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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.
If by “playing games with definitions” you mean “contrasting the substance of democracy with the appearance”, then sure. That’s the whole purpose of thinking, and words. This is the intended purpose of words. Tell me how far apart you would measure an early American democracy and a democracy in which a ruling party controls all media exposure. Calling the latter non-democratic is a no brainer, because the substance of democracy is being thwarted. No one would call the latter “democratic”. I’m alleging that our current system is similarly thwarted from the fact that the median voter decides votes based on misinformation and propaganda purchased by wealthy parties.
Early American democracy had a vigorous debate and discourse culture a la Lincoln-Douglas debates. These were real debates, published all over America, read by much of the population, with the debates lasting hours. [insert “this is what they took from you” meme.] The distance between 1800s democracy and ours is so stark that we should not call ours a democracy.
It’s persuasion with no scruples or guilt or code of honor*. And yeah, once corporations and wealthy donors are able to “persuade” anyone they want without regard for facts, we don’t have a democracy anymore, we have something else.
Various levels of control over the media and political writers has been going since the nation's founding.
In a modern context, the left does not control the media. Many employees of the mainstream media are left-leaning and that certainly tilts coverage in a lot of ways, but anyone is free to start their own news organization, and there are several ones in existence right now like Fox and Breitbart that cater to right wing views.
The internet has made debating easier than ever, and presidential candidates have several debates while they're running.
I'm not sure what the quote marks around "persuade" are supposed to imply. Rich people can hurl tons of money towards basically whatever political cause they want thanks to the SCOTUS's asinine decision in Citizens United, but thankfully money doesn't have that much of an impact outside the margins. Bloomberg's campaign in 2020 was an example of this.
Tell me, what do you think Citizens United actually said?
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but the effects are an extension of money = speech, thus allowing for the formation of superPACs and a greater emphasis on money in political campaigns.
Citizens United did not assert that "money = speech" -- the FEC asserted that they could regulate "electioneering communications" (that is, speech), and therefore Citizens United could not air their documentary that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The Supreme Court said no, you can't suppress speech under the guise of regulating campaign contributions.
Sure, I trust your explanation is more correct than my simplification.
But the important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics. That said, I still don't think it matters all that much since people overrate the power of money in politics.
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