anti-democracy – Page 4

Fascism and Democracy

Since I’ve been discussing fascism, and since it is topical, at least round here, because of the imminent arrival in Luton of the English Defense League, I will look at it in more detail.

I don’t mean to imply that the EDL actually are fascists — I don’t know what they are, and it really doesn’t matter at all. Their enemies, who control the media, all political parties, and every arm of government, will call them fascist, so any discussion of them is a discussion of fascism, whatever it is that they really believe.

I side with the fascists against many liberals in that I don’t see dispersed political power as a desirable end. It’s not that I’m in favour of concentrated political power as an end — I would happily accept dispersed power as a means if it advanced good ends, but I don’t think it does. Concentrated power, for me, is a means towards government that will protect peace, prosperity, security, freedom etc.

I think many fascists, possibly including Schmitt, would not have listed peace as a good end, as I have done. So on that score I oppose the fascists: other things being equal, peace is better than war.

The bad things associated with fascism are excessively aggressive foreign policy, persecution of selected minorities, economic collectivism, omnipresent dishonest propaganda, and a clampdown on opposition.

The belligerence, persecution, collectivism and propaganda all derive from the requirement for a broad popular base. This differs slightly from a democracy: democracy requires the acquiescence of a large majority, fascism requires the active support of at least a large minority. The similarities are close enough, however, that in the last 60 years the democracies have taken on levels of collectivism and propaganda that are indistinguishable from those of 1930s fascism. (George Street is still strewn with the purple streamers of “Luton in Harmony“, a fairly typical government propaganda exercise). Collectivism is part of the mix because it enables the government, by controlling economic activity, to reward support and punish dissent in a subtle but sustainable way that a laissez-faire government cannot.

The direction of the democratic propaganda is of course opposite to that of fascism; this reflects the difference between the popularity requirements of democracy and fascism. Luton in Harmony is supposed to generate a diffuse low-level hostility to opponents of the regime across as wide a base as possible, whereas Fascists need to stir active fear and hatred among a a smaller group who will maintain the regime in power — what Dsquared elegantly paints as “arseholes”. That is the reason why democracies are generally less unpleasant to live under than fascist parties. The ability of the regime to survive on no more than passive acquiescence of the population is the real advantage of democracy, though it only exists because people believe other good things about democracy that aren’t true. It is the feature of democracy that needs to be held onto through a transition to a better system.

Comparisons between democracy and fascism on the foreign policy side are interesting. Britain has operated an aggressive foreign policy over the last decade, but that appears on the face of it to have arisen despite the demands of democracy rather than because of them — it does appear to have been driven by the personal convictions of Tony Blair. But just possibly that is missing the point. The link between war and popularity is not necessarily that war is popular; it is that the people are more inspired by a leadership personality who displays the characteristics that are likely to lead him to war. Hitler and Blair, then, were popular not because they had war policies, but because they had the conviction and charisma of crusaders. That conviction is what then produced the war policies.

Or maybe Blair was just weird. After all, many other democracies are less belligerent. I’m not really convinced either way on this question.

As for the curbing of opposition, I have no problem with it. The reason why it is generally considered proper for a government to tolerate opposition is that it is generally believed that the need to compromise and satisfy opponents pushes government policy in a beneficial direction. I believe the exact opposite: that nearly all governments, good or bad, are made worse by opposition. All competent governments treat sedition as a crime. Politics in the real world is a matter of life and death, and those who perpetrate it must accept the risks.

That is not to say that opposition to any government is bad: even if all governments become worse when they are opposed, they may be replaced by something better if they are actually overthrown. But I don’t expect bad governments to cooperate in their own overthrow.

Concretely, if the current events in Egypt result in regime change, that could possibly be beneficial (though I would be surprised). But if they don’t, any “reforms” that the current regime is driven to will make things worse. True revolutionaries understand this — they want concessions not for their own value, but because concessions further weaken the regime, bringing its fall nearer.

So to strengthen my earlier post, which was slightly equivocal, I reject fascism. It relies on mass popularity, and therefore fails to improve on democracy, but going further, because it has to win more positive support from the population than democracy does, it has the problems of democracy in a stronger and more dangerous form. One of the worst things that can be said about democracy is that, particularly in it’s young form, it has a tendency to devolve into fascism. A young democracy is little more than a battle between competing fascisms — each party is the active street-fighting kind, rather than the passive tick-in-the-box democratic kind.

That actually explains a mystery that troubled me in the past: why it is that there is such an exaggerated fear of fascist or near-fascist organisations like the BNP, despite their appearing laughably weak and incompetent. At some level, the regime must recognise that in intellectual terms fascism is the obvious response to democracy, however irrelevant a particular party might be. I think it’s fair to say that if fascism had newly appeared twenty years ago, without the baggage of history, it would by by now be popular enough across Europe that it would probably have taken over most of it.

Carl Schmitt

Tyler Cowen linked to a New Republic article about political thought in China

The first point is that the Chinese take politics really seriously — something that looks strange to those of us who live in democracies, where politics is mostly fantasy, and goes some way to explaining the Chinese regime’s unnecessarily serious take on such idiocies as the Nobel Peace Prize.

More interesting, to me, is the summary of the thinking of Carl Schmitt.

“Schmitt assumed the priority of conflict: Man is a political creature, in the sense that his most defining characteristic is the ability to distinguish friend and adversary… If you have nothing to say about war, you have nothing to say about politics. There is, he wrote, ‘absolutely no liberal politics, only a liberal critique of politics'”

That last point is what tore me away, finally, from classical liberalism. You can establish, as the libertarians have done, that politics is basically harmful — that it would be better if it did not exist. That is true, and it gives useful insights. But by itself, it doesn’t actually get rid of politics, any more than declaring any other crime to be a crime gets rid of it. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. We would be better off without politics, but classical liberalism offers no way to achieve that, and I suspect it is not possible. If I am resigned to living in a world with politics, the question of what form of politics is least bad presents itself, and classical liberalism supplies no answers.

Schmitt, who I was not previously aware of, did not merely point out the problem with liberalism. He did something about it. Specifically, he joined the Nazi party.

Fascism is a fairly obvious answer to the problems of liberal democracy. Get rid of the liars, the elections, the corrupt influences of guild, agency and business, and lets just have a Leader who makes the decisions and is answerable to nobody but God and history. That’s pretty much what I’ve been saying for a while — am I a fascist?

That’s a tough enough question that I’ve been sitting on this draft for several weeks while I work it out. Clearly, I’m not far away — certainly not far enough to be respectable. I want quite a few of the things the Fascists want. But then, when people sit around spouting political theories, they frequently want much the same things: prosperity, security, personal freedom… it’s means, rather than ends, that cause most disagreements.

The easy answer is “No, fascism is way too democratic for me”, because fascism relies on a mass party, which is a form of demotism even if there aren’t necessarily regular fair elections. But that’s a bit glib, given that I don’t have a clear path forward, and it’s possible that in some circumstances fascism could be a path to something I would approve of.

The real answer is that arguing about theories of government in the abstract is meaningless and irrelevant. If I did not believe that, I would still be a libertarian. I am not likely to actively support any real fascist movement, because I am a passivist, not an activist. If I supported fascism I would be committing politics, and becoming part of the problem. When the time is right for a responsible government to exist, there will be no need for a movement with supporters, because the people will acquiesce in the new regime as they now acquiesce in democracy. The new order will not be imposed by an ideological struggle, but by a straightforward business transaction, which at the time will seem inevitable and even minor.

I am not saying the new order is inevitable — just that if it happens it will become inevitable first. Any order that is installed by a struggle is obviously political, and therefore doomed.

[Update: fixed link, corrected source to New Republic, not National Review. Thanks Kalim Kassam]

Liu Xiaobo again

It seems that the Guardian has actually investigated and discovered (by the extraordinary method of finding someone who can read Chinese) what I merely assumed — that Liu Xiaobo is a professional front-man for American imperialism.

That isn’t such a bad thing, of course. There are many worse forces in the world than American imperialism, and many places that might benefit from a bit more of it. China might even be one of them (though I am not persuaded on that point).

What would be significant about the revelations that, for instance, his organisation has been funded by the US government, or that he was outspoken in favour of George Bush and against Kerry, or that he says “to choose westernisation is to choose to be human” would be if they changed anyone’s mind about him. Because really, it is all implied by what little we knew about him before the Grauniad dredged up translations of his writing.

And of course, the fact that a paid agent of a hostile power, openly dedicated to overthrowing his country’s government and culture, was allowed to remain at liberty for as long as he was, to my mind falsifies a lot of what is said about China today.

The Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been beyond the grasp of rational criticism, but I don’t think this year’s award can be let by with just the usual cynical chuckle.

Timothy Garton-Ash says in the Grauniad CiF that the prize “hits China’s most sensitive nerve”. In fact, the offence that the Chinese government has taken is all the result of a misunderstanding. They really do have difficulty understanding the level of the West’s hypocrisy and stupidity.

To the extent the award means anything at all, it is a declaration of intent, by the Nobel Committee and all those that speak in support of it, to overthrow the government of China and replace it with a Western-style government. Garton-Ash explains that Liu Xiaobo “has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy”. It is possible to advocate respect for human rights and the rule of law within Chinese politics, but to advocate democracy is to advocate the destruction of the Chinese government and its replacement with a Western-style one.

To make such a warlike declaration in the name of peace is, of course, just the usual annual joke.

Therefore, it is reasonable for the Chinese authorities to react to the award as a declaration of outright enmity. Their reaction is, nevertheless, wrong. There are two things they do not understand.

The first is that this declaration is purely ritual. In calling for the overthrow of the PRC, the Western intelligentsia have not the slightest idea of any actual program of action; they are merely showing each other how virtuous they are. It is the equivalent of the prayers for the conversion of England that used to be said by Catholic congregations – a creed that had to be regularly affirmed, without the slightest reflection on its actual meaning.

The second is that, because of the lack of such reflection, the self-declared enemies of China actually have no inkling of what they are actually saying. “Democracy”, in the mouth of someone like Garton-Ash, is just something that goes with human rights and rule of law – it is a minor adornment of a political system, that can be increased here and there without killing millions of people.

In Britain, that is indeed what it is – as democracy crept gradually into the British system over a couple of hundred years, the system absorbed and to a great extent neutralised it, producing a comfortable and moderately stable synthesis. That is not what happens when it is introduced in one go. Then it destroys one regime and produces another, usually very short-lived, replacement. Then there is generally a settling down into some kind of civil war. France is the model, not Britain.

The Garton-Ashes and Nobel Committees do not understand that. The thought never even enters their heads. They probably assume that even the CPC leadership itself really wants democracy, but is just a little too cautious and conservative in bringing it in, and needs to be gently chivied by the likes of Liu Xiaobo.

If the Chinese really understood Western politics, they would ignore it and watch the X-factor like sensible westerners do. But it is out of place for the politicians themselves to criticise the Chinese for taking them at their word.

I don’t say all this to attack the idea of reform in China. While I am no great fan of democracy, and while the Chinese regime does have a fairly decent record over the last couple of decades, I recognise that it is bound to run into serious problems as wealth and economic freedom increase the power of rivals to the present establishment. There are already serious power struggles between central and regional governments. It may well be that political collapse is inevitable, and if so, then a somewhat Western-ish democracy would not be the worst possible outcome. Liu Xiaobo might be the nucleus of a future non-terrible government of China, and the alternative to something worse. It’s hard to say. But these aren’t the terms in which the debate is being carried on.

Thoughts on the World Cup

Cephalopods aside, I think the most important fact about the 2010 World Cup is that it was the first in which both finalists were teams from monarchies – and that after a run of seven finals in a row between two republic teams.

His Majesty King Juan Carlos becomes the third monarch to reign over world cup winners, following Victor Emmanuel III of Italy (1934 and 1938) and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth (1966).

Monarchies have lost to republics in 3 finals, Sweden to Brazil in 1958, and The Netherlands to West Germany in 1974 and to Argentina in 1978. So Her Majesty Queen Beatrix joins Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden, and her mother Queen Juliana as monarchs of world cup runners-up.

What does this break in the trend signify? Possibly a resurgence of Europe relative to monarchyless South America, but that doesn’t cover the poor showing of France and Italy.

Other factoids arising from Victor Emmanuel III and fascism: Mussolini was deposed by Victor Emmanuel in a proper constitutional manner in 1943, and German President Paul von Hinderburg’s will is believed to have expressed a desire for Germany to return to a monarchy. (The History Place says he did, Wikipedia says it’s disputed).

It is the received wisdom that in 1933-34, Hitler’s oratory was so supernaturally spooky that he convinced the German people even to abandon democracy to put him in power. It seems more likely that by then democracy had failed so badly that any alternative looked like a good idea. But that’s not the stuff to give the troops.

On Holiday

I’m on holiday, and have been for a couple of weeks, which has taken my mind off matters political and philosophical. But I’ll be back at work within the week, and in the meantime my distraction has been broken by anticipation of what will be my first July 4th in the United States.

The argument of my previous post leads me to see the patriotism of my hosts as a human virtue, and ordinary good manners demands that I not treat the event as an opportunity to demonstrate the faults of republican government in general and that of the United States of America in particular.

I therefore aim to concentrate my attention on the American People, who have achieved so much in spite of unwisely lumbering themselves with such an inferior form of government – one which brings such predictable and immediate tragedy when attempted by peoples less endowed with individual and collective virtues, of solidarity, initiative, generosity and even, when using a realistic standard of comparison, intelligence. The American People is almost uniquely qualified to overcome the handicap of democracy and to maintain a society that, while visibly decaying, remains the envy of much of the world. Just imagine what they could have done these last two centuries with a decent monarchy!

I can often be accused of gratuitous contrarianism, and while globally the American form of government is more admired than Americans themselves, my tastes have always run otherwise.

Red Toryism

Libertarian economics is sound. But libertarian politics is an oxymoron.
Individualist Libertarianism and collectivist Socialism are opposites. But they came from the same roots and the first always becomes the second.
Victimless crimes should not be prosecuted. But broken families do more damage than psychopaths.
No-one should be born into privilege. But the alternative is to compete for power.
Mencius Moldbug is a lone nutter. But opinion is shifting more and more against democracy.
Global Warming is rubbish. But it might not have been, and what would have happened then?
I have always believed that morality only makes sense in terms of the individual. But I can’t remember why.

Froude Society
Philip Blond – Red Toryism
Cato Unbound

Much more to follow, if I can find my feet again

Fixed Term Parliament

All through the election campaign I told myself, and my loyal readers, that it was just a game – that, out of habit, I would follow it closely, but in the spirit of a major sporting event rather than something that was actually important.

In the face of the new Conservative-LibDem government, however, I am struggling to maintain my cynicism. This government really might make a difference to the real world.

Abolishing ID cards is good. Abolishing ContactPoint is great. But abolishing Parliamentary Sovereignty – that is genius. And done with such subtlety, as a rider on fixed-term parliaments. “Oh, and by the way, Parliament will no longer be able to get rid of the government by majority vote”. Talk about balls.

Of course, the newly created system does not make sense. We could end up with a government that can’t be sacked, can’t resign, and can’t govern. What then? Then they will make it up as they go along – and probably at least some of the inconsistency will be resolved by further limiting the powers of parliament.

At the Blogger Bash, I asked the panellist how bad things would have to get before they would give up on democracy. Perry de Havilland (I think) stood up for democracy, saying that it was important that the government could be thrown out. But that is not the same thing as having the voters choose MPs and MPs choose government. You could have the Prime Minister appointed for life, and ministers too, and merely have them recallable by a popular supermajority, and that would still meet the criteria.

Most people think that the government should, in principle, be controlled by the people, but in specific cases most intelligent people come to the conclusion that reducing democratic control actually produces better outcomes. If the new contradiction between the government and the commons majority resolves itself in favour of the government (as I suspect it will), then it should be possible to demonstrate the improvements brought about by reducing democracy.

This would not have been possible even thirty years ago. What has made it possible to casually take away what were always seen as vital fundamental democratic principles is that recent democratic governments have been so bad that nobody cares any more. When I casually mention to strangers that my preferred political outcome is a military coup installing an absolute monarchy, the most common response is “well, it couldn’t be any worse.” They probably aren’t serious, and don’t realise that I am, but the reaction is almost automatic – what is the point of defending the democratic system that gave us Gordon Brown? If we do escape democracy, it may not be through violent revolution, or Mencius’ “True election”, but simply through the influence of voters being chipped away to a chorus of apathy. The electorate will, reasonably in my view, just not care.

Election 2010

Apparently there’s an election campaign on.

By a twist of fate, the first election since I gave up on democratic politics is the first election in which I have the opportunity to influence the result – I would estimate the probability of my vote changing the result as something like 1/100,000 which is non-negligible, and orders of magnitude higher than in previous elections.

My old strategy in elections was, since the main parties are so close as to make no important difference, to attempt to influence the future positions of the parties by voting for fringe candidates.

A related idea is that of Peter Hitchens, who advocates voting against the Conservative party in an attempt to destroy it, opening the possibility of the formation of a new party to represent the conservative majority of the population.

These are both logical ideas, but they depend on the assumption that it is possible to affect the medium-to-long-term political climate by voting, and further, that it is possible to do so in a predictable way. The distinction is important; a butterfly’s wings might affect the path of a hurricane, but it’s not possible to aim a hurricane at a particular target by strategically releasing butterflies.

I do not accept the assumption. The Conservative Party does not represent the conservative tendency of the population, it is the conservative tendency of the political class. I could affect the political landscape (in a tiny but non-negligible way) by joining the political class, but not by voting. I’m not willing to join the political class, as I have better things to do with my life.

My conclusion is that I now see myself as a subject of the political class, rather than as a citizen of a democracy. That’s calming – when I thought the government was “my” government, I was infuriated by how bad it was, but as a subject, I look at the tidbits of protection and freedom that my ruler gives me, and my position isn’t so bad really, compared with that of most people who have ever lived.

And next month, as a free bonus, like a free entry in a prize draw, I get a tiny but non-negligible chance to have a small effect on the government itself. Well, why shouldn’t I take it? If I thought I was more than a subject, then the trivial choice offered to me by David Cameron would be such an insult that I would spurn it as a matter of principle. Nobody who sucks up to the environmentalist lobby and who accepts that government should control more than a third of the economy can possibly represent me. But as a free gift to a subject – well, no more attacks on Home Education, scrapping ID cards, a faint possibility of lower taxes – I guess I’ll take box “C”, since you’re offering.

I suspect that normal, sane people have always looked at elections this way – that would explain much of the mental gap between idealists such as I used to be and the rest of the population. It does make me wonder what would happen if normal people thought like we do – possibly they would demand a democracy and the whole country would go down the tubes.

That does leave me the choice of what to do about my membership of the Libertarian Party. For me, the party only ever had one useful point from the very beginning – getting Chris Mounsey on television. Now that that’s actually starting to happen, I think I should continue to give support, even if it’s not, by all accounts, going too well so far.

Peter Kellner on Democracy

Peter Kellner is an expert on British Democracy. President of YouGov polling company, formerly political analyst of Newsnight, visiting fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, author of books about the system from “Callaghan: The Road to Number 10” in 1976 to “Democracy, 1000 years in pursuit of British Liberty” in 2009. As the title of the recent book implies, he not only knows about democracy, he is in favour of it.

How does he reconcile those two things?

[…] George Canning, who was briefly prime minister in the 1820s, gave a speech defending rotten boroughs. One of his points was that rotten boroughs like Old Sarum, which had two MPs and no residents, produced some of the finest parliamentarians of the late 18th and early 19th century: people like William Wilberforce and William Pitt. Canning argued that if you did away with the rotten boroughs you would lower the quality of the House of Commons. Of course, this is an exact parallel to the arguments about the reform of the House of Lords today. And in a way he had a real point: so it demonstrates why, if one is a democrat, it is important to stick to the principle of democracy. Because if you get into the functionality, if you say the principle is to get the best people or the best government, you might well end up arguing against democracy, which has to be defended as a good in itself.

(my emphasis). Democracy is good in itself – even if, nay, even though, it demonstrably produces worse outcomes than its alternatives.

So that’s how. Read the whole thing at Five Books.