To constrain the executive. 2000-10000 years of history demonstrate that roughly all kings all the time are horrid. They range from uninterested, and therefore only minimally oppressive to interested and(theref0re) atrocious. Democracy is an attempt to constrain the power of kings, whose power is known to be dangerous on a level somewhere between forest fires and Cthulhu.
I assert that while democracy has tried to prevent oppressive kings, it has failed, and seated instead oppressive "elected" leaders. Given that...the founders of the US seem to have understsood the problem better than anyone else. First, set up a power-tension between the states and the federal government...with purse-strings at the state level. Then set up a power-tension between the branches of government. And finally, set up a democratic system, so that the losers who don't accomplish what is actually preferred by the electorate can be thrown out. The problem is oppressive government...and republican federalism with democratic elections is the first large-scale attempt to solve the problem. Seems clearly to have failed...but it is never wise to try to dispose of a system without attempting to understand the problem the system was attempting to solve.
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The problem democracy, with either highly limited or mostly full franchise was designed to solve was that military power was out of synch with political power. You'll notice that democracy seems to go hand in hand with militaries where the middle class is the foundation. Systems are stable when political power roughly matches military power. Presently, in the US and most other Western countries, I believe that military power is seriously out of synch with political power.
Oh! I know this one.
The point of democracy is to give everyone a shot at the top spot. Some Athenian (or sophist) realized that not only is 'divine right' wrong, it's the opposite of true - kings have rarely had any special qualifications at all.
By symmetry, it's only fair to spread the divine right to everyone.
Or to put it in Moldbug's terms, someone's balls will descend and become plump. Everyone should at least have a shot at that. The one* reason I'll highlight is that otherwise the incentive is to change the system entirely, rather than supporting it.
*(Apparently I could go on all day with variations on this theme.)
Second, there's that whole Roman emperor thing. If there's a lot of power formally associated with one position, there will be stupendous efforts spent to gain that position. It is much, much better if that effort can be successful without bloodshed.
Well..that's modern democracy. Ye Olde Democracy was mostly about putting Sophists in charge, though it may have not been totally innocent of these ideas.
"The public opinion of voters was remarkably influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theatres.[1]"
Sound familiar? Not a coincidence, or an accident.
Monarchy was nowhere near as awful as you make it out to be. And democracy also has far more blood on its hands: Stalin, Mao. Hitler was impossible without the preceding democracy -- and Hitler of course still held elections, just as Stalin and Mao did. At least kings are sometimes uninterested in ruling; democracy never sleeps.
I know, I know: single-party democracy isn't really democracy. Right? Only nice democracies are really democracy. Thus, the problem is solved by definition. (Though I'll note that the USA's bloody war to conquer the CSA doesn't have this excuse.)
I will agree with you that, if you can somehow get it, a confederal minarchy that is strictly limited from doing anything except defending the several states from invasion is probably as good as you can do. But as we saw in 1789, and can also observe ongoing in Switzerland, minarchy is not a stable solution. The state always grows if the elites that comprise it want it to, and since it is sovereign, there is nothing that can stop it. The experiment has been tried, and it has failed.
The liberal democrat looks at the dismal history of actual limited government and says: this time I am gonna design it right. (Example.) I look at it and say: I can see why it evolves that way; it's logical that it would do so. You cannot stop a sovereign entity from doing stuff. So you must either abolish sovereignty itself (hence my attachment to anarchocapitalism), or you must design a sovereign system such that the elites that control do not want to expand it.
Leonard,
1. Claiming Hitler for democracy is kinda sane.
2. Claiming Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc for democracy is ludicrous, regardless that Moldbug does it. The Qaddafi held elections. Does that make him not a king?
3. I wasn't saying that Democracy successfully solved the problem. Just...that was the direction of problem Democracy was trying to solve.
4. A/C is my preferred direction as well, with an expectation that capitalist city-states, some of them near-formalist, are the realistic best thing we're likely to find.
Jehu,
You win for being even more cynical than I am.
I have a deep disagreement with the military power line at this point. I'd rephrase to economic power. However, I'd also suggest that the number of times when economic power and military power are out of whack historically is very low. So we don't have much evidence to split our positions.
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