The Power to Tax…

I really didn’t intend to obsess over the US government shutdown, which is not of great importance.

However, while I was distracted catching up on some
pulp monarchist fiction, @Outsideness has only gone and threatened to carry a modified form of Montesqiueuan separation-of-powers into the neoreactionary era.

I think that is a terrible mistake. The British, of course, were going through the process of abandoning the separation of legislature and executive while the US constitution was written — Queen Anne appointed Tory Ministers in spite of Whig Parliaments, but by the 1830s this was recognised to be unworkable, and any Prime Minister who could not win a vote of confidence would resign. The legislature owned the executive.

Against this, @Outsideness points out, reasonably, that the USA has not been the worst-governed nation over the last couple of centuries, so mere association with the treasonous blackguards of 1776 is not quite sufficient to dispose of the idea of separating tax-raising and policy into different bodies. If it is such a bad idea, how did the US manage with it up until 2012?

One way is that, because both the House of Representatives and President have both been elected by the same electorate, they have tended to be mostly in step. The periods of “gridlock” when they have been in opposition have generally been recognised as temporary, so the limits of the powers of each side were not fully tested, both sides assuming that a period of united government would follow at some point. (It’s interesting that the concept of “gridlock” has disappeared from the lexicon over the last six months — it is
something that can only happen to white presidents, not to The Holy One. The disappearance of gridlock is one of the reasons I take the current process to be a permanent shift in constitutional arrangements).

Another has been the unusually legalistic attitude of Americans: more than any Europeans, including British, they tend to accept that something should be done just because it is the rule, whether or not it iseems like a good idea. Presidents before Obama accepted that they could not do much — certainly not anything very expensive — against the will of Congress. The “balance of power” between the executive and legislature could last as long as it was not tested.

The other reason why separation of powers worked longer in the US than in Britain is that the US government was not always the government of the US. In the division between the States and the Federal government, the “Keep the lights on” functions were predominantly State concerns, until the mid-20th Century.

The idea of assembling a government from independent self-perpetuating institutions is not one I would dismiss out of hand. There are strong echoes of the role of the medieval Church. But dividing the taxing institution from the domestic policy-making institution is either a sham or a shortcut to civil war.

Where, then, did it come from? My assumption has always been that the origin of the House of Commons is that it embodied the people whose active cooperation was needed in order to practically gather taxes in 11th to 16th Century England. The King ran his tax demands through them because if they, out in the country, chose to be obstructive about assessing and gathering the tax, he simply wasn’t going to get any. The small to medium landowners handed over their portions to the Royal Treasury without a fight because they knew that everyone else was paying on the same basis, and they weren’t just being landed on and raided, which is what it would look like if the King raised taxes without going through any kind of collective.

By the time of King Charles the Martyr, it was no longer clear that this was the case, and so Parliament’s control over taxation had gone from being a practical physical power to being a constitutional entitlement. As such, it could be lost and needed to be fought for. Since the ensuing fight was, by my measure, where progressivism first started to obtain power in the world — to become a party rather than an occasional aspiration, I strongly suspect that the separation of powers of taxation and executive is the worst idea in the world. That is all.

Shutdown

It’s not the role of the neoreaction to get too occupied by current affairs. The day-to-day obsessions of domestic and foreign policy are mostly irrelevant to our concerns; we must set our sights on a larger scale and a longer term.

The US Government shutdown, however, is a somewhat larger event, in which the actual forces shaping events ought to show themselves, and which we must be able to account for as a test and a demonstration of our theories.

I have not seen such an account, except for James Donald’s tightly constructed argument that, on the part of the Republican Congressional leaders at least, the conflict is a sham.

Even accepting Jim’s thesis, the wider story still needs explaining and putting into context.

There is a kind of dynamic equilibrium of politics under the Modern Structure. The Cathedral moves left at a controlled pace. It drags the political establishment behind it. The parties and the media drag the backward mass of the people behind them.

The last 15 years, under the Bush and Obama administrations, have seen an increase in the rate of expansion of the economic activity of the Federal Government beyond the previous rate. We can think of the old rate of leftward drift as the equilibrium rate, though of course that’s oversimplifying a complex situation.

That departure from the equilibrium rate of advance produced the Tea Party, by damaging the illusion that flyover country could oppose what was happening simply by supporting the Republican side of the political class.

The belief of the political classes in Washington today, received from the Cathedral, is that the White House is the government, and the House of Representatives is somewhere between a historical curiosity and a large lobbying firm. The motive for this is that the Presidency is easier for the Cathedral to control (particularly when it is in the hands of a leftist of weak character).

Leading Republicans, accepting the Cathedral position that the President is allowed to make domestic policy, but with their lucrative jobs threatened by the Tea Party, are adopting the fake-aggressive position described by James Donald.

Once they lose, the right of the Presidency to rule alone will be established. Congress will be a dead letter. It is still just possible that the Cathedral could attempt to revive Congress at some later time if they need to restrain an uncooperative president. But I would consider that unlikely — for a start, there’s no indication where an uncooperative president would come from.

The change in the constitutional roles of Congress and the Presidency that we are looking at the middle of is a prime illustration of the way the Modern Structure achieves major advances. There is plenty of noise, but no meaningful debate: the case for the new constitution consists primarily of shocked outrage that anyone could consider retaining the old one.

From a European perspective, it looks most like the situation when a new Treaty extends the powers of the European Union. In those cases at least there is a debate at the time, but once it is accepted, it is done for ever, and can no longer be considered negotiable. If a country like Denmark or Ireland votes down a change, then there is a much-resented delay while a new vote is arranged, and then finally the new consititution can be considered finished. It is then beyond any challenge. To suggest in France at any time since 1993 that the Maastricht treaty be rolled back would be utterly extremist, though it passed in a referendum by a vote of 51% to 49%, and Denmark needed two attempts to get the right answer.

From the American standpoint, it more concretely resembles the McCarthy period. McCarthy believed that the permanent US government was following a foreign policy at odds with that publicy avowed by the elected government, and that that was a crime. The facts and the law were on his side, but the Cathedral wasn’t, and his defeat meant that the question was settled: elected bodies no longer had any claim to control the State Department. The current conflict is about taking the power to control the Federal Government’s spending policy out of the hands of the elected body.

(Correction: according to Congressman Devin Nunes, the president does not have the power to spend as much as he wants on whatever he wants — he can be stopped if a supermajority in both houses of Congress opposes him. So that’s all right then.) None of this makes much difference in the long run. It is not as if Congress was ever a serious constraint on the steady march towards communism. I just think that it’s a big enough change in the system’s own terms to require an explanation.

Kingdom 2037 discussion

Kingdom revisited
Konkvistador brought up Kingdom 2037 on twitter yesterday, and elicited a few comments.
@admittedlyhuman was turned off by the idea of criticism of the King being illegal. I would refer her to, for instance, the recent article at Theden on
Georgia’s Rose Revolution, or to my thinking on Bo Xilal. The state has to protect itself against revolutionaries, and has to do so efficiently enough to not turn into a police state. The most efficient method is not to wait for enemies to build a mass movement and then take the mass movement on in a fair fight — it’s to make the existence of such a mass movement unthinkable so nobody ever starts it.
That doesn’t mean that the most efficient way is to listen into everyone’s private conversations and drag Fred Bloggs in front of the Star Chamber because he said the King has a big nose. I’m not talking about going the full Thai, nor about prohibiting discussion of the merits of alternative policies. It is only the position of the King that is beyond criticism.
That was the only criticism made which I reject outright.
Mike Anissimov and C-LAR noted that a total tax level of 25% was high, since medieval monarchies ran at around 10%. 10% is a good target for the running costs of the state. But medieval monarchies often ran deficits, which had a destabilising effect. They also started out (at least in England) with very large landholdings, which were gradually depleted. A King in 2037 needs to be accumulating assets, not exhausting them. A new landed aristocracy has to be built, and that will not come cheap. In the very long run, I would expect taxation to fall to close to zero, and the administration to be funded from the profit on the royal estates, since even low levels of taxation will cost more in terms of impairment of asset values than they bring in in revenue, but in the medium term those estates have to be built up, stability has to be bought, and 25% is still a good deal less than modern people are used to.
I mentioned on twitter that the King has to compete for allies with revolutionaries who can promise to tax at 50% and deliver the profits to their supporters. The whole point of advocating monarchy as an ideal is that he does not have to compete on equal terms, but he still needs to be a strong figure, and a 17th-century beggar-king borrowing to pay his tailor’s bill is not a strong figure.
C-LAR was also concerned about immigration, and the adverse effect on “the proles”. Again, this is a legitimate worry, addressed in the commentary article. The phrase “not tightly restricted” is perhaps misleading: I never imagined open borders or unlimited immigration; that undesirables will be kept out goes without saying.
However, I think that even quite high levels of immigration can be beneficial provided that cultural integration is expected, and the immigrants do not become a politically significant bloc. The idea of an income tax specifically on foreigners (it may not be clear from the original article that I do not expect ordinary people to be paying income tax) is for symbolism as well as revenue: immigrants are permitted to live in the country, they are not entitled to live in the country. I pointed on twitter to my later article on Antidisestablishmentarianism, which is another example of the idea that the majority native culture is openly and concretely privileged over foreign and minority cultures.
In the end, immigration is a practical question, not a matter of principle. If it causes more trouble than it’s worth, cut it down.
Added: Further discussions on Twitter
Before addressing the tax situation, I need to make something explicit that should be obvious but hasn’t been mentioned: the level of tax is entirely up to the King. There is no “man behind the curtain” forcing a 25% limit on him: the only reason for him to moderate his demands is the fact of the long-term value of the country to him being higher if its economy is allowed to flourish, and of high taxes restricting that flourishing. If he believes that the economy will benefit from massive state investment projects funded by a 40%-50% tax level, that is what he will do. I think that would be a mistake, but there’s nothing to prevent it. The whole point of the system of government I’m sketching out here is to make the sovereign as safe from rebellion as possible; it would be dishonest for me to try to say, “obviously nobody would tolerate a 30% income tax, the King would be removed immediately”.
Anyway, @DocCLAR was very interested in the details of taxation. As discussed above, I’m suggesting a level of taxation around midway between what we have now and what is actually necessary to run the state. I don’t have very strong views on the actual manner of taxation, but the main considerations are the distorting economic effects of the tax, and the cost of administering and enforcing it. I had suggested Land Value Tax plus an assortment of duties and tariffs on specific goods, plus the income tax on foreigners. The thinking behind that is that LVT is relatively non-distorting, and maintaining information on the ownership and estimated value of land, while not free, is something that is reasonable and useful for the government to do anyway. I dislike general income taxes and sales or value added taxes, because they need the government to check the value of everyone’s day-to-day business in order to assess, which is both expensive and intrusive.
The reason for putting more weight on the administrative cost of taxation than on the economic impact is that the economic impact can be reduced by reducing the tax level, whereas heavily administrative taxes create a de facto tax floor by needing to collect an amount justifying the existence of an organisation of the size necessary to administer it. So while a general sales tax would be less economically distorting than, say, a fuel tax, it would require a much larger bureaucracy to collect.
Again, the reason for suggesting a (by reactionary standards) high level of immigration is that rich immigrants attracted by efficiency and stability can be a source of state revenue that doesn’t require the government to interfere economically with the mass of the population.
Tariffs are another easy-to-adminster source of revenue, but would interfere with the idea of England recovering its position as a world trading hub. I don’t completely rule tariffs out, depending on circumstances.
I’m more concerned with these governing principles than with the details of tax policy, which is not my area of expertise. Any questions anyone has about the mechanisms, advantages, and alleged drawbacks of LVT can probably be answered by searching on Mark Wadsworth’s blog.
It turned out @DocCLAR was largely concerned with the tax question in the context of central versus local government. For England I don’t think the question arises — England has been ruled as a single tax jurisdiction for almost a thousand years, give or take the farcical failed experiment of local councils over the last century. I’m taking on plenty in drawing up a blueprint for my own country; there are enough American neoreactionaries to do the equivalent work for theirs.
There is, of course, the possibility of the United Kingdom surviving in some form into the neoreactionary era. I don’t really see any practical mechanism of real devolved power; following the logic of the Act of Union, Wales and Scotland would be under the full authority of the King, though his rule in Scotland might well be adapted to Scotland’s different traditions. An alternative of an independent but friendly Scotland would be perfectly workable. A hostile Scotland working with the International Community to Restore Democracy to England, on the other hand, would be a probably-fatal problem; I don’t think a 2037 regime could survive the internal conflict that war with Scotland would produce.
It seems a little unlikely that after any large upheaval the English King would continue to rule Northern Ireland. There are conceivable circumstances, on the other hand, where the British Isles become reunited. Ireland, though, like the USA, cannot easily present monarchy — still less an English monarchy — as a return to the nation’s traditions, so that’s also a problematic contingency.

Thinking about Urbit

OK, I’ve been driving myself nuts trying to work out how Urbit does I/O when it’s implemented using Nock and Nock doesn’t do I/O.

It’s now the middle of the night and I think I’ve got it.

Since it’s not in the Nock spec, and the Nock spec is defined in terms of nouns, it can only be hidden in the implementation of a noun.

A naive reading of the spec suggests there are two kinds of noun:

  1. a literal value (arbitrary-size integer)
  2. a pair of nouns

The only way it can work is if there are at least four kinds of noun

  1. a literal value
  2. a pair of nouns L and R
  3. the stream of input events
  4. a nock invocation on a pair of nouns A and F

Further, the “opcode 2” reduction in the Nock evaluator is not implemented by recursing the Nock evaluator, but by returning a type 4 noun.

A type 3 noun “counts” as a pair, where L is the next event in the input stream and R is another type 3 noun

The runtime creates a type 4 noun where A is a type 3 noun and F is the system-implemented-in-nock

It then calls a native function output(n) on the noun it created.

output(n) looks at the type of n. If it’s type 1, it treats it as an output event and “performs” it.

If it’s type 2, it calls output on L, then on R

If it’s type 4, it runs the Nock evaluator on it and calls output() on the result.

Can anyone who’s looked into the vere source tell if that is about right?

South Place Ethical Society

For another look at Victorian progressivism, let’s take the South Place Ethical Society.

Like the Boden Professorship, it is something I tried to discuss on twitter as a demonstration of the pre-Marxist flowering of harmful progressivism, but I was not able to make my case clearly, and I also made a serious factual error, which I will come to below.

In this instance my route to the subject is not a Featured Article, but my own reminiscences: twenty years ago, I considered myself a Secular Humanist, and went so far as to join SPES (as it then was).

The history of the Society is recorded on both its own website and Wikipedia. It started as a non-conformist church in 1787, became unitarian, and then discarded any belief in a personal god, becoming an “Ethical Society” in 1888.

Towards the end of the 19th Century, the society was associated with campaigns for free education, abolitionism, and womens’ rights. The central aim was to encourage the major churches to follow their example, rejecting belief in the supernatural in favour of secular ethics.

If Max Müller was at the prestigious, respectable mainstream of intellectual progressivism at this time, South Place was the slightly iffy fringe. Think of it as Chomsky to Müller’s Krugman. You could suggest that the members were perhaps taking things a bit too far, without losing your own standing as a right-thinking person, but it was still influential. From its website:

‘The great and the good’!
It would take up too much space here to list all the famous people who have occupied the Society‘s platform and been reported in its journal during all these years, but here is a more-or-less random selection:
Felix Adler, Norman Angell, William Archer, A J Ayer, Annie Besant, C Delisle Burns, Herbert Burrows, W K Clifford, John Drinkwater, G W Foote, John A Hobson, Laurence Housman, Fred Hoyle, Julian Huxley, T H Huxley, Cyril Joad, Margaret Knight, Peter Kropotkin, Joseph McCabe, William Morris, Gilbert Murray, H W Nevinson, S K Ratcliffe, John M Robertson, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, Leslie Stephen, Graham Wallas, Sidney Webb, Rebecca West and Israel Zangwill.

My original intent in bringing up the society on twitter was to make two points — first, that today’s progressivism was approaching at a rapid pace throughout the nineteenth century, and wasn’t something triggered in the twentieth. I think that is well supported: the destruction of the family, of the church, of the idea of hierarchy, were all deliberate projects embarked on by influential people in the Victorian era.

My second intended point was that the evolution of a protestant sect into atheist leftists was something home-grown in Britain in the 19th Century, and not a foreign import. That claim is not borne out by a study of the society’s history. On the contrary, from 1864 to 1897, which includes the period when it ceased to be a nominally Christian church and became an explicitly non-religious society, it was run by two American ex-Unitarians: Moncure Conway, after whom the society’s premises and now the organisation itself is named, and Stanton Coit, who organised the wider “Ethical” movement in Britain. Their intellectual inheritance comes straight from Emerson’s Transcendentalism, and their activist background was abolitionism. Conway “was asked by American abolitionists to go to London to convince the United Kingdom that the American Civil War was a war of abolition”.

I never heard about the Society’s American roots during my membership, but then US connections were not popular with British leftists during the administration of the first Bush, so it is not that surprising they preferred to emphasise Fabian connections — which were close: this quote is from the Ethical Movement article:

The short lived Fellowship of the New Life, established in 1883, furnished the London Ethical Society with much of its membership when it disbanded. Those who did not join the Ethical Society made their way to the much more politically active Fabian Society, which was itself a direct offshoot of the Fellowship.

Though I am backpedalling on my claims that Britain produced a form of
extreme leftism in isolation, the importance of the Fabian Society is hard to exaggerate.

Ultimately, the Ethical Movement slightly overreached — its aim of explicitly converting churches to open atheism was not quite subtle enough. That, perhaps, is the purpose of the “slightly iffy fringe”, to make the progressive mainstream look moderate. But all its practical goals were accomplished in the long run.

The Boden Professor of Sanskrit election, 1860

It’s normal to label Wikipedia as part of the liberal propaganda system, which of course it is, but its sheer breadth of scope makes it impossible to turn it into a coherent lie, so a lot of information comes through it that right-thinking people would prefer was kept quiet. Further, I get the faint impression that someone in influence is pushing in a faintly reactionary direction — something that comes through most strongly in the choice of historical “featured articles” that are selected daily.
I was particularly fascinated by the featured article of the 7th of August, The Boden Professor of Sanskrit Election, 1860. That drew comment in some quarters as an amazingly minor and trivial piece of history to be unexpectedly well-documented, but to me, involved as I was in the long and difficult debate within the reactionary movement about the origins of cultural relativism, anti-racism and multiculturalism, it was a bombshell.
That it is not a minor or trivial piece of history is clearly evident from reading the Wikipedia article itself. The merits of the candidates were hotly disputed, the campaigns carried on in national newspapers, recognised on both sides as part of the “culture war” that is today so often denied. When the forces of conservatism won, the law was changed to prevent another such embarrassment occuring in future.
In this story, Max Müller represents the progressive establishment. He was a German Lutheran. His father was a poet, his grandfather a prime minister of Anhalt-Dessau. He wrote a dissertation on the Ethics of the Jewish philosopher Spinoza.
The Wikipedia story presents him as the downtrodden outsider, facing the great entrenched power of tradition and conservatism with nothing but his superior scholarship. The details make clear that everyone important was on his side: senior academics, The Times, the East India Company, and even senior Anglican clergymen, while his opponent Monier Williams relied for his victory on the old rural landowning class, out of power except in a few anachronistic areas such as the Convocation of Oxford University, to which they had shown up as part of the routine of their upbringing. They were due — overdue, in the view of the powers of the time — to be disenfranchised, and in due course were. As Müller himself wrote to his mother, “all the best people voted for me, the Professors almost unanimously, but the vulgus profanum made the majority”.
The social bases of conservatism and progressivism were also represented by the two men: Williams, son of an officer in the East India Company’s army, Müller, grandson of a European Prime Minister.
What’s remarkable about the election is not simply that it was an episode in the culture war between advancing universalism and retreating traditionalism, but that it was openly so, and that it was debated in terms of which side should win the culture war. It was universally understood that the line taken by Oxford University in this matter was of crucial importance for the future. There is no suggestion of academia being remote or isolated from the key cultural and political battlefields:

The Professorship is not for Oxford alone.
It is not for ‘The Continent and America’.
It is for India.
It is for Christianity.
Let us then Vote for the man who is well-known and loved in India, and who, even by the voice of his opponents, is declared to be a trustworthy depositary of the Christian interests of a Christian Foundation.

Today, Müller’s Wikipedia article is three times the length of Williams’, and includes this gem:

The designer Mary Fraser Tytler stated that Müller’s book Chips from a German Workshop (a collection of his essays) was her “Bible”, which helped her to create a multi-cultural sacred imagery.

Christopher Minkowski is the current Boden professor of Sanskrit (under the 1882 rules that removed control of the chair from the Convocation of Oxford graduates and brought it under the control of the University authorities). In his inaugral lecture in 2006, he made reference to the history of the professorship, contrasting the intent behind its original endowment — promotion of missionary Christianity in India — with the contrary attitude represented by Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta in 1784. Minkowski describes Jones as “the most prominent articulator in his day of a universalizing Enlightenment ideal, believing that the study of the cultural artefacts of ancient civilizations, and especially of India’s ancient civilzation, could provide instruction and edification for modern people. At the same time, he argued that it would be in the interests of good government in India for British rulers to understand the culture of those whom they ruled, and to govern as much as possible through pre-existent cultural forms.”
As to what Wikipedia says about Jones, well, I have to stop somewhere, and he looks well worth an article in his own right. Tutor to the future Earl Spencer (later Home Secretary), friend of Benjamin Franklin and supporter of American independence are minor asides in his biography
Back to Müller and Williams, I don’t want to oversimplify; a claim that Williams represents tradition and Müller the nascent Cathedral is more than supportable, but is subject to interesting qualifications. The mid-nineteenth century in England was the period where the progressive elite was privately shrugging off Christianity as a source of truth for their own use, while not yet abandoning it as the basis of the social order. Williams’ faction is therefore not simply the Tory opposition to progressivism, but also elements of the Whig side whose ideology still centred on the Christian religion rather than the new progressive morality that was beginning to separate itself from it. There was still a large overlap between puritan morality and progressive ideology, but differences were appearing, and the new multiculturalism was one of them. Thus, the bishops were for Müller, while the missionaries were for Williams.
The contradiction survives today in the Church of England and other protestant denominations — pockets of socially conservative Christians sending missionaries to convert the heathens to the True Faith, in spite of a hierarchy over them dedicated to social justice, respect for other religions, and the political debates of the day

Bureaucracy and Power

In my previous post discussing the tension between Bureaucracy and Aristocracy, I was not actually describing two forms of government, but three.

The ‘tension’ is between bureaucratic centralism, where a central authority rules through appointed officials, and aristocracy, where offices belong to a noble class who have some guaranteed degree of independence from the central power.

What we actually have today is neither one nor the other, but a self-perpetuating and largely unaccountable bureaucracy. It is not quite yet a true aristocracy, though it is well on the way, but it is
nearly immune from “political influence”, to the degree it is sometimes openly demanding such immunity.

So when Spandrell comments that there is no alternative to rule by bureaucracy, I am not quite sure what he means. Certainly we have had no aristocratic rule in a modern country for a couple of centuries; the dominant ideology has been set against it. However, it does not seem impossible to have a bureaucracy under genuine central control. I get the impression that prior to World War II, the governments of Britain and the USA were mostly in control of their bureaucracies: they could fire officials and dictate policy.

Moldbug’s interpretation of US history is that the FDR Government was entirely in sympathy with the bureaucracy, and effectively did not end as later governments were not able to divert the Civil Service from the path that FDR set it on.

In Britain, the Civil Service seems to have gained power over approximately the same period, due to a combination of the destruction of the old ruling class in the Great War, and the arrival of Labour politicians, outsiders to the government system, who the Civil Servants were both willing and able to defy.

My answer, therefore, is that it is possible for a government to rule through a bureaucracy, rather than being ruled by it, and that this was the normal situation prior to 1918, and to a lesser degree even up to 1945. If the government were no longer subject to elections and media opinion, it would be in a much stronger position to impose its will on the bureaucrats.

As for aristocratic rule: if the existing civil servants were to mainly hire their own children, we would be there — it is conceivable that we could have a de facto aristocracy within a decade or
two. Replacing the existing bureaucracy with a different aristocracy, such as the old titled families of Britain, is more far-fetched; but given (somehow) the total ideological sea change that it would require, there are no practical obstacles to it functioning.

Democracy affects the tension between the centre and the bureaucracy in two major ways: as above, the precarious position of elected politicians weakens them vis-a-vis their permanent officials (Moldbug’s “rotor/stator” point). Second, the employment of very large numbers of low-ranking officials becomes one of the main forms of vote-buying. The junior officials do not have direct power over policy in the sense that senior civil servants do, but they have democratic power over questions relating to their continued employment and working conditions. In Britain particularly, the Labour party is now overwhelmingly the party of state employees. Without votes, the block power of junior state employees would be vastly diminished.

Admin note: anonymous commenting is now enabled for the blog

Five Tensions

While pondering the tricky questions that have come to be debated within the reaction — such things as the conservation of sovereignty, I was struck by this lecture in a series of Harvard’s online learning that I’ve been working through on Chinese history.

This lecture, covering the Han dynasty, raises a lot of the questions that we’ve already been looking at about how power should be organised in a reactionary state.

(It doesn’t provide answers, which doesn’t matter since I’m not all that concerned with what Harvard thinks the right answers are, but it’s a good look at the questions).
The key slide is 25:

  • centralization versus regionalism
  • feudalism versus bureaucracy
  • hereditary right versus merit
  • military versus civil interests
  • inner court versus outer court

The lecturer says, “None of these institutional tensions … is ever stabilized perfectly in Chinese history”

As important as these tensions are, I don’t think there are clear-cut answers to them, even to the closely-related second and third tensions which I’ve previously written about in some detail. I didn’t do more than critique the progressive position which is unequivocally in favour of bureaucracy over feudalism and meritocracy over hereditary right. In attacking that position I did not establish that the reactionary state should adopt the wholly opposite position.

In the absence of simple answers, we can nevertheless talk sensibly about how a reactionary state would handle the tensions.

This whole discussion exists in the context of the long comment chain at Outside In which considered the nature of limitations on power or sovereignty. Crucially, we do not believe we can design a solution to the problems of government. We are not writing a legal constitution for a supreme court to enforce. What I am hoping to produce is constitutional writing in an older sense: a description of how a good government works, that influential people can point to when a question that it addresses becomes relevant, and say, “as described in the collected writings of AnomalyUK, this development which seems to be happening is harmful and should be resisted; rather, the current problems should be addressed in this other way”. It’s not guaranteed to work, but nothing else possibly can. It’s what I mean when I talk about the war of ideas.

To demonstrate, consider yet again the tension between feudalism and
bureaucracy.

The reactionary argument for bureaucracy is the Moldbuggian one that power should be undivided. If subordinates serve at the whim of the sovereign, there is no struggle for power between the subordinates and the sovereign, and therefore no policies adopted for their effect on the balance of power between the two, rather than for their overall effect on the realm. Establishing powers of subordinates that can be exercised in defiance of the sovereign historically tends to lead to civil wars between barons and the crown, and to stripping of assets by aristocracies who get all the benefits of seizures, while the long-term benefits of respecting private property of commoners accrue generally.

The reactionary argument for feudalism is that undivided power is an unrealistic aim; that underlings will in fact be able to exercise power in private interests, since limitations of knowledge and time mean they can never be supervised sufficiently, and therefore, on formalist principles, their powers should be established and exercised openly. This actually reduces the conflict over the extent of their powers compared to the case where the powers are informal and exercised surreptitiously. Further, establishing a formal class of aristocrats stabilises the system by giving a large body of powerful people an interest in preserving it. It breaks the link between educational institutions and political patronage that defines today’s cathedral.

There’s a lot more that can be said on both sides, and it’s worth doing, but for now that serves as an example of how to look at the tensions. In teasing out the arguments, we can link them to circumstances, and show what circumstances favour particular approaches and solutions.

It is easy to see how a state can move between bureaucracy and feudalism. Starting from bureaucracy, if the sovereign is unwilling or unable to overrule his officials, they will consolidate their power, and collectively take control over selection of entrants to their ranks, eventually reaching the stage of being able to hold offices within families. Conversely, a stronger sovereign will bypass established families and institutions, and divert influence to appointed officials of his own choosing, loyal to him personally. Both of these courses are familiar.

What I have argued for most recently is a formally established but weak aristocracy. That would not be immune from either being bypassed or growing more powerful, subject to circumstances and personalities. The justifications for it are:

  • It provides a pool of officials under higher than normal expectations of loyalty and good behaviour
  • Hereditary privileges are a reward for loyalty and achievement
  • It prevents some other institution with an important purpose from becoming a de facto aristocracy

If a strong king can rule well without relying on the aristocracy, that is probably a good thing, but the three justifications above become three dangers. His successors may not have his advantages, and therefore may struggle to find trustworthy underlings either among a disgruntled aristocracy or a competitive and anonymous commons. The powerful may scheme to find ways to privilege their descendants if there is no approved path to do so. Other institutions (educational, media, military) could acquire aristocratic pretensions and compromise their proper function in doing so. If these things start to happen, the cause should not be a mystery.

 

The Modern Structure

Moldbug’s coining “The Cathedral” has caught on and been the subject of much debate, but his other term “The Modern Structure” less so, which is a shame.
The Modern Structure is the constitution of the United States of America, in the sense that that term was originally used — a description of how the government of that country operates. Other Western Democracies have very similar constitutions.
The centre of the Modern Structure is the Civil Service. They actually carry out the business of government.
In theory, they are under the control of Politicians, but in reality the politicians are at most peers of the civil service, and in many cases completely subservient.
In theory again, the Politicians are controlled by the Electorate. However, the influence of the Electorate is slight: enough to tip the balance occasionally when the issue is close, but not to dictate anything. Further, on any issue, the majority of the electorate are completely ignorant, and depend on the media for information about the issue and how they should vote.
Meanwhile, business has at least as much influence on the politicians, and additionally has direct influence on the civil service (through lobbying and other forms of corruption).
In terms of power over government policy, then, the map of influences look something like this:

That is less than half the story, however. In the long run, what matters is not how the noisy controversies of the moment get resolved, but rather what is or is not controversial in the first place. That is the matter of the dominant ideology — what all the people in this network believe about what is and what should be.
The ideology is not fixed: it has changed enormously over mere decades. Who has influence over ideology?
The high status of the organs of the modern structure make them significant, but there are other important influences, and other directions of influence within the network.
This diagram shows the flows of ideological influence. For this purpose I have broken out of “Education” the most crucial organ of ideological influence — “Elite Academia”. This is where ideology comes from.

It is true that, in a sense, everything influences everything else. However, a fully-connected undirected graph has little information content, so the diagram only shows what I think are the biggest influences on what people believe.
I have left out business from the ideology diagram. My view is that while business and lobbyists are able to significantly affect policy, they has very little influence on what people believe. They perhaps have the capability of causing such influence, but in practice businesses are primarily in competition with each other, and it is much more profitable for each player to spend his influence on favouring his own narrow interests rather than on promoting a general business-oriented ideology. To the extent that a business-oriented ideology exists, it is developed by enthusiasts, and funded more by a few eccentrics such as the Kochs rather than by moneyed interests as a whole.
However, this is a disputed point, so here’s the diagram with them added back in, and with the Conservative media broken out from the respectable media.

With or without business interests, it is in the network of ideological influence that we see “The Cathedral” — Elite Academia and Respectable Media — at the core. Ideology flows out from them.
It should go without saying, that this is not intended to be the last word: it is my interpretation of what is mostly general knowledge, and there is a lot of room for refinement, correction and expansion.

Conservation of Sovereignty

Nick Land wants us to get to the
bottom of the Moldbuggian precept, “Sovereignty is conserved”.
The response has been a lot of wrangling about definitions. But it
doesn’t look like being resolved, so I’d rather bypass it and get to
specifics.
There are two things that Moldbug might mean. The first is that
someone is always supreme: that if you attempt to limit the
sovereignty of the nominal sovereign, someone else becomes sovereign
in his place. (The second is that sovereignty can be divided but still
“add up” — I will not address that here).
When he talks of the “Council of Nine”, the first meaning is what he
appears to intend. The president is not sovereign: he is subject to
law. Who decides what the law is? — The Supreme Court. Do they have
untrammelled sovereignty? — in theory not, since they also are subject
to law. But they decide what the limitations are on their own power,
not only on the President’s. Therefore, in reality, they are
sovereign.
Does this sovereignty mean they are all-powerful? Clearly not. Their
power can only be exercised through the bureaucracy, the police, the
army, and there are instructions they could issue that would not be
obeyed.
Then again, that is true of every sovereign, up to the most absolute
of monarchs.
Nevertheless there is a difference, in that an instruction of the
Supreme Court might be defied because its subjects believe it has
exceeded its legal role. A truly absolute monarch might be defied for
other reasons, but not for that reason.
It is not clear to what extent historical monarchs were considered
truly absolute in that sense. The question of whether a monarch was in
theory subject to some law, though there was no formal body that could
impose it on him, seems to have been an open one through British
history, with arguments made on both sides. My impression is that the
less absolute view generally had the upper hand, at least from Magna
Carta on.
Note this is the position in favour of “sovereignty is conserved” —
the conclusion is that the sovereignty that the US Supreme Court has
is the same as the sovereignty that Henry VIII had. Not perfect or
complete, but supreme over any formal rival.
At the same time, it makes the conservation of sovereignty less
interesting. It means that a ruler still has practical limitations on
his power, in spite of his sovereignty. The nature and scope of those
limitations are matters of great interest, but are excluded from the
question of sovereignty.
The question that follows is: what is the effect of denying legal
sovereignty to the role of “leader”. On one hand, it might be nothing:
whoever has the legal sovereign is the leader, and a purported leader
without sovereignty is an empty figurehead. On the other hand, it
might be significant — the practical limitations on a sovereign who is
supposed to be a judge rather than a leader are different from the
case where the sovereign and the leader are the same person.