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> I don't think a smart and good-intentioned person today goes into politics here.

I don't think this is a localised phenomenon. PG mentioned in one of his essays that following the industrial revolution and the rise of modern-day capitalism, a lot of the driven individuals who would have gone into politics, now decide to go into business.

Here in the UK, we had a lot of noise made about political reform this year after a fraught, tense election. Talking with friends about it though, we feel that nothing is likely to change until the type of politicians we have changes, and that seems unlikely to happen. All the people we think would make good politicians don't want to go into politics, and we end up with a situation where we just get career politicians who grow up with a particular way of thinking and a particular mindset regarding politics.

All the clever, driven people are busy running startups. Who'd take politics over that?

I'd think there a couple of smart guys at places like Harvard who go into politics. I went to a wealthy middle class neighbourhood High School in California and there were some very smart guys there (top of the class) who were planning to go to an Ivy League college and then go into politics.

I don't doubt it, but being intelligent is only a part of it, maybe a small part. There are also leadership skills, communication, vision, and just plain luck with being the right person for the time.

I don't think anyone will say that Pres. Obama is not brilliant. Many people might argue about his goals, but I don't think that anyone could argue in good faith that he has failed spectacularly at bringing about the change that he promised.

(not to pick on Democrats alone; GOP politicians have obviously failed every bit as much, even though some of them have brilliant minds as well)

The real problem is that you have to "play ball" with entrenched institutions, both public and private, in order to get anything done. Political parties exist to perpetuate their franchise and prevent outsiders from being elected on their own terms, and they are much more effective at executing this task than they are at governing well.

> All the clever, driven people are busy running startups.

No. Don't fall into the "my profession is smarter than everyone else trap". There are very many very smart people with something to contribute to governance who have no interest in running startups.

I used to feel this way, and it's actually part of the problem. It makes it ok for techies to disengage, politically.

We've had a case here in the Toronto mayoral election where I now wish that I'd done some organizing, instead of just voting. Voting is not enough when the issues really matter. Your opponents know this, and will use it against you.

I would recommend following and getting involved in local politics.

Yes, bureaucracy is frustrating, but you have to deal with that in business too. Not all companies are < 20 person shops.

Don't disengage. Your opponents won't.

UPDATE> We're used to hearing sermons on the importance of voting. The thing is -- your individual vote doesn't matter. What matters much more is how well you can organize others to vote in support of your goals.

I did not say my profession is smarter than everyone else. I was merely using startups as a familiar example that was pitched towards the audience (of HN) as one of many things that people find more interesting than politics. Apologies if that was unclear.

I'm sure there are a great many able-minded potential good politicians in many other sectors of business, as well as other areas like charity-work or the armed forces.

The point is not 'which non-political area are they in', the point is 'they're in ANY non-political area'.

You are right about "career politicians" though - I have immense respect for the older generations of conviction politicians, you might not agree with them but at least you knew that they were basing their policies on some fundamental personal beliefs.

These days UK politics looks more like an extended and expensive reality TV contest where people say/do anything to get into and maintain power purely for the sake of it.

On the other hand that makes politicians focus on their customers (i.e. voters).

Democracy can be viewed as an attempt to make career politicians listen to the demands of normal people.

"All the clever, driven people are busy running startups."

I know a few engineers, academic scientists, lawyers, medics and people in the armed forces who meet both of those criteria to a level at least equaled by any start-up founder I have ever met.

I've worked at startups, currently founding my own, and some day I aspire to running for office.

Luckily they don't overlap too much, you can't really be elected to federal offices in your 20s.

Now will an engineer beat a lawyer? (because odds are, my future campaign will be against a lawyer), who knows.

While I was reading your excellent comment, I realized I could simply replace "Hungary" with any country of the former eastern block or the Balkans and still get a correct view of how things are over there. Many ex-Yugoslavians are, just like yourself, wondering if a revolution could have sped up the transition. I must tell you I don't think it would have. Just look at Romania, for instance: They had a violent revolution and things aren't actually peachy over there even after 20 years. I think it is hard for us to admit to ourselves that the process is going to take much longer. IMO, generations that were born and raised during communism have to leave this earth before anything can truly change.

That said, the problem of government-sponsored innovation, which you mention, isn't exclusive to post-communist countries. It is an (extremely wrong) EU policy.

What you're talking about is a problem of the political culture (that takes centuries to establish) and of the legitimacy of the core institutions and of the political system (democracy).

I don't see how a revolution instead of a peaceful transition would help in any sense.

Right on target. I'm from Poland and I can definitely relate to problems described by Maro (although we seem to have fared better than Hungary in the long run).

Everybody thought that re-establishing Democracy (with a capital D, to signify a pervasive culture of democracy along with ethics, not just a political system) would take several years. It turns out it might take generations.

The worst part is that people are used to subsidized life and instead of DOING something they expect the government will provide.

The worst part is that people are used to subsidized life and instead of DOING something they expect the government will provide.

This. I'd call this attitude the number one problem across most of Europe. (bad political climate is a massive problem, but I think its root cause is this) Riots in France due to raised pension age? Multiple attempts at budget reform in various countries failing? Students on the streets complaining about studying conditions due to poor funding?

Something has to give, and we're approaching the point where the answer isn't "higher taxes" anymore. (we're already well beyond the "more debt" option) Except nobody is willing to sacrifice anything personally.

Amen! I qualify for a lot of government help as a student, but because I qualify for a good job, I'm working 30+ hours a week to pay for my schooling without having to go into debt or get grants from the government. I'm not a big fan of Obama, but it makes me sick when I see people around me complain about how he's ruining the economy, and then go by X-Boxes and motorcycles with the money the government gave them for tuition.

Agreed. I am from Ukraine and after the USSR broke up a "democracy" was established, except the people in charge are basically the same ones who where in charge under the communists. Same agenda, just different pretense. I think it will take several generations to realizes that nobody is going to come and fix the problems.

I think what Marco is alluring to is that if the change isn't coming from the inside, because of an awareness of it's necessity, it's going to be very hard to maintain an actual change.

In other words without a clean swipe, the power structures are still maintained making it possible for those who ruled before to rule again even if their titles are new.

I'm not really qualified to have such a discussion, but I guess the reasoning is that, if you have an actual revolution, you can quickly throw out the old crappy stuff (bad laws, bad taxes, gov't agencies, etc.) and introduce new, better ones. Then, more importantly, if a nation had to fight for its political system, it will value it and not fuck it up.

Eg. as I describe in a post below, our current gov't is using its current power to change the constitution to better fit its short term political goals, in other words they don't respect it, unlike eg. the way the U.S. Constitution is a symbol of the country's core social values.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Constitution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unite...

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...

Rules chosen in haste are very far from guaranteed to be better than what they replace. Most likely, in the massive rush to replace everything, cronies and political allies will carve off chunks, loopholes etc. to profit from.

The USA is different in that its institutions grew up over a few hundred years, starting out with a fairly trivial population and minimal government over a primarily agricultural people, and growing the state in response to crises. It's certainly important that it had a very good core in the constitution and the early amendments (bill of rights etc.); but that just laid down the architecture of what grew like a crystal afterwords.

Unfortunately, there's a brand of anacho-libertarianism in certain influential chunks of American thought, especially in economic circles, which believes that government itself is evil, and that if you only overthrow it, everything will be better. They tried that with shock therapy in Russia, and to a degree even tried it again in Iraq - no planning for aftermath etc.

It's my opinion that almost every part of a well-functioning state is balanced between strain in multiple directions, getting larger and getting smaller, regulating more and regulating less, clamping down on moral offenses and easing back on others, etc. These kinds of strains oscillate with the political winds, and the organizations that are grown in prevailing winds are stunted in one direction or another, and only corrected when they've gone too far, in a crisis.

In the light of this metaphor, it should be clear that an overthrow isn't the right recipe to grow a good new state: the organization won't have had the time and crises to grow in balance with its competing stresses. Instead, the immediate insiders will be unstoppable political gales, deep structural faults will be embedded into the heart of the operation that guarantee the politically favoured factions rents for decades to come.

I speak of an Irishman, who has, of late, longed for a revolution in my homeland, but recognizes it for the folly it would be. My country's primary problem is that it has too many representatives, too much clientelism, too much of politics is cynically local, and above all too much voting is based on tribal allegiances that date back to civil war nearly 100 years ago.

If it's any consolation, Austria got rid of the Soviets in 1955 and yet the situation you describe sounds extremely similar to the one here. The main difference seems to be overall wealth - GDP per capita is about 3.3x as high here, despite being neighbours. Neighbours on the other side of the Iron Curtain for 3-4 decades.

I don't know what the answer is, but I have a feeling it's not violence. The countries of former Yugoslavia to me don't seem to be doing better than those that emerged from Soviet rule peacefully. It's hard to judge from the outside, but the societal problems there seem even deeper.

The people of former Yugoslavia weren't really fighting the communism, they were fighting between themselves. It wasn't a revolution but a mixture of civil war, agression, ethnic violence, etc.

I am aware of that; my understanding is that the sudden release from the grip of communism also released this brewing internal tension. I've been lucky enough to avoid getting caught up in any sort of revolution, violent or not, but pure black & white "us vs. them" rebellions seem to be rare these days. Any other kind of violent uprising tends to end with some kind of societal rift due to the former oppressors living among the formerly oppressed or having to cooperate in some way. Presumably, the more violent, the deeper the rift. I strongly suspect the original reason for the revolution to be irrelevant to that part of the outcome.

Here in Canada we never got rid of Soviets... Actually we never had them in the first place.And you know what ? The amount of government bureaucracy, corruption, cronyism and nepotism is staggering.

> A lot of people say that "we should have made a revolution", what they mean is that the "free", externally imposed peaceful transition may not have been the best thing in the long run.

I think you are concentrating on the wrong word: "peaceful" instead of "external". A revolution need not be violent, and either way it implies that there is a real chance a sufficient percentage of citizens is ready to move on from the current system although both violent and peaceful revolutions are prone to slipping back toward the old system or some other form of authoritarianism, for different reasons: violence also attracts the wrong elements whether in itself or as opportunists whereas a peaceful transition may not be able to remove all the remnants of the old system.

The fundamental idea, though, is that the society needs to be ready and willing to change internally. In a way, as much as it infantilizes people, when most of a nation has grown up with a powerful authority, it is hard if not impossible to go straight to relative liberty. Part of it is cultural, part of it is the seeming evolutionary human trait of being either submissive (most people) or dominant (few people). It takes some time for a submissive person to learn to fend for themselves, and as we see with "highly developed" societies today, many are still highly susceptible to needing leaders.

Of the famous recentish revolutions, it should for example be remembered that Marx stipulated the "communist revolution" should happen in the highly industrialised nations (ill-advised as the idea of armed revolution is). Russia in particular, a backwards agrarian empire, was about the last place he thought would be ready for it. And turned out he was right.

Edit: clarified wording of drawbacks of violent/peaceful revolutions.

Thanks for the comment, you may be right wrt. to "peaceful instead of external".

> Of the famous recentish revolutions, it should for example be remembered that Marx stipulated the "communist revolution" should happen in the highly industrialised nations (ill-advised as the idea of armed revolution is). Russia in particular, a backwards agrarian empire, was about the last place he thought would be ready for it. And turned out he was right.

Do not forget the marxist model was exported by Russia wherever it could (Easter Europe block pops in mind) and failed in every case even if the country was industrialised. It is just plain wrong. Even China ditched it and now has real chances of becoming a superpower.

China was (at that time) also a pretty backwards agrarian empire after its more glorious days. I do not want to delve too far off-topic, but then you are talking about two completely different things:

A) An internal revolution (borne out of people's desire to change their system in the idealised version);

B) An already-failed-at-communism totalitarian state's external enforcement of totalitarianism upon a mostly unwilling populace.

The latter will, of course, not work. The former might.

>>Russia in particular, a backwards agrarian empire, was about the last place he thought would be ready for it. And turned out he was right.

Hmmmm, communist regime turned the agrarian empire into world's 2nd industrial power, that won the biggest battles in human history and was the 1st to send robots and humans to space.

And killed off a sizeable chunk of the population.

Russia until the first world war was one of the fastest growing economies in Europe, though from a low base. So you can't really compare, without a time machine.

I've always wanted someone smarter than me to compare the US to Canada as a case study for or against revolution. It seems one could learn a lot by comparing the violent revolution that created the US and the slow and peaceful transfer of power that created Canada. Since the cultures are so similar, it's striking that the 49th parallel created such different paths to statehood.

Do you really think England would have been willing to let Canada go without violent precedent? Point is, I don't know if the future US had Canada's options.

And about Hungary and economy, there is a Diaspora of tech workers from Hungary; the country is obviously badly managed. A pity.

And about revolution, don't forget that Hungary tried one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956

It might have been that history which resulted in harder Soviet control -- and a bit worse transfer to freedom, than the rest of Eastern Europe in 1989?

Reading this only makes me wonder one thing; Do you really think it would have been anything different had there been violence in you revolution ? Do you think anyone different would be running the country now ? Do you think years of violence, revenge and deeply nested hatred would make things better ?

You can probably tell, but I think not. Violence thrown into the fray only makes matters worse. IMHO

Personally I'm against all violence, but here's a story.

4 years ago a voice recording was leaked, where our democratically elected president (F. Gyurcsany), who's been in power for 4 years, said in an internal party-meeting that "we fucked the country up really bad".

As a result, tens of thousands of people, including me, went out on the streets to protest and demand he resign. A very small fraction of people (a few 10s, mostly soccer huligans) started burning cars and breaking windows. Police responded of course, and shot tear gas and rubber ammo at the crowd, I remember a tear gas canister almost hit me on the head. The mayhem continued for a couple of days, plus we had another similar situation a couple of weeks later on a nat'l holiday. (The damage caused by the huligans to fellow citizen's and gov't property was probably around a few million dollars.)

In the end the president did not resign, which I thought is outrageous, but with police shooting at mostly peaceful protesters, including members of parliament from the opposing party being hit in the head with rubber bullets (not pretty), public opinion shifted, so eventually, 2 years later he did resign, and then in the 2010 election his party went from ~45% support to ~15% support. So overall, the protests and ensuing mayhem worked in the sense that it, and the goverment's response to it shifted public opinion.

So what happened after?

The then-opposing party went from ~45% support to >66% support, they won the elections a couple of months ago, which is important because in our system if you have >66% you can basically pass any law (2/3 majority).

So we were all pretty hopeful that the then-opposition, now ruling party would use its huge popular support and power to do great things.

The verdict is not out yet, but it seems that these guys, although they're very much different from their predecessors, aren't that good either, and unfortunately with their 2/3 parliament majority they can wreak parliamentary havoc (eg. they just changed the constitution to fit their short term political goals). A friend of mine more knowledgable in politics said that our system is basically not designed for a single party to have a 2/3 majority.

Final twist: the then-president F. Gyurcsany is actively working on his comeback =)

So, overall I do think that sometimes you gotta go out to the streets and protest, because it does have an effect, but as the above example shows, it's all pointless if you don't have good politicians to take over.

Is it really that big of a secret when some party is "fucking a country really bad"? The fact that a politician was heard saying it should not have changed things. The level of debt, regulations and taxation is pretty much public knowledge. And so, if a subsequent party gains power and does nothing about those issues, there should be equal outrage.

I've just been rereading de Tocqueville's recollections of the 1848 revolution in France. He remarks on the pervasive corruption of the July Monarchy, which came about--how else?--through a revolution. Not an especially violent one, but a revolution even so.

> Their best bet is to unite with South Korea in a painful way (eg. forget their own laws, taxes, gov't agencies and crappy gov't run companies, which means tons of people loose their job, and adopt what they have in South Korea), the way East Germany united with West Germany.

Who knows. The German unification is still a work in progress today.

The UK is an interesting case, we have never revolted either. We're definitely worse off for it. Longest working hours in europe.

EDIT: As pointed out we do not have the longest working hours in europe, but we do in "western" europe.

And I was too hasty to describe the UK has having never had a revolution, I should perhaps constrain it to "the English."

I didn't vote your comment, but "Wikipedia" does not agree http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yearly_working_time_2004.j...

Point taken. However we work substantially longer than France, our neighbours who are a stone's throw away with a similar national history, except they had a successful popular revolution. I am not saying there is a direct causal link but it forms a part of a general cultural divergence with regard to the population's relationship to the state and to authority that I believe stems from Britain's relative lack of revolutionary culture/history compared to other similar countries.

Yes, you have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War

It was a long time ago but it was a very important turning point in British history as it has lead to a transition from a strong king & weak parliament monarchy to a weak king & strong parliament monarchy and eventually constitutional monarchy and democracy.

The english civil war was not a popular uprising against the state by the populous, in the way that the French revolution was. The soldiers were largely paid professionals fighting for politicians. Most english paesants were not ideologically invested in the conflict. That is why these events have not had the same effect on the national psyche and culture of the English, their idea of what England and Englishness is, that other nations' revolutions have had on their people.

The failed 1745 rebellion certainly did leave a huge impact on the culture of Scotland.

There have been more revolts in what is now the UK than I can list easily... some were completely successful and ended up with regicide, or the effective independence of that part of the island for a few hundred years.

The most recent case that I can think of, was that soldiers had to patrol Glasgow with tanks in 1919 to suppress what was perceived, probably incorrectly, as an attempt at a Marxist revolution.

At a small scale things like the Battle of the Braes on Skye where people stood up to the Clearances eventually led to huge reform in the shape of the Crofting Act.

So I would hardly say that we've never revolted.

[Edit: And of course there is the history of the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland as well]