The election has made me consider one of the opening argument’s for the neoreactionary movement a bit more seriously. I have doubts about the goodness of democracy.
But policy governing 300+ million people in the ever-more-complex Universe we inhabit is super fucking complicated.
How can we trust the electorate to make these decisions? Why should we? How do they know anything relevant to the decision they are being asked to make when they vote? Why is there any reason to believe there will be a correlation between what the people will with their vote and what is actually good for the people?
I have no idea if Trump or Clinton (or Gary Johnson) is “best” for America’s interests. I’m not even sure most Americans know what “best” means for them.
I couldn’t trust the average American voter to make a good decision about the complex issues facing the U.S. gov’t.
And the average American voter doesn’t make a decision about “the complex issues”, he only makes a decision as to who will represent him (referendums aside).
As to who actually makes a decision about the complex issues, the usual answer is “the civil service bureaucrats”.
I’m not sure. I’ll have to give this more thought.
I guess my concerns in the immediate aftermath of this election are based on how much misinformation and ignorance are involved in the process. People know almost nothing about anything (or believe lots of things that are easily proven false), and yet they have strong opinions that inform their decision on who to vote for. And then they (basically) directly elect the President.
Keep in mind that all the empirical data on the basis of which we conclude that democracy is an okay political system comes from reality which includes stupid and ignorant electorates.
On a purely theoretical level (which is fun to talk about so I think worth talking about) I would like to see one of the high status and respected members of the rationalist movement (Yudowsky, Hanson etc) in power. They’d become corrupt eventually, but do a lot of good before they did.
On a practical level, our choices are the traditional establishment (which has shown its major flaws), backing Trump, or possibly some time in the future backing Sanders. Unless somebody here has a practical way to achieve something different, that’s all we have.
(EDIT: For what it’s worth, I base my trust on their works, somewhat on their theories on rationality, and the fact that reviewing ideas in far mode for so long has them “nailed” to policies. Without, say, an implacable Congress in their way, I think they’d do enough good to outweigh their inevitable corruption)
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
I understand this to mean that it is better when the people in power use propaganda to convince at least a fraction of the population that they are the good guys, instead of simply using torture to keep everyone in line.
But of course there are people who prefer torture over hypocrisy. (Often they assume they would be among the torturers, and historically they often find out this assumption was wrong.)
How much of the benefit of living in a democracy is in the small influences that voters occasionally manage to exert on the political process? And how much of that benefit is from power-wielders being too scared to act like historical kings and slaughter you on a whim?
Arguably, the chief historical improvements in living conditions have not been from voters having the influence to pass legislation which (they think) will benefit them, but, rather, from power-wielders becoming scared of doing anything too horrible to voters. Maybe one retrodiction (I haven’t checked) would be that if you looked at the history of England, you would find a smooth improvement in living conditions corresponding to a gradually more plausible threat of revolution, rather than a sharp jump following the introduction of an elected legislature.
This debate is the main reason that I’m fascinated by post-democratic ideas, but dial my skepticism up to 11 with regards to their real-world consequences.
I have no idea if Trump or Clinton (or Gary Johnson) is “best” for America’s interests
But then, if you have a better knowledge than the average voter and still couldn’t decide who is better, what difference does it make? If more knowledge is not able to influence your opinion on who to vote, then no harm is done by ignorance. It even saves you time to do other things.
It seems to be possible to win elections even if you are obviously not qualified to run the country. Trump ostensibly has some business chops, but I don’t see any reason to believe who we elected would need to have any governing skill. This is, I suppose, my point.
For example, is it impossible to conceive that Beyonce or Ellen Degeneres could win the next election? Or Justin Bieber? Kim Kardashian?
I know it’s cliche… but because of social media… and the fact we can all vote and it’s easy to do, the system can be hacked. And then everyone will just kind of agree to the results and say, “Welp, that’s the Sacred System. So we have to go by it. Drake is our new president.”
There seems to be a skill set and set of circumstance (eg. celebrity and fame) that is useful for winning elections that is not necessarily correlated to being a president. And the system seems to be super hackable so that we get a leader that doesn’t know how to do the job.
In other areas, people advanced based on their merit in a given field. There are “politics” involved, but there seems to be a glitch in the democratic system whereby someone could get elected based on some combination of name recognition, a sincere populist desire plus some faction of the population that just wants to see the world burn (like, apart from a genuine belief that a given candidate actually represents their interests, they take joy in the chaos upsetting the status quo for it’s own sake. I.e. Trolls)
I mean that democracy’s basic point is that the masses elect whoever they like. They don’t have to be rational and the candidate doesn’t have to be competent. The will of the people is paramount and sanity is not a prerequisite.
Imposing various limitations on the freedom of stupid people to vote for whoever (such as e.g. literacy tests) is seen nowadays as undemocratic :-/
Imposing various limitations on the freedom of stupid people to vote for whoever (such as e.g. literacy tests) is seen nowadays as undemocratic :-/
They are, by definition.
On the other side, you have the problem of imposing boundaries and the gaming of said boundaries. What you measure you get more. Exactly what you measure...
I mean that democracy’s basic point is that the masses elect whoever they like. They don’t have to be rational and the candidate doesn’t have to be competent. The will of the people is paramount and sanity is not a prerequisite.
Well, sure.
What I started out saying is that I don’t think that is good, which was one of the opening points made by the neo-reactionaries, IIRC. The system is breakable so that a very harmful candidate could be elected.
Imposing various limitations on the freedom of stupid people to vote for whoever (such as e.g. literacy tests) is seen nowadays as undemocratic :-/
And perhaps it is. Some sort of filter to prove you are reasonably rational and informed seems like an idea that may have some good consequences.
Maybe it creates more problems than it solves. Tough to say. But 40% of Republicans voting and thinking Obama is a secret Muslim who isn’t actually a citizen seems...off.
I don’t think that is good … The system is breakable
What exactly does this mean? The real world is messy and you are doing the nirvana fallacy bit. What kind of a political system do you think is NOT breakable?
Some sort of filter to prove you are reasonably rational and informed
The word you’re looking for is “disenfrachisement” X-)
What exactly does this mean? The real world is messy and you are doing the nirvana fallacy bit. What kind of a political system do you think is NOT breakable?
I was just thinking this...perfect solution fallacy. I agree. I agree there isn’t necessarily a perfect solution.
The voters’ decision making process just seems to be getting exceedingly bad.
“The Denver Guardian reported on November 5th that an FBI agent investigating Hillary’s emails was found dead in an apparent murder-suicide implying that it was a hit job by the Clintons. Except there was no murder-suicide. The Denver Guardian doesn’t exist. This was the only article on their website. The story quoted Police Chief Pat Frederick of Walkerville, Maryland. He doesn’t exist. Walkerville, Maryland doesn’t exist. There’s a Walkersville, but they don’t have a police department. This fake article was shared on facebook more than 500,000 times.”
This story was shared half a million times. (Btw, the only two people I talked with at length regarding the election this past weekend mentioned that the Clintons were “murderers”...)
I’m not under the illusion people have ever been hyper-rational in regard to politics, but with the “mainstream” media receiving a huge black eye in this election, it seems possible that this trend of the electorate being utterly bamboozled by obvious falsehoods may continue, or get worse.
“Nearly four years ago I wrote about the Beige Dictatorship, and predicted:
Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the "peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off" mechanism that prevents revolutions. If we're lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it'll be back to oligarchy as usual."
Speaking of “literally Hitler”, the fascists in both Italy and Germany came to power democratically.
No, they didn’t. They were elected democratically, but then sized power not granted by the democratic process through a combination of political assassinations, a sizable private militia and the ineptitude (or cooperation) of those who should have stopped them.
No democratic position allows the creation of a private militia or grants political assassinations rights. They grabbed some power through elections, they grabbed some other power by force, they grabbed some other power by sheer assumption and others, too cowards to intervene, let them.
They were most emphatically not political hackers, weaseling their way through the democratic process and installing themselves through subtle laws editing. They rose to power mainly using violence, intimidating and killing those who opposed them.
No democratic position allows the creation of a private militia or grants political assassinations rights.
I don’t know about that. I suspect it depends on the definition of “democratic position” and that historically there were interesting edge cases. Plus, of course, the democratic position of the President of the United States grants you assassination rights (colloquially known as “droning”).
Compared to what? and why do you think so? Speaking of “literally Hitler”, the fascists in both Italy and Germany came to power democratically.
It would be hard to measure objectively. I’ve not compared Trump to Hitler because, well, it’s the internet. But the idea of a populist swell leading to a dangerous leader a la Hitler, yeah, it occurred to me. And I’m not sure saying ‘America circa now isn’t as bad as that’ makes me feel any better. :)
That usually means Vince Foster.
Yeah. Or the email with “90 people close to the Clintons that have died mysteriously”. I’ve received at least two different versions from three different people in the last couple months.
But the idea of a populist swell leading to a dangerous leader a la Hitler, yeah, it occurred to me.
Like everything else democracy has its failure modes. Neoreactionaries think they are a big deal (though their list of the failure modes of democracy is probably different from yours).
It’s not a new idea, of course: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’” (New York Times, 1938)
Like everything else democracy has its failure modes. Neoreactionaries think they are a big deal (though their list of the failure modes of democracy is probably different from yours).
What is the list of neo-reactionary failure modes for democracy?
I’m too lazy to compile one, maybe one of our local NRx people will provide :-/ Or you can go read Moldbug, Nick Land, and such. “Being gamed by demagogues” is probably in there and I’m sure some derivative of the word “cuck” will make an appearance.
It seems reasonable to conclude there is something like a “Good at Being President” rating composed of some mix of appropriate skills.
It also seems there is a “Good at Winning Elections” rating that overlaps with the “Good at Being President” rating in some ways.
And then there is a “Good at Being Popular and Having a Large Online Following” rating because of the ever-growing internet, which may be starting to overlap more and more with the “Good at Winning Elections” rating, and which itself has less overlap with the “Good at Being President” rating.
So then an Instagram chick with XXX million followers becomes POTUS because voting is so simple and no one knows anything and fake news is everywhere so everyone thinks all the “insider” candidates are corrupt and murderers and this Instagram chick probably has some good ideas and isn’t a shill to special interests...but said Instagram chick, by all reasonable accounts, has a very low “Good at Being President”, despite her incredible “Good at Being Popular and Having a Large Online Following” rating that allowed her to be elected.
Like I said, Trump winning isn’t inconceivable and ostensibly he has some POTUS skill rating. But how low a POTUS skill rating could we possibly elect if there is a crazy cynical, troll-ish, populist swell? If Instagram chick or Taylor Swift or Beyonce become president, do we just say, “Welp, the people have spoken! Yay, democracy!”
The election has made me consider one of the opening argument’s for the neoreactionary movement a bit more seriously. I have doubts about the goodness of democracy.
Specifically, I don’t think the average voter knows anything. About a third of voters can’t identify the three branches of government and half don’t know their state has two senators.. I’ve seen polls saying something like 40% of Republicans believe Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen. I know many people personally who sincerely believe he is a secret Muslim.
But policy governing 300+ million people in the ever-more-complex Universe we inhabit is super fucking complicated.
How can we trust the electorate to make these decisions? Why should we? How do they know anything relevant to the decision they are being asked to make when they vote? Why is there any reason to believe there will be a correlation between what the people will with their vote and what is actually good for the people?
I have no idea if Trump or Clinton (or Gary Johnson) is “best” for America’s interests. I’m not even sure most Americans know what “best” means for them.
cf. Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
You make an interesting distinction between “we” and “the electorate” X-D
Perhaps you should ask how could you trust yourself to make important decisions about your life.
Perhaps. And maybe I don’t.
But then, even more so, I couldn’t trust the average American voter to make a good decision about the complex issues facing the U.S. gov’t.
And the average American voter doesn’t make a decision about “the complex issues”, he only makes a decision as to who will represent him (referendums aside).
As to who actually makes a decision about the complex issues, the usual answer is “the civil service bureaucrats”.
I couldn’t trust the average American voter to make a good decision about who should make decisions about the complex issues facing the U.S. gov’t.
Well then, is there someone or someones you could trust to make such a decision? And what do you base your trust on?
I’m not sure. I’ll have to give this more thought.
I guess my concerns in the immediate aftermath of this election are based on how much misinformation and ignorance are involved in the process. People know almost nothing about anything (or believe lots of things that are easily proven false), and yet they have strong opinions that inform their decision on who to vote for. And then they (basically) directly elect the President.
Keep in mind that all the empirical data on the basis of which we conclude that democracy is an okay political system comes from reality which includes stupid and ignorant electorates.
A good question to keep in mind is how much real power the electorate has, as opposed to entrenched bureaucrats or de facto oligarchies.
On a purely theoretical level (which is fun to talk about so I think worth talking about) I would like to see one of the high status and respected members of the rationalist movement (Yudowsky, Hanson etc) in power. They’d become corrupt eventually, but do a lot of good before they did.
On a practical level, our choices are the traditional establishment (which has shown its major flaws), backing Trump, or possibly some time in the future backing Sanders. Unless somebody here has a practical way to achieve something different, that’s all we have.
(EDIT: For what it’s worth, I base my trust on their works, somewhat on their theories on rationality, and the fact that reviewing ideas in far mode for so long has them “nailed” to policies. Without, say, an implacable Congress in their way, I think they’d do enough good to outweigh their inevitable corruption)
But also:
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
by the same man :-)
I understand this to mean that it is better when the people in power use propaganda to convince at least a fraction of the population that they are the good guys, instead of simply using torture to keep everyone in line.
But of course there are people who prefer torture over hypocrisy. (Often they assume they would be among the torturers, and historically they often find out this assumption was wrong.)
I think these are important points, but an important counterpoint is the subject of The American System and Misleading Labels:
This debate is the main reason that I’m fascinated by post-democratic ideas, but dial my skepticism up to 11 with regards to their real-world consequences.
But then, if you have a better knowledge than the average voter and still couldn’t decide who is better, what difference does it make?
If more knowledge is not able to influence your opinion on who to vote, then no harm is done by ignorance. It even saves you time to do other things.
It seems to be possible to win elections even if you are obviously not qualified to run the country. Trump ostensibly has some business chops, but I don’t see any reason to believe who we elected would need to have any governing skill. This is, I suppose, my point.
For example, is it impossible to conceive that Beyonce or Ellen Degeneres could win the next election? Or Justin Bieber? Kim Kardashian?
I know it’s cliche… but because of social media… and the fact we can all vote and it’s easy to do, the system can be hacked. And then everyone will just kind of agree to the results and say, “Welp, that’s the Sacred System. So we have to go by it. Drake is our new president.”
There seems to be a skill set and set of circumstance (eg. celebrity and fame) that is useful for winning elections that is not necessarily correlated to being a president. And the system seems to be super hackable so that we get a leader that doesn’t know how to do the job.
In other areas, people advanced based on their merit in a given field. There are “politics” involved, but there seems to be a glitch in the democratic system whereby someone could get elected based on some combination of name recognition, a sincere populist desire plus some faction of the population that just wants to see the world burn (like, apart from a genuine belief that a given candidate actually represents their interests, they take joy in the chaos upsetting the status quo for it’s own sake. I.e. Trolls)
Hacked? You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Democracy is a beauty contest by design.
Use whatever word you’d prefer. I meant the election could be overridden in ways those who came up with the format didn’t intend.
Tell me more. How do you mean?
I mean that democracy’s basic point is that the masses elect whoever they like. They don’t have to be rational and the candidate doesn’t have to be competent. The will of the people is paramount and sanity is not a prerequisite.
Imposing various limitations on the freedom of stupid people to vote for whoever (such as e.g. literacy tests) is seen nowadays as undemocratic :-/
They are, by definition.
On the other side, you have the problem of imposing boundaries and the gaming of said boundaries. What you measure you get more. Exactly what you measure...
That depends on the definition, doesn’t it? I don’t think that defining democracy is a trivial exercise.
/me looks at voter turnout percentages. Is that so?
Well, sure.
What I started out saying is that I don’t think that is good, which was one of the opening points made by the neo-reactionaries, IIRC. The system is breakable so that a very harmful candidate could be elected.
And perhaps it is. Some sort of filter to prove you are reasonably rational and informed seems like an idea that may have some good consequences.
Maybe it creates more problems than it solves. Tough to say. But 40% of Republicans voting and thinking Obama is a secret Muslim who isn’t actually a citizen seems...off.
What exactly does this mean? The real world is messy and you are doing the nirvana fallacy bit. What kind of a political system do you think is NOT breakable?
The word you’re looking for is “disenfrachisement” X-)
I was just thinking this...perfect solution fallacy. I agree. I agree there isn’t necessarily a perfect solution.
The voters’ decision making process just seems to be getting exceedingly bad.
For example, a comment on reddit regarding The Denver Guardian
This story was shared half a million times. (Btw, the only two people I talked with at length regarding the election this past weekend mentioned that the Clintons were “murderers”...)
I’m not under the illusion people have ever been hyper-rational in regard to politics, but with the “mainstream” media receiving a huge black eye in this election, it seems possible that this trend of the electorate being utterly bamboozled by obvious falsehoods may continue, or get worse.
Compared to what? and why do you think so? Speaking of “literally Hitler”, the fascists in both Italy and Germany came to power democratically.
That usually means Vince Foster.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/11/playtime-is-over.html
“Nearly four years ago I wrote about the Beige Dictatorship, and predicted:
No, they didn’t. They were elected democratically, but then sized power not granted by the democratic process through a combination of political assassinations, a sizable private militia and the ineptitude (or cooperation) of those who should have stopped them.
Yes, they did. They came to power democratically and then used their position to grab more power.
No democratic position allows the creation of a private militia or grants political assassinations rights. They grabbed some power through elections, they grabbed some other power by force, they grabbed some other power by sheer assumption and others, too cowards to intervene, let them.
They were most emphatically not political hackers, weaseling their way through the democratic process and installing themselves through subtle laws editing. They rose to power mainly using violence, intimidating and killing those who opposed them.
I don’t know about that. I suspect it depends on the definition of “democratic position” and that historically there were interesting edge cases. Plus, of course, the democratic position of the President of the United States grants you assassination rights (colloquially known as “droning”).
Yes, I agree.
It would be hard to measure objectively. I’ve not compared Trump to Hitler because, well, it’s the internet. But the idea of a populist swell leading to a dangerous leader a la Hitler, yeah, it occurred to me. And I’m not sure saying ‘America circa now isn’t as bad as that’ makes me feel any better. :)
Yeah. Or the email with “90 people close to the Clintons that have died mysteriously”. I’ve received at least two different versions from three different people in the last couple months.
Or it could have been Benghazi.
Like everything else democracy has its failure modes. Neoreactionaries think they are a big deal (though their list of the failure modes of democracy is probably different from yours).
It’s not a new idea, of course: “When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled ‘made in Germany’; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, ‘Americanism’” (New York Times, 1938)
What is the list of neo-reactionary failure modes for democracy?
I’m too lazy to compile one, maybe one of our local NRx people will provide :-/ Or you can go read Moldbug, Nick Land, and such. “Being gamed by demagogues” is probably in there and I’m sure some derivative of the word “cuck” will make an appearance.
Well, that’s your revealed preference: you do know that Drake (or Trump) is worse for America’s interests than Hillary or Johnson.
It seems reasonable to conclude there is something like a “Good at Being President” rating composed of some mix of appropriate skills.
It also seems there is a “Good at Winning Elections” rating that overlaps with the “Good at Being President” rating in some ways.
And then there is a “Good at Being Popular and Having a Large Online Following” rating because of the ever-growing internet, which may be starting to overlap more and more with the “Good at Winning Elections” rating, and which itself has less overlap with the “Good at Being President” rating.
So then an Instagram chick with XXX million followers becomes POTUS because voting is so simple and no one knows anything and fake news is everywhere so everyone thinks all the “insider” candidates are corrupt and murderers and this Instagram chick probably has some good ideas and isn’t a shill to special interests...but said Instagram chick, by all reasonable accounts, has a very low “Good at Being President”, despite her incredible “Good at Being Popular and Having a Large Online Following” rating that allowed her to be elected.
Like I said, Trump winning isn’t inconceivable and ostensibly he has some POTUS skill rating. But how low a POTUS skill rating could we possibly elect if there is a crazy cynical, troll-ish, populist swell? If Instagram chick or Taylor Swift or Beyonce become president, do we just say, “Welp, the people have spoken! Yay, democracy!”