Hugo Chavez came to power as the result of democratic elections. Democracy and party politics has continuously led to tyrants like Lenin, Hitler, Chavez, etc.I responded thusly:
I'm sure we have to tango about this whole Moldbug line of Democracy as the cause of Lenin.Perfidy then chimed in beginning:
Lenin was involved with the overthrow of the Monarchy, and the communists replaced a 8(?) month old democracy. Saying Lenin was a result of democracy is a convenient fiction. Lenin overthrew a monarch. Same as did Cromwell.
Hitler came out of a democracy that was guaranteed to fail via the peace of '21...which was a result of the war fought by Wilhelm I. Wilhelm fights war, destroys country, accepts impossible terms of reparations, and ... let's blame it on democracy?
Aretae, don't be to sure (heh) about the Lenin and Hitler. There's a couple lines of argument you can make regarding those two. [...lots of good stuff...]Here's the question. To what extent can Democracy be blamed for Hitler, Lenin, the evils of the 20th century? My read on history is that the problem is governments that have lots of power. Hitler was a result, as Perfidy says better than I did, of the onerous restrictions from the Treaty of Versailles. It had little to nothing to do with democracy. Similarly, Lenin was homegrown, and blaming his ascent on Democracy is a stretch...if you're being nice.
Rather, the problem is that over-powerful government is the scariest thing on the planet. The single thing joining all the horridness of the 20th century is over-strong governments: Mao's China, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Khmer Rouge Cambodia...and the prior centuries weren't great either. 4000 years of Chinese stagnation (strong central government), French Revolution (strong central government), The Tsars (Were they better or worse than the communists?).
As a good Bayesian...I think it's hard to assign Democracy more than a 10% share of the blame.
50% I put on the shoulders of the doctrine of unlimited government, and
20% on the "Fatal Conceit" ... the idea that smart people/priests/academics can make large decisions that improve things without HUGE unintended consequences.
20% left for general I don't knows.
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Aretae, I think you slightly misunderstood me. I was arguing, on Hitler, that the flaws in the constitution led to Hitler more than the other things - bad treaty, economic woes, etc. Not that they weren't factors.
"More than anything, the cause of the collapse of Weimar was *not* the reparations, onerous terms of Versailles, the later depression, but Emergency Measures provision of Article 48 " There's a "not" in there.
And for Lenin, I was arguing that he was the result of decades of revolutionary agitation in Russia, not the spontaneous collapse of the monarchy. But that cancer was - and I see I didn't make that clear - revolutionary progressivism. Which is, like fascism, a heretical democratic movement.
The history of socialism is twisty, but Fascism and Communism grew out of the same roots, and those roots lead back to the democratic impulse.
The evils of the 20thC are primarily (in terms of megadeaths) in totalitarian governments either killing their own people, or starting wars that kill other people. Conservatively, a quarter billion. But all of those movements are mass movements, in a sense, requiring the mobilization of the people.
That sort of totalitarianism was not seen in divine right monarchies, or the Chinese empire. It's really different - totalitarian and authoritarian are really different things - which is why we have Singapore, Hong Kong, Chile on one side; and Soviet Russia, Maoist China, etc., on the other. The doctrine of unlimited government is a democratic doctrine - that the "people" have sovereignty. (Or whatever group of godless commies holds it for them.) A divine right monarch was an absolute monarch but in a very different sense - he had a place, ordained by god, but so did his subjects.
I think we can blame Hitler and Lenin on Democracy - at least more than 10%. Hell, if I can blame WWII on Wilson, I can certainly blame Locke for Communism.
And yes, the Tsars were better than the communists.
Is the problem over-powerful government or over-active government? Moldbug's ideal is the East Asian notion of a powerful but inactive ruler — wu wei.
Anyway, I think the argument is that the tyrannies of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao, etc. all came to power under romantic notions of restoring power to the people. They all destabilized the existing order and came to power using democratic rhetoric to mobilize (some of) the masses.
Huh? Democracy is responsible for Hitler and Lenin? Democracy is responsible?
Clearly the problem is in Democracy. Which I'm sure is why Hitler and Lenin abolished it.
[/sarcasm]
How about "people sometimes choose poorly, both in the individual and aggregate cases?" What's different about Democracy is that it has built-in self correction mechanisms that don't require the 3rd Guards Army.
There's another whole discussion in there on the nature of Man and Original Sin, but an engineer would describe Democracy's failings as "graceful". The catastrophic failings occur once Democracy is abolished.
BP, the soviet union had elections for 70 years, with about as much turnover as our congress.
Granted, we have contested elections. But that's the point. The great totalitarian movements were perversions of democracy and wouldn't have existed without it.
I don't see how you can call a democracy turning into totalitarianism a graceful failure. In the monarchies of the past the failure mode was a new monarchy, typically under a more able ruler. The system was no worse (if no better) although the transition was on occasion more bloody than an election in the US.
@Perfidy,
Hmm. Thought you were agreeing with me. The problem is that the economic situation with the Versailles treaty were such that nothing could succeed. And so the question was what form the failure would take, not whether it would fail. Failure through bellicosity is a non-surprising solution in that case.
What's I'm disputing here is the linkage of those ideals to democracy. They're both HIGHLY non-democratic...and both far more (as I suggested to Borepatch this morning) in the Rousseau-->Hegel tradition of central authority rather than the lockean tradition of individual rights.
But I'll borrow your statement here: "A divine right monarch was an absolute monarch but in a very different sense - he had a place, ordained by god, but so did his subjects."
My claim...it is the rights of the people against the government that define the quality of the government. What is the government NOT allowed to do.
The principal failure of the Chinese Empire, the Sun King in France, and Lenin were the same...there were NO restrictions on government power. The primary win of the Dutch, the English, the Americans, and Silicon Valley were that government couldn't figure out what was going on and who had rights to regulate something well enough to regulate it. And so prosperity evolved.
@Isegoria,
wu-wei is the thing. I had thought that previously we (me and some of the formalists) had agreed that almost all historical cases of wu wei were cases where the government was un-ABLE to act, not where it was not acting because it was smart. The question had been whether we could replicate that, or whether we need a different approach gonig forward.
I'll agree that their rhetoric was democratic. However, the GOP in Washington sounds fiscally responsible this week too. Rhetoric != reality for power-hungry bastards seeking control.
@Perfidy,
I'm with Borepatch here. Graceful failure modes are the key to the whole business. And autarchic systems tend to have really crappy failure modes.
I think the Tsar in russia, or even Chiang Kai Shek in China (standard military conqueror) led to the worst two excesses in history (Mao, then USSR, with Nazi Germany 3rd.). 2/3 of the super-horribles were at best nominally related to democracy, but rather takeovers from autocracies...with a wobbly middle period.
And again...the question is what rights do the citizen have against the government first...and what form the government has 2nd. As per a prior post, we as humans spent between 4-10K years looking for a way to restrain monarchies from screwing their populace 6 ways from Sunday. Holland and England were great because they found ways of restraining the monarch. But no one has yet solved the problem of restraining democracy. Switzerland and Madison's states vs. feds solution was the best thing going. It still works in Switzerland.
I believe Borepatch has come into this conversation with the conventional modern American understanding of what Democracy means — it's what we have here in America, flawed, but working.
[I believe I'm required to cite Churchill's famous dictum: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." (from a House of Commons speech on Nov. 11, 1947)]
Moldbug uses the term in the sense the Ancients used it, which is the same sense in which the founders used it — mob rule. Certainly the French Revolution was not Democratic in the first sense but perfectly Democratic in the second.
If we define Democracy to mean a system that successfully protects the individual rights of its citizens, it's hard to say anything bad about it. If we define Democracy as granting political power to the people, it's hard to say much good about it — because that kind of Democracy led directly to the Terror of revolutionary France, Hitler's rise to power, and the Communist revolutions in Russia, China, etc.
As Perfidy (Buckethead) said, the great totalitarian movements were perversions of [our style of] democracy and wouldn't have existed without it.
Is this just rhetoric? I think we can agree that the demagogues shouting "Power to the People!" can cynically spout manipulative nonsense to get themselves in power, but they're only able to harness the mob because the mob believes it deserves the power. The mob believes in Democracy — and the demagogues are happy to leave the distinction between mob rule and responsible government with checks and balances strategically ambiguous.
Aretae, easy one first - I was joking about Locke.
The movements that ended up, in the fullness of time, as totalitarian murder states are very much in the Rousseau-Hegel tradition. (But would they have been the same without Locke? Maybe not.)
I'm not altogether sure - though it is very much arguable - that the economic conditions in pre-Hitler Germany led inexorably to Hitler. The Weimar republic did not have to fail, just because of the externalities. Other nations at that time, and in other times, have endured the same or worse without collapse. Flip side, other nations have collapsed seemingly with far less obvious stress. The Weimar republic recovered from the drastic hyperinflation of the immediate post war period, and enjoyed several years of stability before again hitting economic stressors - but not as bad, really, as the 1919-1923 period in some respects.
Add economy, population resentful of the end of the war, communist insurrection, a poorly structured government all together, and then you get failure. No one of these could have done it - Germany had an inherently prosperous and well ordered people - social or governmental collapse was not foreordained.
I agree, but maybe wouldn't have phrased it the same, that that the right of the people in relation to their government define the quality. All though, maybe, are an important factor in defining, etc. I think there is a real difference in some of the states/governments/rulers you are lumping into one category. Chinese Empire/Sun King on one side, Lenin/Mao on the other.
Its the difference between authoritarian and totalitarian, and it is an important distinction.
With failure modes, I don't disagree that failure modes for monarchies, etc., can be bad. I argue that for Democracies they are worse, at least for real failures.
You talk about feedback - on the small scale, Democracy can win, because you can change leadership, etc., smoothly. But if the whole system tanks, you have a real chance of totalitarian dictatorship. France is the only nation that has repeatedly had democratic systems fail, and only once has gone totalitarian. It reverted several times to monarchy. (You know, maybe we should be thinking more about France between 1780 and 1950.)
Changing leaders, advantage: democracy.
At the failure of the system due to internal or external stresses, advantage: monarchy
Monarchy ---> Monarchy
Democracy ----> Hitler, Lenin, etc.
Finally, where did that wobbly middle period come from? It didn't just appear out of nowhere. Tsar Nicky was trying to introduce reforms, which got the nasty minded in the socialist set all hot and bothered - they sensed weakness. They sensed that everything and everyone they had blown up over the last century (including the Tsar's grandfather) was not for nothing.
And Chiang Kai Shek didn't cause Mao - he lost in to Mao in a conventional war. If anything they were brothers, not father and son.
But anyway. Restraining the government, or having a government that has restraint, that is the key. Maybe it's easier to restrain one monarch than a couple hundred million greedy fellow-citizens.
@Isegoria & Perfidy
Mob rule is indeed bad.
But 90% of Moldbug's discussion (that I've read) isn't around Mob Rule. It's around arguing that the core problem is democracy, not freedom. And I'm arguing the opposite.
The core problem is totalitarianism, be it divine emperors, sun kings, or communist scum, and governments that have the prerogative to do a lot.
Further...I really don't like the characterization of Communism. Have you read Marx/Lenin/Mao? I don't read a lot of power-to-the-people there. Instead, I read (in Lenin/Mao) that what will benefit the people is strong central leadership (the Moldbug position). Essentially, it's an attack on democracy as a bad idea, and seeking an effective monarchy. And in Marx, I read that people engineering socialism are mouth-breathing morons who don't understand the historical process.
The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese revolution were totalitarian revolutions. The Glorious Revolution and the American revolution were libertarian revolutions. In one case, people argued that government had TOO much power, and we took some away. In the other case, they argued that government had too little power, and added more.
Fundamentally, that's the distinction. How much power the government has over the individual. I _think_ that the formalist position is that more power to the center will through some complex chain result in less power being exercised. My expectation is that I've not seen that happen besides George Washington and Marcus Aurelius.
So...we've at least got that China was under proper (formal) rule when Mao took over. And Russia was under proper monarchic rule several months before Lenin took over. And Germany had a mess of a situation that makes the factors really hard to pull out.
2/3 of the worst atrocities the world has ever known were failure modes of autarchies. And 1/3 was too complicated to parse? And we want to blame it on democracy? I think it's a huge stretch.
In perfidy's approach
Military Rule in China --> Mao
Tsar --> Lenin
Mess in Germany after WWII --> Hitler
Autarchy seems to be the problem, with democracy hiding somewhere in the fringes...and it takes a LOT of digging to find it.
@Perfidy,
Took me 10 minutes to realize you had referenced Locke in an early comment. I used Locke completely independently of your usage. Heh.
I think that we have a model for restraining a monarch that was managed once (England, Magna Carta).
We also have a model for operating sans monarch called small government. Best current example is Switzerland and it's small cantons, weak federal government. Only thing this model requires is a hella-hard to invade place. Like Switzerland. Or America.
It's back to the key to government...and my claim is that Moldbug's off on a wild goose chase. The issue is what the government doesn't do...not how it's organized.
There's "Democracy" and then there's the Left's "Democracy in Action" - a mechanism prominently labeled "Democracy" but which is a mere skeleton of Democratic features, larded with the pork of political self-interest.
It means stuffing ballot-boxes (I did that in College), hiring Union thugs and intimidators, paying Academics - oh wait, that's unnecessary - paying people to vote a certain way (community organizing by ward heelers), Dead people voting, faking computer-results (Honduras), and in every way possible destablizing the playing field in favor of their own candidates. That's how Chavez came to power and what they were trying to flip in Honduras.
As soon as the external trappings of such "Democracy" are achieved its internal transformation begins as the rotten, pustular, bloated and maggot infested corpse of Socialism that snuck-in and died in the corner begins to stink-up the joint and the essential odor of Socialism is revealed.
I have just made a blog post with my thoughts. I'd love comments from everyone.
DirtCrashr,
As host, thanks for stopping by. I take you to be asking the question of whether Democracy can be done right (without massive cheating). That objection actually worries me.
I've read a bit of about how Mao ruled and he was not an autocrat. He was a ruler by theology and popular will. At no point during his reign was their anyone popular enough with the populace to challenge him. When Mao met opposition within his his government (they tried to have him removed from power) he destroyed them by mobilizing the youth of the country (cultural revolution) to destroy the power base that opposed him. He was at heart a managerial democrat. The people believe what he wanted them to believe.
An actual monarch would have asserted his right to rule and had the traitors tried and shot. In no case would he have ask the mob to rise up. Mao killed 40 million people, set back china for an entire generation to achieve what Elisabeth the first would have done with few deaths and zero disruption to her nation. That's the difference between democrat and an autocrat.
Aretae, I think your assignment of blame via probabilities at the bottom of the above post verges on meaningless. Certainly I was unable to extract any information from it. Not only are human beings NOT designed to process percentages, but assigning naked context free numbers there is just so ambiguous it can't be processed. I'm not on the whole Bayesian bandwagon. I'm an avowed frequentist. In my opinion, percentages should mainly be used to express degrees of emotional certainty in human cognition.
Also, in your above case, blame is not zero sum, so the entire structure fails immediately. Also, the implications are unclear - if democracy is 20% responsible for the bad things that happen, it doesn't follow that democracy is 80% good. Nor does assigning 20% blame for a democratic country's failure even compute, since imagination usually fails to superimpose a different government without entering an utterly unpredictable alternate universe. In other words, democracy was a 100% necessary portion of the chain of events as they occurred.
Sorry to get all tetchy on your numbers, but I've just been introduced to the whole Bayesian brouhaha. I'll have a post up shortly.
I guess the only way I can process the percentages is to imagine you are the monkey troupe leader, some displeasing kerfluffle has occurred, and you're disciplining those involved. Some combination of partiality and discipline is then distributed to each of the subordinate monkies, titled "Democracy" etc.
Which is exactly how percentages are intended to be used by humans. That's the proper English Standard meaning of percentages, an emo-rational hybrid of "sureness" based on addition rather than statistics. But it's certainly not Bayesian!
@Koanic
Well said. Let's try it again.
I think trying to assign very much of the blame at all to democracy is absurd.
I think there are a pile of factors involved, but to some extent there may be a primary factor. I think the odds of democracy being the sine qua non are no better than 10%...and that there are at least several well known, well defined factors that we ought to worry about MORE than democracy.
To have been clearer, I should ahve
Aretae, I think that Democracy is at least 17.4% to blame, if not more.
I think Koanic has a good point though - that's not a flat distribution type thingy. (stand in awe of my mastery of terminology) Even if Dem. was only 10% responsible - we'd have to consider its effects on the other causes. For example, I would argue that the doctrine of unlimited government is an outgrowth of Democracy - which right off would make democracy 60% responsible.
Also, very valid point in that even if it was only a minority shareholder in the evil of China, that doesn't mean its good. That might only make it a less effective evil.
Also, in response to your earlier comment, it's:
Collapse of Empire -> Weak Democracy -> Simultaneous appearance of Chiang and Mao -> Civil war which Mao wins. I don't think Chiang was ever considered as legitimate as Sun - he really was little more than a bigger than average warlord.
Collapse of Tsar -> weak dem. -> Bolshevist dictatorship -> civil war, which Lenin (Trotsky, really) wins
Collapse of Kaiser -> weak dem -> Hitler seizes power
There's a democracy in each one, right before the terrible evil. And remember, democratic ideas had been permeating the global noosphere for decades prior to all of these, infecting and weakening those regimes. That's what made the weak democracy seem a plausible solution.
@Grim,
I hadn't known that about Mao. Thanks.
@Perfidy,
2 items still:
1. Sounds like the collapse of systems is pretty bad. Systems under collapse lead to bad shit. Lenin, Stalin, Mao are all outgrowths of systems under collapse.
2. It sounds like systems under collapse that give absolute power to the government are really bad shit.
3. I think Hobbes/Rousseau get us totalitarianism, while Locke gets us Democracy.
Systems in collapse, bad - yes. But do they always lead to totalitarianism? No. England after the war of the roses didn't, nor did many other states in the pre democratic age.
Collapse leading to totalitarianism seems to be a recent phenomenon.
Again, I think France might deserve a look - they went totalitarian once - twice if you count Vichy - but all the other times their government collapsed they quickly adopted a new one, monarchy, empire, republic. Why is that, I wonder.
Hobbes led to Locke, he's not really in the same bag as Rouseau and his ilk.
The core problem is totalitarianism, be it divine emperors, sun kings, or communist scum, and governments that have the prerogative to do a lot.
This.
Permitting any exceptions, any expression of "we'll respect your natural rights except in cases of this-and-such," ends up on the exit ramp at Might-Makes-Rightsville. Always and everywhere, so far as I have seen.
@Ken,
Welcome to the party. Thanks for joining in.
Perfidy,
(A) I agree that it's recent, and that that's interesting.
(B) Hobbes was the position that looks most suspiciously like the Moldbugian formalists. Locke was the libertarian response. Rousseau was a hippie fruitcake from 1720. My argument is that Hobbes, Rousseau, and Locke are 3 distinct positions, and that Moldbug wants to toss Rousseau in with Locke...when said pairing is as absurd as the pairing of Locke with Hobbes. Libertarianism...natural rights...Individualism...this is not a leftist or a rightist movement. It opposes both equally.
Hobbes was the position that looks most suspiciously like the Moldbugian formalists.
Moldbug actually thinks Hobbes was a leftist. Moldbug's right-wing idol from the 1600's is Sir Robert Filmer, who wrote Patriarcha. Molbug also likes Josiah Tucker, who wrote a rebuttal to Locke. I believe that Moldbug's problem with both Hobbes and Locke is that they both believe that the will of the people/social contract is the basis of authority. Moldbug believes that in practice, this theory de-legitimizes existing rulers, which incites rebellion, and rebellion leads to unlawful government, which are almost always worse than lawful government.
I haven't actually read any of these guys, so I cannot really say who I like the most. But I will note that historically almost all rebellions/revolutions that claimed to act in the will of the people made things much worse, and tended to lead to government far more totalitarian and violent than what they had before.
Aretae,
You really think a good Bayesian would conclude that it's purely a coincidence that all the horrors of too-much government that you name occur during the era of democracy?
All the leaders took over in the name of the people.
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