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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.
Democracy in a single nation is very different from a single democratic world country that encompasses the entire planet. Pointing at some hypothetical superpower UN and claiming its potential sins proves anything about democracy is an absurd strawman.
Where exactly is a discontinuity of such a magnitude as to make this absurd? It's somewhere between 300 million people and 8 billion people, I gather, but ... I can't even really picture 1 million people in my head, much less calculate how many more would need to be added before we hit Democracy-bad-critical-mass. Can you? Did India cross the line yet, or does it risk doing so? Would China, if the CCP transitioned to democracy? Would a world country have been fine a few centuries ago, but it's too late now?
The US is a single nation ... how? Looking for "a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society" isn't getting me much. 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and about 40% of native English speakers aren't American. We get a million immigrants a year with their own histories; presumably they still count as American regardless. We're certainly not an ethnostate. This is the Culture War roundup, so that's out; skimming through the old tenets of American civil religion and looking for universal and/or religious levels of acceptance is doomed to fail. The US is a single country, but our hypothetical single democratic world country would check that box too.
Part of what made us (barely) hold together as a single country is the paradoxical idea that we don't have to be a single nation, that "United States" is a plural noun and not just an extra 's' for funsies, that the federal government should just be handling the friction between states, who in turn try to devolve their own power onto even smaller localities ... but that's all pretty antiquated at this point, isn't it? Opposing local control because slavery is too awful was a pretty noble rationalization, but it was less than a century from that point to "growing too much food is too awful", and it's been nearly another century since. Even when Texas state government is grousing about DC they'll happily turn around and overrule Austin city government. Who are we to say that China's citizens' votes shouldn't be overruling US mistakes or (in less common cases) vice-versa too, as the obvious next step once we finally give Californians the rest of the control over Montana they want? Is it just special pleading and status quo bias? It really does feel like "more populated places should outvote less populated ones" is a "principle" that's convenient to hold when I'm part of the majority in the more populated place and suddenly abandon when I'm part of the people expecting to be outvoted.
Any state, democratic or not, becomes pretty untenable when there's a significant, politically empowered portion of people with a different culture. For most countries that line is drawn at ethnicities, e.g. unrest that perennially rises in the Balkans. The US is weird in that its cultural ingroup is a strange amalgamation of mutable racialism and civic nationalism. The intricacies of how that works for the US are certainly interesting, but the pertinent point is that there's certainly still a cultural ingroup. An assimilated, 3rd+ generation Chinese living in Philadelphia is very different from a Chinese living in Beijing.
Sliders' post implies that democracy means we should let Chinese living in Beijing run American politics. But that's obviously wrong. It's pure strawman.
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