Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship | Hacker News Reader

Political failure modes and the beige dictatorship

antipope.org

47 pointscstross56 comments

Hard to argue with his conclusion. In the UK, the three main political parties are shockingly similar; I can't think of a single truly-significant policy difference. As an example, the 'left wing' party wants to restrict university tuition fees to £3000pa, whereas the 'right wing' party wants them to be £9kpa. Such things are the limits to our political discourse.

They even look the same, like slightly-morphed versions of Tony Blair. Same suits, same accents, just different tie colours. Honestly, I find it slightly spooky.

If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do), then remedying this within the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement structure gets any traction, the System will squash it.

The only way that I can see is to try and work around it - to create new structures and forms not as competition to the current system, but as subversive alternatives. Bitcoin is the best example of this at the moment, and it will be very interesting to see how that plays out. Make no mistake, the prospect of growing BTC adoption is genuinely threatening to the Beige Dictatorship, and a crackdown seems inevitable - but its success less so.

> If you agree with Mr. Stross that this is a structural problem (and I do), then remedying this within the system seems pointless. So what? Trying to replace the system seems equally doomed, because as soon as your replacement structure gets any traction, the System will squash it.

I think it's a shame that guerilla gardening didn't take off more. Or that graffiti artists don't also clean up bad graffiti.

Or that there are not more voluntary home gardening schemes - there are a bunch of people who enjoy gardening but don't have gardens, and a bunch of people who don't enjoy that kind of thing (or who can't do it) but who do have gardens. There must be some kind of way to get them together.

Unfortunately, doing it within the system means insurance and criminal records checks (and the misuse of those) and etc etc etc.

I've heard two game theory ideas about why politics works the way it does.

The first is: When you have three political parties and each party has about a third of the vote, it makes sense for the two parties that are closest to merge, giving them two thirds of the vote, letting them win and implement their policies. So electoral systems like in the US and UK naturally tend towards being two-party systems.

(There are other countries with political systems that don't tend towards two-party systems, but these have their weaknesses too; Belgium's multiparty system sometimes doesn't produce a government at all.)

The second is Hotelling's Law [1] - to win elections, both parties want to attract floating voters/capture the middle ground with centrist policies, so both parties end up next to each other.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

Liquid democracy (delegative democracy) might be a potential alternative. It has its problems, but it would at the very least be an interesting experiment.

http://wybowiersma.net/pub/essays/Wiersma,Wybo,A_global_advi...

Liquid democracy is a hybrid between direct and representative democracy, that provides better incentives to vote. It was invented by G. Tullock in 1967, and it, and very similar ideas, are also named proxy voting, and delegable- or delegate cascade democracy. Its core idea is delegation. That is, citizens can either vote directly, or voluntarily assign their vote to a proxy that will represent them, similar to how this happens in stockholder voting. Also, as in stockholder voting, people can vote by themselves at all times. The selection of a proxy can either be pictured as temporarily passing on ones voting right, or as automatically copying the proxies vote onto ones own ballot paper. Another important property of TDD, and the one that makes it different, is that delegation is transitive, in the sense that the representative can, in turn, transfer his collected votes on to another proxy (...read the paper for more).

Well, the guy has a obvious leftish slant in some of his opinions.

But excluding his pontual opinions on some issues, he is mostly correct.

And that is very unfortunate.

But what else can we expect?

Democracy, is only good as the people voting. Take a look at what happened in Egypt, people wanted democracy, removed the dictator, then the sunni majority of the country obviously elected those they wanted, a sunni guy.

Then he changed the constitution a little, the constitution is almost the same, and in most areas improved, there are one thing that is very questionable:

Instead of the laws being "inspired" by Sharia, now they are "inspired" by Sharia according to sunni islam.

Bang, there you are, the other half of the country, mostly non-sunni muslims and christians, are very upset, and screw democracy, now we want you to come out of power because if you don't we will throw molotovs in your palace.

EDIT replying the guy below, because I got seemly slowbanned or something (I am getting the message "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks."):

Oh, I am from Brazil, to me US center is right...

(I say that US has two parties: right, and even more right).

But I am referring to gay marriage (it is a traditional point of the left, specially if you are a follower of Frankfurt School or of Gramsci) and drug decriminalization (Another point that the left likes more than the right).

I am personally against gay marriage (actually my opinions in marriage are quite complex) and pro decriminalization.

Out of interest what points would you say give it a "leftish slant"?

NB I'm not being snarky, I'm genuinely interested as it seemed fairly neutral to me. But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie.

It's one point CS missed in this otherwise excellent article: the redefinition of words robs the public of the ability to discuss certain concepts.

In this case, the label "leftist" (= meaning "bad") is now commonly applied to people worried about issues of social and civil justice, people who engage in political dissent, criticizing corporations and their influence, being non-conformant with the all-pervading religious undertow, being wary of "law & order", or applying scientific methods and solutions to political problems.

As such, the leftist label is in common usage as a curse word that automatically taints dissidents, but from what I can tell it's happening in American lingo only.

I believe you can also tell public overexposure to Fox News by looking at the frequent invokation of Sharia law, as shown in this sentence which is somewhat resistant to semantic analysis:

> Instead of the laws being "inspired" by Sharia, now they are "inspired" by Sharia according to sunni islam.

It's ironic though that Sharia law is often portrayed as one of the main threats to freedom by people who actually favor the western equivalent of Sharia in the sense that they, just like islamic extremists, want a justice system that closely resembles a religiously infused small-town court system with broad powers to regulate everyday personal affairs, such as who you are allowed to have sex with and many other "morality"-based legal decisions.

I don't know. I think left-of-center types could take back "leftist" and similar labels if they wanted to. See "queer", "geek", the mascots of both American parties, etc.

It's confusing why you would be complaining about left-of-center being outcast when America has just re-elected a left-of-center president and when the media is awash with "whither the Republican Party?" features. It seems to me that the left is doing fine (if not better) right now.

>America has just re-elected a left-of-center president

This is exactly the problem. Everywhere except in the US political bubble he is solidly right wing.

The redefinition of people like Obama as left wing is exactly what Udo and others here are talking about.

What about Obama would put him in the right-wing "everywhere except the US" (meaning Europe, I take it)?

He has moved the U.S. to the left as much as was possible in his first term. He would have moved it farther if it were feasible but the U.S. government is large ship and it takes a while to turn.

What specifically has he done to make the US government more "left" other than health care reform (based on Republican proposals but for the sake of argument lets allow that as a liberal cause)?

I'm surprised it's not obvious that Obama is leftist, but...

He supports raising taxes over cutting spending. He placed two leftist justices on the supreme court. He has cut military spending significantly. Supports gun control. Repealed don't ask don't tell. Supports gay marriage. Supports carbon taxes. Favors expanding social welfare programs. Favors debt and inflation over balanced budgets. Raised the minimum wage.

Conversely, issues where he falls on the right side of the spectrum are few and I would challenge someone to come up with a list.

Also, don't confuse his accomplishments with his political alignment. For example, I'm sure he would have created a single payer healthcare system if he could.

Obama is center-right, for now it seems.

He is taking several of Gramsci positions in social issues.

But I won't say he will become a communist or anything close to it.

Also I say "leftish" because it IS "leftish", not because I deride the left or something (I am a former socialist actually)

Not to criticize the blog's politics, but to inform:

"prison-industrial complex", "non-heteronormative", corporations as a primary source of harmful behavior, complaints about privatization, austerity is the problem not overspending

You can reach the same broad complaints about modern Western democracy starting from other political alignments, but the particulars he chose point to a left-of-center (but not communist) political alignment.

Well yes, I am left of centre.

But I was trying to articulate an argument that doesn't rely on that.

Seen over and over again in the comments on Charlie's blog -- and elsewhere -- is that the perceived center for the USA is well to the right of the center for the UK.

This may actually represent a basic difference of opinion, but I suspect it is simply another (set of?) chaotic attractor on the acceptable spectrum of debate points.

I would argue that the American right and British have similarities but that they desire fundamentally different things.

For example, enhanced federalism isn't a primary goal of the British right.

"enhanced federalism isn't a primary goal of the British right"

I suspected for a while that the leadership of the Conservative party (and a lot of Conservative voters) would be delighted to see Scotland getting independence, but they can't really say that publically.

Similarly, I suspect the leadership of the Scottish National Party would be horrified if we actually got independence as what I suspect they really want is to maximise what Scotland gets as part of the UK. Obviously, they can't say this either....

I'm guessing he is a fan of these policies, "But we've somehow slid into a developed-world global-scale quasi-police state, with drone strikes and extraordinary rendition and unquestioned but insane austerity policies being rammed down our throats, government services being outsourced, peaceful protesters being pepper-sprayed, tased, or even killed, police spying on political dissidents becoming normal, and so on."

> But then again I am the same nationality as Charlie

I would point out that the Conservative party in the UK just voted 400-175 in favour of gay marriage.

Actually that's incorrect.

The parliament (all parties) voted 400-175 in favour. The ruling Conservative party voted something like ~130-~135 (slightly against, with ~30 abstaining).

The point is still valid though - what is considered right wing in the UK would largely be considered left wing in the US.

Just to point out that the House of Commons voted that way - that's the combined vote of all parties eligible. The Conservative party was rather split on the issue, I think only a (largish) minority of the Conservative party itself voted in favour (although I can't remember the split offhand). That's still rather better than you would have got a few years ago, but then the Conservative party is now basically split down young/urban/secular-ish and older/rural/religious-ish lines and votes on these issues tend to be somewhat predictable.

Of 303 Conservative MPs, 139 voted against and 30 abstained. So 44% percent of Conservative MPs were in favour.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9851322/Cameron-acc...

'leftist slant ... but'

You make it seem as if sounding like a leftist discredits him. In any case, you are right about what happens to the newborn Arab democracies, but these countries have very immature political systems and they are not analogous to the much more mature western systems. Democratic elections is only one feature of a well functioning state, the rule of law and accountability take much longer to grow roots, and only then does democracy show her true value.

I think the existence of a Political Class (which as Charlie points out, is an inevitable outcome of our current system) is one of the main problems.

Personally I would like to see a random election system whereby every X years a random group of Y people are chosen to be MPs for the next parliament. It would be a civil obligation, similar to jury duty. Each person would only be allowed to serve once. That way the MPs would not be insulated from the world outside of the political sphere.

In the UK at least there might be some, for me, rather undesirable consequences of such a scheme - for instance we'd probably get the death penalty back.

Luckily they couldn't do that -- not without quitting the EU, which would result in an entirely different clusterfuck. (And I need to blog about the second-order consequences of that at some other time. For starters: the way the City of London would respond (mostly by pulling the eject handle and relocating to Frankfurt and Paris), the way the US multinationals who use the UK as an Anglophone business centre in the EU would respond (ditto), and how the Commonwealth would respond ("we only loved you because you were a cheap way to get our exports into the EU. Bye!") ...

Unfortunately, the UK (or a post-independence Former United Kingdom) leaving the EU seems to be a clusterfuck that seems to be gaining a surprising amount of momentum.

The City of London cannot pull the eject handle and relocate. The City of London is a separate legal entity[1] with it's own laws and rules, and it's those rules that meant that the trading that took down Lehman Brothers was conducted in the City of London, because it couldn't have really legally taken place elsewhere.

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc

You're missing the point: the institutions that are headquartered there conduct a huge volume of Euro-denominated derivatives trading, which becomes impossible if the City loses its license to do so, and it's hard to see them retaining it if the UK leaves the EU. So those banks would have to relocate their investment arms to somewhere in the EU. That's got to be worth several points off the UK's GDP. Instant recession -- and it's not recoverable.

The ancient Athenians agreed with you that sortition is more fair than election, for many metrics of fairness.

That would just make lobbyists and bureaucrats more important. Would your grandmother know how to draft a law governing water purity standards?

Also juries are known to be easy to manipulate. Perhaps legislators are as well, but I don't see government-by-jury as being clearly superior.

That's not a bad idea!

I personally would like to see very simple laws passed:

a) to be able to work as a politician you must first have been working at least x years in the private sector

b) if you're father / mother is a politician, you cannot become a politician

This would solve two of the biggest issues with politicians in Europe:

a) gross incompetence

b) conflicts of interest

In Belgium there are a lot of "son of..." which are becoming ministers and whatnots. And there are regularly scandals about public funds disappearing in the pockets of families where both the father and one of its son are in power.

"a) to be able to work as a politician you must first have been working at least x years in the private sector"

So someone coming out of the armed forces wouldn't be able to directly stand for election - that strikes me as an awful idea.

e.g. Paddy Ashdown was in the SBS and MI6 (!) before becoming a diplomat and then a politician. I'm not a supporter of the Liberal Party but he strikes me as precisely the kind of person who should be in politics - he actually has opinions and views based on his experience in the real world!

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

Any kind of restriction to this leads to abuses and disenfranchisement. Must have X years experience? Must have a University Degree? Must be at least Y years old? Must Earn Less than/greater than/between a certain value? All you do is just cut people out who aren't part of the status quo.

One thing which is hinted at, but not explicitly called out, in this article is that some politicians are just batshit insane.

See for example the recent politician who plead guilty to perverting the course of justice. He got a camera generated driving penalty. He put his wife's name on the ticket, forcing her to take the penalty to avoid political trouble for him.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21320992)

His ex-wife is alleging some remarkable things about him too.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21372250)

Some might say that resigning is the honourable thing to do. But he did this ten years ago, has denied it ever since, and even when it went to trial he tried very hard to get the case dismissed. (That failed twice.) He only left when there was absolutely no option for him.

This kind of single-minded idiocy affects many politicians of all parties.

Blair and Bush saying that Iraq was connected to Al-Qaeda; Iraq had weapons of mass destruction; Iraq was ready to launch WMD within 45 minutes; Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" in May 2003; these people are so disconnected from reality that it must be a pathology.

This echoes a lot of things that Noam Chomsky talked about in Manufacturing Consent (both documentary film and book originally published in 1988) esp. the idea that one of the ways the status quo is sustained in a democratic society is to encourage vigorous debate but only within a narrow scope of acceptable opinions.

Oh good, I'm glad that I'm not the only one who got about a third of the way through the article and said "well, yes, this is pretty obviously the way things work if you've read Manufacturing Consent or similar critiques."

The differences of opinion between different critters inside the Washington DC alternate-reality bubble are greatly magnified by how hard they pretend to fight over them.

While I agree with the general sentiment, we should remember that while things might seem bad now, the general state of things for the average middle-class Westerner is unquestionably better than at any time in history. Just half a century ago we a decade of crushing world war, and before that (in America) crushing civil war, and not that long before that kingdoms and tyranny, and things go way downhill past that.

Now that's not to say that everything is peachy, that things can't be improved, or that we shouldn't strive to do so. I guess Stross's question is, can things be improved given the current system? I don't know. Some days I suspect that human pettiness, fallibility, tribalness, and forgetfulness will doom us to forever repeating a cycle of violence and revolution.

On a side note, sometimes I feel that America, despite our relatively prosperous position in history, is on the knife's edge of falling over into a blatant Minority-report-ish surveillance/police state. Look how fast it happened to other countries in history that didn't have the overwhelming military power and surveillance infrastructure that America has in place today. What would it take for the country to tip over the edge? Could we stop it if it happened? Would we want to? (Apropos: today on NPR they had a quote from Brennan at his hearing where he said, without a hint of irony, something along the lines of, "drone strike killings of Americans will never be used for people who have committed crimes in the past; only for people who pose a threat to America in the future.")

I'd love to have source and context for that last quote.. not because I don't believe you, but because it seems rather scary and vaguely important, and the more details the better.

Possibly this recent DOJ White Paper? [PDF]

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/020413_DOJ_W...

The "beige policies that nobody wants" reminds me of the reliance on "fairness" within debate at the moment. Raise taxes on the rich and cut services to the poor because you can persuade people that it is "fair". Everyone gets poorer but its okay because our society is so unequal who would even notice? They get away with policies that know one really wants because they are usually directed at someone else (richer or poorer than me). We have replaced empathy with simplistic politics.

Beige politics is surely intellectually frustrating, but what if it is quite optimal from the utilitarian point of view?

Maybe we should not measure politics by how interesting it is?

Sometimes the middle-of-the-road option is worse than either the left or right options. Also, don't underestimate how important it can be to have definitive winners in debates. Compromises in heated debates can lead to prolonged foot-dragging and resentment that can be worse than both the disease and the cure.

I like Charlie Stross essays, and I'm glad this one was submitted here, but when Stross writes,

"The range of choices available at the democratic buffet table have therefore narrowed until they're indistinguishable. ("You can have Chicken Kiev, Chicken Chasseur, or Chicken Korma." "But I'm vegan!") Indeed, we have about as much choice as citizens in any one-party state used to have,"

then I have to say no. Evidently Stross has no lengthy experience in living in a one-party state. I do. The range of choice for voters in the United Kingdom, and especially the range of channels for dissent there or here in the United States, far exceed the range of choice available to citizens in a one-party state. Been there, done that. (The one-party state I lived in during the early 1980s, Taiwan, still had rigid mass media censorship and political assassinations both at home and abroad, but even at that was rather benign compared to many current one-party states. Taiwan has transitioned to democracy. Throughout Stross's lifetime and mine, the U.K. and the U.S.A. have offered far more political choice to citizens than has any one-party state anywhere in the world.)

Stross is a science-fiction author by occupation, and maybe the next stage of his self-education for spicing up his science fiction stories is to learn more about political science, especially public choice theory.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....

http://perspicuity.net/sd/pub-choice.html

http://pileusblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-left-and-publ...

Stross's point is quite correct that people developing their careers in politics look for channels to increase their influence on the system, whatever their ideological proclivities. That is human nature--why work hard in political activism to NOT end up with influence? But the counsel of despair in the interesting article kindly submitted here is an exaggeration. There is still diversity of point of view in the system, and plenty of opportunity for activists to make meaningful changes, including the example he gives: "Marriage equality is a fundamentally socially conservative issue, but reflects the long-term reduction in prejudice against non-heteronormative groups." Choices still abound. Advocate for those that you desire.

When there is an important new policy change needed (think environment conservation) - then in beige politics it gets coopted by all or most of the parties. In this way they stay beige (and the green party never becomes important) - that looks boring and is intellectually frustrating - but it is so much better what happens in dictatorships (even when they are overthrown by revolutions and the politics become so interesting and exciting).

For the last three elections in a row (at the very least), the will of the US' citizens has been very, very clear: "give us good health care, stop the war, keep the rich from killing us all."

No one has offered more than small parts of that, and the small parts that have been promised, have not been delivered in good faith. So yes, the US is a one-party system; Taiwan, your example, is not the only way to do it.

He's not saying anything much different than what people like Vilfredo Pareto(of Pareto principle fame) and Oswald Spengler and others of German Conservative Revolutionary movement... they were right of course but they also provided an ideological basis for fascism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilfredo_Pareto#Fascism_and_pow...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decline_of_the_West#Democra...

I hate cars analogies. But now I'm going to make one.

Sixty or seventy years ago, cars were unsafe, contaminant, ugly, heavy... add to this that they were driven mostly by (often drunk) males.

What has changed? How? Did some of the changes annoy big corporations?

That's it. What are the problems with democracy now? I'd say:

- Defective control of party functioning: represenatives hiding behind party line, opaque lobbying, etc.

- Bad representation systems. Winner takes it all that prevents new minority parties to enter the system.

- Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives.

These are general non-partisan problems, couldn't they be solved on their own?

> Opinion created and spread top-down through media and representatives

I would argue the emerging long-tail media is reinforcing special interests and gotcha politics. Some of it is top-down but much of it isn't.

Hmm. Michel's "Iron law of oligarchy".

Summarized as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."

See also Niklas Luhmann's[1] idea of autopoiesis[2] in modern social systems, the political system being an example of a modern social system. Luhmann contends that modern social systems are functionally differentiated from each other: legal, political, mass media, and so on. Autopoiesis is the idea that these social systems contain within them the means for their own continuation and effectively do not exist for anything other than to continue their own existence. In order for these systems to come into being one needs self-reflexivity, this is provided by language. No language, no autopoietic systems (this is my contention). "An autopoietic system is to be contrasted with an allopoietic system, such as a car factory, which uses raw materials (components) to generate a car (an organized structure) which is something other than itself (the factory)." The common natural example (of an autopoietic system) given is the biological cell. The primary function of a cell is to keep the cell being a cell. Sure, different cells do different things but they all use the raw materials of their environment primarily for their own upkeep.

Ok. So given the Iron Law and Autopoiesis how do we stop social systems from becoming self-serving? This is the challenge of our times. Luhmann is a pessimist. He contends that you _can't_. Should we be pessimistic? It is the nature of these systems. We have never been able to have a full participatory democracy because of the coordination problem. Does the internet change this? Can we show that the internet allows everyone's hand to be on the tiller so to speak? Another idea might be to go with the inevitable flow of the way systems "evolve" and "mutate" over time and come up with a virtue theory for social systems much like we have a virtue theory for human behavior. So we should 1) reject monopolies (in politics, single party systems; in commerce, single telecoms carriers, single os vendors, and so on), we should 2) prefer transparency over opacity (think wikileaks), following on from this we should 3) prefer freedom of expression over censorship (an example often given is the advantage protestant countries had over catholic countries because of the papacy banning certain titles thus handing economic advantage to protestant publishers).

Anybody else got any ideas? Sorry for the vagueness and haphazardness of my thoughts.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis

edit: clarification, elucidation, and grammar

I would add that long-tail media consumption reinforces the tendency toward special-interest groups.

we haven't been on the receiving end of a bunch of jack-booted fascists or their communist equivalents organizing putsches

This brings to mind a quote [1] from George Carlin:

"When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts, it will not be in jackboots, it will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley smiley."

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKQs-jDI7j8 (around 4:00.. though the whole thing, especially the end, is relevant here)

The "beigeness" in europe was specifically engineered to avoid another world war. Everyone chooses a slightly different shade of beige in their own country and then sticks to it. Every couple of years they all go to an EU summit and sign a treaty that enshrines more "beige" as the way things are done.

Is moderate prosperous apathetic "beige" better than the alternative? The founders of the EU seem to think so, it's not like there are any great ideological alternatives is there?

"They concede that the opposition may disagree with the party in power on precisely how the state must operate, but agree that it should operate..."

I don't get that sentence from TFA. Is the author really against any kind of statism?

Even most libertarian don't argue that there should be no state operating at all. Only crazy anarchists advocate for no state at all, like in Somalia ; )

I am not anti-statist. I was trying to set out the difference between systems that acknowledge a Loyal Opposition, and totalitarian/one-party/monarchical systems, where the centre of power explicitly rejects the legitimacy of other groups' aspirations and desires for how the state should be run.

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