Campaign promises

In just over a month, Donald Trump will move back into the White House as the 47th President, the only one besides Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms. Among his supporters, anticipation is high for all the marvels he will achieve as soon as he is sworn in. Among his opponents, there is a level of gloom and dread over exactly the same topic.

But what is he really going to do? The only sure answer is, No one knows. 

The correlation between What candidates promise and What Presidents perform is not high. 

• Partly this is because Presidents have no control over external events, and those events can override all their plans. George W. Bush campaigned on a plan to be "the education President" and to focus on domestic policy; when Al-Qaeda struck the United States on September 11, 2001, his administration shifted to a wartime footing from which it never recovered. 
• Partly, some candidates for the Presidency—especially those who come from outside the Washington Beltway—seem to overestimate the office's power; then they find out after inauguration that they can't really do things the way they had planned. For example (at least, this is the most charitable explanation) Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Obama served two full terms as President; but even today—sixteen years after his election—that camp is still open and functioning. A similar explanation might serve for the collapse of Bill Clinton's "gays in the military" initiative early in his first term. 
• And of course sometimes candidates make promises with no intention of honoring them. There's a story about Earl Long, the Governor of Louisiana, who reneged on a promise to a group of constituents. When they came to the Governor's office to ask about it, Long instructed an aide, "Just tell them I lied."

Back in 1964, most of my parents' friends were liberal Democrats supporting Lyndon Johnson. But they had one good friend who strongly supported Barry Goldwater. This unusual affiliation caused a good bit of discussion among my parents' friends, and years later I remember the man himself telling the story this way.

"All throughout the campaign, my liberal friends kept telling me, 'Goldwater is such a horrible man! If you vote for Goldwater, six months later we'll be stuck in a war in Southeast Asia!' And you know what? It turns out they were right. I did vote for Goldwater, and six months later we were indeed stuck in a war in Southeast Asia."

In case any of my readers are not American, or don't remember the 1960's, perhaps I should explain the deliberate irony in his remark. Yes, this fellow did vote for Goldwater—but notwithstanding that, Goldwater lost the election overwhelmingly, in one of the great landslides of the Twentieth Century. It was Lyndon Johnson, "the peace candidate," who finally committed American troops to the Vietnam War. 

What candidates say has very little to do with how they govern. With Trump, at least we already have four years of experience from which to guess how he'll perform. But then, Trump has said that he wasn't prepared in his last administration and this one will be different. So who knows?

 

Did Joe Biden just concede the election?

Did Joe Biden just concede the Presidential election of 2024?

No, of course not. At least, not in so many words. But … Those with ears to hear, let them hear!

Earlier today, news came out that Biden supports major reforms to the Supreme Court, including term limits, an enforceable ethics code, and a Constitutional amendment to undo the Court's ruling earlier this month in Trump vs. United States (2024). You can read the Associated Press reporting here.

Doubtless there is much that could be said about the wisdom (or otherwise) of each of these proposals, but we all know that President Biden has been struggling with the Court for some time. And heaven knows that other people have made these proposals before now, in the form of opinion articles or editorials. So I want to ask a different question: WHY NOW?

Before answering, stop and reflect how very difficult each of these proposals will be. 

• The third one explicitly requires a Constitutional amendment. 
• But term limits will require amending the Constitution as well, because Article III Section I—after establishing the Supreme Court and "such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish"—explicitly states: "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, …." (In other words, for life.)
• The ethics code is the easiest of the three, but it will still require a majority vote in both houses of Congress. And we should expect a lot of partisan pushback.

In other words, any single one of these proposals—to say nothing of all three together—stands only the slimmest chance of passing, and would require burning an enormous supply of political capital to make any headway.

Traditionally, Joe Biden has been very cautious about burning that kind of capital. If he had any plans to govern for another four years, he would want to keep his powder dry.

So the most logical answer to the question WHY NOW? is that Biden realizes there is no possible way he can win in November. He badly botched the debate with Donald Trump; he has botched interviews and public appearances since then; and most recently, an assassination attempt against Trump has made the latter look like a hero. There is no way Biden can compete with that.

So I think he has decided, To hell with it. You only live once. Time for the Hail-Mary play. Time to swing for the fences.

Of course these proposals will probably fail. Remember what I said about how very, very difficult they all are. But Joe Biden has only six more months on the national stage—at a maximum, provided his health holds out, God willing. Failure doesn't matter any more. Time to go down in a blaze of glory.

               

On the edge

Two weeks ago, or almost, I posted that "The American Empire ended this week." 

I just saw the next step spelled out, in another blog today.

This was a comment to the June 2024 Open Post on John Michael Greer's Ecosophia blog. In case the picture doesn't show up legibly for you, the text runs like this:

Yesterday the US ambassador to Russia was called into the Foreign Office because of the latest attack on Crimea using US supplied and aimed ATACMs that killed several civilians and injured ~150 including babies and small children.

Our Ambassador was told that a state of Peace no longer exists between the US and Russia. This is not a casual description of current events but a formal legal diplomatic message that we are on the precipice of War with the one country in the world that can kill every American. There are rumors that the Russians have already shot down a US global hawk drone over the Black Sea, and a promise that Russia will be suppling weapons and maybe training and funding for anyone who wants to kill American soldiers. Give the 800 bases the US has all over the world the Russians have plenty of targets.

And of course, none of this is being reported in the West.

The Doomsday Clock should be reset to 15 second to midnight.

Didn't I say—just a fortnight ago—that we should expect exactly this?

I would really have preferred to be proven wrong!

__________

P.S.: If you want a report from a reputable news source—and not just somebody's comment on a blog—see, for example this report from Al Jazeera.

               

The American Empire ended this week

When historians in the future look back to try to find the date that the American Empire was definitively finished, odds are good that they will choose this week. In the space of five days, the actions have been taken that will make our ruin inevitable. Of course, nothing has come crashing down yet. It will still take time before the effects manifest. But from this point on, time is all it will take. As of now, the results are certain.

America's dominant position in the world has two aspects: economic dominance, and military dominance. Both are now finished.

End of the petrodollar

On Sunday, June 9, Saudi Arabia allowed the 50-year-old "petrodollar" agreement with the United States to expire, with no new agreement in place. This agreement, dating from the Nixon Administration, guaranteed that America would protect Saudi Arabia militarily; in return, the Saudi government committed to accept only U.S. dollars in payment for oil, and to invest their excess U.S. dollars in American Treasury certificates. (For references, see here, here, or here.) This agreement meant that countries who wanted to buy Saudi oil (i.e., most of them) had to use U.S. dollars to do it; therefore, it created a significant international demand for U.S. dollars. At the same time, it created an international demand for U.S. Treasury bills, because the Saudi government had to have some place to park all their earnings. The result is that the U.S. government could engage in 50 years of deficit spending without ruining the economy.

Give me a minute to explain this. Normally if a country spends far more money than it takes in, the result is runaway inflation. But the reason for the runaway inflation is that there is too much currency in the market (for example, too many dollars) chasing the same quantity of goods. So if there are (let's say) $10 billion in circulation, and suddenly the government prints another $10 billion without increasing the available quantity of goods and services, those goods and services are now worth $20 billion (the total amount of available money). What that means is that the value of each dollar has been cut in half, because it takes $20 (for example) to buy what would have cost only $10 last week.

But notice that this effect only works if all those extra dollars are circulating in the marketplace competing for the same goods and services. If someone comes in with a vacuum cleaner and sucks up all the extra dollars, so that they are no longer competing for the same goods and services, then there's no pressure on prices to go up. There's no pressure towards inflation. At that point the government has generated money out of thin air and gotten away with it.

And that's exactly what the petrodollar agreement with Saudi Arabia did for us. Since nations all over the world needed dollars in order to buy oil, they regularly bought up all the extra dollars that our government was printing. Since countries like Saudi Arabia needed places to park their new wealth, they (and others like them) bought U.S. treasury securities, thus lending the American government money that it didn't otherwise have. Both steps allowed the American government to spend like a drunken sailor for 50 years and get off scot-free.

No more. 

With the end of the petrodollar, we should expect to see the natural results of our profligate overspending finally catch up with us. What this means is that, as other countries decide they no longer need to hold onto dollars, the value of the dollar will start to drop. How far will it drop? I don't know, but the U.S. national debt is now $34.7 trillion. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is only $25.4 trillion. So even if every penny generated in the country in an entire year were confiscated and used to pay the debt, there would still be trillions left to pay. I assume the dollar will fall far enough that owing a trillion of them isn't so much of a burden as it used to be. But that is likely to be ruinous for personal savings.

This won't all happen at once. It will take time for the international markets to react. Also, America's internal market and internal economy are huge. Even if the dollar drops compared to other currencies, it should still hold up for a while for buying domestic goods. I don't know what form the future will take.

All I know is that American economic domination of the world will be a thing of the past.

Supporting Ukraine against Russia

Maybe there were things we could have done to stave off the fall of the petrodollar, but to some extent the final decision was out of our hands. The end of American military dominance, by contrast, will be the result of a massive unforced error. We did this one to ourselves.

Today, Thursday, June 13—just four days after the end of the petrodollar—"President Joe Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy … signed a 10-year bilateral security pact aimed at strengthening Ukraine's ability to defend itself in the present while also deterring aggression in the future." (Reference.) The Fact Sheet that the White House issued for this agreement lists a number of specific provisions, and then summarizes as follows:

This agreement, together with the mutually reinforcing security agreements and arrangements Ukraine has signed with a broad network of partners under the G7 Joint Declaration of Support for Ukraine, is a key part of Ukraine’s bridge to NATO membership. As President Biden said in Vilnius last year and as NATO allies have agreed, Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We are not waiting for the NATO process to be completed to make long-term commitments to Ukraine’s security to address the immediate threats they face and deter any aggression that may occur. (Reference.) [Emphasis mine.]

Do I have to spell out what a bad idea this is? I've talked about it before in other places. 

• If Ukraine joins NATO, then Russia will declare war on NATO. (I discuss that point in this post from two years ago.) 
• Russia still has nuclear weapons. (Everyone remembers this, right?)
• Nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia means the loss of a lot of lives all around the world. What's more, if there are any winners, it won't be us.

I've argued some of this in other places. I don't know if I have the heart to dig up all the links and reproduce them here. Suffice it to say that I remember the peace movement from the 1970's. Back then people on the Left did the calculations and came up with horrific numbers of deaths, in case of a nuclear war with what was still (at that time) called the Soviet Union. The argument throughout all of polite society was that we had to do whatever it took to avoid such a war, because the consequences would be catastrophic for everyone involved.

Am I the only one in this country whose memory reaches that far back?

Sometimes it feels like I am.

Anyway, there are one of two possible outcomes for this pact with Ukraine.

The less-likely option is that the Senate will reject it, or that Joe Biden will lose the election and his successor (whoever that might be) will tear it up. I don't expect that, I don't really believe it will happen, but logically it is possible and so I have to leave it on the table. But of course if that happens, American credibility around the world will be shot to hell. And since the looming economic crisis (see above) will make it ever harder for us to pay for troops around the world, we will retreat from our hegemonic position with our tail between our legs.

The more-likely option is that we will be stuck with this treaty. Then we will have war with Russia. Then we will lose. Again, it will mean the end of American hegemony, but in a much more sudden and painful way.

I wish I could see another option. If you see one, please comment to let me know.

                

Puritanism

We all know what the word "Puritan" means, right? 

I don't mean the historical group of dissenting Protestants who fought in the English Civil War and settled in New England. I'm thinking more of the way the word is popularly used. H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might be happy." And in casual conversation, Puritans are taken to be people who disapprove of booze and sex. They are also routinely assumed to be wrong. Even people who advocate caution in the use of alcohol (because of risks like addiction and early death)—or who advocate selectiveness and discretion in choosing sexual partners (because of risks like abuse or disease, among many others)—hate to be called "Puritans." Even as they argue in favor of temperance and a restraint on indulgence, their message is always a little apologetic: "I'm not a Puritan, but …."

Of course, even in this casual sense, Puritans have something to say in their own defense. It is a simple fact that alcohol abuse can have devastating effects. Drink too much, and your judgement is shot to hell; drink too much, and your nervous system is never quite right again; drink too much, and your liver starts to shut down. These are all terrifying consequences. In the same way, unchecked sexual libertinism can result in recklessly unplanned pregnancies, not to mention the spread of nasty diseases. It can also mess with your emotions, leading people into abusive and exploitative situations that they find themselves powerless to leave. Again, when you go to the extremes the risks can be terrifying.

Why then are Puritans mocked so badly, when they are warning against real dangers? Simply because the vast majority of people who drink alcohol or engage in non-marital sex never get near the extremes. Plenty of people drink beer or wine with dinner, and maybe even something stronger while watching TV, but never let it ruin their lives. They don't get fired from their jobs, and they never experience delirium tremens. In the same way many couples live together without benefit of clergy, but their lives are in other respects boring, respectable, and normal. And when Puritans warn that these people are playing with fire, that they are just one bad day away from catastrophe, … the people laugh at them. And rightly so.

This is why so many people make fun of what used to be called "political correctness" and is now called "woke-ism." The speakers of the Left—preachers, activists, harridans, or what have you—condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and other similar scourges. And the folks who hear them, mostly laugh at them. This persuades the activists on the Left that those other people actively support racism. It's why the Left genuinely believes that every recent Presidential election has been a contest over racism, and that every registered Republican is a racist at heart. The accusation is absurd (and often means that people laugh at them a second time for believing it). But for the Left it is logical: Why would they laugh at us, unless they supported all those things we oppose?    

Before I answer that question, let me pause for a minute to explain that the Left has sober reasons for opposing all these things. The way they see it, racism is the root cause behind lynching; if you allow racism to flourish unchecked, lynching is the inevitable consequence. In short, racism means murder. In the same way, homophobia, transphobia, and all the other phobias also mean murder, because those things have led to murder in the past. Sexism might not mean murder (although remember Bluebeard!) but it certainly means exploitation and servitude, just because we all know that in extreme cases women have been reduced to terrible conditions in the past.

In short, the Left are Puritans. They see that racism, sexism, and the rest can have terrible consequences in the extremes, and so they insist that all these tendencies be eliminated root and branch. But of course, just as with alcohol or non-marital sex, the vast majority of people never come anywhere near the extremes. Let's say we're all together at Thanksgiving Dinner. When Uncle Ernie gets a bit drunk and makes a jovial remark about the cute little "pickaninnies" down the street, he's not about to murder them. When Aunt Esther shakes her head primly while talking about the "confirmed bachelors" in her apartment building, she's not contemplating foul play. And when Dad slaps Mom on the ass at the end of the feast and announces loudly to everyone in the room how lucky he is to have married such a good cook, he's trying to convey affection and devotion, not ownership.

Normal people know this. 

Normal people know that the extremes are a distant memory, and almost never a risk in real life. 

Normal people know that the United States has already made huge progress along all of these fronts in the last sixty years, and has come as close as any society in history to embodying the ideal where racism, sexism, and the rest have disappeared as meaningful threats. Any vestigial remnants are harmless.

Normal people know all this. But Puritans can never let it go. 

               

Metaphysics of job-holding

There's something strange about holding a job.

I don't mean there's anything strange about working. Working is straightforward. I have a friend who is an artist: he gets commissions, creates the art, delivers it, and gets paid. Nothing bizarre about that. Done and dusted.

But I'm thinking about those of us (very much including myself!) who work (or have worked) for companies, or other organizations. People who work for employers, where those employers are not sole proprietors (a farmer who hires a field hand to help him bale hay) but some kind of corporate entities. Underneath the day to day grind of the work, and the pleasant (or not-so-pleasant) interactions with your coworkers and supervisors, there is a fundamental incoherence in the structure of the activity itself.

Corporations are invaders from Mars …

On the one hand, corporations are not human beings. They are in principle incapable of human emotions. They treat humans dispassionately, as disposable parts. This is not a bug, but a feature: corporations are supposed to behave like this! The ones that don't, end up wasting their strength and resources to support the weak and unproductive—and therefore lose out in the competitive marketplace to others that are not similarly encumbered. The advice to managers is absolutely consistent on this point: 

Don't let your emotions get in the way. Your duty is to secure the well-being of the organization. Therefore you must be absolutely objective in rewarding the productive and pruning the unproductive. Sure, maybe he's unproductive because he has been diagnosed with cancer and will die in six months—but that's not your problem. It's unfair to his coworkers to keep him on when he's not pulling his weight, so let him go now before his absences and missed work end up hurting everybody else. 

[In fact I had this exact conversation more than once with my company's HR department, about an employee of mine who genuinely was dying of cancer! I ended up delivering a eulogy at his funeral.]

Charlie Stross has a good essay here, which compares corporations to invaders from Mars. He's not far wrong.  

… but people quit if they feel exploited

On the other hand, the advice to managers is also full of exhortations to empower your people so that they find meaning and purpose in their work. Everybody knows that cynical or disengaged employees will soon quit. (Or if they don't quit, their inattention and lack of caring will lead them to do stupid or reckless things that end up very badly for the organization.)

Most of the time, money isn't enough to hold them. I have a friend who landed a well-paying career as a software engineer. After a while she found it hollow and meaningless, so she quit it for a much lower-paying role in retail, where at least she had contact with her customers and felt like she was helping them. 

Occasionally companies are able to retain employees through financial pressures alone, even when their hearts aren't in it: these arrangements can be summarized under the expression "golden handcuffs," and even Wikipedia says that the "experience that follows an agreement of this sort may be draining and abhorrent."

So corporations can thrive only by lying

The consequence of these two points is that corporations can thrive only by lying. In order for a corporation to flourish, its employees must fail to understand its true nature.

The employees must find meaning and value in their work. The team must have a kind of ésprit de corps that animates them. Otherwise the organization will be moribund.

But a team that finds meaning and value in their work, a team that experiences the frisson of a true ésprit de corps, cannot help but feel deep loyalty to the organization that makes it all possible. And this organization cannot—by its nature!—feel any loyalty in return. The employees might as well be romantically in love with an alligator; the fact is that the alligator will do what it likes, with or without them.   

  

How is this supposed to work?

Right now I don't know the answer, but I think it is important that we recognize it is a question, and a problem.

               

Is democracy too democratic?

The other day, somebody posted an article on Twitter (X). I read it with interest, though it was a while before I realized that it was five years old. The title breathlessly announces "The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy," and it appeared in Politico in September 2019. (I've provided a link so you can read it yourself.) In the end it's not a terribly profound article, but it got me thinking.

Just to be clear, this post is not really a response to the article. It just uses the article as a jumping-off point for some meditations about the nature of democracy.

The first thing that this article makes clear is how dishonest all modern American political discussion is. Time and again the author (Rick Shenkman) tells us that democracy is important, that it is under threat, and that it is doomed to disappear. And yet, the thing that threatens democracy seems to be the participation of all those damned people! If only the people would let themselves be led by their betters, the way they used to do once upon a time, things would be fine. But today they are riled up and want a piece of the action—the word he uses over and over is populism—and so things are going to hell.

Populism and elitism

Prof. Shawn Rosenberg

When I talk about "their betters," Shenkman uses the word "elites." He defines them (following UCI Prof. Shawn Rosenberg, whose recent paper was actually the focus of Shenkman's article) as "experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule." Later on he expands this definition. 

"The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have 'the motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to do so effectively.' In their roles as senators, journalists, professors, judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutions …. But today that is changing."   

It's changing, the argument continues, because the Internet gives a voice to anyone with a laptop or a phone. As a result, populism has become a far more powerful challenge than it once was, and has begun to threaten democracy. 

Now at this point I have to step aside for a minute. Rosenberg argues (and Shenkman appears to agree) that populism threatens democracy. Is that even possible? Let's look at those two words. Democracy means rule by the δῆμος (demos), which is Greek for "the people." Populism, by contrast, means rule by the populus, which is Latin for … (checks notes) … "the people." When you trace back to fundamentals, democracy and populism are the exact same thing.

If Rosenberg thinks that populism (i.e. democracy) is a bad thing, he should feel free to say so. But then I wish he could be honest enough to say openly that he's criticizing democracy. That position would put him in good company, by the way. Most political philosophers over the years have taken a dim view of democracy, largely for the exact same reasons that Rosenberg does: they've all thought that the common people are too stupid to govern. Rosenberg says so too. 

Of course I realize that I'm asking too much here: he can't let himself criticize democracy openly and in so many words. That's the dishonest part, but it's not really his fault: the word "democracy" is a shibboleth today. When Rosenberg (or Shenkman) uses the word "democracy," what he really means is the modern American polity. As a result, no one who expects to be taken seriously dares speak a word against "democracy." 

On the other hand he tips his hand by saying that democracy works best when it is governed by elites, which is a little like saying that cold weather is great so long as it's warm out. The correct word for rule by elites is "elitism," and that's clearly what Rosenberg has in mind. As I say, this puts him in the mainstream of political philosophers in the Western tradition, even if we can't say so out loud these days.

Rosenberg's argument

As summarized by Shenkman, Rosenberg's argument is that "democracy" (by which, as I say, he means the modern American polity) is doomed. "Democracy is devouring itself—his phrase—and it won’t last." This outcome is inevitable because human psychology is not built in a way that supports self-government by the common people. In particular, Rosenberg makes three points that I want to discuss. (Shenkman arranges his material a little differently, but I am putting these points in an order that is convenient for me.)

1. "The irony is that more democracy—ushered in by social media and the Internet, where information flows more freely than ever before—is what has unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism." [The words are Shenkman's.]
2. "The majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship." [The words are Rosenberg's.]
3. "Democracy is hard work and requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to respect those with different views from theirs and people who don’t look like them." [The words are Shenkman's.]   

What can we say about these claims?

The first one is easy. It is a traditional commonplace that democracy leads to authoritarianism. Plato discusses this linkage lucidly in Book Eight of the Republic. The only reason that the connection sounds paradoxical to us here and now is that we have deliberately forgotten all the traditional teachings about democracy because we think we are better than all that.

The second point is a little harder, and I think it is an artifact of our current historical moment. When Rosenberg says that most Americans can't understand democratic practices, that has to mean (among other things) that he doesn't see Americans practicing democracy on a daily basis. But we used to do so, as I argued in a recent post. (And please see that post for details.) In our clubs, our civic associations, our recreations clear across the board—to say nothing of the more complex question of our workplaces—Americans used to have a connection to democratic activity in their daily lives that we simply lack today. So Rosenberg's observation on this point is fair so far as it goes, but I think it indicts our modern condition far more than it indicts human psychology as such.

The third point requires some more discussion. 

Respect for others

The claim that democracy requires respecting those with different views and "different looks" (however understood) is a complex one, and I think it would not be recognized or even understood by anyone who lived longer ago than about a hundred years. Let's study it for a minute.

Different views

In a trivial sense, of course democracy requires respecting those with different views about matters of public deliberation, precisely because democracy involves public deliberation over public issues. If nobody has different views on whether to build a road here or a harbor there, we don't need to deliberate; and if people do have different views, democracy gives us a way to resolve the disagreement without coming to blows. So far, so good.

What about views on other topics? What about religion? Religion is not a matter for public deliberation: we might debate whether the state should pay to build a church here or there, but no democratic debate can settle that This Religion is true, while That One is false. And so there is nothing inherent in the nature of democracy to require religious toleration. Socrates was put to death for disbelieving in the gods of democratic Athens, and no-one objected that the charge was unconstitutional.

In the United States, because of our special history, we are guaranteed religious toleration by the First Amendment. Even so, there are limits. If someone insisted that he wanted to worship the old Aztec religion by sacrificing his neighbors to the Sun God, law enforcement authorities would put an end to it pretty quickly.

What about patriotism, or loyalty to the regime generally? Here the history of thought shows even less wiggle room than in the case of religion. It is a commonplace of classical liberalism that no government should tolerate political parties who are not willing to tolerate classical liberalism itself. (The usual examples are Nazis and Communists.) So here again, there are good theoretical reasons for refusing to respect someone with different views, in case the difference is that you are loyal to the regime and he is not. 

It is true that historically the United States government has been willing (at least recently) to accept the existence of American Nazi and Communist Parties. But I would argue that this acceptance is less a theoretical requirement of democracy-as-such than it is a gesture of lordly disdain. The American regime has been so strong and so secure that it allowed parties to survive even when those parties said overtly that they wanted to bury the regime itself. The implicit message is that the regime regards these parties as totally impotent, no worse than screaming toddlers. 

"Different looks"

This last proposition—viz., that "Democracy … requires people to respect … [other] people who don’t look like them."—is even more narrowly, parochially bound to our local place and time than any of Rosenberg's other claims. Surely it is obvious that neither Rosenberg nor Shenkman would ever have written such a sentence were it not for the peculiar history of America's most peculiar institution: race-based slavery, followed in history by institutionalized racial discrimination and (even more recently) by a race-based civil rights movement. In no other country could someone have written those words and expected them to be understood the same way.   

So is it true? Let's break this into two questions. First, is it true that the American polity here and now requires people to respect those of other races? Yes, that's pretty clearly true. One way or another, that's the corner we have painted ourselves into right now, because of our past history.

Second, is it true that Democracy in principle—Democracy as such—requires people to respect (or even enfranchise) those of other races, or who look different in other ways? No, this has never been a requirement. Often the assumption has been the exact opposite.

Traditionally, before the founding of the United States, democracies were found only in small communities. That's why James Madison had to write Federalist Number 10, to prove that it was possible to implement democracy over a large country. And those small communities in which democratic government was traditionally found were also largely uniform in racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious composition: if they weren't, they dissolved into conflict right quick. (See this post for more discussion of small, homogeneous communities.)

For that matter, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his classic Democracy in America that one of America's greatest challenges for the future would be that three different races shared the continent. (At that time he meant Whites, Blacks, and Indians.) He took it for granted that it would not be easy for these three peoples to settle into a single community.

But these are just examples, and anyone can multiply examples. Is there a logical argument that addresses the role of sameness-or-difference in democracies?

I think there is. But I am feeling my way, so bear with me.

Social trust

For a society to cohere, there has to be some measure of trust among its members. What I mean by "trust" in this context is that people have to be able to predict how other people will act. Only then can they work together. There's a large literature around social trust in the social sciences, and I don't propose to crack it open at the moment. But let me make a couple of simple and obvious points.

There are (at least) two ways you can feel like you can predict what someone else is going to do. One way is if you know that he is compelled to do it by external forces. Another way is if you feel enough sympathy with him that you can see the world through his eyes, at least to a limited extent.

Politically, the first of these ways corresponds to the condition of empires, where everyone is equally subject to one Sovereign. It is relevant to note that the first recorded multi-ethnic societies were all empires. This is because everyone's common subjection to the Emperor makes other people's behavior predictable. As long as a stranger greets you with "Hail Caesar" (or the equivalent) you know that you can trust him to obey the Emperor's laws and customs. It might not be everything you could wish, but it's something. It makes for predictability, and that allows the growth of trust.

The second way, the way of sympathy, is the way of small communities and is more natural in a democracy. Strictly speaking, to be able to sympathize with someone well enough that you can predict how he will react, you need to know him and know him well. Nonetheless, when strangers meet, there are often other kinds of commonalities that stand as proxies for genuinely knowing each other. 

It might be a commonality of religion. In the pagan Roman Empire, Christians were a persecuted minority and trusted each other on sight. In modern America, I have seen neopagans give food, lodging, and transportation to total strangers just because the strangers were also neopagan.

It might be a commonality of hobbies or interests: two surfers, two backpackers, or two Dungeons-and-Dragons gamers are more likely to trust each other than either would be to trust someone that did not share the same passions. 

It might be a commonality of language, or even of accent. The last time I was in the United Kingdom, I spoke the same language (English) as everyone else around me; but if I got separated from my friends and found myself chatting with strangers, I chatted most easily with other Americans.

You know where this is going. 

Like it or not, it is easier for people to feel sympathy with others who look like them. This means—when we are talking about democracies and not empires—that the levels of social trust, and therefore social cohesion, are likely to be greater in a mono-ethnic democracy than in a multi-ethnic democracy. They are likely to be greater in a monoracial democracy than in a multiracial democracy. Note that I say "likely." There are always factors that can throw the probabilities—for example, if there are religious or political differences that produce antagonism and hostility even when there is only one ethnicity or race. But other things being equal, you can expect greater levels of social trust when fellow citizens share more features in common. Race isn't the only one of those features, and sometimes (depending on circumstances) it isn't even the most important. But to deny that it is at least one feature among others is simply foolish. 

Summary

I've made a number of points in this post, some more important than others. Among the smaller points are these:

Populism cannot threaten democracy, because populism is democracy.

Yes, democracy can lead to authoritarianism. This is not news.

If Americans don't understand democratic practices, it is because the modern world has eliminated most of our social organizations, and because we have no opportunity to exercise authority or responsibility in our workplaces. This is a modern dysfunction, and not a sign of fundamental human limitations.

I think the larger points are these: 

First, democracy does not require freedom of opinion. (It is a blessing that our Constitution guarantees it anyway.)

Second, the most successful multi-ethnic societies are empires, not democracies. If your goal is to create a fully-functioning multi-ethnic state characterized by diversity, equity, and inclusion, then quit mouthing democratic platitudes and forthrightly build a non-democratic empire.

Conversely, the most successful democracies (for example, the Scandinavian countries at least until very recently) have been mono-ethnic. This is not a historical accident, but in fact there are logical reasons for it.

Now, the main point of Rosenberg's article (as described by Shenkman) is that American democracy is doomed. And he might be right. Never mind that I have quibbled with his detailed points, but consider the consequences of the principles I have just outlined above. 

If indeed democracies require some nonnegotiable level of commonality among the citizens as a basis for sympathy and social trust; … 

… and if furthermore a (nominally) democratic society consciously undercuts or disregards any grounds for commonality among the citizens in the name of (for example) diversity or equity or inclusion; … 

… then naturally we should expect democracy in that country to STOP WORKING. 

And this is exactly what Rosenberg says: that democracy in the United States is no longer working, and will ultimately disappear. So in the end his observations and predictions may be completely accurate. It might just be his assessment of the causes that's a little off.

           

If I read as many books ....

Sometimes I wish I spent more time reading deep books, and less time on the Internet. And it's true that the Internet can be addicting. But it also tosses up the weirdest intellectual flotsam and jetsam, and sometimes this detritus can trigger interesting thoughts on its own.

It can be reassuring to know that even Thomas Hobbes, for his part, felt he hadn't read as much as many others had. But he reframed it as a strength. Maybe some day I can aspire to that.

 

          

Education for servitude

The United States prides itself on its democratic heritage. We believe in educating our children, and our neighbors, in the virtues of democratic citizenship. Or we say we do. But what does an education like that really mean?

In Book 3 of the Politics, Aristotle writes:

But [besides rule … over persons in a servile position] there is also rule of the sort which is exercised over persons who are similar in birth to the ruler, and are similarly free. Rule of this sort is what we call political rule; and this is the sort of rule which the ruler must begin to learn by being ruled and by obeying—just as one learns to be a commander of cavalry by serving under another commander, or to be a general of infantry by serving under another general and by acting first as colonel and, even before that, as captain. This is why it is a good saying that 'you cannot be a ruler unless you have first been ruled.' Ruler and ruled have indeed different excellences; but the fact remains that the good citizen must possess the knowledge and the capacity requisite for ruling as well as for being ruled, and the excellence of a citizen may be defined as consisting in 'a knowledge of rule over free men from both points of view.'

⸻Aristotle, Politics, Book 3, 1277b, ed. and tr. by Ernest Barker

(Oxford University Press, 1946, 1980), pp.104-5.

Ruling and being ruled. That's the key for Aristotle, and it makes sense. On the one hand, a free man should be able to rule his own affairs, and this means (in particular) knowing how to rule something successfully. On the other hand, no society can have everyone rule at once. (When I was a child the expression to describe that latter situation was, "All Chiefs and no Indians," but I suspect nobody says it that way any more.) So in a free society, responsible adults have to be able to pass back and forth smoothly from one state to the other. And the only way to learn this skill—Aristotle says this clearly too—is through practice.

How do we get that practice? Once upon a time, there were a number of ways.

• 
  If you go far enough back in time, most Americans lived on farms. Of course you might have been a hired hand on such a farm, or a cousin visiting for the long term; but if you owned the farm then you were responsible for it. The farm functioned like a small community. Whoever owned it (typically a Mother and Father) allocated chores among the people who lived there (themselves, and also the children and hired help, if any) and made decisions about how to use whatever was produced (what to consume, what to sell, what to buy with the proceeds). At the same time, a farm was likely not completely self-sufficient; so the owners of the farm were also members of a larger civil and political society, including church, schools, and towns of some kind, all governed by laws. While they ruled at home, in these other domains they were ruled by others.
  
  
• 
  Then there were townsfolk. These might be merchants or doctors, blacksmiths or lawyers, barbers or barkeeps, preachers or teachers. But again, if you go far enough back in time most of them were sole proprietors, or close enough. A successful merchant might hire a couple of men to handle his warehouse; a successful lawyer might take on a likely lad as a clerk. But in time the clerk could learn the law and might start his own practice; a man who started by heaving and stocking dry goods in a warehouse might go into business on his own moving and hauling. So the distance between the working man and the customer was small; and in this sense, many townsfolk were masters of their own affairs. At the same time, naturally, they were ruled in various ways by city, county, and state governments.
  
  
• It's also true that somebody had to hold these government positions, and frequently they were not full-time jobs.* So a prosperous farmer or a successful townsman, someone who could afford time away from work, might well run for office for a term or two and then go back to private life. Again, we see the alternation of ruling and being ruled.
  
  
• 
  And of course there were service clubs, fraternal organizations, and other kinds of voluntary groups. Most of them involved some level of governance, however minimal; most of those chose their officers according to some kind of vote for some kind of period, after which the office would expire and be conferred on someone else. Someone who didn't have time to run for City Council might be elected to head his local Rotary Club, or volunteer for a leadership position in 4-H, or Scouting.**

One way or another, then, it was not unusual for adult Americans to have some experience of leadership or responsibility over some group of other people, however small or temporary. And our idea was that this experience made us all better citizens. By diffusing the experience of command throughout the society, we thought we were making it less likely that we would later accept servitude or despotism. If we were used to standing up straight, we would find it harder to bow.

Sounds great. How's that working out for you?

These days? Not so well. 

The problem is that none of these avenues towards responsibility and the experience of temporary rulership has the same meaning it once did.

These days, fewer than 2% of Americans live on farms; so while the farm household might still function as a small-scale political community, it is not available as a learning environment for the overwhelming majority. 

In fact, never mind farms: even the ownership of real property—land—doesn't mean what it once did. At the time of the American founding, voting rights depended (among other things) on owning property, because property meant independence. The fear was that a man without property would vote however his employer told him to vote. But back when I owned a house, it didn't make me independent. All it meant was that I had a mortgage to pay every month, so I had a strong incentive to keep my job. If there had ever been a measure on the ballot which hurt my employer, I would have voted against it blindly, without a second thought—so I could keep paying my mortgage. So much for independence. 

Government jobs are full-time and professional now. (For the implications of this shift, see this wonderful essay by Charlie Stross.) Even towns and cities are mostly large enough that you are unlikely to be ruled by your neighbors anyway. I don't know many cities that still hold Town Meetings.

Fraternal organizations appear to be in decline. I can't speak for volunteer organizations of other sorts; but when my kids were in Scouts and Little League (and I was serving in the PTA), it seemed like I kept meeting the same small group of parents volunteering in one venue after another. (And of course they kept meeting me.)

But in some ways the biggest change—as monumental in its effects as the disappearance of our farm population—is the change in the nature of work. In most places, in most professions, sole proprietorship has disappeared. The polite question, when you meet someone new, is no longer "What do you do?" but "Who do you work for?" Economically speaking, Americans—rich and poor alike—are mostly employees. And American workplaces are not designed to be democratic institutions! Swedish managers may have to discuss a new initiative with their employees to get buy-in before implementing them. German managers have to get permission from the Betriebsrat before instituting major changes. American managers are free to call out, "Hey everyone! Gather 'round and listen up. Effective immediately …!" Don't like it? No hard feelings. You can always quit. It's a free country, after all.

"It's a free country," but in our daily working lives, as employees, our experience is of obedience to authority. This is true at the operational, or ground-floor level; but it's often true to some considerable extent in management as well. I worked once at a company where one of our Directors confided quietly to me that he was feeling really bad about his job because the VP that he worked for was regularly overruling all his decisions. This is the kind of management that Scott Adams lampoons so famously in The Pointy-Haired Boss, and Adams couldn't have made such a profitable career of his cartoons were it not that so many people recognized the scenarios on a visceral level.

Of course, workplaces differ, and I don't mean to sound bitter. On the whole my own experience with workplaces has been very pleasant. And in some workplaces, a measure of distributed responsibility is still possible. I have sometimes speculated that the closest I've ever come to the Aristotelean ideal of "ruling and being ruled" was when I managed a small department for a struggling technology start-up. My department had a critical (but very narrow) role in the operations, loosely characterized by everyone else as "the stuff that Hosea's group takes care of"; I was consulted on all major decisions that affected our work; then once a decision was finally made I saluted and went to implement it (even if I had argued the other way). Ruling and being ruled. And while I had no legal responsibility for the company (and no financial stake besides my salary and a few stock options), I was able to base my contributions on the company's overall needs and goals (as I understood them). This is what political engagement ought to look like, and what strikes me most is that it almost never does.

Certainly my engagement with the political entities where I live has never looked like this. Those organizations—city, county, state, and federal republic—ask me to cast a ballot every two years, and I do it because it is the right thing to do. But I can't believe it matters. My vote for Senator or President must surely disappear in the collective pool of votes as less than a rounding error. My vote for Mayor probably makes a little difference, because I don't live in a big city. Even so, I don't have any sense that the city is some kind of collective enterprise which needs my input. Voting is just a ritual, so I do it for the same reasons I celebrate holidays.  

I seem to have wandered some distance from my original topic, but the basic point remains. If a Man From Mars studied the way that most Americans live their lives on a daily basis, he would never call us a democracy. He would point out that as children we go to schools where we have to do what we are told; then as adults we go to jobs where we have to do what we are told. Outside of work, well, there are doctors and insurance companies and agencies and bureaus of one kind and another. The Man From Mars would tell us that our whole experience, most of the time for most of us, is that of obedience to authority. In practical terms, our lives are one long education for servitude.      

This essay is not a call for revolution. It is not an incitement to any kind of change. These conditions have grown up for reasons, which means that trying to make a sudden, abrupt, arbitrary change will be no help at all. But it is helpful to understand where we really are, especially when that point differs so far from the story we tell ourselves.

__________

* As late as the 1980's, when Howard Dean was elected to the Vermont House of Representatives and then later to the Vermont lieutenant-governorship, all of those roles were part-time positions and he maintained a private medical practice alongside to pay the bills. (Reference.)   

** And yes, I am conflating different decades here. Rotary and 4-H and Scouting were all founded in the first years of the 20th century, as the period of family farms and small towns of sole proprietors was beginning to recede into the past. But the point is that even as some opportunities for "ruling and being ruled" faded away, others came forward.   

                

Conquest's three laws

Yesterday, I was looking for something else on the Internet and I stumbled across something called "The Three Laws of Politics," from Robert Conquest. They go like this:

1. Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. (Also called O'Sullivan's First Law.)
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. (Also called Conquest's Second Law.)

OK, they are funny. But why am I writing about them? My aim is to see whether I can give rational explanations for each one. I think I can.

Everyone is reactionary about what he knows best.

The Wikipedia article about Robert Conquest gives an example to illustrate this law:

In his 1991 Memoirs, Kingsley Amis wrote of Conquest that "he was to point out that, while very 'progressive' on the subject of colonialism and other matters I was ignorant of, I was a sound reactionary about education, of which I had some understanding and experience. From my own and others' example he formulated his famous First Law, which runs, 'Generally speaking, everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about.'

Fair enough, but why should it be true?

I think the reason goes something like this. To begin, "reactionary" is a term that contrasts with "progressive." People are "progressive" on a topic when they favor new methods; they are "reactionary" when they prefer old ones. 

Now, when you really grapple with a topic—carpentry, say, or music, or teaching—you learn from experience what works and what doesn't. And over time you learn where there are seductive-looking shortcuts that actually make the work worse rather than better. For the most part, the methods that work will be the same ones that successful practitioners have used in the past, because the discipline itself isn't going to change in a few paltry years, or even in a generation. The nature of the material will remain the same (the wood, say, or your instrument, or your students), and so will the successful methods. Consequently, when you really know a topic, you are likely to respect the wisdom of the traditional ways of handling it; and you will see the folly lurking behind attractive new methods, because you yourself probably tried something similar years ago and saw first-hand how it failed.

Therefore, by knowing the topic well, you will be reactionary about it.

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Again, the Wikipedia article gives examples: the Church of England, Amnesty International, the ACLU, and the Ford Foundation. But why should it be true?

The point of this principle seems to be that the natural tendency of any organization is to drift leftwards; therefore unless the organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing it will end up left-wing. (Presumably if an organization is defined from the outset to be right-wing, that might be enough to slow or even halt its natural drift.) So we can rephrase the question to ask: Why is it in the nature of organizations as such to drift to the left-wing?

You can find here the article (by John O'Sullivan) that originally proposed this law, but it doesn't give a very good explanation. All it says it that the "people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world"—but it doesn't say why that should be.

So let's start by understanding the terms left-wing and right-wing. These terms originated from the seating patterns in the French National Assembly, during the early days of the French Revolution. Those members of the Assembly who cared more passionately for social equality sat to the left of the President of the Assembly, while their opponents sat to the right. But in any society, the party which cares most about equality are always the Weak. The Strong are sure of their place and therefore are less likely to spend time thinking about equality; but the Weak fear being trampled by the Strong, and therefore cling to the ideal of Equality in self-defense.

In today's world, people who are sure of their own strength most often want to use that strength to make money. They are the ones who light out on their own to start businesses, or who rise quickly to the top to lead them. The people who do like "private profit, business, making money" are the Strong. 

The Weak, by contrast … well, of course there are gradations. The weakest simply fall through the cracks of society and end up on the bottom, no matter what. But there are others who are able to make a living for themselves, but who feel nonetheless far more kinship with the Weak than with the Strong. Perhaps we can call them the middling-Weak. These people become employees (almost never employers), because employment means a kind of security with only a narrow scope of responsibility. (The Owner or the Boss, by contrast, is responsible for everything.) And the best employer from the perspective of the middling-Weak is a large organization or institution. Organizations are force-multipliers. Organizations are like walled cities for the middling-Weak; and as long as they do their jobs faithfully, their organizations will protect them.

Therefore organizations (especially large ones) attract the middling-Weak; at the same time they tend to repel the Strong, because the Strong find them constraining. So over time, organizations (especially large ones) are staffed and managed predominantly by the middling-Weak. They may have been founded by strong men—John D. Rockefeller, say, or Henry Ford—but the strong men die after a time and a management team takes over. The management team contains a number who are middling-Weak, and every decade there are a few more. Consequently, over time the management team comes to feel more and more sympathy with the Weak in society at large. Over time, they throw the organization's weight behind causes that support or favor the Weak. And this is to say that over time they drift to the left-wing. 

The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.    

For this law, the Wikipedia article quotes one remark to the effect that "a bureaucracy sometimes actually IS controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service." Even when such overt subversion is not literally at issue, though, the point is that bureaucratic organizations often behave in ways which are baffling if you consider their stated goals. I think that—again, leaving out overt subversion—I can identify two reasons.

First, the directors of the bureaucracy have their own private interests, which are bound to differ (in at least some respects) from the interests of the organization itself. So when they make choices, those choices are likely to be at some kind of angle from the organization's own interests. I don't mean that the directors simply exploit the organization cynically as a cover for their own actions. Doubtless that happens from time to time; but I think far more common is the case where the final decision is some kind of weird vector-sum of the interests of all the important directors individually, plus the interests of the organization simply. Trying to unravel the logic afterwards is likely to be very difficult. Hence the note of despair implicit in this law.

Second, the directors of a bureaucracy are often not as enlightened and perspicacious as we think they ought to be given their exalted position. Even the ones at the very top are human beings like you and me: and they are just as capable of being short-sighted, muddled, and confused as we are. When they make decisions that look gobsmackingly wrong-headed, of course it is possible that they are trying to subvert the organization from within (as per Conquest's Third law); and it is also possible that they are playing four-dimensional chess, so that things will all turn out fine for reasons we can't even imagine; but it is just as likely that they made a simple mistake.

Robert J. Hanlon summarized this last possibility in Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

So much for Conquest's Three Laws.