Tag: anti-democracy

Bonald of Throne and Altar is aiming to produce a “neofeudalism“, which should be interesting. He opens with the challenging line, “We shall never truly defeat socialism until we abolish private property.”

To be clear, my own view is different: the problem is not that we got rid of feudalism, it’s that the one last obsolete feudal institution that needed to be destroyed unfortunately remains.

I don’t think feudalism works at all outside a primarily agricultural economy. If the government is made up of landowners who have the bulk of economic power, then their interests are both fairly uniform, and fairly consistent. Compare with the present day, where the interests of civil servants, bankers, professors, property developers, union leaders, arms manufacturers and media providers are all at odds, and vary rapidly, meaning that government made up of those groups is mostly concerned with internal disputes rather than overall effectiveness.

My musings on religion and authority from last week have gone round Vladimir to Foseti to Aretae.

There are two ways to look at the historical relationship between the reformation, the enlightenment, and the unfortunate rise of the concept of popular sovereignty.

One is that privilege can only be tolerated if it is seen as having divine sanction: that if man denies God, he denies that anyone can have rightful authority over him. The reason popular sovereignty followed atheism is that it naturally follows from atheism. I thought it was worth throwing that idea out there because it’s plausible and some serious thinkers have proposed it.

There is an alternative view, however, that the old order had used religion to bolster itself, and when rationalism started to show religious beliefs to be questionable, the political system associated with it came under immediate suspicion. According to this narrative, the reactionary case must be made on a rationalist foundation, or else it is always in danger of being undercut again.

That’s my own view; since I have been persuaded by the secular argument for authority, it’s evidently possible.

The dangerous factor is that what I call “the secular argument for authority” is non-obvious. If you start from scratch to produce a political theory from philosophical foundations, you’re not likely to hit it — it really helps to have the evidence of the results of a naive rationalist political system in front of you to lead in the right direction.

Aretae believes that politics is inevitable, and looks to reduce the damage that it can do.

I should clarify what I mean by politics, because I’ve perhaps warped the meaning of the word a little. I feel a bit like I’m a fish trying to invent a word for water.

The exercise of power is not, in itself, politics. Politics is the process of attempting to gain or retain power. I am concerned with state power, but other forms of power (such as in an organisation) also can produce politics. A company department manager trying to make the department more profitable is not politics; trying to make his department larger is politics.

The actions of a person with power, if he is rational, will be motivated in his actions by one or more of the following three concerns:

1. To increase the value of those things he has power over (“improve”)
2. To increase the share of that value that comes to him (“appropriate”)
3. To increase or maintain the power that he has (“win”)

Improving is positive-sum. The more a ruler acts succesfully towards aim 1, the more I would call what he is doing “good government”.

Appropriating is nearly zero-sum. The ruler gains, but whoever would otherwise have received the value loses. Appropriating can be in conflict with Improving, because rearranging resources is likely to reduce efficiency.

Winning can be strongly negative-sum. Whatever resources are diverted to aim 3 are not available for other purposes. A policy of Winning at all costs can be so destructive as to appear insane.

Conventional attitudes to political systems are shaped primarily by fear of Appropriating. Mechanisms are intended to set Appropriating and Winning in opposition, so that rulers avoid taking a large share for themselves as that risks their power. They work.

However, the mechanisms that do this have to legitimise Winning: rulers acting under these mechanisms openly seek to extend their power, because that is “how the system works”.

Worse, for the system to work, it has to also legitimise threats to the ruler’s power (“Losing”). If the ruler’s power is not threatened, Winning is not operative, and Appropriating is unchecked.

Introducing these mechanisms works, and improves government. Introducing a threat to a ruler’s power that will become stronger the more he appropriates will discourage him from appropriating.

But for attempts to cause the ruler to Lose to be affect him, they must have a realistic chance of succeeding. A realistic chance of power is power in itself. It can be traded, borrowed against, threatened with. A “politician” is one who holds “Virtual Power”, and tries to increase it, just as a fund manager tries to increase the assets he holds.

But since the ruler, by the design of the system, is held responsible for the condition of his realm, and gains power by making it successful, his opponents the politicians gain only by making the realm less successful.

Democracy is a method of producing a group of people with both the capability and the motivation to make government worse.

There is a way around the problem, which is to make authority clear and simple enough that it is obvious when problems are the fault of the opposition rather than of the government.

Aretae says, “One huge component of increasing the net welfare of the citizenry is to decrease the ROI on manipulating the rules of the game. How can you do that?”

Why put such emphasis on manipulating the rules? I would only worry about that if I thought the rules were any good to begin with. You can — and we do — have hugely destructive politics entirely within the rules of the game, as opposing parties quite legitimately divert resources to one favoured group or another in order to acquire and retain supporters. That isn’t either a manipulation or a breach of the rules: it’s democracy working as designed. Opposition politicans, with their virtual power, also make threats and promise favours, some openly and some in secret.

Notably, the ruler and the opposition have one area of shared interest — one direction in which the power and the virtual power can be united. And that is to keep out of the power system anyone who isn’t already in. That needn’t even require “manipulating the rules”, though that is the obvious way. Threatening those who support outsiders is effective enough. Threats need not be direct. For any identifiable group, there are policies that harm it.

Of course, the outsiders can’t be protected, because giving someone any kind of protection from reprisals by the combined forces of politicians means giving them yet another lump of unaccountable power.

Aretae’s next solution is to limit the ability of the ruler to do anything — the less power he has, the less his power is worth fighting for.

There are several problems with that. The first is that limited government implies that someone is doing the limiting (the “political perpetual motion machine”). They must have power too. It is therefore not just the power of the nominal ruler that is being fought over, but also the power that belongs to whoever the limiter is. That goes also for any attempt to protect outsider groups from politicians — the result is they become independent power centres.

The track record of limitations on government is possibly even worse than that of monarchs’ lack of rivals.

The second problem is that power is always worth fighting for, because power is status. It is worse messing up a country in order to keep power over it, even if the power is limited, and it is worth fighting to increase your power, even if there’s nothing particularly useful you could do with more power.

The scale question is difficult too. Small states can be very effective, but they usually require some level of cooperation between each other, at least for defense. That means a division of power between national and supernational authorities, and that division is another variable which can be fought over. The EU is the prime example; for everyone in European-level government, the primary question is what the extent of EU power is. Any ideas as to what would be good or bad to do with that power are entirely secondary to retaining and extending it.

International politics are a problem for my vision too, of course. I mentioned the Sun King in my previous post, without mentioning the fact that his reign was a period of continual war. Will an absolute ruler always lean towards conquest? I need to address that.

Mencius like Aretae preferred the city-state scale, which he called “Patchwork”. However, his explanation for why this would be peaceful rested on the rulers of each patch being rational, which itself rested on neocameralism, which rests on our old friends the cryptographic weapon locks in which I do not believe.

My Westphalian World of Monarchies is not going to be as peaceful as Moldbug’s Patchwork, because my kings will not be as rational as his chief executives. Some kings are going to succumb to the lure of conquest as a source of excitement and challenge, even if it is clearly not optimal in return-on-investment terms.

Therefore external security will be a much larger consideration in the design of the countries themselves. City-states may turn out impractical on defensive grounds, while very large states have to devolve power for practical reasons, which tends to produce serious internal politics. (If there is a way of managing a very large operation without devolving power, the commercial world has not yet found it.) Maybe there is some sweet spot of size that is large enough to be defensible, but small enough to be managed without compromising centralism. Obviously doing as little active management as possible is a key technique.

Nick Clegg is in the papers, appearing not only vague but unconcerned about “who is running the country” while Cameron is away. (Nick Clegg ‘forgot’ he was in charge of the Government this week) (dead link)

One of the most interesting things about politics in the last decade or so is that the fictions are breaking down. That is also the theme of Mencius’ latest post, where he wonders if he is being made redundant by the openness of the USG’s intervention in Egypt, and by Wikileaks.

The notion that the government of Britain is “run” by a handful of well-known politicans has over the last hundred years gone from being somewhat true, to being something often deviated from in practice, to being an earnest pretence, and finally a flimsy charade.

Now Clegg, who as a Liberal Democrat is somewhat more isolated from the continuity of political office than his predecessors in cabinet, seems to be unaware of the tradition of paying lip-service to the idea. If someone really needs for some bizarre reason to ask the Prime Minister something, they have his phone number, and anyway Clegg is thinking of taking a day or two off.

Jeremy Paxman in his book “The Political Animal” quotes an unnamed Tory ex-minister:

‘Once we lost the 1997 election,’ one of the best-known Conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s told me, ‘I knew it was over for me. What was the point of standing up in parliament and lambasting the Labour government, when I knew exactly how limited the options open to them were? It was all empty and pointless.’

It’s a very interesting book. While its aim is to look at the character of politicians, in the process it has to show the environment in which they act in more detail than we normally see.

As an opponent of democracy, I am constantly irritated by the suggestion that there are no practical alternatives. The book reminds us that mass democracy as we understand it today is something that appeared in Britain within living memory:

“In April 1925, for example, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, announced that Britain was to return to the Gold Standard, whereby the value of sterling was guaranteed by allowing pounds to be exchanged for gold. This momentous (if ultimately unsuccessful) decision had been two months in preparation, involving heartfelt arguments on both sides of the debate. Yet not a word of it appeared in the newspapers. Indeed, it was hardly heard outside the confines of the Treasury.”

Decisions were being made by an establishment, and if ministers were part of the process, that was because they, coincidentally, were also members of that establishment. Paxman also describes what happened when ministers were elected from outside the establishment, quoting from the diaries of Hugh Dalton, from the period of the Labour administration of 1929-31.

The Cabinet is full of overworked men, growing older; more tired and more timid with each passing week. Pressure from below and from without is utterly ineffectual. High hopes are falling like last autumn’s leaves. There is a whisper of spring in the air, but none in the political air. One funks the public platform, and one wishes we had never come in. We have forgotten our Programme, or been bamboozled out of it by the officials. One almost longs for an early and crushing defeat.

We have there an explanation for why Britain has got off so lightly from democracy: the parliament of 1925 was elected under a restricted franchise (women under 30 did not get the vote until the 1929 election), and as we saw above major policy debates occurred without reference to the press. Once outsiders started to be elected, they were largely powerless in the face of the establishment. Dalton presumably became more influential in later administrations, but I suspect that was due not so much to the power of the establishment waning, as to the establishment moving closer to the Labour party’s views.

This is the important but subtle point I’ve made before — elections are not what they are claimed to be, but neither are they irrelevant. The establishment rules, but it is not unanimous, and politicans are able to exert crude broad-brush influence where the establishment is divided. Because the politicians are motivated by elections, the influence they exert tends always to be in the same direction. In the period before politicians were answerable to the mass media, the influence of the electorate was lessened.

Tyler Cowen linked to a New Republic article about political thought in China

The first point is that the Chinese take politics really seriously — something that looks strange to those of us who live in democracies, where politics is mostly fantasy, and goes some way to explaining the Chinese regime’s unnecessarily serious take on such idiocies as the Nobel Peace Prize.

More interesting, to me, is the summary of the thinking of Carl Schmitt.

“Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary… If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, ‘absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics'”

That last point is what tore me away, finally, from classical liberalism. You can establish, as the libertarians have done, that politics is basically harmful — that it would be better if it did not exist. That is true, and it gives useful insights. But by itself, it doesn’t actually get rid of politics, any more than declaring any other crime to be a crime gets rid of it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. We would be better off without politics, but classical liberalism offers no way to achieve that, and I suspect it is not possible. If I am resigned to living in a world with politics, the question of what form of politics is least bad presents itself, and classical liberalism supplies no answers.

Schmitt, who I was not previously aware of, did not merely point out the problem with liberalism. He did something about it. Specifically, he joined the Nazi party.

Fascism is a fairly obvious answer to the problems of liberal democracy. Get rid of the liars, the elections, the corrupt influences of guild, agency and business, and lets just have a Leader who makes the decisions and is answerable to nobody but God and history. That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying for a while — am I a fascist?

That’s a tough enough question that I’ve been sitting on this draft for several weeks while I work it out. Clearly, I’m not far away — certainly not far enough to be respectable. I want quite a few of the things the Fascists want. But then, when people sit around spouting political theories, they frequently want much the same things: prosperity, security, personal freedom… it’s means, rather than ends, that cause most disagreements.

The easy answer is “No, fascism is way too democratic for me”, because fascism relies on a mass party, which is a form of demotism even if there aren’t necessarily regular fair elections. But that’s a bit glib, given that I don’t have a clear path forward, and it’s possible that in some circumstances fascism could be a path to something I would approve of.

The real answer is that arguing about theories of government in the abstract is meaningless and irrelevant. If I did not believe that, I would still be a libertarian. I am not likely to actively support any real fascist movement, because I am a passivist, not an activist. If I supported fascism I would be committing politics, and becoming part of the problem. When the time is right for a responsible government to exist, there will be no need for a movement with supporters, because the people will acquiesce in the new regime as they now acquiesce in democracy. The new order will not be imposed by an ideological struggle, but by a straightforward business transaction, which at the time will seem inevitable and even minor.

I am not saying the new order is inevitable — just that if it happens it will become inevitable first. Any order that is installed by a struggle is obviously political, and therefore doomed.

[Update: fixed link, corrected source to New Republic, not National Review. Thanks Kalim Kassam]