Aikin & Talisse must break up for Democracy to 'trive'

Scott Aikin & Talisse write, at 3 Quarks,

Democracy is a precious social good.

This is false. Democracy is a political arrangement which may or may not be productive of social good. It is not valuable in itself- i.e. people would not vote for it unless there was some individual benefit they received from its existence.

Not only is it necessary for legitimate government,

This is quite false. A Democratic government may lack legitimacy to tackle insurgent or revolutionary elements. As happened in Venezuela, it might let a coup leader out of prison with the result that a ruthless Dictatorship is installed.

A necessary condition for 'legitimate government' is a monopoly of coercion which, at the margin, is only very ineffectively contested.

in its absence other crucial social goods – liberty, autonomy, individuality, community, and the like – tend to spoil.

There is no evidence for this view. Jim Crow era America and Apartheid South Africa were democracies. If you wanted to marry across racial lines you had to cross State borders- into Portuguese controlled territory in the case of South Africa. But Portugal was then a dictatorship.

It is often inferred from this that a perfectly realized democracy would be utopia, a fully just society of self-governing equals working together for their common good.

Which cretins make such an inference? Name and shame the buggers. Deprive them of tenure and chase them out of the Academy.

The flip side of this idea is familiar: the political flaws of a society are ultimately due to its falling short of democracy.

Coz racial, religious, linguistic and other divisions will magically disappear if Democracy were perfected. Also the Sky would turn out to be made entirely of blueberry pie.

The thought runs that as democracy is necessary for securing the other most important social goods, any shortfall in the latter must be due to a deviation from the former.

Who has this thought? I suggest that nobody actually does so. Some may pretend to do so for virtue signalling or 'bullshitting' purposes. But such hypocrisy obtains in many other fields. Why not simply say, 'if everybody were nice, there would be no need for nasty prison cells.'?

This is what led two of the most influential theorists of democracy of the past century, Jane Addams and John Dewey, to hold that the cure for democracy’s ill is always more and better democracy.

But few have ever heard of either. Arrow's theorem, and the whole literature on Voting and Preference Revelation theory put paid to any such notion seventy years ago.

The Addams/Dewey view is committed to the further claim that democracy is an ideal that can be approximated, but never achieved.

But every merely notional thing, including the notion of an ideal or the notion of an approximation, is beyond our reach.

This addition reminds us that the utopia of a fully realized democracy is forever beyond our reach, an ongoing project of striving to more perfectly democratize our individual and collective lives.

It also reminds us that reminding people of stupid shite is an ongoing project of striving to more perfectly remind people of stupid shite.

This view is certainly attractive

to morons.

Trouble lies, however, in making the democratic ideal concrete enough to serve as a guide to real-world politics without thereby deflating it of its ennobling character.

Trouble lies in making vacuous shite into concrete. That is why concrete costs money.

Typically, as the ideal is made more explicit, one finds that it presumes capacities that go far beyond the capabilities of ordinary citizens. It turns out that democracy isn’t only out of our reach, it’s also not for us.

No. It turns out that listening to vacuous shite is not for us.

Those who recoil against this kind of view tend to

be equally stupid. Don't recoil, avoid.

embrace a more realist picture according to which democracy is no aspiration at all, but rather a mechanism for preserving a decent social order under conditions of individual freedom.

This is foolish. We know that no 'mechanism' exists which is capable of 'preserving a decent social order' under any conditions whatsoever. Mechanisms aren't magic.

The thought here is that there’s really no common good for citizens to work towards,

Nonsense! There is 'overlapping consensus' in this regard.  Nobody is saying 'We must blow up the world! Life will be so much better once we are all irradiated corpses.'

only more or less satisfactory decisions made among individuals who have varied preferences and interests.

But, because 'coordination' and 'discoordination' games arise in Social Life- i.e. because everybody is better off if certain conventions and 'channelizations' exist- there is still a 'common good' re. which there is 'overlapping consensus'.

On this view, democracy is that set of institutions and processes that facilitates generally peaceful negotiations among politically opposed parties; when it functions properly, democracy results in bargains and compromises that are tolerable enough to disincentivize revolt.

This is a foolish view. It presupposes something that can't be true viz. that Democracy is not a Tarskian primitive notion. It has an intensional definition in terms of set theory. But this means people can't decide for themselves what Democracy involves and what type of Democracy they want. That is undemocratic.
Revolt won't be disincentivized unless it is heavily punished. America fought a long and very costly Civil War to establish this principle. 'Compromises' and 'Bargains' did not prevent that Civil War. Indeed, Democracy is what made it inevitable.

Though it has the advantage of better capturing practices in contemporary democracies, it also requires one to cede a certain critical stance towards them.

But we all already have a critical stance to how we are governed. We more more of stuff we like- e.g. transfers- and want less of stuff we don't like- e.g. taxes.

Whatever else a conception of democracy must be, it should make intelligible the thought that some flawed political decisions in a democracy owe to the citizens’ failure to live up to democratic ideals.

No. A conception should be useful. It uses up cognitive resources. Only worthless shitheads in utterly shite University departments should talk worthless shite.
Saying 'bad stuff happens coz you failed to live up to some shite or the other' is completely useless.
You may say 'fuck off. I did not fail to live up to my ideals which is why I'm very rich and getting lots of tail while you are an ill-paid pedagogue with a harridan for a wife'. The reply would be 'but, if you lived up to the right ideals the sky would be made of blueberry pie.'

That a procedurally valid but substantively flawed outcome has been implemented stably does not establish its credentials as a proper exercise of democracy.

Yes it does. If the Supreme Court says the thing is kosher, that's exactly what it is. If you disagree then what you are saying is 'I conceive Democracy in my own way- not the way the Constitution says it is to be conceived (i.e. in accordance with the interpretation given by the Bench)'. But this utterance of yours has no probative value. It is merely idle talk.

This is why democratic citizens are entitled to criticize and protest political decisions even when they have been made by way of properly democratic processes.

There is no such entitlement. There may be an immunity. It depends.

The realist view contends that if the democratic process has produced an outcome whose implementation will not spark a revolution, the democratic citizen’s job is done, and any further contestation of the matter is nondemocratic.

It is idle talk which is not itself 'non-democratic'.  There may be an immunity with respect to this contestation if it doesn't cause much of a nuisance. But that may change.

In our new book, Political Argument in a Polarized Age, we develop a conception of democracy that opposes both of these views. 

To call it a 'conception' is only reasonable if one adds that the thing is a fucking monstrous abortion of a wholly unviable type.

Although we ally with the Addams/Dewey tradition (and against the realists) in seeing democracy as an ideal, we reject the claim that social ills are always the result of falling short of that ideal.

This is foolish. If the ideal is unrealizable it may be inexpressible and not cognitively accessible. There is no way off knowing if that inaccessible ideal, if implemented, might not get rid or all social ills and turn the sky into blueberry pie. Suppose there is some type of quantum entanglement in some particular neuron and that some Democratically decided procedure allows all voters to access the secret powers of the Higgs boson so that we enter a multiverse such that all live in their best preferred universe and yet interact in a higher dimension such that their felicity is unimpaired. Then this is the ideal of Democracy. It is Kant's Kingdom of Ends. It is Marx's final stage of pure Communism. It is Bulwer Lytton's 'vril' because anyone can blow up the world if he doesn't like it without anyone else's world blowing up and even the antaganomic blower-upper retaining perfect felicity.

We hold that democracy is an ideal composed of elements that are prone to conflict with one another.

Why? A more ideal ideal would be composed of elements which have overcome this propensity thanks to some clever mechanism design, perhaps with a technological twist.

These conflicts create sites for certain democratic dysfunctions, even when citizens are all performing as they should.

Buy democratic dysfunctions either already have 'sites' or 'sites' don't exist. Mention of them is worthless verbiage. Why speak of some imaginary conflicts creating imaginary sites? Why not simply say 'the dark elves erected the Caste of Naughtiness to the north of the Forest of Niceness. Since then, warfare has been incessant between the archons of Cuteness and the daemons of Uncuddliness.'

Accordingly, democracy suffers some ills that admit of no cure.

Also democracy is wearing a toupee. Its hairdresser told me so. Incidentally, that same hairdresser is having an affair with Democracy's Doctor. That's how come I know it has some ills- like haemorrhoids- which admit of no cure coz its arsehole is located in the Castle of Naughtiness and so the archons of Cuteness aren't able to administer Preparation H to its fundament.'

To explain, democracy is the ideal of self-government among political equals.

No it isn't. Political equals could choose a Monarchy or a Dictatorship or else a Nightwatchman State with Judges but no Kings or Presidents.

Political equality is a complex notion, but it’s clear that a byproduct of such equality is that citizens will exercise their own judgment, think their own thoughts, and formulate their own opinions about politics.

Nonsense! They will outsource 'judgment' to professionals. That's what actual Democracies do. I have the right to say you are a thief. You have the right to suggest that my income from Beyonce celebrity impersonation is actually the reward for plying a nefarious trade. However, we leave it to judges to decide whether or not you really stole my wig or whether or not you libelled me by saying I was a bum-boy rather than a jobbing Cost and Management Accountant who pretends that his exiguous earnings derive from his skill at twerking.

This means that citizens will inevitably disagree about such matters.

No. It is inevitable that they ought to disagree. Whether they actually do so is not inevitable at all.

And insofar as they are members of a self-governing polity, these disagreements will be engaged in some way:

they may be- but again they may not.

democratic citizens will not only hold different and opposing views about politics, they will also argue with one another about politics.

they are more likely to find this a waste of time and outsource the thing to professionals.

Now, even under the most favorable conditions, argumentation over important matters is fraught. Yet, as we document in the book, when arguing over matters of politics, particularly in a democratic context where we are required to regard our interlocutors as our political equals, novel obstacles emerge.

No Democracy requires us to regard interlocutors as other than imbeciles, not our equals at all. It is my claim that my voice commands many more votes than yours does.

To be specific, the urgency and moral stakes that are in play in most political debates amplify the need for competent and precise argumentation.

That may be true of Judicial, or other protocol bound, disputation. It is not true of political debates. Saying 'okay boomer. Whatever dude. ' works better than any 'competent and precise argumentation. Also, the ability to twerk like Beyonce lends one's utterances a certain undeniable gravitas, if not indefeasibility.

This requires us to develop a vocabulary for evaluating one another’s (and our own) argumentative performances.

Fuck off! That's the most effective vocabulary.

For example, we must craft a diagnostic idiom for identifying fallacies and other common foibles of reasoning.

No we mustn't. The thing is a waste of time. The above is a good example of a fallacy- viz. that imperative statements should (or can) have a logical form in order to be prescriptive.

However, politics is intrinsically messy, and consequently so too is the diagnostic vocabulary.

Fuck off you stupid wanker is 'diagnostic vocabulary'. It could involve messiness if you actually jerk off in the direction of the wanker you are instructing to fuck off. But, unless your ejaculate can really arch over considerable distances, this is not- speaking generally- an effective rhetorical strategy.

Witness terms like “politicize,” “fake news,” “troll,” “weaponize,” and “civility.”

What they have in common is that they are useful at this particular point in our history just as terms like mugwump or goo-goo was useful at some other point.

These terms enter the political diagnostic vocabulary as means for identifying errors in argumentation.

No. They impugn the objectivity and alethic quality of statements which may or may not have a logical form- i.e. qualify as 'argumentation'.

However, partly because they are crafted in media res and partly because we function both as players and referees in argumentation, such concepts are inevitably fuzzy and variable.

Surely, for the vast majority of us, they are 'ready at hand', not 'crafted' in the heat of battle. But they are 'ready at hand'- unlike stuff you just made up- e.g calling an advocate of the Capabilities approach a big fat Sen-na-pod- precisely because they represent clear and fixed, not fuzzy or variable, concepts- at least within the context you have in mind.

It is a different matter that individuals conceptualize 'Schelling focal' terms in different ways. But that does not mean such focal points are fuzzy or variable, though they may be computationally or cognitively inaccessible. The 'Grothendieck Universe' in which we do Math has an inaccessible Cardinal. But that Cardinal is not fuzzy nor variable- it is merely inaccessible.

Given certain baked-in psychological inclinations, such as our tendency to positively evaluate arguments for conclusions we agree with even when they’re flagrantly fallacious,

but we may do the same thing with respect to arguments we don't give a shit about

our deployments of that vocabulary quickly devolve from being ways to diagnose errors in reasoning into new ways to express our favored conclusions.

Only if we are stupid or the thing doesn't matter two shits. Otherwise, we devise protocol bound, impersonal, juristic processes so as to advance a particular epistemic program or implement a particular Social Choice Mechanism. 

To give one vivid example, the realities of online political communication necessitated the coining of the term “bot” to refer to a social media account enacted by computer code to mimic human partisans.

No. The increasing ubiquity of non-human agents- robots of a particular sort- on certain fora, gave rise to the need for an economical way to refer to the phenomenon.

Now, however, in online discourse, “bot” is used as a term of abuse against human interlocutors with whom one disagrees.

But the suggestion is that the person in question is acting like a robot either because they have been paid to do so or because their own cognitive processes have been hijacked by the human equivalent of a computer virus.

As a result, democratic discourse devolves into a thinly disguised form of name-calling.

Nonsense! A not so thinly disguised form of name-calling, which masquerades as 'democratic discourse', loses its rags and attempts to appropriate the vocabulary of its mockers. It's like what happens when you try to explain, using a context-free Extended Backus Naur form of argumentation, why you have the right to watch 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' instead of 'Tellytubbies' but your interlocutor keeps saying 'poopy-head' till you lose your rag and say 'you're the big poopy-head! Not me. I have a degree from the LSE. Your parents are paying me big bucks to sit here with you. So who is the real poopy-head- me or you?' Anyway, that's the one argument with Raghuram Rajan that I actually lost.

There is no way to insulate our diagnostic concepts from this kind of devolution.

Yes there is. Every worthwhile type of discourse- one that can 'pay its way'- quickly evolves a protocol bound adjudicating process of an impersonal or alethic sort. So long as there is competition between such processes on an uncertain fitness landscape, no 'devolution' occurs. This does not mean that every Research Program which is currently degenerate was necessarily shite. But, what is certain is that it wasn't robust enough to 'pay its way'. 

And, what’s more, the devolution is often the result of our sincere attempts to reason well together.

But Scott & Aiken have never reasoned well together. They should split up.  It's like me and Beyonce. We both started off at the Karol Bagh skool of Mudern Dunce. But she got gender reassignment surgery and, I hear, is doing quite well for herself. I'm doing very well too. Really amazing stuff is happening for me. Big big wins all day, everyday. Truly Cosmic. I feel so Blessed. And, no, I won't release my tax returns but it I did, I gotta tell you that stuff is so-ooo fantastic it would just blow your tiny mind.

By contrast, Scott & Aiken got engaged but never managed to conceive anything with legs.

Our spirited engagements of democratic citizenship heighten our vulnerability to cognitive forces that distort our collective political reasoning.

Spirited engagements need not make you vulnerable to distortionary cognitive forces. Anyway, you could always adopt.
If your job is 'political reasoning' then, if your 'spirited engagement' is making the both of you utterly shite at it, then break up. Go your own separate ways.  Democracy won't suffer at all. It won't notice. That's the trouble with aggregating mechanism operating over millions of individual preference profiles. Stupid shite tends to cancel out against stupid shite of an opposite stripe. This is the magic of the Law of Large Numbers or the Condorcet Jury theorem. Get over yourselves. Split up and you too, like me & Beyonce, can achieve success in diverse fields.

Democracy suffers, even though citizens are acting as they should.

No it doesn't. Mechanisms are impassable, like the God of the theologians. It is not the case that the Cosmos entire weeps tears of blood every time you touch yourself inappropriately or get a hard on mistaking Beyonce for me.

If the fitness landscape for citizens is both heterogeneous and uncertain, then diagnostic parameters for Social Mechanisms must fluctuate. If they don't, it means- by something like Fisher's fundamental theorem- that the arrangement is not 'regret minimizing'. It reduces 'evolvability' in a manner potentially catastrophic.

Hence there is an ill for which more and better democracy cannot be the cure, because there is no cure.

Nor is there an illness as opposed to something some 'spiritedly engaged' couple disapprove of. 

However, the upshot of Political Argument in a Polarized Age is not despairing.

Because its cretinism impugns only a branch of Academia we stopped despairing of in order to make it a collective butt of satire and, there but for the grace of God, and my grades being too low to get into Grad School, schandenfreude. 

The point is not that democracy is doomed, but rather that in order to avoid doom democracy must be maintained.

Nonsense! Scott & Talisse must break up. They must not pay maintenance to each other. I know that both think the other will resort to environmentally unsustainable levels of onanism without such maintenance but tough shit, Gaia. Look after yourself the way the Cosmos does. By contrast, the Sun only rises so as to feast its gaze on my twerking. Without this necessary act of maintenance on my part, that yellow dwarf would fuck off to find Snow White at the heart of the Milky Way.

This means giving up the realist idea that democracy is simply a set of institutions and procedures that can be established and then left to run themselves.

So to make a little money pretending to provide maintenance services to Democracy or a yellow dwarf star or God or the Cosmos, you have to give up a 'realist idea'.
But it is not a realist idea that anything we have a theory, or a model, about was actually established by that theory, or model, and then 'left to run itself'. 

But is also means giving up on the idea that all of our political failings are due to an incomplete or imperfect realization of democracy.

An incomplete or imperfect 'realization of democracy' means an objective, protocol bound, juristic Social Choice Mechanism. We don't know, can't know, if some such Mechanism, perhaps using Technology little dreamed of now, might not overcome all of our 'political failings'. We can and do know that thinking in this way is helpful, if done by smart people, and can 'pay its way'. Thus we should not give up this idea at all. 

Democracy is always a work in progress, but it is also a work that, even at its ideal limit, is always flawed.

No. It is never flawed from some ideal perspective. The question is does current idiographic dynamics 'pay for itself' from the 'ideal', post res, intensional theory with 'univalent foundations'. Our guesses at the answer represent a co-evolved process which turns Knightian Uncertainty into a driver for endogenous growth.

In this sense, democracy can’t be fixed but only maintained. And we need to embrace that point if we want democracy to trive.

I have to agree. If these guys had said 'thrive', I'd disagree because what this unlovely couple embrace can't help anything to thrive. But trive is the good. Mobled Queen is good.