Motus Mentis

Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, I’ve expressed in several comment-threads my increasing lack of enthusiasm for democracy — a disaffection that has increased in proportion to the fetishization of “Our Democracy!” in political discourse and propaganda.

To listen to it all, you’d think that Democracy is somehow an end in itself, the founding principle of the United States, and the basis of all that can possibly be good and decent in public affairs. Democracy properly understood, however, is none of those things. It is a mechanism of government, and nothing more; indeed we might more accurately say that it is simply a kind of frame into which various systems of government can be placed, including the severest forms of tyranny. It is also a mechanism that can be used, and commonly has been used, to destroy itself (as, for example, in the rise of the Nazis). It guarantees neither liberty nor order, and in particular it makes no guarantee of good government; indeed, in its purer forms, at national scale, it virtually guarantees the opposite of all those things.

H.L. Mencken described democracy as “a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” Benjamin Franklin described it as “two wolves and a lamb deciding on what’s for dinner.” The Founders, educated men who understood both history and human nature, knew that democracy had been, again and again, a buttered slide to tyranny, and sought desperately to find a way to find a way to implement a strictly limited version of it that would allow Americans to attempt some kind of self-government without the experiment immediately going completely off the rails, and descending into bitter and lawless chaos. (And they succeeded surprisingly well: as things worked out, it took over two hundred years for America’s experiment in self-government to go completely off the rails and descend into bitter and lawless chaos — with only a single civil war along the way.)

I understand the attraction of the idea, however illusory, that we somehow rule ourselves, rather than being ruled. But before going any further, let me put my cards on the table: I don’t give a hoot about democracy as an end in itself, and its perils and liabilities are so overwhelmingly obvious that I think we should all be wary of it.

I think the right way to look at governance is as an engineering problem, in which you start by imagining what your specs are — and to do that, we should ask why we want government in the first place, and only then start thinking about what kind of solution we might build.

So: what do we want from a government? Presumably, above all, we want a good one, and not a bad one. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say we want the very best government we can have, one that does all the things we want it to, and does them as well as possible, and doesn’t do any of the things we don’t want it to do. As far as I’m concerned, that’s it, really, and I have no prejudices about what kind of system — what kind of engineering — we should apply. If it maximizes what we want a government to do, and it minimizes what we don’t want, then that’s the system I want.

Well, what are those things? What do we want our government to do? Here are some of the things I’d put in the spec-sheet:

1) We want it to safeguard basic liberties. Among those are freedoms of political opinion, of movement, of religious belief, of association, of peaceable assembly, of self-defense, the pursuit of happiness, and various others.

2) We want it to provide security for property, for national borders, for personal and civic safety, for the enforcement of contracts, etc.

3) We want it to maintain public order.

4) We want it to provide stability, and to consider long timeframes. (What I mean by that is that I want it to guarantee that the rate of change will be damped sufficiently to enable confident investment in the future and to incentivize “low time-preference”, which is the bedrock of civilization.)

5) We want it to put the interests of its citizens above those of other people and places.

6) We want it to provide a system of law that is as small, consistent and comprehensible as possible, to be administered as transparently and justly as possible.

7) We want it to be as local and subsidiarian as possible, with each higher level of government addressing only those tasks and duties that can’t be administered closer to home.

8) We want it to provide reliable means of exchange, and consistent weights and measures.

That’s a brief list; I’m sure it can be expanded, but you get the idea. We should also ask: what do we not want our government to do? Here are some thoughts:

1) We want it not to arrogate powers that it doesn’t need for the list above.

2) We want it not to waste our resources, seize our property, tax us unnecessarily, or interfere with us any more than necessary.

3) We want it not to engage in foreign adventurism.

And so on.

As with any engineering problem, you have to consider what tools and materials you have at hand. In particular, for this problem, we must ask: what sort of people are we? How much do we have in common? How tribal or fractious are we? How virtuous? How capable are we of the individual self-discipline that is what makes lighter external government possible? What are our metaphysics? What beliefs and customs do we share? How much do we care about each other, and trust each other? Different answers to all of these questions make a critical difference to what sort of government is required. A small and homogeneous population, with high public trust and shared traditions and values, will be amenable to a lighter form of government, while a congeries of rival tribes and factions with nothing in common can only be held together by an iron hand.

My opinion, then, is that whatever system of government optimizes our spec-sheet within the constraints and conditions of our particular place and people is what I want. No form of government is best in itself, because no form of government exists in an ideal, abstract space.

In our last interaction, Bill asked me the following, in defense of democracy:

My question is a question in political philosophy.”The question is whether a just form of gov’t can exist that allows the governed no say in their governance.”

I say No. I am trying to get you to concede a very obvious point. Abe Lincoln: a just govt’ is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Now focus on “for the people.” Will you concede that a just gov’t exists for the benefit of the governed, and not for the benefit of the governors — except insofar as they too are part of the governed?

I replied:

If I understand you correctly … you are separating the philosophical question of justice in government from the messy practicalities of real-world politics. But shouldn’t any useful political philosophy include in its premises the actualities — the “crooked timber” — of human nature? (The political philosophy of the Founders certainly did.)

I will, of course, agree that a just government exists for the benefit of the governed. What I’m trying to get at is that the benefit to the governed is what ought to be maximized, and whatever form accomplishes that is arguably what is most just.

“Of the people”: yes, of course. “For the people”: yes, that should be paramount. But “by the people” is where it gets tricky, because “by the people” can (and often does) end up flushing “for the people” down the loo.

Earlier in that thread I had said:

I agree that “just” is nice, but it’s not so easy to pin down exactly what that word means, when it comes to government. Is it “just” to give imbeciles a say who will bring the whole thing crashing down on everyone’s head, including their own?

Regarding democracy, then: given the eight-point list of desiderata above, how are things looking these days? Is our government getting closer to achieving them, as we relentlessly expand the franchise, or farther away? Is it really such a good idea to connect the fulminating and mercurial passions of the mob directly to the drive-train of government?

In Leftism Revisited (page 144), Erik von Keuhnelt-Leddihn quotes Jules Romains:

“Hitler and Mussolini … are despots belonging to the age of democracy. They fully profit from the doubtful service which democracy has rendered to man in our society by initiating him into politics, by getting him used to that intoxicant, by making him believe that the domain of catastrophes is his concern, that history calls for him, consults him, needs him every moment.”

Also, from another exchange with Bill V.:

It seems that there is a “solution” to the game of democracy, a consistent winning strategy (described persuasively by Bertrand de Jouvenel) in which the high (the oligarchy that exists unavoidably in any form of government) buys off the low to expropriate the middle. The power of the resulting coalition is unstoppable.

The key to this is a constantly expanding franchise that is easily persuaded to vote for redistributed largesse. (Do we not see this happening before our eyes?)

This appears to be a permanent, exploitable vulnerability in the nature of democracy itself. The Founders were well aware of it, which is why they did whatever they could to limit the franchise. (And once you get the pathologically altruistic cat-ladies and spinster aunts of the middle-class itself to join the cause, it’s “game over”.)

This is getting long (and rambling), so I’ll leave it there for now. But at this point, you might well ask: “OK, then, after all that, what does an ideal system for the current-day United States actually look like? How do we get there from here?”

My answer: I’m not sure that the United States, as it now is, can be well-governed under any imaginable system. It is too big, too diverse, too dumbed-down, too polarized, to corrupt, too divorced from any stabilizing metaphysics, and generally just too sick and broken. But this I do know: the bloated, fly-blown corpse of the system the Founders put in place for the American people of their long-gone era is utterly, hopelessly insufficient for the governance of what America has since become. I think some kind of collapse and breakup is almost inevitable, after which something new might arise, hopefully carrying forward some of the best of what we had. But if that doesn’t happen, then I believe we’re looking at a long, sad epoch in which everything just … rots.

Comments welcome.