Michael Fuerstein on compulsory gender reassignment

 Michael Fuersteinis professor of philosophy at St Olaf College in Minnesota, US. He is the author of Experiments in Living Together: How Democracy Drives Social Progress.

He writes in Aeon-

The transformation of American public opinion on same-sex marriage is

inconsequential. Only 1.2 percent of marriages in the US are same sex. This does not affect anybody else though some people may feel that their Religion forbids them from recognising such marriages. But they may also not recognize all sorts of other things- e.g. the validity of Darwin's theory of Evolution

among the most remarkable and rapid shifts in moral consciousness ever recorded.

In moral matters, as elsewhere, de minimis applies. The thing is inconsequential. I suppose one could 'virtue signal' about this. But one can also 'virtue signal' about 'pro-nouns' or the Dalai Lama or whatever.  

Since the late 1980s, public approval of the practice climbed from 11 per cent to 70 per cent, where it has remained stable since 2021. What explains this?

TV- shows like 'Modern Family' & magazine articles about homosexual Rock Stars and other celebrities getting hitched in glamorous locations. Anyway, given that 40-50 percent of first marriages and 60-67 percent of second marriages end in divorce, it simply isn't the case that matrimony is seen as anything special. 

This is in part a puzzle about democracy.

It really isn't if the democracy in question has 'separation of Church & State'.  

On its face, democracy offers the promise of voice and foment, of revolution without war.

Or Revolution & War.  

And liberal democracies have indeed propelled just about every major social advance over the past 100 years or so:

They have propelled none. It was the Bolshevik Revolution which forced Democracies down the path of expanding freedoms. Interestingly, things like LGBTQ rights were a way of splitting off 'progressives' from an alliance with 'organized labour'. 

not only gay rights, but also labour rights, women’s rights, animal welfare, environmentalism and racial equality.

Identity Politics has been great for 'Globalization'. The problem is that rights without incentive compatible remedies begin by being rationed and end by being wholly unenforceable. Don't forget that the Bolsheviks started off by decriminalizing sodomy. Stalin recriminalized it in 1933.  

The latter notably encompasses the dismantling of formalised racial segregation in the United States, another stunning (if highly imperfect) turn in moral history.

Political history. Morality hadn't changed. Politics had. A curious reversal took place with Republicans pursuing a 'Southern Strategy' & Dems trying to pretend they'd always lurved darkies.  

Democracy isn’t the only factor that explains all this, but it is hard to tell a story about social progress in which it doesn’t play a key role.

Democracy plays a part in democratic politics. Politics is about shifting coalitions & pandering to different interest groups. However, politics has little to do with morality. It is not the case that Austrians are more or less moral than the Hungarians because they have same-sex marriage. It's just that their political trajectories are different.  

At the same time, recent events confirm what a large body of research has long established: democratic publics are largely ignorant and irrational, approaching politics in roughly the same spirit as bare-chested soccer fans contesting a foul.

If Kamala had won, he'd be piping a different tune.  

Most of us – and particularly those of us with broadly liberal intuitions

The fundamental 'liberal intuition' is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We don't think anybody- even the King or the Archbishop or the leader of the Party we vote for- should exercise power save under strict scrutiny and for a limited purpose.  

– carry around these dissonant ideas together: democracy is an open invitation to the ignorant

Which is why 'Classical Liberalism' thought there should be a property and educational qualification for the vote. The Bolshevik Revolution put an end to the project of only very gradually extending the franchise.  

and, at the same time, a vital instrument of social progress.

Governments solve collective action problems. This indeed is vital for society. But Liberals understand perfectly well that a Dictatorship could make more rapid social progress. The problem is that it might do extra stupid shit because there are no checks and balances upon it. That is why 'regret minimization' keeps us content with liberal institutions. 

Social history can help us make better sense of these intuitions.

Only if you actually know it. Not if you just make shit up.  

The case of same-sex marriage, in particular, provides an astonishing example of social progress at scale, propelled by democracy, among a public full of spite and misinformation.

It really doesn't. Nobody gave a fart about this. It's like how, in India, posh cunts speak of the 'landmark' High Court decision which decriminalized sodomy. But nobody had been prosecuted under that act in living memory. The thing was mere 'gesture politics' or 'virtue signalling'.  

Here, democracy’s special virtue was its ability to convert minority grievances into ‘experiments in living’: interventions in social life that gradually reshape core social emotions and identities.

Very true. In each neighbourhood, President Obama constructed a glass- house containing a Homosexual couple. Residents were encouraged to come and view this couple interacting. There were fears that this experiment would backfire. What if those peering through the windows were grossed out by two blokes kissing in between cooking dinner? Thankfully, up and down the land, this was not the case. Thus, thanks to Democracy, Obama was able to change attitudes to Homosexual Marriage.

Sadly, Biden did not undergo gender re-assignment surgery. He did not use Federal funds to cause heterosexual males to experimentally chop off their dicks to see how they liked it. Biden's failure to conduct this 'experiment in living' caused Trump to be elected. Fuck you Biden! Fuck you very much!

That, in turn, enables people to respond to the grievances of groups otherwise marginalised under systemic oppression.

I wish this Professor would respond to the grievance of groups who think he is teaching nonsense to imbeciles.  

Democracy thus drives social progress by improving the background conditions of moral cognition.

There are no such 'background conditions'. Morality is the same regardless of background. Conventions or habits or norms may differ but that's why we don't equate morality with convention. 

Privacy Policy

The American gay rights movement first began to take form in the 1950s,

Why? The War had itself sparked a sexual revolution. By 1947, the use of penicillin to treat syphilis had become standard in the US. This meant the risk factor was reduced. Also, during the War, soldiers had been encouraged to use condoms.  

when hostility to homosexuality was the default, and a suffocating body of laws and norms forced homosexuals into a life of fear and repression.

The police preferred to shakedown Gays rather than go after violent criminals. Thus, the Mafia alone could provide Gay bars.  

The earliest gay rights organisations in the US, such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, grew out of

the opportunity they provided to find partners. A lot of political action isn't about policy. It's about affiliation- including fucking.  

homosexuals’ increasing frustration with the status quo and, relatedly, a coalescing sense of homosexual identity itself.

The other side to the story is that the Federal Government realized it needed brainy Gays- like Frank Kameny- just as much as it needed brainy Women and brainy 'Negroes' and so forth. Otherwise, the Soviets would build a better bomb to blow up the Earth.  

The earliest arguments for gay rights centred on the premise of basic equality,

Many Americans had played a great role in the liberation of France. They noticed that the French (and, later on, the Turks!) had decriminalized homosexuality at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. It was absurd that, for religious reasons, the Anglo-Saxon world had not done the same- more particularly in the US where 'separation of Church & State' is a fundamental dogma. 

and drew on parallels with the movement for racial equality that was taking shape.

Civil Rights does not mean 'equality of outcome'.  

Through the 1960s and ’70s, the movement grew into a larger and more vocal social force, achieving a progressive series of important cultural and legal changes: the formal revocation of the government’s ban on homosexual employees,

if you can hire and promote women, why not guys who might use a touch of lipstick or eye-shadow from time to time?  

the election of the first homosexual representative to the Massachusetts state legislature, and dozens of ordinances barring anti-gay discrimination at the county and municipal level.

In many cases, this was advantageous to the business-owner. If his Vicar or Rabbi said 'why are you serving homosexual customers?' you shrug your shoulders and say it is the law.

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s brought greater attention to the movement and catalysed highly effective activism, and this is when public support for gay rights first begins to tick upward.

Gays are smart. Since they have higher motivation to find a cure for this disease which also affects heterosexuals, let's get behind them. Also, by being behind them, there's less chance they can bum you.  

The 2000s saw continued advances as sympathetic portrayals of homosexuality spread more widely through the culture. Hate-crime protections were extended to homosexuals, anti-sodomy laws were struck down, and same-sex marriage was legalised for the first time in several American states. In 2015, the push for same-sex marriage culminated with the landmark Obergefell v Hodges Supreme Court decision, which secured the right to same-sex marriage as a matter of US federal law. Remarkably, in spite of the Donald Trump administration’s reactionary push against transgender rights, there has been no widespread movement to walk back same-sex marriage rights.

SCOTUS may say it is an issue for the States.  Still, the plain fact is- save for religious reasons- few men ever had a problem with homosexuality. Women too couldn't get too worked up about what penises were up to, provided those penises weren't up them. 

The dominant theoretical accounts of democracy don’t offer a good model of this trajectory.

Because they don't bother with trifles. There was and is some religious opposition to homosexuality, but religious people also think poorly of gluttony or sloth. It is not true that Lord Jesus Christ said, in his Sermon on the Mount, 'binge-watch Netflix while working your way through a stack of 15 inch pepperoni pizzas'.  I know it is the sort of thing you'd expect the 'good shepherd' to say. But it wasn't what he actually said. I checked. Anyway, that's the reason I gave up on my dream of becoming Pope. 

Going back (at least) to the fourth US president James Madison, the traditional liberal account of democracy focuses on the idea that, by distributing power widely, it is difficult for any one group to dominate.

With Andrew Jackson, you get the populist account of democracy- which is what actually prevailed till giant post-war bureaucracies spread their tentacles into every facet of social, or, indeed, private, life.  

Beyond the reduction of domination, this thinking goes, power-sharing also tends to encourage compromise as smaller factions seek coalitions to gain power. But the same-sex marriage case illustrates the limitations of this model.

No. The plain fact is local democracy meant that there was wide latitude when it came to which laws were enforced and what illegal practices were allowed to flourish. 

Sometimes the logic of power-sharing favours minority groups, particularly when they provide a ‘tipping point’ vote.

There were places where Gays were an important 'single issue' voting block. But we don't all live in the San Francisco of Harvey Milk.  

But often – as in the case of midcentury homosexuals or African Americans – it entails structural marginalisation from power.

No. People were cool with closeted homosexuals most of the time. Darker complected African-Americans couldn't 'pass'. The 'one drop rule' could become the bane of their lives.  

Majorities thereby become tyrannies, systematically ignoring the concerns of groups perceived to be unnecessary or harmful to the winning coalition.

They may tyrannize over minorities but they aren't tyrannies with regard to the majority. A genuine tyrant might recruit his secret police force from specific minorities.  

In part because of this concern, ‘deliberative democracy’ has been the more influential model for contemporary theorists.

This was cool when candidates for high office did 'debate prep' and pretended to care greatly about all sorts of virtue signalling shite. Trump has upended such ideas.  

This approach envisions democracy, in the ideal, as an inclusive conversation among equals, in which decision-making proceeds based on ‘the unforced force of the better argument’, as Jürgen Habermas put it, rather than power alone.

In other words, it was stupid shite which only a fucking German Professor might believe in.  

Here, democracy aspires to an ideal in which the arguments of all are heard and

compulsory rape and bereavement counselling is provided to all- including cats and potted plants

guide the public use of power.

In other words, doing nothing while everybody virtue signals like crazy.  

Political decisions thereby show respect for the will of everyone (even minorities) and resort to coercion only as a necessary fallback.

Just as Jack the Ripper only resorted to slitting his victim's throats as a necessary fallback to their refusal to show respect for his tiny todger.  

As the same-sex marriage case reveals, however, democracy functions through a variety of mechanisms that don’t easily fit the model of ‘deliberation’: voting, protesting, activism, the arts and so on.

So, the thing is useless shite. However, it must be said, in one-party states run by technocrats, the deliberations of the Politburo or the State Planning Commission can be highly consequential. But, the thing isn't Democratic in the slightest. What we have is Plato's Republic run by an erudite 'guardians'.  

This wider spectrum of cultural factors influences moral reasoning, not directly, but instead by reshaping the psychological background of emotions and identities against which reasoning takes place. A large body of social psychology confirms that our attitudes towards other social groups are guided by our tendencies toward in/out-group sorting and, relatedly, a repertoire of identity-linked emotions that determine how we respond to their concerns. The same-sex marriage case nicely illustrates the fact that, if we want to understand changes of moral mind, we need to attend to this wider psychological context as it shifted over a period of decades.

No. This was a case of 'cognitive dissonance'. I like 'Modern Family' and the music of Elton John. I also like weddings. I see people I like having wonderful weddings and decide I am for homosexual marriage because the people involved happen to be homosexual. 

The single most important social change wrought by the gay rights movement was the (open) social presence of homosexuals themselves, both in mass culture and in day-to-day personal interactions.

You may initially get a shock when you find out that Elton John or Freddie Mercury is gay. Will you stop listening to their music? Fuck that! Their music is good. I don't care if you call me a faggot, Mummy.  

The first step occurred in the 1960s and ’70s, as homosexuals gradually made the shift from invisibly to visibly oppressed.

In Britain, a film starring Dirk Bogarde had changed public opinion. But it was an aristocrat in the House of Lords who brought in the private bills which 'stopped the badgering of buggers and the butchery of badgers'.  

Several openly gay candidates ran for local public office, and a number of major protest events – such as the landmark Stonewall uprising in New York in 1969 – drew media coverage and wide public attention.

It created a backlash helpful to the Evangelicals. 

Popular films and fiction, such as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), began to bring homosexual characters and their interior lives into public view. The AIDS crisis of the 1980s provided a turning point, when images of the sick, dying and grieving helped to transform homosexuals from an imagined radical fringe to real human beings with relatable vulnerabilities. The AIDS crisis also organised a highly visible and effective activist campaign by groups such as ACT UP.

Again, this was manna from Heaven for the 'born again' Right Wing. True, your favourite TV evangelist was bound to be caught with a 14 year old rent-boy and a big bag of cocaine- but, obviously, Satan tempted him. We must all 'pray the Gay away' more particularly if we just spent the kid's college fund on a Fire Island orgy. 

That, in turn, helped inspire increasing numbers of homosexuals to come out of the closet, a trend that continued steadily upwards for decades.

Sexuality is income elastic. If you are as poor as shit, you don't have much of it. Rising affluence meant there could be a distinctive 'Gay life-style'. This caught on. Everybody wanted to be 'metro-sexual'. It showed you weren't getting by on Food Stamps.  

In the mid-1980s, polls show that only 5-20 per cent of Americans had a personal acquaintance who they knew to be gay. By the end of the 2000s, that number was about 70 per cent.

In the 1990s, Homosexual couples became the most sought after market segment. In those days, they had the highest disposable income. Everybody tried to jump on the Gay bandwagon. 

Survey research confirms that the single most important factor in causing people to change their mind about same-sex marriage was personal contact.

We want to be in personal contact with people who smell nice, have great clothes, and have high disposable income. We don't want personal contact with smelly homeless peeps regardless of their Harvard degrees and skill in fellatio.  

This rise in personal contact was matched by increasingly sympathetic exposure to homosexuality through mass media. Through the 1990s and 2000s, network television showed growing numbers of sympathetic and/or normalised gay characters. By 2010, the network sitcom Modern Family, whose main characters included a gay couple with an adopted child, was among Republicans’ most popular shows. In 1994, IKEA ran a television ad featuring two men buying a dining table together, marking a new and normalising acceptance of homosexuality among the corporate mainstream. This trend was matched among elites, as increasing numbers of gay politicians and celebrities made their identity known. By the time Pete Buttigieg ran for US president in 2020, his sexuality attracted little attention in major press outlets.

TV matters. We watch a lot of it. 'Deliberation' does not matter. It causes us to fall asleep. The question is why TV started portraying Gays? The answer is advertisers wanted to know that Gays would tune in. That's why 'Will & Grace' & 'Modern Family' portrayed Gay characters not as saintly folk but as bitchy, irresponsible, and endlessly entertaining.  

Overall, we can observe a virtuous feedback loop here: social progress arises through interventions in social norms that, over time, transform the emotions and identities that govern the reception of moral arguments.

Nonsense! Only money matters. Gays had money. Advertisers wanted to use music Gay people listened to and to back shows which Gay people found entertaining. Plenty of heterosexual artistes benefitted by being taking up by the Gays. This was also true of political candidates. 

In turn, this sets the stage for further interventions in practice, which further transforms social experience, which further reshapes the evaluation of arguments for equality, and so forth. The process begins with a small vanguard of the exceptionally prescient and courageous, who are willing to voice their grievances, or their support, at great personal risk.

Does the Professor mean Charlie Kirk? He was killed. What bigger risk can there be?  

As greater numbers add their voice, the costs of joining the movement decline, and previously radical ideas gradually take on a more moderate valence.

Or become more radical. We don't know whether MAGA will decide to strip citizenship from second or even third generation immigrants. Nigel Farage, in England, has raised that possibility. 

The key ingredient in this story is the role of lived experience in moral cognition.

Sadly, it has none. That is why two people with the same 'lived experience' have different 'moral cognition'.  

This idea was central to the political thought of the American philosopher John Dewey.

Within a particular, highly pragmatic, context. Dewey's cohort saw that many Americans' had reduced life-chances because there was no publicly facility for High School education of a type which would make them 'College ready'. Between 1911 and 1938, there was a massive expansion in High School availability. This is why the GI Bill could be so successful. Europe only began playing catch-up in the Fifties and Sixties. Otherwise only about one or two percent of young people attended the type of School which prepared them for University.  

In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey argued that we should think of democracy

if we were White and lived in America 

not just as a framework for decision-making or deliberation

sadly, this is what was lacking. Dewey should have been saying 'we need a strong Federal Government able to use fiscal and monetary policy in an anti-cyclical manner'. Instead, he was talking boring, obsolete, bollocks.  

but as a way of life centred on a particular ideal of community:

one without a strong Central Government able to implement anti-cyclical fiscal and monetary policy was bound to turn to shit. That's what happened after the Wall Street Crash. Dewey was useless. But, to be fair, so was Irving Fischer.  

'Wherever there is conjoint activity whose consequences are appreciated as good by all singular persons who take part in it, and where the realisation of the good is such as to effect an energetic desire and effort to sustain it in being just because it is a good shared by all, there is in so far a community.

That's what the US had in 1929. Everybody agreed that 'Balanced Budgets' were good. But they weren't. They were a very fucking bad idea.  

The clear consciousness of a communal life, in all its implications, constitutes the idea of democracy' 

Nope. The idea of democracy is that voters act self-interestedly. If they vote for a guy who says 'fuck the deficit! I will create jobs by spending money like a drunken sailor ', then that means there is a mandate for Keynesian policies.  The egg-heads can sweat the details as to how to prevent a 'crowding out' effect on productive investment. But if the country is in the trough of the Business Cycle, they needn't bother. 

Dewey’s key insight was that a

Professor could talk virtue signalling bollocks and not get called on his cretinism.  

democratic public needed, not just an intellectual endorsement of shared principles or formal institutional equality,

nobody needs this.  I have never intellectually endorsed the principle that one should shit in the toilet bowl, not one's own bed. Nevertheless, I do not shit in my bed. As for 'formal institutional equality'- it is meaningless. Formally, the POTUS is equal in dignity to a guy on death-row. But that's no consolation to the guy taking his seat in the electric chair. 

but a sense of common good and an ‘energetic desire’ to sustain it. That depended on the development of pro-social ‘habits’

don't shit on the streets. Kindly intellectually endorse this principle.  

– routine patterns of thought often embedded beneath conscious reflection – that would activate genuine care and concern across social differences. And this, in turn, required the cumulative impact of our day-to-day experience – our way of life – encountering diverse social groups.

like far-right militias or vaccine deniers or the good folk at Hamas HQ? 

When minorities experience profound frustrations that do not arouse the ‘desire and effort’ of others, societies need to experiment with new ways of living together in order to deepen the reservoir of community.

i.e. Socialist politicians should be able to force Christian families with kids to provide lodgings to paedophile Satanists. 

Because there are always new problems and frustrations down the road, Dewey argued that democracy itself required continual experimentation.

E.g. the experimenting of imposing Sharia law on Tuesdays? 

In the mid-20th century, the systematic marginalisation of homosexuals

'open' homosexuals- maybe. 

made it impossible for the average American to generate the kind of sympathy and identification required to address oppression.

The average American did fight in a Civil War which addressed oppression. So not worth it. Lets focus on getting rich. 

The gay rights movement

was a great way for older gays to meet hot young men from small town America 

effected an intervention in social life

no. It improved social life for smart peeps in big cities. Without Gays- more particularly Roy Cohn- Disco would have been confined to working class neighbourhoods. Studio 54 would have featured line dancing. 

that enabled Americans to develop new habits of moral cognition, thereby repairing (though still imperfectly) the democratic community.

Gangsta-Rap did the same thing. Sadly, Kamala did not take the hint and gun down a cop or two.  

We learned from an experiment in living:

we get it. The Professor spent the Seventies shacked up with a Lesbian goat.  

the experience of acting on a novel ideal.

like what? Taking it up the arse from Roy Cohn?  

How exactly should we think about the role of democracy in all this?

The Hindi film 'Disco-dancer' was a big hit behind the Iron curtain. That's why Putin is so democratic.  

The definitive feature of democracy is its radical egalitarianism about power.

No. Its definitive feature is the majority of voters choose the Chief Executive. If he were chosen by lot, we would say there was 'radical egalitarianism'. 

In particular, democracy involves the (nearly) universal distribution of fundamental decision-making powers without regard to merit.

Utterly false. The guy who consistently comes second in election after election has zero decision making powers no matter how smart or popular he is.  

That architecture means that the authority for political power lies with all those subject to it (‘the people’) and should serve ‘the people’ considered as equals.

Architecture doesn't mean shit unless you really are talking of insensate bricks and mortar.  

Egalitarian elections

i.e. one's where all candidates are given the same financial resources and media opportunities.  

are the most readily identifiable marker of the democratic approach,

There is no such 'marker'. Anglo-Saxon countries tend to have a two party system. France never did. A 'Plebiscitary President' militates for different dynamics. 

and this is perhaps why empirical research on democracy so often centres on the inputs, outputs and procedures of elections.

Nonsense! Empirical research relies on opinion polls and game theoretic 'structural causal models'. A good rule of thumb is 'follow the money'.  

But the formal distribution of basic electoral and civil rights is insufficient.

America has lots of very smart and well paid political analysts. A Philosophy Professor is bound to sound utterly retarded if he strays into their territory.  

Democracy thus depends on a wider range of norms and institutions.

No. It depends on the ability to prevent a military coup, a Civil War, or a foreign invasion. But this is true of any type of Government. What matters is whether there is an accessible, non-Democratic, way of doing things better.  Even if there is, Democracy can do the same stuff and thus there is no need to replace it. This is like the folk theorem of repeated games. 

One of these is a wider presumption against hierarchy as a justification for public action and, likewise, the idea that the spaces in which the use of power is being debated, decided and framed should be open and inclusive.

Perhaps the Professor wrote this before DEI was decisively rejected at the ballot box.  

A second and related norm is the presumption in favour of open and reasoned deliberative processes, which provide a critical check on existing hierarchies.

aka the rule of law.  

The battle for gay rights was fought in the public square, in newspaper columns, in scholarly societies, arts institutions and town halls.

It was won in boardrooms. When the Sales Dept says- 'we need Gays to like our product. Otherwise, our rival gains market share and our stock price collapses. That means lower bonuses. This concentrates minds.  

Gay voices were often unwelcome but, without a principled basis for excluding them, they became increasingly difficult to dismiss.

This may be true of principled people. But they are few in number.  

One notable example was the debate about homosexuality within the American Psychiatric Association.

Smart peeps understood John Maynard Smith's theory of evolutionarily stable strategies. It turned out Homosexuality was a prediction of the correct theory. It was a feature, not a bug. Trying to remove it was the medical equivalent of turning lead into gold or inventing a perpetual motion machine. 

In the early 1970s, gay psychiatrists joined activists to argue for removing homosexuality from the profession’s list of disorders. Many dismissed this out of hand,

more particularly if they were getting paid to de-gay patients 

but the opponents struggled to rationalise the existing state of affairs without resorting to brute dogma. The debate spilled over into a series of exchanges in The New York Times, where the old guard was forced into increasingly awkward contortions. Though it was succeeded by ‘sexual orientation disturbance [homosexuality]’, the term itself as a disorder was dropped from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the profession’s official handbook) in 1974, a key turning point in the cultural change underway. Dogma gradually sank under the combined weight of open public scrutiny and the presumptive obligation to defend power with reasons.

No. Psychiatry has to pretend to be scientific. That's why they also got rid of 'neurosis' in 1980.  

For the liberal, the appeal of egalitarianism is so deeply ingrained that

liberals frequently join homeless people for dinner. John Rawls prepared a very tasty stew from road-kill. He was very disappointed when his daughter Anne refused to marry a hobo.  

it can be easy at times to forget its costs.

e.g. getting knifed by the hobo you are dumpster diving with.  

In settings where expertise is important, difficult to acquire and relatively straightforward to identify, there are considerable advantages to hierarchy. The community of policy researchers – economists, political scientists, ecologists, urban planners and so on – is to some degree internally democratic.

Nope. It is highly selective. Moreover, a Pareto Power law operates. A small percentage makes most of the important decisions.  

But the threshold for joining this community is extremely high and, without the requisite credentials, there is no prospect of participating in the conversation.

Nonsense! If you are right and people can make a lot of money out of your discovery, the experts are disintermediated or else fall into line.  

The policy world is an elitist institution.

No. It is one where money talks and bullshit walks.  

This is a highly effective strategy so long as (a) insight is highly unlikely from those without expertise and (b) the typical markers of expertise – a PhD and publications in the subject – are reliable and easy to identify.

Till people start to notice that guys with PhDs in useless shite are useless shitheads. Still, they may have important work-skills- like sycophancy.  

Meanwhile, the inefficiency of radical egalitarianism – welcoming everyone into the conversation without regard for any markers of expertise – would be enormously costly.

Not really. It is easy to 'screen' for nutters or virtue signallers.  

Conditions (a) and (b) are reasonable assumptions so long as we stick to technical scientific matters.

Sadly, this isn't the case. Look at RFK.  

But morality is epistemologically different.

It isn't epistemological at all.  

Two things stand out in this respect. The first is that, historically, the individuals and groups who have offered the greatest moral insights have been distributed unpredictably across social categories.

Nonsense! The distribution is highly skewed to people who make a living by preaching or teaching as opposed to working in a factory or coal-mine.  

This makes sense given that our moral outlook is to a large degree shaped by the particularities of our identity and experience. Since moral problems are complex and heterogeneous, moral insights emerge across diverse social strata,

only in so far as those strata have some preachers, teachers, journalists etc.  

and typically only in partial, imperfect ways. Immanuel Kant was a white man who authored both the foundational ideas of modern liberty and equality,

No. He was a Prussian Beamte- i.e. a Civil Servant of a special kind- who believed that private liberties should be heavily circumscribed. If you were a Professor you could say certain things in that capacity to your peers which you would be remis to say to your servant in the privacy of your own home.  

and, at the same time, some of the earliest ideas in scientific racism. Margaret Sanger was a pioneering feminist voice but also, at the same time, harboured crude inclinations towards eugenics.

So did the Myrdals and the other Swedes who turned that country into a Welfare State.  

The second factor that makes morality epistemologically distinct is that there are no reliable credentials available.

Sure they are. If a big bunch of people follow the moral instruction of a particular dude, that dude has the required credential. A moralist whose sole audience is his cat, lacks it even if the cat gives up killing mice. 

If there were PhDs in moral insight, then its wide and unpredictable distribution would be a surmountable problem. But there is no recognisable form of training, education or experience that reliably marks those with most moral insight.

There is no evidence that anybody has more or less of the thing.  

So moral insight is both (i) widely distributed across the public in a way that (ii) is not linked to any reliable marker of its presence.

This is the theory behind the 'lamed wufnik' or the Sufi 'abdal'. There are some people, unknown to all and to each other, who are the hidden pillars upon which the World stands. But for them, God would have destroyed His Creation. These secret Saints justify Man to God.  

These two factors reveal the special advantages of democracy.

Very true. America has the great moral preceptor, Trump, for POTUS thanks to Democracy. He never got a pay-check from the Government till he moved into the White House. This had nothing to do with the success of his TV reality show. It just so happened that the President was going to be a hobo- because he was even more moral than the Donald. Sadly, John Rawls fed him some road-kill stew which gave him the stomach ulcer which finally killed him in 2015. After than, American Democracy had no choice but to elect the Donald.  

Under such circumstances, any practices we might use to filter contributions to public discourse would run too-great a risk of excluding critical insights.

You teach shit to shitheads. There's a critical insight for you, Professor.  

That risk is further heightened by what a number of philosophers have called the ‘epistemology of ignorance’: the perception of credibility on morality and other matters tends to favour the interests of the dominant group,

Diversity hires tend to be 'empty pant-suits' like Kamala. I guess, this favours the vested interests of donors. 

thereby laundering oppression through the operation of ‘reason’.

Why stop there? Why not say that it is the blood of innocent Palestinian homosexuals which is being laundered out of Kamala's hair?  

Under such conditions, we are therefore stuck with the inefficient logic of radical egalitarianism: wilfully ignore presuppositions about merit and hand out decision-making power indiscriminately.

Professors of useless shite may hand out diplomas indiscriminately. But they have no power to hand out.  

If we rewind to the oppressive environment in which the gay rights movement arose, it is easy to appreciate the importance of democracy’s radical egalitarianism.

It is impossible the moment we are reminded that the Ottoman Caliph decriminalized sodomy in 1858.  

Social power was tightly consolidated among a white male elite that was

welcome to sleep in the same bed with a chum as Lincoln was wont to do.  

thoroughly hostile to homosexuality, and the concept of moral merit was, indeed, explicitly framed so as to exclude homosexuals.

They were also supposed to exclude crooks.  

In a peculiar synthesis of bogeymen, the idea of homosexuality as a psychological ‘perversion’ was often closely associated with communism.

Not by Communists who associated it with 'bourgeois decadence'.  

In the McCarthyite fever of the 1950s, homosexuals in the government were seen as ‘moral weaklings’ whose sexual identity made them ‘easy prey for blackmail’ by anti-American elements.

The KGB did indeed invest in gay honey-traps.  

Democratic norms and institutions thus could not prevent the marginalisation of homosexuals’ pleas in the national debate.

Did you know sodomy causes earthquakes? Crack the good Book sometime! Why do you think California is so quake-prone? It's because of all the homos in San Fran bumping uglies incessantly.  

But they did provide enough of an opening to effectively press for social changes that accumulated over time.

What accumulated over time was money in the Bank Accounts of people who didn't have kids. Still, you might want to give a shout-out to Roy Cohn. His daddy was a Judge who got him his start in politics with MacCarthy. Kennedy and Nixon rose the same way. 

The success of the gay rights movement depended on

a change in the underlying Science. Neo-Darwinism prevailed. Lamarckian eugenics bit the bullet. Oddly, a former Communist party member, John Maynard Smith, did most for rehabilitating 'bourgeois strategies' (like deciding who owns what matters. Who deserves what doesn't) are eusocial. Once you have proved homosexuality is 'natural' (i.e. a canonical solution to a game theoretic problem re. evolutionarily stable strategies) the next step is to condone homosexual marriage as the most bourgeois thing possible. Sadly, this meant that homosexuals increasingly ceased to be 'dinks' (dual income no kids). Thus, there was a 'reversion to the mean'. 

a public deliberative culture that would enable its arguments to be heard and received, both on a small scale (within particular businesses and institutions) and by a wider public.

Social Media means any fucking argument whatsoever can get heard.  

It depended on a series of electoral victories.

At the local level, sure. But what was behind those victories? Economic forces- i.e. money.  

It depended on ballot initiatives across multiple jurisdictions.

Which cost money.  

It depended on the power of radical protest and civil disobedience, both of which gain their force, not only from formal rights guarantees, but also from the implicit threat of electoral consequences for officials sitting ‘on the wrong side of history’.

That's an argument which cuts both ways. The crazy guys who stormed Capitol Hill seem to have been on the right side of history.  

And it depended on a variety of court battles that culminated with the landmark Obergefell Supreme Court ruling. Though the US Supreme Court itself is a highly elitist institution, the Obergefell decision was made possible only by

the fact that Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, sided with the majority. Roberts, Thomas & Scalia dissented. The decision may be overturned.  

a decades-long democratic transformation in which arguments for gay rights could be heard, taken seriously, and ultimately enacted without public revolt.

Because nobody gave a flying fart. There is a proposal to let elderly siblings who live together to marry so as to gain financial security in the event that one of them dies. No harm in it at all.  

So there is a close link between the virtue of experiments in living,

like marrying your sister? What about your cat? Immigrants will think twice about eating your pussy if she is married to you.  

and the radically egalitarian architecture of democracy. Experiments in living play a necessary role in transforming our moral sensibilities

hopefully, his students will experiment with the hobo lifestyle.   

so that we are able to respond to the moral concerns of a diverse public.

Unless Trump deports them.  

But this requires a social technology that gives voice to the most aggrieved, and gives them a basis for making interventions in social practices.

DEI. Vote for Kamala. It turns out she had plenty of grievances against mean girls working for the Oval Office.  

Democracy is that technology.

It really isn't. DEI is DEad.  

It sacrifices the efficiency of a more merit-based system in order to maximise the odds that, over time, the complaints of the most aggrieved may get some traction.

The complaint of the most aggrieved is that they are going to die very soon because a homicidal rapist is sawing their fucking head off. Democracy is a technology which must abolish death though it may also legalize rape and decapitation so as to be inclusive towards diverse maniacs. 

The sense of doom that many of us feel right now reflects the unpredictable consequences of a system that refuses to gatekeep decision power. Democracy may have brought us same-sex marriage, but it also brought us Trump.

Virulent wokeness & virtue signalling, like insisting that muscular rapists should be sent to women's prisons because they have decided they are more comfortable in a frock, is what brought us Trump.  

Democracy is a vital source of progress,

Not in China. They may overtake America by 2035. 

yes, but also, as Plato observed, a potential amplifier of division and ignorance.

He was against Democracy.  

There can be no purely philosophical solution to

anything. Philosophy is stupid and useless.  

authoritarian populism. But philosophy can help us to diagnose our current predicament.

Our predicament is that politicians started to virtue signal in the manner of vacuous, woke, academics who teach worthless shite.  

The lesson of the history of same-sex marriage is

that nobody gives a shit about it. The thing isn't a 'wedge issue'. Abortion is. 

not that democracy somehow makes progress inevitable but, instead, to illustrate how it is that democracy might help us to protect and promote it.

Promote progress? That is done by raising productivity not talking bollocks.  

We are living through a moment when Americans seem particularly incomprehensible to one another,

But not to the rest of the world. We understand that America doesn't give a fart about anything save getting more money out of the rest of the world. Also, maybe Greenland and Canada and the Panama Canal and Bagram Airbase should be handed over to the US of A.  

when our capacity for sympathy, empathy, mutual care

reciprocal tenderness and egalitarian propensity to go dumpster diving with hobos,  

and a sense of common fate across social differences is depleted. The path forward requires understanding that this is not a narrow problem that can be repaired through policymaking or education.

or anything feasible.  

It requires interventions in social life that allow us to experience one another’s concerns in a new light.

That is infeasible. Still, this is not to say that those who teach stupid shite should desist from demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery for all practicing heterosexual males. Not till such people have experienced penises entering them will they be able to see the concerns of their alterity in a new light.