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Why do Aircraft Carriers vote?
The Case against Democracy.
A common retort on the left is Why does Land Vote? I don’t think they can explain that view when I will assume they believe Aircraft Carriers should vote.
Balaji had an interesting tweet which led me to coin this term.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1663429591757885440?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Synopsis the global system is controlled by America with some partners. If it was a Democracy a bunch of other countries would control the system. America consistently interferes with other countries policy thru sanctions etc. Those countries in a Democracy would do that to America when they don’t like what we are doing.
Benjamin Franklin famously said “A Republic if you can keep it”
I think it’s beyond clear that Republic/Democracy isn’t clearly the best form of government but it depends on something else. At the global level I don’t think the world would be a better place if India, China, and a few other populous countries were in charge.
South Africa is struggling a lot now. Electricity is spotty and other public goods. I think that country is probably best if the Elon Musks white people had more power but perhaps in a less racists and nicer way.
Historically I’m not sure I can think of a Republic/Democracy that didn’t limit who could become citizens. Rome made some tribes into citizens but not everyone.
It makes me think the key thing is a shared civic religion and beliefs that are good and makes a successful country. In that situation a Republic probably works better than other forms of government. And yes I’m probably arguing that a Republic needs a certain level of average IQ (Which I believe is Garrett Jones argument he avoided saying directly).
Can anyone make an argument a Republic is best for all people - land and aircraft carriers shouldn’t vote? Or that land and aircraft carriers are not the same thing - the UN should be how it is but countries should all be Democracies?
The only counter I can come up with is at the global level the rest of the world hasn’t developed enough. A blank slatist type argument that America has reasonably good public schools creating a sufficient amount of citizens. But the rest of the world isn’t there yet so the world should be governed by the strong now. But fundamentally I think most people just use the arguments that increase their own power and power of their tribe when they can.
America doesn’t have a democracy in any substantive way. What we have is a colosseum of capitalist interests, where corporations and advocacy groups and institutions fund gladiators to shred each other in the public arena, mediated by social media companies and entertainment. The average American does not participate in or listen to debate or know where they could even do this. Instead, they are presented by political parties with figures and stories and myths, which they then subscribe to according to their limited knowledge and understanding. So what we have is a kind of perverse consumer capitalist meritocracy where wealthy people and corporations controls the trajectory of the nation. I don’t think you can consider this system “mostly democratic”, because democracy presupposes rational actors, informed voters, and an absence of psychological manipulation. If a man tricks a drunk woman into sleeping with him, and then uses brainwashing techniques to keep her around, we don’t consider that a consensual relationship, but abusive.
So, re: “shared civil religion”, the ideas of democracy and freedom are the civic religion. If everyone thinks there’s a democracy, then we have the main benefit of democracy (less rebellion) without its problems (mob rule). Ib the same way, people think they have freedom (despite an inability to decide how their children are raised or what they are taught, ie the continuation of any culture). They think they have a higher standard of living than Europeans, because the system’s thinktanks write studies that inaccurately compare wages without consideration of debt, work conditions, general social stress, commute times, car culture, healthcare, public school quality, etc.
Our civic religion is just… lying to the proles. And in a way, both Christianity and Islam share this feature. Islam has a vivid portrayal of an afterlife with sex and good food. Christianity on the other hand delegitimizes the value of “worldly” goods, like sex and good food, and instead orients the adherer toward focusing on a spiritual life which consists of non-acquisitiveness and non-competition.
The only way anyone comes to this conclusion is by playing games with definitions. Communists like doing this by retorting "real Communism has never been tried" whenever someone points out the faults in their ideology. This post is doing something similar, except instead of defending a system, it sets out an unrealistically high bar for being defined as a "democracy", then using any faults to say "hey the US isn't a real democracy!!!"
The first two would be nice, but are not necessary. See Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality for example. The last one, "psychological manipulation" is just "persuasion" written in inflammatory language.
There's a much simpler and coherent way to arrive at that which is to adopt the position that democracy is an impossible state of affairs. Much like indeed, communism is.
Yeah the US isn't a democracy, because the rule of many is not something has ever existed. Every regime is a rule of few. To say organization is to say oligarchy. Etc.
Why use a goofy, excessively stringent definition of democracy like this? It doesn't conform to common usage nor to the dictionary definition.
Then following this up with a very lax definition of oligarchy reeks of noncentral fallacy.
I don't believe it's goofy to worry about where power truly lies when accurate nomenclature of regimes that's the entire point of those words. This is political science, not litterature.
And I'm not convinced it's ever lied with the many. I don't think it's ever lied with the one either by the way. Monarchy is similar fiction.
You can still use the words, but like communism they only refer to the story the ruling class tells about itself. Not actual power relationships.
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