anti-democracy – Page 5

Climate and Democracy

The theory has been going around recently that dealing effectively with climate change is impossible due to democracy. I think it may have been triggered by an article in Der Spiegel, published in a translated form at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog.

As a sceptic of both global warming and democracy, I have no dog in this fight. If Climate Change means we have to ditch democracy, that’s OK with me; on the other hand, if democracy means we can’t do anything about climate change, that’s just fine too. Nevertheless, the intersection of the two obsessions that this blog seems to have settled on demands my attention.

So let’s take the argument, attributed to David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith, that democracy is incapable of taking the collective action made necessary by the threat of climate change. I haven’t read their book, so I am dealing with a summary of their ideas, for instance from these articles by Shearman.

The weakness of the global warming argument doesn’t necessarily invalidate the claim that democracy is unequal to the challenge it presents. To defeat it on that basis, you would have to show either that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is not just untrue, but impossible, or else that the determination of democratic governments to take any measures necessary short of action is primarily the result of well-founded doubts about the science.

Take these in order: first, is it possible that some such threat as global warming is claimed to be could actually be true? I would say that it is much less likely that some such threat would materialize than that a false threat would be promoted by opportunists, but I cannot say that it is impossible. The global warming scare itself cannot be dismissed out of hand (despite the attempts of some sceptics to to so), but can only be ruled out on the basis of a close look at the evidence.

So we can go on to ask the second question: if AGW or something like it were actually true, would the political structures that we have make it impossible for the necessary collective action to be taken?

It’s plausible, but, at least in the brief articles if not in his book, Shearman does not make that case. He relies on the fact that meaningful action has not, in fact, been taken by democratic governments. That might be, as he says, because they’re not capable of it, but it might equally be that the stalemate is the result of opposition from those who, in my view correctly, believe on the basis of the evidence that such meaningful action is not in fact warranted.

Assessment of this issue is complicated by a feature that global warming alarmism shares with other religions: many people even at an individual level say they believe it but act as if they don’t. I’m not sure it makes much sense, descending into familiar arguments about cheap talk versus revealed preferences, to ask what such people “really” believe, but I think one has to say that to some degree they are unpersuaded by the evidence, even if they say otherwise. Given that, there is still the possibility that the doubt which they have but deny is not reasonable doubt, but is founded on a psychological unwillingness to internalise inconvenient truths.

If this contradiction were limited to the common people, it would be a point in Shearman’s favour. The plebs are not fit to govern, therefore the wise must rule them. However, the inconsistency seems to me to be just as widespread among the powerful as among the mob – I have previously observed, for instance, that investors do not rate sea level rises as significant in their valuations of commercial property.

So for me, Shearman’s argument fails, unfortunately. I suspect that, despite its faults, our democratic governments (in the sense of old democracy, of course) would be able to take sufficient action on climate change, were it really necessary. The reason they are not taking such action is that it is not necessary. The reason they say it is necessary, while not actually taking it, is that they are are lying as usual.

The real link between democracy and global warming is quite different, and is adequately summarised by my guru Mencius Moldbug. In short, the global warming scare and its associated bureaucratic outgrowths are the sort of thing you would expect a democracy to produce – indeed, the kind of thing they always have produced.

The scare originated in democratic countries, spread through democratic countries, and has only been accepted by non-democratic countries after they were pressured or bribed to do so by democracies.

Proof of the Impossibility of Democracy

There’s nothing new here, but I think I can put it more simply and clearly than I’ve managed to do before.

Obviously many “democratic” governments exist, and when we normally talk about democracies, these are what we mean. What I’m talking about here is the theoretical idea of democracy, where policy is controlled by the voters. This is the distinction I made previously in Two kinds of democracy.

Political systems can be changed, either by invasion, overthrow from within the territory but outside the government, or subversion from within the structure of the government itself.

All governments devote a large part of their effort and resources to protecting themselves against being changed. It can be assumed that any governments which do not do so, get changed.

To protect the political system, the government needs to correctly identify the threats that exist to it, and devote sufficient resources and attention to resisting them. The chief premiss on which I base my argument here is that this is hard.

If those inside the government structures do not have the freedom of policy to protect the system, they will be unable to do so and the system will be changed. Most commonly, it is subverted from within, until those within the system do have the ability to hold onto power.

If the system is truly democratic, office-holders within the system do not have freedom of policy. Policy is dictated by voters. This is the line I am drawing: I am not attacking some straw-man “perfect” democracy, but any in which the voters can overrule the elite on matters of policy. If they cannot, then it is an “old democracy” and potentially stable.

Voters do not have sufficient inside knowledge of the political situation to choose the policies that will preserve their democratic power. Further, they do not have sufficient interest in doing so – the value of having a vote is in being able to influence policy according to one’s preferences, and that is always likely to take priority over preserving the present system.

There are many examples of democracies voting to get rid of democracy – 1930s Germany and Italy being the best known. What I say is that democracies always vote to get rid of democracy, if not directly, then by not voting to prevent the system being subverted from within. That produces the “old democracy” I wrote about previously, in which the influence of voters is minor, and real power lies in institutions which are capable of perpetuating themselves

There could be an important exception to all this. If the franchise is limited in some way to a distinct minority of the population, then the chief threat to the system is from the disenfranchised. The voters will be well aware of this, and will have a clear and obvious interest in preserving the system which keeps power for their class. Such a system will be more stable than a true democracy with a universal or near-universal franchise.

This breaks down if there is no clear distinction between the ruling class and the disenfranchised. In that case, one faction or other within the ruling class can always benefit by a small extension of the franchise. The result is a ratchet causing the restricted franchise to eventually become universal.

Thus classical and 19th-century democracies were somewhat more stable than new democracies created today. The voters were aware that the current system was what kept them in a privileged position, and were very aware of threats to the system. From the point of view of a voter in a universal-suffrage “young” democracy, democracy just isn’t worth voting to defend.

This doesn’t mean that the fact of there being elections doesn’t have an effect – just that the actual opinions of the voters don’t.

The End

I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, and I expected to write quite a lot here in that time.
The reason I didn’t is that my political thinking has pretty much come to a conclusion. I don’t like it at all, but it’s a conclusion for all that.

When Adam Smith was writing, there were many theories, public and private, about what a business ought to do. Smith pointed out, [drawing from Darwin and Malthus] (edit, yes I really wrote that, oops), that whatever theory they believed, the businesses that survived would be those which aimed at maximising profit, or those that, by coincidence, behaved as if that was what they aimed at.
The situation in politics is that, while there are many theories about what politicians should do, those politicians will succeed that behave as if their aim is to achieve power at any cost. Perhaps historically many politicians had other aims, and the successful ones were those who happened to act as a pure power-seeker would, but now there is sufficient understanding of what path will gain and hold power that those who consciously diverge from the path least will be those who win.
To be clear, I’m not simply talking about electoral politics here. I’m talking about all politics, in non-democratic systems, in the electoral process, and in the wider and more important politics beyond elections, where power lives in media, civil service, educational, trade union and other centres outside the formal government.
The trivial fact – that power will go to those that want it – is reinforced by the more effective co-operation that pure power-seekers can achieve than ideologues. A large number of power-seekers, although rivals, will co-operate on the basis of exchanges of power. The result is a market in power, and that is the most effective basis for large-scale collective action. Those attempting to achieve specific, different but related aims will find it much more difficult to organise and co-operate on the same scale.

Is it not possible, then, to have significant influence, not by competing directly with politicians but by competing with the media/educational branches of the establishment by promoting ideas? The metacontext, as the folks at Samizdata say. It is indeed possible to influence politics by doing that, and that is what libertarians have done for the last half century or so. But I’m not sure it’s possible to have good influence. Certainly some good things have happened because libertarians have changed the metacontext to the point where the things have appealed to power-seekers. But some bad things have happened that way too. The fact is that while the “background” beliefs of the electorate and other participants in politics does have an effect, there is no reason to assume that correct background beliefs cause better policies than incorrect background beliefs.
One of the most depressing aspects of activism is that on the very few occasions when you get someone onto your side, either by persuading them or just finding them, more often than not they’re still wrong. They’re persuaded by bad arguments rather than good arguments. Activism would appeal to me on the idea that I will win out in the end because my arguments are good, but in fact not only do my good arguments not win against my opponents’ bad arguments, my good arguments do not even win against my allies’ bad arguments. The idea that truth is a secret weapon that is destined to win out once assorted exceptional obstacles have been overcome is an utter fantasy.
As a result, even if you do achieve marginal influence by working for policies or ideas that would be widely beneficial, your success is likely to backfire. The other players in the game are working for the narrow interest of identifiable groups and, as such, are able to mobilise far greater resources. They also are willing to trade with other power seekers, which improves their effectiveness further. The idealist is not able to do that, because the idealist obtains only the particular powers he wants to keep, whereas the politician grabs whatever power he can, even if it is of no use to him, and that which is of no use to him, he trades. The only way to do that is to get whatever power you can, which is my definition of a politician.
It still feels like there is something noble in working for better government, even if the project appears doomed. But there isn’t. After all, most utopians from anarchist to fascist to Marxist are working for better government, but we oppose them because their utopias are unachievable and their attempts to get there are harmful. Your ideas don’t work because they’re flawed, my ideas don’t work because politics is flawed. Hmmm. Why are my ideas better than yours, again?
And that is the final straw. In truth, I have never been an activist. I have neither appetite or aptitude for practical politics, which after all is basically a people business, but I used to believe it was interesting to look in isolation at the question of what those with political power ought to do with it, so as to make the government as good as possible, in a vaguely utilitarian way. What brings my political efforts to an end is the realisation that that is meaningless. A political theory based on the assumption that a government will act in the general interest once it understands how to do so is as useful as a theory based on the assumption that the world is flat and carried by elephants. Politics has given me some entertainment over the years, but not as much as Terry Pratchett has.
If I am going to assume that governments work in the general interest, once they understand how to do it, I might just as well assume that industrialists work in the general interest, in which case all my clever arguments about the value of private property rights for resolving opposing private interests are completely irrelevant.
It’s amusing that of all the posts on this blog, one of the most important turns out to be one that I thought at the time was unimportant: this one, originally driven by my musings on Newcombe’s Paradox.
Almost all significant propositions are, implicitly or explicitly, of the form IF {some hypothetical state of the world} THEN {something will result}. In politics, the hypothetical frequently involves some person making some decision. The proposition therefore needs to take into account whatever is necessary for that person to actually make that decision – and the other effects of those necessary conditions may well be more significant than the stated result.
I came very close to making all the connections back then, even raising the significance of my facetious “if I were Führer” form of putting political propositions. I am not Führer, and never will be, and neither will anyone like me, and all my political logic collapses on that just like any other proof premised on a falsehood.
Where does that leave me? I am no longer a libertarian – I find libertarian arguments just as correct as I always did, but they are of no relevance to the real world. I could continue to comment here on the stupidities that people accept from various politicians, but I would be doing it in the same spirit as if I were judging the team selection of a football club – in full awareness of my own impotence and irrelevance. Maybe I will. It would make more sense to take up something useful, like gardening.
I can also attempt to benefit humanity by encouraging others to detach from politics as I am doing. Someone has to have power, and if you think you can get it and you would be good at it, by all means go for it. If not, then leave well alone. Be one of the ruled, and pursue whatever aims you choose without the illusion that you have the right, the duty or the capability to change the policies of the rulers. Embrace passivism.

Dennis Wheatley

My Leader, Ian PJ, has dug up the “Letter for Posterity” written by popular author Dennis Wheatley in 1947, and tried to claim him as a Libertarian.It will hardly do. Wheatley was at the very least conservative, and I would happily claim him as a reactionary with only slight reservations.In particular, he had no respect for mass democracy. His letter (available in full as an 11-page pdf from the BBC) disposes of it in a couple of paragraphs:… But the voice [of the people] was stilled by the coming of the electro-machine age, as the new inventions enabled the professional politicians of all parties to get into direct touch with every community, however remote. First came the electric press, enabling a million or more copies of a newspaper to be run off in a single night — and enormously improved arrangements for distribution. Then came the wireless telegraph — which swiftly developed into radio, with a five times a day news service which, by means of a cheap receiving set, could be picked up in every home. And these were followed by the cinematograph which soon became one of the most insidious weapons for political propaganda. The result was that instead of forming their opinions by quiet thought and reasoned discussion, the bulk of the people took them ready made (from so called “informed” sources) …Quite.And before you ask, no, blogging doesn’t help. What led to the centralisation of opinion-forming was not the necessity of centralisation – such as has been attributed to the capital costs of printing and broadcasting – but the possibility of centralisation: the fact that the most immediately attractive ideas could reach everyone at once, unfiltered, and gain credibility from their momentum.(Do not imagine that I wish to reimpose the filters on the flow of ideas: it can’t be done, and it shouldn’t be done. I don’t want to control the opinions of the masses, I want to ignore them.)So, no, Ian, Wheatley would not think all the better of us for being “committed to peaceful change through the ballot box”. He would think we are wasting our time.Unfortunately, his prescriptions are not optimistic, unless you accept his assertion that when we are killed fighting for our freedom against the state, we will be reborn with “a finer, stronger personality” as well as being an example to others. (The problems of being an atheist and a reactionary are a subject I’ve been meaning to write about for a while).Back to Wheatley’s non-libertarianism; if we have any historical model of libertarian government, it is probably Whig Britain at the end of the 19th century. Here’s what Wheatley’s recurring hero the Duke de Richleau says about the classical liberal movement, in a scene set in 1906The main plank in the Liberal platform has for long been Free Trade, and with it they have won the votes of the masses in the towns because, on the face of it, their policy means cheap living. But go a little deeper into the matter and you will find that it has another altogether different aspect. The great strength of the Liberal party lies in the industrial north, and the money to finance industry comes from the rich manufacturers and the old Whig families who have invested their wealth in commerce. They are very shrewd people, and they know that if they can bring the cost of living down they will then be able to force down wages and derive bigger profits from their factories.

“Vendetta in Spain”, Dennis Wheatley, 1957 ISBN 0-09-004660-9 p.153

I mentioned slight reservations about Wheatley’s reaction – simply, he is too soft. In the letter, he defends Kings being answerable to an aristocratic class, and even to the will of the people when that was not short-circuited by mass communication.

Political Passivism

For two years now I have been hanging on the words of Mencius Moldbug, who’s analysis of the politics of our time (Unqualified Reservations) I find almost completely persuasive.

Having advanced a vision of government by for-profit corporations, MM has at last started to lay out the path by which we can get from democracy to responsible, effective, secure government.

His answer so far validates both my high estimate of his understanding, and my pessimism. The logic is completely sound.

The problem with government is politics – the fact that no government can aim primarily at the welfare of the population, or for that matter even at its own profit, when it is constrained most of all by politics to do whatever is necessary to hold off rivals for power.

Anyone who attempts to improve the government, in any aspect, by any method, is committing politics and is therefore part of the problem. MM gives us a steel rule – that in order to become worthy to hold power, the first requirement is “absolute renunciation of official power”.

Will this approach – passivism – work? It doesn’t seem likely. But, it doesn’t seem likely that activism will work either. I’ve said before, long shots are all we’ve got

Passivism appeals to me. I even put forward my own version when I refused to sign a petition calling for Gordon Brown to resign. But I have not completely abandoned activism, albeit in the form of half-hearted engagement with the least effective activist movement imaginable.

Since passivism is the prerequisite to step 1 of the procedure for reaction, and since 9a implies at least a 9b, there may be something I can do to bring about a better government. When I find out, I will consider it here.

The Rights of the Mob

Previously on Anomaly UK, I have discussed Rights and the relationship between rights and Mob Violence

I am brought back to these subjects by a programme I happened to catch last night on BBC4, about the Miners’ Strike.

The point I had previously missed, but has to be taken into account, is that a mob of protesters is generally recognised to have additional rights beyond those that exist in law.

From a legalistic viewpoint, the violent clashes of 1984 were very clear. The government has the duty of keeping the roads open – that has been the case for as long as there have been governments and roads. If a group illegally blocks the road, they must be removed, without more force than necessary, but with as much force as is necessary. If that means charges of mounted police, then send in the horses. If it means tanks, send in tanks. If it means machine-guns, load them up. It is out of the question that the law can be openly defied by violence.

Clearly, that’s not the situation – nobody saw it that way. The horses were controversial, tanks and guns would have been out of the question, while giving up and allowing the strikers to block the road was a real possibility. Nor was the restraint on the government’s actions some irrational daintiness on the part of Lady Thatcher – to have employed sufficient force to make victory in the field certain would have torn the country apart. The Police and Army would have run real risk of mutiny, workers in other industries would have sided with the miners – these were real dangers which put the outcome of the overall dispute in doubt.

Any model of where real power lies in the country, such as I have been attempting to create, is incomplete unless it can explain what rights a mob is understood to have, to form and to break the law without facing any greater force than lightly-armed police.

The limitation of the power of the state is simply that it can’t shoot everybody – it requires a level of voluntary cooperation from the population in general in order to function. But that only pushes the question back – why would rolling armoured cars through picket lines have forfeited that cooperation? It breaks some unwritten rules, but where did they come from?

I wrote in the context of more recent disturbances that rights are acquired by violent precedent – that if a group has won a conflict in the past, they will be assumed to win again, so that conflict is avoided. But that does not cover the case – what is the precedent for the use of military levels of violence against mobs in England not being successful? The chief candidate that comes to mind is the Peterloo Massacre, but that was not really unsuccessful, in that a revolt was averted. 1972’s Bloody Sunday would seem more relevant, being both recent and a case where lethal force used by the government did backfire politically, but I get the feeling that at the time Northern Ireland was seen as more of a special case, being at that time a conflict between two groups in the population rather than one group against the government.

My impression is that Peterloo is the key precedent, and the reason it counts as a defeat for the government is because the British regime in its entirety – from the TUC to Margaret Thatcher herself – is descended not from the government of 1819 but from the protesters of 1819. They won in the end and the measures that the ancien regime used against them are now out of bounds.

Voter Power

In my previous post, I wrote

. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

That probably needs to be explained more carefully. I’ve talked about the three-way game between civil servants, politicians and voters before, but there’s a lot more that can be said. It’s easy to argue in terms of “Democracy means the people control the government” or “Our democracy is fake”, but the truth is more complex.

To a first approximation, democracy in Britain is fake. The real power lies with the civil service, who have to reach a compromise with other powerful interests in the media, other industry, the universities.

They also have to deal with the politicians who are nominally in charge of them, and who themselves are answerable to the electorate. In theory this is what gives the voters the power.

The politicians want to satisfy the voters by doing popular things, but that only works for them if they can appear successful. If the permanent establishment wants one thing, and the voters want another, the politician will do better in elections by following the wishes of the establishment than by following the wishes of the voters. Because if they do what the voters want, the establishment can make them look bad – everything that goes wrong (and lots of things always go wrong) will look like the politician’s fault if the government is following a policy which the establishment opposes.

What it amounts to is that the fact that politicians are elected is an essential part of the system, which would be very different without it, but that its effect is not to take power away from the permanent establishment to any large degree. The voters have no fine control over policy, but within the permanent establishment (which obviously itself contains factions and differences of opinion) policies which have more appeal to voters will always have a slight advantage over policies which have less.

On this very coarse level, what most clearly gains votes is the expansion of the clients of the state – those on benefits or those in government employment. An establishment policy which cuts government employment will be one which politicians will be able to resist, one which adds them will be very hard to resist. Detailed arguments about economics or technicalities are insignificant in electoral terms compared to that – because the context in which they are presented to the voters is set by the civil service and media.

Two Kinds of Democracy

Arguing against democracy can get confusing because democracy exists in two very different forms.

What we have in Western Europe and America I call “Old Democracy”. It has parties and regular elections, which are carried out fairly, and it also has powerful non-party institutions of civil service, law and media which stabilise the whole edifice. These powerful institutions get their power mostly from tradition – from the fact that they have had power for a long time and are widely respected as such.

These systems of government are very different from those created by a pro-democratic revolution or a pro-democratic invasion. Those normally produce “Young Democracy”, in which power is concentrated in elected institutions.

One cannot argue for or against democracy without distinguishing these two forms. Their merits and faults are quite different.

Old Democracy is the system of which it is tiresomely said, that it is the worst form of government ever tried, except for all the others. The claim is irritating but more than plausible – the most successful governments of the last hundred years, leaving aside a few city-state tax havens, have been of this kind.

Young Democracy, on the other hand, is what Old Democracy purports to be. The voters can vote for what they want, and they get it. Any theoretical, rather than empirical, defence of democracy applies to Young Democracy, not Old Democracy.

Young Democracy, however, is highly unstable. If the people can vote for what they want, then before long they will vote for “Strong Government” which will put an end to free, fair elections. The best case for a Young Democracy is that the unelected institutions solidify power and it becomes an Old Democracy before that happens.

The faults of Old Democracy are more subtle. It is not controlled by the electorate, but neither is it independent of the electorate. The effect of the electorate’s limited power of choice is not catastrophe, but the slow expansion of the bureaucracy into every area of life, along with a slow decline of effectiveness in everything it does.

The endpoint of Old Democracy is the utter bankruptcy of the state and its collapse under the weight of its ineffective functions. I don’t think that has ever happened in the West – economic growth has kept up with the growing cost of government – but I would expect it to look something like the end of the Soviet Union. which I do not classify as an “Old Democracy”, but which in its late stages shared many of the characteristics of a very old Democracy.

Alternatively, it might not be coincidence that economic growth and the expansion of the state keep pace with each other. It may be that Old Democracy exercises just as much waste as the economy can afford. The growth of the state is not an inevitable process of Old Democracy per se, it is its inevitable response to economic growth. Old Democracy would therefore be stable in the long run.

The virtue of Old Democracy is its stability. I have made the case before. While Mencius Moldbug may have come up with something better, he has yet to describe how it could come about, and my own suggested path to non-democratic government is no more than a sketch.

Supporters of Democracy are able to switch between the two forms as it suits them. Thus a commenter at UR was able to say

You like to offer up weak, fledgling democracies that collapse into dictatorships as arguments against democracies, but really they’re just arguments for creating democracies that can stand up to the overly ambitious sociopath and his cronies.

But a democracy that can stand up to its new leader is one that can stand up to the voters – i.e. an Old Democracy. The implication that it is voter power which protects democracy from tipping into totalitarianism is the opposite of the truth.

I must admit finally that the labels “Old Democracy” and “Young Democracy” are not ideal. Not every Old Democracy was previously a Young Democracy – the non-elected institutions in Britain are older than the mass suffrage, and I’m curious about the history of post-war Germany. And Old Democracy is only one possible outcome of Young Democracy – the Old’s link with the Young is more a matter of its own propaganda than a natural one.

Hierarchy of security needs

Mencius Moldbug’s latest has a real gem where he talks about the political needs of a society as a hierarchy of needs parallel to Maslow’s psychological hierarchy of needs.

there are four levels of sovereign security. These are peace, order, law, and freedom. Once you have each one, you can work on the next. But it makes no sense to speak of order without peace, law without order, or freedom without law.

His claim is an essential tool for understand how I can whinge about ID cards and yet make allowances for brutal policing in China or Iran.To analyse the reasons behind the hierarchy, the first need is peace, and the second order. Order is valuable, but if an enemy is present, the inhabitants must use violence against the enemy. If inhabitants are using violence, you do not have order. Therefore, peace must come before order.If you have peace, you can then impose order, and stop inhabitants using violence within the realm. We also desire law, meaning that by following some published laws, I can be assured I will not be the subject of violence from or approved by the state. But if violence is not controlled between inhabitants, then safety from the state is of little value. The state has to first reduce violence between inhabitants to a low level before we can get benefit from the state following law.Once we have law, there is then value in freedom. Freedom means that the state will not restrain me from doing things I want to do, to the greatest extent practical. I cannot have any freedom if I do not know what the state will and will not punish, so law is a prerequisite to freedom.Therefore, the hierarchy is : peace, order, law, freedom.I want to live under a good government, and a good government is one which will provide freedom. But I cannot have freedom unless there is law, there cannot be law unless there is order, and there cannot be order unless there is peace.We have order where I live, and mostly we have law. I would like more freedom than we actually have, and I think it is entirely practical to allow more freedom without compromising the more basic social needs of order and law.In China, there is order and they are working on law. There is much less freedom than in Britain even under New Labour, but allowing freedom to political rivals is almost sure to wipe out law and severely reduce order. We can see that order has broken down in part of China just recently.The hierarchy of needs also explains some of my differences with Mencius. We could do with a little more order and law around here, but we have enough to support freedom. Mencius gives the impression that in his area, at least, order has broken down. Now, I don’t live in the leafy, peaceful suburb where my mother went to school, my grandfather used to play bowls, and I used to play in the park when I visited, and where the Shine My Nine gang now kills those who encroach on its women. But then, I live in Luton, which isn’t exactly cut off from the problems of the rest of Britain. And yet in my view we have at least the necessary minimum of order. I would like more, but I don’t think we have to abandon law and freedom to get it.(Is it not possible to have order without the state, some will ask? I think not, though that’s another discussion).

What Ecclestone should have said

In Britain, if we want a government that was not entirely dependent on actively managing interest groups to hang on to power, either with elections or without (and I do want just that), there is only one conceivable alternative basis that the government could rely on for authority and legitimacy. That is of course the monarchy. And while a genuine restoration of monarchy is just conceivable, it is a very long way from being likely.
The advantage of monarchy is that the ruler does not normally face a rival who holds an equal right to rule. That makes him the opposite of a modern dictator who rules because the army followed him, and will be deposed by the next person who can get the army to follow him instead. Her Majesty, for all her strengths, is I fear a little past the stage of being able to lead a counter-revolution. She could of course serve as a figurehead, but that would not fill the need for a stable government that could concentrate on governing well rather than retaining power. The shogun with real power would have rivals who were his nominal equals, and struggles among them would dominate government just as her nominal subordinates do today in Whitehall.No, we need a ruler with real personal power, who cannot be replaced by a rival with equal legitimacy. If the current sovereign is too old, we must wait for her successor. Unfortunately, the idea of the Prince of Wales assuming personal power as an autocrat comes over as somewhat ludicrous. Even if I am misjudging him, and he does have the inclination and competence to rule, it seems far-fetched that he could command the organs of state to support him.As an aside, I might seem to be contradicting myself here – my point is that we need a ruler not responsible to popular opinion, yet I am ruling out King Charles III on the ground that the army etc. will not wear it. However, the value of a monarchy is that once established, its legitimacy is inherent and not dependent on external opinion polls or power struggles. To go from a failed democracy to a monarchy nevertheless will necessarily entail a power struggle of some kind – the first monarch will have a harder job than his successors.Leaving Charles aside, then we look at the next generation. There, possibly through mere ignorance of their actual nature, we have grounds for hope. The long-cherished links between the Royal Family and the military are much stronger than Charles managed, the young men show admirable willingness to defy popular and fashionable opinion, and not in the direction of exotic mysticism or deep environmentalism either. The next decade will very likely crush my hopes, but based on what we know now it remains at least conceivable that in the kind of degringolade which hangs over this century, an emergency seizing of power in royal hands could be the response to one disaster or another.It is a long shot, but it is more imaginable than any other route to non-political government that I can think of.Of course, monarchy does not eliminate all the problems of politics. The fact that the monarch has an extra legitimacy from who he is gives him a head start in holding off rivals who cannot duplicate his every other asset, but there is a level of political lead which will overcome that advantage. The King therefore needs to do expend that much less effort on security. That itself makes his government more pleasant than a dictator’s would be, which reinforces both his own position and the legitimacy of monarchy as a concept. But if he is unwise, he will fall as many past monarchs have.Not that the monarch needs to be exceptional. His absolute power over government does not mean he has to make every decision. He merely has to hire expert managers. The essential feature is that the hired manager is not a public figure, and does not command any legitimacy of his own – he can be fired at will by the monarch. The King must take care that the manager is doing well, but that is a far easier job than the management itself.There are also the other difficulties inherent in monarchy, which arise when the succession is unclear, or when the rightful monarch is incapacitated. It would take a new Wars of the Roses, though, to bring the quality of royal government down to the level of recent Prime Ministers.