ways to do that. https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/the-constitution-and-its-enemies-2/?utm_source=John+Locke+Foundation&utm_campaign=1368026dbf-CJ+Daily+Update-+December+11%2C+2023_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3fd40895e8-429675718&mc_cid=1368026dbf&mc_eid=ca8b050e3b
P.S. We need them all.
Couldn’t access link. Is that this article?
https://t.co/Y5lDYcgkW9
No, it was published at the Carolina Journal on 9/1725. Where are you? I sent a link to a friend in Australia, and he couldn't open it. I wonder if the government there could possibly have blocked access? Maybe I'm being paranoid. Anyway, try going here, https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/, and then clicking the link to "The constitution and its enemies" on the right hand side of the page. Please let me know if that works. Thanks.
It's not an Australia problem, I can read it fine. I'd suggest it might be something in the tracking portion of the URL that the snakes' browser doesn't like.
FYI, most URLs to that kind of site (news, blogs, etc) will work better and be more user-friendly if you delete everything after and including the first "?" in the URL. For example https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/the-constitution-and-its-enemies-2/
That's very helpful. Thanks.
Democracy is not about giving elected official power over non-elected officials. Democracy is not about having an election or another election after that.
Democracy is sovereignty of the people.
Of course it is very difficult to obtain it. Constitution is a tool to achieve this goal, via proclamation of rights, elections, separation of powers...
Of course how Donald Trump attacks the constitution, the rule of law, the balances and checks, is a threat to democracy. This leads to an authoritarian regime, accumulation of wealth by those at proximity of the ruler, causing the impoverishment of the general population.
I dunno. I guess the way to say my feelings is that I share your worries (electing people does not guarantee you get to do so again), but I don't think your solution (elect democrats), will work. Like, if we look at our present President's behavior, it's alarming, but the last guy tried to throw his opponent in jail and win by default!
I'm open to the idea that democracy is threatened, but I have yet to see a plan where it can be defended. Both parties seem to be tag teaming it. If I get an election in 2028, I don't know which lever to pull to have better odds of getting one in 2032.
>the last guy tried to throw his opponent in jail and win by default!
The check for this should be "have an independent judiciary decide if the opponent belongs in jail," not "never investigate prominent politicians for crimes." Otherwise you run into problems when a politician is, in fact, committing crimes.
Another check we previously had was "have an independent law enforcement agency with norms against directly ordering investigations on a specific target," but unfortunately we never put those norms into law and Trump decided to ignore them.
This is not meant to defend Trump, but one should note that the NYC DA also decided to ignore these norms.
This is right, but what’s missing is a mechanism by which the politician’s supporters can be convinced that the prosecution against him is honest and independent, rather than a political witch hunt. Of course, the politician himself is highly motivated to scream “witch hunt” even (or especially) if he’s guilty
Democracy is an ideal notion: that the government will be controlled by "the people" somehow. But the whole point of the government is to constitute "the people" as a unit, and give that unit some degree of agency. So, democracy is a loop. The government exists to control the people. The government is also controlled by the people. We can bootstrap that loop somehow. If the bootstrapping succeeds, the loop might persist for a while due to its angular momentum. But it has no foundation. We can't even clearly define "democracy".
When leftists screech that populism is a threat to democracy, they just mean that the voting process might generate an outcome that they don't like, so they want to change the process to prevent that outcome (e.g. "fortifying the election"). One man's rigged election is another man's democracy.
I think the most important point about all of this, is that unless the American government is willing to go Full-Iran on its own people. What a sufficient majority people want, if they want it consistently for long enough, will eventually happen.
Weather its pro/anti abortion. Or more/less immigrants. Less foreign forever wars or sending Al-Qaeda back to the stone age.
So yes, it is fair to say that Trump is damaging democracy even though he's the guy with the most votes. But its also fair to say the real thing that damaged democracy, is a few decades of government that was increasingly out of alignment with a majority of the public creating the environment that brought someone like Trump into power.
A big part of that is things like Judicial Activism (I'm thinking a lot from a UK perspective and how many judges have stopped cautious norm-abiding governments from stopping mass immigration), so the outsider is of course going to make that their first target. To promise to stomp over the laws that stopped the previous elected governments doing what they promised.
So TL;DR mainstream politicians need to find ways to move the balance of power back away from the unelected and towards the public, before the public get someone like Trump to do it for them.
"Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same."
- Screwtape Proposes a Toast, C.S. Lewis
Good quote (in a sea of Trump-worshipping slop comments). One might suggest that this parallels the "paradox of tolerance".
You missed the most obvious counter-argument: what if this is what the people want? What if people realize that there's no justification for allowing leftists to hold positions of power in this country when they ruin everything they touch, and are solely responsible for the moral decay and division that has occurred over the last century? What if they want a country for Christians, by Christians, as Kirk did?
If the people who voted for him want this, it would be undemocratic for him 𝘯𝘰𝘵 to pursue this dream by any means necessary. And if this is all done with the consent of a majority of American men, is this still not rule by majority, the essence of democracy?
> What if people realize that there's no justification for allowing leftists to hold positions of power in this country when they ruin everything they touch, and are solely responsible for the moral decay and division that has occurred over the last century? What if they want a country for Christians, by Christians, as Kirk did?
Then they would presumably stop electing leftists. And then a new ideological split would open up within the Republican Party and form two new parties, perhaps a Conservative Party and a Libertarian Party. And it would probably be a better world.
But the people who want this are not electing leftists. In fact, leftists would probably not be getting elected in the first place if women were not allowed to vote. And we still called it a democracy back then, didn't we? No reason to give leverage to people who don't have it in the first place.
And ultimately, demographics can be changed. New lines can be drawn for what ideas are tolerated. The majority becomes the entirety. Order is restored.
Here's my (mostly serious, but not entirely) proposal, sure to piss *everyone* off in one way or another. A constitutional amendment (in layman's terms, rather than formal language for the purpose of this comment). Lines with # are comments, not part of the actual text
Section 1: No delegation. No branch of the federal government can delegate any portion of its power to any entity outside that branch. All regulations and "laws" must be passed via presentment (passed by both houses, signed or at least not vetoed by the president). All penalties must be imposed after judgement by an article III judge; all law enforcement and military must be subordinate to the president (and removable by him). Anything that mixes these streams must be split up or abolished.
# Note: this means that if the legislature needs expert help drafting legislation, those investigative and research bodies need to either be entirely advisory OR be part of the legislative branch. Similarly, the whole abomination of non-article-III judges imposing penalties would be over. This drastically reduces the ability of anyone (Congress, judges, or the president) to take over and requires each side to guard its own privileges (via the next section).
Section 2: Private right of action. Any individual can bring suit to enforce the terms of this--the only standing required is proof of citizenship and of paying at least one dollar in taxes the previous year. The penalty for violating this is immediate removal from office and a permanent ban on ever being employed by the federal government or any of its contractors or being elected to any federal post, with a bounty for the one bringing the complaint. An external defense attorney can be provided in case of conflicts.
#This prevents the executive from just saying "no, we won't prosecute anyone for this." There'd probably have to be some measure to enforce res judica (no second bites at the apple for any given government action on the same grounds).
Section 3: We really mean it clause.
# this one's a bit of a joke...trying to enforce any of this via judges who are perfectly willing to overlook the text isn't very easy.
It’s getting harder to know what the people want with technology advancements and outside meddling augmented by those technologies. As well as meddling by special interests.
We need to rethink online discourse. There needs to be a space where reputation and people/info being verified is central. And where the algorithms are tuned to not push easily digestible content.
Or we could just eliminate it entirely. Do we need to tolerate this uncontrolled spread of information? We could make it so even online content requires a publishing license, which would effectively prevent social media from existing. It would also prevent this comments section from existing, but would that be a huge loss?
Like a dictatorship? lol
My idea is more opt in.
It's not that different from the pre-internet status quo. Just because the government can't prosecute people for their speech doesn't mean they can't control the avenues for information to spread in the first place.
There were similar conversations about the printing press, haha
Given the current state of the media, maybe they were correct to be concerned. Perhaps it's for the best if unaccountable individuals are unable to affect public consensus.
Ok, let’s boot the monastery’s back up. Back to handwriting copies.
I feel like I understood this as a kid so it's weird to see that adults who work in politics can't wrap their heads around the idea that functioning democracy requires numerous limitations and counterbalance on the power of the winner of an election.
Constitutions exist for a reason and are difficult to change by design. The writers of the American constitution could plainly see that someone winning an election did not mean they were immune to the temptations of corruption and megalomania and therefore imposed rules to force them to answer to other competing elected officials, and to have fixed terms.
I’m sorry but I feel quite certain that the US will not hold another free and fair election. One does not consolidate this much power and then hand it’s over to a group they’ve been claiming are evil and ruining the country after being voted out. They’re not planning on going anywhere. It’s over
How old are you? Is this your first election? People have been saying the same thing every year since at least 2000. And we keep having elections. This is the sort of catastrophism that leads the unhinged to assassination.
I’ve been around for a while. Trump 2028 am I right lol. Normal stuff, totally happens every election
It is 2025. Are you from the future? Do you know something that is going to happen 3 years from now? And no, I wouldn't support that if it was tried. At this point, I would support Vance 2028.
When Trump himself is on the Trump 2028 bandwagon, it doesn't take a time traveler to be worried.
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/08/23/whats-in-a-hat-white-house-merchandise-room-includes-trump-2028-caps
Perhaps you want to bet over here?
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I’d do it if I thought this market was regulated and had enough volume to not be easily manipulated. I value my money though
Democracy (defined as having meaningful elections that actually change the identity of the people in power) is not under threat, what's under threat is good governance.
Democracy is relatively easy, doing good governance under the constraint of democracy is hard, because the obvious failure mode is that fighting the other side becomes more important to those in power than actually doing the boring business of government.
Some properties of tolerably good government:
1. Government policy is reasonably well aligned with the preferences of the population
2. Where the preferences of the population are split somewhat evenly, government policy tends to move towards a stable compromise rather than oscillating wildly depending on who is in power
3. Budgets are balanced, if not every year then at least when averaged over an entire cycle.
>what's under threat is good governance
This sentiment seems a few decades out of date. It's not under threat, it's dead and buried. The inertia on which the deadlocked system still stumbles on hasn't entirely run out though.
I dunno man, I think your #3 hints that there is more to #1 than meets the eye.
The reality is that most people don’t really think that hard about policy and don’t want to. They would rather vote for something like “the economy is good” rather than “what is the correct depreciation treatment for particular capital expenditures”. And the people often express policy preferences that put the short term over the long term. Budgets are far from the only way that happens.
I think you want something like, the system translates the high level preferences of the population into specific policy in a way that is stable, transparent, etc.
Many good points. The US has a government of limited & separated powers, for many good reasons including all those in the article.
It is possible to have governments of limited powers that are not democratic, i.e. do not select leaders by election. For instance, British history has plenty of examples of governments where there was no election or the election itself was the merest veil of tissue paper, yet no one leader had full and complete power.
Even theocratic monarchies can have checks. The king may be anointed/divinely chosen but he must still listen to the voice of the gods, prophets or priests (or both!).
Absolute authority in a single individual is a less common form of government historically; IIRC the first theorists were the centralizing monarchs of the early modern period. Greatest practitioners have been of course the 20th and 21st century dictatorships.
Democracy/elections may be good; limits on government power may be good. They can go together but they need not do so. Our Constitution endorses both.
We erred when we decided "Democracy" was the word we would use for this sort of discussion. And again when we allowed one of our political parties to adopt that name. I would prefer that we talk about "defending the Republic" or "the Republic" being under threat; that also has the problem that we foolishly let a political party adopt the name, but it at least carves reality closer to the relevant joints.
The only forms of government worth having, are ones where there are clear and enforceable limits on what powers the government can have and how it can wield them. "Democracy", alone, has nothing to say about that. It may tell you who the government will be, but not what it can do. "Republic", is by definition a sort of democracy but one with an elected legislature as intermediaries between the people and the policies, and by implication generally has other structural limits on the government's power.
There seems little chance that the United States will any time soon be any thing other than *some* form of Democracy. But if the Republic falls, I don't want to be any part of it even if what remains is technically some other sort of "Democracy".
> I would prefer that we talk about "defending the Republic" or "the Republic" being under threat
"Republic" in modern usage just means "country with a President". All of the most horrible dictatorships are Republics.
It does not. India is a republic having a President as ceremonial head of state but the effective power is in hands of prime minister.
The Republic of India is a country with a President, like I said.
Yes, yes, as in "Democratic People's Republic of Korea", we know this. Nobody is fooled by it; nobody believes that North Korea is in fact a Republic, and saying a thing doesn't make it so. And *whatever* word we generally settle on to describe the sort of government a free society should have, all the most horrible dictatorships will incorporate into their name at the next reasonable opportunity.
Why should any sensible person care? The word has a well-defined meaning, and that meaning has nothing to do with whether the head of state is named "President" and everything to do with having an elected legislature that can say "No we're not doing that" to the nominal Top Dog. People will sometimes say that their glorious and wonderful nation is a "republic" even though it has only a token legislature of yes-men, and they'll be lying and we'll know they are lying.
"Democracy" says something very simple about what a government can do; it can do what the people want.
The fact that elected governments routinely defy public opinion and get away with it on a wide range of issues only undermines their claims to be democracies; perhaps a model originating from 17th and 18th-century Anglo-American aristocrats is less democratic than it claims to be.
Modern Democracy is a type of population management that emerged alongside Fascism and Communism. Even countries like Russia and China are mostly Democratic in this sense, even though their systems are illiberal. Democracy generates primary legitimacy by growing the wealth of the population, unlike fascists nationalistic dreams or communist social utopia. Elections have little to do with actual Democracy - fascists and communists generally also have elections. Its quite easy for bureaucrats to manage populations in all 3 systems so the mass votes correctly. Instability happens when two sets of elites send alternative messaging.
>Imagine a system where the winner of a fair election gets unlimited authority during his term. What forces this person to ever hold another fair election?
So, the Papacy?
Heh. And note that the Pope *does* respond to the pressures from his cardinals.
The important thing to note, here, is that the country is way too big for one person to meaningfully rule it *regardless of how much official authority they have*. Authority =/= power. You can have all the authority in the world, but if no one listens to you, you're stuck. And the President only has power *because* people listen to him. If the military said "sorry, no", he'd have zero recourse.
China's a lot bigger than the US. Xi doesn't seem to be having much issue.
He doesn't rule alone--he has the entire weight of a very carefully constructed system behind him, the personal loyalty of many people at all levels, and a culture that has been shaped for this kind of control for millennia. He has real power, not just paper authority. And it's still pretty fragile, requiring constant compromise (hidden by the system on purpose to obfuscate how fragile it is) and maintenance from millions of people.
That's what I mean by authority not intrinsically being power. Power requires building and maintaining systems, systems that will often turn on any individual and often take a life of their own.
Thank you for an eloquent article Scott. This is why I still come here despite other articles. I've seen people saying this is another "rant" article but this seems much better than all other "rant" ones.
About democracy dismantling democracy, I guess there's a merit in saying that if people wants to dismantle democracy, it'd be within their right to do so. And we can't stop it anyway since they can all just pretend that a new constitution is the actual valid one and left the old one in the dust. But the most important question remains, do actually ALL people want it dismantled? If not, how much? Do we want it dismantled despite 49% of them not wanting it to be? How about 33%? 10%? 1%? The question becomes very nuanced and is actually already (attempted to be) handled in the constitution itself, where significant changes are gated behind supermajority (66%).
The broken part of current American democracy is that the fracture is so deep that that number can never be obtained so now 50+-5% of people tries to snuff the other 50+-5% of people. Regardless of who wins, 50+-5% of people will suffer. And the other 50+-5% shouldn't be able to claim that they represent the other 50+-5% people. And we haven't even counted people who don't or can't vote!
The argument here is pure self-dealing. It's all rationalization for "we don't want the guy we don't like."
Donald Trump has done ~nothing that wasn't commonplace in the U.S. from 1789 to 1960. There is no evidence that he is any threat to "American democracy" as defined over that timeframe.
To which the immediate rejoinder is, "Oh, but before 1960 we had <insert parade of horribles>. Are you saying we should go back to THAT??"
Which simply proves my point: the real dispute is about policy preferences, not "democracy." We should be honest and discuss those polices directly, not attempt to preempt that discussion with grandiose talk about "democracy."
Strong agree. He misses that while all the things he describe may have some theoretical relation to democracy, the magnitude is unclear (as you point out, seemingly empirically not that high). Very surprised that many read this as some great revelation.
The US South only democratized in the 1960s. (There was an earlier attempt in the 1860s-70s, but it fell in the face of a violent insurgency.)
The things Trump is doing now are very much *not* routine across the history of the Northern US; there are precedents, sure, but most of them are remembered as dark moments in American history. There's a reason John Adams was a one term president.
According to the most widely accepted political history, the United States was a republic from the beginning of its constitution in 1789 and became broadly democratic under Jackson in 1829 ("Jacksonian democracy").
You can obviously fuss about this or that exception, but again, that simply proves my point that what is at stake here is particular policies, most of which have been common in the U.S., not some grandiose thing about "democracy."
As applied to the northern and western states there isn't that much reason to argue with it, although some states (Vermont and Pennsylvania come to mind) were democracies before Jackson.
However, the United States is a federation, and a state where the outright majority of people are disenfranchised or even enslaved can not be in any real sense considered democratic. I think most historians recognize the US as mostly democratic with an undemocratic south oddly grafted on. Democracy came to the South with the Civil Rights Movement and the abolition of the Poll Tax, not earlier.
None of that has much to do with whether the Trump administration "threatens democracy" in the sense of OP.
Okay.
The things Trump is doing have few precedents in US history, and said precedents, at the federal level, either happened during major wars (which, you might note, the US is not currently in) or are broadly remembered as near-misses with dictatorship.
I suppose an exception could be made for Biden's abuses of power - but Biden was the Pompey to Trump's Caesar and no friend of democracy either.
I encourage you to investigate the many, many extralegal exercises of power that went on in the Johnson administration (not to mention Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations). You're treating as anomalous things that are not at all anomalous.
What if a democracy wants to vote itself out of being a democracy though? Is that even allowed?
With a 2/3 majority of Congress and a 3/4 majority of the States.
Fair.
Democracy is not the point and it never really has been. Liberty is the point. Without liberty, democracy is just mob rule with better branding.
I sincerely say that not as a provocateur, but rather as a federalist and a classic conservative. The trappings of liberty have been conflated and not particularly effectively laundered into the connotations of what in post Cold War American political rhetoric is virtually universally called upon when people use the term “Democracy.”
Democracy is not a functioning system of government in the classic sense of the term, it is an important but secondary element that serves, when used well, as *a mechanism* to reverse the inexorable intentional restrictions on liberty. I say ‘inexorable intentional restrictions’ because what government in history has ever, over the long arc of its existence, progressively increased the opportunities for the citizens of that country to exercise those liberties outlined in, for example, the UN declaration of human rights?
I do not mean to say that citizen participation in deciding who gets authority and in lawmaking is not important, and in some moments, essential. My point is one that many others have made: the conversation has shifted over decades towards an unthinking primacy for the term “Democracy” when discussing existential political angst, and when discussing what is claimed to be the fundamental virtue that we hope all mankind can enjoy to the fullest. But no one ‘enjoys’ democracy, we flourish or we fail best within an ordered liberty that is minimally, constrained by regulation.
And I believe that this current moment is exactly the time to make this point. Because it is at this moment that it could be said that those who elected Trump are undermining and proactively seeking to deny essential liberty, through democratic processes.
From a 1-D diachronic perspective, this sounds like a bad argument. “Subverting the courts and the constitution are not democratic actions,” goes the refrain. Problem is that this reflects a gross mischaracterization of the important but limited scope to which we should expect to depend on the mechanisms of voting for authorities, and is in fact, a weak argument that can be rebutted by anyone with an adequate awareness and facility in rhetoric.
2025 is precisely a moment when people who care about risks of a genuine tyranny emerging should STFU about democracy, and instead use the much much sharper swords of Liberty and Pluralism. Libertarians most of all - this is your moment to speak up, but use the right fucking words that carry the right import and make the maximum impact to the largest audience in the most effective way possible. And I do not speak of abstract liberty, so I propose grounding this in “Let’s begin again, with Pluralism.” Because a proper understanding of pluralism put the spotlight precisely on where liberty is most under threat: American citizens of various political tribes have been actively trying to deny each other essential liberties for about the last decade because of differences in political opinions. Differences of opinion, that are churned by intellectual tribalism and other forms of tribalism, into such heated rhetoric that we view each other, not as people with different opinions that we are absolutely allowed to dislike challenge and spurn but must abide as equals, but as enemies of the republic who deserve no less than to be denied the full set of liberties guaranteed under our constitution to each citizen.
If you actually want liberty to survive, begin again with Pluralism. Because the minute you deny your enemy the rights you demand for yourself, you’ve already lost.
https://josephheath.substack.com/p/observations-on-the-us-constitutional
A Canadian professor wrote about something similar. He views democratic governments as having 3 branches to check each other, but with one acting as first among equals based on some combination of norms and actual government structure. For example, Canada's legislature is the dominant branch, while France centers the executive (at least with the current republic).
The US has evolved to have the judiciary dominate. For example, we are looking to the courts to invalidate Trump's tariffs. Judicial supremacy is unsatisfying, as it is the branch with the least democratic legitimacy. Trump is attempting to destroy this convention of judicial supremacy and establish a strong executive branch.
I'm not entirely convinced by his framework, but it was an interesting perspective.
The judiciary only gets involved when someone breaks the law. In a sense, it's a sign of the *weakness* of the judiciary when the presidency feel frees to violate the law in a new manner every day and it's worthwhile because the judicial remedy is so often late or inconsistent.
>which itself requires large donors whose money cannot be arbitrarily confiscated
Or perhaps large amount of donors who don't live paycheck to paycheck and can afford sparing some of their money for socially beneficial institutions. Don't sneak in the assumption that society somehow requires rich people, when the only effect of rich people is institutional capture of [essentially everything] - nothing funded by them will ever go against them and their fortunes, and that's the whole "democratic" system, and the effect is the system doing what they (and not the voting public) want. After a while, people just give up and vote for anyone at all who promises to shake it up, and we end up with Trump(/Putin/etc.).
On a more general note, this is why we'd perhaps do better ditching leaders entirely (at least institutionally entrenched leaders with institutional powers). Unfortunately, leaderless coordination is a hard problem to solve. But even more unfortunately, we aren't even trying.
This is what the sycophants forget, when it comes to Trump.
For sure, he won the election. But there are still rules and laws, and Trump is not immune to them. I woulda said norms, but that ship sailed a long while ago.
Perhaps better to view this in terms of high-middle-low politics as I think Burnham has spoken off. Your defence of "democracy" is in practice a defense of the privilege and power of the distributed "middle" class -- i.e. judges, doctors, media owners, etc., and prevents a strong central leader from ever making use of a popular mandate to roll back the power and privileges of that "middle" class. You may call them "civil society", but they could also be called the "clerisy", the "managerial elite", etc.
"I'm defending the constitution" is a pretty solid American line.
Yep. I always say: Elections are a necessary but insufficient element in a democracy. Rule of law and freedom of speech are probably more important parts.
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
Sadly I found this argument unconvincing. Okay, all of those things you described have some relation to the next election. How much? If not much, then you can't reasonably assert that democracy is "threatened" or "in danger". And it really does seem that in many cases the relation isn't that much, because you need to go through a lot of inference steps to get to some of the things you're defending.
Most people do not believe the next election is in any serious danger. If you believe it is, you can say that, but insofar as it isn't, democracy isn't in danger by this definition, even if it has some tangential relation to some auxiliary features that are being weakened.
(The "liberalism" argument, on the other hand, seems true.)
If you anthropomorphize the result of election as "the Will of the People" then attacking democracy is an equivalent of "preventing the Will of the People tomorrow". So it makes sense to think why would you do that. Basically, it means that you expect the People to change their Will.
One possibility is that election had a narrow outcome. The Will of the People is actually more like the will of the 50.001% of voters, so they want to cement the outcome, just in case the coin flip would end up differently the next time.
Another possibility is that there is a good reason to expect that the People will soon learn something that will change their Will... which kinda sounds like maybe someone was deceiving the People?
This got very messy around Brexit. An unambiguous referendum result in 2016 (albeit close) followed by a highly ambiguous election result in 2017. The tories were only able to form a majority at all with DUP backing and because of some gains in Scotland off the back of Ruth Davison (a very unorthodox tory). Otherwise we would have had an extremely messy Corbyn-led coalition. Instead we got two years of deadlock, ended by the 2019 election, which settled the question. I'm not sure if there's a possible world where Brexit gets reversed, but a more competent Labour leader might have actually been able to form a government in 2017 or put up more of a realistic fight in 2019. You have to say the will of the people is a bit of a will o' the whisp if elections are all you have to go on - we also need opinion polls, public consultations, parliamentary scrutiny, right to protest, satire etc.
One problem with using regular elections as a barometer of public opinion is that political platforms consist of all sorts of elements. For example, it's quite conceivable that a candidate might win because the public like his stance on, say, social security, even though they dislike his policy on crime. If the successful candidate then goes on to claim a popular mandate for his crime policies, that's... not entirely false, because people did vote for him knowing what his policies were, but it's still a bit misleading, because most people voted for him *in spite of* his policies in this area. That's why I think it makes sense to treat referendum results as more dispositive of the will of the people than election results: referendums are generally about one thing, so the signal is less noisy.
I agree with this entirely with the proviso that even a referendum is a blunt instrument - brexit voters included labour-supporting industrial workers who wanted more protectionism, and right-libertarians who wanted Singapore-on-Thames. There were always going to be problems of interpretation.
True, you sometimes get baptist-and-bootlegger coalitions supporting a particular referendum outcome, but this tends to be less of a problem than with elections. And even with something like Brexit, the issue of "Should Britain be more protectionist or more free-trade afterwards?" is arguably separate to Brexit itself.
We should define what "Democracy" means, before we can define how to defend her.
Scott argues that: Democracy is about having *the next* election. Therefore, we must prevent the winner of the current election from accumulating enough power to rig the next one, or to cancel it completely. The checks and balances to achieve constitute "liberal" democracy: An independent judiciary, media, etc...
We can steelman Scott's argument by operationalizing "Democracy" as "a government that enforces the Will of the People"(*).
If we do this, an election can be seen as *a mechanism* for the people to incentivize government to enforce "The Will of the People", or else get voted out. If we allow for the election-winner to have too much power, then this mechanism breaks down, and the election-winner can just enforce his own will.
----------------------------
This idea opens up a whole can of worms:
1. Who are "The People", and how do we know what their will is?
This leads naturally to the next question:
1.1. Does the will of the people include whatever issue has 50% + 1 approval?
1.2. Do we enforce a higher limit for certain issues such as changing the constitution?
1.3. Do we enshrine certain protections for the minorities, under the justification that they are also part of the people and they should be respected?
The resolution to these issues are typically enshrined on the constitutions, and governments usually implement a whole set of institutions to resolve these issues, which is what constitutes "liberal" democracy.
2. Does the "Will of The People" coincides with what is good for the people?
If we answer affirmatively, then democracy would be more or less synonymous with "Good Governance".
This is obviously difficult to answer, but in economics there has been many attempts to answer a weaker version of this (Does the "Will of the People" coincides with what causes economic growth?"), and there is evidence that it does.(**)
Since the most common form of democracy for which we have evidence is "liberal" democracy, then this means that our evidence goes in favor of liberal democracy.
----------------------------
But there are alternatives.
1. On the issue of who "The People" are, we can argue, like Thatcher did, that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals".
Then we could probably end up in a Libertarian rabbit-hole where the purpose of government is to maximize the liberty of the individual, not necessarily to enforce the "will" of anybody.
In this case, we would be abandoning the idea of "Defending Democracy" in favor of "Defending Liberty first, and Democracy second".
2. On the issue of "Good Governance", we can argue that there are Reactionary countries with better governance than liberal democracies.
Over a decade ago, the favorite country was Singapore(***). Scott back then counterargued by claiming that this good governance was because of Singapore being a "supercapitalist Chinese-British city-state".
I am not entirely satisfied with this counterargument, because it implies that Good Governance is *independent* of democracy, leaving us with the need to defend democracy as a good-in-itself.
Instead, I think that we have to conceptualize the idea that our world is one of tradeoffs: Sometimes we can have both more democracy and better governance, and other times we can tradeoff a little less democracy for a little more of good governance.
If we do this, then we can have a more fruitful discussion, because we start arguing about which countries are in a stage where they can benefit from copying Singapore, and which are just not at that stage.
I think that, to continue having fruitful discussions, this is a good opportunity to bring back the "Dictator's Book Club".
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(*) - After all, Democracy means "the power of the people", and how powerful can "The People" really be if they can't even enforce their own will?
(**) - Acemoglu et al. (2019). Democracy Does Cause Growth. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700936
(***) - Please read 2013 Scott here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/08/we-sail-tonight-for-singapore/
As in all philosophical debates, it all lies in how you define your terms. Democracy originally just implied "rule by the people", but pure democracy in this sense is simply mob rule, which the founders were so worried about that they put in place a large number of safeguards, which are the source of the claim "We are a republic, not a democracy" - ie, we are a limited democracy, not a pure one.
Populism has been defined as "The power of a community over the rule of law." Mob rule, historically, almost always comes in the form of a strongman becoming a tyrant claiming to represent "ordinary people" (that is, in fact, what the word "tyrant" means. In ancient Greece it indicated a popular leader who overthrew the aristocracy). In the founders eyes, protecting against mob rule was nearly the same thing as protecting against a tyrant.
Nearly every safeguard used against tyranny rule takes the form of de-centralizing power. The tree branches of the federal government were intended to be more or less equal in power, at least in the long run, so that no one branch could rule unrestricted. This was particularly true of the executive. The independent sovereignty of the states, the ten amendments (which manifest the concept of civil rights), a free and independent press, separation between church and state, etc., are all intended to protect against the rise of a popular tyrant.
And historical justification isn't hard to find. The history of Greek city states is full of stories of tyrants causing civil wars and disrupting the state. Julius Caesar was murdered because he was suspected of trying to become a tyrant. And of course, not to Godwin the thread, but "You Know Who" was famously elected before starting a war that killed tens of millions of people.
Trump isn't threatening "democracy", per se, but I think a case could be made that he's threatening our constitutional republic, and it's safeguards against tyranny.
In germany this is actually codified into law. For example, the communist party of germany is outlawed precisely because they are an anti-democratic party.
They do this because of their *unique* history. The nazis themselves were democratically elected, however the people democratically elected an antidemocratic party.
Germany is currently doing the same thing with their ongoing process to get the AfD labelled as "gesichert rechtsextremistisch", arguing that the AfD itself is antidemocratic and thus should be outlawed. (I'm explicitly not putting forward an opinion on the AfD in general here though)
Are you from Germany yourself? What do you think are the merits of the case against AfD? (Not your personal opinion on the AfD but the facts of the case)
I'm not German, but I think that I know something about this.
The big weakness of the case against the AfD is that there doesn't seem to be an actually anti-democratic ideology that is being espoused by the leadership of the AfD. This is different from Hitler and Marx, both of whom rejected democracy (Hitler permanently and fundamentally, while Marx was more 'the end justifies the means').
A lot of accusations of the AfD being undemocratic are false accusations, based on conflating certain political choices like non-discrimination, with democracy. I have seen no evidence that they actually want to establish an autocracy or such.
The best evidence against the AfD is an alleged coup attempt by sovereign citizens, where an ex-lawmaker of the AfD was part of that group, but that is still very weak evidence given that the lawmaker was not an active member of the AfD at the time of the alleged plotting, nor is there apparently any evidence that the AfD as an organization was involved in any way, nor does the AfD espouse the sovereign citizen ideology.
Any ban is unlikely to restore Germany to its old political landscape. If we look at Belgium, then the ban for the Vlaams Blok merely resulted in the creation of a new party. And in The Netherlands, the implosion of the LPF that broke the taboo on being anti-migration didn't result in the voters returning to the old mainstream parties, but in them finding new parties.
Thanks. LPF was an interesting one because Pim Fortuyn was explicitly trying to protect Dutch liberal permissiveness from the puritanism of Islamic immigrants. This idea may yet have its day.
"an alleged coup attempt by sovereign citizens"
What are "sovereign citizens" and how do they differ from other types of citizens,
A sovereign citizen is someone who believes that government power is not legitimate.
It seems common for these people to have the misguided belief that government power is actually fully constrained by laws and that it merely requires finding a loop hole to be able to opt out of (the current) government and its laws.
In the German case, it is alleged that Heinrich XIII Prince of Reuss was going to be made the new monarch in a coup. This gentleman believes that the current federal German republic is not valid because the allied victors set up the new state in a legally invalid way, and that the old royalty are the legitimate rulers. And for some reason, that he, as a descendant of very minor royalty, that ruled a small kingdom in pre-unification Germany, is now the legitimate ruler of all of Germany.
But note that this kind of belief is fairly particular to sovereign citizens in Germany. In the US and other countries, they seem to generally have a more anarchist, rather than monarchist belief, where they are not bound by the laws.
I think this story is basically right as far as it goes. But it doesn't seem to go to the place that seems most troublesome to me. I hear plenty of people calling Trump an authoritarian because he asserts control over the bureaucracy, for example by firing directors of various executive branch agencies. I have the same response, that Trump was elected and the bureaucrats were not. But unlike the media, the nonprofits (which are usually not called "NGOs" in the domestic context but whatever), or the judiciary, the bureaucrats don't seem to make an appearance in this story about how we ensure that there is a next election. The parenthetical paragraph suggests, without any explanation, that the bureaucrats are somehow part of the checks on the president. But this is never tied in to the rest of the story, and it flatly contradicts what we all learn in middle school civics. The checks on the president are supposed to come from the other two branches of government, not from the bureaucrats. If the bureaucrats play some role in ensuring that there is a next election, somebody please explain what it is.
I would also note that in our system, the elections, even the federal ones, are run by the state secretaries of state. They do not work for the federal government, and thus cannot be fired by the president. So that particular part of the story I find a bit weak, but that I believe can be patched up so that the rest of the story holds together.
I think that Fukuyama fundamentally misunderstood what he was describing in The End of History. He noticed that almost no one openly disagrees with words like democracy, so he thought that there is consensus.
However, in reality, there is a taboo about rejecting the word 'democracy,' but not actually a taboo on disagreeing with a specific definition of the word. So in reality, there are still large disagreements about how democracy should be implemented, including the extent to which people (don't) want power in the hands of the populace. They just all call whatever they themselves want: 'democracy'.
Because we don't use clear, separate terms that describe the different things we want to achieve, it becomes nearly impossible to have a proper debate about the upsides and downsides of certain choices, because everything ends in a shouting match about what is actually 'democracy' and accusations that everyone who rejects our own definition is undemocratic and thus a bad person. People usually see no need to actually properly defend what they want because they hide behind the taboo on rejecting the word.
This essay by Scott suffers from the lack of clear definitions and lack of multiple concepts as well. His argument is essentially that to defend democracy we must have less democracy, which is a muddled argument exactly because everything is forced into an artificial single dimension: more democracy, more better. But less is apparently more, because of reasons. Yet if you introduce other concepts, and leave democracy to just mean 'to do the will of the people,' then you can have a proper debate about the trade-offs that you want to make with regards to each of these concepts.
For example, if you introduce the concept of political expertise and the other side of that coin: the political insularity of professional politicians. Then you have a way to argue for a representative democracy without having to abuse the word 'democracy,' to argue for term limits, or to argue for direct democracy. And you can have the concepts of political stability and executive stability, versus responsiveness. You can have the concept of error correction, where you can value the ability to correct legislative mistakes, when you see how the laws work out in practice, versus the benefits of more often sticking with choices, so people can trust that the law is fairly stable. And you can have the concept of crucial laws where you cannot afford to make big mistakes or really need stability, and then there are a whole bunch of methods to achieve this (higher levels of consensus than 51% to make a change, requiring the probationary law to still have support after another election, etc, etc).
But an honest discussion about tradeoffs requires the willingness to say that one is opposed to maximal democracy, and values other things more than maximizing it.
Scott has written before about the undesirability of vague, overly-broad definitions of democracy:
"I find myself nervous at the recent trend towards using “democratic” to mean “good” and “undemocratic” to mean “bad”, because it either makes us twist language in an Orwellian way to say that courts overruling elected officials is “more democratic” than them not doing that, or serves as a bludgeon that would-be dictators can use against an independent judiciary."
(https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/bad-definitions-of-democracy-and?utm_source=publication-search)
I would be willing to give extremely favorable prediction odds on:
Trump will not be the president at the end of 2029.
There will be no legislation passed or court cases following from such legislation that ban the media from reporting on Trump's missteps.
The US government will not confiscate the DNC treasury between now and 2029.
Agents of the US government will not murder the 2028 Democratic candidate for president.
Gay marriage could equally be interpreted as a few judges imposing their will over the wishes of the majority.
A judicial tyranny, in fact.
No judge forced you to get a gay marriage, as far as I can tell.
It's almost as if marriage isn't just a pair of atomised individuals choosing to live together in a hermetically-sealed vacuum, but is fundamental for the continued survival of society as a whole.
A society that has one type of marriage is different from a society that has another type of marriage.
Validation of gay marriage changes the straight marriage as well.
Notice I need to qualify marriage by the unnecessary term "straight".
There are allegations of widespread fraud and irregularities in 2020 presidential elections too.
We aren't now in village era anymore. American elections practices are odd from a global perspective. It takes far too long to count. Not to mention oddities like hanging chads etc.
Sorry man, it's too late now.
Okay. Then can someone please explain what Trump is doing that makes the next election less fair?
He's supporting paper ballots (cannot be hacked, cannot even plausibly claim they are hacked, can be counted fairly in presence of observers from both parties, used in most jurisdictions outside USA).
He's supporting proof of citizenship. Yes, that would benefit his voters who are more motivated and less lazy, but the real thing is lots of progressives want illegals voting for their candidate, cannot justify that openly and so keep screaming about racism; again it's not racism it's Trump favouring his voters. Similar to the Louisiana stuff it's just not logical that Democrats can safely gerrymander their seats, but Republicans can't because Democrat voters are Black. Anyway, racism aside, citizens do have a right to vote, illegals do not.
He's opposing harvested ballots. Yes, those make it harder for citizens to vote, but also much easier to confirm that the correct person voted, and that the vote was real.
It seems to me like he's fixing actual, observed problems that make it difficult to prove that there was no election fraud. None of what he's doing at the moment is rigging the next election. Almost of all his moves are fixing the potential for election rigging by progressives (who lost despite the potential for illegal activity which favoured their side more).
The idea that paper ballot would make for uncontroversial elections would come as a surprise to the people of Florida circa 25 years ago.
But more to the point, if you're looking for a substantive discussion, I would suggest not caricaturing your opponents. If you don't understand the substantive reasons why people are nervous about his proposed voting reforms, you can ask, but jumping in with "for the illegals" suggests you're just looking for an extreme version of your opponent to score points against.
>If you don't understand the substantive reasons why people are nervous about his proposed voting reforms
In a lot of years of trying to be charitable, I've yet to hear one *good* explanation why voter ID is bad and ballot harvesting is good.
The rough trend is Dems want more vote *numbers*, and Reps want more *confirmed* votes. The incentives are clear: loose ballot confirmation benefits the team with more activists; high ballot security benefits the team with fewer, ah, low-agency people.
While I'm sure a dedicated journalist can find some hardworking single mother working 5 jobs despite having zero forms of ID or some heartstring story about a care home of quadraplegics that can't mail their own ballots, I've never been convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it.
But you're not speaking to OP's points, or at least not most of them. "Voter ID" requirements and "proof of citizenship" requirements are different concepts.
Paper ballots are a whole other ball of wax.
If you want to ban 'ballot harvesting' - what do you mean? Is 'voting by mail' included in that?
So what's the debate we're having here? Are we asking if Specific Reforms A, B, and C make sense? That's one I'm happy to talk about. If you're saying you've never heard an objection to _any_ voting reform that sounds like a good faith objection, then either you just haven't been in the right forum, or you're not really operating in good faith yourself.
Only citizens can vote in federal and (most?) state elections, so while voter ID and proof of citizenship are technically different concepts, they're close enough for my tastes. Some form of ID that confirms citizenship seems like the most straightforward way to provide proof, yes?
I didn't comment on the paper ballots part, deliberately.
I would define ballot harvesting as "any person other than the one registered on the associated ballot, or their legal representative, submitting the ballot to a ballot-collection site." Vote by mail has its own issues but I wouldn't count it as ballot harvesting on its own, though it can enable ballot harvesting. I mean primarily people
Several years ago on- I think the Slatestarcodex subreddit or possibly the blog comment section- there was a partisan campaign volunteer that went door to door knocking and had been coached that, if the person seemed likely to vote for their candidate, to help them fill it out and to collect their ballot to deposit it for them, so they don't forget. If the person was not likely to vote for their candidate, end the conversation politely but quickly and move on. The commenter seemed to think this behavior is virtuous.
The obvious corollary is that one could just *lie*, collect all the ballots they think are opposed to their candidate too, and dispose of them. There's an ongoing court case of possible voter fraud in Hamtramck, Michigan regarding social pressure being used to harvest ballots and have them filled out a particular way, as well.
>If you're saying you've never heard an objection to _any_ voting reform that sounds like a good faith objection
No, I quite specifically meant I have not what I consider any good-faith objection on why voter ID is unacceptable and why ballot harvesting is good (and also not easily abused).
I am sure I have heard good faith objection to other voting reforms. The catch-22 of gerrymandering is a can of worms but some of those objections are good faith, for example.
I would be in favor of both of those changes. I think they're both nothingburgers, to be clear - I think harvesting is not a thing, and that the kind of fraud that voter ID would prevent is exceedingly rare. But I also think they would not impact voting rights much and Democrats are being hysterical when they oppose these measure.
But the overall framework here troubles me, and this is why I think trying to operate in good faith (on both sides) is so critical.
Democrat's bad faith is to treat all forms of voting reform as de facto suppression efforts. Republican's bad faith is to treat allegations of voting fraud as fundamentally non-falsifiable, such that you can justify ever-escalating forms of election 'security'.
Take OP's call for paper ballots. Back in '04 it was Democrats who were convinced that Diebold machines were flipping votes to Bush, and it took a round of reforms to make people feel secure enough to trust voting machines. But then, in Arizona in 2020, Democrats won a state that used electronic voting, and suddenly it was a conspiracy again. Even though this theory was disproved as thoroughly as possible, it still hasn't stopped some (mainly on the far right) to insist that only paper ballots are okay.
That's the cycle I'm wary of.
1. Someone proposes a reform to make elections more secure. Anyone who objects is considered to be doing so for bad faith reasons (i.e. they want to enable fraud).
2. They get implemented anyway
3. A party loses at a time of national partisan fervor
4. That losing party comes up with new theories for why the election was actually stolen, with zero evidence, just theories.
Go to step 1.
I'm not convinced we can get out of this cycle. Both parties are to blame here at different times but at the moment it seems to be mainly Republicans who are convinced that fraud is happening and we can stop it if we just get to step 2 (reforms).
Pessimistically, I just don't think that's true for most people. You sound reasonably enough to be an exception, to be clear, so thank you for the sober response.
> I'm not convinced we can get out of this cycle.
There's a very clear endpoint. Make votes public rather than anonymous. All of the problems are due to the goal of anonymity.
> The obvious corollary is that one could just *lie*, collect all the ballots they think are opposed to their candidate too, and dispose of them.
This reminded me of something that bothered me about a local vote-by-mail election.
My ballot came to me in the mail, addressed to me personally and distinct from the ballots addressed to the other people living in the same house.
It had a unique identifying code on it, and it advertised that I could use this code to "verify" that my vote had been counted. It seems safe to assume that other ballots in fact had different codes on them.
A website was provided where you could go and enter the code from your ballot and see a message saying it was counted. Now, the problem is:
Why is that supposed to verify that your vote was counted?
In the first place, since you enter the code yourself, they can just show a message saying "we received your vote", regardless of whether they received your vote.
In the second place, in a slightly-better-designed system where you go to a list of received ballots and check for yours, the code on the ballot originated from them, not from you, so there's still nothing stopping them from showing that they've received your vote, regardless of whether they received your vote. (Technically, there is a risk that they could be caught by someone who kept their ballot and then audited that it 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 received; this risk exists but I'm guessing it's pretty small.)
They could verify that they received your vote by publishing 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘃𝗼𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝘁𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳 when you enter a ballot code. Except that since the codes they 𝘶𝘴𝘦 are associated with your personal identity, the principle of the anonymous ballot legally prevents them... from... having that information....
I wonder how they destroyed the records of which codes were sent to which voters.
The correct way to do this is either:
(1) Print a bunch of coded ballots, let people pick them up from a centralized location -- breaking the connection between code and identity -- and display the recorded vote when a ballot is audited; or
(2) Print a bunch of uncoded ballots, mail them to individual voters, provide a space where the voter is free to supply an audit code, and record the audit codes you've received in a place where people can look for them.
Either of these also allows for verifying (probabilistically) that a vote was counted and not just received, if you display the vote in the audit records for option (2). If you don't want the vote count to be auditable, option (2) will allow you to prove that you received ballots without making you also prove that you counted them.
So, I can speak to this with some knowledge regarding how it works in my home state of NJ. First off, they make sure that all identifying information is on the envelope that encloses the ballot, not on the ballot itself. When they get the envelope back they check for signature match and that everything on the outside is properly filled out, and then they scan it to mark it as a submitted vote. At that point, they take the mail-ballot out of the envelope and put it in a sealed bag of valid votes that will be counted. (Same sealed bag they use to transport provisional ballots cast in-person.) From this point on, the ballot itself lacks any personally identifying information, in order to protect ballot secrecy. Voters can easily use a state portal to look up whether their ballot has been received, but those who wish can see the full list of every individual who has returned a ballot so far - it’s all public record and you just need to find the spreadsheet on the board of elections website. Could they mark a ballot as received when it wasn’t? It’s technically possible, but if you do that with any frequency, at scale, you will absolutely run into cases where people notice. Political campaigns go through all this data in very fine detail to determine who they’re targeting, and if they find people who are listed as voted but still have their ballots, that would become a huge scandal.
Now, how can you know that your vote is counted and not just your ballot received? The answer is that you can’t, you basically can only have the same confidence that you’d have if you voted in-person with a paper ballot. There are safeguards in place, for example campaigns on both sides can appoint watchers to observe the process, and the board of elections itself is a bipartisan body with members appointed by chairs of the local dem and gop committees. So you have multiple democrats and republicans watching as each mail ballot is fed into an optical scanner, and then there are random audits to double check the scanner counts.
The biggest threat to having your ballot counted isn’t malfeasance, it’s that when they finally open up your ballot there might be some issue which makes your vote impossible to read. Like, maybe you spilled water on your ballot and the pen marking your vote bled and they can’t tell who you voted for. At this point they no longer have your personally identifying information connected with that ballot, so you will never know that your vote wasn’t counted. But… this is the same issue you run into any time you use paper ballots, with or without a machine to scan them. If you look at the Florida recount in 2000, one of the challenges I was that ballots were private so of course they couldn’t just call up the voter and ask them who they had meant to vote for. If you could, that would open a whole other can of worms where people could be paid or pressured to lie about how they had voted.
The states decide who votes and how, so these are all just theatre.
A meaningful example: the next election will be less fair if the FCC threatens to pull the license of networks that air opinions that are overly critical of one candidate or party (but not the other).
Another example. The President could insist the DOJ "go after" the opposition candidate. It doesn't take much to indict someone, and a President-friendly judge may be happy to maximize the damage to the candidate. The President may have committed similar or worse crimes, but as President they can't be charged.
These are standard authoritarian moves (see Turkei under Erdogan) to bias electoral results in favor of the incumbent (ie, create unfair elections). You may think these things could never happen in the USA, but never say never.
"You may think these things could never happen in the USA, but never say never."
Why would I say never? They did it to Trump. Moreover Trump's prosecutions all involved novel legal theories and prosecutions for things no one else had been prosecuted for.
By contrast, Trump's intended prosecutions are for standard crimes and the Democrats did many incredibly authoritarian (see COVID) things during their reign.
The media last time was 95% favourable to the Democrats. You cannot seriously be saying that anything the Republicans do with the media would be unfair.
"The states decide who votes and how, so these are all just theatre."
The Supreme Court (and not you) will decide if Trump's laws or executive orders on this are legal or not.
Wow that is really quite blind. What would you call the prosecutions of candidate Trump in 2022 and 2023 by the DOJ and various local democratic DAs who ran for office in a platform to get Trump?
Funny how I didn't mention any particular president but you and Navigator both assume I have a particular one in mind. Blind indeed!
I thought it was a terrible idea to prosecure Trump for trivial crimes, and I think it's a terrible idea for Trump to do the same to his political opponents. I thought it was bad when the Biden mucked with the media, and I think it's bad when Trump does the same. For me these are not partisan issues, but represent a drift toward authoritarianism, which might be good for particular politicians but is likely to be bad for civic society and for Americans in general.
No but the clear implication was that you were talking about out Trump who is the subject of the article. No one here is a mind reader so next time why don’t you just spell things out clearly.
Trump is not the subject of the article. The subject of the article is the maintenance (or not) of democracy. I took a couple of examples from the news of the day to make a point or two about what I think are some real risks to democracy.
This is a nominally rationalist community - I don't come here (or anywhere) looking for partisan battles. Like the rest of us I'm sure my biases show through from time to time, but my actual positions on many issues might surprise you.
The post starts with the following sentence.
Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he’s asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs.
Good stuff.
I'd add that their intervention should be limited substantively, too, because the more expansive the government gets the harder it is to contain it when it goes rogue.
For instance, when the government is in charge of assigning frequencies to media companies or approving media company mergers, it creates auch larger attack surface against free speech.
When the government funds most basic research and gives students a large part of the financial support, it becomes hard for universities to assert their independence.
And so on.
Shame that you didn't think about "what is democracy" during Trump's first term, when the institute of Presidency itself was obstructed.
The fact that you have to make these points in 2025 is an indictment of our education system.
I agree with the people saying that democracy requires having *meaningful* elections, and that you can't have meaningful elections if the bureaucracy/judiciary/media/etc. prevent half the country from ever implementing their favoured policies, even when they win. But I'd add that another precondition for having meaningful elections is knowing whom to blame when things go wrong, and that requires having someone, or a clearly-identifiable group of someones, responsible for each thing. In a functioning democracy, if, say, the legislature passes a bad law, you can vote out the legislators who supported the law at the next election; or if the executive appoints corrupt incompetents to high office, you can vote for another candidate. The problem with ceding lots of power to bureaucracies, the judiciary, NGOs, etc., is that this often complicates the chain of responsibility, making it harder or impossible to hold people accountable. (If the Department of Education produces some catastrophically bad guidance for all schools to follow, how do you know which one of the thousands of employees there is responsible?) The democratic response would be to make these institutions less powerful and/or more responsive to the wishes of the elected parts of the government, but doing this often leads to accusations of trying to destroy democracy, as we're seeing now.
I like the spirit of this, but as you rightly said, political platforms consist of all sorts of elements. Trump has supported a smorgasbord of things, some of which are contradictory. VP Vance, before he was nominated, praised Trump for his "strategic ambiguity". And that's a valid strategy but obviously it then becomes difficult to say this is our programme and anyone who opposes it is anti-democratic.
Yes, I was thinking more of the "being able to kick out corrupt and incompetent politicians" aspect of democratic accountability, rather than the "get your preferred policies implemented" aspect. Although the fact that the two go together is another complication -- if you're an American who likes Trumpism but thinks Trump himself is too incompetent to achieve anything meaningful, or if you liked Biden's policies but thought Biden himself was obviously too senile to govern, there was basically no way for you to vote for what you wanted.
No, I think it is not simply so. I think the word "democracy" simply changed. It used to mean "majority rule", but today it means "individual rights". Originally, "individual rights" was associated with a republic, not a democracy, but the two were merged into the concept of liberal democracy, where the liberal part meant individual rights, and then it was shortened to "democracy".
Arguably elections don't really matter much. The electorate has the attention span of a goldfish and treats politics as an entertainment, there are no reasons for politicians to care about what their electorate wants, therefore their vote gets them nothing. They will just do whatever they do want anyway, or they will do whatever the experts of the think-tanks want them to do.
Elections are not a load-bearing part of the system anymore. The important part is that the system respects your rights or not.
The football thing doesn’t appear relevant to this discussion.
"....nothing about this situation justifies the argument that democracy is not in danger because the person who got most of the vote is still in charge."
Sure, agreed, and well argued as always.
But unfortunately, a further drift toward autocratic rule may be in the cards, once the process is set in motion.
Not because rulers are gradually becoming emotinally fonder of autocracy. But because they behave rationally in an evolving social setting that makes it gradually more rational to become (gradually more) autocratic.
Call it "the rationality of autocratic drift".
Here's the thing: If Trump should ever lose power to the Democrats after all the dubious legal tricks he has played against them since he regained power, they will have good legal cases against him if or when they regain power.
....Which gives him an ever-stronger incentive to rig (or more likely, "influence") the election system in a way that increases the probability that his successor will be a loyalist Republican.
(Digression: Right now his successor, whoever that will end up to be, looks like he/she will win without having to do much "influencing". Since the Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot all the time. But it is not guaranteed that they will continue to do so all the way till the next election & beyond.)
In a nutshell: Trumps incentive to try to control the succession increases, the more stuff he does that the opposition might use to legally come after him should he NOT be able to control the succession.
Notice that such rigging can probably be done in subtle legal ways, much like the curtailing of free speech is now done in subtle and perhaps/probably in formally legal ways.
It was a similar logic that let to the dismantling of democracy in Venezuela. Maduro could not afford to lose, since he had done stuff that might put him to prison - or at least to personal ruin - should he lose the election. A similar "rational" process has happened in Russia, which is still formally a democracy. And might be unfolding in Hungary with Orban.
Brazil barely escaped the same fate, thanks to Bolsonaro not managing to sufficiently "influence" the election system in advance. Which is something similar-type rulers in similar positions in democratic countries should (rationally) make a mental note of.
Oh well.
Why not do a deep dive on the literature on how democracy works in practice? I wrote about it for Aporia, but there's a lot more studies. I'm sure a "More than you wanted to know" style post would be excellent on this. https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/do-elites-control-public-opinion
Reading this comment section, and seeing the immense number of arguments about what "democracy" and "liberalism" mean, I am begging everyone to try to adhere to two simple principles:
1. If you understand the basis point of what is being argued, don't be overly pedantic about whether the exactly proper terminology was used. After all, if you understood the point, it doesn't really matter.
2. If you *didn't* understand the point, consider the possibility that this is a "you" problem, and try to think about what the writer is trying to say.
Lots of people here who are too used to thinking of themselves as the smartest person in the room like to be pedantic so they can hear themselves talk even when they have nothing important to say.
None of the pedantic arguments about "democracy" vs. "republican" or anything else are actually relevant to the core thesis.
What you described in this essay is our daily reality in Nigeria. The one who wins (through election that was only barely fair) indeed gets all the power and then goes ahead to flex it over all the already servile institutions. It's rare for an incumbent not to win a second term in Nigeria. The only exception was Goodluck Jonathan who lost in 2015 precisely because he refused to fully capture these servile institutions for his own gains. His opposition did and those very institutions worked against an incumbent. This happened because Nigerian institutions are never independent: they're begging to be captured and used by any power player with loads of cash. And to make matters worse, the elected president in Nigeria has the constitutional rights to select the electoral chairman after the expiration of the 5-year term of the current one. So, indeed institutions are everything and must be built and protected at all cost if liberal governance is to thrive and survive.
The Left gains power, captures or ideologically subverts institutions (NGOs, large parts of the press, most universities, the independent judiciary and the largest share of the administrative state etc.)-> Democracy is endangered by this. The right gains power, attacks those institutions -> Democracy is endangered by this. Democracy is always in danger. Like every other power structure at all times.
Rather than trying to devise ways in which the terms ‘democracy’ or ‘liberalism’ can be fine-tuned to cover every conceivable form of attack on their principles, which given human ingenuity is clearly impossible, anti-authoritarians would probably do better to defend and stand by the principle of ‘rule of law’. Yes, I am aware of what German justice became under the Nazis, or Russian justice under Stalin; but by the time both authoritarian systems were fully in place, it was too late. Rule of law must be defended tooth-and-claw the moment it comes under threat.
Unions work by being elected to represent their workers once... and there is a union there forever. Don't like your union? Why did they get voted in 70 years ago then. Do you hate democracy so bad?