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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   35137 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply does not work.

The form envisioned by American's founders might have, except for the fatal problem latent in democracy which leads to a race to the bottom to expand the franchise for more votes. Inevitably this will include people who really have no business getting involved with policy decisions.

Then again our (American) system was explicitly designed for a 'moral and religious people' and Adams openly admits that without those elements it all falls apart.

I don't know. We were given something amazing and ruined it. That much is clear. Whether such a thing can ever arise again remains to be seen, but what we have now is not headed in a viable direction.

Democracy simply does not work.

I agree with the other guy: It's the least awful form of government we have. The only real alternative is dictatorship, which is almost always worse overall for human flourishing. Every time I think the voters are too terminally stupid to be trusted to do much of anything, I watch a video like this and feel even worse about any alternative.

Citation needed. Or at least some kind of argument. You're just stipulating this as though it were fact.

Actually existing actual monarchies tend to produce lackluster economic growth while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes of their neighbors. Granted, the only place where you really see monarchy and demotism side by side is the arab world. But still; it's probably fair to say that monarchy tends to avoid the worst mistakes a government can make in ways that other forms of government do not, but is also not a magic bullet.

while offering much higher stability and avoiding the dumber mistakes

Strong disagree on both of those statements. Democracies are the most stable form of government in existence since they allow for peaceful transfer of power. Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America are notoriously unstable and chain coups like they're going out of style. More totalitarian states like Russia and China are more stable overall, and can seem even more stable than democracies... until they aren't. They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms. The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.

And autocracies make stupid moves all the time. Zero Covid? Also, the whole Communist flavor of autocracies from 1945-1991 was a major unforced screwup.

They're brittle and tend to shatter rather than undergo painful reforms.

What do you call Chile, Singapore, South Korea, or Taiwan, if not "undergoing painful reforms"?

Hybrid regimes like those in the Sahel or Central America

Calling them "hybrid" sounds like cope to avoid accountability for the failures of the system.

The biggest threat to democracies is rarely a big civil war, but rather descending into Orbanism.

The biggest threat to democracies is getting locked into a path constant deterioration that can't be plausibly changed through voting, like South Africa.

‘Monarchies’

Monarchies were just the dictatorships of old.

This is a very modern misunderstanding. Most European kings did not historically have anything like absolute power, but were beholden to a law above their own authority. Their prerogatives were sharply circumscribed in all sorts of ways.

Check out Missing Monarchy if you haven't. https://www.amazon.com/Missing-Monarchy-Correcting-Misconceptions-Democracy/dp/B0D6FGC9YF But not the audiobook, which is auto-generated and awful.

There are several cases of countries speedrunning from mediavel to modern through a dictatorship, are there any success stories like that with democracy?

Also, your metric is rather confounded. It only makes sense to use it, if you assume all people in the world are fungible. The question is if these monarchies would fare better as democracies. Various recent experiments by the US cast a large doubt on that theory, in my opinion.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Democracy simply does not work.

Rightward leaning folks essentially re-inventing the Chinese government is potentially one of my favorite things about the mid 2020s.

I just listened to an interview with Oren Cass and you change about 10 words and this dude would have made Daddy Xi proud.

Can't wait for "the shining city on the hill with Chinese characteristics"

If not for the quote I'd think you responded to the wrong comment. You didn't engage with the substance at all and I don't know how you got to China from "moral and religious people".

Sorry I was being snarky, I actually quite like what you wrote and I agree with it.

I just keep seeing the same "democracy doesn't work because voters are dumb and unbridled capitalism has hollowed out the country. Therefore we need a strong and decisive government to use industrial policy to bring the heavy industry back!" train of thought and it's pretty adjacent to many of the thoughts you expressed there

The main complaint is that while a good electorate is possible, perverse incentives ensure that it will gradually be watered down. Not sure whether the Founders saw that coming or not but there is some ancient precedent and they'd surely have been aware of it. Would like to know more.

Anyway I don't really think our problems are solvable. We're so far unlike anything that's come before on so many levels. "We are trapped in the belly of the machine, and the machine is bleeding to death." Something will come after this but I don't think we'd recognize it as continuous.

To your point, many people do seem keen on comparing our current situation to that of the late Roman Republic (and the 'No Kings' protesting sure does help carry the vibe) but it's not clear to me that Caesarism is a viable option for us. The analogy only goes so far, and like I said so much is so different now.

It has been a really wild and wonderful time to be alive. As I enter middle life I wonder more and more how much I'll get to see of what happens next.

Yeah, it's bizarre that this is controversial.

The magic of the United States is not in its laws. We exported the same set of laws to Haiti and Liberia with predictable results.

The United States is a people, not an idea.

Immigration fundamentally changes the United States in a way that laws cannot.

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