Participatory Democracy can be either direct, with all eligible citizens making decisions, or it may be representative- where that decision making power is delegated to agents who enjoy popular support and meet various other criteria.
Liberal Democracy is a variety of representative democracy where there is an independent Judiciary which limits the power of elected officials to alter Social outcomes- more particularly in connection with the allocation of resources or the expression of opinion.
'Strongman' leadership is sometimes defined as authoritarian leadership. This can't exist if there is an independent Judiciary though a leader may wish to have an aura of decisiveness or, indeed, of omnipotence and infallibility. In this case, there may be a widespread fear that the leader is plotting to undermine or even overthrow the Constitution. FDR was considered to be 'packing the Bench' and turning himself into an elected Dictator. This was one reason for the two term limit for POTUS put in place by the 22nd Amendment. However, an authoritarian or even wholly autocratic leader can be very weak and vacillating or extremely amiable and anxious to promote consensus and avoid conflict.
Strength is a quality a leader of any type may find it convenient to project or reject depending on the circumstances. Thus, there is no conceptual link between authoritarianism and 'strongman' leadership.
Thomas Wells, a philosophy professor, takes a different view. In a post on 3 Quarks, he writes-
Strongmen Leaders And The Infallibility Trap
It is easy to become exasperated with liberal democracy.
Or any other form of government though it may not always be prudent to express any such sentiment.
Various factions bicker and manoeuvre against each other in an endless grubby contest for power,
This is a feature of life at the Court of an Absolute Monarch. But it also obtains in wholly inconsequential social groups. Just recently, I was forced to resign as President of the Institute of Socioproctology because of sexual harassment allegations made by my Deputy. It so happened that the Treasurer, whom I had myself appointed, chose to back my Deputy against the only directly elected representative of the Institute's rank and file. In any case, it is highly questionable if self-abuse constitutes harassment. On the other hand, the subsequent scandal clearly showed that my Institute is not a 'one-man band'. The neighbor's cat is an ex-officio member of the governing board.
hypocritically appealing to a shared public interest while continuously generating and sustaining social divisions.
This works just as well as a description of family life
Things that are necessary – like addressing climate change – do not get done,
unless they do get done by people who are tired of not being able to breathe properly. The deadly 'pea-souper' smog of 1952 killed 12,000 over the space of four days. This led to a number of policy decisions which greatly improved the environment. This in turn led to greater confidence that collective measures could be taken to avert ecological catastrophes.
lost amidst the endless dithering, quibbling, and bargaining for advantage.
Once a particular industry can make large enough profits by tackling the problem, the implementation of the solution becomes more likely.
Things that should not be done
in the opinion of a Philosophy professor- i.e. an ignorant fool
– like deporting UK asylum applicants to Rwanda –
the alternative is that UK scraps all Human Rights Legislation and exits UN Conventions re. Asylum, refoulement etc. This is not to say that the Rwanda scheme is viable. It is just something the clowns running things post-Brexit pulled out of their collective horse's ass.
become official policy against all common sense and multiple laws, seemingly mainly as a way of trolling the opposition and civil society.
The problem with philosophers is that they take things which 'seem' true- but aren't- within their own narrow clique on Campus, as irrefragable axioms. On the other hand, it is obvious that Society can make no genuine progress towards social inclusivity till everybody has mandatory gender reassignment surgery while masturbating.
So it is disappointing but perhaps not surprising that people around the world are increasingly likely to endorse the strongman theory of government, that “a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and election is a good way to run the country”.
Who is saying that? Republicans who want Biden to become Dictator-for-Life?
Strongman government has two major attractions compared to liberal democracy.
It has only one. The judiciary ceases to act as a check on the Executive. This is only a good thing if the Legal System is rotten to the core and there are plentiful 'low hanging fruit' from disintermediating it. However, there is no reason why the free operation of the market should not have the same effect. Justice is a service industry. If there is flight from a particular jurisdiction, its judgments won't be enforceable.
First, it promises wise and benevolent rule:
Would a wise and benevolent ruler want to be seen as a circus 'strongman'? No. She would wish to be seen as a warm, compassionate and approachable figure whose legitimacy arises from love and admiration.
undistracted by factions
The leader should concentrate on 'big picture' stuff while a trusted lieutenant sorts out internal problems and keeps the rank and file fired up. But this is true of any type of organization.
motivated by political interests the strong leader will be freed to make wiser, better decisions in the national interest.
Mummy will be better able to make wise decisions if Sister doesn't keep badgering her with complaints about my farting.
Second, it promises decisiveness: without the endless bickering and second guessing, strong leaders can get on and do what needs to be done.
Good leaders delegate responsibly. They disintermediate dysfunctional mechanisms.
In what follows I want to challenge these apparent advantages and show that the very failings of liberal democracy are actually the solution to the problems that strongman governments run into.
This is foolish. Governments fail when they do stupid shit or fail to do mission critical stuff. But this is true of any sort of enterprise or social unit. It is not the case that a particular way of doing things has a remedy for the shortfalls of some other way of doing things if that shortfall arises from a human failing, not something intrinsic to the relevant mechanism. We might say 'Jenny would be better at her job if she imitated John, her more successful colleague, in such and such manner'. We don't say 'Jenny's failings, in the field of peeing standing up, are actually the solution to the problems that John would run into if he got drunk at the Office Party and peed in the Punch bowl.'
Let us start with the virtue of wise and benevolent leadership.
It arises purely because wisdom and benevolence are virtues. Wise and benevolent discipleship has the same quality as does wise and benevolent disengagement or indifference. Wells' mistake is to think there is some structural connection between a predicate and its object. But, if there is, then there is no predicate such that unicity obtains or an equivalence class can be constructed. There is merely an ad hoc observation of what appears to be a feature of a particular regime. But this is subjective or merely a figurative way of speaking. A kid might say- 'Mummy is totes Fascist because she won't let me stay up watching TV on a School night'. But the kid isn't as stupid as Wells. Kids know Mummy isn't Fascist at all. She is very very nice.
It is easily observed that democracies are far from wise.
It is just as easily observed that the wise are giraffes. They nourish themselves from the tops of trees rather than chomping down on saplings. But this is merely a figurative way of speaking.
This should not be surprising if you consider that voters have little interest at stake in making voting choices well because – unlike when weighing up even trivial decisions like what sandwich to buy – they know that their choice will not decide the outcome.
They know no such thing. The Muth Rational Solution is superior. Alternatively, we could speak of a Newcombe problem or Kavka's toxin. In any case, preference intensity is expressed by willingness to queue up to cast your ballot. Moreover, there are long established reputational and other benefits for citizen's groups to take collective action to 'get out the vote'. In India this is called 'booth management'. It is one reason India often has higher voter participation then many 'advanced' democracies.
So voters mostly choose on the basis of things irrelevant to the policy platforms of politicians, in particular as a way of expressing their social identity.
Which is fine if politicians are rational and adjust their platforms to ensure that 'representative agents' of those identities gain in a predictable and publicizable way. Thus, before an election, each party explains, and seeks to put a cash value on, how much those in various income and other groupings can expect to benefit from the programs.
In addition, few people of great capability are willing to put themselves forward for the thankless task of public service, especially given the many easier and more rewarding careers available to such people in a free society.
But Econ has a 'signalling' and 'screening' theory which explains why having held public office lowers information asymmetry and enables a rent to accrue to people who have made the sacrifice of going in for the 'Cursus Honorum'. But this was true even in Cicero's time.
Hence the low ability and excessive confidence of most candidates for political office in democracies.
This may be true of politicians who benefit from an unexpected turn of events- e.g. Brexit or the 'Red State' revolt against Political Correctness. It is obvious that Brexit supporting Ministers and Prime Ministers are less mature and economically literate
The result is that democracies are emphatically not governed by wise statesmen in the interest of the society as a whole.
Unless they are. Social Choice theory predicts that if preference or endowment diversity fails a 'Goldilocks condition', there are going to be 'topological holes' in the decision space- i.e. you could get extreme saltation events. But that is true of any coevolved system. It isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Nonetheless, merely because democracy isn’t great doesn’t mean that autocracy is better.
Sinclair Lewis spoke of the rationality of infecting a person with Malaria so as to cure Syphilis (higher blood temperature kills the spirochetes) but the irrationality of doing the reverse. Democracy was like Malaria. Fascism was like Syphilis.
Sadly, the analogy doesn't quite work. A Democracy can choose to become Fascist and vice versa. Franco may have been better than crazy Commies run amok raping nuns. But, liberal democracy was better and Franco helped that transition before dying peacefully in his bed.
Firstly, autocracies have a selection process of their own, which is even less well aligned with the interests of their people.
Unless it isn't. Communist China probably had a better 'selection process' than any country in South Asia. But even if this wasn't the case, two countries whose leaders have the same program- e.g. India and China after 1992- still may have very different outcomes on the basis of 'control rights' even if 'selection' is good in both. In India, the Judiciary and 'Civil Society' were very successful in preventing reform and development.
While democratic rulers have to keep a substantial part of the voting population happy to stay in power (how much depends on the electoral system),
No. Democratic leaders just have to be less shite than their nearest rival. Even if a popular agitation forces them out of office, they will be back in a couple of years because the other guys turned out to be even more shitty.
strongmen only have to maintain the support of a small cabal of key accomplices.
No. They have to keep killing them or shipping them off to the Gulag. This terrifies the fuck out of 'accomplices'.
Democrats are only weakly accountable to the people, but autocrats are not accountable at all
Assassination, as the Tzars found out, tempers autocracy. Stalin kept escaping from Siberia. When he got power, he ensured that guys who got Gulaged stayed Gulaged.
(although they do cultivate popularity
No. They actively foster slavish devotion. Failure to express frenzied enough love for the Beloved Leader can get you killed.
as a means of reducing the costs of suppressing dissent).
Nonsense! The one item on the budget the Dictator loves to see rise is the budget for beating the shit out of all and sundry before they start getting any ideas into their heads.
Indeed, their independence from democratic political processes and institutions is the very attraction of the strongman to those who have come to find those things tiresome.
Dictators get hard thinking about the millions they have killed or Gulaged. Those who get hard for Dictators may be masochists or they may just suffer from what Polanyi called 'moral inversion'.
Unfortunately it turns out that this independence is quite compatible with a dearth of virtue in political rulers.
The reverse is equally true- that is the hallmark of a meaningless statement.
Witness the terrible things that autocrats have done to their people – genocides and famines and so on – without losing power.
Also true of democratic leaders- at least in East Bengal.
The things that autocracies are doing right now to the people subject to their power and supposedly under their care in Tigray, Xinjiang, N. Korea, Myanmar, Venezuela, and so on.
The 'war on Terror' killed plenty of people and displaced millions more. Democracies did that. Who is to say what they will get up to next?
Such things don’t happen in liberal democracies
The US was a liberal democracy when it had Jim Crow. Indeed, the Nazis imitated America's racial policies while Scandinavian countries went further down the eugenics road.
(not, at least, outside colonial contexts where the victims lack political rights – which supports rather than disproves the point) for two reasons.
Firstly, voters don’t have to be especially smart or public spirited to notice and reject such straightforwardly awful and evil policies, so if voters count then they don’t happen.
Wells won't accept that the vast majority of Americans were racist and misogynist and so forth. France didn't give women the vote till 1945. Lichtenstein's women had to wait till 1984.
Secondly, it turns out that the endlessly tedious political arguments and exchanges of accusations that take up so much of the public sphere in a democracy actually serve a crucial function of informing the government of what is going well or badly.
Not necessarily. The Condorcet Jury theorem has no magical power. If the vast majority have crazy ideas they will focus on meaningless 'wedge' issues. Consider how much time Britain wasted on the issue of rate-payer support for Church schools.
Autocracies have enormous difficulty understanding what the problems of the society are
unless they don't because the autocrat has eyes in his head.
and whether their policies are working. Like all underlings, theirs are hired and promoted on the basis of loyalty,
whereas Biden makes a point of hiring people who scream abuse at him- right?
and hence are disinclined to report bad news up the chain.
this does not matter if foreign sources too are being ignored. Take Stalin's refusal to heed British warnings of Hitler's impending invasion. Clearly, the problem was that Stalin had already made his mind up.
But unlike in a democracy there is no free public sphere in which outsiders can identify and criticise the regime’s mishaps and errors,
France and Britain did have this 'free public sphere' but it turned out to be useless in the late Thirties.
and hence no way for an autocrat to access such an external perspective on their rule.
Only if they don't want to access the thing. But this is also true of democratic leaders.
Strongmen regimes achieve unity by eliminating all dissent,
but also eliminating a lot of loyalists just so everybody goes to bed terrified of the 'mid-night knock'. What kept Stalin in power after Hitler invaded was the fact that everybody was still more terrified of him than of the whole country being conquered and enslaved by crazy Nazis.
and this requires treating anyone who voices disagreement with the official truth and ideology as a threat to the regime.
That isn't enough. You have to randomly torture loyalists and conduct 'show trials' and then kill them and Gulag their families. Stalin underlined this point by celebrating Ivan the Terrible. Had he lived longer, there would have been films about Olga the fucking awful and Boris the unutterably bestial.
So there is good reason to conclude that democracies are dumb but autocracies are dumber.
If by 'good reason' you means 'arbitrary shite you pulled out of your arse'- sure. Why not? The plain fact is that it is dumb to have a democracy if preference and endowment diversity don't meet a Goldilocks condition. It would be even dumber to have an autocracy if your security forces are recruited entirely from the cute kitten population.
Moreover, it is their lack of the very things that make democracies so far from perfect (the factions competing for voters; the endless bickering) that make autocracies worse.
Very true. It was Jenny's lack of a penis which made her far from perfect at peeing standing up which, paradoxically, made John's propensity to pee in the punch bowl at the Office Party so much worse.
Even if the believer in autocracy would accept this conclusion, they might still defend its superiority on the grounds of its second promise: decisiveness.
John's having a dick means he can be more decisive when it comes to peeing in the punch bowl.
Decisiveness can be considered as a virtue in itself, separately from the quality of the decision itself (at least up to a point).
But a person who is decisive on stupid questions- e.g. those regarding virtue- is shit. We do well to avoid such people.
In politics just as in other spheres it is often more important that a reasonable choice is made and effectively acted on than that the very best choice is made.
In politics, what is important is that stupid shit is not done.
For example, suppose someone falls to the ground clutching their chest on a busy street. The bystander effect
for which there is little evidence
describes the phenomenon that where there are lots of people available to help, each individual becomes less likely to step forward and act, mainly it seems because lines of responsibility become unclear.
unless there is a pre-existing norm or legal requirement. Some countries have a 'Good Samaritan' law whereby failure to render assistance is punishable. In other regimes, there may be a convention whereby the one who renders assistance becomes legally responsible for any further costs which are incurred on behalf of the victim. In the UK, if I call an ambulance for a guy who collapsed on the street, I am not expected to pay for the ambulance. Moreover, in the event that the person I helped dies, it is extremely unlikely that the police will arrest me because the person's next of kin accuses me of using witchcraft to kill the bread-winner of the family.
I suppose, were I an 'illegal immigrant', I might run away from the scene of an accident because I feared that I would be deported if I gave a statement to the police. As a matter of fact, this does not happen but a foreigner may not know this.
The best thing might well be for someone to step forward and take charge (‘You call an ambulance. You and you, hold other people back so we can have some space. Now, does any one of you know CPR?’) regardless of whether they are the best medically qualified of the people there or whether their instructions are a close match to the Red Cross’ latest first aid guidance.
Leadership breaks 'concurrency deadlock' or solves a 'coordination problem'. But there may be a Schelling focal 'leader'. Thus, where a person suddenly becomes ill, bystanders automatically turn to the guy with a stethoscope around his neck.
Likewise, in situations like the Covid epidemic, there were a number of plausible policies available to governments (and no perfect ones). It was more important that some policy from that list was chosen and then systematically implemented than that the policy chosen was the best possible.
Only if the administration had no previous relevant experience. This wasn't the case in Kerala which had just dealt with the Zipah outbreak. What Wells is talking about is a situation where 'maximum uncertainty' applies. However, precisely because Covid has happened, there can be no 'situations like Covid'. Countries now understand that their own internal constrains matter more than the nature of the calamity. Tardean mimetics has been inhibited. Poor countries will take one path. Islands another. America might suspend or curtail the activities of certain Agencies. China might pursue 'subsidiarity'.
The strongman Xi Jinping opted for Zero-Covid and implemented it systematically, resulting in a tiny death rate in the very country where Covid originated.
Xi has been continually increasing the Party's residuary control rights over every field of activity. Covid was an opportunity to test out and to expand and extend methods of social control at the neighbourhood level. Sadly, China's vaccine turned out to be a dud. That's not Xi's fault. Still, his people should have followed a regret minimizing strategy by laying in stocks of other vaccines. It is important to remember that a lot of China's scientific capacity has only been built up very recently. There has to be a 'discovery' process to see what works and what doesn't. But this is not a function of type of political regime. The fact is public health is an area where authority must be exercised authoritatively. But having an authoritarian leader may not ensure this outcome because the Dictator thinks the population is already too large. Let some virus thin out the herd. The strong will survive.
In contrast it is easy to find evidence
Wells confuses impressions or hearsay with evidence.
of dithering democracies switching continuously between different incompatible disease control regimes, with attendant unnecessary deaths. Boris Johnson’s government spent $1 billion subsidising people to eat out in August 2020,
so as to avoid having to shell out many more billions in Social Security. Still, one has to admit Rishi got his sums wrong.
and then put the UK into lockdown 8 weeks later as cases rose alarmingly;
The UK is in an unusual position because it has a National Health System. Preventing the thing collapsing is essential for political survival.
many federal systems such as the USA implemented multiple incompatible policies at the same time;
subsidiarity of this sort probably is a good idea. The US is vast. England is small.
and so on.
And yet once again the dithering of democracy turns out to be a feature not a bug of successful policymaking (a point made very eloquently by David Runciman).
Dithering is not a feature of successful policy making. Runciman published a silly book ten years ago which expressed the traditional British confidence in 'muddling through'. Yet, Britain didn't actually muddle through shit. It was shorn of its Empire and its leisured class had to do without butlers and valets unless they were successful in turning their country mansions into tourist traps.
The very decisiveness of autocrats risks locking them into a course of action that may well turn out to be disastrous.
Unless it doesn't. But this is true of anyone and anything. If only the neighbour's cat had dithered instead of crossing the road, it wouldn't have been runover by a car.
The very indecisiveness of democracies allows them to think about and experiment with alternatives and so adapt to changing information or circumstances and to correct mistakes before it is too late.
Nonsense! If you don't make a decision it is not the case that 'thinking' and 'experimenting' will spontaneously occur.
Consider how Xi Jinping’s signature Zero-Covid policy changed from a source of gloating triumph over weak-willed democracies to a threat to his own regime as more virulent Covid strains appeared.
Only because the Chinese vaccine was shit.
Moreover, the problem faced by decisive strongmen like Xi Jinping is directly related to their success in achieving a unified and harmonious political sphere.
Xi is not facing any fucking problem. He got what he wanted and then relaxed the lockdown. Nobody is going to blame him for the vaccine being shit. No doubt, some scientists will get shot or 're-educated'. That's the way Stalin would have played it.
Because the decisiveness model requires everyone to do as they are told,
No. Arbitrageurs in free markets act decisively all the time. Sometimes their expectations are proved false because people don't do what experts say they should do. If so, they lose money.
no public disagreement or second guessing of the situation can be permitted.
There is no necessary connection between any of these things. An autocrat may encourage disagreement and second guessing amongst his team of expert advisers. An elected leader may do the reverse.
Everyone must behave as if the strongman leader is infallible,
unless he is irreplaceable in which case it is in his interest to foster a belief in his fallibility so that his subjects exercise prudence rather than leave everything up to him.
and all his underlings must strive to help maintain that impression – that this policy is the right and thus only possible choice.
This could be true of an elected leader. We may speak of a 'paranoid style' of leadership as opposed to one which is tolerant and inclusive. But, actual leaders may zig-zag between these two styles.
Hence, even within the government organisation itself, there can be no acknowledgement of the possibility of failure and no planning for alternatives.
This is equally true of a commercial organization. The fact is, tort law in a particular jurisdiction may be such that Management must actively 'manage the news' so as to reduce liability. You have to be sure your senior employees can say, under oath, that there was never any knowledge or suspicion that things could go wrong in a particular way. It would then be up to the petitioner to show that there was something unreasonable about holding such a view.
In Xi Jinping’s case this meant that the public was caught by surprise by a policy U-turn (a more appropriate term is ‘policy collapse’) that was never even formally announced and for which almost no preparation had been made (increasing vaccination of at risk groups; stockpiling medications; preparing hospitals for a wave of cases; etc).
The public was caught by surprise by Covid and Ukraine and so forth.
It is estimated that the eventual collapse of Zero-Covid may kill more than a million Chinese citizens,
which we also know won't matter at all. Indeed, China could lose five or ten million without there being any political ramifications whatsoever.
but the bigger impact may be to the halo of infallibility on which the regime’s popular legitimacy rests.
Wells is a Professor. He must have seen Chinese students on campus. Does he really think they believe their Chairman is infallible? Why are so many smart Chinese people settling in Western countries? Why don't they prefer the protection of their omniscient leader?
In contrast, democratic governments are constantly barraged by suggestions for policy amendments and alternatives,
which they blithely ignore or, in the case of Trump, which they disparage with a 'mean' Tweet in between scoffing cheeseburgers and watching late Night TV.
and so the public is not surprised when things do change. There is no myth of infallibility around a democratic government.
There can be. Look at FDR. He kicked ass big time.
There could hardly be when every mishap and gaffe is broadcast to the nation and picked over gleefully by political opponents, journalists, Twitterati, and cable TV comedians.
But Modi is not gaffe-prone. Biden always was but he got elected.
To the contrary, seeing one’s leaders publicly humiliated is entirely normal in a democracy
No it isn't. Thatcher had to go because her Party humiliated her. The tears in her eyes killed off her chance to make a comeback.
– and thus no threat to the regime. This greatly reduces the costs of admitting mistakes and changing course, while the costs of those mistakes are still small.
If the cost is small, why admit shit? Brazen things out. The same is true if the cost is very very fucking big.
Let me put these points together and sum up. Critics of democracy are correct that it is a deeply flawed system of government.
No. They are wrong. A deep flaw is one which systematically leads to bad outcomes. Democracy is not deeply flawed though under some circumstances it may perform poorly. However, there are some territories where setting up a Democracy would be a very very bad idea. But this means it is the 'fitness landscape' rather than anything internal to Democracy which determines when it will be deeply flawed and when it will be the best feasible solution concept.
At any moment one can see the proof of this
only if that is what we want to see and we are as stupid as shit
in the bumbling and bickering and destructive factional competition that is all too visible among our politicians.
But politicians as a class can ensure that the thing isn't too visible. Indeed, some countries have that sort of political culture.
And yet, liberal democracies do rather well in the long run
only if the underlying territory would have done well in the long run no matter what form of government it had
compared to the regimes that lack those flaws.
Lacking a flaw is a good thing.
It is not an accident that they tend to be so much richer than non-democracies;
Only if the underlying territory always had that potential. Geography matters. A culture of thrift and enterprise matters. Bollocks talked by Professors of Philosophy does not matter at all.
that autocratic China has three liberal democracy neighbours much more prosperous than it is (or is ever likely to be).
North Korea is much poorer than China. It too is a neighbour. Nobody would have described Taiwan or South Korea as a liberal democracy in the Seventies. Hong Kong was a colony. Is Singapore a democracy? Biden didn't invite it to his Democracy summit.
The very things which make democratic politics so deeply exasperating
to a guy who teaches shit in between getting 'exasperated' and parading his ignorance and inability to reason
turn out to be the reason for its success, not a problem to overcome.
And yet democratic countries engage continually in 'mechanism design' so as to reduce 'exasperation' or rent contestation or rent dissipation. Philosophy Professors can contribute nothing to this. They exist merely to be laughed at by Socioproctologists.
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