Aiken & Talisse destroying democracy

A democracy is a political system where a large class of the country's people chose the country's leaders and thus decide important matters of policy.

Democracies come in various flavors and have different political institutions some of which are not government institutions in any sense- e.g. political parties. 

Aikin & Talisse ask 'does democracy exist?' in 3 quarks. 

We tend to think of democracy as a set of governmental institutions. 

This is not the case. We think of it as a place where the people will fuck up any 'governmental institutions' which try to fuck them over.

We see it as a political order characterized by open elections,

we prefer a secret ballot and strict laws preventing foreigners with hostile intentions or dangerous criminals running for office 

 constitutional constraints,

but a democracy can change or scrap the constitution.

 the rule of law,

there is a trade off between the rule of law and democratic decision making

 freedom of speech,

again, there is a trade off here. It is unlikely that a democracy will really have unrestricted freedom of speech. At the very least, the 'rule of law' won't prevent some speech acts being severely punished.

 a free press, 

and free love and rainbows shooting out of the asses of unicorns 

an independent judiciary, 

and virile husbands and beautiful wives and kids cute enough to star in a Disney movie

and so on. This makes good sense. These institutions indeed loom large in our political lives.

No they don't. The truth is we don't want the judiciary to be too independent or the press to be too free or desire 'constitutional constraints' which prevent needful action in the face of exigent circumstances. The point about democracy is that a leader accused of having done wrong is deemed to have done right if he gets re-elected. The Condorcet Jury theorem may be mentioned in this context as may Christ's saying 'Ye are as Gods'. The electorate is the ultimate ecclesia which decides what is true and what is right. 

However, political institutions differ considerably from one purportedly democratic society to the next.

Political institutions differ from one district or even one neighborhood to the next in any give polity. I live on a street which the Tories didn't bother to canvass even a decade ago. Now it is Labor which is afraid to show its face. 

 Voting procedures, representation schemes, conceptions of free speech, and judicial arrangements are not uniform across societies that are widely regarded as democratic. In some of these countries, voting is required by law and military service is mandatory. In others, these acts are voluntary. Some democratic countries have distinct speech restrictions, others have different and blurrier boundaries. And the ancient Athenians appointed their representatives to the Boule by lot, instead of by vote. Given these variations, how can these societies all be democracies?

The Greeks gave the answer. If voting by a large section of the population determines political outcomes then we have a democracy. If a monarch decides things- that is monarchy. If a bunch of rich dudes run things- that is oligarchy. If the Army, or particular political formation with coercive powers, runs things then we speak of Dictatorship. 

We may say 'marriage is a bond of mutual affection, respect and reciprocal care between two or more people'. But we recognize that plenty of marriages exist where there is little affection and no mutual respect. 

This leads to the thought that although certain institutional forms are characteristic of democracies, 

This simply isn't the case. 'Institutional forms' are determined by ideographic circumstances. A small city-state may hold elections involving a simple show of hands. A vast densely populated country like India may hold elections over an extended period. 

democracy itself should be identified with the kind of society those institutions realize. 

No it shouldn't. 'Kind of society' is multiply realizable. A benevolent dictatorship may create a society which looks as free and secure and affluent as a well functioning democracy with good leadership. 

We hence can see how two societies with distinct constitutions nevertheless can be democratic.

Just as we see that not all other people are bastards even if their Daddy is not married to our Mummy. It could be that he has a wifey of his own who is not our Daddy's cum dumpster. 

This prompts the obvious question: What kind of society is a democracy?

One where the votes of a large class of the population can change who holds power within the medium term.

Abraham Lincoln’s depiction at Gettysburg may seem a good place to start. He identified democracy as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Yet this goes only so far. For one thing, it retains the idea that democracy is centrally a mode of government.

as opposed to what? A mode of space travel?

 More importantly, it doesn’t specify what it means for government to be by the people. 

The 'Spoils System' operated till 1883. After an election, a lot of political offices changed hands. Government was 'by the people' not professional civil servants. 

As Lincoln’s remark stands, it may allow a society to count as democratic even though benevolent oligarchs, or some other subset of the citizenry, runs it. 

For a polity to count as being sovereign it must be the case that a subset of citizens run it. If the place has no government then it is a terra nullis and has no sovereignty. If the power of any subset of citizens can be taken away by a large class of voters then democracy obtains.

 Consider this against the fact that there are many democracies with appallingly low voting rates.

And there are many marriages with appallingly low rates of sexual intimacy. So what? I'm under a lot of stress at work, you know. 

What’s missing from Lincoln’s account is the idea that a democracy is a social order accountable to all the people. 

Because no form of government is accountable to all the people. Babies in particular face tremendous obstacles to holding high officials to account for their refusal to get off the TV box so the cartoons can come on.

In a democracy, the people not only rule themselves; they rule themselves as equal partners.

Nonsense! They pay for governance and use their votes to get rid of administrations which they feel aren't delivering value for money. When I hire a guy to drain the septic tank, I don't expect to be an equal partner in the labor. 

 No citizen is another’s political subordinate, master, or overlord.

This is only the case when it comes to casting your vote. However, as an employee of a political party or a holder of political office, you may indeed be a subordinate. However, you can resign if you don't like your 'overlord'.  

 In short, a democracy is a society in which people govern themselves as political equals.

In which case there is no government. No territorial sovereignty exists. This is a terra nullis. Only if these sovereign individuals can individually, or without any great coordinative effort, repel any invasion or insurrection would this state of affairs continue. However, arguably, there is no Society here. There is simply a terrain with a population. We might say 'Robinson Crusoe' governs himself'. But we may equally say 'Crusoe is married to himself.' 'Crusoe is the autocephalic Pope of his own creed.' But we are merely talking nonsense. 

It is worth emphasizing that political equality does not mean that every citizen is identical or as equally admirable.

Two people may be said to be 'politically equal' if they have the same power to affect political outcomes. Under agent heterogeneity, 'Shapley values' will differ. But the underlying dynamics is likely to be discontinuous.

 Rather, our political equality means that we participate in the activities of collective self-government as equals. 

No it does not. Suppose I give you a hair cut and then you give me an equally good hair cut. We may be considered equals in haircutting. But when hair is being cut, we don't participate in that haircutting as equals. One is being served. The other is serving. 

True, we may decide to set up an elaborate system of cameras and mirrors and devise a way for one of us to hold one arm of the scissors and the other to hold the other arm and then we might hold a long and balanced discussion before going ahead and cutting each hair. In this case we might be said to have equally participated in the act of collective self-haircutting. But the results would be horrible. We would reject any such activity. Equally, we would tell Aikin & Talisse to fuck off if they suggested we 'self-govern' anything at all according to their stupid criterion. 

We each get to make up our own minds about political affairs. 

Or not.

We don’t merely get an equal say in political decision-making; we’re entitled to one.
No. We neither get an equal say nor are we entitled to one. Why? The result would be horrible. We should tell Aikin & Talisse to fuck off while beating and imprisoning nutters who try to storm the Legislature so as to 'get an equal say' in its decisions.

This definition helps to make sense of why institutions can vary across democratic societies.

No. Institutions vary because societies and their histories vary. No entitlement for nutters or nutty Professors to 'have an equal say' is involved. 

 There are different ways to structure a society of self-governing equals. 

But they are incompossible with any life form which evolved by natural selection.

Thus, democracy can take various institutional forms.

Institutional forms are irrelevant.  What matters is whether it is or is not the case that a large class of voters can grant or withdraw significant political power within the medium term. 

Societies embodying significantly different institutions can be democratic.

Or represent the same outcome as democracy would have achieved.

However, this conception of democracy raises a new difficulty. 

Because conceiving of stupid shit is productive of yet more stupid shit.

Arguably, no existing society fits the definition.

Because the definition is shit.  It's like saying 'marriage is a bond between equals'. Equality means both parties have the same sized dick. But no actual married couple has exactly the same sized dick. Thus nobody is actually married. Marriage does not exist. 

Material, social, and historical blocks to equal standing among citizens are pervasive in all societies claiming to be democratic. 

Also some peeps be cripples. They can't stand at all. How can they have equal standing? 

There is no self-governing society of political equals to be found. Every existing society falls short of that mark.

Just as no married couple has exactly the same sized dick. Every marriage falls short of the mark.

Does it then follow that democracy doesn’t exist, that no society should count as democratic? No. To see why, we need to take a step back to consider some features about what we might call aspirational concepts.

Very true. My wife aspires to have the same dick size as me. Thus our marriage- though not one of equals yet aspires to become so. 

Let’s begin by asking a different question: Was Aristotle a scientist? 

Yes. The word 'scientist' has a 'rigid designation'. Obviously the scope of 'science' has changed over the last centuries. However, it is perfectly proper to say Aristotle has been called a scientist for as long as the word 'scientist' has had currency. 

He wrote multiple treatises on scientific subjects, from marine biology and botany to astronomy and physics. However, he never looked through a microscope and had no conception of DNA. He had never heard of the theory of evolution or of Newton’s laws of motion. Moreover, he held views of natural phenomena that could hardly be called scientific by today’s standards. For example, he thought that species were eternal, that men and women had different number teeth, that the Earth is the center of the universe, that the universe’s motion had to be sustained by a purpose, and that formal and material explanations must be distinct. Not only were these views incorrect, but they arguably stood in the way of the progress of the sciences.

This is immaterial. It is of the nature of science that what is considered good science today will be considered as plain ignorance in the not too distant future. 

Nonetheless, Aristotle sought to explain the world around him by means of a particular style of inquiry, a mode of investigation that directed him to observe, tinker, take notes, track how things change, theorize in light of the available data, and revise as new evidence emerged.

There are plenty of great scientists alive today who don't 'observe, tinker, take notes' etc. They spend all their time doing very complicated maths. We think of Aristotle as an amateur Naturalist, not a Natural Scientist modeling population dynamics with arcane mathematical tools. However, we can't deny that a great Natural Scientist might find something interesting in Aristotle which we miss precisely because we don't know the relevant math.

For this reason, Aristotle was indeed a scientist.

But in that case, Socioproctology too is a science because its founder aspires to getting a Nobel Prize in Physics and two in Chemistry and perhaps half a dozen or so in Medicine. 

His status as such is due to the aspiration his empirical studies embody, and the way that aspiration guided his work. We’d say the same of Ptolemy and Newton. Moreover, we contend that contemporary scientists are bona fide scientists, even though we also expect that in the next 100 years new discoveries will render obsolete much of what they believe.

Suppose I aspire to say the same as what Aikin & Talisse have said in the last paragraph but vomit copiously and then shit myself instead. Would they consider me to have communicated the same thing as they just did? 

We should say the same about democracy.

Very true. North Korea genuinely aspires to be a true democracy but just can't get over its darned habit of shooting dissidents instead. 

It’s the name of a political aspiration. Accordingly, a society counts as democratic in virtue of the extent to which the aim of realizing a self-governing society of political equals guides its institutions and practices.

So only Marxist dictatorships which aim at the 'withering away of the State' are democratic. They may keep shooting people or Gulaging their sorry asses but their hearts are in the right place.

 This means that a society that falls short of being a self-governing society of political equals might nonetheless qualify

in the eyes of a cretin

 as an authentic democracy.

but it could equally well qualify as an inauthentic facsimile of the Nicaraguan horcrux of my neighbor's cat. 

However, it remains the case that a society’s being a democracy comes to more than its claim to be one. We regard Aristotle as a scientist not simply because he says he’s being scientific. Rather, his status as a scientist has to do with how he conducted his investigations; he counts as a scientist in virtue of how the aspiration to understand the world informed his efforts.

No. The reason Aristotle still qualifies as a scientist for some great natural scientists is because though his own investigations did not rise above that of an amateur naturalist, nevertheless he identified and was concerned with deep epistemological and ontological questions which remain at the center of 'open questions' and fecund research programs.

 We might call it a broad empiricism and a commitment to systematic and natural explanations.

Which is why Socioproctology is a science. Empirically assholes exist. Socioproctology's systematic and naturalistic explanation for the shite academic assholes produce focuses on the stupidity and ignorance of pedagogues like Aikin & Talisse.  They are simply incapable of writing a single sentence which isn't utterly foolish.

 Similarly, there are certain necessary institutional and practical conditions that a society must meet if it is to qualify as embodying the democratic aspiration. 

This is not the case. If, even absent any institutions or practical arrangements, we can be sure that a large class of voters can redistribute political power in the medium term, then democracy exists. 

Here we return to the familiar governmental and institutional forms that typically spring to mind when we think about democracy: open and fair elections,

which are costly and require high State capacity

 the rule of law,

which is even more costly and which requires not just high State capacity but also a class of legal professionals with strong normative traditions built up over centuries

 freedom of speech, and so on. A society that does not satisfy certain baseline institutional requirements cannot count as a democracy,

for the same reason that a nigger or a injun couldn't count as an equal citizen of Jefferson's democracy

 because it cannot be regarded as embracing the democratic aspiration.

Obviously, the guys who were slaughtered or enslaved to make room for American democracy didn't have any aspiration to belong to it. They'd rather have been left alone to live peacefully with their families in their own ancestral lands. 

But that’s not all. The democratic aspiration also involves the creation of a culture in which the aim of achieving a self-governing society of equals is operative in the minds and practices of political officials and citizens. 

So these cretins think 'democratic aspirations' involve setting up a fucking brainwashing cult. The truth is quite different. We just want to chuck out the guys we voted in to spend our tax dollars if they fuck up. That's it. That's the whole story. No taxation without representation. 

This means that for a society to qualify as democratic, 

in the eyes of academic assholes with zero reasoning ability

certain kinds of considerations, reasons, and arguments must count in discussions of political policy.

What considerations count in practical matters? Practical considerations, i.e. stuff like is this feasible? Can it be done more cheaply? Who pays for it? 

 To use a simplistic example, a cogent argument to the effect that a particular policy diminishes the capacity of some citizens to participate in self-government as equals must count as a formidable criticism of that policy. 

Nonsense! Unless there is some glaring Agent Principal hazard, specific Hohfeldian incident, or other significant informational asymmetry, this is not a formidable criticism at all. But this is a justiciable matter. Suppose I feel some proposed public policy negatively impacts a class to which I belong. I can approach the courts and argue that there has been a 'due process' violation in that adequate consultation has not occurred. 

What’s more, in the absence of similar considerations that favor the policy, the equality-based critique must be regarded as decisive. 

No. A Judge may find it trivial and dismiss the case. More generally, 'Laches' applies. Those who sleep on their rights deserve to lose them. It is not the case that nothing can bee done till every possible counterclaim is settled. 

Now putting the point in a different way, a society in which arguments about equality simply have no purchase 

because peeps be smart enough to see that such arguments are just worthless virtue signaling indulged by stupid academic assholes and antaganomic activists

in political discourse is at best a democracy in decline, and arguably not a democracy at all. 

in the opinion of two cretins. What people want is more nice things and less nasty things in their life. They are not concerned with a levelling down which will swiftly turn into mass starvation and levelling up is clearly impossible coz everybody can't have their own personal butler and physical trainer and gourmet chef. 

Similarly, politicians and political coalitions that disregard considerations about equality,

or what these cretins consider equality

 or that openly seek to limit any citizen’s equal access to the activities of self-government,

for example, by telling Aikin & Talisse that they are stupid and should kindly shut the fuck up when grownups are talking. 

 have effectively divested from democracy.

these cunts have certainly divested from Reason. 

Thus, even though no society lives up to the 

stupid, not

strict definition of democracy, democracies nevertheless exist. 

because peeps don't give a shit about equality or 'self-governance'. They just want a better deal for their tax dollar. 

Real world societies are democratic in virtue of 

only one thing. Voters get to kick out the administration and install a different bunch of jokers. 

This has nothing to do with any shit Aikin & Talisse pull out of their arse. 

satisfying two related conditions. First, the society must feature certain characteristic political institutions.

This is neither a necessary or sufficient condition. It is simply irrelevant. Why not simply say 'for me to recognize some foreign country as being like my own country, it must look exactly like what I am familiar with'. This is mere bigotry. 

 Second, the people – politicians, officials, and citizens alike – must regard those institutions as manifesting the moral aspiration to realize the idea of self-government among equals more fully. 

They may consider the Institution of the Witch Finder General to manifest moral aspirations of this sort. Moreover, they may stipulate for the  idea of self-government among equals with ginormous dicks be manifested more fully up Aikin & Talisse's collective asshole. 

Crucially, this means that a democratic people must treat certain kinds of moral considerations regarding equality as politically salient – always weighty, sometimes decisive – in their own political thinking.

Because if a people aren't Aikin & Talisse level stupid and ignorant of economics, they can't be called a 'democratic' people at all. 

Why stop there? Why not say a society which does not elect me President isn't democratic at all? 

We conclude by highlighting one important upshot of our account. It is common to think of democracy as something that is founded or established. 

It is uncommon to think of democracy. What useful purpose does it serve? Back in the Sixties, when people took a lot of drugs, you could argue whether Maoism was true democracy and whether the term 'Justice' could be applied to any outcome other than the physical liquidation of the bourgeoisie and the kulaks and the feudal remnants and the counter revolutionary forces and so forth. But doing so now is just stooopid. 

This leads to the thought that once a democracy is set up, all that remains it the task of upholding it.

These stupid cunts can't set up or uphold shit. But that's equally true of almost everybody else which is why don't we pretend otherwise. 

 This is an error. 

Just like thinking that Night will end and Dawn will rise even if we omit to shout loudly so as to wake up the Sun God from his deep slumber.

Once we see that democracy is an aspiration, we also see that the task of democracy is that of sustaining it. 

Fuck off! The task of democracy is to get us guys- the demos- a better return for our tax dollars. Similarly, the task of plumbing is to unclog my fucking toilet already rather than just carry on sustaining the aspirations of plumbing to get around to doing something useful some time. 

And sustaining democracy is a matter of working to change it in the direction of greater political equality.

Absolutely not. Experience has taught us that only nutters or vacuous virtue signalers describe themselves as 'working' for greater equality or social justice or true fraternity or other such bullshit. Sustaining any system of government involves improving governance0 i.e. administrative efficiency. Working involves doing useful stuff. What these two assholes are doing is not work. It is a wank. 

Is greater political equality desirable? Not if it leads to the exit of capital and enterprise and the sort of peeps wot take pride in their work and don't want to be endlessly harangued by virtue signaling nutters. 

Control rights should be aligned with uncorrelated asymmetries of an informational or productivity based type. Those control rights need to be reflected in apportionment of 'Voice'. Thus, if we are discussing what should be done about COVID, cretins like me should not be given an equal opportunity to express our views.  This is not to say that 'Voice' needs to be rationed. It just means that Social Choice must be at least as rational or regret minimizing as individual choice. Aiken & Talisse think that Social Choice must face much greater a priori constraints. Its menu must be stupid shit. Thankfully, we don't live in an epistocracy. We have democracy or, in China, a dictator who needs to ensure the cadres don't decide to arrange a nice 'accident' for him.