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Comment by williamDafoe | Hacker News Reader

If you are a fan of Alexis DeTocqueville's "Democracy in America" you probably realize that he left off the very ending of that book title, "Democracy in the American Midwest" !! A lot of the really positive things he saw were seen among hardworking people of the MidWestern USA.

It's ironic that Ohio was so advanced because it used to be the USA's Silicon Valley (birthplace of American Aviation and many other inventions) but now has fallen economically the most among Midwestern states ... It's become the most Republican state now ... Coincidence? I think not!

I've noticed an alarming number of torturing crimes come from Ohio lately, too, thankfully it has displaced California which had a terrifying reputation after the Manson murders of the late 1960s!

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I’m a huge fan of "Democracy in America. But you’re missing a critical point. By 1830 when de Tocqueville was writing, the seeds of the Republican Party were already sown in the Midwest. Ohio was (essentially) Republican then for the same reason it’s Republican now: it’s a culturally and religiously homogenous place. And it’s also the same reason it was an egalitarian democracy—high social trust and social consensus. The Midwest is the closest America has ever come to the egalitarian socialism of Northern Europe, which is similarly homogeneous.

By contrast, we have never seen that model of Midwestern democracy replicated in a multicultural society. When you have these different groups, you lose the social trust, you lose the consensus. You end up needing elites and top-down hierarchy to mediate those disparate groups. Contrast say Minnesota with New York. Or consider the history of machine and ethnic politics in Chicago, all the way up to the recent election.

You may find this diagram on Page 2 of this paper interesting: https://dial.uclouvain.be/pr/boreal/object/boreal%3A211443/d...

It theorizes how to build social trust, without top-down hierarchy / constant mediation, through the cultivation of strong institutions and a common identity. It's an interesting premise that opposes progressive ideology. However, I have yet to read the books it references, nor have I examined the history behind its findings: https://www.amazon.com/Strains-Commitment-Political-Solidari...

A simple and obvious fact that has an incredible explanatory power in understanding the motivations and actions of the ruling class.

Massachusetts was remarkably homogeneous for the first 100yr and they ran the kind of authoritarian theocracy that the Taliban would be proud of.

I guess they voted for it in the same way that there are plenty of dictators that always win an overwhelming vote but it kind of begs the question what is democracy? Is it possible to consider a society in which the elites (clergy rather than landowners in this case) tell the peasants how to think and what to think and the peasants then turn around and vote for "yes we'd like more please" a democracy? Can it really be a democracy if the system all but precludes bottom up grassroots change? I think such a society is not a democracy. It's just a well run theocracy. It only "works" so long as the elite don't become out of touch and do things to run it all into the ground.

Well, true.

All kinds of governments can form with all kinds of demographics. That's for sure.

I guess looking at stats, today Mass. does better than Minn. in almost every category as well. (College sports excepted.) I guess Mass. is the closest we have in the US to authoritarianism meets capitalism, and, yes, I suppose it worked out really well for Mass. as a historical practice. But I also wonder where you have the largest number of happy stories? Mass. or Minn.? That's not as easy to check as the stats.

By the way:

Can it really be a democracy if the system all but precludes grassroots change?

Yes it can. Democracy means everyone gets a vote. We can't say it's not democracy when people don't vote the way we want them to. That's the first step down an even darker path.. If the way people are voting precludes grassroots change, then the people have spoken.

>Yes it can. Democracy means everyone gets a vote. We can't say it's not democracy when people don't vote the way we want them to. That's the first step down an even darker path.. If the way people are voting precludes grassroots change, then the people have spoken.

If the rulers have designed a system where change the existing rulers have not condoned is all but impossible then have they really spoken? There's a reason I compared it to a dictator that keeps getting "elected".

At what point does it become not a democracy? There isn't an obvious distinction. It's necessarily a subjective judgement call.

Surely 2023 Russia isn't a democracy despite having elections. What about 1802 United states? 1859 Georgia? There are many factors that go into it and there's isn't a simple and easy answer.

I think it's probably easier to be a democracy in lower touch government systems simply because there's less axis of potential policy and therefore less potential for "I hate this but I'm voting for it anyway because of some other thing" combinations and therefore any expression of intent by the people is more clear. For example contrast a simple ballot measure with any given US presidential election that always begs the question "are people voting for one guy and/or party or against the other guy and/or party". The intent of the people is more clear in the case of the ballot measure (yes I know direct democracy vs representative induces an apples and oranges situation but it still illustrates my point).

What you're expressing a desire for is pluralism. Not necessarily democracy.

Athens was a democracy, but I'm guessing you likely would not have approved of it because it was anything but pluralistic.

You're talking about an ideological ideal, where the grassroots is as heard as the clergy. A laudable goal, but democracy is a mechanism. You use democracy to get to that ideal. But you may need more than simple democracy. You may need a rule separating church from state to stop what happened in the Commonwealth. Completely non-democratic, because you're precluding people from voting for certain people, but it's protecting pluralism, and pluralist thoughts and ideas. Of course that rule does you no good if people just ignore said rules, but that's another discussion.

> If the rulers have designed a system where change the existing rulers have not condoned is all but impossible then have they really spoken? There's a reason I compared it to a dictator that keeps getting "elected".

I don’t think you’ve established that the Massachusetts Bay colony had a system that prevented change that wasn’t condoned by the existing rulers. I would argue it had a system of enforced social consensus that could change (and did change) as the consensus changed.

“Dictators” come in two varieties. One is someone like Putin, who enforces policies the majority may or may not support. But another is someone like Lee Kuan Yew, who presides over a consensus-oriented society that keeps getting elected because the consensus supports the direction of the country. The latter is still a democracy, and in a way a more perfect democracy. The authoritarian element serves not to oppress the majority, but to overcome the heckler’s veto and allow the government to actually do what the majority wants.

And, of course, the structure of power in the Massachusetts bay colony was much more distributed and democratic than Singapore. It was a sort of collective authoritarianism rather than top down authoritarianism.

I agree with your first point, but I think the Massachusetts Bay colony is actually a model of democracy. It was an authoritarian theocracy, but not a top-down one. It was built on distributed social consensus between autonomous congregations, a structure that survives to some extent to this day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congregationalist_polity

And it was a vehicle for “grassroots change.” They came over here and built exactly the kind of society the people wanted. Maybe it’s not the kind of society you’d want, but it’s the kind they wanted.

The Taliban analogy is interesting. I think democratic theocracy would have been a much better model for our nation building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan than the secular liberal democracy we tried to impose on those countries.

> ... It's become the most Republican state now

This is easily verifiable as false, so it makes the rest of your comment suspect. https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/most-republican-states/

Based on the rest of that sentence you quoted, it is the most among midwestern states.

thanks, that wasn't clear at all. But even among Midwest states, that is not true. (KS, MO, SD, ND, NE are all more republican) https://www.bls.gov/regions/midwest/midwest.htm

Agriculture in general was Big Tech at the opening of the 20th Century.

I think manufacturing is more similar to big tech (it WAS tech) in both type and impact.

> it WAS tech

That’s a pretty small view of “tech”. Development of repeatable agricultural practices for predictable yield is absolutely a technological accomplishment (and not just because there were machines involved)

By what measure has Ohio fallen more than other midwestern states? I suspect it ranks better than average compared to most midwestern states in terms of health, income, education, etc.

I was curious and checked. Looks like it consistently ranks in the bottom half of the twelve midwestern states:

Life expectancy: #10 of 12

GDP per capita: #8

Median household income: #10

Literacy rate: #9

High school graduation rate: #9

Minnesota, North Dakota, and Nebraska rank highest by most measures.

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