The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy | Hacker News Reader

The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy

politico.com

31 pointsSubiculumCode48 comments

So long as the electorate is asked to vote on policies, democracy will fail because for large nations the policy issues are too complex for the electorate to deal with.

The original idea in the US was for the electorate to elect representatives on the basis of their character and intellect. The representatives would then study the issues and create appropriate policy responses.

In fact, there was even a second level of indirection to isolate the Senate from current passions and fads of the electorate by having the Senators elected by State legislators for 6 year staggered terms.

I’ve often thought that it would be easier for people to make votes on moral questions rather than policy questions.

I really don’t know why this is being downvoted, because that is what the research shows...

Because nobody but you has any idea what you’re talking about. What constitutes a “moral question”? If it’s not attached to some policy, then what, exactly, are we voting on? Seems like a poorly developed half-thought.

The original system was genius... basically, the voters pick the person they know in real life (30,000 people) who they trust. Those people make all of the upstream decisions. Sadly various idiots between 1789 and now introduced concepts like direct election of Senators, bound elactors, and — retch — primary elections, all of which will combine in their effect to produce the eventual death blow.

The original system was awful because wealthy landowners could do whatever they wanted. Appointed senators were awful because it boiled down to who could bribe enough legislators, and the electoral college system basically ensures that rural interests will always dominate the political system in the long-term.

.. wait are you saying it's not like this now?

I'm saying it was always messy, and it wasn't better before. It worked great in the US in the 30s and beyond because there was a large consensus around the New Deal, the government created a middle class that favored moderate policies because they had a stake in the system, and the Democratic party largely controlled the legislature for 60 years, which restrained the policies that could be enacted by the executive, and again...consensus around pro-social policies that contributed to widespread economic prosperity.

The shift to populist politics just mirrors pre-WWI politics.

Of course you're getting grayed down for stating the obvious because you CANNOT be telling HN readers that policy issues are too complex for them to understand.

You can tell me that some policy issues are too complex for me to understand, not because I'm feeble-minded, but because I'm not neck deep in the details all day, every day.

I think both that policy issues are often less complicated than you make them out to be, and also that the people in charge are unfit to deal with them. The problem isn't complexity, it's judgement. If I had to pick my pet peeve, look at public or private education and its policies. The questions are simple, the answers are crazy.

I'm not going to disagree with anything you've said. I would just maintain that connecting policy initiatives to the real world does tend to be rather complex in terms of budgeting, administration, staffing and oversight.

Now this is completely independent from the politicking that often deforms what should be common sense solutions like what you mention in your example above.

I'd say that part of the problem too is that the people in charge are willing to ignore the conclusions of good judgement in favor of graft.

Im one of the few who would not mind for the Senate to go back to being elected by state legislators. We have to balance responsiveness to the electorate and responsiveness to the mob.

Too many people end up on the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. These people end up overworked and want relief from a monotonous, stressful, overworked life, and aren't thinking further ahead than that. So they will indeed give up liberty for security.

It's ultimately because people use other people to accomplish goals, so it's always a big pyramid scheme.

There is probably no escape from this while human labor can help others achieve goals.

IMHO the problem of populism is not as centrally a threat to democracy as the article states. The more central problem as it recently manifests is called "same images, different movies". People read about the same events in two publications, and make two completely opposing interpretations, and go out there to defend their interpretation. It doesn't occur to them they might be wrong once in a while, as we all are. On this front, the article makes rather skewed distinctions between the advantages and disadvantages between social media and legacy media outlets, as well. Only because legacy media outlets supplied you with a narrative doesn't make them any more trustworthy than the cleaning liquid merchants you can see on TV in between broadcasts.

If you publicly chip away on people's trust in the most basic premises about governments, you're nothing short of a fool. Reining immigration is a good thing, because integration of immigrants is a lot of work which costs money, therefore cannot be practiced at infinite scale, and racism is not something that happens exclusively to white people. I swear I can wear a hoodie with my bleak, sewer-dwelling European face and not exactly look trustworthy to you, just as well. To argue that had anything to do with the skin color namely makes whoever came up with this example very much a racist instead.

I'm filing this article under "dangerous nonsense", therefore. We should invite populists of both sides of the aisle to debate issues with one another so that maybe, we might not think as ill of one another and courageously carry democracy into the next centuries, so that we can learn to deal with attacks on basic western principles like this one. Wait, I suggested we required courage. We're doomed.

This a load of nonsense FUD. It's all sensationalism in response to the current political climate. He'd be singing a completely different song at the height of Obama's presidency.

Even the language and word choices are FUD: "elites". Conspiracy theories work because people respond more viscerally to fear and uncertainty than to optimism.

Even more amusing: his argument is actually that (1) we basically didn't have a democracy because the "elites" ran the show, then (2) technology made the US more democratic, so (3) democracy will fail.

What? Because things are more democratic, the democracy that we never actually had is going to fail now?

There's a relevant quote from Heinlein's classic science fiction novel, Starship Troopers:

"There is an old song which asserts that "the best things in life are free". Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted… and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears. … I fancy that the poet who wrote that song meant to imply that the best things in life must be purchased other than with money — which is true — just as the literal meaning of his words is false. The best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony and sweat and devotion... and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself — ultimate cost for perfect value."

TANSTAAFL - There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Also from Heinlein.

I have a serious question, hoping someone can answer thoughtfully.

Why are populism and democracy - in this article and elsewhere - treated as opposites, or at least incompatible?

For me, I understand the definitions as follows:

Populism: "a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups"

Democracy: "a system of government held accountable to the wishes, needs, priorities, interests and voices of ordinary people - typically through representation"

If the populist thesis is that powerful elites, wealthy magnates and corporatists running their country disregard the concerns of ordinary people - couldn't that be true and also democratic at the same time?

Populism is always decried as unserious by media because they are biased towards status quo.

FDR was elected four times being a democratic populist.

EDIT: the paper does mention right wing populism specifically. It's dangerous because it's antidemocratic by nature.

I'm confused by this article presenting populism as not democratic. If people are freely voting directly, that's democracy (rule by the people). Whether or not their voting decisions are driven by populism doesn't mean it ceases to be democratic. Populism if anything is the pathological case of democracy. Democracy is essentially mob rule and one reason the US was set up as a republic using representative democracy instead of direct democracy.

Furthermore, this article only talks about right-wing populism and completely elides left-wing populism. The two go hand in hand, fueling one another because of reactionary-ism.

> I'm confused by this article presenting populism as not democratic.

Don't worry, the article and/or the underlying scripture appear to be confused about that, too.

It's considered one of the fundamental pitfalls of democracy[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

Its a good thing that America isn't a democracy. [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic

It may or may not be a good thing, but your quip certainly hints at the kind of structural choices that have gone into the design of the federal government (for example the two houses of congress).

Populism is generally predicated on one cohort of the population denying democratic rights to another or other cohorts.

Where it is, imposes, or results in authoritarianism, it's inherently anti-democratic.

Its good that the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution prevent cohorts from doing this.

History suggests a poor record of compliance.

That's only with the people who don't uphold the Constitution.

Unfortunately, tyrants—inclulding demagogic ones—rarely uphold laws that interfere with their tyranny.

Like other laws, it doesn't prevent anything. At best, it provides people who are inclined to prevent it a framework which helps avoid getting so bogged down in unending debates about where to draw lines about the boundaries as to never be able to take coordinated action.

At worst it demobilizes action when people get the mistaken idea that the existence of a law is sufficient to guarantee correct behavior without vigilance.

Aristotle thought that democracy required some level of maintained equality to be stable. Madison thought that elites should run a democratic republic so that economic equality wasn't needed.

We expanded the concept of who has franchise, but never expanded the equality. A certain level of economic and educational equality was assumed by the founders when they constructed a government where only landed gentry could vote.

You can't have it both ways. The current system will keep skewing towards pitchfork-ville until elites realize that it's in their self interest to decrease the level of inequality.

We may call them democracies, but I venture to state that there are no democracies existing in the world today. What we do have is a lot of oligarchies which are labelled as 'democracies' but are in fact no such thing.

If that rich billionaire or multinational company has more political clout than you, you are not living in a democracy.

Then in your view there has never been any real democracy, and there will never be.

There will always be some people more influential than others, people like to have leaders to follow and listen to, it’s who we are.

People instinctively back the leader they feel is the luckiest because there is a subconscious hope that leader's luck will bring them luck as well.

This is what I believe was the biggest reason for the outcome of the last election.

Was always told when I was in the Marines the Masses pay for the few. Easy to see the masses pay for the few corrupt politicians. The few corrupt companies who spend billions to lobby. On and on down the line. We have lost morality and instead feed on emotions and greed.

Anyone have a link to the paper?

Maybe here, top of the list?

https://uci.academia.edu/ShawnRosenberg/Papers

Here you go: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8806z01m

Thanks!

>The structural weakness of democracy.

>While recognizing that the rise and fall of RWP movements reflect fluctuating social and economic circumstances, I want to suggest that recent developments are manifestations of something more fundamental. They reflect a basic structural weakness in American democracy, one that renders it ever more vulnerable to the threat of right wing populist alternatives. This weakness is that democratic governance in America (and elsewhere) has not been successful in creating the citizenry it requires. Thus it is left with citizens who lack the requisite cognitive and emotional capacities to assimilate its cultural definitions and norms, to function in its institutional organizations and to participate in its public sphere. The claim I make here about the nature of the citizens in modern democracies, particularly the American one, is not new. However a consideration of its structural underpinnings and implications is.

Earlier in the paper he described the characteristics of a citizen in a liberal democracy. It is very unlikely that they exist in any great number, and instead a liberal democracy operates by elites conditioning the thinking of the mass of citizens through education, media, and other means of swaying public opinion. Thus, liberal democracy is an oligarchic authoritarian regime that tries its best to not appear to be such. It current quandary is how to exert sufficient control without revealing its true nature.

Democracy is hard work. And as society’s “elites”—experts and public figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities that come with self-rule—have increasingly been sidelined, citizens have proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-wing populists...He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists’ recent success is that “elites” are losing control of the institutions that have traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses. When people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.

This is really total nonsense. That doesn't sound the end of democracy to me, that sounds like democracy in action. He just don't want the rule by elites in the guise of democracy to end. There's nothing anti-democratic about these policies he's tarring as "racist" and "authoritarian", which I assume would be things like stopping illegal immigration or securing one's country's territorial integrity (which, by the way, don't even ever happen due to the intervention of elites). But I guess he finds these things self-evident. That isn't good enough for me.

It's kind of hard to blame the people for Trump when the people didn't choose Trump.

Between the structure of the Senate, House, and the Presidency, plus things like gerrymandering and voter suppression, how much influence does the voter even have?

Well, enough of the people must have chosen Trump because Hillary ain't president.

Comments like this never get downvoted on Lib HN, yet are just as offensive to conservative readers as conservative comments are to liberal readers. I'd flag it if I could.

The people didn't pick Trump because we don't function in a presidential system where a) the people elect the president directly, b) the ballot functions on a one vote, one man principle.

The president is elected by gaining enough Electors, whose voting totals do not correlate with the total amount of votes nationally for the president. Instead, the votes are weighed based on the state's congressional delegation and senators, which is based on a population proportion for the house and none of the senate. So some states have a higher impact on the EC total than others; for example, a voter in California has less marginal impact than a vote in Wyoming.

The comment isn't wrong, and its pretty telling that modern conservatism is triggered and upset when facts are presented.

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