Jason Stanley writes in Project Syndicate
The End of US Democracy Was All Too Predictable
Some did predict that the Dems would win but everybody agreed the margins would be narrow no matter who won. It appears that voters focused on the economy rather than foreign policy or some supposed Fascist threat. Abortion seems to have had much less influence than many had thought- probably because voters understand that this is a matter for the States. All in all, the outcome is in line with rational choice theory. Trump is expected to do better than Harris as President. That's why he has won. This is the Condorcet Jury theorem in action.
Since Plato’s Republic 2,300 years ago, philosophers have understood the process by which demagogues come to power in free and fair elections, only to overthrow democracy and establish tyrannical rule.
Equally, a demagogue may rally resistance to a tyrant or an oligarchy. Then, as now, some nutters denounced decent folk as demons while some decent folk were taken in by raving nutters.
The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out.
Trump will get a second term which may be a bit better or a bit worse than his first term. That isn't 'tyranny'. It is business a usual.
NEW YORK – Like others, since late Tuesday night, my phone has been blaring with text messages asking how this could have happened (as some of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances know, I had been fully convinced that Donald Trump would win this election handily).
Then you are a better man than I am, Gunga Din. The Dems had better 'booth management' as we say in India. There are smart young people whose start-ups will explain how Kamala could have won with targeted social media campaigns and other such high IQ stuff. But there were lower hanging fruit- e.g. picking up endorsements from the Teamsters and so forth. What if Kamala had picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate? I suppose there are smart people who are being paid a lot of money to figure these things out.
Instead of responding in detail to every message, I will offer my explanation here.
Fascism is on the prowl. That explains everything- including why I am fat and am losing my hair.
For 2,300 years, at least since Plato’s Republic, philosophers have known how demagogues and aspiring tyrants win democratic elections.
All elections are won in the same way- viz by getting more votes than the other guy. Some people who win elections are shit. Others are less shit. If a country prefers to be a dictatorship, that is what it will become whether or not there are elections.
The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out.
We watched a political process of a routine type. This nutter was watching Senator Palpatine in Star Wars.
In a democracy, anyone is free to run for office, including people who are thoroughly unsuitable to lead or preside over the institutions of government. One telltale sign of unsuitability is a willingness to lie with abandon,
Biden was a habitual liar but it was kinda endearing. 'My uncle was eaten by cannibals in New Guinea' is the kind of thing we'd say if we had an uncle whose plane crashed in the Pacific. Anyway, the guy is very very fucking old. Maybe he really thinks his son died in Iraq.
specifically by representing oneself as a defender against the people’s perceived enemies,
rather than the familiar of Count Dracula who wants to SUCK YOUR BLOOD!
both external and internal. Plato regarded ordinary people as being easily controlled by their emotions, and thus susceptible to such messaging – an argument that forms the true foundation of democratic political philosophy (as I have argued in previous work).
No. That is the foundation of anti-democratic political philosophy based on the rule of an elite class of 'Guardians' who use 'Noble Lies' to keep the great unwashed from reverting to cannibalism.
Philosophers have also always known that
they have shit for brains. Still, to make a little money, they shit into their cupped hands and fling their faeces about.
this kind of politics is not necessarily destined to succeed. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau
wrongly
argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too glaring.
The reverse has always been the case. Democratic tribal republics or city states may have been able to fuck over their own rich, but they were conquered soon enough. On the other hand, where inequality was allowed to grow without limit (because productivity was able to grow without limit) there could be a professional army and police and even an independent judiciary and a decent enough Press and Academy and so forth. This society won't be vulnerable whether it is a monarchy, a tyranny, a commercial enterprise, an oligarchy, a Lesbian eco-collective, a Democracy under the Rule of Law, or a theocracy worshipping the Great Spaghetti Monster.
Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for demagogues to prey on people’s resentments,
No they don't. Conditions where people finds it pays to be resentful create the conditions for dudes to get them to be even more fucking resentful. Speaking generally, this doesn't end well. Golden geese mightn't just fly away, they may roost in a place which decides to bomb the fuck out of the resentful nutters who are manufacturing terrorists.
and for democracy ultimately to fall in the way that Plato described.
Plato didn't know shit about what we have- viz. Democracy under the Rule of Law.
Rousseau thus concluded that democracy requires widespread equality; only then can people’s resentments not be exploited so easily.
He was wrong. If there is widespread equality there is a widespread free-rider problem. If there is high inequality, then there can be liturgical duties not too onerous to be borne by the patricians who might also go in for a cursus honorum and so forth. That's what worked in English speaking countries though it must also be said that there have been mechanisms by which relatively poor people have been able to rise to high political office. But where inequality arises from productivity improvement, such mechanisms spring up organically. In any case, competition and Tardean mimetic effects will drive functional convergence amongst successful polities. Sadly, some may be unviable or are bound to become so. This is an ideographic matter.
In my own work, I have tried to describe, in minute detail, why and how people who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies – racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry – which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject.
Jason felt slighted because he ended up teaching nonsense to cretins. Other kids were becoming tech billionaires or gaining political power or making scientific discoveries. Did this drive Stanley mad? No. He was too stupid. He was bound to make the same sort of childish error in Political Philosophy as he had in Anal-tickle shite.
And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today.
It always lacked them. Still, it did get rid of slavery and finally granted citizenship to the indigenous people.
If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality,
because of massive differences in productivity. On the one hand, you have a Yale Professor like Stanley who makes his students stupider and more ignorant than they otherwise would have been, and on the other hand you have Elon fucking Musk.
a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment.
If poor folk really are seething with resentment, why have they voted an elderly billionaire into the White House, not once but twice? Stanley will say it was because of propaganda. But no American voter believed that immigrants were going to eat his puppy dog or pussy cat. They didn't believe Kamala was a Communist. But they also didn't believe that Trump would ban abortion and birth control pills and force all nubile women to get pregnant by repellent incels. On the other hand, Vance definitely does fuck sofas.
What this election has shown is that propaganda doesn't matter. Fake news doesn't matter. The cost of living does. But voters know what happened to their own cost of living and level of discretionary spending better than any economist.
With 2,300 years of democratic political philosophy suggesting that
political philosophy is utterly shit
democracy is not sustainable under such conditions, no one should be surprised by the outcome of the 2024 election.
No one is greatly surprised. It would be a close call. The good news is that hysterical ranting would end after it. Trump can't get a third term. He was the first and will be the last POTUS to never previously have received a pay check from Uncle Sam.
But why, one might ask, has this not already happened in the US?
The Party system. Trump was a floating voter who forced his way on to the Republican ballot.
The main reason is that there had been an unspoken agreement among politicians not to engage in such an extraordinarily divisive and violent form of politics.
That is classic 'duopoly' behaviour. It acts as a barrier to entry. Trump dismantled the barrier for the Republicans- who were divided and directionless. People thought this would give Hilary an automatic win. It didn't because she was shit. Trump wasn't. He got one break- the FBI announcement about Hilary's Emails- and he ran with it by getting folk to chant 'lock her up'. People hoped Hilary would do what Nixon had done with his 'Checkers' speech. He had been accused of financial impropriety and he went before the nation on TV to say the only gift he had received was a lovable spaniel named Checkers whom his kids doted on. Perhaps Hilary could show a human side to herself in a like manner. The problem was that Obama had appointed Comey who appeared to be suggesting that Hilary was a danger to national security. Trump saw his chance and stayed on point for the next dozen days of the campaign.
Recall the 2008 election. John McCain, the Republican, could have appealed to racist stereotypes or conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth, but he refused to take this path, famously correcting one of his own supporters when she suggested that the Democratic candidate was a foreign-born “Arab.” McCain lost, but he is remembered as an American statesperson of unimpeachable integrity.
No. He is dismissed as a loser who worked as a shill for the Military Industrial complex. It is Sarah Palin people remember.
Of course, American politicians regularly appeal more subtly to racism and homophobia to win elections;
Which is why Kamala kept banging on about how totes bleck she was.
it is, after all, a successful strategy. But the tacit agreement not to conduct such a politics explicitly – what the political theorist Tali Mendelberg calls the norm of equality – ruled out appealing too openly to racism.
Don't say 'nigger this, nigger that' say 'bussing' or 'inner cities'.
Instead, it had to be done through hidden messages, dog whistles, and stereotypes (such as by talking about “laziness and crime in the inner city”).
Or, don't bother doing it. Say you will make America great again. Also, don't forget, Obama was actually a black man. That means his Veep must have been doing all the brain work- right? How bad could Biden be? Initially, it must be said, he didn't look bad at all.
But under conditions of deep inequality,
e.g. slavery
this coded brand of politics eventually becomes less effective than the explicit kind.
Sadly, if you aren't a Professor at Yale, you won't be able to understand that when Trump says 'fuck you, you nigger-loving kike' what ordinary people actually hear is 'I'm going to make America great again'.
What Trump has done since 2016 is throw out the old tacit agreement, labeling immigrants as vermin and his political opponents as “the enemies within.” Such an explicit “us versus them” politics, as philosophers have always known, can be highly effective.
Hilary and Clinton were always saying 'be sure to vote for the Republicans at least half the time. We don't want them to feel excluded, do we?'
Democratic political philosophy,
is based on the Condorcet jury theorem
then, has been correct in its analysis of the Trump phenomenon.
Voters picked the candidate better able to deliver on the issue that really matters to them- viz. economic well being.
Tragically, it also offers a clear prediction of what will come next. According to Plato, the kind of person who campaigns this way will rule as a tyrant.
In which democracy is shit. It is bound to collapse. It is not 'robust'. There is a similar problem with 'kitten-ocracy'. At first the kitten is a very good and just King and gives assent, by miaowing, to laws and ordinances highly conducive to the common weal. Then vested interest groups dangle a string of yarn and the kitten goes bananas. This can have a deleterious effect on the proper conduct of monetary policy.
From everything Trump has said and done during this campaign and in his first term, we can expect Plato to be vindicated once again.
No. We can expect history to repeat itself. Trump will be a controversial President. Will he try to change the Constitution to get a third term? Perhaps. But death will supervene.
The Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the US a one-party state.
No. Opposition parties are banned in one-party state. Stanley is a cretin.
The future may offer occasional opportunities for others to vie for power,
Kamala may have an opportunity to form a rural militia. After that she will follow a classical Maoist strategy of encircling and cutting off the towns from each other.
but whatever political contests lie ahead most likely will not qualify as free and fair elections.
There will be bloody insurrections and great battles. But America will never again see an election of a conventional sort. Thus sayeth the Jacob Urowsky Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. I suppose 'Jacob Urowsky' is Yiddish for 'utter shithead'.
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