Great opening post. Hope this theme is pursued further. One of the many disappointments of our sorry crop of leaders is their failure to engage in any of these vital conversations. (See for example, Steve Bannon who fancies himself a leader of resistance yet, even after being railroaded by a corrupt DOJ and Congress, can only direct people to redouble their insane faith in a Red Wave etc...)
If anything, autocracy of some form of probably more compatible with subsidiarity than democracy. It's simply impossible for one man to personally direct everything, therefore, the natural and wise move is to delegate as much decision making power as possible so as to free his attention to focus on the big issues that affect the entire state. Given that political systems tend to be fractals, the same organizational principle then gets replicated at each level. Thus for instance in the Roman system, just as the imperator had total power over the state, the paterfamilias had total power over the household.
The other advantage of autocracy is the nature of the selection process. Democracy selects for glibness; leaders are almost invariably manipulative dark triad types, because they outcompete others when it comes to pretty words. A system that prioritized candidates possessing the virtues - strength, wisdom, justice, charity, and the like - would result in a leadership class that systematically excluded venal sociopaths. This could be achieved by having candidates compete in contests of skill and ability, rather than popularity.
A system that prioritized candidates possessing the virtues - strength, wisdom, justice, charity, and the like - would result in a leadership class that systematically excluded venal sociopaths."
Let's stop right at "a system.." There is no such *system*, sadly. We might argue that something like military service might serve as a preliminary prerequisite for any elective office, a first cut for candidates, but this will ultimately fail as well because any system will always be subject to capture by what Matthew Crawford has described as the kunlangeta-- the psychopaths and sociopaths. Eventually the power of such a military system would attract psychos who use the system to elevate their favored conspirators and we're back in hell again.
The only setup i can imagine is one that is highly localized. As you and the host and others suggest, only a local community can effectively identify and kill (Crawford mentions the Inuit practice of pushing kinlangetas off the ice) psychopaths before they can gain the upper hand. Local governance can thus take whatever form deemed effective and desirable (and dissenters should be free to vote w their feet).
My question is whether a nation can function or survive foreign depradations if it has little to no central, national government?
For better or worse I'm betting we're going to find out as the trajectory is toward a major collapse of national government and a necessity for people to form local defense and farming communities just to survive. We're likely to find out whether we need anything above county government in the not too distant future.
The US may get the worst of all possible situations: plenty of central government and an equal serve of foreign depredation. To a degree, Chimerica (the fusion of the US and Chinese versions of state-capitalism) already achieves something like this.
The US ruling class or oligarchy faces very difficult choices because of the rise of China and the loss of the competitive advantage the US once enjoyed. If the US choses to compete directly it will require major financial, industrial and educational changes that would tax the authority and competence of the US elite to their limits.
Provided the true situation can be camouflaged in some way, the US might well accept a vastly more modest place in a multipolar world rather than face the consequences of domestic reform. Third World elites have frequently preferred to remain junior partners with Western capitalism rather than risk the disturbances attendant on rapid development and social change (above all the rise of an assertive local bourgeoisie). There is a possibility that the US might ultimately settle on such a strategy itself. A managed decline marked by ever- escalating dysfunction is probably the preferred option for the political elite (dominated by the Democrats) and key elements within the oligarchy (Silicon Valley, finance) plus key domestic clients (NGOs, beneficiaries of affirmative action or employees of the education sector).
The reason i think collapse is more likely than managed decline is that every nation now has deep, structural rot and is on brink of collapse. CCP is hanging on. Russia might be strongest and may ironically come to our rescue but they have their own problems too.
We're too far gone to manage. And the Regime is full of ideologues who want to crush us, so at some point they will push past a line and it will get so bad people will snap. Right now it hasn't gotten bad enough. People still have too much to lose. But when people finally feel pushed into a corner w nothing to lose...
We may know for sure by the end of this year. If the US oligarchs are prepared to sacrifice the Democrats and let something like MAGA stabilise things, I'd say that managed decline is the way it will go. If the Deep State insists on keeping the Democrats in power no matter what, the system will accelerate its ruin. And there is always the possibility that they will try a war...
I don't for one second believe that any election here will make any real difference, red wave or no. At tje federal level, the system is far too corrupt and choosing between GOP and Democrats is like choosing between Hitler and Stalin. It's corrupt gangster government all around. No one going to DC can do anything against the Fourth Branch, Uniparty, or the various swamp factions ruling from there.
That's why managed decline isn't in the cards. It's a criminal cartel that is determined to suck every last dime out of us and then abandon ship when it's done.
Best we can hope for is a revolt at tje state level where states go their own way and become self sufficient or form regional coalitions to survive and fend off federal depradations. Worst case is we survive at a local level and hope we dont get nuked or caught up in a Spanish civil war 1930s style.
To develop your argument about the selection of leaders, I'd argue that we (dissidents, dissenters, whatever) need to do more than just focus on how best to select leaders (the fantasy football of political thinkers since Plato) and instead consider how to select and form cadre and partisans (reservoirs from which leaders can be selected regardless of the formal or extant political system).
Consider the way this is done elsewhere. The Communist Party in China is exceptionally demanding. Candidates for membership must endure waiting periods, sit for exams, demonstrate community or public spirit via involvement in altruistic grassroots community-level good works and impress an interview panel. The lefty Orebro party in Sweden also does much the same.
My guess is that long-term success requires great patience and a preference for quality and sincerity. Any dissident political or para-political movement that aims to achieve anything significant needs to recruit serious people, form them into cadre and maintain their enthusiasm and commitment over long periods of time. Difficult to conceive perhaps, but it has been done many times in the past and we can learn from successes and failures from across the political spectrum.
Absolutely agree. I'd add that cadre cultivation doesn't just involve barriers to entry in order to filter out the intrinsically and irredeemably low quality, but also training for those who possess the minimal standards and potential. I've been banging on for a while about this - right wing groups that try to funnel recruits towards activism are just wasting time and wrecking lives. Groups that explicitly focus on broad spectrum self improvement would have immediate pro-social impacts, broad appeal, and provide a recruiting pool; further, the meritocratic orientation of such groups is implicitly right wing.
Further to my comment, if BAP has achieved anything it is to have revealed the strength of the interest amongst the young for life-affirming alternatives to everything the system has to offer. The 'amphibious' constituencies are responsive to self-improvement. Anything that affirms quality, authenticity, beauty will attract precisely the sort who are ill-at ease in the present climate.
'Wasting time and wrecking lives'...spot on. Party politics is not the point and cannot be the point until/unless the times are right. Focusing on political activism misdirects energy and attention and ultimately increases frustration, rather than alleviating it. Activism per se is sterile in that the whole point is to transform the wider culture/environment rather than just fill an office and compete in 'clown-world' politics as entertainment. The ranks of the Left are littered with burnt-out activists; the Right needs to avoid reproducing anything like this.
The answer is meta-politics at a grass-roots level. Pro-social activities (inherently good and in high demand by people fed up with the anomie and fragmentation that reign supreme elsewhere) across a wide range of interests. The potential is enormous. Cthulhu is intensely anti-social and directly threatened by anything that builds social capital, especially amongst potential future leaders (brilliant but disturbing description of Stanford that conveys just how deeply https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/).
That Stanford essay was disturbing, but it matches my own observations of the evolution of campus life perfectly - it isn't limited to Stanford. Nor for that matter to the campus. The 21st century has been characterized by a steady removal of spontaneity and joy from the social environment, as the managerial class inserts its permission-granting architecture ever more deeply.
Loa Tzu say: Running a large country is like cooking a small fish. Your fractal analogy is really compelling. Fractals scale up. That means at some level, running a large country is like running a family. The father is the head and the mother runs it. Like the George Clooney scene in Terrance Malik's The Thin Red Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prpp236oydk
Do you think a cultural technology could allow the electorate to "learn" how to prioritize such candidates in their self-interest, or is that pie-in-the-sky fancy?
I honestly think as long as leaders are chosen in elections the problem will persist. There's no intrinsic reason to use a popularity contest for leadership selection.
The best emperors in Rome were adopted in adulthood by their predecessor. There is a case for selection by co-option, subject to formal mechanisms for transparency and quality assurance. The best constitution is mixed, with varied elements balancing things out. Popularity contests work well in small communities, where the truth about claims concerning character or reliability can be tested easily enough.
Leadership has always had an element of a popularity contest. Rhetoric aside, every chieftain, king, and emperor has understood that he needed the people on his side to continue his rule. Even Alexander the Great had to do a bit of politicking.
The problem with democracy is that it makes popularity the sole factor, and this is easily gamed by sociopaths.
There is a game theoretic element to using education to better align popularity of person with popularity of the ideas they actually hold and are likely to act on. Again, maybe wishful thinking.
I am not sure that the electorate has that much role, to be frank. If they did, we would see a very different kind of political culture in the first place. The current system is very good at discouraging good people to run for office. No one with much self-respect (or concern for their family) would expose themselves to the media scrutiny or the thuggish character assassination that has become normalised. There are exceptions: Ron Paul and Rand Paul spring to mind as inherently decent and public spirited and the electorate responded to them.
Perhaps the weight of such character assassination will be diluted to the point that it is ineffectual if enough people start getting engaged. I don't know. I'm very interested in developing a realistic strategy to find an optimal path to the other side of the coming storm.
I think most people already discount a very great deal of what the MSM have to say about any candidate. The tone of political coverage is so over the top and unbalanced.
The only strategy that will work would be to be build capacity of all kinds at a local level. Effective communities will generate effective leaders.
No. Not that I want to be dismissive, but I can't see why libertarians even bother. The political trend for the foreseeable future is in the direction of collectivism. War, domestic conflict and economic insecurity favour group-focused politics, not individualism.
Autocracy has much to offer as a thought-experiment (as we can see from the work of Curtis Yarvin), but the real world prospects in the West for any kind of autocracy are dim. The enlightened despots of the 18th c. relied heavily on the habits of obedience and loyalty inculcated by countless generations of dynastic rule. Nothing like those habits exist in the West today.
You are 100% right to identify the fractal character of politics. Family structure determines political culture. The emerging post-patriarchal family structure in the US is typically fragile, frequently female-led and is adapted to the unstable, constantly shifting, social conditions of an economy plagued by chronic underemployment and precarious employment. Such structures are incapable of sustaining the lived experience of classical ethical thinking (which prioritised autonomy and enduring loyalties). They are incapable of forming a population that would respond positively to a traditional autocrat.
Any political system that selected for merit as traditionally understood (especially if embodied by a male politician) would provoke anxiety, hysteria, and opposition. The reaction to Trump is a foretaste of what is to come. The collapse is set to continue for a very long while.
Perhaps. Then again the reaction to Trump was strongly polarized. Half the population exulted in the image - if not the reality - of a strongman figure. The organic popularity of the God Emperor memes demonstrates that there's a yearning for a Caesar. The feminized portion of the population reacts with extreme aversion to that, but there's another section of the population that instinctively understands that nothing about the current social order is functional.
Now that we're entering into hard times, strong men are beginning to rise. In fact, they've been preparing themselves for years now - times haven't been hard exactly, but many can see the hard times approaching, and have been preemptively hardening themselves in anticipation. That psychological shift activates the search for a strong leader to rally around. It's deep instinct.
Frankly, we are all in uncharted territory. Conditions are so disordered and the psychic life of the masses so disrupted that things could go in any direction. You are dead right that there is a yearning for a caesarian figure, but just who might fill such a role is a mystery. A very large part of the US population mistook Obama as a scholar-statesman and any number seem to think of Trump as a strong leader, so I am not game enough to guess what sort of pretense might succeed when it comes time for Central Casting to find a hero. In a normal systemic crisis, I'd suspect that a military man would fit the bill, but I get the impression that the Pentagon was purged of the dangerous types from Clinton onwards.
The instinct to which you refer can drive the formation of collective affect (or collective emotion), but this affect forms only in coherent groups of one kind or another. In the US today it is hard to conceive how the many elements of the population could come together and bond behind any single figure. This lies at the heart of my disappointment with Curtis Yarvin's failure to fully develop his ideas for a CEO style monarchy (an intriguing proposition). To explain, I've pasted some comments that I made a while ago on that subject; they apply equally to a hypothetical caesar.
"The USA, like all regimes, has no choice but to shape, direct and gratify the psycho-affective forces of those who rule and those who are ruled. These are essential for securing loyalty. A degree of charisma is required for anything as personal as a monarchy, even one that is modelled on the position of CEO.
Much of the unhappiness of the USA today derives from the rapidly diminishing ability of the masses to identify with those they serve, let alone bond with them.
This problem is going to be especially acute for a CEO-styled monarchs. The trouble with CEOs is that the culture of the depersonalised institutions from which they emerge chills and disgusts.
The artificial social psychologies of such institutions is revolting and distinctly uncharismatic.
With all this in mind, what would the psycho-affective landscape of an American monarchy look like?
How would any member of the current, or any viable real-world, elite bond with the US masses?
How could a CEO-style monarch (possibly recruited from a racially diverse Coastal elite) do to bond with the Future Alawites of America in their redoubts in Idaho or the yeomen and kulaks of the Rustbelt across the Midwest?
Conversely, could a Muad'dib style CEO that was minimally attractive to the Red State Fremen secure the personal respect/loyalty of Covid-compliant Blue State SJWs?"
The cultural divisions are irreconcilable. No leader can appeal to all, meaning the leader that succeeds will be the one that best appeals to one of the factions.
True, cannot agree more. Because the divisions are irreconcilable it follows that any purely political resolution can only be temporary. I suspect that a 'conservative' or Red wave in November, followed by a MAGA restoration in 2024 will stabilise the economy, but the underlying dystopian dynamics will continue. The steep decline in fertility, collapsing family formation and the erosion of economic security may well continue for quite a while. We are witnessing way more than the end of the gerontocracy: liberal capitalism's greatest achievement (the integration of the masses into the capitalist order via formal full-time work and widespread substantive prosperity) is crumbling and this process will see social and political disorders that will dwarf the significance of any presidential election.
It is difficult to argue with Hoppe. While perverse incentives may vary between different forms of government, I'm starting to think culture is more important than the particular form of government. The government will grow and get away with as much as it can. It is constrained by cultural opposition to this more than any particular laws. Hoppe's argument about familiar monarchies having a better incentive to conserve resources and for the long term is persuasive, but I think early America had a culture that was so thoroughly libertarian that it easily outperformed other countries in spite of this mismatch of incentives in government structure. I think this is the same reason an attempt to clone the U.S. Constitution without the cultural foundation to support it results in immediate collapse. Regarding your point about diversity, I agree that is probably true, but wanted to highlight that ideological conformity might be able to substitute the function of religious or ethnic conformity resulting in an emergent diversity of demographic characteristics in communities, say, culturally committed to the NAP.
Republic means you don't have a monarchy. Democracy means you have elections. These do not exclude each other. France is a republic and a democracy. So is Germany. So is Italy. So it Finland. So is Hungary. So is Czechia, Ireland, and on and on. Not a single one says "No, we can't be a democracy, because we're a republic!"
Neither did the Founding Fathers say that. That's why Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN PARTY. Which blows all this "a republic is ackshually not a democracy!" nonsense out of the water even in the U.S.
The only people in the world who don't understand what a republic and a democracy are, and who keep saying they can't be the same, are part of the GOP voters base. "Haha, wez a REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY, and our party is called the Republicans! Take that, Democrats!" If the party names had been reversed you wouldn't be saying that.
"But, but I have this quote from Benjamin Franklin, who was practually a Founding Father, that says 'a republic if you can keep it'." Take that quote and shove it, finally. How many times do we have to hear a quote as "proof" of something? The only thing this group of GOP voters have to cling on in this argument is that some in the first days lied about the matter, because some landowners didn't like the idea that the common rabble could vote. "No," the soothing answer came, "it's actually NOT a democracy. It's ... uh ... a republic! That's not a democracy."
How to claim there's a difference? "Well, you see ... yes! A republic has a CONSTITUTION! A democracy doesn't!"
Another lie. That has never been the definition of either a republic or a democracy. Again, a republic means you don't have a monarchy, a democracy means you have elections. Whether these have constitutions or not is irrelevant, and in fact, republics the world over do have constitutions, and still call themselves democracies.
And democratic monarchies like Britain, Spain and Sweden also have constitutions. By a GOP voter's definition that would make them republics. Nice job.
Nowhere in history has "republic" been defined as "a country that has a constitution," and nowhere has democracy been defined as "elections without constitutions and whatever," except among those GOP voters who use it to "own" the Democrats because of party names. Time to give it up. Stop showing that right-wing voters can be as dumb as left-wing voters. If you cling to this ridiculous definition you are no better than leftists who still think corona is deadly. In fact your issue is far dumber, because it's so easy to show how wrong you are.
And Jefferson and Madison, founders of the Democratic-Republican Party, would very much like you to stop using "the Founding Fathers" as your false support in this discussion, thank you.
A republic is a state in which public affairs are settled by citizens, people entitled to a direct role in government. Government is literally the public thing (res publica in Latin). The opposite is a state which belongs by right to a private party (usually a monarch or, sometimes, a corporation of some sort).
As I understand it, the republic/democracy question revolves around the claim that the constitution established the US as a federation of essentially independent and autonomous states, an assembly of states rather than a single integrated system based on democracy. In 1776 the degree of democracy across the 13 colonies varied greatly and the federal system was itself weakly democratic and incorporated mechanisms designed to constrain democratic pressures.
IMHO the issue cannot be settled by semantics or by definitional game-playing. The republic/democracy issue is a cope designed to buy time as the demographic clock runs out. Using constitutional arguments to make a plea for the majority or near majority population to respect the autonomy of the minority in Red America is a losing strategy (no surprise that it is so popular with Republicans desperate to tranquilise the rubes). The emerging majority in no way shares the world-view or political assumptions of 18th c Englishmen and expecting them to do so is fatuous. Constitutional fundamentalism is a political dead end. For many, many, tens of millions of Americans the pogroms of 2020 were exactly what democracy is all about.
And for the record, the republic has already dissolved itself. Public business belongs to corporations and oligarchs who purchase policy and legislative outcomes. Citizens have no share in any of it. The passivity and resignation with which the electorate greeted the fraudulent election of Biden demonstrates that the public understand their essential irrelevance and lack of agency. Commentators who huff and puff about 'republics' and 'democracy' are misdirecting our attention from the serious, vastly more urgent matter, of how to secure civil peace in a post-national condition in which there is no real-world possibility of shared agreement over what might constitute the common good.
Great explanation of something I have slowly come to realize about democracy. But one of the big issues with ANY kind of government is selecting the proper leaders. Specifically, WHO decides those which are qualified to lead? Somehow, many if not most of those "leading" us now are unfit for purpose. It has become increasingly obvious that most of them are not the pick of the litter.
This is the most cogent argument for anarchy I've ever read. There is a lot of discussion today about destroying and rebuilding the UN. The Russian Consulate says Russia cannot be excluded without disbanding the whole organization. I agree with destroying it but why rebuild it? I think of anarchy as the future achievement of a society of improved people. Right now we can't achieve anarchy because most people aren't good enough to live without rules imposed by an exterior force. When we improve enough to achieve anarchy, we will. In reality, we probably will have anarchy before we are ready for it, because all these tentacles of corporate governance will crumble as the stock company model fails, and as its currency fails. Call me a romantic idealist. I've been called worse.
Democracy only has a scaling problem if people sit back and allow it to NOT scale.
If you check US state freedom indexes, you'll find California consistently at or near the bottom, and New Hampshire consistently at or near the top.
As of 2020, California has about one state rep per 494,228 people. New Hampshire has 3,444, Iin fact, TTBOMK, New Hampshire has the 6th largest political body in the world, for a population of about 1M people. It's the closest thing to a plebiscite that exists. https://ballotpedia.org/Population_represented_by_state_legislators High representation isn't the only reason for more relative freedom, but I'll argue it's a big factor.
If they had kept the original level of representation in the US Congress, there'd be about 50,000 representatives. This IMO would be a huge improvement on the current state of affairs, because they wouldn't be able to get a damned thing done. Naturally, TPTB would never allow this, which is one of many reasons why the current system is stick-a-fork-in-it done.
Great opening post. Hope this theme is pursued further. One of the many disappointments of our sorry crop of leaders is their failure to engage in any of these vital conversations. (See for example, Steve Bannon who fancies himself a leader of resistance yet, even after being railroaded by a corrupt DOJ and Congress, can only direct people to redouble their insane faith in a Red Wave etc...)
If anything, autocracy of some form of probably more compatible with subsidiarity than democracy. It's simply impossible for one man to personally direct everything, therefore, the natural and wise move is to delegate as much decision making power as possible so as to free his attention to focus on the big issues that affect the entire state. Given that political systems tend to be fractals, the same organizational principle then gets replicated at each level. Thus for instance in the Roman system, just as the imperator had total power over the state, the paterfamilias had total power over the household.
The other advantage of autocracy is the nature of the selection process. Democracy selects for glibness; leaders are almost invariably manipulative dark triad types, because they outcompete others when it comes to pretty words. A system that prioritized candidates possessing the virtues - strength, wisdom, justice, charity, and the like - would result in a leadership class that systematically excluded venal sociopaths. This could be achieved by having candidates compete in contests of skill and ability, rather than popularity.
@john
A system that prioritized candidates possessing the virtues - strength, wisdom, justice, charity, and the like - would result in a leadership class that systematically excluded venal sociopaths."
Let's stop right at "a system.." There is no such *system*, sadly. We might argue that something like military service might serve as a preliminary prerequisite for any elective office, a first cut for candidates, but this will ultimately fail as well because any system will always be subject to capture by what Matthew Crawford has described as the kunlangeta-- the psychopaths and sociopaths. Eventually the power of such a military system would attract psychos who use the system to elevate their favored conspirators and we're back in hell again.
The only setup i can imagine is one that is highly localized. As you and the host and others suggest, only a local community can effectively identify and kill (Crawford mentions the Inuit practice of pushing kinlangetas off the ice) psychopaths before they can gain the upper hand. Local governance can thus take whatever form deemed effective and desirable (and dissenters should be free to vote w their feet).
My question is whether a nation can function or survive foreign depradations if it has little to no central, national government?
For better or worse I'm betting we're going to find out as the trajectory is toward a major collapse of national government and a necessity for people to form local defense and farming communities just to survive. We're likely to find out whether we need anything above county government in the not too distant future.
The US may get the worst of all possible situations: plenty of central government and an equal serve of foreign depredation. To a degree, Chimerica (the fusion of the US and Chinese versions of state-capitalism) already achieves something like this.
The US ruling class or oligarchy faces very difficult choices because of the rise of China and the loss of the competitive advantage the US once enjoyed. If the US choses to compete directly it will require major financial, industrial and educational changes that would tax the authority and competence of the US elite to their limits.
Provided the true situation can be camouflaged in some way, the US might well accept a vastly more modest place in a multipolar world rather than face the consequences of domestic reform. Third World elites have frequently preferred to remain junior partners with Western capitalism rather than risk the disturbances attendant on rapid development and social change (above all the rise of an assertive local bourgeoisie). There is a possibility that the US might ultimately settle on such a strategy itself. A managed decline marked by ever- escalating dysfunction is probably the preferred option for the political elite (dominated by the Democrats) and key elements within the oligarchy (Silicon Valley, finance) plus key domestic clients (NGOs, beneficiaries of affirmative action or employees of the education sector).
Could be. Hope not.
The reason i think collapse is more likely than managed decline is that every nation now has deep, structural rot and is on brink of collapse. CCP is hanging on. Russia might be strongest and may ironically come to our rescue but they have their own problems too.
We're too far gone to manage. And the Regime is full of ideologues who want to crush us, so at some point they will push past a line and it will get so bad people will snap. Right now it hasn't gotten bad enough. People still have too much to lose. But when people finally feel pushed into a corner w nothing to lose...
We may know for sure by the end of this year. If the US oligarchs are prepared to sacrifice the Democrats and let something like MAGA stabilise things, I'd say that managed decline is the way it will go. If the Deep State insists on keeping the Democrats in power no matter what, the system will accelerate its ruin. And there is always the possibility that they will try a war...
I wish i had your optimism, Phil.
I don't for one second believe that any election here will make any real difference, red wave or no. At tje federal level, the system is far too corrupt and choosing between GOP and Democrats is like choosing between Hitler and Stalin. It's corrupt gangster government all around. No one going to DC can do anything against the Fourth Branch, Uniparty, or the various swamp factions ruling from there.
That's why managed decline isn't in the cards. It's a criminal cartel that is determined to suck every last dime out of us and then abandon ship when it's done.
Best we can hope for is a revolt at tje state level where states go their own way and become self sufficient or form regional coalitions to survive and fend off federal depradations. Worst case is we survive at a local level and hope we dont get nuked or caught up in a Spanish civil war 1930s style.
To develop your argument about the selection of leaders, I'd argue that we (dissidents, dissenters, whatever) need to do more than just focus on how best to select leaders (the fantasy football of political thinkers since Plato) and instead consider how to select and form cadre and partisans (reservoirs from which leaders can be selected regardless of the formal or extant political system).
Consider the way this is done elsewhere. The Communist Party in China is exceptionally demanding. Candidates for membership must endure waiting periods, sit for exams, demonstrate community or public spirit via involvement in altruistic grassroots community-level good works and impress an interview panel. The lefty Orebro party in Sweden also does much the same.
My guess is that long-term success requires great patience and a preference for quality and sincerity. Any dissident political or para-political movement that aims to achieve anything significant needs to recruit serious people, form them into cadre and maintain their enthusiasm and commitment over long periods of time. Difficult to conceive perhaps, but it has been done many times in the past and we can learn from successes and failures from across the political spectrum.
Absolutely agree. I'd add that cadre cultivation doesn't just involve barriers to entry in order to filter out the intrinsically and irredeemably low quality, but also training for those who possess the minimal standards and potential. I've been banging on for a while about this - right wing groups that try to funnel recruits towards activism are just wasting time and wrecking lives. Groups that explicitly focus on broad spectrum self improvement would have immediate pro-social impacts, broad appeal, and provide a recruiting pool; further, the meritocratic orientation of such groups is implicitly right wing.
Further to my comment, if BAP has achieved anything it is to have revealed the strength of the interest amongst the young for life-affirming alternatives to everything the system has to offer. The 'amphibious' constituencies are responsive to self-improvement. Anything that affirms quality, authenticity, beauty will attract precisely the sort who are ill-at ease in the present climate.
'Wasting time and wrecking lives'...spot on. Party politics is not the point and cannot be the point until/unless the times are right. Focusing on political activism misdirects energy and attention and ultimately increases frustration, rather than alleviating it. Activism per se is sterile in that the whole point is to transform the wider culture/environment rather than just fill an office and compete in 'clown-world' politics as entertainment. The ranks of the Left are littered with burnt-out activists; the Right needs to avoid reproducing anything like this.
The answer is meta-politics at a grass-roots level. Pro-social activities (inherently good and in high demand by people fed up with the anomie and fragmentation that reign supreme elsewhere) across a wide range of interests. The potential is enormous. Cthulhu is intensely anti-social and directly threatened by anything that builds social capital, especially amongst potential future leaders (brilliant but disturbing description of Stanford that conveys just how deeply https://palladiummag.com/2022/06/13/stanfords-war-on-social-life/).
That Stanford essay was disturbing, but it matches my own observations of the evolution of campus life perfectly - it isn't limited to Stanford. Nor for that matter to the campus. The 21st century has been characterized by a steady removal of spontaneity and joy from the social environment, as the managerial class inserts its permission-granting architecture ever more deeply.
Loa Tzu say: Running a large country is like cooking a small fish. Your fractal analogy is really compelling. Fractals scale up. That means at some level, running a large country is like running a family. The father is the head and the mother runs it. Like the George Clooney scene in Terrance Malik's The Thin Red Line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prpp236oydk
Do you think a cultural technology could allow the electorate to "learn" how to prioritize such candidates in their self-interest, or is that pie-in-the-sky fancy?
I honestly think as long as leaders are chosen in elections the problem will persist. There's no intrinsic reason to use a popularity contest for leadership selection.
The best emperors in Rome were adopted in adulthood by their predecessor. There is a case for selection by co-option, subject to formal mechanisms for transparency and quality assurance. The best constitution is mixed, with varied elements balancing things out. Popularity contests work well in small communities, where the truth about claims concerning character or reliability can be tested easily enough.
Leadership has always had an element of a popularity contest. Rhetoric aside, every chieftain, king, and emperor has understood that he needed the people on his side to continue his rule. Even Alexander the Great had to do a bit of politicking.
The problem with democracy is that it makes popularity the sole factor, and this is easily gamed by sociopaths.
There is a game theoretic element to using education to better align popularity of person with popularity of the ideas they actually hold and are likely to act on. Again, maybe wishful thinking.
I am not sure that the electorate has that much role, to be frank. If they did, we would see a very different kind of political culture in the first place. The current system is very good at discouraging good people to run for office. No one with much self-respect (or concern for their family) would expose themselves to the media scrutiny or the thuggish character assassination that has become normalised. There are exceptions: Ron Paul and Rand Paul spring to mind as inherently decent and public spirited and the electorate responded to them.
Perhaps the weight of such character assassination will be diluted to the point that it is ineffectual if enough people start getting engaged. I don't know. I'm very interested in developing a realistic strategy to find an optimal path to the other side of the coming storm.
I think most people already discount a very great deal of what the MSM have to say about any candidate. The tone of political coverage is so over the top and unbalanced.
The only strategy that will work would be to be build capacity of all kinds at a local level. Effective communities will generate effective leaders.
Agree 100%. Are you tracking the strategy espoused by the LP as recently dominated by the Mises Caucus?
No. Not that I want to be dismissive, but I can't see why libertarians even bother. The political trend for the foreseeable future is in the direction of collectivism. War, domestic conflict and economic insecurity favour group-focused politics, not individualism.
Autocracy has much to offer as a thought-experiment (as we can see from the work of Curtis Yarvin), but the real world prospects in the West for any kind of autocracy are dim. The enlightened despots of the 18th c. relied heavily on the habits of obedience and loyalty inculcated by countless generations of dynastic rule. Nothing like those habits exist in the West today.
You are 100% right to identify the fractal character of politics. Family structure determines political culture. The emerging post-patriarchal family structure in the US is typically fragile, frequently female-led and is adapted to the unstable, constantly shifting, social conditions of an economy plagued by chronic underemployment and precarious employment. Such structures are incapable of sustaining the lived experience of classical ethical thinking (which prioritised autonomy and enduring loyalties). They are incapable of forming a population that would respond positively to a traditional autocrat.
Any political system that selected for merit as traditionally understood (especially if embodied by a male politician) would provoke anxiety, hysteria, and opposition. The reaction to Trump is a foretaste of what is to come. The collapse is set to continue for a very long while.
Perhaps. Then again the reaction to Trump was strongly polarized. Half the population exulted in the image - if not the reality - of a strongman figure. The organic popularity of the God Emperor memes demonstrates that there's a yearning for a Caesar. The feminized portion of the population reacts with extreme aversion to that, but there's another section of the population that instinctively understands that nothing about the current social order is functional.
Now that we're entering into hard times, strong men are beginning to rise. In fact, they've been preparing themselves for years now - times haven't been hard exactly, but many can see the hard times approaching, and have been preemptively hardening themselves in anticipation. That psychological shift activates the search for a strong leader to rally around. It's deep instinct.
Frankly, we are all in uncharted territory. Conditions are so disordered and the psychic life of the masses so disrupted that things could go in any direction. You are dead right that there is a yearning for a caesarian figure, but just who might fill such a role is a mystery. A very large part of the US population mistook Obama as a scholar-statesman and any number seem to think of Trump as a strong leader, so I am not game enough to guess what sort of pretense might succeed when it comes time for Central Casting to find a hero. In a normal systemic crisis, I'd suspect that a military man would fit the bill, but I get the impression that the Pentagon was purged of the dangerous types from Clinton onwards.
The instinct to which you refer can drive the formation of collective affect (or collective emotion), but this affect forms only in coherent groups of one kind or another. In the US today it is hard to conceive how the many elements of the population could come together and bond behind any single figure. This lies at the heart of my disappointment with Curtis Yarvin's failure to fully develop his ideas for a CEO style monarchy (an intriguing proposition). To explain, I've pasted some comments that I made a while ago on that subject; they apply equally to a hypothetical caesar.
"The USA, like all regimes, has no choice but to shape, direct and gratify the psycho-affective forces of those who rule and those who are ruled. These are essential for securing loyalty. A degree of charisma is required for anything as personal as a monarchy, even one that is modelled on the position of CEO.
Much of the unhappiness of the USA today derives from the rapidly diminishing ability of the masses to identify with those they serve, let alone bond with them.
This problem is going to be especially acute for a CEO-styled monarchs. The trouble with CEOs is that the culture of the depersonalised institutions from which they emerge chills and disgusts.
The artificial social psychologies of such institutions is revolting and distinctly uncharismatic.
With all this in mind, what would the psycho-affective landscape of an American monarchy look like?
How would any member of the current, or any viable real-world, elite bond with the US masses?
How could a CEO-style monarch (possibly recruited from a racially diverse Coastal elite) do to bond with the Future Alawites of America in their redoubts in Idaho or the yeomen and kulaks of the Rustbelt across the Midwest?
Conversely, could a Muad'dib style CEO that was minimally attractive to the Red State Fremen secure the personal respect/loyalty of Covid-compliant Blue State SJWs?"
The cultural divisions are irreconcilable. No leader can appeal to all, meaning the leader that succeeds will be the one that best appeals to one of the factions.
True, cannot agree more. Because the divisions are irreconcilable it follows that any purely political resolution can only be temporary. I suspect that a 'conservative' or Red wave in November, followed by a MAGA restoration in 2024 will stabilise the economy, but the underlying dystopian dynamics will continue. The steep decline in fertility, collapsing family formation and the erosion of economic security may well continue for quite a while. We are witnessing way more than the end of the gerontocracy: liberal capitalism's greatest achievement (the integration of the masses into the capitalist order via formal full-time work and widespread substantive prosperity) is crumbling and this process will see social and political disorders that will dwarf the significance of any presidential election.
Mighty fine. Hit the nail on the head!
It is difficult to argue with Hoppe. While perverse incentives may vary between different forms of government, I'm starting to think culture is more important than the particular form of government. The government will grow and get away with as much as it can. It is constrained by cultural opposition to this more than any particular laws. Hoppe's argument about familiar monarchies having a better incentive to conserve resources and for the long term is persuasive, but I think early America had a culture that was so thoroughly libertarian that it easily outperformed other countries in spite of this mismatch of incentives in government structure. I think this is the same reason an attempt to clone the U.S. Constitution without the cultural foundation to support it results in immediate collapse. Regarding your point about diversity, I agree that is probably true, but wanted to highlight that ideological conformity might be able to substitute the function of religious or ethnic conformity resulting in an emergent diversity of demographic characteristics in communities, say, culturally committed to the NAP.
Republic means you don't have a monarchy. Democracy means you have elections. These do not exclude each other. France is a republic and a democracy. So is Germany. So is Italy. So it Finland. So is Hungary. So is Czechia, Ireland, and on and on. Not a single one says "No, we can't be a democracy, because we're a republic!"
Neither did the Founding Fathers say that. That's why Thomas Jefferson and James Madison founded the DEMOCRATIC-REPUBLICAN PARTY. Which blows all this "a republic is ackshually not a democracy!" nonsense out of the water even in the U.S.
The only people in the world who don't understand what a republic and a democracy are, and who keep saying they can't be the same, are part of the GOP voters base. "Haha, wez a REPUBLIC not a DEMOCRACY, and our party is called the Republicans! Take that, Democrats!" If the party names had been reversed you wouldn't be saying that.
"But, but I have this quote from Benjamin Franklin, who was practually a Founding Father, that says 'a republic if you can keep it'." Take that quote and shove it, finally. How many times do we have to hear a quote as "proof" of something? The only thing this group of GOP voters have to cling on in this argument is that some in the first days lied about the matter, because some landowners didn't like the idea that the common rabble could vote. "No," the soothing answer came, "it's actually NOT a democracy. It's ... uh ... a republic! That's not a democracy."
How to claim there's a difference? "Well, you see ... yes! A republic has a CONSTITUTION! A democracy doesn't!"
Another lie. That has never been the definition of either a republic or a democracy. Again, a republic means you don't have a monarchy, a democracy means you have elections. Whether these have constitutions or not is irrelevant, and in fact, republics the world over do have constitutions, and still call themselves democracies.
And democratic monarchies like Britain, Spain and Sweden also have constitutions. By a GOP voter's definition that would make them republics. Nice job.
Nowhere in history has "republic" been defined as "a country that has a constitution," and nowhere has democracy been defined as "elections without constitutions and whatever," except among those GOP voters who use it to "own" the Democrats because of party names. Time to give it up. Stop showing that right-wing voters can be as dumb as left-wing voters. If you cling to this ridiculous definition you are no better than leftists who still think corona is deadly. In fact your issue is far dumber, because it's so easy to show how wrong you are.
And Jefferson and Madison, founders of the Democratic-Republican Party, would very much like you to stop using "the Founding Fathers" as your false support in this discussion, thank you.
A republic is a state in which public affairs are settled by citizens, people entitled to a direct role in government. Government is literally the public thing (res publica in Latin). The opposite is a state which belongs by right to a private party (usually a monarch or, sometimes, a corporation of some sort).
As I understand it, the republic/democracy question revolves around the claim that the constitution established the US as a federation of essentially independent and autonomous states, an assembly of states rather than a single integrated system based on democracy. In 1776 the degree of democracy across the 13 colonies varied greatly and the federal system was itself weakly democratic and incorporated mechanisms designed to constrain democratic pressures.
IMHO the issue cannot be settled by semantics or by definitional game-playing. The republic/democracy issue is a cope designed to buy time as the demographic clock runs out. Using constitutional arguments to make a plea for the majority or near majority population to respect the autonomy of the minority in Red America is a losing strategy (no surprise that it is so popular with Republicans desperate to tranquilise the rubes). The emerging majority in no way shares the world-view or political assumptions of 18th c Englishmen and expecting them to do so is fatuous. Constitutional fundamentalism is a political dead end. For many, many, tens of millions of Americans the pogroms of 2020 were exactly what democracy is all about.
And for the record, the republic has already dissolved itself. Public business belongs to corporations and oligarchs who purchase policy and legislative outcomes. Citizens have no share in any of it. The passivity and resignation with which the electorate greeted the fraudulent election of Biden demonstrates that the public understand their essential irrelevance and lack of agency. Commentators who huff and puff about 'republics' and 'democracy' are misdirecting our attention from the serious, vastly more urgent matter, of how to secure civil peace in a post-national condition in which there is no real-world possibility of shared agreement over what might constitute the common good.
Great explanation of something I have slowly come to realize about democracy. But one of the big issues with ANY kind of government is selecting the proper leaders. Specifically, WHO decides those which are qualified to lead? Somehow, many if not most of those "leading" us now are unfit for purpose. It has become increasingly obvious that most of them are not the pick of the litter.
This is the most cogent argument for anarchy I've ever read. There is a lot of discussion today about destroying and rebuilding the UN. The Russian Consulate says Russia cannot be excluded without disbanding the whole organization. I agree with destroying it but why rebuild it? I think of anarchy as the future achievement of a society of improved people. Right now we can't achieve anarchy because most people aren't good enough to live without rules imposed by an exterior force. When we improve enough to achieve anarchy, we will. In reality, we probably will have anarchy before we are ready for it, because all these tentacles of corporate governance will crumble as the stock company model fails, and as its currency fails. Call me a romantic idealist. I've been called worse.
Democracy only has a scaling problem if people sit back and allow it to NOT scale.
If you check US state freedom indexes, you'll find California consistently at or near the bottom, and New Hampshire consistently at or near the top.
As of 2020, California has about one state rep per 494,228 people. New Hampshire has 3,444, Iin fact, TTBOMK, New Hampshire has the 6th largest political body in the world, for a population of about 1M people. It's the closest thing to a plebiscite that exists. https://ballotpedia.org/Population_represented_by_state_legislators High representation isn't the only reason for more relative freedom, but I'll argue it's a big factor.
If they had kept the original level of representation in the US Congress, there'd be about 50,000 representatives. This IMO would be a huge improvement on the current state of affairs, because they wouldn't be able to get a damned thing done. Naturally, TPTB would never allow this, which is one of many reasons why the current system is stick-a-fork-in-it done.
That's a really great idea! I've got one more in the hopper after today's post, but that might be a good idea for the post after that.